StringJunky

Yes, German wines are around the 9-11% and you can pay a very pretty penny for them. There is no correlation between alcohol content and quality. Done with appropriate care, higher proofs will last longer keeping-wise and mature more slowly.for potentially more complex flavours, but of itself, % proof means little.

You can get Japanese-style chisels that have a thin, very hard face, which holds the edge, backed onto a thicker, softer, more shock-absorbing steel. For sheer maintenance of sharpness, Japanese-tempering styles are the best I've come across.

Decays are always random but the more atoms there are, the more constant the measured rate of total decay is.

I just had this thought, prompted by the OP, about unpredictability within predictable limits which is not something I'd given any thought to before. This is statistics I suppose.

The configuration of nucleons must set the bounds of decay probability, I suppose.

An enquiring thought: if radioactivity is truly random then there wouldn't be unique half-lives for each element; the decay is only random between two temporal points, the positions of which depend on the element.

Yes, many rabbit-holes lie ahead. My great grandad, born around 1887, wouldn't let his wife, who already had a child out of wedlock, transfer his name to her daughter. My Aunty Madge had to go though her early life known as a bastard.

Before the second half of the twentieth century this was no small matter

Apathy moves in the path of least resistance.

One of my maternal great-aunts did this over a number years, probably decades, and she ended visiting village churches and looking at records there. She managed to trace her line to the 1400's. One good thing, pre-industrial revolution, about those days is families tended to live and die quite locally to each other.

Apart from purely intellectual endeavours, where emotional responses may not be desirable, emotions are really the drivers and raison d'etre of why people do things. Pure reason itself is as sterile as pure maths in terms of living a fullfilling existence.

Easily, with current timing accuracy I think It seems to me he is arguing against basic observations of Relativity

30cm, I think swansont mentioned recently. Devices are in development that could get it down to 2cm

Ok. I thought with the increase in the number of nucleons and the very short range of the binding force, I thought this was what was happening... never thought about the different types of decay.

Radioactive elements have a nuclear binding energy that is basically on the limit of just holding it all together and at some unspecifiable time an atom spontaneously decays.

How far can a meteorologist see into the future? That's the limit.

Listen to a completely different type of music to set new threads off. Familiarity is the bane of originality... of course! Mull of Kintyre and Video Killed The Radio Star were like limpet-viruses on my memory when they came out.

yes, I don't think anything useful or sensible will come this.

I like the article too... perfectly condensed. On the question of how such complexity transmits through the stapes... It does! Think of all the information embedded in the undulating line of a vinyl record; a needle is following a groove and vibrates left/right and up/down, varying a current. Part of your problem, I think visualising this, is you are experiencing what appears to be a completely seamless symphony of sounds, when to another more highly-tuned organism it's patchy and rough as heck! We don't know what we don't know ...if that makes sense... it's only amazing because that's all we know. Our brain will 'digitise' any gaps to make our sonic experience smoother as well.

Think of it as vibrational patterns in the fluid of the semi-circular canal and the hairs are placed strategically for frequency. The time difference between the two ears gives the positional information and partly whether they are from the same source or not. This Yamaha Tutorial gives a nice overall view of ear anatomy, sound capture and processing. There's 3 sections.

Can I suggest the OP has plenty of material in this thread to ponder over and that any new additionis is just repetition of what's already been delivered. It's clear the OP has his fingers stuck in his ears.

As I get older, I am having philosophical problems with the idea of a general population being 'innocent', extant of its national forces.

You've got to take into consideration the speed of information and sources available at that time. Perhaps the full consequences were not known about Hiroshima when Nagasaki was bombed. It's easy to judge with our near-instant modern viewpoint.

Strawman. We've been talking about control, not banning. He's only got ridicule left to argue with.

When that happens we'll know where the problem is, won't we?