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Microbiologist Brantley Hall of the University of Maryland in College Park and colleagues study the metabolism of gut microbes. They tried unsuccessfully to measure hydrogen production from gut microbes with a sensor in an oxygen-free chamber. Frustrated, “we took the sensor out of the chamber, and we were like, ‘Screw it. We’re going to try to measure a fart.’” So Hall stuck the device down his own pants and let rip. “And the signal was enormous.” https://www.sciencenews.org/article/smart-underwear-human-fart-frequency

Interesting article from 'Interesting Engineering' https://interestingengineering.com/science/scientists-discover-liquids-can-fracture So a simple question on this, what makes a liquid, a liquid in terms of viscosity, given that water is free flowing (if put on a tray and the tray is moved around the water will move around freely). However, if I put cooking oil on the tray and move the surrounding tray requires more tilt to move the oil, (it also depends on friction from the tray I guess (smooth vs rough surface). So do we think about solids and liquids differently ? By fracturing are they suggesting that the bonds in the molecules break or are they referring to the forces that hold the molecules in state where the state would be classed as a liquid. I think oils have long chain, so is it the chain that is pulled for forced apart. Paul

Trump Says Intelligence Played No Role in His Decision to...“Intelligence is for losers.”

This chart of Japanese cherry blossom seasons going back to 812AD seems to support the onset date of the current climate change cycle as happening during the industrial revolution. of the mid-1800's.

Greetings. Learned something today, as how was determined. Came to this article recently. It is not news to be posted in 'Science news' ; decided to post here unless deserves moving somewhere else. ========================================================================================================================= Clair Patterson He discovered how old the Earth was. Then he discovered something that could destroy us all. For thousands of years, humanity wondered about the age of our planet. Religious texts offered one answer. Philosophers debated another. Scientists made educated guesses based on fossils and rock layers. But nobody actually knew. Until a quiet scientist named Clair Patterson figured it out in 1953. He should have become instantly famous. His name should have appeared in every textbook. Instead, what he discovered next turned him into a target. He found himself standing alone against one of the most powerful industries on Earth, fighting a battle that would determine whether millions of children would grow up with damaged minds. And for decades, almost nobody knew his name. Patterson's journey began in the late 1940s at the University of Chicago. He was a young geochemist with an impossible assignment: measure the precise amount of lead isotopes in a meteorite fragment called Canyon Diablo. The theory was elegant—if he could measure these specific lead ratios accurately, he could calculate when the solar system formed, and therefore, when Earth was born. But there was a problem that nearly broke him. Every time he tried to measure the lead in his samples, the numbers were wildly inconsistent. One day high, the next day higher, never stable. His equipment seemed fine. His calculations were correct. Yet the data was chaos. Most scientists would have given up or blamed the methodology. Patterson was different. He possessed an almost obsessive attention to detail and patience that bordered on stubborn madness. One day, he realized something shocking: the problem wasn't his rock sample. The problem was everything else. There was lead everywhere. On the lab benches. In the air. Tracking in on people's shoes. Floating as invisible dust particles. The entire world was contaminated, and it was sabotaging his measurements. So Patterson did something unprecedented. He built the world's first ultra-clean laboratory. He scrubbed every surface until his hands bled. He sealed cracks in walls with tape. He installed specialized air filters. He made his assistants wear protective suits and wash repeatedly before entering. For years, he cleaned and refined and eliminated every possible source of contamination. Finally, in 1953, he achieved it. He got a clean reading. He ran the numbers through a mass spectrometer, performed the calculations, and suddenly held an answer that no human in history had ever known: 4.55 billion years. The Earth was 4.55 billion years old. It's said that in his excitement, he drove straight to his mother's house in Iowa and told her he'd solved one of humanity's oldest mysteries. The weight of not knowing had finally lifted. But while building his clean room, Patterson had stumbled onto something far more disturbing. Where was all this lead coming from? Lead is naturally rare on Earth's surface. It stays locked deep underground in mineral deposits. It doesn't float freely in the air. It doesn't coat laboratory tables. Yet it was everywhere—in quantities that made no sense. Patterson began testing the world outside his lab. Ocean water. Mountain snow. Everywhere he looked, lead levels were hundreds of times higher than natural background levels. And then he understood. Since the 1920s, oil companies had been adding a compound called tetraethyl lead to gasoline. It prevented engine knock and made cars run smoother. But every car on every road was functioning as a poison dispersal system, spraying microscopic lead particles into the air with every mile driven. Lead is a neurotoxin. It damages developing brains. It lowers IQ. It causes behavioral problems, aggression, and cognitive impairment. And an entire generation of children was breathing it every single day. Patterson had to make a choice. He was a geochemist. His job was studying rocks and isotopes, not fighting corporations or advocating for public health. He had stable funding and a promising academic career. He could have simply published his Earth-age discovery and moved on to the next project. But he couldn't unsee what he'd found. In the mid-1960s, he published papers warning that industrial lead contamination was poisoning the environment and harming human health. The response was swift and brutal. The lead industry was massive, wealthy, and had no intention of losing billions in revenue. Their chief scientific defender was Dr. Robert Kehoe, who had spent decades assuring the public that environmental lead was natural and harmless. Kehoe was polished, well-funded, and had the backing of powerful corporations. When Patterson challenged this narrative, the industry attempted to buy his silence. Representatives visited him offering generous research grants and institutional support. All he had to do was redirect his focus elsewhere. Patterson refused. So they tried to destroy him professionally. His funding from petroleum-connected sources was immediately cut. The industry pressured his university to dismiss him. They used their influence to block his papers from peer-reviewed journals. They publicly dismissed him as an overzealous geologist stepping outside his expertise. For years, it worked. Patterson was marginalized, labeled an alarmist, and isolated from mainstream scientific discussions. But Patterson had something the industry couldn't counter: evidence from before the contamination began. He realized he needed a time machine—a way to prove what Earth's atmosphere was like before automobiles. So he traveled to one of the most remote places on the planet: Greenland. In brutal, freezing conditions, Patterson and his team drilled deep into ancient glaciers, extracting long cylinders of ice. These ice cores were frozen time capsules. Snow that fell in 1700 was preserved deep in the ice. Snow from 1900 was higher up. Snow from the 1950s was near the surface. Back in his clean lab, Patterson carefully melted layers of ice from different time periods and measured their lead content. The results were devastating to the industry's claims. For thousands of years, atmospheric lead levels were essentially zero. Then, starting precisely in the 1920s—exactly when leaded gasoline was introduced—the levels shot upward like a rocket. The graph was unmistakable. The contamination wasn't natural. It was recent, man-made, and accelerating. Armed with this irrefutable proof, Patterson returned to the fight. He testified before congressional committees, sitting across from industry lawyers who tried to confuse the science. He wasn't comfortable with public speaking. He was nervous, awkward, and preferred the quiet predictability of his laboratory. But he refused to back down. He told legislators they were poisoning their own children. He showed them the ice core data. He made the invisible visible. Slowly, reluctantly, the truth broke through. Other scientists began supporting his findings. Public health advocates took notice. Parents started demanding action. The tide turned. In the 1970s, the United States passed the Clean Air Act and began the slow process of removing lead from gasoline. It took years of regulatory battles, but eventually, unleaded gasoline became the standard. The results were nothing short of miraculous. Within years, blood lead levels in American children dropped by nearly 80%. An entire generation was saved from cognitive impairment, behavioral disorders, and reduced intelligence. Millions of lives were protected from lead-related health problems. Clair Patterson had won. Yet when he died in 1995, few outside the scientific community knew his name. He never received a Nobel Prize. He never became wealthy. He simply returned to his laboratory and continued studying the chemistry of the oceans and the history of the Earth. Patterson's story is a reminder of what integrity looks like when nobody's watching. It's easy to do the right thing when the crowd is cheering. It's infinitely harder when powerful interests are trying to ruin you, when your career is threatened, when taking the money would be so much easier. He could have stayed silent. He could have enjoyed a comfortable, well-funded career studying rocks while children's minds were damaged. He could have said, "Not my problem." But he looked at the data, looked at the world, and decided truth mattered more than comfort. He gave us the age of the Earth—a number that changed our understanding of time itself. And then he gave us a future—a world where children could grow up without poison in their lungs. We often imagine heroes as soldiers, activists, or celebrities. But sometimes a hero is just a stubborn man in a white lab coat, scrubbing a floor over and over, refusing to accept a convenient lie. He cleaned the room. And then he cleaned the world.

So gases ( like air ) can 'fracture' also, at the shock line between supersonic and subsonic flow. ( just glad to be discussing something other than made-up 'theories of everything', or drug induced 'consciousness' in QM ) True, but they also adapt to reflector 'astigmatism' induced by differing mirror orientations. ( astigmatism is different curvature along different radial axis; I have plenty on my corneas due to scar tissue from many operations )

A good math joke, albeit 30 years old:

"According to my sources Israel has not yet decided when to send US ground forces into Iran."

Knowledge is knowing that tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad. Philosophy is wondering whether that makes ketchup a smoothie. Common sense is knowing that ketchup isn't a smoothie. Your statement is neither knowledge, nor wisdom, nor philosophy; and least of all, common sense. Science is made of all of them, plus knowing when to drop one when the rest can do without.

In the same vein: "Firstly, THANK YOU everyone for your concern. I’m okay, just a bit shaken up. Fact is I was robbed this afternoon in broad daylight at the gas station. Afterwards, I was disoriented. My money was gone, so I called the police, who asked if I knew who did it. “Yes," I said. "It was pump 4.”

You have to think about different levels of organization. On the smallest scale, muscles are made out of specific proteins. They form the fibers allowing to do contractions. One step up, we have muscle cells (or myocytes) that is a contractile cell type that has a lot of these proteins organized in a fashion, that allows the cells to contract as a whole. Then, another step up, we have muscle tissue, which contains a large number of cells, forming what we often talk about when we talk about a msucle (there are many forms which different functions, such as in the lining of our intestines and blood vessels, which are very different from e.g., the biceps). Fat also have multiple levels of organization, from the molecule (lipid) in each of our cells, to organized fat deposits, which are formed by specialized fat storage cells. So it is correct that a protein molecule can be converted to sugar and lipids (and vice versa) via our central metabolism, but that is not what bodybuilders mean. Rather they an increase in the mass of muscle tissue and a reduction of fat tissue. There is no direct conversion, as the increase in muscle mass is not directly linked to an equal reduction in fat. With that as basis, it is also clear why organs generally cannot turn into something else: most cells in our bodies are specialized (differentiated) and cannot suddenly become something else. There are minor and very interesting exception, where a cell can be become less differentiated and switch a role, and it is most frequently observed when e.g. there is a need for tissue repair. This is an interesting area of research (and funnily, has been observed in adipocytes) but again, this is not what folks mean in exercise-related contexts.

On the other hand, I don't think the Imams of the Iranian leadership had any fear of being further exposed by the Epstein files. They had enough enriched Uranium to make approx. 11 bombs, but it was only enriched to 60%, not weapon grade: and that is a big step. They admitted this to the American negotiators. There is also the rumor that the negotiators, S Witkoff and J Kushner ( with whose family B Netanyahu used to stay when he visited New York ), were tasked with getting the ruling Iranian Council all together in one known place, so they could all be taken out with one strike. Still, the way they treat their people is abhorrent, and I'm not the least bit sad for their deaths. But I don't actually believe they are 'end of times' religious fanatics either; they are adept at controlling their people with the religious institution, and plenty of violence when that fails. D Trump thought this was a win-win situation. Take control of another country's oil, as he did in Venezuela. Distract his base from Epstein files revelations and the economy, plus avoid impeachment, and possible jail time. Shore up 'patriotism' under a 'war-time' President. Further erode the powers oh House and Senate by showing that he can do whatever he wants to do. But he's stupid and didn't realize how badly things would turn out. B Netanyahu has his own agenda. He's been wanting to do this for 40 years. Hr needs to stay in power to avoid persecution and jail time, and the people keep re-electing him because of his willingness to 'protect' them by going to war. He saw the American President as one who could be easily manipulated, and forced his hand ( as M Rubio let the 'cat out of the bag' 2 days after the attacks. Its too bad American, Israeli, Lebanese, other neighboring countries, and Iranian lives have to be sacrificed as these men try to push their ideologies, hide their crimes, and empower/enrich themselves.

TIL You carry just 1 dead body, and that's all you get remembered for.

Today I learned that the word TARE found on railway wagons and shipping containers comes from an Arabic word طَرْح ṭarḥ meaning “deduction” or “that which is removed”. The word refers to the unladen weight of a cargo van, vessel or container, and its use in English dates back to the reign of King Henry VII at the end of the 15th century. A TARE weight is subtracted from the value recorded on a weighbridge to calculate the actual weight of the cargo for customs or shipping charges. The photo is of a “Cavell Van” a type of railway parcel van, so named because it was famously used to transport the body of nurse Edith Cavell from Belgium back to Britain in 1919. https://kesr.org.uk/the-cavell-van/

That's not correct. From the formula for escape velocity (or alternatively from the Schwarzschild metric): [math]r_s = \dfrac{2GM}{c^2}[/math] From Kepler's third law of planetary motion: [math]\dfrac{a^3}{T^2} = \dfrac{GM}{4\pi^2}[/math] Eliminating [math]GM[/math] from both formulae: [math]r_s = \dfrac{8\pi^2}{c^2} \dfrac{a^3}{T^2}[/math] Thus, we have an expression for [math]r_s[/math] in terms an orbiting object without [math]G[/math] or [math]M[/math]. I recently said that using [math]r_s[/math] as the arbitrary constant in the Schwarzschild solution is purely mathematical, not requiring any connection to physical mass. Even the original equation: [math]R_{\mu \nu} = 0[/math] does not contain any reference to physical energy-momentum. However, there is a natural connect to distance within the mathematics. Not only can GR work without [math]G[/math] and [math]M[/math], but it takes extra effort to work with [math]G[/math] and [math]M[/math].

Why do I feel that that one explains why I am never called to initial strategic meetings and only get put on committees which fixes what others have messed up?

@MJ kihara Type the @ symbol then start typing the name it will pull a drop down elimination list. I did the above from my phone

Point of correction,it's spacetime being equivalent to Energy.... That equivalency for I, I totally 100% support it,up to to that point.

That's because I see value in it. Nevertheless, I'm still scrutinising you and your work. And the nature of your work has made it very difficult to scrutinise in the way I feel is necessary. I'm not sure that what value I see is what you intend me to see as I'm not in full agreement with your philosophy, although some of it does align with relativity. What I would like to see is some form of mathematical proof that your theory fully agrees with general relativity. What you have provided so far is not such a proof, and I'm not sure what such a proof would look like. Thanks. This looks more detailed than what I saw earlier. I want to look through it to see if you have addressed the problem I see in your explanation. Bear in mind that I know why the defection of light under general relativity is twice that of Newtonian theory. It's not straightforward and I believe you have chosen the wrong explanation. I don't wish to reveal what I believe to be your mistake because I think it is important for your theory that it be able to derive things without the guidance that exists when deriving preexisting results. I feel that what I'm asking for may be too difficult for the piece of information I'm looking for from you. While I asked for a complete formula, in fact I want to know how you handle a specific scenario that I don't wish to reveal, but maybe I should. I apologise for that. Anyway, if you can preempt why I am asking you about non-zero mass, perhaps you can address my concern without deriving the formula.

If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism.

Susceptibility to BS and stupidity are correlated. "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

I believe in an expression made famous 250 years ago in Boston. "No Taxation without representation" IOW, if you pay Taxes, in any form, the Government works for you, and you have a say in how they govern. In a perfect world, this would mean everyone gets a vote. Preferably by choice, and competent electors would inform themselves of the issues before making their voting choices. But we know the world isn't perfect, so neither us Democracy. But it's still better than all other systems.

Kirk and Spock were only good together, either one, in isolation, was insufferable. In any society, the 'good of the many' has to be finely balanced with the 'good of the few ( or one )'. Getting that balance right is very tricky; we ( as a society ) seem to swing from either extreme to the other.

Why should they be not familiar? Or in what sense....I think spacetime is a unified thing,what happens in either dimensions should affect the other...If it's not like that then there might be some aspect of either dimension that we don't fully understand...and according to me specifically what time is(nature of time). Yes, spacetime is a unified thing. But that's not how we experience reality. Our experience of space and time are very distinct. Firstly, there are three space dimensions and one time dimension. The spacetime metric itself separates space and time into separate notions by their opposite signs in the signature. This creates a notion called the speed of light which acts as an impenetrable barrier between space and time, forcing us to exist as timelike worldlines in spacetime. Thus, we exist in space but experience time. At human scale, one second in spacetime is very close to three hundred thousand kilometres in the time direction. This disparity in the perceived magnitudes of space and time intervals is connected to why the speed of light seems so fast to us. Actually, why the speed of light is so fast is an interesting question in its own right, but the consequence of this is that the time components of quantities have an exaggerated existence compared to the space components of the same quantities. This can also lead to the notion of magnetic quantities, space components that arise due to the motion of time components. For example, the electric field vector is the time components of the electromagnetic field tensor. But when an electric field vector is put into motion, that motion produces space components of the electromagnetic field tensor that is the magnetic field pseudovector. With regards to curvature, it is my understanding that when considered in terms of the same units, the space and time components of the curvature of the Schwarzschild spacetime are essentially the same in magnitude. But we do not see the space curvature. Pythagoras theorem is assumed to be true. Yet for time, we see objects fall to the ground, planets orbiting the sun, and moons orbiting their planets. In spacetime, the earth has a helical trajectory around the sun in spacetime. But in spacetime, the trajectory of an object in orbit is a straight line. However, because the time of an orbit of the earth around the sun is one year, the length of the helical trajectory in spacetime is about one light-year, and at this length, no longer seems significantly curved.

The OP states that this is about algebra, relational geometry and some other concepts are introduced. So let us take stock of the consequences this implies. algebra, geomtery and relations fall within the province of Mathematics. A relation is defined as a set of members each comprised of two elements, one element from each of two sets. The two sets may be actual copies of the same set so the relation is then between elements of one set. This is the case for geometric relations (relational geometry), where the elements are points of a geometric manifold. the process of creating/defining sets can be carrier further by taking the pairing set and another set to establish further relations. a metric is such a relation. But the OP has disbarred the use of such a relation so we are left with simpler geometry to work with. Less onerous geometric relations are still possible but we must look to other physical justification to provide the necessary rules. I'm sorry but the expression energy = space just will not cut it. However I do wonder if some process akin to the derivation of the Madelung Constant might suffice. Such a relation could yied a non metric, yet numeric (ie algebraic), statement of the relation between any two points of the geometric manifold. But no meaning can be attached to the statements "The distance between point a and point b is" or "point c is further from point a than point b is", since there is no metric.

You’re absolutely right, and it was meant to be that, I once again forgot the conversion. This is what happens when you don’t do this stuff every day. Thanks for picking up on it 👍 Thanks @Markus Hanke. I'll write out the corrected formula: \[\varphi =\int_{r_{\min}}^{\infty}\frac{\gamma v_{\infty} b dr}{r^2 \sqrt{\gamma^2 c^2 - \left(1 - \dfrac{2GM}{rc^2}\right) \left( c^2 + \dfrac{\gamma^2 v^{2}_{\infty}b^2}{r^2} \right)}}-\pi\] I’m not entirely sure what “to second post-Newtonian order” actually means, but I presume this is an approximation of some kind? The full integral looks elliptic, so there shouldn’t be a closed-analytic form for the exact result. The formula itself was said to be "classical general relativity". I'm not sure what the authors meant by “to second post-Newtonian order”. My initial thought was that they were applying modified theories to the problem and that "classical general relativity" was just one theory that was applied, since they also mentioned "semiclassical general relativity". But I suspect you may be right about the formula I gave being an approximation of some kind.

It is: \[\varphi =\int_{r_{\min}}^{\infty}\frac{dr}{r^2 \sqrt{\dfrac{E^2}{L^2} - \left(1 - \dfrac{2GM}{rc^2}\right) \left( \dfrac{1}{L^2} + \dfrac{1}{r^2} \right)}}\] For non-relativistic speeds and weak fields, this reduces to the Newtonian scattering formula. For v=c and massless test particles, you get the Schwarzschild light deflection formula. For strong fields and massive particles, the integral can be evaluated numerically.

Thank you very much. I can now reveal where you have made your error. I don't know what the actual formula is for the non-zero mass object, but I can see that the above two formulae do not agree for [math]\beta = 1[/math]. For a non-zero mass object travelling at 0.999999999c, the deflection should be the same as for light. That is, your error was to assume that the factor of 2 arose because light is massless. The trajectory of an object in a gravitational field does not depend on the mass of a test mass (a mass that is sufficiently small as to not affect the surrounding spacetime) but depends on the speed of the object. Thus, the trajectory of a non-zero mass object travelling at 0.999999999c will be negligibly different to the trajectory of light, and therefore have deflections that are the same (negligibly different). As I see it, the ratio of the actual deflection angle to that predicted by the equivalence principle will itself depend on [math]\beta[/math]. For [math]\beta \approx 0[/math], the spacetime trajectory is mostly governed by time, and therefore the deflection will correspond to that predicted by the equivalence principle. But for [math]\beta \approx 1[/math], the spacetime trajectory is governed more-or-less equally by time and space, and the contribution by space equals the contribution by time, thus doubling the deflection corresponding to that predicted by the equivalence principle.

Quantum 101 with Katie Mack. She’s an accomplished science communicator, so this looks quite promising

“This month could be the best time to spot the northern lights for nearly a decade, as the combination of the "equinox effect" and supercharged solar activity will make auroras more likely. However, precisely where and when they will appear is still up in the air.” https://www.livescience.com/space/the-sun/march-could-be-the-best-month-for-the-northern-lights-for-nearly-a-decade-if-the-sun-stays-active I had not previously heard of the equinox effect (aka Russell–McPherron effect, as I learned) but it makes sense that there would be times where the alignment of the earth’s field made it easier for the solar wind to enter the atmosphere https://www.northernshotstours.com/equinox-effect/

@Anton Rize, I've being looking at your first PDF, starting from the beginning, in order to gain insight as to how to solve a physics problem using your theory. I believe I found an error with regards to your explanation of the deflection of light by a source of gravitation, specifically the factor of 2 which distinguishes Einstein's prediction from a Newtonian prediction. I would like you to derive a formula for the deflection of an object with non-zero mass by a source of gravitation. That formula should include all its dependencies. You may specify the gravitation as: [math]\dfrac{r}{r_s}[/math] and you may assume the mass of the deflected object, though non-zero, is sufficiently small that any gravitational radiation is negligible. It is up to you to determine what the deflection angle of the object depends upon.

Except that it's not a Polish doughnut. Because Polish doughnut don't have holes in them. They look like this, for example: It's hard for them to have holes when they're filled with jam or cream inside.. The jam can be rose, currant, cherry, cream chocolate, vanilla, pistachio, etc. Rose jam is the most popular. Here is the procedure for making them: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUGgJuLCF47/ Statistics show that 45-55% of all doughnut sold are filled with rose jam.

flour, baking powder with a bit of salt and enough water or milk to make a soft dough then fry it with a bit of butter or oil add other ingredients to suit your taste I particularly like adding blueberries

Emily's offer to help Iran is rejected. Raw onion, shallot, Ayatollahs? No, I...no! War!

The similarity of the Polish doughnut to the American doughnut is remarkable! I like the way the sack has been ripped open, as if by some ravenous animal. This creates a dramatic tension with the superhuman restraint which the young gentleman is displaying. I just ate an odd snack: mashed a leftover potato, mixed in butter, green beans, a spoonful of crushed almonds and some dill pickle relish. It works.

On Sunday March 1st at UTC 18.11, shortwave radio-hams in France and Italy noticed that a new ‘Numbers’ station had begun broadcasting in Farsi on 7910 KHz. The broadcasts began the day after the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran by US and Israeli forces on Saturday 28th February. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErmbTpxAM7Q Numbers stations are enigmatic radio broadcasts that consist of nothing but a human voice reciting cryptic groups of numbers. They are widely believed to be communication channels used by intelligence agencies to transmit instructions to field-agents in foreign countries. The numbers are copied down by agents equipped with shortwave receivers, and decoded with the help of a one-time pad. Provided that the one-time pads are never reused, the encryption is unbreakable. Numbers stations have been extensively used by western intelligence agencies from the Cold War period onwards, but Iran has no history of ever having used them up to now - which makes the appearance of a brand new Farsi language Numbers station all the more remarkable. Article 111 of the Iranian constitution provides detailed instructions on the succession plan to be followed in the event of the death of the Supreme Leader, but the decapitation attack carried out by Israel and the US appears to have killed many of the Iranian officials who would have been in charge of carrying out the succession plan. This raises the possibility that the activation of this new Farsi Numbers radio station might be part of a Doomsday contingency plan. Faced with the death of their leader and the imminent destruction of their state, Iran’s surviving military leaders have already launched widespread and indiscriminate missile and drone attacks against infrastructure and civilian targets in many neighbouring countries of the middle-east. The worry must now be that the new Numbers station might be sending instructions to activate whatever sleeper agents and terrorist assets Iran possesses throughout the whole of the middle-east and Europe. This could mean not only a sudden spate of fresh gun attacks in western capitals, but the nightmare scenario of a ‘Fourth Protocol’ attack ( c.f. the 1984 Fredrick Forsyth novel) involving chemical, biological or improvised radiological weapons. Not for the first time I fear that the US may have underestimated its opponent.

I guess the difference is in the level of intensity - for autistic people the fixation on their hyperfocus can be very powerful, to the point that it is at the forefront of their inner lived experience much of their waking hours, and can often almost look like an obsession of sorts. Eg someone with a hyperfocus on Spongebob Squarepants might own all the relevant media, have SBSP bedlinen und brush their teeth with SBSP-branded toothpaste, while simultaneously knowing everything there is ever to know about SBSP. This can then also "bleed over" to other areas, for example when in a conversation they might inadvertently start to blabber about their hyperfocus ("infodumping") even though the initial interaction was about something entirely unrelated. This is not to say that neurotypical people don't have special interests or expertise in particular subjects, but the difference is in the degree / intensity of how this is experienced. Note also that this in isolation is not a defining indicator for someone being autistic, but it does form a part of a larger list of diagnostic criteria. Indeed.

Just need to point out one important detail: Because of my methodology I could not simply postulate the volumetric nature of mass and density so the terms that I derived are: [math]\rho=\frac{\kappa^{2}\cdot c^{2}}{8\cdot\pi\cdot G\cdot r^{2}} [/math] [math]\rho_{max}=\frac{c^{2}}{8\cdot\pi\cdot G\cdot a^{2}} [/math] when [math]\kappa=1 -> r=R_s [/math] [math]m_0 = 4\pi r^3 \rho [/math] You can find derivation here https://willrg.com/documents/WILL_RG_I.pdf#sec:density So the relation between standard [math]\rho_{crit} \approx 9.5\times10^{-27}[/math] kg/m^3 and my [math] \rho_{max}[/math] is [math] \frac{\rho_{crit}}{\rho_{max}} \approx 3 [/math] so when written in my terms it looks like this [math]\frac{\rho_{gamma}}{3\rho_{max}}=[/math] [math] \frac{4\sigma_{SB}T_{CMB}^{4}}{c^{3}}\ \frac{8\pi GR_{H}^{2}}{3c^{2}}=\alpha^2[/math] My interpretation is that its got to do with total relational shift [math]Q^2[/math]. When system is energetically closed no leakage (we not speculating anything apart of the universe so there's no outside the system is closed) we getting [math] Q^2=\kappa^{2}+\beta^{2}=3\beta^2 -> \beta=\alpha -> 3\alpha^2 -> [/math] [math] -> H_0=\sqrt{8\pi G\ \frac{\rho_{gamma}}{3\alpha^{2}}}[/math] What do you think about it? Does it make sense?

While a step in the right direction, I fear that it does not go far enough, and there have been issues regarding enforcement. Nonetheless I am looking forward to see how things develop and at minimum it shows some reaction to things. Percentage-wise, perhaps (or at least less so than younger folks). However, quite a few are on social media (pre-pandemic data on folks over 65 was a bit less than 50%). However, it turns out that older folks (and also the younger ones, it is a bit of a biphasic distribution) are also more likely to share misinformation. A weird thing is that folks that are GenX and Millenials are those who are the most tech savvy, and especially older as well as younger folks are more susceptible to misinformation and scams. Or rather, it is pretty much expected, due to the way tech has changed. It is somewhat interesting to look at perception of far-right parties among older folks in different countries. For example, the German Nazi-wannabe party (AfD) has the lowest votes among folks 70+ (10%), peaking around ages 35-44 and going down again. But folks 18-24 are voting far right with similar frequency as 45-59 year olds, but they also vote with a much larger frequency to the leftist party. I.e. the are on the extremes on both ends, whereas the oldest folks are generally more voting for center or center-right parties. I suspect that this is related to the fact that the oldest generations still have impressions from the post-war era, whereas for many others the lessons of the past have sadly faded. In the UK, which OP was about, the distribution is more"traditional" with the Reform Party favoured substantially more by the older segment. But many other European countries have lower support for the far right among the oldest bracket, but a peak somewhere around 35-60. I.e. folks that should fall under the more tech savvy generation. That is all to say, I suspect some of the traditional wisdom regarding age and voting behaviour has gone straight out of the window.

Right. We hear about outliers because they are outliers, but they are not typical even if it’s hinted that they are; the hasty generalization fallacy in action (specifically, as I just reminded myself via search, it’s pars pro toto - a part taken to represent the whole) I think it comes about in part because we see examples of math savants who look like they are on the spectrum and improperly extrapolate from there, so it’s a sampling bias error.

Got a solid good laugh today one of my nieces when told to do her math homework stated math is " mental abuse to humans". Couldn't argue that logic lmao

I'll see your Purcell and raise you one Nepomuk Hummel.

I decided to investigate this because of the mention of the fine-structure constant. I'm actually quite impressed with how close the derived Hubble constant matches the measured value. Unravelling the formula, what you appear to me to be saying is that: [math]\dfrac{\rho_{\text{electromagnetic}}}{\rho_{\text{critical}}} = \alpha^2 \approx \dfrac{1}{18779}[/math] However, I don't agree with your suggestion that you've figured out the fine-structure constant. The mystery of its particular numerical value remains, even though its relation to other physical notions is well known to physicists. In particular, it is known to be the value of [math]\beta[/math] of the electron in the lowest orbit of the Bohr model of the atom.

I think many people tend to over-focus on the savants, who are very much a minority. Autism is a disability and can have global negative affects on a person's social functioning and cognition. The same thing happens with certain sections of the deaf community: they consider themselves 'different', rather than socially disabled. I'm deaf and consider myself socially disabled in face to face interactions. My opinion is they are kidding themselves. There is two young men living in my street that I know, and they are considered high-functioning. I can't see them being self-sufficient anytime in the future

If we look at voting behavior of Trump as an indicator of making a mess, the clearest differential is between men and women. Trump was 10 points up among men and Harris 10 points up among women. Looking at Brexit data, men were 10 percent up for leave, whereas women were 2% for remain (https://www.statista.com/statistics/567922/brexit-votes-by-gender/ I do believe the age differential was higher here). For the Reform party, 12.9% of young men voted for Reform, compared to 5.9% of young women (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/gender-gap-strongest-at-opposite-ends-of-political-spectrum-in-the-2024-general-election.) In Germany, AFD was at 22% with men, compared to 16% with women. So clearly, we should disenfranchise penises until they settle down and make rational decisions.

Some Flatt trumpets and warblers to soothe your furrowed brow while we wait.

Perhaps it's the way we use representative democracy that causes the problem of advancing age within it. If our elected officials were more like a committee instead of individuals, we'd benefit from older, wiser heads while still having input from younger representatives with a more vested interest in progressive change. So many of our processes are rooted in misogyny and Christian hierarchies that glorify the individual rather than the group. We keep asking for a great leader instead of demanding fair representation of all our views. I also think capitalist strategies favor conservatism, but only after a company has a good model in place and therefore doesn't want the applecart upset. Then they start looking for older politicians to support, with the idea of keeping things just the way they are. Perhaps a more socialist strategy could enjoy the benefits of "git wisdom" without simply putting us all out to pasture?

Thought the guitar sounded good here too

It rings a bell:

Emily has written a will, which expresses her wish for cremation. Sniff o' crematoria fair, o tamer coffins.