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Everything posted by TheVat
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DeSantis is like a form of ChatGPT producing responses to populist inputs. If insentient robots ruled, their proclamations on "intellectual freedom" would often sound Orwellian the way DeS does. The thing is, when he proposes policies that are blatantly unconstitutional, and sounds most like a robot with no thoughts of its own, he is at his most repellent to most of the electorate. You can't fool enough people forever with this crap. The policies will crumble in the Courts, he will look weak and foolish, and he will fade from the scene. Crikey I'm optimistic this morning. It also helps that DeS has many in the GOP abandoning him after his recent Trump-bot-like dismissal of Russia's attack on Ukraine. David Frum, a conservative columnist, summed it up as "Message: Tough on drag queens. Weak on national security.” I think this helps to further mark him as someone following simple culture war algorithms but who is otherwise clueless to what's happening in the world. Russia trying to take territory by force? Red tides killing Florida shores? Ex felons cheated out of voting? Ecological disaster in the swamps? massive affordable housing crisis in Florida cities? Pfft! Wokeness is the REAL problem!
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YW. Regarding the DC question DC doesn't have much. It's under sole jurisdiction of Congress and lacked a local government until 1973. And all laws from that local council have to be reviewed and approved by Congress, so it's really a bad situation for the residents of DC, who are US citizens but have no Congressional representatives or local autonomy. If there weren't nasty partisan roadblocks, DC would have been a state years ago. A friend of mine was a journalist in DC, so I've gotten earfuls on this.
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Or when there is a controversy between two or more states. We're going to see more of that type, with women leaving one state pregnant and returning home not pregnant, because the state they visited allowed abortion. Or, say, Illinois permits cleaning the hamster cage in Lake Michigan but Wisconsin does not. When wood shavings and poo float up to Milwaukee, the Wisconsinites can't bring an action in Illinois state court. And if there's no relevant federal law to settle it, then the federal district court decision itself becomes binding and a legal precedent. I.e. federal courts can arbitrate, and make it stick. (which makes clear why we need a federal law on reproductive rights)
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Maybe approach is our natural epistemic condition. Lagrange took a nice step in getting rid of constraint forces (his rigid pendulum rod, e.g.) as @Genady mentioned, and his step was towards describing a system's energies, a function which summarizes the dynamics of the entire system. For my limited understanding of physics, it seems like "force" can be a move away from sound ontology. (it is fine for moving furniture) And energy and Riemannian curvature seems, oddly, less abstract and more towards ontological terra firma.
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https://blog.batchgeo.com/surveillance-cameras-in-your-city/ Least CCTVs by Population Nairobi, Kenya replaces Reykjavik as the number one city with the least surveillance when population is taken into account. In fact, Reykjavik now no longer even appears on the top ten list. City Country # of CCTV Cameras # of People # of CCTV Cameras per 1,000 People Nairobi Kenya 42 4,556,381 0.01 Melbourne Australia 93 4,870,388 0.02 Riyadh Saudi Arabia 150 7,070,665 0.02 Manila Philippines 300 13,698,889 0.02 Cairo Egypt 500 20,484,965 0.02 Stockholm Sweden 70 1,608,037 0.04 Dhaka Bangladesh 1,000 20,283,552 0.05 Surat India 614 6,873,756 0.09 Brasilia Brazil 453 4,558,991 0.10 Bangalore India 1,301 11,882,666 0.11
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Not exactly a Pleasant Valley Sunday!
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That's a United States District Court. Federal case, as Swanson noted. State and federal courts are entirely separate systems, so much so that for example double jeopardy laws don't apply - a person can be tried for murder in state court, be found not guilty, but then be tried for murder as a federal crime (where state lines were crossed, or federal lands or entities were involved). This judge was appointed by Trump, is sympathetic to conservative legal causes (something no judge should openly be, ever), and so his Amarillo courtroom is a travesty waiting to happen.
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"Significant amount" sounds like a really difficult question. Will post if I find such an estimate. I guess a lot hinges on planetary condensation, crustal plate movements, cometary water contributions later, and other factors.
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Debatable. Early supernovae were massive and blew out a rich broth of heavier elements. https://beta.nsf.gov/news/potential-first-traces-universes-earliest-stars#:~:text=The very first stars likely,distinctive blend of heavy elements.
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The Drake equation has many conjectures as to each of its factors. Not all of them yield millions of intelligent civilizations. While I could agree that if there are millions, some will be likely higher on the Kardashev scale than us, we just don't know at this point how often intelligent civilizations happen or how long they last on average. Our data point is one such civilization, us, still struggling not to annihilate ourselves.
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He's comparing the pursuit of GAI to Captain Ahab's obsessive pursuit of Moby Dick, the great white whale. The whale ends up eating him. Not sure that analogy works well, but I sorta can see it. Edit function really leaves something to be desired.
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Toxoplasmosis is a champ. Half the world has it, and most never have symptoms, and it spreads from cat litter boxes. The parasite's survival is dependent on a balance between host survival and parasite proliferation. T. gondii achieves this balance by manipulating the host's immune response, reducing the host's immune response, and enhancing the parasite's reproductive advantage. Once it infects a normal host cell, it resists damage caused by the host's immune system, and changes the host's immune processes. As it forces its way into the host cell, the parasite forms a parasitophorous vacuole (PV) membrane from the membrane of the host cell. The PV encapsulates the parasite, and is both resistant to the activity of the endolysosomal system, and can take control of the host's mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum.
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Life is an test where someone gets easy question and someone gets hard question but only those pass who prepared well for test. it is not necessary easy one will pass and hard one will fail but those who give up on little possibility of success will fail
TheVat replied to life is like science's topic in General Philosophy
Somehow I am reminded of an old Peter Cook / Dudley Moore skit, in which Moore was interviewing Cook, who claimed to have stopped WWII. PC: I was against it, you know. DM: Yes, I think we all were. PC: Yes, but I did something about it. I wrote a letter. "Dear sirs: Stop it." DM: Thank God you wrote. -
Depends on size. I meant mass extinction wallops, the kind that have come every 50-100 million years, most recent 65 MYA in the Bay of Campeche strike. It was really just to example the concept of low probability (within a lifespan) events with very high stakes. The impactors of several kilometers diameter, as in the est. 10 km Chicxulub impactor.
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I should have added to my post that avoidance diets are best done with medical supervision. I did mention that in the second paragraph but didn't stress that enough. I appreciate that you did. That said, the low FODMAP diet can be tried for a little while since it still allows a nice range of complex carbs. It's mainly wheat and rye that is avoided during the most restrictive phase, along with beans, milk, onions, tomatoes, apples, dates, pears, plums, cashews, pistachios and cruciferous vegetables. Some on the diet can eat wheat if it's an authentic sourdough, which is more digestible. Oats, rice, quinoa, sorghum, buckwheat, all fine. And there are many fruits and vegetables that are low FODMAP, e.g. berries, oranges, green beans, avocados, chickpeas (in moderation), carrots, potatoes, bell pepper, potatoes, zucchini, sweet potatoes, sprouts, etc. Nuts like walnuts, almonds and macadamias are okay. The problem with lack of supervision is if you don't know much about nutrition and you oversimplify the diet, like just eating potatoes and meat after tossing out all the whole wheat and cabbage and broccoli. A nutritionist can help with healthy substitutions like rolled oats for whole wheat, or blueberries for apples, or bell pepper for cabbage...that kind of thing. IOW, if you are knowledgeable you can try substitutions, if they don't short you on needed fiber, fatty acids, vitamins, minerals etc.
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Onions are a high FODMAP food, which means sensitive people will experience gas and bowel irritation. Cooking onions into a soup tends to concentrate FODMAPs and so you are more likely to react. Especially when garlic and tomato puree (again the puree has more FODMAP than other forms) are added. People who have IBS often are put on a low FODMAP diet. You can Google search and find a list of high FODMAP foods to avoid or at least minimize. And be sure to check with a doctor if such strong symptoms continue. You don't want to have some other GI tract issue go untended. And they might also look at other suspect foods like cow's milk or yeast (which were also in that bloaty soup). Both are foods that people can develop intolerance for.
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I always feel caught in the middle, when chats polarize along these lines. I'm open to most astonishing hypotheses, so long as there's as a path to clean data, Ockham's razor is handy, and basic logic and probability isn't molested. I would speculate that scientists are more likely to sneer at ET reports, not because ET contact seems so improbable but because of the history of tainted data, hearsay, biased data collectors, and eyewitness reports that always seem so precisely fit whatever popular culture is generating at that time and place. God(s), OTOH, seem beyond the purview of science, so maybe there is less sense of scientific principles being trod upon - there's no data involved, and it's generally understood that someone's god beliefs are metaphysical intuitions or faith-leaps. God beliefs don't involve science, so they don't involve sloppy science. I agree with @Alex_Krycek that, given the high stakes for humanity, if there were alien contact or alien observation, that any such hypotheses deserve more attention even if low-probability events are being considered. Just as with asteroids - an asteroid strike is highly unlikely within a human time frame, but the consequences could be so catastrophic, we really need to know as much as we can.
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DK what the AS uptake is with corn, beans, and squash. I guess it's a case of agri experiment stations trying the sargassum out, seeing if there are elevated AS levels in various crops. (and I would guess that different areas of sargassum have differing levels of AS, depending on what blows their way) For the insulation use, I guess the important test would be flammability (or its ability to be treated with something cheap that makes it nonflammable) and moisture absorption (if used in walls or roofs)?
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See the post I was replying to. It's use as a fertilizer was under discussion. Arsenic leaches into soil and is absorbed, especially by rice.
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Caution - it has a high arsenic content. Depends on population density and winds near populated areas of shore. The hydrogen sulphide releases from rotting are a problem some places. I guess systemic solutions aren't gonna fly, like getting soy farmers along the Congo to control fertilizer runoff.
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And yet here are some scientists discussing him, he has several widely read books out, and his seven experiments have gotten quite a bit of peer review. (see my earlier post on those experiments) I don't think he can legitimately complain that people trying to poke holes in his theories (which is the basic and essential gauntlet of all scientific research) are shutting him down. I've heard people in various scientific fields talking about Sheldrake for nearly forty years. Methinks he doth protest too much. Yes. Francis Crick, a towering eminence in molecular biology, wrote a book in the eighties about earthly life starting with microbes that were intentionally delivered by a visiting alien spaceship. He fully expected many scientists would poke holes in the idea ("directed panspermia") and had the integrity to say he wasn't wedded to the idea. Perhaps Sheldrake could take the resistance and critique he receives with similar grace.
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Since the Earth rotates, what would happen if...
TheVat replied to raphaelh42's topic in Classical Physics
The chopper shares the Earth's momentum. As does everything on the planet. If you jump high on a trampoline at the equator, the trampoline and yard doesn't shoot away from you at 1000 mph (460 m/s) and drop you a few blocks to the west. Galileo's boat is a helpful google search. -
I think these are not dogmas so much as false impressions. In fact, there have been research groups, like Princeton's PEAR group, that studied paranormal phenomena. And holistic medicine, and investigation of ancient techniques in Ayurvedic medicine, indigenous peoples herbal treatments, etc, is an active area of study right now. Sheldrake has always styled himself as a maverick who is stifled by a rigid orthodoxy. (sound familiar, science forum regulars?) The only positive thing I can say about him is that he has proposed several scientific experiments to test his hypotheses about morphic resonance. Anyone can look at his nineties book, 7 Experiments that Could Change the World, and try doing one of them. I don't see how positive results would prove his particular theoretical framework of morphic fields, however. They would, at best, show there's something unusual going on, and maybe lead to better experimental setups in the future. Do dogs telepathically know when their humans are coming home? I would think clean data would be really hard to get on this. Sheldrake seems to forget that interpretation of animal behavior, where nonverbal creatures are concerned, is quite tricky and observers can deceive themselves quite easily.