TheVat

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.

We always get reminders that the cutting edge technology that wealthy countries use to produce food, shelter, energy, transit, etc. is seen by the developing world as a model they want to follow. (e.g. when China started building up their industrial base, they went hogwild on coal burning, just as earlier the UK, US, did) So, whatever we do, that has a ripple effect through many other nations as they seek our material comfort and standard of living. The ethos of capitalism (or lack of one) is a central problem. When you ask capitalism, what's more important, shareholder profits or a healthy and sustainable human lifestyle for everyone? you know the answer you will get. So we need to stop asking capitalism for its wisdom on these matters, and focus on humane systems of government that will promote that latter choice.

Also: Blood volume doesn't increase proportionate to body volume in obese persons. The increase in body size is mostly adipose tissue, which is relatively under-perfused when compared to lean body mass. And blood is not what generates metabolic heat - most body heat comes from rapid contraction of skeletal muscle fibers. Being fit and well-muscled fortifies you against cold more than adipose tissue - it's a common misconception that fat humans have their adipose tissue in one exterior layer that insulates them. We're not seals, and a lot of our fat is interlaced in the muscle tissue. It is true, however, that a compact build overall retains metabolic heat better, given the greater volume/surface ratio. It's not surprising that Sami, Inuits, Sherpas, Yakuts and other dwellers in cold places tend more to have that compact build, while Watusis in tropical Africa are long bodied and slender of build. (in my own family tree, the Swedes were notably heavier of build than the Irish and Yorkies)

That map has a real problem which would be extremely obvious to anyone living here, especially in southwestern quadrant of the USA. Hint: German is not the major ancestry there. It's another large European country, which is not listed at all there.

Bonaire is a polyglot society. If 3/4 of citizens have Papiamento as their main language, are they expected to know sufficient Dutch to communicate with officials and so on? Also, does Dutch citizenship require renouncing other citizenship, or do they allow dual?

It can't all happen at the level of individual companies. Renewable energy happens, if it happens, at a national level (that's the whole point of Biden clean energy bill in the US) with masssive infrastructure (like grid upgrades to handle moving the various types of renewable energy around) investment, tax credits to help the initial costs of throwing up windmills etc, residential tax credits and rebates, subsidies to companies that put in conservation measures and on-site renewable installs, etc. Your company needs to join with other companies and lobby the government - if you want us to turn wind into widgets, you need to help capitalize those wind-grabbers, and put up high-V lines to get it to our factory, and subsidize the transition costs. IOW, every taxpayer needs to chip in and do the right thing, to get Isles that runs on tides, winds, sun (on the rare occasions it appears over there), and other renewables. Companies doing this alone is a straw man. Huge sea changes require that massive public consortium we call government.

Sort of a Russian battle of Capriccios. First Tchaikovsky's Capriccio Italien, then Rimsky-Korsakov's Capriccio Espanol. I'm calling it a draw. The Tchaikovsky is maybe a little warmer, more romantic, but the RK is haunting and might make you ache for someplace you've never been. What the Germans call fernweh.

Per the article, they think it may have been lifelong Hep B, caught in childbirth. "Arthur Kocher, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and one of the new study’s co-authors, offered another possible explanation for his infection: The composer could have been infected with hepatitis B during childbirth. The virus is commonly spread this way, he said, and infected babies can end up with a chronic infection that lasts a lifetime. In about a quarter of people, the infection will eventually lead to cirrhosis of the liver or liver cancer..." That his father was born of an extramarital affair was also a finding that might be more common than people expect. And yes, the Beethoven was Black theory is amusingly stupid. I had not heard the rumors that his father was an illegitimate son of Friedrich Wilhelm II or even Frederick the Great. Sounds like the DNA can only confirm that Ludwig's grandfather was not his biological grandfather. Unless they can then test DNA from those royal lineages. Too bad about those Belgian van Beethovens getting shut out of the picture.

The NY Post is a Murdoch owned tabloid. It has zero journalistic integrity. Wall to wall sensationalism. No one need feel pain questioning its content.

The New York Times reports on DNA analysis done on locks of hair that were determined to belong to the composer. https://archive.is/E9yQ5 (screenshot of NYT article) Now, an analysis of strands of his hair has upended long held beliefs about his health. The report provides an explanation for his debilitating ailments and even his death, while also raising new questions about his genealogical origins and hinting at a dark family secret. The paper, by an international group of researchers, was published Wednesday in the journal Current Biology. It offers additional surprises: A famous lock of hair — the subject of a book and a documentary — was not Beethoven’s. It was from an Ashkenazi Jewish woman. The study also found that Beethoven did not have lead poisoning, as had been widely believed. Nor was he a Black man, as some had proposed. And a Flemish family in Belgium — who share the last name van Beethoven and had proudly claimed to be related — have no genetic ties to him. Researchers not associated with the study found it convincing. It was “a very serious and well-executed study, “ said Andaine Seguin-Orlando, an expert in ancient DNA at the University Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, in France....

To an American, this sounds like some sort of human anatomical feature. If you are rich, you can probably have your right (or your left) internal pickle replaced by a transplant. I think a lot of the GOP is already trending away from him. And are now a little disoriented, since their Plan B was DeSantis and now he's starting to alienate a lot of party power brokers. Which leaves them with a bunch of either boring or hideous Red State governors. What's the difference between a chickpea and a garbanzo bean? Donald Trump never had a garbanzo bean on his face.

When I read chats about the threat of AI, and it turns to actual rogue machines bent on harm, the phrase "air gap" pops into my mind.

Nope. 😀 Done.

Yes, the article points to critcisms of innate grammar and what Chomsky called universals. The section on language localization presents strong critiques of innateness. First, as Elman et al. 1996 argue, neural localization of function can occur as a result of virtually any developmental trajectory: the localization of some function bears not at all on its innateness....