TheVat

This was helpful, and clarifies more the dangers of shooting a balloon down over land, especially with the small holes method. The balloon certainly demonstrated the capacity of the Right Wing news bubble to take a rational, measured response and warp it into Biden dithering and being foolish. It's appalling to see what's in some of the RW feeds re the balloon.

Thanks, I clumsily expressed that in two sentences so left "transfer of" out of first one. Nor did I mean to imply energy transfer after temps have equalized. And this.... I guess that should be "lower average kinetic energy." Write in haste, repent at leisure. Ahh. Did not know that last bit. You've all sent me off to do some reading. Thanks. (And I can see the use with thermal solar, yes. Where your heat source is, by definition, external. And the setup is static.)

As a gawker, looking in here and haven't read the 15 pages, have to ask: what, besides expensive cogeneration, are Stirling engines good for? Using external heat, as opposed to IC, to pressurize a gas and turn that heat into work seems pretty inefficient. That's why we don't drive steam cars. If I have a car and it's winter, then my waste heat can go simply to heating the cabin via a simple diversion of coolant. But nobody is using that waste heat to power a Stirling. Also I don't understand "transferring heat" the way OP is saying it. Heat is kinetic energy. Energy is transferred. Higher kinetic energy molecules are transferring energy to lower kinetic energy molecules on the other side of a barrier. Entropy. A slow process, would seem like. The external heat needs lots of time for energy to transfer to the inside of the engine. Where would the wait be worthwhile??

Back there, page 1, pics were posted but not of actual boobs. Though said pics were posted by boobs. (yours truly among them) Now it all seems like a distant mammary.

Thanks for pointing this out. I was suggesting earlier that culture/nurture is likely to act as a magnifier of fairly small initial differences. Another problem is that sometimes researchers will "find" neurological differences that they are looking for, and which later prove unfounded. The notion of females having a functionally different corpus callosum, for example, became a sort of pop science myth which persisted after later research rejected it.... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9353793/ (it's handedness, actually, that makes more of a difference in thickness of those fiber bundles)

ChatGPT may really only be suitable for dull tasks like writing a State of the Union speech in the style of Shakespeare or Seinfeld. https://apnews.com/article/if-chatgpt-wrote-state-of-the-union-8b4dc4774acd0f4ba4ad2fb1ea768d47 Situations where fabrication or outright nonsense isn't a problem. And for the SOTU address it might be more niggardly, er, parsimonious with word count.

I was surprised there was no try for a more gradual descent, perhaps by shooting a small hole with a BB gun. (perhaps those are hard to mount on an F-22) Our next step is clear: obtain a Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade float and release it from an allied nation that's upwind of China. Mickey Mouse would get my vote.

Yep you really dropped the ball on helping us get population down to a nice couple billion. 😀 The economist David Graeber argued for debt forgiveness by wealthy nations towards poor ones - pretty convincing I thought. That was so wildly optimistic I need to lie down for a moment to recover. I'm not sure that's right, but like Bearded Spock says to Good Kirk in the transporter room, I shall consider your words. It is impressive how liberal democracy has last this long and seems to have generated a lot of viral memes on this planet. There is a toughness under it's seeming fragility.

Just remember you'll need a Langstrom 16 centimeter ganglia wrench to reset the positron beams in the interociter. And never cross the beams! Ghostbusters has taught us all the importance of this.

But first you hogpatch the rheostat on the interociter, tuning the mandrills with a zygomatic bridge. I'm pretty sure of this.

An observation (aside from the obvious precocity of the girl): while hormones can play some role (on impulsivity, e.g.), I would think it's reasonable to ask if the difference in sweets strategies are more due to personality variations and not necessarily a function of the stubby Y vs the savvy X. Some solid research, across diverse cultures, would help here. Sorry to see things here turned a bit acrimonious after that. Hope we can get back to early learning research and see how all these notions of little boys and girls hold up. My own conjecture is that girls get more positive reinforcement for patience and emotional intelligence in some cultures, which then magnifies a relatively small initial difference. And other factors tend to blur any clear picture of "innate" personality. Birth order can make quite a difference what social strategies emerge. Total hours of contact with each parent, ditto. Parental behavior towards each other can also introduce modeling of certain tactics that we as parents may not even be aware we're modeling. (my own family btw, also boy and girl, does not provide an anecdote that supports the patient girls hypothesis - indeed, the girl was somewhat more impulsive and reckless, and LOUDER, for vast stretches of their childhoods and youth. )

Ok, cool. Possible I may have misunderstood the intent there. It is odd that it's a necropost in that it replies to a post that's 14 years old today. Also going to say I was unaware that cows came with guns. And that IS a joke. (Using my standard formula of taking ambiguous sentence structure the most obtuse way possible)

Social cognitive theory has had some success. Also Piagetian development theory. Behavioral economics seems to do better with large groups - not so well in predictions of individual behavior.

I feel my defense of Mr Mack's right to post a transgressive joke was misunderstood. I am NOT supporting a political view, but rather that we not downvote on such subjective matters as to whether we find something funny or whether we disagree. Down voting on dubious logic or evidence in a science forum, yes that makes more sense. But here? Could the person downvoting please just say what's got you riled up here and I will be glad to listen to you.

In the realm of ethics, it would seem that caring is of lesser importance than what actions we take or facilitate others in taking. I can virtuously broadcast how much I care about ecological and climatic changes over the next couple generations, but if I keep serving beef or pork at every meal and driving an Escalade everywhere I go and sitting with my wife in a 2500 square foot propane-heated house with a heavily irrigated quarter acre of bluegrass lawn, then my caring has minimal ethical component. The duty of care is to implement those worthy concerns I have in remedial actions. This action would also mean that passing on wealth to the next generation is more likely to succeed, since ecological and climatic catastrophes seem likely to destroy wealth. Ergo, joining in on a beneficial approach at the societal level can also yield benefit at the familial level. For some, the latter motivates the former.

I don't think homophobia enters the behavioral picture if a mere distaste remains a privately held one. Distaste is a matter of aesthetics, and active dislikes and ensuing hostile action may not follow from that. There are forms of sexual play that are not my cup of tea, but I'm content to just not do them without malice or prejudice towards those who do. So I don't think you or I would qualify as phobes of any stripe. I think this chat is more focused on behaviors that evidence something more than distaste of the "ewwww" variety. Like aggression and prejudicial treatment. As for Italian food, our family moved to a predominantly Italian community when I was eleven, and my bland prairie palate was introduced to the cuisine in a big way. Been crazy about Italian food ever since. And though I may find the American fast food eaters disgusting, I would still rent an apartment to them. Poor pitiful creatures!

An ISRAELI CORPORATION You have two cows. They come with guns. Move you to a dusty cowshed and take your cows. Then they bulldoze your cowshed and when you protest, they shoot you for being a terrorist. Then American taxpayers pay to replace the bullets. Then end times. https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/35130-political-humor/page/17/#comment-1228505 (post content from other thread added by moderator for context) The joke takes a swipe at Israeli hardline policy, seems like. Maybe not the greatest joke, but I would not want to start downvoting jokes. Am counteracting the DV, not because I agree with all the premise of the joke but because I like this thread being one thread where people feel accepted to make weird or even smelly transgressive attempts at political humor. (one can also Google "Palestinian olive trees destroyed" for further research on what triggers such jokes - quite the eye opener!)

I don't see just one cause, but globalization is one factor when you have large corporations based in wealthy nations who buy up land in developing countries and then "strip mine" agriculturally speaking, for a quick burst of capital. Faraway owners, hiring locals, are not always on top of stewardship as it works in that local bioregion. (We actually have the Saudis doing that in Arizona now, where a good friend of mine lives, abusing fragile desert land and draining the aquifer there to grow cattle feed they ship back to their herds in SA. I think some major paper did a big expose on this recently and now there are finally rumblings in DC and Phoenix, as it sinks in that scarce water is being siphoned off by foreigners who can't raise feed for their own beef herds.) A similar problem exists with rainforests in Indonesia. Big U.S. corporation muscles in and levels rainforest for palm oil plantations. I am short of time, but there's a crap-ton of examples of globalization run amuck these days.

I appreciate you taking time to point this out. I have wondered about the concept, but am fairly rusty on trends in evolutionary biology, so I'm going to look at some recent critiques of the GS idea. And yes, I can see how selection at the individual level can direct social animals towards behaviors that promote group cohesion and cooperation. (IIRC, there were studies of the amygdala in domesticated animals, which mediates fear responses. Domestication seems to be partly a selective process for shrinkage of the amygdala so that humans can be approached and interacted with more easily)

Group selection is also part of NS. From Brit Tanica... group selection, in biology, a type of natural selection that acts collectively on all members of a given group. Group selection may also be defined as selection in which traits evolve according to the fitness (survival and reproductive success) of groups or, mathematically, as selection in which overall group fitness is higher or lower than the mean of the individual members’ fitness values. Typically the group under selection is a small cohesive social unit, and members’ interactions are of an altruistic nature. Examples of behaviours that appear to influence group selection include cooperative hunting, such as among lions and other social carnivores; cooperative raising of young, such as in elephants; and systems of predatory warning, such as those used by prairie dogs and ground squirrels. Homophobia, given its potential effect on the cohesion of, say, hunting parties, could have some negative group selection effect. When social humans divide up by gender so that male groups go off to hunt or trade or make war with other tribes, some tolerance of homosexual play (recreation, relaxation, bonding) might improve stability and effectiveness of that group. Given the constant fertility of human males, it seems unlikely that nonreproductive acts, be it blowing, wanking or buggering, would put much dent in overall pregnancy rates. We're like bonobos - lots of nonreproductive sex done for bonding.

There is no gene for tongue rolling. In 1940, the prominent geneticist Alfred Sturtevant published a paper saying the ability to roll one’s tongue is based on a dominant gene. In 1952, Philip Matlock disproved Sturtevant’s findings, demonstrating that seven out of 33 identical twins didn’t share their sibling’s gift. If rolling the tongue was genetic, then identical twins would share the trait. Sturtevant later acknowledged his mistake.

Less absurd to an American. We have quite the smorgasbord of legislation and Supreme Court decisions that run counter to what a majority of constituents want. This seems true in one sense but not in another. It's true that a proportionally smaller working age population shrinks the tax base, but it also raises the value of labor especially for those on the lower rungs of the scale, who would be in high demand for assisting the elderly. Unemployment would be (unless massive robotic replacement becomes reality) near zero. And an older population has fewer young couples with children, who are the most costly segment of population in terms of government services. Those schools and soccer fields cost a ton of shekels. Also running counter is the trend in medicine to push back the age of infirmity. Also the "top-heavy" effect of the first couple generations of Big Shrink will be reduced somewhat as following generations won't be from baby booms.

All depends on the level of concern a person has for their larger community. A long time frame requires an imaginative leap and thinking about many trends that are fairly abstract. Reincarnation believers, thinking they might appear in a womb in a distant future, might be more concerned in that regard. Or someone very invested in a longterm legacy, like an environmental activist or a social reformer, who spends time thinking about future generations and what lives they will have. Others, as they get old, are very family oriented and care about the world of their grandchildren, so maybe will think ahead a century at most. For many, the century is a reasonable time frame in which to look at policies that make a livable world and good quality of life. (there is also the short-term problem: where we should be thinking about right now because something terrible is happening, and we ignore it because we feel we're in one of the "safe" places or because we believe nothing can be done so why bother) I would be thrilled to see more politicians who see more than 5-10 years ahead.

I would find it difficult to discern what is "natural, unprimed" in my own experience especially at that age. Children are often not aware of all that influences them. The fact that you were (a) in a Catholic family, and (b) had an older brother who was likely trying to present matters in a way to gross you out (had he described heterosexual sex to you, he might have gotten a similar response?), suggests that your reaction was not as "natural" as you saw it.

Yes that thought has crossed my mind, too. Once you reach a generation that forgets the crowded and dirty old days, then they may restart a cycle of overpopulation. Or maybe the smaller family by then will be part of society's basic ethos. But who knows how long any ethos lasts?