TheVat

A lot of the arguments against XY participation seem to me structurally similar to someone arguing against Swedish-American girls in sports. Those girls are big-boned and strong, it's really an unfair advantage and they're going to break the delicate bones of the other girls. I'm sure there are anecdotes. I'm sure we could have sixty pages of homing in on detailed analysis of Swedish girls, and there would be many anecdotes about brutish Swedish girls annihilating other girls on playing fields and the awful spectre of driving out non-Swedes from elite sports and Olympics. Just saying there is a reason regulars withdraw from this thread. Just not worth it to watch the endless reycling of arguments and parading of anecdotes. Skoal!

Guess I didn't win the lounge suite. Last time I looked into the chess world, Magnus Carlsen was the world champ. I don't really keep up with chess, except a couple times a week I solve the daily chess puzzles at chess.com. The end of the week ones are usually the hardest.

LoL! It's quite a different ecosystem in the human GI tract.

That analogy suffers in that Darwin was looking at scientific data about speciation, whereas this is more an issue of social acceptance. People identify themselves in society many ways - outdoorsy, bookish, cat-adoring, devoutly religious, athletic, metrosexual, etc. We tend to defer to their self-ID, I guess on the principle that they are somewhat self-aware. We might question someone on an individual level if they seem to be a poseur, but we don't dismiss a whole category as delusional, e.g. all bookish people are just pretending, they just skim wikipedia... ETA - just read Zapatos post, looks like arrived at that point already.

Be great if that worked. And realistically I don't see many SA ranchers opting to let cattle graze in the rainforest (though forest grazing is a real thing now), so soil modifications of cleared pasture is a more likely approach. Which hopefully would reduce the forest clearing by creating longterm pastures.

I think many youtube songs, you can type in the song name followed by the word lyrics, and you will get a video that shows the lyrics. (with better quality than some of the CC) This all raises a question, perhaps for another thread, which is about the viability of a fly that a person has swallowed whole. Would the low pH environment of the stomach quickly kill the fly, if the muscular action of swallowing didn't? If the stomach were empty, could there be sufficient air and space for the fly to buzz around in there for a while? Or would the coating of saliva and mucus have already incapacitated it?

A humorous folk song by Burl Ives, which has the woman swallowing successively larger creatures, until she swallowed a horse....she died, of course. No one knows why she swallowed the fly. 😀

The GBR experiment is different in several ways from what we are discussing, so it does not address the issues I was talking about. BTW, any positive results reported on that experiment? One of the reasons environmental groups have pushed boycotts on S American products like tinned beef. Forest clearing gets beef producers a couple years of grazing, then the land is a ruined mess and has to be abandoned.

The article you later posted doesn't support your assertion of "most straight people...." All the article does is reflect someone's opinion that present rape statutes could be interpreted to pin "rape by deception" on a sexual act with a trans person. I don't see either polling, or expert legal opinion, or actual incidents reported, on this. Given the facial bone structure (and ghost of 5 o'clock shadow) of the opining tv personality, I feel confident that her sexual partners will be quite aware that she is trans.

Makes no sense. If wind and sun aren't doing it, the nozzles of man aren't going to do diddleysquat. Expensive fountains. Like the Bellagio casino in Vegas. It's mainly sun that evaporates, and the shore waters are already having their surface increased by the wind roughing them up. Even if you did miraculously lob a few tiny clouds landward, the desert air would just boil them away and you would, as I mentioned in previous post, just have a slightly more humid patch of sky retaining slightly more insolation heat.

It may help to research the enthalpy of vaporization of water. The sun pours terawatts on that water and the adjacent deserts remain desert. I looked up the thread and see you were not interested in pursuing that when Seth suggested it, so I'll leave it be. Another error I spotted was the assumption that water vapor is cooling. Water droplets are cooling (we call clusters of them "clouds"), but vapor is a GHG and magnifies the GH effect. Without megatons of condensation nuclei, you could end up making that desert a hot sticky hellhole. You also have the sinking branches of the Hadley Cells suppressing rain at the subtropic latitudes where many of these deserts are located. Would not money be better spent encouraging farmers to decrease their goat flocks and try the various measures in my linked Smithsonian article on the Sahel? Building vegetation and enriching soils may be the better longterm solution.

This sentence is either a dull tautology, or you are asserting that a gender transition is merely donning the appearance of the transitioned-to gender. If the latter, you would need some evidence because it sounds a lot like barstool blather. To the first questions, what does it matter? Are other adult's sexual encounters or how they handle them any of our business? Do we have a lot of rules for what prospective sexual partners are supposed to inform us about? Criminal records? Checkered pasts? Previous boyfriends? Bisexuality ? Political affiliation? I think adults are supposed to work these things out. Stephen Rea got upset and threw up in The Crying Game when he discovered his girlfriend's penis, but was okay after a couple days and having a good think on it, and was able to accept her as she was. I would think most good relationships end up there. ETA: Have spent several minutes trying to determine why all the text came out underlined and trying to get rid of it. Finally figured how to eliminate it in my text, but can't make that work inside Mac's quote boxes. Sorry, Mac.

So what is your own opinion on the topic? Would take terawatts, looks like, and deserts that border oceans tend to be that way because they lack onshore winds and tend to rapidly evaporate any water that does come their way. IOW, world's most expensive fountains. A mosaic of indigenous land use practices, however..... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/great-green-wall-stop-desertification-not-so-much-180960171/

My post on the use of tooth pulp was simply a reply to another poster on the type of DNA that can survive almost any kind of calamity. While I am not personally invested in bodily remains being found, I can understand their use in reconstructing what exactly happened. I don't think those who perished will mind if their bits serve a scientific purpose. I hope that speculation of mine is not too empty for you. If it is, you are free to move along.

The cladistic approach makes a lot of things clearer, regarding species and extinction. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/bf00144036 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cladistics (from Springer article) The correct explanation of why species, in evolutionary theory, are individuals and not classes is the cladistic species concept. The cladistic species concept defines species as the group of organisms between two speciation events, or between one speciation event and one extinction event, or (for living species) that are descended from a speciation event. It is a theoretical concept, and therefore has the virtue of distinguishing clearly the theoretical nature of species from the practical criteria by which species may be recognized at any one time.

In tooth pulp, very likely. (I'm a bit late catching up with this thread)

It was helpful when they added "the" or "truly" to the mnemonic, Dear King Phillip Came Over For Truly Good Soup . The addition of tribe, e.g. Hominins, was helpful in understanding our lineage and how we are more closely related to chimps than orangs.

This is not a porn website, sorry.

It really depends on what the taxon is, in a particular analysis. If you take the taxon to be genus, then Homo didn't end when Erectus did. Heidelbergensis followed and continued the taxon. If the taxon under discussion is species, however, then the species did end and would satisfy the definition of extinction. So no one is going to argue these points without the taxon being defined. If the taxon was class, then we could have a sixth extinction event that left only gophers in the entire class Mammalia and we would say mammals didn't go extinct. No. It's someone you can mate with and produce fertile offspring. Horses and donkeys mate successfully all the time. But their mule progeny are sterile.

The Church potlucks are better, too.

I think it was bare serpents, for the Greeks.

Maybe I misread you, but did you mean Brown v Topeka Board of Education, 1954? Marshall definitely argued for Oliver Brown on that one, when he was an NAACP attorney. The SCOTUS decision then partially overruled the 1896 Plessy decision. (iirc, another decision finished off the rest of it) The simplest tap dance I can think of is outreach to those who lived childhood below the poverty line and would be first-gen college students. This would also defuse the victimization narrative from the white rural poor. Where my spouse grew up, at the hub of a mostly rural area of Arkansas, this was a common narrative of resentment - If I were just black, they woulda given me a ticket to U of A! That grievance story has legs like you wouldn't believe. Sorry, the quote above belongs to @CharonY, but I must have clipped it from Stringys post and the software doesn't nest quotes.

I'm a Feces. It's a small constellation located under Taurus. We enjoy bullshitting. I could see testing the hypothesis that there are seasonal effects on people (being born when it's cold and days are short, versus when the pollen and humidity is thick), but the names of imaginary shapes formed by stars wouldn't have much to do with it. And the effect would be reversed, calendar-wise, in the S hemisphere. One of my children is a Gemini and fits the description disturbingly well. I have rarely had a phone conversation with him shorter than two hours. Not well-versed in the lore, but aren't Virgos supposed to be pretty logical? Anyway, yes, rubbish.

Amanda Marcotte amusingly and incisively details Trump's low energy state. https://www.salon.com/2023/06/29/gops-lackluster-frontrunner-seems-awfully-low-energy-lately/ Per forum rules, no need to read this, but it gets at some reasons he really only has his MAGA base at this point and little prospect of expanding beyond that crowd of simpletons.