StringJunky

I''d be more inclined to go with the military assessment because they are hands-on.

They joined last Sunday.

Which I think suggests it's an observer-dependent phenomenon and probably why it is difficult to objectively pin down and describe quantitatively..

To attack/change the Republicans you need to be one. As someone once said to me: If you want to change the system, you've got to be the system.

It has clearly sounded alarm bells for the Democrats as well, and they are obviously doubting the substance of any military threat from Iran, going by this Japan Times article: Nancy Pelosi warns Trump against declaring war with Iran as Democrats demand info

Reciprocating influences?

It was reading this BBC article that kind of made me think "Hey, wait a minute, this is rather melodramatic" considering Iran has not made any explicit overtures to violence and merely said what they would do if certain things happened, like blocking the Strait of Hormuz i.e. they are responding and not initiating. They have a right to respond in their own interest in this Republican-contrived crisis imo. US pulls 'non-emergency staff' from Iraq as Iran tensions mount

It seems to me that the Trump administration is pre-meditatively creating and escalating a problem with Iran to the extent of maneuvering the armed forces and removing non-essential staff from Iraq. Do you think the ulterior motive might be to bury bad news at home by distraction?

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Another way to put it is: a pattern of irregularity..

Ink quality matters as well.

Ten minutes is too much of someone's life only to to find it wasn't worth that ten minutes. It's bad enough reading some of the stuff.

It goes beyond economics. It looks like Homo sapien sapiens have an existential problem looming, so we don't have much choice but to start to looking away from Earth.

Another way to look at it: The Moon, hammer and feather are moving in the same direction through space (co-moving) , all physically connected to the astronaut. When he lets go of two of them, the gravity of the Moon deflects the path of the two objects towards itself and the hammer and feather try to deflect the path of the moon towards themselves, with negligible effect.

Not carbon-based. If one surmises that our behaviour is just data, there is no reason why that data cannot be executed from another substrate, like silicon.

"And now we get back to our normal programming"

But the book won't be able to tell how it becomes water, or that it can predicted, only that it does. You can't reverse-engineer an emergent property. It is not amenable to a reductionist approach. You'll always get this it-just-happens part... it's just the way Nature is or we are ignorant. As someone already implied: one relates to an unknown but naturalistic process and the other relates to metaphysics.

I'll go with that and implied in this post:

Anything to give us hope.

This was in today's BBC, which could potentially alter things maybe:

I wonder if the people protecting him will jump ship eventually, spinning on a penny, turning against him.

Are you reading this thread? What it 'is', pertaining to this subject, is precisely what we are discussing.

It's linked with emergence.

What is "dark matter"? What is its composition. You might as well say it's made of axolotls or frisbees. Get the picture? I have no problem with dark matter because it fills a space in knowledge and is anticipated to be a solution for physics but you seem to have big problems with emergence doing the same for biology.

No, it's greater than the sum of the parts... thought that would have been obvious to you... as in analogy. So, what's the problem? Once you put certain elements together you get <insert object or phenomenon>. The only difference is that we don''t know the precise configurations that make life, consciousness or sentience. We can only say they emerge.