joigus

Most people, Oceanians, pharmacists and books would find this kind of listings categorically incorrect.

Unfortunately, no. I didn't say it was necessary though. It could be sufficient. It could be neither: only highly correlative statistically. But any illuminating comments on your part are very welcome.

Gravity plays a big part though, somehow analogous to the high stress that the authors of the paper mentioned for the case of fluids.

Brilliant. I didn't know the joke.

This is very interesting. Granules in any conglomerate are several orders of magnitude bigger than molecules, so this suggests that the surrounding processes, playing the role of a re-scaled 'solvent' perhaps? replicate what molecules would do in a fluid, only re-scaled. Does that imply something like landslides being pictured as some kind of re-scaled phase change similar to what the original post by @paulsutton seemed to imply? When I say 'solvant' I include air, water, the vacuum... The vacuum is a solvant, as far as any of us should be concerned.

I don't know, as the abstract doesn't mention what this phase change consists in. I would be surprised that it didn't somehow involve a discontinutity in the velocity field. Eg: They don't mention domain walls either, but I'm sure they are involved as well. Upon further reading, you may be right that it's more about density than velocity. As to the materials, it is my understanding that the fluids they use are mostly polymers, while they also claim the phenomenon is quite universal. I don't see where metals are involved, but again, I could be wrong, of course.

In fact the authors describe a sonic effect too, reminiscent of what happens in the case you mention. I agree on TOEs and quantum hallucinations, etc. This is much more interesting. x-posted with @studiot

Yes, the word "flow" threw me a bit off track. I should have understood that in your use of quotation marks. Sorry. I also said something incorrect. Namely, that fluids do not resist shear, which is incorrect. It's only correct for so-called ideal fluids. Viscosity is defined in a way analogous to a shear. By 'fracturing' and such I suppose they mean the velocity field experiences a discontinuous change. I'm inferring that from the text. But they don't explicitly say that. I don't know what other thing they might be referring to.

Dimensional analysis suggests this to be an exaggeration. At room temperature, glass viscosity is somewhere around 10²⁰-10²² Pa·s. Atmospheric pressure is of the order 10² Pa. The dimensional quantity with units of time that results is the order of 10²⁰ s, which exceeds the age of the visible universe by 3 orders of magnitude. Gravity being implied in atmospheric pressure. With desert temperatures it becomes a tiny bit more credible, but still... Edit: Sorry, atmospheric pressure is not 10². It' rather 10⁵ in Pa (different format for numbers here, I'm sorry). But still...

This has always been my understanding too, for a long time. But I hesitate to tell students glass is a liquid in which every molecule more or less keeps in place, just because there is no recognizable spatial pattern. Another criterion I seem to remember is liquids do not resist shear, which amorphous "solids" do. I would be more favourable to enriching the classification of different phases. It's been a long time since we know of liquid crystals. Planetary science introduces all kinds of different phases of either amorphous or crystalline materials too. Water alone can crystallise in many different systems. If I remember correctly, second-order phase transitions do not have a discontinuous change of entropy (which gives rise to a latent heat) and therefore are continuous. Yet they are still considered phase transitions in some sense.

Neither. But I've been known to say dumb things from time to time, and not to see things that are obvious to others too. It's bound to happen for everybody.

I'm more and more rusty on these things with every passing month, but doesn't the latter require S to be a closed set to be true? At the very least it requires a topology, if I remember correctly. Open subsets don't necessarily have minimal elements. I remember I still have a quiz/riddle on divisibility that you posed months ago pending. I'm sorry about that. Maybe you published the solution?

Knowledge is knowing that tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad. Philosophy is wondering whether that makes ketchup a smoothie. Common sense is knowing that ketchup isn't a smoothie. Your statement is neither knowledge, nor wisdom, nor philosophy; and least of all, common sense. Science is made of all of them, plus knowing when to drop one when the rest can do without.

Ancient traditions die hard. Peoples' identities die hard. So let me make your phrase a tad more nuanced: By around the 10th century the majority of Persians would be subject to the Muslim rule. Not "be Muslims". That I would agree with. If the local authority forces you to proclaim yourself a toad, under penalty of death, you will enthusiastically trill in response. But that doesn't mean you're a toad. There is a reason why modern Persians haven't forgotten they were once Zoroastrian, even after Alexander the Great burned their sacred book. They still hold a fire, they swear it was never put out, in honour of Ahura Mazda. There is a reason why modern-day Persians who don't necessarily believe in Ahura Mazda, deem it worth laying down their lives on behalf of their identity, quite independent from Islam. Which to me implies not all of these 10th-century Persians were actually that Muslim. Similar things happen in other parts of the world. It doesn't mean "I believe in my gods of old". It means: "You can stick your god wherever it fits in your anatomy".

For them (the Islamic regime) it's not about nuking the US. They know that's out of their reach by a loooong shot. They will not nuke Vanuatu either. The way they attack the US, and South America, and European countries, is by infiltrating different kinds of low-to-medium-level operatives (demonstrators, activists, terrorists, etc) and create havoc. "Strike terror in the hearts of the unbelievers", if my memory serves. They will do as much harm leading to destabilising the world order as they can: Israel, UAE, international trade routes, etc, with missiles and drones. Getting ordinary people to shit their pants in terror wherever their missiles and drones don't reach. See? This is the kind of ambiguous statements I honestly can't get past. Which Iranians? The minority in power since 1979, or the huge majority of Iranians whose culture is actually alien to Islam and had this parasitic culture imposed on them nearly 50 years ago? Looks like Ezra Klein is being deliberately disingenuous here. Let's rather talk about what the ordinary Iranians would want, and not what a clique of religious fundamentalists and the hitmen in their payroll would have it be.