joigus

I found this beauty on the web today: https://www.freshdaily.ca/travel/2020/01/pingualuit-crater-quebec-canada/ ------------------------------------------------- Some facts from http://craterexplorer.ca/pingualuit-impact-crater/: Pingualuit Crater Lake, Québec. Pingualuit ᐱᖑᐊᓗᐃᑦ is an Inuit word meaning pimple. Ironically, Pingualuit Crater Lake is said to have the purest freshwater on earth. The crater surrounding the lake was formed by a meteorite over 1.4 million years ago in the Pleistocene Epoch. The meteorite evaporated on impact in an explosion which melted thousands of tons of stone and wiped away all life for hundreds of kilometres around the crater. Local Inuit people consider this unusually calm place to be a site of extreme power, where one comes to revitalize oneself. In order to protect this unique impact crater, Pingualuit National Park was established in 2004. Photo Credit: NASA -------------------------------------------------- List of lakes that formed as a consequence of meteorite impacts: https://time.com/4371446/these-tranquil-lakes-are-actually-ancient-impact-craters/#:~:text=Clearwater%20Lakes%20(Lac%20%C3%A0%20l,Eau%20Claire)%2C%20Quebec%2C%20Canada&text=About%20290%20million%20years%20ago,in%20Quebec's%20largest%20national%20park. If anybody has been there or has anything more to say, I'd be very interested to read about it.

I was a little confused when he started talking about fighting height with height. It became clear when I started listening to it from an Antipodean point of view. 🤣 "Love" is perhaps not the word I would have chosen for the brilliant point he makes, but I understand. As to Trump and his only-too-obvious scratching anybody's back as long as they scratch his... The only possible antidote I see is education. Not his, it's too late for that. As to his ilk, it's too late too: Once people are in their forties+ they're just too set in their ways. I hope it's not too late for the upcoming generations. Good standards of education that only the most ignorant of course will fear as indoctrination, ignoring the extent to which they have been indoctrinated by others. Education in critical thinking is critical.

Point taken, but I'm not so sure about that. Being thwarted seems to defeat the purpose with "true believers." But even true believers are bound to be sensitive to the possibility of becoming a laughing stock, as long as they're not made the object of cheap laughs. I think humour, in some of its many forms --perhaps not necessarily sarcasm--, as long as it's refined and intelligent, and has a seed of reasoned criticism in it, and not bordering sheer insult or epicaricacy*; can be quite useful. Give you an example. I've heard many arguments against belief in the Christian god, but IMHO nothing as powerful as that memorable bit by George Carlin: "Organised religion has actually convinced people that there is a man living in the sky; who watches everything you do every minute of every day; who has a list of ten specific things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he's got a special place for you to burn and suffer in anguish till the end of time... ...But he loves you. He loves you and he needs money. He's all-knowing, all-powerful,... But somehow he can't handle money!" ----------------- *Epicaricacy: Rejoicing at or deriving pleasure from the misfortunes of others.

Yeah, it's a tough one. Perhaps sarcasm can be more efficient than either indifference or disagreement... Disagreement seems to reinforce the wildly speculative mind.

I'm no expert, but I'd say confinement and other restrictive measures are playing a part in boosting the paranoia.

Many, or even infinitely many, possibilities is not the same as "anything can happen". Physics has room for unpredictability and very stringent constraints at the same time. Nothing that we know can, ie., violate local conservation principles. Quantum laws do satisfy local conservation of probability, for example. Which translates in the fact that nothing macroscopic, nothing with global charge or mass, etc., can just "materialize" at a point, unless a flux of probability has been driven there, by a process which must, in turn, be physical, and satisfy the same constrictions. Nothing we know violates Lorentz invariance either. Quantum mechanics tells you, rather, that Lorentz invariance has to be taken with a grain of salt, and precisely how little salt that must be (HUP). Same for conservation laws. There are no violations of these principles, there is a very strict room for ambiguity in their application. The famous h bar constant is involved in how much "violation" is acceptable. Murray Gell-Mann summarized it very well with his phrase "anything that can happen will happen". But for something to happen, it must be possible to happen.

Which actually goes to prove that you mustn't take anything literally.

And we don't know anything about many more things than those we know something about. And then there are things we don't know if we don't know. And things we don't know if we could know. And maybe things we think we know, but we don't. Makes you wonder.

Well, the identity is not considered to be an interesting symmetry transformation, because everything is symmetric under it. It does play a role in the theories that involve symmetry (mostly in group theory as far as I know). Example: Consider three numbers, i, j, k. And a function alpha: \[\alpha\left(i,j,k\right)=ij+jk+ki\] And the transformation, \[\pi\left(i\right)=j\] \[\pi\left(j\right)=k\] \[\pi\left(k\right)=i\] Then we say alpha is symmetric under pi.

Long live coffee|

I care not how you define me. Nor would I waste a second's thought in defining you. Nothing you can say about me can move me one way or the other. Although I suspect you will appeal to insult rather easily. I do care about ideas, theories, consistency, rebuttals, compelling arguments, experimental checks, different levels of cross checks, certainty, hidden assumptions... If this site is dead, what are you doing trying to find a place among the dead? There are plenty of places out there where you can find people far more unconcerned about assumptions and logical consistency, and totally obsessed about defining each other and themselves rather than examining their mutual assumptions. You would feel far more at ease.

Now you have You're careening off topic towards discussing your favourite toys at alarming speed.

Please, do give up on me. And stop hijacking other people's posts with your pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo. Nothing you've said so far has been substantiated.

Absolutely science-spectacular. Thank you. +1 Thank you, Studiot. +1 Somewhere I had an answer written for you, but I must have lost it. A bookish answer, as always.

Thanks a lot. +1 I will adjoin the wikipedia link here, for completeness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Prismatic_Spring And a brief explanation of the most outstanding feature:

Mmmm. Yeah, sounds like you guys totally agree. You cut and paste some of your sentences and you can mock up a bitter debate.

I would like to create a little room here for the wonderfully unexpected, beautiful,... (add your adjective) in Nature. Unexpected and/or beautiful could be interpreted as curious/spectacular, or similar. I mean to use these examples in order to keep the kids interested in Nature. The youngest ones get bored very easily. Examples could be: a rare animal, plant or protist, an almost unbelievably beautiful geological phenomenon, an amazingly complicated molecule that looks like a tinker-toy assembly, spectacular phenomena in water eddies and such. You get the idea. My getting-started examples: Glasswinged butterfly A family of butterflies that eat poisonous leaves when they're caterpillars and grow transparent wings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greta_oto Rainbow Eucalyptus tree A species of tree that looks as if somebody had Photoshop-painted them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus_deglupta Maths are also welcome. Things that look paradoxical like 0.9999999... = 1 would be the idea. I'm sure people will enrich this with possibilities I'm not foreseeing.

Totally. +1

Touché.

Sanity is a mental condition. A platitude is an unnecessary (on account of being too obvious to be useful) statement. You really seem to have no clue, neither about what Eise is saying, nor about what you're saying yourself. Your sentences really are a challenge as to how many inconsistencies you can fit into them per word.

If they are well-learned enough in science, maths, logic, linguistics, computer science..., why not?

Thanks a lot. Very useful. +1

I personally don't take offence at the concept of science being wrong, even though I use my leisure time mostly to learn more about it and I've made of it my method to try and understand the world better, like most of us here I would say. I don't think science aims for absolute truth. It's not about being right or wrong beyond any doubt. It's about being more right and certain and less wrong and uncertain, and pushing the limits of doubt and ignorance. Science doesn't provide us with a magic wand to dictate ethics either. It evidences correlations, most of them of statistical nature. It sheds light on plausible causal connections, it refutes previous ill-conceived ideas. If we do that, we are in a better position to take better decisions, diagnose better, tackle evil before it happens. But this can only be achieved by adding to the structure more layers of rational thinking and open discussion. Our understanding is never complete. What kind of philosophy marginalizes individuals? Do you mean something like social Darwinism? It's not a universal trait of philosophy, AFAIK. I'm guessing you've voted that there are good and bad philosophical theories...