TheVat

Screwing is sometimes more literal than I had realized.

Yes, there are no Good Guys in this conflict. And Israel didn't have to lower themselves very far - they have always paid lip service to "warning civilians in advance," so they could evacuate, but that's just putting lipstick on a warthog, it's clear they have no respect for innocent Palestinian lives. Or, apparently, the lives of Israeli hostages. All is collateral damage.

Looks like Hamas crossed that line, in terms of atrocities against civilians, where the two state solution is essentially dead. I am sorry for the Palestinian people, most just trying to survive, whose future has been torpedoed by Hamas. Like many people in the world, the desecration of corpses and other Geneva violations erodes my sympathies.

When all else fails, play dead... https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/oct/11/female-frogs-fake-death-unwanted-advances-study When it comes to avoiding unwanted male attention, researchers have found some frogs take drastic action: they appear to feign death. Researchers say the findings shed new light on the European common frog, suggesting females do not simply put up with the male scramble for mates – a situation in which several males can end up clinging to a female, sometimes fatally. “It was previously thought that females were unable to choose or defend themselves against this male coercion,” said Dr Carolin Dittrich, the first author of the study from the Natural History Museum of Berlin...

I what you mean. Maybe one could combine Clarke's space elevator and a magnetic mass accelerator so that one could accelerate a shuttle without the use of onboard engines until it came off the rails already at some velocity. You would have some engineering limits, e.g. crushing passengers would not be permitted.

As former HG peoples, we have a deeply felt need for mobility - any sense that we cannot move about freely (as is felt by, for example, most residents of Gaza) can arouse a trapped anxious feeling. We have an instinctive grasp that prisons and prison-like states are places we do not want to be. People cope with such conditions of confinement by finding interior freedoms to compensate. You don't have to be Mandela to do that. That was the point of some of the cruelties of Guantanamo, to try and deprive detainees even the freedom of their imaginations by blasting music at them, depriving them of sleep, etc.

Trump keeps cementing the view of him as a monumental human turd, so it reaches the point where any claim of Trumpian perfidy is plausible. It is certainly possible that Trump's big mouth could have resulted in Iran assisting Hamas, via Thom Hartman's Russia - Iran - Israel chain. But I doubt that Trump's cognitive processes have ever been sufficiently organized to actually transmit anything useful, with specific technical details re Iron Dome.

There's some irony, when one reads Arthur Balfour's letter of 2 November 1917... His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. Sigh...

Yeah I'm wondering how the hostages will work out. Hamas already has said it seeks the release of all Palestinian prisoners (4500 is the number I've seen) in Israeli jails. Some of the insiders are saying all the Israeli hostages will severely limit Bibi's response, some are saying they will bomb the crap out of Gaza anyway. I would think public sentiment, in a country where people formerly marched in the streets and rended their garments over one Israeli soldier hostage (Gilad Shalit), would mean they'd have to tread very lightly. PIJ alone says they have 30, and Hamas has dozens more. Yes, maybe not stupid.

I can see some truth to the first paragraph, but your second went in a tinfoil hat direction I would question. I can see political opportunists making the most of a war, but welcoming it? Especially when that attack in the south made Israel's defense forces look inept and clueless and sort of asleep at the wheel.

Must be related to the collision impact, and the relative effects. An IC engine block and drive train are fairly durable in an impact. I don't about batteries and other EV components. Maybe there's a lot of expensive fly-by-wire stuff that's delicate?

Seems like that would be the classic distraction tactic. Guys like Bibi pretty much created the Hamas of today. And now their timing couldn't be better for bolstering the Likud Party and its corrupt boss. It was also the 50th anniversary of the 1973 war, which began October 6 of that year. Hamas basically just gave Israel its very own 9/11 attack, and an excuse to level Gaza. I don't know if they're just stupid or fatalistic, maybe both.

I was curious, so looked at a few citations, starting with the EPA. https://iwaste.epa.gov/guidance/radiological-nuclear/orphan-sources Which provides basic definitions. Then looked at a list of incidents on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incidents And this catalogue is used by professionals to help find orphaned sources. https://www.iaea.org/resources/databases/international-catalogue-of-sealed-radioactive-sources-and-devices One disturbing bit I found in my meandering was that a lot of orphaned source materials end up as scrap metal, which scrappers are often unaware of.

Believe. I had difficulty with this, which I presumed to be some sort of rebus. Axe ewe rocket time? Pick ewe launch time? Hmm. I look up British synonyms and see first image also called a mattock. Nope, that doesn't work. Or ewe could be the more general sheep. Nope. The non-AI continues to struggle, though leaning towards something about picking your launch time (or lunch time? if one is willing to bend a word, something I don't see an AI doing). With AI, the question is if it can figure out a context. I went straight for a rebus, but perhaps it would waste time trying to construct a narrative and flounder around in that context....Pick a sheep to send on the eight o'clock rocket. Humans are good at zooming back and assessing a larger context, so a human would realize a narrative would likely be pretty silly and move on to it's being a rebus. We also presume a left to right sequencing, if our native language follows that convention. And that there is likely to be a verb. Could an AI home in on those assumptions? Probably. It's really larger context that seems to be the challenge.

Unless we go to Clarkeian space elevators or rockets using some exotic propulsion that drastically drops payload costs, I would see privatized space travel as mostly creating a playground for the wealthy. Even if there were asteroid mining or similar profit ventures, very few people would physically go up, as automated processes (without expensive life support systems and radiation shielding) would be far cheaper - engineers and other technical staff would likely run such operations from the ground while robots dug out the minerals.

There was that odd tinkling that coincidences make, when I read "Flannan Isle" in your post, as I had just the past week watched a 2018 movie about the Flannan Isle mystery. The Vanishing offers a solution a wee bit more dramatic than that a storm surge swept them into the sea.

No. That would be....weird. Early 20th century American slang, "tickle the ivories," for playing the piano. Ivory piano keys were common then. Mostly from walrus tusks, IIRC. (common misconception that they were from elephants)

You have failed to capitalize Jelly Roll! It is Jelly Morton Morton, the ragtime/blues piano icon. You have offended the Piano God! I speak of the coming annihilation of the heretics who are not humble before the Great 88 who tickles the ivories of heaven! There is no God before the Piano God! Prepare yourself!

Went a little overboard on plus ones. Good thread, and I thank @iNow for a chuckle, imagining a Dem Jeffries as speaker of a GOP House. How many nanoseconds would pass, in today's hyperpartisan congress, for a motion to vacate if Hakeem were voted in? But yes, it would be cool if paleo Repubs sort of jumped ship.

Th GOP seems so divided between ordinary conservatives and the freaks in the Trumpian clown car that it could require some Dem votes to get a speaker. Which could mean someone more centrist. OTOH, the GOP could continue letting itself be tugged farther to the right - but that would ignore voters who are tired of the attacks on women's rights, labor rights, and LGBT rights, a fatigue that has spread well past party lines. So then you'd see quite the turnover in the next election cycle. I think the GOP has to move towards sanity, or wither and die.

I've thought about that effect of acceptance of what one is born into, and it's certainly an element of generation ship novels (like Harry Harrison's Captive Universe). You could argue the ship would just be your world, and seem normal, but I wonder how a starship compares to an entire planet, especially if you are young and restless and find out what planets are. Much would depend on the shipboard culture that evolves over the dozens of generations. And the question also gets back to Mac's comments on size. How much ship does it take to satisfy any human desire for a "world"?

Three generations and one can be happy knowing ones grandchildren will step on a new world. 100 and any future involving another world and your descendants would be pretty abstract. How would many generations that know they are only placeholders....footnotes in history feel about their lives? I guess it's the topic that generation ship novels explore.

Isn't a scaramucci ten days? Should we check with the International Bureau of Weights and Measures? (July 21 - July 31, 2017)

It's a crude analogy. I guess the idea is that the number of universes that have constants which favor black hole formation will tend to increase. Not about competition, more about "fertility" - without any barriers, the ratio of BH forming universes tends to increase. Indeed, black holes don't have to adapt - just form and then collapse. The collapse opens another universe. The process is passive proliferation.

For a viable longterm colony, the 50/500 rule of population biology would apply. For a human population to retain evolutionary potential, to remain genetically flexible and diverse, 500 is considered an approximate minimum. For exploration, I've heard of studies that monitor glucocorticoids (stress hormones) in groups and found optimal sizes ranging from 6-25, however I wonder if there is still a shortage of empirical data on this (especially where a rigorous selection process is used as would be the case with astronauts). And, in the situation of exploring an entire strange new world (boldly going where no one has gone before), the demand for many kinds of expertise could mean higher numbers regardless of what would be optimal group dynamics. It wouldn't be like a moon trip where a couple astronauts can confer constantly with JPL while doing a small set of activities of limited scope.