Prometheus

What has pharmacology and murder got to do with boxing? This equivalence is stretching credulity. So sometimes consent is valid and sometimes not. What you have still failed to address is why consent in boxing is not valid, and consent in rugby, say, is. Then you should be able to explain your reasoning, not argue from authority. Except i'm not advocating banning rugby, or boxing - you are. So no, i'm not advocating banning cars. And the cardiovascular and psychological wellbeing boxing (yes, some people gain confidence from it). Most boxing actually happen at junior levels, with little 'entertainment' (and smaller risk). I wasn't aware that Christians consented to that. Learn something new every day.

So? Why does that make rugby OK even though it has a higher risk of mortality and morbidity than boxing? And you seem not to understand it is done with the consent of the other person. There is a precedent for banning things have health risks (illicit drugs). There is also precedent for allowing things that have health risks (alcohol, tobacco). The question then is where we decide to draw the line. Surely the rational approach would be decide what level of risk society is willing to tolerate. In which case swimming, rugby and ice hockey would need to be banned before boxing, as the evidence i shared suggests they are more harmful.

If your concern is really the risk of damage these people are doing to themselves, then the intention behind the sport is irrelevant, only the damage it actually does. Surprisingly hard to find stats directly comparing various sports for head injuries, but in this Japanese research judo, rugby, baseball and swimming all had higher deaths and severe disability than boxing in school aged children over a 13 year period, whereas this research finds ice hockey has the highest rate of concussion in adult male sports, Taekwondo in adult female sports. If you want to ban boxing you should ban swimming, rugby and baseball to be consistent, or offer additional reasons it should be banned but not the others. That's your opinion. You need a better reason than you think it's childish in order to stop consenting adults from participating in an activity - otherwise i'll have to stop playing dungeons and dragons. And more generally, why do you get to dictate how much risk another adult should take with their health?

Depends what they're doing: if they having 'boxing' matches in the playground i think intervention is reasonable. If they've set up some jumpers for goalposts for a game of footy i think we can leave them to it. I remember the first time i headed football as a young kid. I didn't even try again for about 10 years.

That's why childrens' sports activities should be closely supervised - that determination can be made based on current evidence and measures taken to minimise risks (e.g. headgear). And if we are talking risks then the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle should also be taken into account.

As long as the fighters are aware of the risks and the referees and trainers primary focus is ensuring the safety of the boxers i don't see a problem.

That's interesting, but i thought there was a viable amount of thorium on the moon? For instance, this blog, makes a case for liquid fluoride thorium reactors. I imagine there would have to be significant capital investment to get things kick started. I've heard ideas of making self-replicating - but even if you have the raw materials, how much infrastructure do you need to make the micro-processors, and how much more so for the industries required in the pipeline before you can even think about making a micro-processor? Moving away from materials, i can imagine service industries exported services to space. For instance, the banking system would likely all be Earth based.

That's as it should be. I was referring to they lay community - but now realise i forget about anti-vaxxers and isn't there some kind of HIV/AIDs conspiracy movement? I stand corrected. As for the trust issue - there are not many alternatives are there? If i go to a doctor, i might read a little around an illness, maybe get a second opinion, but at some point i'm just going to have to trust someone. Same when i get a car fixed, i could tinker a little, but a mechanic knows far more than me. I guess it's comes down to public engagement and showing people why scientists can be trusted.

What's the big deal? When we see pain in another our own pain pathways can become active. Good little article here. There's variation at every level in biology so there's no surprise if some are more able to feel this than others. And given our shared evolutionary past it would also be no surprise if they could be activated by some animals (came across an article a while ago suggesting dogs specifically evolved to play on these pathways, making it more likely humans would feed them).

That's not an artifact of politicisation - that's just science. I used to work in a medical research facility and auditors would come in and find discrepancies all the time. Most of the time they were small, but occasionally larger issues were found requiring data to be re-analysed and changes in practice implemented. But strangely no one ever questions medical science to the extent they question climate science.

Would you think it viable that the 'world's' first trillionaire would be that entrepreneur who first makes a successful move in this market? But it could it be just one company? It seems that to establish a presence in space such a broad knowledge base is required that it would not be feasible to establish a monopoly. I don't know much about economics, but it seems that viable economies are an ecosystem requiring other agencies, perhaps with overlapping market interests, to flourish. Greater cooperation might be the only viable strategy to establish an off-earth presence. Or is that just wishful thinking? I thought there were locations around the south poles in near permanent light making solar viable? I can't remember the source of that though.

Sure, so we could imagine one of the early industries would need would be water mining and/or manufacturing to support a growing human population in space. With the only competition being an expensive supply from earth, the financial incentive is there.

Yeah, i'm trying to get a rough idea of what a space economy might look like. Imagine space tourism, industries (manufacturing that benefits from microgravity such as zblan, printing of organs), asteroid/lunar mining (helium 3 seems the most viable for lunar industries) and commercial and government funded research missions to Mars beyond.

Or replace them with absolutely anything. But i'm interested in the other way round: rare in space, common on Earth (to the point it could be economically viable to ship it up the well to near Earth space habitats/industries).

I think there will always be a market for luxury items, because this is real meat, don't you know. So there's no elements on Earth that would be so rare and essential in local space that it would be worth the cost of going up the well. Biota seems viable, but perhaps that could be managed eventually with hydroponics in simulated gravity. Seems human resources, if needed for industry (not too many jobs automated), would be the most valuable resource.

Since you're not worried about inference you could just try fitting different curves to it and seeing which has the lowest least squared error. The problem is over-fitting the data: for a high enough polynomial you'll be able to find a 'perfect' fit. Stick to simple curves.

I'm trying to imagine how a future off-world economy might interact with the Earth economy. If we imagine a few moon bases and several orbital habitats, supporting various space industries - the first wave of really commercialising/industrialising near earth space. I can imagine luxury items, such as steak, being pretty expensive off-Earth. But i was wondering what essential components would need to shipped up the well to support those habitats that couldn't be mined or manufactured in space (given the cost of going up the well, companies would do everything they could to source as much as possible off-Earth).

Are there any commercially and/or industrially significant (or potentially so in the near future) elements that are rare in local space but abundant on Earth? Water was the first thing that came to mind but apparently it's quite abundant and easy to make from existing elements.

Any science that makes projections into the future and contains complete unknowns is informed guesswork? Don't take a peek at medical science. Is solar activity a complete unknown? The 11 year cycle is well established isn't it - not quite completely unknown. I'm sure volcanologists would disagree that volcanic activity is completely unknown. It seems you have very standards of evidence - but are you consistent in this standard? We know there are completely missing between quantum and relativistic sciences as the two theories are incompatible. Then by your own reasoning we should admit that theories of gravity are informed guesswork. Even if it is informed guesswork, what else would you base decisions on. Uninformed guesswork? If you see a car coming towards you and you can't quite gauge its speed would walk faster or slower?

The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test should work as it compares the entire sample distribution against an empirical distribution of any shape. A visual check would be better though.

Hmm... Which is most useful when talking about environmental impact? I'd have thought power as it takes into account time spent performing operations, which is what you seem to suggest. I guess then the question is a practical one of whether QCs become common enough to have a significant environmental impact. The applications i've seen involve computational chemistry and similar modelling - not exactly for the masses. But could we have apps accessing cloud quantum computing for some of its processing? Could they, for instance, be used for encryption on a messaging app, requiring banks of QCs? I just came across this paper which was cited on several sites to suggest QCs will reduce power consumption. However, the paper is above me so i'm not sure that's what it actually says.

Apparently by 2030 21% of electricity demand will come from computers, a significant contribution to energy consumption. My understanding of quantum computers is that because they run at near absolute zero, there is negligible electrical resistance, making them exceptionally energy efficient. However, to achieve these temperatures must require a significant amount of energy. Overall would a quantum computing be more energy efficient than traditional computing?

I recently discovered that the Catholic and the Protestant Bible are slightly different, the Catholic version having a few extra books in the Old Testament.

Being a human construct does not make things somehow less real. Things like justice and mercy exist: they are not flesh and blood although they are emergent from it. Why is 'subjective' purpose often thought inferior to 'objective' purpose? Like being given meaning is somehow better than creating meaning. Memetics probably plays a larger role now than genetics. Why does being a temporary phenomena make it less real? Even atoms have finite lifetimes - so they aren't real either. What are you talking about? Just because you have a favourite definition of the word spirituality, doesn't make it the 'right' one. I agree it can lead to confusion so it's worth stating which one your following, but to discarding all other meanings as wrong is just plain silly. Like one word can't have more than one meaning. It's like not believing in atoms, because the root Greek word means indivisible and atoms can be split. Doesn't work, does it?

You wouldn't just drive a Ferrari in VR. You could be a Ferrari, driving through space faster than the speed of light, dodging supernova for fun. To the OP: there will always be people who would rather stay in the physical world. Many of them i would imagine.