Yet, while we constantly make incremental discoveries every year; it seems the days of discoveries as significant as electricity, gravity, atoms, DNA etc are well behind us and we are not really uncovering any new fundamental laws in nature. We don’t know for sure but it seems unlikely that we will ever discover, say, a new color or a sixth Platonic solid and certain highly desirable future technologies like Faster-than-light travel or anti-gravity will never materialize no matter how hard we try to make them a reality

Science appears to be moving more rapidly than ever but that’s just from our narrow perspective. Science has always moved slowly and most times; individuals live and die before entirely new ways of thinking come into our species’s awareness

Yet in some distant future; will science as we know it come to halt as there will really be no significant new things to discover OR is it a never-ending conversation- a zero-sum game?

Here’s another related topic

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/25/climate/silurian-hypothesis-another-civilization-before-humans?

“If an advanced civilization had lived on Earth millions of years ago, powered themselves with energy and wiped themselves out, would we know? Would they have left traces of their presence etched into the record of our planet?”

It looks like they looked at several lines of evidence that might show up, or would be easy to miss. Tectonic activity would mask/erase some evidence, and if we think in three dimensions, much of our planet is unexplored.

The Silurian Hypothesis

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/silurian-hypothesis-would-it-be-possible-to-detect-an-industrial-civilization-in-the-geological-record/77818514AA6907750B8F4339F7C70EC6

I wonder about what might be missing, or changed from what we’d expect - missing oil and coal deposits where you’d expect, or nuclear waste, which would not have the natural isotopic abundances, regardless of whether it was still radioactive (not necessarily in some identifiable container, though you’d expect they’d have used one). That would include finding depleted uranium. (along the lines of evidence of the natural reactor found at Oklo)

The paper mentions the possibility of finding markers of a society that had a nuclear-weapons exchange

And the impact is not just in straight productivity, it’s also tied in to the fact that the tech is deflationary. A basic personal computer costs about the same today as it did 30-40 years ago, when they started to become ubiquitous, while the capability of them (processing power and memory)

If the cost of computing power had risen with inflation or even just been flat, computers would be massively more expensive than they are now, and without that you don’t get the same productivity improvements that we’ve seen.

Printing might be one example that rivals the productivity gains but I’m not sure of how the costs scaled as printing advanced.

Comments?

What can scientist do about oxiadation?

Could vehicles be made of other material that does not react to water and oxygen?

"Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like “synergistic leadership,” or “growth-hacking paradigms” may struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study reveals."

"In a work setting where corporate jargon is already the norm, it’s easy for ambitious employees to use corporate BS to appear more competent or accomplished, accelerating their climb up the corporate ladder of workplace influence."

"Workers who were more susceptible to corporate BS rated their supervisors as more charismatic and “visionary,” but also displayed lower scores on a portion of the study that tested analytic thinking, cognitive reflection and fluid intelligence. Those more receptive to corporate BS also scored significantly worse on a test of effective workplace decision-making.

The study found that being more receptive to corporate bullshit was also positively linked to job satisfaction and feeling inspired by company mission statements."

Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs | Cornell Chronicle

Just to be clear, I am using the word characteristic in its common or garden meaning of quality or property or similar, not in the specialised mathematical meaning to to with the wave equation.
Equally I am using duality in a broader sense than just in the wave/particle apparent dichotomy, as it applies to all sciences, not just light.

I am of the opinion that the so called wave/particle duality issue has been 'blown up (inflated) out of all proportion', being seized upon by the media as some sort of inscrutable mystic woo.

In other science we comfortably accept duality and say 'it depends upon the circumstances' and move on to consider those circumstance.

Here are a few examples.

Chemistry : Is aluminium acid or alkali ?

Biology : Is a vurus dead or alive ?

Materials Science : Is concrete a stron or weak material ?

Electrical Science : Is a hole a particle or a wave ?

Biological Science : Is a fungus a plant or an animal ?

Visual Science : Optical Illusions : Is the picture the external corner of a cube or the internal corner of a box ?

Chemistry : Is compound X covalent or ionic ?

My question for discussion is; "Are we making too much fuss about light duality so that the it has achieved mystic status that brings so many to misunderstanding ?"

Passages written in the period, in 100-year increments

“Before the mid 1700s, there was no such thing as standardized spelling. Writers spelled words as they heard them, or as they felt like spelling them, which is why the 1500s and 1600s sections look so alien, even when the words, underneath the surface, are ones you know.”

“As you move backwards in time, the French and Latin loanwords that make up an enormous proportion of the Modern English vocabulary grow fewer and fewer. When you pass 1250, they drop off almost altogether. Where a modern writer would say he underwent torture, a 1200-era writer must say that he suffered pinunge instead”

Is sensitivity to thermal included when the filter is removed; or the sensor works only to a near-IR and thermal sensing is not 'near' ? What is a thermal camera spectrum ? ~12um ? Is any common canibalizable camera sensor that can be used for 'toy grade' thermal imaging ?

If you want, jump to time stamp 1:10 at --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YEvkOVCaNI

What is this spotted? No idea they had this in Cambodia.

Scotch whisky. American whiskey. Whisky and Whiskey are not made the same way. Whiskey encompasses several styles and ingredients. They are different drinks.

Post Type: Question

(1) I was wondering how to best measure the success of new digital tools in a consumer goods production process. (2) I don't mean just traditional metrics like output speed, but truly effective indicators for employee adaptation and process flexibility. (3) In other words, what are the most relevant performance indicators for a successful digital transformation? Any help here would be appreciated.

Under what term can I find studies/suggestions of which percentages of a daily (or monthly) income is supposed to be enough for expenses of food, fuel, electricity, car payment, insurance, entertainment, housing, medicines, savings, clothing... all the costs of daily living for a 'normal' ideal life (no luxury, no hardship) ?

Example: A 'normal' income budget should keep up with housing cost under 30% , car payment under 10%, electric bill under 8%, food under 6% , savings ideally over 10%, insurance under 4%, and so on.

Any suggestions how to/where to look ?

What determines how a plant recognizes the altitude in which it is supposed to grow better or not ?

Is it the oxygen content, the temperature, the barometric pressure ? Escapes to mind how/why a plant can grow better (or only at) the Andes and not at a location with similar environment.

I would like to know what would be, from a scientific point of view, the best way to reforestation in a large scale, say at last 5 million square kilometres, within a timeframe of 50 years?

Quote For starters, infants and children died at a horrific rate (some say up to 1/3 of all died before the age of 5) Quote

https://www.sarahwoodbury.com/life-expectancy-in-the-middle-ages/

Why did infants and children died at a horrific rate in the Middle Ages?

Most people only lived to mid 40s.

What happen in the Middle Ages people died so early?

Was there just more bacterial and virus back in that time?

Their key argument was that my skepticism is meaningless because science was wrong before and when the germ theory was created, scientists initially rejected it (which is largely true).

How would you guys counter it? Those two discussiosn were the first time I've debated religionists for over a decade.

Hello Ken. An interesting research paper came out several days ago. I've been really soaking my brain in it today. Much to think about. Intrinsic vs. extrinsic.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2424725122

Historical and experimental evidence that inherent properties are overweighted in early scientific explanation

Zachary Horne https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6629-2040 Zachary.Horne@ed.ac.uk, Mert Kobaş https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9669-9033, and Andrei Cimpian https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3553-6097Authors Info & Affiliations

Edited by Timothy Wilson, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA; received December 2, 2024; accepted August 6, 2025

September 19, 2025

122 (38) e2424725122 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2424725122

Significance

"Some of the most significant achievements of human history have come about as a result of our scientific ingenuity. Thus, understanding scientific reasoning is a key goal for cognitive science. The present research uses a unique combination of experimental and historical data to advance this field of inquiry, revealing that basic cognitive processes underlying explanatory reasoning give rise to a systematic inherence bias among practicing scientists—a tendency to explain phenomena in terms of their inherent properties rather than external factors. This bias, which acts as a bottleneck to scientific discovery and the learning of new scientific concepts, appears to shape the trajectory of scientific theories throughout history."

Abstract

"Scientific explanation is one of the most sophisticated forms of human reasoning. Nevertheless, here we hypothesize that scientific explanation is susceptible to some of the same biases that influence everyday thinking—particularly during the initial stages of theory building, when scientists are first grappling with complex phenomena and are thus more likely to rely on explanatory “guesses.” Specifically, we investigated whether scientific explanation exhibits an inherence bias—a tendency to explain phenomena through inherent or intrinsic features rather than extrinsic factors such as context or relations. Consistent with this hypothesis, a comprehensive analysis of major explanatory transitions across the history of Western science revealed that initial scientific explanations systematically favored inherent properties, while subsequent explanations incorporated extrinsic factors more consistently. Seven experiments with lay participants (both adults and children; N 1,673) and two experiments with practicing scientists from top departments worldwide (N 275) provided converging evidence for this bias and identified the psychological mechanisms involved. When explaining unfamiliar phenomena, even leading scientists showed a robust tendency to overweight inherent properties and underweight extrinsic factors relative to established scientific understanding. This bias appears rooted in basic cognitive constraints on attention and memory that excessively narrow the space of hypotheses initially considered. These findings advance our understanding of both the psychology of explanation and the development of scientific knowledge, while suggesting specific ways to improve scientific training and education."

I'm in need of a complete paper.

here is an article about it. https://www.earth.com/news/centuries-of-errors-expose-a-recurring-human-bias-in-science/

14 hours ago, studiot said:

Hello arc, welcome back.

Kinda difficult to follow you graphs as they seem to cover all sorts of timescales.

But I did pick this out.

This shows a steady temperatiure 2010 - 2024 and entirely misses the local minimum shown by this one over the same time period.

Thank you for the welcoming. Your critiques are appreciated and acknowledged. Good to know you are still here. . . As in SF and not . . . . you know what I mean.

I try to flash out an idea I had recently to combat climate change. I did put it into a presentation you can access under url deleted

I am going to break down every relevant page in this post with the science behind. I would like you to point out my errors, chip in your thoughts and maybe give me a nudge in how to promote my idea the best, if it is an idea worth promoting.

The 1 million will be explained later. The villages should house around 100 paid workers (they are planned more spacious to accommodate their families as well). Most of them are meant to tend the agriculture side of the undertaking. If we estimate that the short-rotation coppice part of the project needs between 200.000 and 1.000.000 trees/km² and that an average person can plant 1.000 trees/day (thats lowballed see https://medium.com/cansbridge-fellowship/plant-trees-thats-all-you-did-c43c30b472c0) it is quiet possible to plant several km² a season with the roughly 100 workers in a village. Its hard to get more specific because of so many moving pieces like region, weather, soil condition etc. But 10 km² should be doable. When these are planted they need to be maintained and replanted partially after taking wood out for the pyrolysis.

This is a complex slide. But (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13399-021-01284-5) is a good overview. Fig. 5 in 4.1 shows that there are pyrolysis technics to produce biochar containing a high carbon ratio. But I assume that this means that it retains possibly 50% or more of the carbon, the organic matter (wood) sucked out of the environment. Am I right? The same paper states under 4.1 that these biochar is possible stable for >1000 years. 

The rapid growth phase is ment to be around the first 5 years of tree growth where they put on a lot of biomass to establish themself against competition. I don't have a paper on this comparing different tree species does this one https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378112720314869 support my point?

We don't want to cut down all at once but every year a part of it. Is this good forestry practice in short-rotation coppicis?  

An easy method to create terra preta. Also the uppercase 1 refers to the 1 million villages. This number could be enough to suck out the yearly amount of CO² corresponding to the amount of manmade eCO². According to e.g. papers like these ( https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332151728_Total_Biomass_Carbon_Sequestration_Ability_Under_the_Changing_Climatic_Condition_by_Paulownia_tomentosa_Steud see Table 1) a tree can suck 4,5 kg of carbon out of the air a year. Planting 3.000 trees a hectare equals 13,5 t of carbon a hectare. 100 hectares make up a km² and 10 million of those equal 1,35e13 t of carbon a year. These would prevent 4,95e13 t of CO² a year of building up in the atmosphere. Man-made emissions were 3,7e13 t eCO² in 2024.

This is a very ambitious time table as most eatable trees need more time to bear fruit. We would need to beige this gap by growing more bags tables and produce between the trees. But as they are on the smaller side the first years they should allow more light onto the ground.

Here is everything counted not just the agroforest produce and the energy but also economic activity in off seasons and by family members not employed but houses on site.

While pyrolysis needs initial heat for “ignition” there are ovens that are self-sustaining by burning pyrolysis gas emitted by the biomass itself. There is still excess heat left over after the pyrolysis. While I forgot to put down the company's name for the oven, it can be seen in action in this video, explanation starting at around 2:50 minutes. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4pEQ2QOAfhk

Around 2:50

From the two million € per village, one is intended for infrastructure, containing housing in containers, batteries, tools and most important the pyrolysis oven. This is at the moment much more costly than needed but I am positive to bring him down by building it on scale as we need a million of these. At the moment they are made one at a time on order.

500.000 € are meant to pay out income for 100 people over 2 years so about 200 € a month from the other 500.000 € I intend to buy food rations locally to fill up for things they can't harvest in the first two years, seedlings to grow the forest and other stuff. I know it is a pinch and it might be more expensive but I take this as a number to start working with. Please show major inconsistencies. 

Thank you for your time and please spread the idea if you like it. Feel free to adapt it.

Daniel

I have never seen a battery with the positive terminal at the black end and the negative at the red end before.

Comments ?

Object appeared just after 2230 eastern, slowly moving to the north

Photo is a 2 or 3 sec exposure so the object is blurred. Video shows the object better but you don’t get the background.

(edit: some the stars visible in the picture are: big dipper to the right, Arcturus is on the left, peeking out behind a tree)

From social media, the likely explanation is that it’s stage 2 of an Ariane rocket that launched last night, venting, and would soon burn up on re-entry (which would have been neat to see)

So now it’s a probably-identified object/aerial phenomenon