TheVat

Don't think abortion prior to birth has been legal anywhere - both Roe v Wade and Casey v PP (the US landmark cases) set abortion rights at pre-viability and not after. But post-viability abortion has been the straw man used by the right-wing to demonize pro-choice policy.

Could you come down from your pulpit and address the points being made here about experimental evidence? These pompous and condescending sermonettes are worse than outright trolling.

Interesting the latest page of Harris v Trump is mostly Canadians chatting about Canadian politics. I think Canada has reason for anxiety about the exporting of MAGA craziness. The politics of fear has seductive appeal when there is social turbulence in the world. Society's problems aren't complex and systemic, they are just groups of bad people. Or, as I recently learned, masturbation. Apparently, Project 2025 includes a plan to ban all porn. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/01/nx-s1-5168877/2024-election-pac-trump-porn-sites

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Following only tiny (Planck scale) bits and pieces of the chat here. So these hermitian operators are describing observable quantities for a quantum system, right? So matching actual experimental observations is key? In dumbed-down-for-biology-majors terms, what kind of observations would confirm or disprove the OP hypothesis? Why would a quark flavor symmetry in chromodynamics apply so broadly? This strikes me as having a Popperian "black swan" issue, in terms of a definitive observation establishing that protons don't decay.

Are you referring to Lars Svendsen's philosophical reflections? https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/P/bo26297655.html Looks interesting. Can you articulate some of what you found in the book, maybe give us a sense of what you think might be valuable to other readers? I am guessing you did not read it in the original Norwegian, and so read a translated edition?

Coeliac is the poster child of elusive diseases that may not manifest until well into adulthood (though there is a pediatric form that can be diagnosed quite early nowadays). Because it involves a complex interaction between the immune system and a protein found in wheat or rye or barley and the lining of the small intestine, it can range from no symptoms (until you get bowel cancer later in life, or finally show malabsorption of nutrients later in life due to very gradual degradation of intestinal villi) to complete havoc - severe IBS-like misery, wasting, anemia, and such. In children, there can be serious developmental consequences including short stature, neurological effects like cerebellar ataxia, delayed puberty, etc. There is also some indication that exposures to certain agricultural chemicals in wheat growing may trigger some autoimmune responses like coeliac. So, to respond to OP, this illustrates that gene interactions with our environment are pretty complex. It may take decades before certain genes, like the HLA-DQA1 and HLA-DQB1 gene variants implicated in coeliac, are activated in a way to cause trouble. (btw, you can get a test for the two principal gene variants by mail for around 100-150 USD, which may be well worth doing)

This fellow has more free time than a lot of the RW camp do. What seems to me more threat than the Gish gallopers are the info-poor who will say they have little time to follow politics, so they assign one talking head at Faux News or one scribbler at The Daily Caller as their Information Gatekeeper. They read Trump will evict freeloading illegal aliens and solve our housing shortage and that's it, they're ready to vote. Who cares if some sawdust-coated lunatic named Joe Inow stops them on the street and talks some smack about Trump? They've got their Trusted Source!

It might be easier to explain to a child that negation in math is like an inversion or flipping the number line. Multiplication is simply making an inversion one or several times. So, one inversion of minus three is -1x-3. Invert the number line and you flip minus three to three. So -3x-3 is inversion of minus three three times, and each time adds a flipped segment 3 units long, getting you to 9. This shows that positive and negative are really somewhat different in character - one just extends, the other flips.

If males with misogynistic and racist tendencies don't vote, how did we get Trump in 2016?

If they are unknown, how do you know of them and form opinions on their likelihood?

Mental illness, even more likely. Check out his previous threads on the hollow Earth and bending laser beams with your thoughts.

So a Bose Einstein Condensate can exist in the hot wet noisy environment of the brain? Any evidence for Hamerof's microtubule theory? Haven't seen anything on this but conjecture and I tend towards Tegmark's objection - he determined the decoherence timescale of microtubule entanglement at brain temperatures to be on the order of femtoseconds, far too brief for neural processing.

Je suis désolé que mon français soit si mauvais. I guess, logic aside, I was given to understand (while traveling in Europe) that Americans starting out speaking in English was viewed as part of our whole aura of obnoxious entitlement. Asking if people speak English, in their country's language, is seen as a show of respect for where you are and sometimes even wins you a compliment like "Oh, are you Canadian?" (i.e. not acting entitled causes some to conclude you're not American) This phrase, of course, opens many doors for you in France: Mon aéroglisseur est plein d'anguilles.

A somewhat more balanced analysis of the issues of wildlife management and interaction with human populations. https://theconversation.com/colorado-voters-weigh-a-ban-on-hunting-mountain-lions-as-attitudes-toward-wild-predators-shift-238265#:~:text=Colorado's Proposition 127 would ban,is currently legal in Colorado. There is also, imo, a cause for concern when the pelt of the animal has a high monetary value. History has shown repeatedly that species populations can be decimated by (sometimes illegal) over- harvesting, when there's a profit incentive. Apex predator populations are quite vulnerable, in this regard. Non-lethal methods of management often better protect the species and actually reduce dangerous human-animal encounters.

Yes, especially for hunter-gatherers who might be camping next to water - a smell of decomp would be a warning of fouled water. Or finding a carcass - if it's gone off, they don't scavenge it. We came to perceive sulfur compounds like hydrogen sulfide as stinky because it indicates food unfit to eat or water not potable.

Who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of?

My guess is Havel is pointing his pen at ideology of the type that gaslights, e.g. Stalinism, Natl Socialism, Trumpism, etc. I have to read further, but it seems like he's saying many people aren't finding real living philosophies in the slogans and aphorisms they're hearing. When he speaks of their conscience being deceived, it's likely he is not targeting, say, civil rights ideology or the human rights principles of liberal democracy generally. I will try to return to this - things be busy in the vat today.

When you use a Q-tip to clean your ear, you need to stop pushing it in when you encounter resistance. I'm sorry this advisory didn't reach you earlier!

You answer quite slowly: a girl with colitis goes by.

Reading The Power of the Powerless, by Vaclav Havel, came across this bit. "Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves." https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-vaclav-havel-2011-12-23

I went to a costume party at a bar last weekend. I dressed up as a harp. When I walked into the bar, the bartender said, "Hey, what are you supposed to be?" I said, "I'm a harp." He said, " You're way to small to be a harp." I said, "Are you calling me a lyre?"

Spec thread, maybe?

I knew it! The French ARE a different species!