TheVat

Any possibility these nuisance ads could be eliminated? Banner ads are okay, but this new format makes for a pretty rude interruption. How can any advertizer, seeing what type of website this is, imagine we would respond to these in a positive way?

In cognitive sciences this goes into the Gordian knot of "downward causation." Can a higher order phenomenon, like say conscious volition, genuinely have causal powers or is it like the Mexican Wave, and any causal effect is illusory. The only causal agent, in the MW, is the individual spectator. So I wonder if physics ever encounters issues of downward causation that are akin to the one in cognitive science. Seems it does. I will try to get through this paper (here's an abstract) https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.07531#:~:text=Basically%2C downward causation is present,the dispositions of the parts.

I would only add that "color blind" can also be actively harmful. In medicine, pretending all people are the same has tended to result in poor, even negligent, treatment where there are real racial differences. Same with gender, where the gender-blind 1SFA approach has caused harm to female patients. When we are really comfortable as a nation with differences, we will celebrate them, not pretend that we're all just featherless bipeds. Happy Juneteenth!

49. North and South Dakota are like two peas in a pod. Wait, make that 48, Oregon and Washington are pretty similar... Seriously, the original Missouri Territory (from around 1820), would probably just form one state - it would include the Dakotas, Nebraska, Missouri (obv) and other northern plains states that all have enough in common to form a cohesive (and conservative) nation. I guess some of this turns on what structural means. Was it DeSantis who tried to bring back a form of poll tax, barring ex-cons from voting if they had legal/court fees outstanding? IIRC it worked as disenfranchisement because how many ex-cons have extra money on hand?

Well, there have been studies like this one https://news.llu.edu/research/new-study-associates-intake-of-dairy-milk-with-greater-risk-of-prostate-cancer and other research, summarized here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8255404/ and then the usual agglomeration of anecdotes (from me, and others I've talked with, including my papa) that dairy consumption seems to tighten the flow a bit. I've also heard some (possibly flawed) reports on casein, the main protein in milk), as a possible inflammatory factor for some people who are prone to autoimmune issues. I get the feeling this is all dependent on body chemistry and not necessarily a problem for everyone. Like a lot of these food warnings, you can experiment with it, making sure to just change the one thing in your diet and nothing else, see what happens. Placebo effect is definitely a factor, too. It is delicious. I still indulge in some cheese. Gotta have the parmesan when there's pasta. LOL "dairy problem." As I said, if it works with your system, and the river flows freely, you might be among the fortunate. YW. Who really needs cow mucus, anyway? The Cro-Magnons did just fine without it. 😀

Leaving aside that DeS appears to be holding a rifle pointed at his own feet and may self-defeat early (I really didn't intend that pun), I'm curious how you came to that view of DeS' relative benignity. And succeed, in the documents case, given who the judge is. I think there's a case to be made that TFG is only running to get immunity starting in January 2025.

Milk is not so great for humans. It's for baby cows. It's murder on the prostate, blocks absorption of iron, has a fermentable oligosaccharide that gets harder to digest in middle age (or never is digested well), sours the breath, amps up some allergies, and increases lethargy. Pretty much all the nice stuff you hear about milk is sponsored by the dairy industry. I know a fair number of singers and they tend to avoid milk, though the common belief that it weakens the voice may be more anecdotal than factual. (it has been my experience, too) Calcium absorption is better effected by eating leafy greens whose vitamin K content helps metabolize the calcium. Combine with a non-dairy milk like Ripple or Silk, and anyone can try non-dairy to see if it benefits, without concern about losing calcium. I suppose I take too much pleasure in dissing milk, but it's a reaction to the way Big Agri pushes it at you relentlessly in my country.

Disinformation lattices - you sure talk fancy, mister. Trumpism seems like what you describe in the rest of that post, a sort of Nazism Lite. I also see elements of the thirty year old Contract with America, drafted by Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey (how perfect is that name?), blended with the White persecution complex and a dollop of autocracy. And like Nazism, it creates the spectre of a sinister elite and bashes those with advanced expertise and education. For Hitler, that resulted in driving out a large portion of Germany's best scientific minds and so proved self-defeating. Imagine a WW2 where all those Manhattan Project brains in the scientific exodus stayed in Germany. Could have been even uglier than it was. I remember reading a history where they described Hitler's early years, and someone asks him, who will be the brains in a National Socialist revolution, and he replies, I will be the brains! Now that sounds very Trump-like. I had a similar take. And understand that many people are growing averse to repeating the actual surname of this malignant turd, so The Former Guy provides a name-free option which also stresses the wish that his moment has passed. I once tried, during TFG's term of office, to promote NMPOTUS as an alternative but it didn't catch on.

If you post under the moniker Alex Krycek, you should be prepared for a bit of teasing. It wasn't patronizing, just joking. You have any idea how many booze jokes or lab monster jokes I've weathered (at three message boards) due to being a vat? I've spent time, on and off over nearly fifty years, reviewing evidence, taking reports from trained observers with the seriousness they deserve. My mind is open that there is something anomalous out there. But nothing has led me to zoom in on the ET hypothesis as deserving more weight than others. AFAICT, that's how open minds work - they don't jump to conclusions when some tall tales of LGM and BEMs (often closely timed with documented fireballs, bolides, satellite reentries, thermal inversions, alien invasion blockbuster movie releases, etc) come their way.

See my reply to Mig. I mean, why assume the converse? If someone checks the box for reparations to African-Americans, why assume they would exclude other ethnic groups from a similar tort law approach? Does anyone out there really say, black reparations yes, but to hell with the indigenous tribes, displaced Latinos, and Japanese internment families! Many I'm sure are like @iNow, seeing all such compensations as worthwhile but knowing that politics is the Art of the Possible, rationally choose to focus on the numerically largest and longest-oppressed group.

Well, not sure who suggested only one ethnic (more precise term than race, perhaps, given that some blacks may be first-gen immigrants from someplace where their families were not enslaved) group get reparations. Many group definitions happen to have a racial component, like my exampled Lakotas and Chavez Ravine outcasts, but their group has other distinguishing features that allow a sharper delineation of the wrongs committed. This approach is more akin to tort law than to discrimination. E.g. if Dupont compensates every worker made ill by Teflon, we don't wring our hands that all the non-Teflon workers are "discriminated against."

Isn't that sort of a straw man? I find most people who favor reparations to Blacks also favor them to Native Americans and other groups like Japanese-Americans whose families were placed in internment camps during WW2 or the Latinos who were displaced from Chavez Ravine in LA. I've never seen reparations as solely for Blacks. For sure, politics operates by the pressure of special interest groups, and they will by their very nature be focused on a particular group. If I join a group to support returning the Black Hills to the Lakota tribe, it doesn't mean I'm not also in favor of compensating Blacks, Latinos displaced from Chavez Ravine, et al.

In German it usually means original or proto-. Like the earliest or most primitive form of something. E.g. schrei means scream, so urschrei means primal scream. Ich hoffe das hilft.

And deportation to Ross 128b is really expensive. Even with the warp drives they helped us reverse-engineer.

After staying off the thread for ten pages, looking in I'm sorry to see the same truism in play, that reversing discrimination is equivalent to discrimination. I think this truism is what messed up AA here in the States. In the Johnson admin, it was straightforwardly defined as reversing racial discrimination. Then, to fend off all the right-wing salvos of "this is more discrimination" most colleges and businesses shifted to diversity as the core goal of AA. The notion of dorms populated with people from all classes and ethnicities had that nice anodyne feel that appeased moderate conservatives. (at least, for a while)

Haha! Yup. I see Nikki Haley also weighed in, with one of those "maybe it's a crime...but it's not the BAD sort of crime" dismissals. I think it would be terrible for the country to have a former president in prison for years because of a documents case. So I would be inclined in favor of a pardon. - Nikki Haley I love the way she called it a "documents case," as if this is nothing but a harmless and bumbling packrat - sorta like one of those people who has a coffee table full of overdue books from the library.

Thanks for asking. (I used to tinker a bit with old cars) With lower voltage, high amperage that flows from an automobile battery presents a strong danger of burns rather than shock. It won't toss your heart's sinus rhythm in a blender, so it is not likely to be life-threatening. Also worth noting that the high-voltage portion of the car ignition system IS a shock hazard. The wire from the coil to the distributor, and the wires from the distributor to the spark plugs, don’t run at 12 volts, but at tens of thousands of volts. On a car with a high-energy ignition system, the voltage level is high enough that it can potentially interfere with your heart rhythm. So you wouldn't want to handle the coil or plug wires without wearing rubber gloves.

I also thank @exchemist for his fact-check on the interstate fireball sightings. And I am surprised that intelligent people can ignore the human penchant for pranking, fakery, and tall tale telling - which is often on display after any dramatic atmospheric phenomenon tweaks the public imagination. I would only add that a second Avatar movie, which happened to feature ten foot tall aliens was released about four months before this Vegas sighting. Like Agent Mulder, @Alex_Krycek wants to believe. 🙂

Also amusing is the way the other announced GOP candidates for 2024, who we presume are running AGAINST Trump, are all hastening to make sure we know they are FOR and WITH Trump, in this his darkest hour. I especially liked Vivek Ramaswamy's threading of the Trump Base needle, where he simultaneously implies Trump's likely guilt of federal crimes and makes sure he is showing maximum support for pardoning him in the future.... Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and activist who is running against Donald J. Trump for the Republican nomination, told reporters outside the courthouse in Miami on Tuesday that he had reached out to other presidential candidates to urge them to commit to pardoning the former president if they win in 2024. - NY Times

It's a crime if a DA determines it may be obstructing an investigation. Someone saying they saw a ten foot alien is not going to be prosecuted unless it covers up an actual crime. And the statement can't be disproved, any more than someone reporting they saw a Yeti or the Virgin Mary. All you need is a campfire, some marshmallows and a flashlight. It appears to be a genuine piece of evidence of an intelligent forum member imagining grainy visual distortions are aliens. They appear to be visual artifacts not uncommon in nighttime videos. Nothingburger.

Oh, you know, private universe stuff. The universe doesn't like to talk about those days.

I looked at the PNAS paper. It studied the mechanism of curled hairs in thermoregulation but said that the evolutionary aspect was speculative. Curled hair could have other adaptive value, and the thermoregulation is just a Gouldian spandrel. (straight hair is prevalent on the Indian subcontinent and SE Asia, a situation which doesn't support the idea that there would be adaptive pressure for curly hair in hot regions) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2301760120 They concluded Maximal evaporative heat loss potential from the scalp is reduced by the presence of hair, but the amount of sweat required on the scalp to balance the incoming solar heat (i.e., zero heat gain) is reduced in the presence of hair. Particularly, we find that hair that is more tightly curled offers increased protection against heat gain from solar radiation.

Do you think they can be kelped?

Glass blocks some UV, so a couch left on a sunny porch will fade faster than a couch by a sunny window. (some modern windows are fully UV-blocking and marketed as not fading upholstery and drapes) The exception is some grades of quartz glass, which will pass UV. You might want that for germicidal purposes, but don't leave your couch near such a window.