TheVat

Pretty cool - sounds like the Bayesian Belief Network that is used in diagnostic medicine. (except the prior P(A) is much better known in medicine, where e.g. accurate rates of pancreatic cancer are statistically available)

Phosphogeddon! https://books.google.com/books/about/Phosphorus.html?id=nqkPEAAAQBAJ The book is also mentioned in the March 6 issue of The New Yorker. https://www.magzter.com/stories/culture/The-New-Yorker/ELEMENTAL-NEED https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/phosphorus-saved-our-way-of-life-and-now-threatens-to-end-it

While I remain in the open-to-fresh-data camp, I am not sure that each sighting can be necessarily independent of other sightings, when you have the cases of dozens of sightings on one night in a particular area. For example, if you have 19 witnesses report seeing something that looks like a balloon, and at least half were able to distinguish the letters "HAPPY BIRTHDAY" across the side, and you have one who reports seeing a spacecraft with eerie lights and emitting a weird whine, you may have to give particular attention to that witness's visual identification skills and overall mindset, in comparison to the other 19. That's what I feel canvassing is so important, where an impartial investigative team interviews not just the person reporting something bizarre, but others who were outdoors at that time. Unfortunately, the smartphone era has introduced a confounding factor: fewer people are looking up these days. And electronic media has for several decades caused more humans to spend their evenings inside of houses.

@iNow [Florida parent...] I find that arrow coming off the Earth also pretty suggestive. Do we really want innocent Denebian children seeing such filth?

This is turning into an argument with Creationists: deflect one bit of nonsense, they quickly post another. Your graphic is from early March. LoL. No one has predicted an ice free Arctic in March - an absurd cherry pick of data. It is summer sea ice which is shrinking, and year to year comparisons are made in September when it's at its minimum extent. https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/arctic-sea-ice/#:~:text=Summer Arctic sea ice extent,covered in ice) each September. As for prediction, look at the overall. The earth got warmer, as predicted, in a sudden spike that followed the Industrial Revolution and usually takes thousands of years when its part of a natural cycle. You can cherry pick data about ice or temperature fluctuations or whatever the Heartland Institute (or other oil industry sponsored think tanks) is peddling these days, or you can try to learn what changes are happening NOW, and what climatology and atmospheric physics have found to be causative factors. And no, climate science is not some idiot infant of a field. Indeed, its roots go back to Eunice Foote, who did research on the warming effects of CO2 in the mid-1800s, so one could point out that it is an older scientific field than subatomic physics, relativistic theory, genomics, virology, and others that we consider quite respectable.

We need to figure out how a large scale is defined. In the absence of knowledge of such phenomena, we don't know if some are stochastic processes (like beta decay) that pop up randomly in the atmosphere, or directed activity that correlate with terrestrial events, hidden agendas of nations, Plan Nine from outer space, populations breathing more mold spores, etc. No absolutes. Sigma value depends on what sort of measurements are taken, and where the data points fall on a normal distribution (Bell curve). Six might be the gold standard for manufacturing processes, while it might be insufficient for data on a possible new neutrino that's quite weird. If you’re taking a pre election poll the accepted standard is two sigma, which gives a 95 percent confidence level. For the Higgs, because what CERN found was expected in their model, 2.3 sigma was considered meaningful. In social science and medicine it gets really tricky. When you get into data composed of eyewitness reports of "I saw something odd," then you have really fuzzy data with the measurements being a welter of differing perspectives, perceptions, and a vast number of variables that can't all be monitored. It seems like this big stew of sloppy social science, atmospheric science, astronomical events, ephemeral geomagnetic phenomena, military tech testing, recent science fiction blockbuster movie releases, etc. Maybe the best hope is one of these anomalies leaves some physical trace evidence that starts right off with a responsible chain of custody and thorough recording of the specimen in situ.

Well put. Pareidolia also bedeviled all those Mars pics that poured in back in the 90s, when the Mars Global Surveyor was snapping away. While it revealed the Viking I pic of the Face (from the 70s) as just another mesa, it set off a whole new round of "hey, that looks like...." Mars has been the pareidolia capital of the solar system since Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell.

The climate models have been biased towards a more conservative extrapolation, you're quite right. Changes in surface and sea ice and permafrost have actually been happening faster than many of the mainstream models predicted. Feedback mechanisms (like exposed Arctic bog particulate release, Arctic methane and carbon releases, decreased albedo from ice loss, wildfire soot on snowfields, scrublands or grassland replacing forests, etc) keep emerging as accelerants. Thanks for noticing GW is happening more quickly than originally predicted due to feedback loops! Thank goodness alert people like you are really paying attention to the massive current data on these dangerous tipping points!

I see Loeb has another recent paper speculating that Oumuamua could be a fragment of a disintegrated Dyson sphere. One that had had a reflective interior, so that a broken piece would function as a light-sail. Basically, a Dyson tile fell past us. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/acc10d Again, this could be split to an Oumuamua thread. Not exhausted yet. 😀 I like anomalies. In many areas of inquiry, they can introduce new paths of research, point to problems in data collection, suggest hypotheses outside a standard set of models. In SETI, for example, it would only take one anomaly potentially to be world-shaking.

Basically he says that artificial origin should be considered. An interesting read, which goes through all the conjectures as to Oumuamua's nature and origin. Perhaps the non UAP chat could be moved to a split-from thread, or merged with an Oumuamua thread (or interstellar object thread) if there is one? I'll try to find a web version of Loeb's paper.

I wasn't going to get into all the problems, but it would help to know the aperture on that shot, because the depth of field doesn't seem quite right for the object to be over that whitish patch. I think Heflin used a 101 model, which would have a fixed focal length 114mm lens, well-suited to distant subjects, and with a shallower depth of field. He could deepen his DOF by raising F-stop, i.e. narrowing the aperture, but I don't think it's enough. I'm too rusty on this stuff, which is why I'm trying to obtain a photo analysis. There's too much that's showing not quite blurred enough, from the car roof to the phone poles to a distant tree. And the cropped portion of the original we see is so grainy, it's easy to confuse blur with grain. It's funny, that long of a lens is suited to nature photography more than details of road surface you would be capturing as a highway maintenance worker. Unless it was used more for bridge structures or other things you are some distance from.

I'm thinking not quite a Gish gallop, since Moontan is not (unlike the infamous Duane Gish) trying to advance one specific theory here. I don't mind if he throws out an array of anomalous events - it is helpful to get a handle on the range of observational data that is out there, good, bad, and muddy. I would like to see photos that didn't have chain-of-custody problems like the Tustin photos (the highway maintenance guy in California, with the polaroids that disappeared for several years). My impression (as a former photographer) of the Ground Effect in that one photo is that there was some kind of pale cylindrical object in there amidst the pale "dust" cloud, and the amount of grain from that ASA 3000 emulsion makes it pretty ambiguous as to what that pale patch really is. There is also minimal information about Rex Heflin, the photographer, which could speak to any possible penchant for hoaxing. The fact that a Polaroid eliminates darkroom fakery is not really helpful, in that it eliminates only one of many paths to creating a fake picture. There is a later photo analysis done in the 1990s, which has to be ordered from the authors, which I've ordered through ResearchGate, and I'll be interested in what they found, if anything. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237243956_Reanalysis_of_the_1965_Heflin_UFO_Photos

That's why I like regulatory laws more than corporate bannings. Laws, properly crafted, hold everyone to the same standard of truth and accuracy. It's always bugged me that reputable print-based newpapers (or ones that started on that ink platform) get sued for millions, and have to fire people and print retractions, if they publish misinformation (SEE the Jason Blair affair at the New York Times), while electronic media often escape that kind of consequence. The NYT has had a tarnished reputation for almost two decades because of one writer. That's the kind of deterrence that should be universal in the information world. The Dominion lawsuit against Fox should not be a once-in-a-blue-moon event, it should be the norm.

Plus one. Also worth noting that Greta doesn't seem to be taking her carbon civilization luxuries for granted. I was impressed that she made her way to a conference in New York by sailboat. She could easily have flown, and made the usual excuses. Sure, it was a stunt of sorts, but she's made a couple of transatlantic crossings this way, at least one in a boat that has no toilet, fixed shower, cooking facilities or proper beds. This sort of thing, if she keeps on with it, gets attention and requires no use of the pointy finger.

Since that is NewsGuard's mission, I hope they have done similar investigations of Faux News et al. Rather than banning all these miscreant companies, however, I think laws should be passed that impose severe penalties for fake news, laws that can't be loopholed by claiming "it's just entertainment!" Lie about news events, pay a huge fine or even do jail time. No white collar crime wrist-slaps. For Tucker Carlson, I can happily envision public flogging, perhaps combined with vultures arriving each day to chew on his liver.

Hence my comment (which applies as well to Oumuamua as Arawn) I would think solar radiation flux, impinging on a rock, would not be sufficient to so strongly accelerate unless a pretty crazy amount of it was subliming. Loeb points out the problems. Given this is not my field at all, I will be open to any reasonable hypothesis as to how that happens. I need to read Loeb's comments again to see how much the last one is a throwaway. Loeb has authored a paper on the possibility of artificial origin for Oumuamua. https://arxiv.org/vc/arxiv/papers/2110/2110.15213v1.pdf Sorry, this format won't permit me to clip out the abstract. PDFs are a nuisance on my tablet.

Beware that British tendency to claim credit for things they didn't invent. (we Yanks have a similar tendency) https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/leisure/article/3022868/fact-check-chicken-tikka-masala-actually-indian-not-british I suspect the genesis of phall is similar, i.e. derived from vindaloos that were developed in the Indian state of Goa. In any case, no need to defend bland cooking, Britain. Sometimes bland can be quite tasty. I myself am fond of pease porridge, a simple tasty dish my Yorkie ancestors enjoyed.

After NewsGuard did that report last fall, it seemed to me that TikTok misinformation levels (it's a popular search engine for young people, who seek a lot of news and info there) were a greater concern than the whole Yellow Peril bit. https://www.newsguardtech.com/misinformation-monitor/september-2022 It's interesting that TikTok is banned in China, despite its ownership by a Chinese internet conglomerate.

With changes brought by global warming and other rapid environmental stressors, any H-W eq. seems like an impossibility. I would be unsurprised to see human cladogenesis, if there is a collapse of tech civilization and we have populations that have remained in the tropics and are geographically isolated. Throw in some mutagenic agents left over from tech civilization and you've got a potential for founder effect groups to pop up all over the globe. They could be composed of small islanded bands of survivors of societal collapse, especially if there "death zones" from a nuclear war that deterred migration/exploration for many generations. Say that survivors of global nuking fled to Bonaire, and an ensuing nuclear winter picked off all but a hardy subset of refugees, and perhaps a couple of Russians and one Azerbaijani. The refugees would be mostly young and nubile, and would need the remaining locals to help repopulate.... I may need some red wine to finish working this out.

In fairness it would be hard to call Avi Loeb a confused individual. His bio at the bottom is worth a look. That's an interesting blog, on Oumuamua. The anomalous acceleration of that chunk is really needing further study. As @Moontanman notes, real scientists are debating possible ways this might have occurred. The odd cutting out of the New Horizons probe in the Kuiper belt is also an anomaly - we should at least be open to possible ways such an object as Arawn could generate an EM interference strong enough to jam the signal - it doesn't have to be an artificial source to be worth investigating. Any explanation would likely advance our knowledge of the KB. These don't seem like Bigfoot tracks that bored teenagers made with size 16EEE (EU 52, roughly) party slippers.

That happiness top ten seems to correlate with long cold winters. Could be that everyone who doesn't have a fairly upbeat outlook, or is prone to depression, moves away. We might be seeing a self-selection effect. 😉

Aaaand we brush a leg against that forum third rail of population control.... Yes, plus one, what was sustainable for a population of one billion is quite different with eight or more. Especially when Consumerism becomes the dominant ethos. I think this might be one reason certain famous capitalists whose names I won't mention (one sounds like a perfume) keep flogging their Mars colonization hobbyhorse, as if this might distract us with the possibility of moving significant fractions of population to other planets. Ha.

When I started reading this, there was a second or two where I wondered if The Onion had figured out how to alter their URL. Did none of the "adults" involved in this 17th century Puritan group projectile vomit ever go to an art museum at that age? I don't think even the current US Supreme Court would define Renaissance art as pornographic. Mods: this can be taken to a split off thread, if need be.

Help us understand what information you feel is lacking here. You seem to have established that life began in seawater, so where would you expect to find seawater? Are you trying to narrow it down from "the sea"? Are there cellular contents that would point towards a particular sort of place in or around the sea? In terms of certain chemicals and mineral concentrations, are there differences between open ocean and shorelines, estuaries, basins, lagoons, tidal zones...other areas?

The Heflin pics are a puzzle, given the original prints were lost and only several generations of copies are available. Speaking as someone who was a photographer in their youth, I find it interesting that the film was ASA 3000, a very fast film that would allow a high shutter speed, and thus stop fast motion and directional blur. If Heflin was a highway inspector who snapped a lot of pics while in motion, that would be handy. At ASA 3000, you could also freeze a tossed pie tin or hubcap, and the 3000 emulsion is quite granular and would tend to hide some telltales as to its true nature. Not saying that's what this is, but that particular type of film would present a temptation to would be hoaxers.