joigus

Well, yes. But if I'm allowed to play with distances, then any force can be made stronger, or weaker, as any other. I'm assuming same distance.

No. The measure of such strenght is the fine-structure constant, which in turn is basically the square of the fundamental unit of free electric charge. You can find it in many a good scientific calculator. So no.

Yes, it's probably combined effects of refraction and diffraction. In the case of refraction, light would appear to bend away from the border if the refraction index has the necessary gradient near the surface of the obstacle. The main point being: Light doesn't have to go in a straight line. I can't contribute anything much now. I'll try to follow, and then maybe comment further.

It happens because of diffraction of light. When light goes past a sharp edge, the trajectory of light rays differs significantly from that of a straight line. The effect generally depends on the light frequency and the typical sizes of the objects involved, as well as the refraction index of the medium that carries the waves. If the source light is bluer, the effect should be less noticeable for objects of the same size, while if the source light is redder, the result should be more noticeable. Diffraction has many similar or related effects associated to it. A nice analogy to understand this qualitatively is provided by sound. As sound has much much longer wavelenghts than typical light --say, visible light--, it can turn corners, so you can hear someone speak even though there are obstacles standing in the way. Diffraction of sound also explains that in Greek theaters you could hear the actors declaiming as if they were next to you, even though they may be many metres away. Analysing diffraction properly is a complicated problem mathematically. In this case, it seems that, instead of seeing the image behind the finger, what happens is the opposite. The take-home message is: Waves can do funny things around corners.

As Swansont points out... DNA by itself is useless. You need a suite of proteins to read regulatory sequences, beside the protein-coding sequences. Don't forget the former constitute up to 95% of its length or thereabouts. You need proteins to tell DNA when to shut up, and when to start "talking." Otherwise, it's like sending a book to Mars, where there are no potential readers, and with the book saying both "do this" and "don't do this" to those non-existent readers. When to do this or that is key to DNA's function. The "readers" are proteins and RNA. Sending organisms --with their ribosomes and proteins-- is more like it. First I would choose a planet with magnetosphere. Then I would send archaea/bacteria that produce the desired metabolic waste --hello, oxygen. Easier said than done though.

Hell, I wish I knew a little bit more about Asian languages. I tried my best, but failed. This question about vagueness gets me thinking about language every other day. I think it becomes a real challenge when the language you're trying to learn uses different words for different concepts that your native language assigns the same word to. Somehow your brain shifts from one concept to another without ever realising it's actually a different concept. A particularly nice example I've found between English and Spanish is the word "time" vs the word "tiempo" in Spanish. There is polysemy in both words, in English and Spanish as well. But the problem is both polysemies are impossible to coordinate. So, English: time (uncountable), as in "time goes by" vs time (countable) as in "how many times have I told you..." Spanish: tiempo (uncountable) as in "el tiempo pasa" = "times goes by" vs tiempo = "weather" as in "hace buen tiempo hoy" = "we have good weather today." For countable "time" we have "vez" or "veces" (pl.) While for "tiempo" English-speaking people have "weather." That's why I always say, if you want to really learn another language, you must in a way become a child again, and learn it from scratch, by as direct association as possible. Yes, there's context, and also cultural entendres. In ASL, "pasteurized milk" is represented by having the sign for "milk" go past your eyes. Thereby: "past your eyes milk." How a coding that's understandable only if[?] you have an idea of the sounds makes its way to a sign language is a total mystery to me. So I would say: You don't need to explain too much if the other person is aware of enough context. And you don't need to explain the connection to the particular symbols if everybody knows those symbols are what the convention has established. I think it was Ferdinand de Saussure who first pointed out that symbols are quite arbitrary. What's amazing to me is that this arbitrariness can be extended to all kinds of languages --even SL's-- even when the original connection was sound-based. Also amazing that most people can so quickly catch on to this... And even more amazing, that this correspondence can be extended to idioms and other combinations of words.

I suppose it depends on where you put the top. Also, I haven't heard the particular fairy tales we're talking about. Usually, fairy tales put me to sleep, something I'm in sore need of lately.

What is religion without people?

If that's a statement, "Computer science is technology-related." I agree. If that's a question, "Is computer science technology-related?" Sure, it is. Obviously.

I'd invert your logic, for better effect: Every religion should respect everybody.

I don't think it would. What I'm assuming here is that this notion of self must be acquired based on recursive references in the experience. If nothing repeats so as to form patterns, no construct of self would be possible to build. Arguably, and furthermore, no construct of any other notion or concept would be possible to build. Yet, we can picture this individual as having a stream of experiences. This individual would be a temporal "congruence" of flashes of colour, sound, and other sensorial imput with no cohesion, no correlations, so it would be incapable of forming a construct for itself. Does that make sense?

Maybe because of those particular tenses being less specific? French is strange though. Their verbs are person-specific, and yet they use the pronoun all the time. Je suis, tu es, elle est,... Je google, donc je sais

In Latin: So both referring to 'I'. I don't know why it is always cited as just 'cogito, ergo sum'. Missing the 'I', resp 'ego' in it. Just a note about language. In English pronoun+tense give you all the information you need, but you need the pronoun to remove ambiguity. In Latin you kind of have the pronoun incorporated in the verb: Cogito (I think), cogitas (you think), cogitat (he/she thinks), cogitant (they think), cogitamus (we think), cogitant (they think). It's very much like Italian and Spanish. You can use the pronoun, but it sounds emphatic. In the nominative case the pronouns usually don't appear. It's therefore not natural to say "ego cogito, ergo ego sum." I might be missing finer points. It's been a while since I last talked to an ancient Roman.

The question seems far from being settled. I've just found this interesting article: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-did-humans-evolve-lose-fur-180970980/ Some of the hypotheses seem a bit far-fetched to me. Let go of you fur because you are better able to notice other people blushing? It seems a tad extreme. A protein seems to be involved that apparently acts as an inhibitor to selectively suppress hair growth in certain areas. In most mammals --according to the article-- the difference manifests itself in the plantar skin in some exceptional mammals --polar bears and some rabbits. Maybe for humans there are intensifiers at the level of regulatory sequences or the like? But there must be a strong evolutionary pressure behind it. Another interesting piece of information providing likely timeline: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3002236/ The main argument is about when clothing probably appeared based on evolutionary divergence of head/clothing lice.

I do remember other people being under neg-rep attack, and reporting accordingly. I know I've been protected when I was under fire for no other reason than disagreeing with someone. I like communities that are self-correcting to some extent. A judicious combination of refereeing and community awareness.

What's very interesting is that hair loss is universal in all human families, irrespective of environment. It could have been a spandrel that got carried along because humans started using animal pelts, so there was no adaptive pressure on having more and thicker hair. If you go to the tundra you still got mammoth! If it further affords you the possibility of turning them into a sensory device for ticks, that would be very welcome. Some further thoughts... I'm acting like a sounding board to people that know much more about this. But I love the discussion.

You must get a few of them (neg-reps). It's a rite of passage. It's bound to happen if you clash with some nut here or there. I'd be concerned if I didn't get any. Have you gotten yours?

I disagree. A cat is a cat, and a jellyfish is a jellyfish. Why do I know that? By virtue of examples of catness and jellyfishness being available to me. That way, I can look at a tree and say "that is no cat, nor is it a jellyfish." "It possesses no catness, nor does it possess any jellyfishness." I've never seen, felt, or even been able to surmise, a non-self. You know, "in the world of selfness, this is no self." As a matter of fact, I've never seen a self either. A self cannot be re-instanciated, or multiply instanciated, it cannot be gradually deprived of its qualities by removing aspects of it, even mentally --like a jellyfish can. It cannot be compared to another "self" in any meaningful way that I can think of. It cannot be presented to my conscience as a distinct, clear-cut --or any other way cut-- thing. I cannot even start to fathom whether you have a self, the same way that I feel I do, anymore than I can fathom whether there is some other space and time outside of this space and time. I can only use the --learnt, inferred, constructed-- notions of time and space to say things like: "Before I was born, there was no catness, no jellyfishness, no quality or example of anything." That's all I can say, but even that is unredeemably contaminated by my experience. How can I be sure that time makes sense outside of my experience? In that sense, I'm with @Sensei in that, if a machine engaged me in a conversation about its self, it might be able to convince me that it has one. How would I know it doesn't? The self is a construct. Very powerful, very intimately-attached to survival for us humans, and therefore very convincing*, but a construct. * How could it be otherwise for animals for whom an essential tool for their survival is guessing each other's minds?

I would be comfortable enough starting from that seed for the purposes of a discussion. I would even go as far as to say that there are hints of an anthropological basis for the emergence of a notion of the self --or intensification of it-- from changes in patterns of human behaviour, but that this self is not a necessary part of the animal condition. Hunter-gatherers seem to have been more at peace with their mortality, even though they practiced burials, and seem to have been aware of this ending of existence. And tribal conflicts emerged only when they had to fight for scarce resourses. I'm aware that I'm identifying burial culture and awareness of death with awareness of self, but I think it's a reliable-enough yardstick for it. When you settle, on the other hand, you tend to identify yourself with things, people, tools, etc, around you. You create this concept of home. This is my landscape, the landscape of my forefathers. This is my game, and my staples, and so on. It's by virtue of the recurrence of your experiences, repetition, that you try to make sense of these "correlations in your experience" --for lack of a better term-- onto a self, which is nothing but a placeholder, that holds all of that experience together. Language, of course, has a powerful role to play in all of this, giving names to things, and people, and generally facilitating all of these initially loose notions to stick. It would be very interesting to know if/how people who are constantly on the run, barely trying to survive one more day, with faces and landscapes being forgotten in a matter of weeks, would be able to develop a notion of "I" in a similar way than we do. My feeling is that they wouldn't. They would be far too busy with the "something is happening" aspect of things. I don't know about Brentano and Husserl a great deal, TBH.

I'm thinking that, in particular, the Weyl solution extends this rotational velocity field to infinity --I'm not clear about assymptotic behaviour, but paper seems to suggest radiation-like, so 1/r. So it's probably not realistic to describe a distribution of galaxies. At some point near the intergalactic distance it's bound to stop being accurate. Even so, it's interesting that the picture of an axially-symmetric rotating galaxy already produces deviations from the Newtonian approximations for reasons that, OTOH, are very physical --a Lense-Thirring-like effect. I'm reminded of techniques that are used to deal with condensed-matter systems like, eg, the mean-field approximation. Usually, when I read about numerical relativity, it's always colliding BHs and the like. Extrapolation to clusters of galaxies, and the metric "looking Weyl" near any particular galaxy? I'm trying to dash-off some thoughts, but I still haven't made up my mind, one way or the other.

DNA by itself says nothing much without an environment. Sapolsky himself insists very strongly on this. He deals at some length on how the Dutch-starvation phenomenon has to do with some genes being activated by an environmental situation, then remaining activated some generations down the line, even when said environmental factors are no longer there, due to perinatal conditions --developing embryos detecting mother's environmental stresses because they're "marinated" --Sapolsky's prose-- in their mother's stress hormones. Thereby => environmentally-induced developmental changes that stick. If the topic gains interest, I will dig for literature and references, and correct possible oversimplifications I'm making... When you jumped to Michio Kaku I kinda started finding it harder to follow your line of thinking. I don't see the connection to "reality" there. Or the "I." "Reality" or the "I" are concepts that I --personally-- find suspect. I would engage in any serious attempt to supersede them with weaker-sounding terms, as "objective descriptions" or "correlations based on experience." => Illusion of "reality"; illusion of "I." But --something I try to say as often as humanly possible-- what the hell do I know.

Very interesting. I'm familiar with Immirzi from the "Immirzi parameter" in topological GR. I'm assuming it's the same Immirzi. I'll probably take a second and a third read of this. Thank you. +1

Definitely the most interesting differential change in humans, up there along with changes in frontal cortex and trapezoid, is skin, along with its hair follicles, and how body fat is organised. I know it's been hypothesised that it's an adaptation to persistance hunting, and "managing of sweat" as a cooling mechanism, to make it possible. In my mind, it makes evolutionary sense to put the hairs to good use as a sensory device, if you're gonna lose a lot of them for some other "collateral" reason. What I mean is several innovative features "helping each other out in a common suite of adaptive advantages" rather than one of them being the only driving causal force. Does that make sense to you?

Interesting... Coincidence? Perhaps these poor things have been too long among us. As nothing but a guess, but a relatively learned one, the longer you live, the more wild variation not based on the common adaptive theme is bound to appear. Perhaps animals that live much longer than their expectations in the wild should be considered as natural targets for some surprises in the development of their bodies.

Besides, guessing is a lot more fun...