TheVat

They seem to overlap. Apropos of this chat I just saw this posted over in Jokes... I suspect this was an innocent mistake, but I did point out the problem, especially for an American, with John's quip. And the DV he won is one I won't "neutralize." You Brits need to be aware, if you aren't already, of how terrible that slur sounds to a Yank. And profoundly UNfunny.

And here we were just discussing, over in political humor, what lines can be crossed in joking. I'm pretty sure you didn't intend the mindbendingly racist aspect of referring to black people as apes. In the United States, this particular slur has a long and terrible history, and a person of color visiting this thread (or anyone, really) might well decide this forum is not worth their time. I won't DV you, but respectfully request you be aware of why this post is offensive.

I especially liked this bit from Shadow's humorous list.... AN AMERICAN CORPORATION You have two cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. Later, you hire a consultant to analyze why the cow has dropped dead.

Whoa. That is pretty dark. 7000+ people dying hideous crushing deaths doesn't seem to me like it's ever going to be great material for jokes. Of course, Mel Brooks and other brilliant comic writers/performers have made jokes about the Holocaust, so I guess there's something to be said for being able to laugh at horrific events. I would guess there's a fine line there to tread, where people want to laugh at something terrible so they aren't afraid of it or traumatized about it, where there's some kind of healthy emotional release from the awfulness, but at the same time not be callous and cruel as regards the victims of terrible events. I think we have to accept that treading the line will inevitably involve transgressions that are too far. The question may be one of intent. Did the joke makers just get carried away and thoughtless, or was there a real malign aspect? There's a saying in US standup comedy: "Dying is easy, comedy is hard."

While I agree that there are some reasonable bounds on jokes - like cruelty and racist attacks - I didn't really see attacking Israeli West Bank policies of razing farms and groves and grabbing land as in such a taboo category. Mac wasn't being anti-Semitic, just anti-RW regime. If you read Shadow's 2009 joke, Mac's makes way more sense in that context. (it's on page one)

AFAICT, the joke Mr Mack was trying for was playing off a 2009 post which also began with "you have two cows." Which I didn't backtrack to 2009 and read, but presume was some sort of political commentary on economic ideologies. Now y'all got me curious...

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)