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  1. Wow, so much to unravel here. Yes. The scientific background was in the open. So it would be just a matter of time. And then the point Swansont mentioned: That is true, more or less. But Japan simply did not capitulate. So the war could have taken much longer, taking many lives of American soldiers. Yes, but only after Germany was defeated. Heisenberg was in charge. The infamous meeting between Heisenberg and Bohr in 1941, gave the latter the impression that the Nazis were making serious work of the atomic bomb, and brought this impression to the US. Yep. I have seen the 'atom cellar' in Haigerloch: Does not quite compare to Los Alamos, is it? I would not put my hand in the fire for this, but it surely was a reason: Truman said something like this about the Soviets and the atomic bomb: "Now we have a real hammer on those boys". Another reason might have been to have a 'real live test'. A hint for this is the second bomb. One of the A-bombs was a U-235, the other a plutonium bomb. Wouldn't it be interesting to compare their effects 'in the field'? About the capitulation of Japan: there was a struggle between the civilian government and the military. The government wanted to give up, the military wanted to fight until the bitter end. One of the struggling points was the position of the emperor. The US wanted an unconditional capitulation, the Japanese government found that the position of the emperor could not be discussed. In the end the Japanese government made a very unusual proposal: let the emperor decide. In the meantime the first atomic bomb was dropped. If this fact had an influence on the decision of Hirohito is not known, fact is that he chose to capitulate. His speech in which he called for the capitulation was recorded, to be brought to the Japanese radio studios. Radical militaries tried to steal the recording on its way to the radio station, but they did not succeed. Hirohito's speech was broadcasted, and Japan capitulated. And the US more or less let the emperor untouched. Had the US made it known that the emperor could stay earlier, Japan might also have capitulated earlier. Maybe the A-bombs would not have been necessary. Main source: Bert Röling, who was a.o. member of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (also called the Tokyo Tribunal, similar to the Nürnberg Tribunal in Germany). Hmmm. Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch were hardly Nazis, they were Jewish and fled Germany in 1938. Otto Hahn: Fritz Strassmann: So four of the 'main characters' were definitely not Nazis. Equating 'German' and 'Nazi' is simply wrong, also during WWII.
    5 points
  2. The solution is for people who are not themselves autistic, and who evidently don’t understand what autism even means, to stop proposing “solutions”. I am autistic, and I am not a problem that needs to be solved.
    4 points
  3. I understand the point you're attempting to convey with all of this, which is that these are all at least some psychological evidence that parts of the mind may exist elsewhere in the body and, by extension, part of mind may exist external to the body. It's true that trauma changes the mind our brain creates, but the psychological effects of trauma isn't truly evidence that mind has lost pieces of itself with that truama--it's not evidence that parts of the mind exist in the parts of the body lost or exposed to trauma. The psychological effects of truama simply shows how easily brain's responses are influenced by truama, which is how easily the mind our brain constructs may be influenced by the data it receives through its sensory array. For example, congenital blindness doesn't suggest that parts of the mind are lost to what some are unable to see nor does it suggest that parts of the mind reside in our eyes. What blindness shows is how the lack of access to visual sensory data affects the mind our brain is able to construct--the parts of the brain associated with our responses to visual sensory do not respond or function as efficiently without that sensory data. In another example, the lost of a hand doesn't suggest that a piece of the mind is lost with that hand. The mind our brain constructs through the lost of a limb merely suggests our brain's reaction to the lost of access to the sensory data that limb has or could have provided. Psychological effects, to be clear, are not evidence that pieces of the mind reside elsewhere no more than the depression some experience on rainy days suggests that pieces of the mind reside in sunlight or is blotted out by that rain. The changes in our mental state are merely evidence of the fragility of the balance between the afferent influences on brain functions and our brain's efferent responses to those influences. That may be true, but the real magic is in the mind of the magician who head that hat likely sits upon.
    3 points
  4. Ahhh perfect timing, I needed a new snake oil supplier. How much ya got? Yup. I'm all for hijacking this weird af thread for as long as it lasts to talk about autism. Just so people are aware of what is meant by spectrum, it is a collection of symptoms and behaviours of which many conditions, neurological and psychological states share a lot of overlap. Because of this, many react to words like "cure" or "low functioning" negatively due to a misconception amongst autistic individuals and their advocates to be expert authorities on the "condition" because they or someone they know doesn't fit into certain boxes. The two divergent models of disability also plays a significant role in this. Those who's issues lie within the medical model of disability absolutely need effective treatments and cures. Those who's issues lie within the social model of disability require their environments to be treated or cured. To make this more confusing, most of the conditions still have overlap. Hypersensitivity to light is an example often associated with AS conditions. The medical fix may be via optometry and the social fix is accomodating lighting installations. I do get what Dim is getting at though and agree with the sentiment. The generalised psychiactric labelling of what is clearly many different conditions, for the purpose of simplified medical signposting is confusing enough for medical experts and downright dangerous in it's invitation to invite public misunderstanding and stereotyping of austism spectrum conditions to the degree where even the sufferers and their advocates just don't get it. It's similar to but obviously not as bad as if they decided that instead of specific cancer diagnoses, all medical signposting would say is "Cancer spectrum disorder" and just hope the person on the treatment end knows what to do. Because cancer spectrum disorder could be anything from a small mole to stage 4 stomach cancer or an inoperable brain tumour. What many psychiatrists fail to grasp is that the act and implications of psychiactric labelling have broader ramifications than just how they as individual doctors treat them, but how everything outside of the doctors control is going to treat them. Just so we are clear, cancer most certainly is a disease and I don't believe autism is anywhere near cancer nor do I believe people with autism are a disease. My criticisms revolve around medical signposting and careless, thoughtless, lazy labels. A cry for more precise terminology is a standard that most scientific fields adhere to. Exhibit A, pluto is no longer thought of as a planet.
    3 points
  5. "More than everyting I said/wrote?" = "Every coin has a flip side". Thanks for clarifying. I still don't know what you mean. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it's often the tumor of understanding.
    3 points
  6. It gives me heartburn. And Trump is only the half of it. The other part is that it turns out half my neighbors think like he does. And it's not even the politics that bother me so much since I can accept policies that are not to my liking. It is the fact that by most measures he is a despicable human being, and half of my fellow Americans find that acceptable. I honestly didn't know that so many people could be like that. I don't read much political news anymore beyond the headlines. It is too much like watching your neighbors cheer for those who sponsor dog fighting or human trafficking. It's just kind of depressing.
    3 points
  7. “what makes this fee revolutionary is that it will apply to emissions that don’t happen on European soil. The EU already puts a price on many of the emissions created by European firms; now, through the new Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, or CBAM, the bloc will charge companies that import the targeted products — cement, aluminum, electricity, fertilizer, hydrogen, iron and steel — into the EU, no matter where in the world those products are made.” https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/food-environment/2024/big-boost-europe-carbon-neutral-goals-cbam This removes incentives to move carbon-intensive industry out of the EU, since that won’t sidestep tariffs any longer. The tariff accounting includes the electricity used for production, so there’s an incentive for business exporting to the EU to use green energy
    3 points
  8. And this is the mistake many folks make when trying to interpret complex issues by using single words to define them. I know a LOT of people who think the way you do, that "liberal" means "anything goes" and conservative means "responsible". I also know a LOT of people who think conservative means "fearful" and "ignorant" and "stuck in the mud", while liberal means "progressive" and "hopeful" and "forward-thinking". This is the problem with using these terms with each other. It's hard to know how a person has been influenced when they use such broad terms. I'm not sure hubris is the problem in the US. In trying to focus on capitalism to the exclusion of any other ownership principles, we're allowing our leadership to pretend to care about us when their re-elections are really up to big corporations. We may find it hard to give up what we think we've earned, but I don't think it's out of pride. If the American public had any pride at all we'd gather to stop these stains on humanity from exploiting us even further (the CEO of Kellogg's recently claimed that if we're worried about the high price of food, we should eat Frosted Flakes for dinner). We make very little investment in The People. Everything goes to keep big corporations in business, including bailing them out with tax dollars when they mess up. I think we should focus on better social spending and representing the will of The People, and maybe then we can better assess whether this is a matter of hubris or not.
    3 points
  9. I was reading that the protective mini-islands are called dolphins https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin_(structure)
    2 points
  10. Should we keep quick-tempered people in a short fuse box?
    2 points
  11. Yeah, independent creation happens all the time*. Especially on a smaller scale than calculus. “you stole my idea” is pretty common, too *I’ve got a cartoon sketch about dinosaurs watching a triceratops and claiming to be tricurious, and Colbert made a similar joke on his show a few years later. Nobody stole the idea from me, and it’s a fairly obvious play on words. Not the only time something like this happened to me.
    2 points
  12. Yes, absolutely. But remember the context of this discussion - the claim was made that autism is a disease that’s due to blood toxicity, and can be cured on that basis. This of course is utter nonsense, and as an autistic person myself I’d really wish there was a way to rid us of such snake oil salesmen (and there are many of them). Autism - like other forms of neurodivergence - isn’t a “disease”, it’s a difference in brain physiology that has genetic, developmental and environmental factors involved. It cannot be “cured” in the classical sense, for that reason. It manifests across a range of areas - social, cognitive, executive functioning etc -, and impacts a person’s quality of life anywhere on a spectrum from very mildly to extremely severely. Succinctly stated, neurodivergent people tend to have support needs - we must live in a world that is fundamentally designed for neurotypicals (both culturally and evolutionary), but because we aren’t neurotypical, some expectations can be hard for us to meet and some situations difficult to handle, and we need support and accommodations to manage them. Some of us need only a little (or no) support and accommodation, others need a lot, and for some it’s debilitating, and they need 24/7 support and care. So in my personal opinion, it’s not about “curing” autism - which fundamentally suggests that we’re somehow deficient and need fixing, which is a questionable stance to hold. Rather, it’s about recognising that autistics may need extra supports and accommodations in certain areas, and being willing to offer those. There are also meaningful interventions available for at least some of the more severe and debilitating manifestations of autism, and I completely agree that these should be offered so long as the aim is to improve quality of life, and not just to make people “less autistic” and “more normal”. That’s an important difference. We will never be neurotypical, but with the right help we can become less dependent on external supports. There’s another thing I’d like to mention, which is not so often talked about - some commonly held life goals and values that are normal and generally unquestioned in the neurotypical world may not be shared by all autistics. For example, wanting and needing to be social and around others, wanting to acquire possessions and material goods, wanting to have family and procreate, conforming to gender norms, following generally accepted blue prints for how life should be lived, ideas around what has value and what doesn’t, concepts of what gives us meaning and joy in life etc. While this is of course very individually different, not all of us autistics share these goals and values, so we end up in a situation where we are forced to try and fit into a society and culture that feels fundamentally alien to us. We can’t be our real selves, but must train ourselves to wear a certain mask and act a role so that we might appear to be able to meet the expectations of a neurotypical society, simply because it’s practically and logistically very difficult to exist outside that system. We feel like we don’t have a choice, so we live a life that’s at odds with who we are. This creates a lot of suffering and struggle. So at least part of our suffering isn’t due to autism itself, but due to demands and expectations placed on us by others to “be a certain way”. Such behaviour - called stimming - causes us no suffering. On the contrary, it feels soothing and comfortable, and dissipates the perceived pressure of sensory overload. I do it by (gently) pressing certain places on my hands for example, and it helps me to self-regulate. Who are others to say that this is wrong and needs fixing? I would suggest that the problem here isn’t this particular behaviour pattern itself, but how it is perceived by others. From a neurotypical point of few it appears meaningless, odd and not normal, and it is tacitly assumed that the one engaged in it does it only because he feels compelled to do so, and thus suffers. But it’s not like that - it’s a self-regulation tool, like people take a painkiller when they have a headache. Both help increase well-being. The problem is only that society has deemed taking painkillers to be acceptable behaviour, but not flicking your fingers. If you stop an autistic person from stimming, or shame them into hiding the behaviour, you aren’t acting to promote their overall welfare, even if as a result they might appear “more normal” and supposedly fit in better. I would suggest that training autistics to appear less autistic is generally not in our overall best interest, unless we ourselves specifically ask for such interventions. This is a difficult ethical question, particularly for severely autistic children - there’s ways and training methods to make them appear less autistic, so they can function better in neurotypical society. The price they pay of course is that they’re forced to be something they’re not, that they’re forced to play a part in a story they themselves haven’t read or understood. Are you really doing them a favour, are they really suffering less afterwards? Most people in the autistic community who underwent such childhood interventions seem to say that no, it wasn’t in their best interest, even if it did enable them to function better in society. The general consensus is that providing supports and accommodations on an individual basis if and when needed, is probably the best way for most of us. Sometimes that means we need a lot of support, and that’s the measure of a modern enlightened society - how it relates to their weakest members, who perhaps can’t contribute in traditional ways. Caveat: if the behaviour is dangerous, or injurious to one self or others, as sadly sometimes is the case, then of course intervention is necessary regardless.
    2 points
  13. I'm start with this statement which is rather erroneous but rather than point out the mistakes I will instead describe the quantum vacuum in accordance with the mainstream. From that the errors will become more readily obvious. I will be including related formulas so may take it a bit (in case of cross posts lol). Lets start with the period prior to inflation the hot dense state. We all agree its a tiny region at an immense density and temperature. In our models we feel the energy density is roughly \[10^{19} K\]. So everything is in that thermal equilibrium state. All particles are in thermal equilibrium. At that temperature if you apply the Bose-Einstein statistics formula you will find you have roughly 10^90 photons. This is an equivalency its actually a quark/gluon plasma state other particles can exist but recall we cannot distinguish any particle species. Here is the Bose-Einstein statistic. Don't worry I don't expect anyone to be able to use these formulas. \[ n_i = \frac {g_i} {e^{(\varepsilon_i-\mu)/kT} - 1}\] In that formulas the effective degrees of freedom is 2 for photons. I gave you an article with the pertinent details earlier on. That's your low entropy state. Now lets look at the quantum vacuum including zero point energy. Were all familiar with the quantum harmonic oscillator. This was one of the earlier studies on universe from Nothing scenarios. Including Guth's original inflation which unfortunately had the effect of "Runaway Inflation". Now one of the problems you have in that quoted section is your likely not aware that when particles come into existence they have to obey numerous conservation rules. The relevant one is conservation of charge in this particular case this includes matter and its antimatter pair. For photons it is its own antiparticle the distinction lies in its circular polarization. anti-photons are Right hand polarized while photons are left hand. This rule also applies to other particles such as neutrinos. Hopefully you can see a problem with your negative and positive universe scenario. Particularly since anti matter is readily formed in numerous processes including stars. https://www.space.com/21889-solar-flares-antimatter-particles.html not to mention we collide matter particles and can can produce antimatter. Knowing that how would this correlate to you negative and positive energy universes ? Something to keep in mind, just like an electric circuit where you cannot measure voltage by placing your test leads on the same copper wire until you have a potential difference between the two lead points. One cannot determine how much energy a vacuum contains between any two coordinates with there is no difference in its potential energy. We can however look for indirect evidence Casimarr effect is one example. The main problem with the zero point energy quantum vacuum is that observations vs calculation show an error margin of 10^(120) aka the vacuum catastrophe. There are plausible solutions to this still underway. \[d{s^2}=-{c^2}d{t^2}+a({t^2})[d{r^2}+{S,k}{(r)^2}d\Omega^2]\] \[S\kappa(r)= \begin{cases} R sin(r/R &(k=+1)\\ r &(k=0)\\ R sin(r/R) &(k=-1) \end {cases}\] lets start with the FLRW metric we wont need curvature so we can keep it set at k=0 c=1 following formulas will be in normalized units. We need to describe two field of lets go with photon/antiphoton for simplicity. Under QFT we have two operators the creation/annihilation operators. They further correspond to their propagators as well but we don't need that detail. QFT uses them to model how particles are created subsequently destroyed. This link details how it applies to the quantum harmonic oscillator aka zero point energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_and_annihilation_operators#Ladder_operators_for_the_quantum_harmonic_oscillator In essence the positive and negative modes of the harmonic oscillator propagates the operators. Where the operators correspond to particle I wont go into too much detail to see if you have any comments/questions up to this point. However this is the zero point energy field and how it can give rise to particle production in essence.
    2 points
  14. Revenge is a dish best served cold... like that.
    2 points
  15. Direct sunlight ~100,000 lux 0.1% of that 100 lux, which is equivalent to an heavily overcast day, and brighter than that of the hallway lighting of a typical office building. A moonless clear night is ~0.002 lux
    2 points
  16. I don't know about that, but if we treat 55 and 145 as lengths in metres, you could fit 450 average bananas between them.
    2 points
  17. And there it is...the unproven and unprovable...the lie that discards real evidence for faith, feeling, and supposition. It is the idea that the brain is merely a lense for some noncorporeal source of the mind that isn't rooted in material evidence. So why are some so determined to believe in that idea? Is it fear of the inevitable or an earnest interest in devining some great truth or deep mystery for posterity's sake? It's the other way around, conventional wisdom isn't science and should be discarded without "findings-observations-data". Perhaps, but you seem to have doubts. If I'm not mistaken from our previous discussion, terminal lucidity appears to be a primary source of your doubts in brain function as the absolute source of the quality we call mind. Whether lucid or confused, mind is a product of the ebb and flow of brain function emerging from what are basically its metabolic,homestatic processes. However, it seem, you believes there's something more?
    2 points
  18. Just to clarify. The matter dominated era comes later; the first era was radiation dominated. What later became matter, with mass, was originally all massless radiation ( possessing the property of energy ), because the Electroweak force had not decoupled yet for the Higgs mechanism to give mass to Fermions, This would have been when the observable universe was in causal contact ( light/information has time to traverse it ) in order to establish an equilibrium that ensures isotropy and homogeneity, prior to a vacuum energy driven inflationary period that expanded that observable universe many many orders of magnitude. See Alan Guth, Electroweak symmetry break, and Inflationary Theory.
    2 points
  19. No matter was not "in the form of energy". That is the same confusion as before. There would have been radiation and fields (radiation is a form of oscillating field) that possessed energy. The entity is the radiation, or the field. Energy is one of its properties, along with other properties like direction, phase, frequency, amplitude and so forth. But my very limited understanding of this (I'm not even a physicist) is that when you try to extrapolate back you reach a limit at which our current theories of matter, radiation and fields etc break down. So we can't "see" any further back, even theoretically. Strictly, the big bang theory starts from the limit of credible extrapolation. All the stuff about singularities etc only has the status of conjecture, so far as I know.
    2 points
  20. There is a special happy feeling knowing one is not part of a garbage fire. Didn't walk from Springer Mtn to Mt Katahdin, but I walked some of it in Vermont and NH. It's all common sense stuff - pick your time (e.g. not winter in the north, not high summer in the South), bring a partner you don't mind having inspect you for tics, bring mosquito repellent, sturdy hiking boots, etc. Keep food in a bag and hang it from a high tree branch when you sleep, never in your tent. Take increasingly long walks before the trip, for several months, to build up muscles and spot any joint/tendon issues beforehand. Keep socks dry. Watch out for the protozoan fiend of Appalachia, Giardia lamblia. Do your homework on finding a high quality water filter that will strain out Giardia - pump filters are the best. Boiling water is a monumental PITA. Ditto cooking. Dried fruit, oat bars, pemmican, peanuts, trail mix, powdered milk or powdered non dairy drinks, are all handy sources that don't need fuel to prepare. Don't gather trail sources of food unless you know exactly what you're doing. Blackberries yes, mushrooms no. No sustained eye contact with bears. Etc.
    2 points
  21. I think if there were scientific evidence it would be documented better than in a youtube video (which, BTW, needs to comply with rule 2.7, found in the “guidelines” tab; a video is not a substitute for substantive discussion and documentation. Asking people to watch a 25-min video rather than you putting the effort in to explain the situation is not going to fly)
    2 points
  22. 2 points
  23. Merleau-Ponty construed existence as understood through the body. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Merleau-Ponty Merleau-Ponty understands perception to be an ongoing dialogue between one's lived body and the world which it perceives, in which perceivers passively and actively strive to express the perceived world in concert with others. He was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the twentieth century to engage extensively with the sciences. It is through this engagement that his writings became influential in the project of naturalizing phenomenology, in which phenomenologists use the results of psychology and cognitive science. Merleau-Ponty emphasized the body as the primary site of knowing the world, a corrective to the long philosophical tradition of placing consciousness as the source of knowledge, and maintained that the perceiving body and its perceived world could not be disentangled from each other. The articulation of the primacy of embodiment (corporéité) led him away from phenomenology towards what he was to call "indirect ontology" or the ontology of "the flesh of the world"
    2 points
  24. But only for what you think is in the proposal. You don’t have those details (or haven’t shared them), so we don’t know - you’re just guessing. I’ve pointed out a few logical things that might have been in the proposal that you did not include. I’m not making any argument. I’m just pointing out the incompleteness of your assertion, and asking you fill in the gaps. Instead of doing so, or even engaging in exploration of it, you attack. It’s quite telling. It’s also quite obvious.
    2 points
  25. That's a good reason, thanks for the info...
    2 points
  26. As I recall, what I was reading in the studies of student performance was more related to students having to get up early than to negotiating transit in the dark. The problem is that children respond to sunrise and seem to do better cognitively when the light is well advanced and they have had maximum sleep while it was dark or pre-dawn. (the DST effect was especially bad if they were located at the western edge of a time zone, where the sunrise is last to reach) These studies also drew the conclusion that later school hours would be beneficial, even where there was no DST. The Circadian rhythmn actually shifts later during adolescence, so the need there is especially acute. Here's one digest of that research: https://www.apa.org/topics/children/school-start-times
    2 points
  27. This is one of those “why are things the way they are” that physics can't address, because we can only observe how things behave. Bare charges and their electric field come as a set.
    2 points
  28. https://www.rte.ie/news/2024/0308/1436684-trees-climate/ "The Tiny Forest concept was pioneered by a Japanese botanist, Akira Miyawaki. He pioneered a special method of planting and ground preparation that can be used to grow forests ten times faster than a typical forest (which usually takes 200 to 300 years" "Usually up to five saplings are planted for every square metre and as a result, the trees are forced to grow upwards for sunlight instead of spreading outwards"
    2 points
  29. I enjoyed that, too. Am sure the Senators favorite part was that she was played by… Scarlett Johansen And one more bc, well, bc snark is how we process modern political pain
    2 points
  30. Really? Bold by me. If a 'scientific article' cites Deepak Chopra as serious witness, then it is not serious scientific article. Maybe you should read Susan Blackmore: in her student days she had an OBE, and she started a career as 'believing' parapsychologist. But her serious empirical investigations turned her into the end being a sceptic, and leaving the field of parapsychology. I can highly recommend Dying to Live: Science and the Near-death Experience and The Adventures of a Parapsychologist. From the Wikipedia article:
    2 points
  31. You can only sense the expanse of space because of objects in it, i.e. the observables are objects, not length itself. Just like the fact that your location changes lets you sense the passage of time.
    2 points
  32. Evolution in cat size tends to be governed by niche partitioning: cat species don't thrive when in direct competition with other carnivores of similar size. In much of southern Amazonia there are six 'common' cat species. In size order: jaguar, puma, ocelot, jaguarundi, margay and oncilla. They each avoid direct competition by feeding on different prey appropriate to their size. However, the jaguarundi and similar sized margay avoid competition by one being diurnal, the other nocturnal. If they'd diverged in size instead, they'd encroach on niches already occupied by ocelot and oncilla. So the whole cat guild can be viewed as coevolving in such a way so as not to step on each other's toes.
    2 points
  33. Disappearance of the major component of the tides, with a devastating effect on intertidal organisms and probably other ecosystems that benefit from the flushing action of tides.
    2 points
  34. Since I was quoting Trump (there are even quotation marks and a link to the original) to demonstrate his confusion, I don’t see why you think the misunderstanding is mine.
    2 points
  35. I would not characterise it as hubris but I am afraid I do think we are witnessing the end of US dominance of geopolitics, as a result of the possibly terminal dysfunction of its politics. One sees every day authoritarians, in Russia, China and even now Israel, becoming ever bolder, as they see the US weaken. The EU is finding itself suddenly exposed by its tacit and complacent reliance on the US to uphold the rules-based order that has largely held sway since the end of the war. The Chinese are gearing up to retake Taiwan and appropriate the South China Sea. Putin knows if he can hold on for a Trump presidency, he will be assured of success in Ukraine and can turn his sights towards the Baltic States and the Kaliningrad exclave. Israel has embarked on a Final Solution to the Gaza problem, via blatant ethnic cleansing and what looks increasingly like genocide, while the US is impotent to stop it. There is every sign that the US Republican party has withdrawn support for the democratic system, taking a large chunk of the electorate along with them, and instead embraced a loathsome personality cult. The USA will be lucky if its judicial system, its free media and its term limits on presidents survive. The country will be consumed with its own internal problems for the next few years at least. Xi, Putin and others will be rubbing their hands at the prospect. So much for "making America great again".
    2 points
  36. It's a shame you chose to ignore everything that everyone had to say.
    2 points
  37. Negative things and positive co-exist together throughout our lives. It's up to ourselves to choose which ones we want to see. I often experience crippling depression and happen to have just acquired four budgies. They interrupt my negativity in positive ways. If you are alone and have nothing to care about, find something to care about.... be it others in some capacity, or in looking after some other living thing. Immerse yourself in their needs, or elsewhere, where there is the possibility of reciprocation. Negative past experiences, for instance, need positive new experiences to push them away into insignificance.
    1 point
  38. There are many activities that could be therapeutic, depending on your temperament and inclination. Some art form - painting or sculpture are the standard choices. Building something, even if it's only bird-houses, can be quite rewarding. Horticulture is very calming and might even yield some superfoods: ripe tomatoes from your own yard, fresh peas, gooseberries, melons...? Another possibility is volunteer work to help other people who are maybe worse off than you are. The objective in any case is to stop focusing on your inner misery and direct your attention and efforts outward, to something positive. There is no magic cure. Maybe you can figure out - with or without help - what's causing the problem and fix it (very difficult and rare). Or you can treat it like a chronic illness, managing the symptoms from day to day (what most people with depression do).
    1 point
  39. Sure, it makes perfect sense. One wants maximum resonance from the body of the instrument. I would presume the use of drying oils, such as linseed oil, would help repel the moisture from sweat. Which reminds me of that joke in the Molesworth books about the boy not paying attention in a biology class about hibernation: Master: "Molesworh, what are you doing? Pay attention. Now, what does a bat do in winter? Molesworth: "Er....er.......It splits if you don't oil it Sir."
    1 point
  40. That fits, certainly. I suspect this product is the resin already fully polymerised, i.e. the curing step was done during manufacture. But let's see if the OP comes back and comments.
    1 point
  41. A couple of thoughts here. There is vigorous debate regarding the power system in the world, and while the US is still a super power, but it is not clear whether we are still in a unipolar world. Many scholars have argued that we are either moving or already are in a multipolar world where international power is far more fractured. I understand that this is not the gist of your question, but I think is relevant context. It is also relevant to note that not only military is relevant, but increasingly access to critical resources, economic power and economic connections. Strong economic interdependency can be a powerful weapon, too, for example. A big issue in the statement is the level-headed democracy aspect. While the US has a special outspoken brand of crazy, Europe for example has similar questions, all connected to populism and mostly right-wing populism right now. In general, populistic streaks have always been a danger to democracies, as they promise easy and quick fixes to real or perceived grievances. However, as part of their anti-establishment appeal, they often popularize circumvention of procedure, frequently scapegoat vulnerable (especially non-voting) groups and are at least friendly with authoritarian ideas. We have seen how vulnerable populations are whenever something happens leading to arguably self-destructive behaviour (e.g. Brexit). Even worse, it does not really seem that negative consequences borne out of this sentiments are necessarily penalized. Even after the rather egregious attempt by the far right to dismantle democracy, the party still obtained the plurality of votes (but lost the majority). Some called it a win for democracy, but really it is more a near miss. Likewise, in Germany the far right party is likely to become second-strongest party and even after the meeting of some of their leadership with (other) self-confessed nazis, regarding the deportation of immigrants and other desirables (Wannsee, anyone), they are only dropping a little bit in polls (which should be unthinkable, given Germany's past). Anyway, the gist of it is that it is difficult to find an strong coalition of enough level-headed democracies, level-headedness goes out of the window the moment folks feel somewhat threatened (and I am almost certain that during uncertain economic times, folks will feel more threatened by e.g. immigrants than, say, Russia). But maybe I am just getting increasingly disillusioned.
    1 point
  42. Yes, you're right. The unusual writing of the Lagrangian set me off. Sorry. That is indeed the way to generalise to higher-order derivatives. I've proven it many times, but now I had just a couple of minutes and I screwed up. There's just a coefficient difference. Later.
    1 point
  43. Unfortunately, I can't read this post: and I don't know how his result is different from mine, but it seems that his EL equation is the same as mine, <<<<< which is different from <<<<<<< I disagree with the latter. We need to use the generalized EL equation, which I have already derived in this exercise: and got the answer compatible with this: (Euler–Lagrange equation - Wikipedia)
    1 point
  44. This is not my area of expertise either, but looking on line, it seems to be an already cured resin, for dissolving in a solvent as a varnish, or as a component in paint formulations etc. I thought this site was interesting: https://www.insituconservation.com/en/products/synthetic_resins/laropal_A81. They seem to recommend it as a varnish for conservation of paintings. I can't imagine they would want to add acid curing agents for such purposes. So my guess would be you just dissolve it in a suitable polar organic solvent, apply it and let the solvent evaporate. But that site, in Greece, has a contact page so you might consider asking them if you need a curing agent or whether you just dissolve it and if so what solvent they recommend.
    1 point
  45. It’s not America per se, but the right wing. And when the US is no longer dominant, it’s China who will take over. Be careful what you wish for.
    1 point
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