TheVat

(with apologies to Bob Dylan) How many roads must a pangolin walk down Before it can learn how to roll? Yes and how many miles must an armadillo cross Before it can end its weary stroll? The answer my friend is rolling in the wind The answer is rolling in the wind.

@mistermack I replied to an assertion you made earlier, as to its factual basis. If I've posted in error, or you have other issues with my historical cites, please let me know. Not much point in me putting up researched answers if they are ignored. I'm not trying to "win" something here, just correcting a false impression that outsiders may have of America.

Andrew Jackson and his supporters contested the legitimacy of his 1824 loss, for many years after, charging various corrupt dealings. His base endlessly attacked the Adams administration as illegitimate and the election a farce. And you may enjoy a look at the Hayes v Tilden disputed election of 1876, and the years of allegations of election fraud. Anyway, sorry to say that "people have acted with a certain amount of honour" (up till now) is pretty far from the truth.

This is all something of a repeat (or it rhymes, anyway) of the situation with John Boehner's speakership.

Given there are hundreds of papers that include study of persons with aphantasia and collection of data (again, PubMed will be helpful to you), your bold assertion is the one for which evidence is needed. Here's one of many research papers.... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35691243/ Simply pounding the table won't get you far with people in the sciences.

Tone --> color synaesthesia is pretty common. Overall, something like 4% of people have some synaesthesia. I see certain hints of color in my mind's eye associated with certain keys. When I'm sleepy and have eyes closed, certain sharp sounds will present themselves as both the sound and a thin streak of color, usually yellow or whitish, across part of my visual field. Or sometimes a string of dots.

DSM is concerned with mental disorders. This is usually defined as a condition that interferes with normal daily functioning. Aphantasia has not been established as such a disorder, but is a documented deficit in an aspect of cognition. There are other conditions - like synaesthesia - that are also not in DSM, for the same reason: there is a different sort of neurological activity but it hasn't been established as a disorder. Indeed, many musicians have synaesthesia (my spouse and I both have a touch of it) and find it quite useful. Try a PubMed search on it, see what researchers are up to.

https://www.sciencealert.com/we-finally-know-how-ancient-roman-concrete-was-so-durable Recent research finds that lime clasts in Roman concrete, formerly thought to be poor mixing, served a vital purpose. (I was first introduced to the wonders of Roman concrete in Robert Harris' novel, Pompeii) Maybe this could help save those seaside condo foundations in Florida that are so beset with problems.

The scaling problem (with a selective advantage at every step pf the way) seems key, so that leaves some sort of bizarre mutation that miraculously worked, e.g. an animal which can turn a nonvascularized bony protrusion with its hands or paws. The odds seem astronomically small. More possible could be an animal that can already turn itself into a sort of wheel, like an armadillo or hedgehog, developing some way to accentuate its mobility as a wheel - perhaps providing motive force with puffs of air or side-projecting limbs that kick against the ground to keep rolling.

I suspect McCarthy's promise to bow to one NC vote from the "Freedom Caucus" is about as binding as the Treaty of Fort Laramie or the Munich agreement. It's pure theater, and I'm sure he's already calculating ways to delegitimize any such vote. The loathing the F Caucus has for him is probably reciprocated.

I think the ultraconservative bloc that put up Donalds is like a dog chasing a car. Perhaps the Democrats should all vote for Donalds: OK, you caught the car. Now what? Well they could use someone who can feather their nest.

Weird how the same trans discussion keeps rearing its befuddled head at SFN. Documented incidents of straight cis male teachers/coaches ogling or fondling or sexually harassing female students -- 34x10238 Documented incidents of trans teachers/coaches etc -- 0

I am enjoying that Patty Murray is currently second in line of succession to the POTUS. Though highly unlikely, it is amusing to contemplate that only six people would need to jump ship to elect Hakeem Jeffries. Five, if "Present" changes their vote.

In the Matrix postulate, reincarnation would seem easy to toss in: live, grow old, die, your memory is archived and your basic consciousness is loaded into an infant simulation which then grows, lives out its life, etc. Between simu-lives, you can access the archived memories of previous simu-lives, perhaps retain traces of skills, wisdom, traits that were developed in those previous lives and which influence your next life. Indeed, I would say that reincarnation as a concept only has coherence and a plausible mechanism in such a virtual existence and nowhere else. Unfortunately any possible coherence is being added ad hoc onto a hypothesis, the Matrix hypothesis, which is already loaded with assumptions about computer simulations. Many of them untestable. So you could puzzle over this, or just pick up that razor. If the Matrix Plus Reincarnation postulate starts to fail, it allows people to endlessly summon ad hoc hypotheses to keep it from being falsified, and so it really doesn't seem worthwhile. No matter how you test it, a believer can then hypothesize new ways that the simulation can fool everyone and be able to recycle conscious minds. The basic problem of the Matrix hypothesis is just worsened by tossing in reincarnation.

I agree. In Rawls ethics, it means opportunity in the sense of equal access to social amenities that allow one to educate, nurture skills, etc. I don't think he meant specific opportunities (or capabilities) were insured for a person. More that being born with special inheritance would not mean pushing others away from their access to advancement, i.e. create an underclass. As I said, it's more an "omega point" rather than a specific stage. As @CharonY noted, one would start with fixes and stopgaps that bring more equity and fair dealing in the system. As others noted, sometimes the practical approach is to remove barriers and stigma, and not worry about optimal outcomes.

If optimal outcomes for all is unachievable (agree with that) then the next best thing might be justice for all. That's a need that's apparently hardwired into humans - studies of children as young as eighteen months find them getting deeply upset at any perceived injustice directed toward others or themselves. This is where Rawlsian ethics comes into play: his "veil of ignorance" idea is that a person would prefer a society where it did not matter which family they were born into. No matter your parents ethnicity or creed or socioeconomic status, you would be born into a place where you received equal justice and opportunity. I don't know if that's going to happen here, but it seems like a good omega point to aim at.

I appreciated the nod to a realist interpretation. And dig at string theory. I think my earlier comment on cowering from probabilistic theories was confused by some - @Mordred was one - as me not seeing the uses of probability in physics. Well of course I do. What I should have said was I'm leery of acausal theories (aka nondeterministic), which seem to skirt thorny ontological problems and just tell you like a stern schoolmarm that it's all stochastic. Here's a lump of twenty trillion thorium-234 atoms. Some of them will soon beta decay to protactinium-234. Some of them won't. Let's give each thorium atom in the lump an address. And name. At 221-B, there is Sherlock. At 10, is Boris. Either could, randomly, decay. As it happened, Boris decayed first, before Sherlock. At a macro scale, such an event seems to have a cause. We have an ontology of macro scale Borises, and can understand why they decay so easily. But the thorium atoms all seem identical. All intuitions seem wrong. Ontology can help. Maybe.

It may go better for societies if all social reform is recognized as experimental in nature. If education allowed people to recognize the complexity of modern societies, and that the success of any proposed alteration is not guaranteed. (This might also reduce the utopian expectations of some)

Always worth asking how these lists are put together, especially when it comes to claims that an invasive outcompetes other species. As @studiot noted, species like vinca minor can make the list (I had to chuckle at that) for trifling reasons - someone had a spot of trouble in their garden? Periwinkle are well behaved, and little threat to biodiversity....unlike the bindweed (Calystegia?) that overruns our yard and sets about choking other plants and forms immortal and indestructible deep root systems. If it weren't for our mule deer friends, who like snacking on it, we would be barely keeping up.

I thought DeB-B had both particles and pilot waves. Not my field, so if I'm wrong or not even wrong that's par for me. Am sorta a fan of DeB-B, due to my apelike gropings over, and cowering from, probabilistic theories.

I know Asian carp have been an invasive scourge in the Mississippi rivershed. In the southern US, there's been kudzu wreaking havoc for decades. My spouse when she was young in Arkansas can recall old sheds and entire trees completely covered with the stuff wherever there was neglected property. The tumbleweed, though movies often use it as a symbol of my western area, was a Russian invasive. The emerald ash borer is another nightmare. Some on that list are not a major ecological threat. The Burmese python is a problem if it eats your cat but then it's probably saving some endangered birds by doing so. And it's unlikely to venture much north of Florida Everglades. The satiric writer Carl Hiaasen has a novel in which a Burmese python plays a central role*. The cane toad is another one like that - your dog might get sick, but the toad isn't likely to ravage the ecosystem (in the USA; however in Australia they are a serious threat). It's the little guys you have to watch out for, like ash borers, bark beetles, African land snails. * "Squeeze Me"

In Highsmith's novel, Ripley ends up getting away with everything and is a rich yachtsman. Highsmith leaves you with one line about a moment of paranoia where Ripley wonders if there will be policemen waiting on the next pier, then he shrugs it off. Herschel Walker's loss in Georgia makes me think even fairly conservative states have limited tolerance for such over-the-top levels of fabrication, so maybe the SANTOS act could get some traction. It might get pared down a bit in committee, but anything would be welcome. Fraudsters like Santos drain public confidence in government further and waste the time of legislative bodies when there is real work to be done.

You have perfectly described my relationship to home renovation. Some gets done, but often only when I've found a workaround for the drudgery part (e. g. wood strips for sheetrock joints instead of plastering and sanding - "rustic charm"). A lot of human creativity has been driven by the desire to avoid drudgery. I second @iNow on walking. A person who sets out on a walk returns a saner and smarter person. (unless they walked behind too many buses inhaling deeply)

I did not revise any definitions, so that's a false characterization of what I said. I pointed out the distinction between moral objectivity (i.e. that there is some objective condition that is a moral state) and objectivity of measurable social outcomes. I suggested that the latter is a real part of science and can make findings as to how moral/ethical beliefs and practices affect the viability of societies and welfare of its members. Nor was I confining objectivity to "what I know," which borders on a trollish insult but perhaps you meant well. Indeed, I was opening up an entire world of data across multiple fields such as anthropology, ethnography, sociology, psychology, economics, population biology, et al. It would seem to me that it is you who is choosing to ignore the most salient points of my previous posts and feeding them back in a dumbed-down form. I already have sensed that you are not likely to acknowledge this or any other mistakes in reading, so I won't trouble you further.

Thanks to Milankovich cycles, however, that eccentricity gets more pronounced every 100,000 years or so. When Earth’s orbit in the Milankovich cycle is at its most elliptic, about 23 percent more incoming solar radiation reaches Earth at our closest approach to the Sun each year than does at its farthest from the Sun. (it's currently at 6.8% because we are at the least elliptical part of the cycle) This would have a sort of seasonal effect even without an axial tilt. The effect wouldn't be as pronounced as we get from obliquity, but it would be something.