TheVat

It wasn't. I appreciate that you have sympathy for the plight of Palestinians.

Gaza is under a multidecade land, air, and sea blockade. Not conducive to beautiful resorts or letting oil companies or other developers in. Gaza airport was demolished by Israel. Border restrictions mean very limited access to Palestinians main urban center, East Jerusalem, or its agricultural resources in West Bank (what's left of them). This is not really "newfound freedom." All this in spite of the terms of the Oslo Accord being that Israel must treat Palestine as one political entity. On what planet would such gross violations of international law result in a prosperous economy for a small enclave effectively torn away from its other pieces and primary urban center of banking, education, foreign consulates and other services? Even if Gaza were run by people better than the Hamas cretins, they would have no shot at the rosy alternate universe you paint.

Not typical of my music tastes, but it's interesting to learn that a mystery regarding a background song on The X-Files has finally been solved after 25 years. I remember the episode, but hadn't the slightest idea that a background song in a bar scene was specifically composed for the episode. Or that it had an ET theme (the second video, at the end of the article, has the full track minus bar noise). https://www.npr.org/2023/12/13/1219137444/x-files-missing-song-mystery-music-lost-media

I think we agree on this. Having friends and a spouse who gain something from their Abrahamic practices, I will offer my observation that not everyone is shackled. Individual people aren't binary where either they attend church and wear cognitive shackles or they are enlightened freethinkers soaring grandly over the intellectual landscape. The problem with stereotyping believers is that not everyone who attends a service has signed on to every page of dogmatic boilerplate. Stereotypes can also be strawmen. I fear a hypocritical douche like Mike Johnson, but I didn't fear a Daniel Berrigan or a Thomas Merton.

Nope. You are seemingly denying the words and actions of Bibi and his Far Right coalition. Bibi has said on multiple occasions that there is no two state solution with Palestinian sovereignty, or any return of stolen land. That's not someone seeking peace or justice for all parties. His position is a radical Zionist position backed up with harassment and killing of West Bank people, fomenting vigilante murder done by illegal settlers, massive and indiscriminate bombing that has in the current war killed over 18,000 civilians, half of them children, use of white phosphorus, starvation of civilians, murder of POWs and surrendered soldiers, etc. These are the actions of an unlawful and immoral regime. There is nothing liberal about them, and my sympathies to the Israelis who have broken free of their national news bubble and realize what their government is doing. So yes, I will compare the illiberal actions of both Israel and Hamas. Look up "Israel War Crimes" on Wikipedia - it's a real eye-opener.

A student of field ornithology Did a GPT search on ontology; When the AI inferred That Kant was a bird He blamed, not the code, but zoology.

I'm astonished that there can really be so much debate as to whether Gaza is a place of inhumane confinement or not. Numerous posts have documented this reality. Few people could leave, except for maybe half a percent who had work permits (also a feature of some prisons). Food and water constantly rationed. Normal trade and economic opportunities blocked. Every few years, jets pass over and destroy part of the infrastructure and housing. Who gives a FF what it's called, it is still inhumane and strips people of basic sovereignty over their own lives. Weird that members here who could easily grasp the miseries of places like East Berlin or the Ghetto of Warsaw, find it difficult to empathize with the 99% of Palestinians who are not Hamas militants and are simply trying to survive. Both Israel and Hamas are at fault, each feeding the endless cycle of vengeful hatred and reprisal, each dominated by an illiberal and miltant faction in a part of the world where liberalism is most sorely needed.

Apparently this company gets involved if we don't ask.... https://www.curicaltech.com/ I think this discussion could benefit from a dichotomy between religion as a hierarchical dogmatic system of population control and as a personal spiritual practice. I see considerable difference from a Zen practice seeking inner peace and enlightenment, and a power broker banging a Bible or a Quran. I know scientists with first rate brains whose spiritual practice may embrace something like the former while rejecting the latter. Religion may not be hardwired (though a tendency to believe in unseen things may lurk in our wiring, as Sagan noted, in Dragons of Eden), but a desire to understand oneself as part of something larger, as connected to all life, may be somewhat baked in, both genetically and memetically. I think it's possible humanity can embrace reason and science without discarding spiritual acts like meditation, contemplation, and some seeking after metaphysical questions. Any utopia that discards all such activity would seem to risk a totalitarian cliff edge.

There's some variation in the menstrual cycle - 21 to 35 days. The moon's synodic period, however, is 29.5 days. So the correlation is kind of weak. And mammalian estrus cycles show wide variation among species, a range which is not at all centered around the lunar month. So those cycles look to be controlled by biological factors not astronomical ones.

And the individual level we can see people interacting many different ways with a religious framework. My wife is Catholic, and derives great spiritual value and comfort from that without taking on some of the more dogmatic and intolerant baggage that some of that faith might do. Her experience is such that I am unable to dismiss the value of a spiritual practice for some people, even if it differs from my own (more buddhistic, with a small B) or I see some members of a group acting badly and without compassion. For her, it's a path of compassion, patience with others, tolerance, and support of personal freedoms (including, yes, medical freedoms for women) in life. The ugliness and manipulations of organized heirarchical religions that alienate @Phi for All and many others here is something I understand, while at the same time recognizing that some people are adept as "taking the best and leaving the rest" in their religious practice. So I find myself falling short of the Hitchens position - religion poisons a lot of life, in a lot of places, but it doesn't poison everything. For some people, their religious practice is a way to codify and issue self-reminders to love, care, show compassion, withold harsh judgments and work for peace. For every religious nut who wants to send women back to the middle ages or squash LGBT folks or violently smite their enemies, there is a religious person who hasn't forgotten what great teachers like Jesus and Gautama taught. And are better people for it.

Thanks, this stresses the coherence problems of epiphenomenalism which as a metaphysical naturalist I reject. Everything either supervenes on the physical, or reduces to it. The relationship of consciousness to the physical is definitely the first one. And consciousness then becomes, in a physicalist view, a certain sort of relationship between collections of matter. E.g. consciousness is not a thing like my brain, it is the relationship between the body, its brain, ("me") and the external world. Sort of like the novel is not ink on the page but the relationship created by those inked pages between a storyteller and a reader. (don't hold me to all this, I'm still working it out....)

I think of Hannah Arendt's banality of evil when this topic comes up. https://philosophybreak.com/articles/hannah-arendt-on-standing-up-to-the-banality-of-evil/

Please tell me you're pulling our legs.

I don't see a clear line of evidence that geomagnetic storms directly cause CV problems. There is a more direct causal link between GM activity and levels of PM 2.5, and the latter is a definite influence on CV problems due to particulates of that size passing through the alveolar membrane and entering the bloodstream. I find no evidence that the pineal gland has anything to do with this, outside of various pseudoscience theories. If the pineal gland does anything besides respond to day/night cycles with melatonin production, no one has found evidence of it. If it were so easily "messed up" by magnetic fields, then I would think power plant workers, physicians, particle physicists, auto salvage yard workers, and anyone receiving an MRI would be in SERIOUS trouble!

I accidentally clicked on the oldest page of the quantum theory subforum, p. 85. https://www.scienceforums.net/forum/9-quantum-theory/page/85/ Why are there all these threads, with zero posts, and the threads are dated Dec. 31, 1969?? Fascinating. Seems "Guest" was quite prolific 54 years ago.

For that three minute period when Nikki was explaining why America should send troops into Mexico, I was able to view Trump as slightly less insane. Then the moment passed and I went back to hoping Trump wins the nomination and makes Biden's job much easier. Trump is his own best Democratic political attack ad.

None needed - I was being grumpy. And my bad for not proofreading. I don't need to be giving math students topological nightmares.

EU is one of the world's largest markets for digital goods and services, so its regulatory moves are influential on companies around the world. Somewhat analogous is California when it enacts regulation on automobiles - automakers pay attention due to the size of its market and its influence on other states.

Per MSM, a deal was reached on Friday, so it looks like the EU act will become law. How much it furthers the EU's existing laws on digital privacy is still not clear to me. The Post reports... The deal on Friday appeared to ensure that the European Parliament could pass the legislation well before it breaks in May ahead of legislative elections. Once passed, the law would take two years to come fully into effect ...

Not to sound grumpy but I think a benefit of the doubt that my autocorrect turned cuboid to cube would have been welcome. Of course I know it's not a cube. Cheers.

Consider the operation you do on the 5:3:2. Can you see what you might do to that result to obtain the volume given? Remember this is a cube.

A liitle trouble following here. Does this relate to Prigogine and self-organizing systems? So rather than a world where pure classical chemistry prevailed, fully deterministic, and maybe the complex chemistry of life would not have developed, we needed the unpredictable but still deterministic chaotic systems of quantum superpositions of all possible arrangements? Would this increase the chances of ACGT bits colliding and starting RNA strands? The primordial pond tends toward states that are more organized?

I take @joigus point, that we don't need hyperbole to talk about the problems of Gaza. A place with its unique blend of economic corsets, Malthusian crisis, failed governance, rotting infrastructure, doesn't need to be a concentration camp to be a place of blighted opportunities and overcrowding. This wiki entry speaks to the troubles and abuse Palestinians have received when seeking free movement... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_freedom_of_movement When a woman in labor is denied passage and has a miscarriage at a border checkpoint, such a story becomes a catalyst that amplifies anger and despair. Israel has operated those checkpoints in a brutal manner that creates thousands of such stories over the years, feeding the hatred. The population explosion aspect also points to the flawed logic of any political and/or religious faction that tries outbreeding its perceived enemy. Both ultraconservative Jews and Muslims have factions that tried this, an insane tactic in a desert land with low biological carrying capacity and narrow borders. As @J.C.MacSwell and others note, Hamas doesn't care about Palestinians but rather about keeping its own ranks well-stocked with young and impressionable cannon fodder. I can see no path to peace so long as all these toxic ideological forces continue to feed each other.

Let me see if I'm following this. Noncommuting, this means a measurement can change the state, right ? If we have observations A and B, we have two observables A and B that fail to commute, it is to say there is an eigenvector (direction) of A that it is not an eigenvector of B. So then an interaction with B isn't just some passive uncovering of preexisting information, but is an interaction that can change the state in question.

When the birthrate soars to where the average age is 18, that's usually a strong indicator that women are extremely oppressed in a society - basically chattel for breeding. And when you're at that point demographically then bad governance is perpetuated. Throw in confinement to a small space and it's a recipe for Calhoun's behavioral sink. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink Again, while acknowledging the horror that is Hamas, I do not absolve Israel of its role in the past century of oppression and displacement. And creating that sink. Apparently when one calls on Israel for moral accountability, everything one has said will be falsely framed by someone as sympathy for Hamas or anti-Semitism.