TheVat

Just as with other climate changes where there are feedback effects, we need to watch closely and determine what all the effects might be. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/17/microbes-melting-glaciers-bacteria-ecosystems Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of bacteria are being released by melting glaciers, a study has shown. The microbes being washed downstream could fertilise ecosystems, the researchers said, but needed to be much better studied to identify any potential pathogens. The scientists said the rapid melting of the ice by the climate crisis meant the glaciers and the unique microbial ecosystems they harboured were “dying before our eyes”, leaving researchers racing to understand them before they disappeared. Some of the microbes may also be a future source of useful biological molecules, such as new antibiotics. The scientists collected surface meltwaters from eight glaciers across Europe and North America and from two sites on the Greenland ice cap. They found tens of thousands of microbes in each millilitre of water....

Thanks, Pete. The National Geographic primer is pretty helpful. It is somewhat reassuring that the turbines turn slowly enough that most fish can get by without being turned to sushi. I will read further.

America, being a fairly stable continental land mass, I imagine that the trend in plate tectonics will keep America as a portion of the Earth's crust for several hundred million years. The duration of democracy, however, a recent experiment in government after millennia of fiefdoms, monarchies, totalitarian dictatorships, and misc. authoritarian political structures, is difficult to predict. Iceland, Isle of Man, and The Six Nations of the Iroquois all managed to keep some sort of democracy going for many centuries verging on a millennium, but those societies differed distinctly from a large modern industrialized nation and had somewhat more homogeneity and zero would-be oligarchs trying to shoulder in. So, tough to say.

As the OP title suggests, just asking if the Grinding Nemo group has a legitimate objection or do engineers have reasonable confidence that the marine life can be kept away from the screws. It looks like the mobile platform approach will be better than the stationary installations, but I just wondered if anyone had more insight on this.

My talent for misremembering Latin phrases is the ne plus ultra. Hobbes has a famous quote regarding mankind, if left in a state of nature... Hobbes wrote some stupid things, too, like a faulty proof of squaring the circle. As fans of the American comic strip know, he inspired the name of Hobbes the stuffed tiger in "Calvin and Hobbes."

Losing to Hobbs, I assume her life will be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. For her party as a whole, it will be Hobbes' bellum omnia contra omnes.

ABOARD THE PLAT-I 6.40 GENERATING PLATFORM, Nova Scotia — The Bay of Fundy, off the Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, has long tantalized and frustrated engineers hoping to harness its record-setting 50-foot high tide to generate electricity. After more than a century of attempts, there has only been one small power-generating station, since closed, and countless broken dreams, abandoned plans and bankruptcies. Even so, a new coalition of entrepreneurs and scientists in Nova Scotia are trying again. One participant, a company called Sustainable Marine, has devised a new technology and successfully operated it for more than seven months, longer than any other similar system, producing enough electricity for about 250 homes. Sustainable Marine’s innovation is that rather than placing stationary turbines onto the seabed as has been tried in the past, it floats movable ones on the surface, lifting them when a dangerous object approaches and for maintenance. If the platform continues to prove reliable, is economically viable and doesn’t harm marine life, it will have harnessed not just a new source of renewable energy, but also one of the most reliable ones in the world. Because unlike wind or sunshine, tides are unceasing and completely predictable. (...) Scientists collaborating with a government-financed research center are studying the impact of the technologies on marine life. A fishing group unsuccessfully went to court six years ago to block the deployment of a turbine at the center’s test site, and ran billboards with the catchphrase “Grinding Nemo.” Regulators have required Sustainable Marine to outfit its platform with a variety of underwater sensors and cameras to track sea life and to automatically lift the turbines when whales or other large creatures approach. If Sustainable Marine’s underwater sensors and cameras confirm assertions by the tidal power generation industry that fish, whales and other sea creatures will safely swim around their turbine blades and the prototype proves reliable, it may become part of a large-scale development. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/tidal-power-clean-energy-bay-fundy.html

Bringing in an extraneous theory doesn't help. Is there any evidence of Kardashev scale 2 civilizations that are bioengineering humans? Huh? The 21 cm and 18 cm wavelengths are obvious choices due to the prevalence of hydrogen and hydroxyl radicals in space absorbing radio noise on those bands and making quiet channels for communication. Has nothing to do with any special neurological attribute of human brains. The "watering hole" (a clever science wordplay in English, since hydrogen plus hydroxyl equals water) is universal, with nothing specific to humans.

Someday I will get a perfect slice of toast, thanks to the LHC. Duh. BTW, y'all....what is a philosophic chat about value doing in quantum theory forum? Anyway, my serious response is: the value of pure research is that it's fun for curious apes like us to find things out. Curious seven year olds take apart old clocks, curious twenty-plus year olds with doctorates take apart hadrons.

Well, Masters didn't want people to unionize....

And it might be more severe if there were lots of lands at higher southern hemisphere latitudes, due to earth perihelion being in early January. That means N hemisphere winters are somewhat softened by greater solar proximity. And S hemisphere subject to more extreme summers and winters, in terms of the insolation factor. (Mercifully this is offset by the prevalence of ocean down under)

Interesting that if you look up the statistics, as that young fellow did, you find that only six US murders in 2021 were done by poison. (might fall under "that we know of") Characteristic Number of murder victims Handguns 6,012 Firearms, type not stated 4,740 Knives or cutting instruments 1,035 Personal weapons (hands, fists, feet, etc.)* 461 Rifles 447 Other guns 277 Blunt objects (clubs, hammers, etc.) 243 Shotguns 152 Narcotics 117 Fire 73 Asphyxiation 55 Poison 6 Other weapons or weapons not stated 1,059

Har! But still doesn't answer the question: is a zebra a white horse with black stripes or a black horse with white stripes?

Good news from Clark County last night, but control is debatable. Unless Warnock can de-Manchinize the Senate by getting that 51st seat in Georgia runoff, we would still have the Coal King of Obstruction up to his party mischief. Yeah, that grimy Manchin shadow may not motivate a lot of voters, and so election fatigue will take over and a smaller turnout could hurt Warnock in the runoff. The bloc of voters who had to jump the most hurdles last week might not all show up in December. I think Georgia's election law is idiotic.

What if someone were born on Mars at the same time? The whole system seems to fall into incoherence. If planets were in a certain relative position when someone was born on Earth, those positions would be different from the perspective of Mars's surface. I'm a Feces - it's a small cluster of stars under Taurus the Bull.

Many of us do grasp this only too well. In fact, more than half of Americans will usually poll as favoring stricter gun laws, while recognizing that the 2nd Amendment (which politically is presently impossible to repeal or modify) limits how far this can go. Most Americans aren't deranged in their attitude so much as resigned to the inherent derangement of applying rural eighteenth century thinking to 21st century urban society. Over yonder in Limey Land it may not be apparent how many Americans strive for "the art of the possible" in getting some gun control on the books, an eternal uphill struggle due to the way our present electoral system favors conservatives and big money donors and lobbyists. What America really has is a canyon sized gap between the informed and the ignorant. And yes, SYG is just nuts. Common sense dictates that if you can retreat and not shoot someone, that is a better option than possibly ending someone's life. SYG empowers the flawed judgment.

I think there's a semantic gap here in using the term fear. One can have a rational fear without being fearful. If a black neighbor of mine, who happens to be from St Louis, moves back to his old neighborhood there he plans to have a gun, on the basis @zapatos outlined. He's not fearful, but has solid intel that reports police service in that area is spotty, slow, and sometimes notably lacking in rapport with black people. And so he's doing what a rancher would do living on a range with multiple mountain lions and coyotes and a very distant sheriff. Few question the rancher's reasoned choice of protective tools, but anyone who buys a gun for urban protection their decision is often interrogated as if they might turn into Travis Bickle or they are at least questioned on their rationality and fearfulness. And I can see why the stakes of gun misuse are indeed higher in a crowded urban setting than in the middle of stixville. I think the problem for my neighbor, and many other Americans, is that we personally didn't create the world. We would love to get rid of all the guns, convert police into compassionate social workers and conflict resolvers, and take walks at midnight wherever our fancy took us. But not everyone is on that same page (how I envy the Japanese). If I were stuck, by circumstances, in a dangerous neighborhood, I might choose differently than I have, and arm myself. I would be sorry to do so, but at some point I might be asking why I should let myself be mugged or raped (if female) so that I can embody the ideals and virtues of gun-free life. Many people are not very fit, or large, or fast runners or adept in martial arts, so carrying that burden of moral purity is difficult for them.

Your choice of words, "crossed over," gave me an eerie visual of a horned ferryman and a three-headed dog.

Yes, the missus and I both had a good laugh at this. Not being a fan of KFC myself, I may have enjoyed this a little too much. As I recall, the Germans have the perfect word for my pleasure: schadenfreude.

Frontline has some good in-depth features. And they often partner with excellent investigative news organizations, like ProPublica. I can tell this episode will be hard to watch. Not sure I quite grasp what Koti's (now trashed) reply was about. If he can regain some equilibrium I would be okay with having a civil chat about it.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/10/kfc-apologises-for-kristallnacht-chicken-and-cheese-promotion

I read his easily googled (jakub poland wow signal) tale: scary dream when he was small child, like a memory of a WW2 soldier being shot, quite vivid. He wonders if the WOW signal relates to this. Or perhaps a military experiment with mind manipulation. Warning: may contain traces of nut.

INow, did your state go and elect an 89 year old to six more years in the Senate meanwhile gobbling up an endless litany from the Right about how 80 year old Joe Biden is just too damn old to serve? Looks like the Senate might retain its Dem majority. Glad to see Dr. Snake Oil get beaten in Pennsylvania. Now he can go home to his mansion in New Jersey.

I just thought the pronoun thing wasn't very funny. We are allowed to react to the jokes, right? For example, my SpaceX/SpaceY joke was tasteless and crude, and I would support anyone's right to say so, or reject it any other way. Personally I find the pronoun choice for nonbinary folks a poor one that's kind of been forced on them by the fact that people are unable to adapt to new pronouns which would surely work better and without ambiguity. Instead of she and her, why not assign a new NB set of pronouns like de and der? This would eliminate what would seem to be a chronic source of confusion with they/their/them.

Even if he were only poking linguistic fun at the confusion of plural and singular, it's still a feeble and witless joke. Ok, to keep this thread relevant, here are two Musk jokes: Did you hear Musk and Bill Gates collaborated on a drug for erectile dysfunction? It's called ElonGates. Why did Elon Musk choose SpaceX as a name for a company to land on Mars? Because if he chose SpaceY he'd land on 14 year old boys.