TheVat

Now there's a use for tea I had not considered. I've heard brown rice is a bigger threat for that (especially rice grown in former cotton fields), so I stick with brown basmati grown in California, a state which never grew cotton. I think the better brands have gone back to natural fiber bags - will post a link if I can figure out where I read that. Anyway, glad to hear your donkeys are getting some stimulants. I recall a chat here about them eating wood ashes.

In the Vat household, where some are very particular about their brew, it is believed that loose leaves in a steel tea ball (or infuser) are the way to go. None of that weird bag taste or potential polyester nanoparticles. And brew times not to exceed five minutes - after that, tannins (the source of bitterness) tend to build up. Milk or cream is considered an abomination. As for listening to Yanks on arcane practices like adding salt, you should remember that we once had a famous tea party which resulted in very salty tea... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party

Just today have learned of the passing last week of Peter Schickele, musical humorist without peer. Am starting with Iphigenia in Brooklyn, then perhaps Oedipus Tex, and then all week sampling from the oeuvre of PDQ Bach, the last and least of Bach's children. and Iphigenia found herself within a market place and all around her fish were dying, and yet their stench did live on.... He will be missed. I don't know how well known he was overseas but I imagine our UK members who liked, say, Anna Russell, Dudley Moore, or Spike Jones, would find Prof. Schickele to their taste. A snip from the Washington Post obituary... Jokes meant for experts on composition were intertwined with gags that required only a cursory knowledge of music — the interruption of a serene baroque adagio with a few bars of boogie-woogie, for example, or an overlay of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” on a J.S. Bach prelude. The works of P.D.Q. Bach often parodied the titles of popular classics. Among them were “The Seasonings” (after Haydn’s “The Seasons”), the “Sanka Cantata” (after J.S. Bach’s “Coffee Cantata”), “Oedipus Tex” (after the Sophocles fable, but set in the Wild West, with Billie Jo Casta and Madame Peep among the characters) and “Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice” (a conflation of the Humperdinck opera and filmmaker Paul Mazursky’s satire about swingers). P.D.Q. Bach’s instrumentation offered twists of its own. Although pieces such as the “Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle and Balloons” used commonplace objects not typically heard in an orchestral context, others required Mr. Schickele to build instruments of his own. When he conceived the early “Concerto for Horn and Hardart,” for example, he knew the title — which alludes to a then-popular (but now defunct) chain of self-service restaurants — would only work if there were a “hardart” to play alongside the horn. So he made a nine-foot gizmo loaded with cartoonish wind instruments (kazoos and ocarinas), zany percussion (buzzers, bells and mixing bowls, as well as exploding balloons), a set of automat-style coin-operated windows and a coffee spigot. For his P.D.Q. Bach shows, Mr. Schickele adopted an alter ego, Professor Peter Schickele, head of the Department of Musical Pathology at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. Typically, he arrived late and with maximum commotion, his shirt untucked, his tuxedo in disarray, and wearing work boots. Until the early 1980s, his entrances often involved swinging to the stage from the balcony on a rope, knocking over as many music stands and chairs as possible; in later years, he would run down an aisle and belly flop onto the stage, or be lowered in a basket.... (end snip) I will always treasure the memory of attending one of his concerts (in that concert hall, he rappelled down a wall, iirc), which included such masterpieces as Throw the Yule Log On Uncle John, My Bonnie Lass She Smelleth, and Only He Who is Running Knows. There was also a piece that incorporated somewhat unconventional symphonic instruments, one of which was called a wind-breaker....yes, pretty much what you'd think. RIP. Or even better, having some big laughs with Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and all the other classical musicians he loved to satirize.

Yes, still interesting as an unusual transient and for its one hour appearance on the exact day, July 19, 1952, of the famous DC sightings. If it was located at the near end of its possible distance, i.e. within the solar system, then I can at least see how someone would speculate that it was a formation of ET craft firing their engines to decelerate on approach to the Earth. My doubt (aside from the sheer improbability factor) is regarding the profile of the three transients - there being no observable elongation due to movement. When bright in 1952, the most isolated transient source has a profile nearly the same as comparison stars, implying the sources are subarcsec in angular size and they exhibit no elongation due to movement.

I was taught (in a geology course) that sodium cation is the least stable in water, so it tends to more quickly hook up with a chloride or other anion, and so becomes the dominant salt. That, paired with sodium being the most easily leached from surface rocks as rain washes over, and you get saline oceans. In fact, the oceans would be even more saline were it not for subduction. And sedimentation. Was tempted to add, take my comment with a grain of salt.

Well, the Oxford U P link, on the triple transients, is worth reading the abstract and then the summary section at the end, where the range of possible distances of the objects is calculated. Between 2 LY and somewhere in the solar system (but not in Earth orbit). It's a mystery on several levels, including if they are actually three objects (no more than 6 AU from each other, if the dimmings are causally connected) or a single one with some unusual gravitational lensing effect. Not thunder, but still an anomaly worth following up on.

😀

Not that I know of. Which is why I used it. Why do you ask?

Wash Post mentions some of the blaming going on.... Something to that first one. Younger women were more supportive of Haley, but getting to the gyms was not easy last night. I found it interesting that 2/3 of Haley supporters are polling as they will not vote for Trump in the general. That could be a fatal slice in November if that holds (big if) in other states. As much as fifteen percent of LVs perhaps.

Two SF Ballet dancers perform this wonderful George Harrison classic:

I was 14 when I snuck into a theater to see Woodstock. I had to sit through the entire credits before I was able to walk. Yes. Earth-centered religions have tended to less elevation of humans over the rest of creation. In Paganism humans are a part of nature. In Abrahamic religions, humans lord it over nature, and are the only beings with immortal souls and therefore have a divinity which separates them from nature. This view has played out in ways that aren't so good for nature.

The bad pun tribunal has just been empan -eled.

Some ceramics retain a bit of water inside, even after firing. I've had such that cracked when nuked. Which is why they need to say Microwave Safe on the bottom, or I don't put them in. If I heat a burrito, it definitely heats from inside out, since the moist interior (with those rotating h2o molecules) heats up quickly while the dryer tortilla wrapping is still cool. Empiricism!

Hey we're just some guys talking online. I don't think you're in the tinfoil hat brigade, nor is anybody else among the regulars here. It's a speculation thread so there's no reputational stake in speculating. I couldn't personally assess the severity of hiding data (versus, say, just bureaucratic rules being followed by office drones who had no interest in expediting scientific sharing of info). I grew up a few miles from where Hynek's family was from, knew people in that community, have heard nothing but good things about his integrity and allegiance to principles of sound science and objectivity. I think he did a good job of pointing out procedural problems and misdirected resources with Project Blue Book. I sometimes wonder if politicians like UAP hearings as a means of distraction from the obvious failure of Congress to do its job. KAOS - should someone enlist the help of Maxwell Smart?

Stockholm U. astronomer Villarroel and her team have been studying transient light sources on old photographic plates. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-92162-7 9 transients that appeared in April 1950. https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/527/3/6312/7457759 Three transients that coincided with famous July 1952 Washington DC sightings of UAP. Article that includes section (scroll to last third of article) on Villarroel's team. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/jan/14/what-happens-if-we-have-been-visited-by-aliens-lied-to-ufos-uaps-grusch-congress Other astronomers, using different techniques, have seen things that warrant further investigation. Beatriz Villarroel, assistant professor of physics at Stockholm University, is leading a team of astronomers looking at photographic plates of the night sky that date from before the first artificial satellite was launched in 1957. As satellites orbit the Earth, they can reflect sunlight causing bright glints to appear in the night sky. These leave streaks on astronomical images or spots of light that appear and disappear seemingly at random. Mysteriously, on one plate from April 1950, Villarroel found nine sources of light that appeared within a half-hour period and then vanished. Conducting observations using the Gran Telescopio Canarias, on La Palma in the Canary Islands, revealed nothing at the locations of the light sources that might have flared up. “There is no astronomical explanation for this type of event,” says Villarroel. More recently, her team found three bright “stars” on a plate dated 19 July 1952 that have since vanished. Provocatively, this is a date burned into the diaries of UFO enthusiasts around the world because it coincides with a famous incident in which pilots and radar operators saw lights they could not explain in the skies above Washington DC. “I think it’s very important to do this kind of [nearby] searching for extraterrestrial objects because the [astronomical] community mostly looks for things very, very far away. I think it’s time to do something new,” says Villarroel, who is now working to establish the ExoProbe project to look for anomalous objects among the vast number of human satellites currently in orbit. (this will get interesting if contamination of these old photographic plates can be ruled out. The Guardian article also discusses the psychological effects on the public, if a conspiracy of concealment of ET evidence were to be revealed, though that might be another thread topic)

I am fairly confident that my generation has been able to retain its longer pre-web attention spans wow is that a gray squirrel in the yard haven't seen one this far west in years!

I laughed hard when Vivek compared himself, in his braving the roads to get to four events, to George Washington crossing the Delaware. Then he had his aides move a meeting with farmers to Zoom. Minus 18 here, at 10:30 AM, and was minus 24 last night. Never been happier to have PEX lines. Only a bit of one line froze, and thawed when I attached flexible furnace duct to a tee branch in the basement and snaked it into the crawl space under the kitchen (a newer wing of the house). Politico covered the diminishment of final days campaigning pretty well.... https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/12/winter-weather-iowa-caucus-00135420 The political industrial complex that had come to the state to close out the caucus instead found themselves walloped by a foot of snow that had ground the campaign trail — and the highways — to a halt. Days before the Iowa caucuses, the field was, quite literally, frozen. The weather prompted event cancellations for Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, the two contenders fighting for a second-place finish in Iowa. It was, in some ways, a fitting beginning to the end of a caucus campaign that, with Trump’s dominance, had never truly felt like one to begin with.

National Weather Service data shows there has never been a colder Iowa caucus night than what is forecast for Jan. 15. The previous coldest was in 2004, when the high temperature for the caucus was 16 degrees. (F.) We may not warm above zero degrees (F) on Monday, said Des Moine meteorologist Chad Hahn. I would not be surprised if we dont get above minus 20 degrees for wind chills beginning on Sunday. -- from AP Wondering what skewing effect, if any, this might have on the results.

Why not use a search engine and find out what the current research is showing? It's hard to make sense of your statement if you don't share what you think those reasons are. Generally, social science data is notoriously bad for establishment of clearcut causal relationships. People, life, culture, physical environment, all are complicated and it's hard to isolate variables. Whenever I remember to carry my umbrella it doesn't rain. Clearly umbrellas somehow inhibit atmospheric condensation.

From the same Latin root as words like paisano or peasant. I lived in a predominantly Italian neighborhood for a couple years and heard "paisano!" used a lot as a friendly greeting among Italo-Americans. It no longer carries the meaning of rustic, just means fellow countryman.

Harder to pronounce, though. Leeuwenhoek is never referenced in a Queen song.

Though many of the hippies sought spiritual goals outside the Christian tradition, there were some who were Christian and in the US were called Jesus Freaks. AFAIK, they didn't control a navy, though some wore navy.

LOL for redirect their support to Liz Cheney . Immunity hearing today had this disturbing exchange... Trump lawyer John Sauer said Tuesday that a president who ordered the military to assassinate a political rival or sold pardons to criminals could only be criminally prosecuted if they are first impeached and convicted by Congress. Appeals court Judge Florence Pan, a nominee of President Joe Biden, posed the hypothetical questions to flesh out the bounds of Sauer’s immunity argument. Broadly, his argument relies on the theory that presidents are shielded from prosecution for official actions if there isn’t an impeachment conviction first. “Could a president order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival? That is an official act, an order to SEAL Team Six,” Pan said “He would have to be, and would speedily be impeached and convicted before the criminal prosecution,” Sauer said. “I asked you a yes or no question,” Pan said. "If he were impeached and convicted first,” Sauer replied. “So your answer is no,” Pan said. Sauer responded, “My answer is qualified yes. There is a political process that would have to occur.” Yikes.

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Never could make much sense of this oft-quoted Biblical definition, in how it worked evidence in there. Many hoped for the 5 sigma results on the Higgs boson at the LHC, which were evidence of things not seen. Hmm.

I saw a Homo Erectus drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic's. His hair was perfect.