TheVat

From a different perspective, it appeared you were badgering a newbie, @Benjamin Karl, who was not making a claim but rather requesting opinions on the claims made in a video. Whose points he courteously summarized when asked to. While he could be encouraged to dig deeper for other sources, I am not sure that your tone was that of a friendly guide in that quest.

There is a sensed presence effect that seems to be generated in the temporal lobe. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-sensed-presence-effect/

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/06/nanograv-picks-up-signal-of-cosmic-choir-of-supermassive-black-holes/ Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, first detected in 2015. But an expected corresponding low-frequency gravitational wave background—a kind of "hum" comprised of a chorus of gravitational waves, most likely emanating from binary pairs of supermassive black holes—has proven more elusive. Now the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) has announced the first evidence of this gravitational wave background. The results and related analyses are described in several new papers published in the The Astrophysical Journal Letters. (....) The idea behind NANOGrav is that as gravitational waves stretch and shrink spacetime, this will disrupt the pulsars' ultra-precise "ticking." There should be a telltale signature in the form of a kind of “shimmering” effect, produced because pulses affected by gravitational waves should arrive slightly earlier or later in response to those ripples in spacetime. By studying the timing of the regular signals produced by many individual millisecond pulsars scattered over the sky at the time—called a "pulsar timing array"—NANOGrav tries to detect minute changes in the Earth's position due to the effects of gravitational waves. It just takes many years to do so.

When your country's name is White Russia, it doesn't help when you want to maintain a clear separation with Russia. Clearly they need to consult a marketing consultant and come up with something less Russian-y. Baja Lithuania?

Sometimes you see the perfect fruit showing underneath some others and you tug at it and it just won't....budgie.

Wonder if one reason the debate over theft v reparation never resolves is a basic tension between the conservative and progressive philosophies. Conservatives emphasize personal responsibility and prog/liberals lean more on community responsibility. So cons are more liable to view paying for someone else's need (if they themselves did not personally cause that need) as a theft from them. That feeling informs their views on a range of public amenities which they may object to. E.g. I get to work on my own so why should I fund a mass transit bond? Or, my kids go to private school so why should I fund a public school system? Or, I didn't get you addicted to drugs so why should I help pay for a drug treatment center in my city? The prog rejoinder to such views usually boils down to Society should try to help lift everyone up; that creates a more livable and safer community which benefits everyone. This difference in perspective is very hard to resolve. In America especially where so many idealize the mythos of the rugged individualist and the Self-Made Man.

Perhaps God has quantum hair. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269322001290#!

Couldn't you just put the credit card inside the wallet and then drag it across an RFID scanner/reader? Just go to an automated checkout at a supermarket where you won't be mystifying a clerk. If any signal got through, you would know it was not really RFID protected.

Interesting to hear of this study which suggests some people may be able to sense a rotation of an earth-strength magnetic field, around 50 microtesla, experiencing a shift in alpha rhythms... https://www.science.org/content/article/humans-other-animals-may-sense-earth-s-magnetic-field#:~:text=A study published today offers,can sense Earth's magnetic field. https://www.eneuro.org/content/6/2/ENEURO.0483-18.2019 Definitely needs followup study.

I wondered what had happened in Camouflage thread. Then saw where the poster had taken offense, and retaliated for it. I cancelled about three of the neg reps, as they seemed unjust and based on spite rather than quality of the posts.

As is apparent from this selfie, I had my spouse add some beer to the vat.

Courts are not set up to remedy generational injustice. They can at best handle some of the fallout, like predatory rental practice and eviction, and there's work being done to expedite that. Legislative bodies exist to handle large-scale problems that courts cannot. With laws. Given the gridlocked and circus-like atmosphere of the federal legislative branch in US, some of these reparations could conceivably be implemented at the state level, one weird and histrionic skirmish at a time.

BBrain is just a solipsistic philosophical conundrum and not a serious theory. You can't argue against it any more than you can argue against Descartes's Demon or the flying spaghetti monster. Speaking as someone who used to post as BrainInaVat, I do appreciate Boltzmann Brain as a forum handle, though. Got a LOL from me the first time I saw it. Statistically, the vast majority of Boltzmann brains would see nothing but chaotic mush and internal confusion.

Musk tweeted: "I have this great move that I call 'The Walrus', where I just lie on top of my opponent & do nothing." He later tweeted short videos of walruses, which suggests he may not be all that serious about the cage match. In a possibly futile attempt to bring this post back to thread relevance, I will note that Mr Zuckerberg's penchant for profuse sweating tells me that he, like the ill-fated submersible, may lack the necessary hull integrity. Even if advancing age assists a change from cylindrical to spherical.

I much prefer being a brain floating in a vat. The vat, really. It doesn't require such outlandish fluctuations of entropy or a googolplex of years to first come into being and then another googoplex to recur as that same being subjectively feeling a few seconds later. Even though you don't feel the wait, it still seems tedious. For alpha, 1/137.036, I much prefer the Doug Adams puddle model. AKA the strong anthropic principle. Imagine one of those observerless universes where alpha is not between around 1/180 and 1/85 and so proton decay is not slow enough for life to be possible. Atoms the size of Dodger Stadium that don't last. What's interesting are the ones just a little bit off alpha, like 1/134. Could those be comfortable puddles, too?

@Commander has also not posted a solution to the "line n grid" puzzle.

Next in the series? Thor witty Existen Get hi Rufo ....

Sinema loves attention (she used to wear a pink tutu to political demonstrations, back in her Leftist days), and acting foolish or clueless seems her preferred method for getting it. She's been receiving corporate bribes since she took office. IIRC, Open Secrets, a group that tracks corporate donations to congresspeople, has consistently ranked her at the top, or near it , in the US Senate.

Civil war cancelled for Saturday. Maybe next week.

Yes, more than one type of selective force will drive coloration. Slow animals with bellies on the ground or near the ground perhaps have less need for countershading. And more need to look like rocks or other non-mobile surface features.

And some Byelorussians are getting stirred up about all the chaos being a possible opportunity for ouster of the dictator Lukashenko. From a Washington Post report.... Losing his Byelo puppet, now that would be embarassing for Putin, too. (probably little chance, but you never know what the chaos of internal strife will bring) Ypa. My favorite news snip this a.m. was from CNN, concerning a Wagner column seen on the move north of Voronezh. Witnesses said they had seen troops....shopping.

I would guess that deep-sea craft will trend back towards the spherical hull, and use the traditional titanium or HY steel alloys. Sounds like carbon fiber can delaminate. https://apnews.com/article/titanic-shipwreck-titan-submersible-search-deepsea-atlantic-implosion-90b9c54c3887c99099170a5afded15bc

Seems like experimental evidence was minimal until recently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countershading Despite demonstrations and examples adduced by Cott and others, little experimental evidence for the effectiveness of countershading was gathered in the century since Thayer's discovery. Experiments in 2009 using artificial prey showed that countershaded objects do have survival benefits and in 2012, a study by William Allen and colleagues showed that countershading in 114 species of ruminants closely matched predictions for "self-shadow concealment", the function predicted by Poulton, Thayer and Cott. If Thayer's Law is valid, then one would expect some predators to favor early morning or near sunset to hunt, when the countershading would be of less use.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.06301v1 Evidence for Near Ambient Superconductivity in the Lu-N-H System Nilesh P. Salke, Alexander C. Mark, Muhtar Ahart, Russell J. Hemley Download PDF Comments: 11 pages, 7 figures Subjects: Superconductivity (cond-mat.supr-con) Cite as: arXiv:2306.06301 [cond-mat.supr-con] (or arXiv:2306.06301v1 [cond-mat.supr-con] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2306.06301 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Nilesh Salke [view email] [v1] Fri, 9 Jun 2023 23:29:43 UTC (1,454 KB)