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“For the first time since the mid-20th century, over 95 percent of this year’s planned new electric-generating capacity in the United States is zero-carbon.” https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2024/04/11/the-next-phase-of-electricity-decarbonization-planned-power-capacity-is-nearly-all-zero-carbon/

He sought the advice of a mathematician who told him to work it out with a pencil.

One recent YouTube video about Trump’s ‘God Bless The USA’ bible that has gone viral in the last week or so is a factual review of the product by a man called Tim Wildsmith, a devout christian who actually reviews bibles for a living on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_6TVa7scKM Tim Wildsmith makes the following points: - This bible is advertised at $59.99, but actually costs $75 with tax and shipping. - In his opinion a Walmart style bible like this should probably cost around $20. - The website implies this bible is bound in real leather - but it’s actually bound in fake synthetic leather. - The text used is the copyright free King James Version, but without any notes or cross-references. - There is no copyright page or printer info - which usually means the bible was printed in China. - The page stock is too thin, so you get substantial bleed-through of text from the other side. - The gilt edge pages tend to stick together and tear easily. Another well known political satirist called Tea Pain USA cites Tim Wildsmith’s review, and calls attention to a remarkable omission in the MAGA material found at the back of this Trump bible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB32CR7Zc9s Although the Trump bible contains a copy of The Constitution, The Bill of Rights, and The Pledge of Allegiance, it *doesn’t* include any of the amendments from the 11th through to the 27th. Tea Pain suggests that these conspicuously missing amendments provide a damning vade-mecum as to which parts of the US Constitution Trump and his fellow Christo-Nationalist Fascists would dearly like to expunge - or at least pretend never to have existed - most especially: 12th Amendment - “Electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for the President…” 13th Amendment - “Neither Slavery nor involuntary servitude .. shall exist within the United States..” 14th Amendment - “ No person shall… hold any office .... have engaged in insurrection or rebellion..” 15th Amendment - “The right of citizens to vote shall not be denied … on account of race, color…” 19th Amendment - The right of citizens to vote shall not be denied… on account of sex…” 22nd Amendment - “ No person shall be elected to the office of President more than twice..”

A few things should be added to lay the foundation for further discussions. First gonochorism (the term to describe a sexual system where there are male and female members) does not always have to be linked to sexual dimorphism (the term to describe differences in appearance between male and females of a species). Sexual dimorphism is often a consequence of the respective reproductive strategies. Among hermaphroditic species, one can actually also distinguish between various forms. The one OP is thinking about is considered simultaneous hermaphroditism, i.e. all individuals producing sperm and eggs, but there are also species who are sequential hermaphrodites. I.e. producing egg or sperm at different points in their life. Studies trying to figure out fitness benefits have been investigating closely related species in which all three strategies are found, e.g. in certain worms. Here, it was found that the different species had different reproductive characteristics, that likely have benefits under different conditions. Generally, they found a trade-off between fecundity (how much they reproduce) and survival. Simultaneous hermaphrodites had the highest survival rate, but least fecundity (and smallest eggs, indicative of lower maternal investment), whereas the opposite was found for sequential hermaphrodites. The gonochoristic species was somewhere in-between. Taking that all together (survival rate, reproduction over total life cycle etc.) it seemed that the dichoristic species had overall the highest fitness. They had higher fecundity in the early stages of life cycle. They outperform simultaneous hermaphrodites, which have lower fecundity. While sequential hermaphrodites are more fecund, they are delayed until their female phase, and during the whole life cycle they are not able to compensate the early advantage. Essentially they are able to reach sexual maturity faster, likely as they only need to produce one form of gametes. The disadvantage of that gonochoristic species pay is that they produce males, that cost the same as females (as eggs) but do not directly contribute to future generations (the limiting factors are the eggs). Hermaphroditism is speculated to be a primary advantage when population densities are low and it is difficult to find a mate. There are also evolutionary developmental consideration. Transition from hermaphrodite to gonochoristic species is comparatively easy, as it could be reasonably executed by suppressing the development of one sexual function. Conversely, there are more steps involved in transition from gonochorism to hermaphroditism. I.e. once gonochorism outcompetes hermaphroditism in the evolutionary history of species, it is very unlikely that they hermaphroditism will develop, even if it became more advantageous.

Poland may offer a lesson to would-be Far Right autocrats. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/14/abortion-poland-maga/ The United States is not alone in confronting a right-wing authoritarian movement that, in addition to undermining democratic institutions and lashing out at the news media (“enemy of the people”), makes curtailing women’s reproductive freedom central to its agenda. The experience of Poland, in which a right-wing government virtually eliminated access to abortion and later paid for it at the ballot box, is instructive as Republicans try to flee from the harsh implications of their antiabortion ideology.... ...Polish voters last year threw out the right-wing government after eight years of authoritarian rule. Women disproportionately carried pro-democracy forces to victory. “Almost 75% of eligible women voted — a 12% increase over 2019,” wrote political scientist Patrice McMahon for the Conversation. “The election also saw a record number of female candidates (44%) and the largest percentage of women (30%) voted into Poland’s Sejm.” Their activism largely centered on abortion. When the right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS) took office in 2015, McMahon wrote, “Poland had one of the strictest abortion laws in Europe. After the ruling government tightened abortion restrictions further, Polish women took to the streets.” Lo and behold, “A breakdown of the women’s vote finds that many women voted for leftist and centrist parties that made women’s rights and liberalized abortion laws a priority.” The democratic coalition leader Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s party is now proposing loosening (albeit not eliminating) abortion restrictions.

Confucius says, "It is only when a mosquito lands on your balls, that there is a way to solve problems without violence"

Trump of course would somehow claim it's just fake pews...

Logically incorrect, even if the premise is true. Equivalent to “All dogs are mammals. I am a mammal, therefore I am a dog.”

Indeed. However, But when a magnet and something attracted by it move closer together, under the influence of the force of attraction between them, work is done. I am saying this comes from a reduction in the stored energy in the magnetic field.

Interesting about Chatham. I was surprised to see from the castle battlements an old (decommissioned?) submarine moored in the river, just downstream of the bridges carrying the railway and road. I might pop down the line from Victoria again some time and take a look. I think it's the next stop after Rochester. Back on the topic, yes there will be work done when the magnet and steel object move relative to one another under the influence of the force from the field. W= Fd, remember. But when the magnet is static, held to the beam by its magnetism, no work is being done. I think that is what @swansont meant by saying magnets don't do work, i.e. they don't do work when they are just sitting there, simply by virtue of being magnets, as it were! And there is no inexhaustible store of energy in a permanent magnet that you can draw on by incorporating it in a perpetual motion machine. There is finite (fairly small) energy imparted to it when it is magnetised and you can get a bit of that back, once only, by allowing an object to be drawn towards it. But if you separate them again as part of an operating cycle of some machine, you have to put the same energy back each time. So as I say, no free lunch.

Either of the two main smallpox vaccines can control it, so if it were perceived as important (eg by killing white people instead), it would be easy enough to deal with. We get the odd case here from time to time. Nature's way of telling us not to mess around with rope squirrels (suspected wild reservoir).

The musician finally gave up and began to erase all the lines of notes. His wife walked into the room and asked, "what is that smell?" "I'm decomposing," he replied.

This is a much more reasonable response, @exchemist, thank you. At least you understand what I'm talking about. So what is happening is that there is a movement of energy into and out of the magnetic field, much like storing energy in an inductor, I guess. That's what I was referring to as 'work', perhaps inaccurately. We might consider that the steel sheet is 'falling upwards' towards the magnet in its magnetic field, that when the steel sheet is on the table and the magnet is fixed 30mm above it there is a potential energy imposed by the magnetic field and when the steel is attracted up to the magnet then that magnetically induced potential energy is converted to kinetic energy until the steel sticks to the magnet. Now the magnetic potential energy has been converted to gravitational potential energy. Then if the magnet is an electromagnet and we cut the current to it the steel falls to the table, a conversion of gravitational potential energy to kinetic energy until the steel rests on the table again. Have I understood correctly? As an aside, I used to live in Chatham, Chattenden and Maidstone when I was at RSME and serving in the Royal Engineers. I spent a good deal of time at the Historic Dockyard in Chatham, where I drove steam cranes on the docks at the weekends. So I'm quite familiar with the area. That place is very interesting too. If you get a chance to visit the Officer's Mess at the dockyard you can see the vaulted ceiling that was built by ship's carpenters and is really the upside-down hull of a ship.

That wasn't my intention, I was trying to get you to learn before you leap. What do you actually mean by a transducer? Because, as I've previously mentioned, tree's don't think before they open their mouths. Indeed, in the brain as I previously stated, we just don't know which bit does the thinking. Indeed, I'm pretty sure I mentioned dog's and computer's in relation to consciousness, in this thread (if memory serves). But again, it does nothing to bolster your case. What's all this "we" business Tonto, do you have a relevant doctorate?

I was out yesterday (visiting Rochester, on the Medway, a very interesting town with a Norman castle, a c.12th cathedral and a rather fine old high street with a lot of history) so have only just seen this. A permanent magnet has energy in its magnetic field. This energy was imparted when the magnet was first magnetised, aligning the magnetic dipoles of the atoms. A permanent magnet is thus in a metastable, higher energy, state, compared to one that has become demagnetised. What happens when a piece of paramagnetic or ferromagnetic material comes under the influence of this field is a bit complicated but I think in energy terms it is something like the following:- The magnetic dipoles in that material are induced by the field to align with it. This costs energy, relative to the previous field-free, non-aligned state and the energy required comes from the field of the permanent magnet. So there has been a potential energy transfer from the permanent magnet to the material that is being attracted to it. The potential energy of the system can be further lowered by allowing the two objects to move together. It is the stored energy in the field of the permanent magnet that is responsible. (This is made clear when you consider the work you have to do to pull the two objects apart.) But any repeated process involving separating and moving together permanent magnets simply moves energy into and out of the field. Energy can only be extracted from it once, in the phase in which they move together. After this there is no free lunch. Yes I suppose that makes sense. Does it make sense, I wonder, to speak of the radiation distribution having an entropy? What you seem to suggest is that the black body distribution has the maximum entropy of any radiation distribution.

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I once tried building a "perpetual motion" machine not too dissimilar - not because I thought it would work but to work out what I was missing, to understand why it wouldn't. Needless to say it didn't work and I saw the push of magnets equaled the pull, with friction as well.

Just like with any other product. Trump markup. That’s the point of this grift. Or there is no copyright attached, which would be the case for the Bible. I’m shocked, shocked, that deceit is going on here. A scam? Involving Trump? The deuce, you say! </s>

Perhaps a short digression into the philosophy of science is appropriate. Science develops models of nature that enable correct predictions of the behaviour of nature to be made. Very often these models are recognised as approximate or incomplete and thus to have a certain scope of application which should not be exceeded. Newtonian mechanics is a good example. Nobody says Newtonian mechanics is "wrong" but it doesn't work at the atomic scale, nor when relative speeds are a significant fraction of c. We all know this and use Newtonian mechanics with those limits in mind. The magnetic circuit model is evidently quite successful for many engineering purposes, provided one doesn't stretch the analogy of its fictitious magnetic "current" too far. It is a scientific model insofar as it makes correct predictions for how nature will behave. If your model tells you a static magnet continually does work, though, you have a major problem, because you need to explain where this energy appears, what its source is and why this source never runs out. So at that point your model fails.

OK I understand what you mean and I'm aware there is a "magnetic circuit" model used in engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_circuit However this has drawbacks if used incautiously, as is in fact mentioned in the article. There is in truth no magnetic "current", as nothing flows. Whilst we habitually draw flux lines with arrows on, these do not indicate a flow of anything. The magnetic field is a vector field, i.e. it has both a magnitude and a direction at any point in space. The density of flux lines is used to denote magnitude and the arrows denote direction. That is all the arrows mean. A field is not a current. (This is explicitly stated in the section of the Wiki article subtitled "limitations".) As for whether this way of thinking of magnetism is a better description, we have just seen how it has given you the wrong answer, in the example of the magnet stuck to a beam. So clearly it has severe limitations. The circuit model may be fine for analysing the shape of the field in electrical machines and so forth but, as with many models in science, it has limits and if these are not borne in mind it can make you look a bit of a berk! 😀 I had not heard of Ed Leedskalnin (not Leedskillin), but I see he was a Latvian immigrant to the USA who was active in magnetism between the wars. I also see that indeed he was on the right track in interpreting magnetism as arising from circulation of charges within the substance, just as I described to you in my previous post. His understanding was thus a foreshadowing of what we understand today about magnetism from atomic theory, quantum physics and quantum chemistry. (Quantum theory was developed in the late 1920s and 1930s, possibly a little later than when he was writing about magnetism.) P.S. Curious fact: magnetism can in fact be shown to arise as a consequence of applying the theory of special relativity to electric charges in relative motion. I think that is rather cool.

Magnetic attraction. If you have a bolt screwed into the beam, all that holds it in place is actually electrostatic attraction, because that is what is responsible for the chemical bonding in the metal that enables it to keep its shape and resist deformation under stress. There is no difference in principle. Don't be fooled by how biological muscles work. Those do expend energy to hold a weight in a static position, but that's to do with the biochemistry of muscle fibres. My example of the bolt screwed into the beam is what you need to consider. That does not expend any energy, not even if the bolt supports a 1 tonne weight suspended from it! Or think of a concrete support holding up a weight. If you did that by your muscles, you would get tired, but the concrete is not doing any work to hold the weight up. Work is only done if something moves under the action of a force. So a crane lifting a weight does work against the force of gravity. But if the operator stops work for lunch and leaves the weight hanging there from the cable, no work is being done. So there's no energy accounting to do in the case of the magnet. A magnetic force or an electrostatic force can both equally hold something in position against the force of gravity, in the right circumstances. There have been a few on this forum. My favourite was Tom Booth's "ice engine". He got banned in the end but that was for failing to take in anything anybody said, not because he was proposing a perpetual motion machine. Unusually, that was a perpetual motion machine of the 2nd kind. But it was a crank classic in that it was all based on Tesla [groan]. I had not realised that among his many eccentricities, Tesla thought you could run a heat engine using ambient heat. There was also, on another forum, aJapanese who thought an IR photovoltaic cell could be put in a fridge, light a bulb and cool the fridge. So that was another 2nd kind example. Tom Booth was interesting in that he had researched the history of thermodynamics and put me onto a paper by Sadi Carnot (in translation) in which he, Carnot, was applying the idea of caloric, i.e. before the modern concept of heat even existed, and nevertheless was able to get the right answers!

The advantage of considering the energy changes in a physical system is that it is often the simplest and most powerful way to analyse it, without the need to get bogged down a mass of in tricky mechanical calculations of forces etc. I learned this in the 6th form at school. The "reflexive insistence" you refer to is simply people applying this principle, to save getting into the weeds of mechanical calculations. Such calculations, though far more complicated, would in any case rely on other laws of physics (laws of mechanics and electromagnetism), which are on an equal footing with the laws of thermodynamics. All are equally as reliable as each other, so it really doesn't matter whether you choose the mechanical route or the energy route, from that point of view. But free energy cranks are all the same, really. They come up with a contraption that is just complicated enough to exceed their powers of analysis - and then claim they have broken the laws of thermodynamics. Magnets are often involved, as magnetism is particularly poorly understood by such people. (Tesla often comes into the picture too, though thankfully not in this instance.) By all means build your machine. It won't output more work than the work input. That is guaranteed.

Simple application of the laws of thermodynamics will tell you that the energy input cannot be less than the energy output. If this device is an attempt to get more out than you put in, it won't work.

As others have pointed out it's a terrible video. Pointing a camera straight at the sun with no filter is a lousy way to see an eclipse - all you get a bright splodge. As to your (strangely naïve) question, you can measure the speed of motion of the clouds, relative to the zone of maximum brightness, by comparing its position with 2 clear areas in the cloud. At 0:05 there is a clear area above the zone of max brightness and one below and a bit left of it. On my screen, these areas have moved ~5cm relative to the zone of max brightness by the 1:05 mark, i.e the clouds are moving at 5cm/min relative to the sun, on my screen. The magnification (zoom) of the camera also changes. On my screen these two clear areas are 2cm apart at the start of the video, 4cm apart at 0:13, 6cm apart at 0:15 and 10cm apart at 0:44, indicating an increase in magnification from 1 to 2 to 3 and finally to 5x. So at 5x, the rate of apparent motion of the clouds will be 25cm/min, i.e. ~4mm/sec. Later he zooms in even more, leading to an even faster rate. But he's holding the camera unsteadily and tends to keep it trained on the clouds, rather than fixing it on a stand so that it points steadily at one point in the sky, where the sun is. So that makes it look as if it is the sun that is "moving" diagonally down and right, whereas in reality it is the clouds that are moving up and left. And obviously, if you magnify the image by 5X or more, the rate of relative motion, of clouds w.r.t sun, will increase 5x or more too. So there is nothing strange going on here. As with the credulous stories some of us have seen previously of spontaneous combustion, or people being strangled by their own thymus glands, a bit of analysis is all one needs to make sense of it.

It was a common internet thingy. On IRC you would need to provide a unique nickname and the command for it is nick. Might have other origins, too.

Sometimes slick jokes are a way to drum up support.

You slippery types know the drill and rig the system so it pans out well for you. It's a viscous cycle!

I don't like Dimreepr's analogy, but I'll try to use it. Picture yourself living on that salt flat, which is level as far as the eye can see, and seems to go on forever. You start walking in one direction ( at a great speed ) and eventually you lose sight of the salt flat, and run into mountains and forests. Even cities and bodies of water that you have to swim across ( again at great speed ) until eventually ( after quite a while ) you come back to the same exact spot on the salt flat. But from the opposite direction. Clearly the surface of the world is finite; but there is no boundary. So where is the center of the world's surface ??? Now ( and this is a big step ) extend your thinking to 4 dimensional intrinsically curved space-time.

It describes a magnet in terms of the torque the magnet would feel in an external field A magnetic dipole (e.g. a bar magnet) with moment u in a magnetic field (B) feels a torque of u X B (u is a vector) The magnetic moment of a wire loop with area A and current I is u = IA (with a direction given by the right-hand rule)

I think the answer is a resounding yes. Mammals have been around for 200 million years and birds have been around for 150 million years. Sounds like it's working out just fine.

There is a spider for that. Sorry about all my oil puns. They were crude. I promise to be more refined.

Am I the only one who sees the OP as a backhanded way to spam and drive clicks to a crap video?

I'm so sorry for your loss. Just a couple of years of formal, mainstream study and you wouldn't have to make things up to fit the gaps in your knowledge. We can help if you're willing to listen. Not sure what to do with the "Creator" issue, but I would ask that you leave it out of this discussion if possible. Much like infinities, all-powerful entities tend to remove our ability to measure accurately.

Philosophy that ignores science is a Lewis Carroll 'rabbit hole'. And you know what they say of people who assume ...

GROAN!

True. All the fascist labelled states, Franco's Nationalists in Spain, Mussolini's Fascists in Italy, Hitler's National Socialists, and even Peron's Argentina, as well as Stalin's communists in Russia, Pol Pot's Communists in Cambodia and Mao Zedong's Communists in China used the same 'actions'. They were better classified as strong dictatorships where dissention is not tolerated, and results in death. The labels have no meaning because, even when you have a popular uprising to protest oppression by the wealthy few, as in the French Revolution, it soon descends into murdering chaos. It seems we humans only know one method. Instead of discussion to gain consensus, we choose to silence opposing ideas; in the extreme cases, mentioned above, by eliminating the people with the opposing ideas.

Why does everyone think there is a need to 'harmonize' Quantum Mechanics with General Relativity ? The two models are well suited to each of their areas of applicability. But there is no doubt that the universe is probabilistic in nature. This non-determinism is 'smoothed out' by large numbers to make it virtually deterministic at larger scales. We are currently at 18-19th century levels of understanding with the two models as we were with Newtonian particle dynamics of gases, and Thermodynamic theory of gases. It took Statistical Thermodynamics to bridge the gap, and give us a more inclusive view of Gas Theory. The large numbers of Statistical Thermodynamics 'smooth out' the transition between the two models; yet the two models also remain valid in their respective applications, and are still used. Some day we may have a model which bridges the gap between QFT and GR, incorporating the most fundamental ideas of both, but that won't mean current QFT and GR cease to be valid where applicable. I am certain, however, that whatever theory manages to bridge the divide, will not, in any way, mention consciousness ...

Don't know what Dima is on about, and I don't particularly care. But "The West is turning Fascist" ?? That's when labels stop having any meaning. You'll recall that Fascists and Communists ( which Russia still claims to be ) are ideologically opposed, and the eastern part of WW2 was fought about those ideological differences. And the reason, given by V Putin, for invading the Ukraine, and liberating its people from the oppressive Nazi fascists. Similarly, it seems that those we label fascists, like D Trump and his brown shirts ( who march on the Capital ) are V Putin ass-kissers and sympathizers. D Trump has said numerous times how much he admires V Putin, and how he'd allow him to have Europe if the Europeans don't pay their bills. This isn't a case of Nazis, Fascists, or Communists. Its despots, Democracies, and wanna-be despots who are willing to throw away our Democracy for personal gain.

Relax, NSA monitors! He's just joking!

There isn't anything in that paper that presents any challenge to main stream understanding of DM or DE which are quite different from another. Gravity waves do not work the way you describe for starters. They do not not cause any attraction toward the galactic centers where the SMBH's you mention are located. Gravity waves are not continous attractor once they pass the original spacetime geometry is restored. I would strongly suggest you study the NFW profile, it will show that the galaxy rotation curves we see require a uniform mass distribution surrounding the galaxy. Any central mass being greater than the spiral arm mass distribution simply leads to Kepler rotation curves. Doesn't matter if it's the galactic bulge itself or due to SMBH's. Secondly we measure indirectly the presence of dark matter via gravitational lenses occurring in regions where no baryonic matter exists. By the way welcome to the forum just a forewarning the first day your limited to 5 posts after that you can post as often as you want. (Anti-spam measure). I have no idea why your confusing flat spacetime with the plane orientation of spiral arms. Flat spacetime doesn't mean flat like a sheet of paper. It means Euclidean 3 dimensional geometry that preserves pythagorus theorem. So I fail to see how using Boyer Linquist coordinates helps your case. Spiral arms are best described using the density wave theorem as the rings of Saturn albeit there are a few differences such as how it leads to different mass distributions with regards to metalicity distribution in regards to star formation. As that formula is the basis of your paper and you don't even show mathematically how it can get a non Kepler curve. Let alone dark energy which is a scalar field I would say you on the wrong track.

It's the reticule from an autocollimator. https://moeller-wedel-optical.com/en/product/reticles/ What were you thinking?

That’s not a foundation of science; there are plenty of non-random, deterministic interactions. The reading you shared did not say that mutations are not random. It said certain outcomes have a bias, i.e. outcomes do not all have the same probability. The word would be credibility, which is gained or lost by whether one is posting information and making arguments that are credible.

Media coverage of Monday’s total solar eclipse took an unexpected and distinctly X-rated turn when a Spanish language Mexican TV station RCG incautiously began broadcasting video clips of the event that had been sent in by their viewers during the live coverage of the totality. https://metro.co.uk/2024/04/10/news-channel-accidentally-airs-testicles-instead-eclipse-live-tv-20619945/ The RCG production team apparently didn’t examine the videos too closely, and succeeded in broadcasting one clip sent in by a prankster which shows the sun being eclipsed by a descending pair of testicles.

Also, that was not a broad consensus. Most researchers had hopes that more disease markers could be identified (and to be fair, some have been), but especially folks working more closely in the areas of physiology were highly skeptical about the benefit of such an approach. In these communities the complexity of biological systems is very apparent. There is a big differences in what one sees in the news and popular science publications as there you need to find grappling headlines. Saying that "stuff more complicated, just as some folks expected, but others hoped it wouldn't be" somehow does not quite engage the public. Exactly, this is a bit of a dirty secret for studies that primarily generate minable information. We really do not know what we get (otherwise we wouldn't need to look), but it just sounds so much better if it is linked to something the public understands. A running joke is that everyone is somehow curing cancer.

Obvious fake...there's only one turtle... LOL. (quietly...yeah no...I won't go there!) In his defence I also would photoshop in some extra...ah...fingers, if my ah...hands were that small... Hard to make any future claim you're "just a patsy" after that post! 😄 ...and I'll see myself out!

For a moment, I thought that looked like this. But it's probably just me...

An English man an Irish man and a Scottish man, walk into a bar, and the barman says "is this some sort of joke?"