sethoflagos

... and definitely not confined to the Paridae (tit family) either. See "Cloaca Pecking Foreplay in Dunnock Courtship" for similar 'shenanigans' in genus Prunella. Incidentally, for those unfamiliar with this particular LBJ, dunnock derives from the Old English for 'little brown bird'. Hence, it is the archetypal 'Little Brown Job'.

The 'true' (translated!?) text is:

Do we have an attribution glitch in the works?

Some think this a 'bad' poem:

Why are these not simply examples of psychological manipulation? - the often willful means of reducing the critical thinking capabilities of the audience to the point that they will accept dodgy assertions as "true"/"factual" when they are not so. Reminds me of that old chestnut of Kierkegaard's: (paraphrasing) "If ten thousand people assemble and say the same thing; they're wrong even when they're right". Simple belief does not establish actual "truth"/"fact" for anyone. The claim to "truth" under such conditions merely demonstrates conviction, not veracity.

Whereas Haver & Boecker Niagara suggest the preformed liner version is "easy to cut and install". Wonder if we'll ever get to see a proper independent fault analysis.

Some staff at my school were leading lights in York Amateur Operatic Society, so I got regular paying gigs as trumpet in the pit orchestra. Learnt Mikado, Pinafore, Pirates, Iolanthe, Gondoliers, and Yeomen pretty much back to front. Nice little earner at the time - half Musician's Union rate for a pre-teen!

Mikado version

Emily finds British legislation confusing: Wales Act on sin on a canon is not case law

Slough by John Betjeman (1906 - 1984) John Betjeman published his poem about Slough in 1937 in the collected works Continual Dew. Slough was becoming increasingly industrial and some housing conditions were very cramped. He came to regret his musings on the destruction of the town when they were partly realised shortly afterwards in WWII bombing raids. Not exactly 'bad poetry' but maybe somehow inappropriate under the circumstances. Slough Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! It isn't fit for humans now, There isn't grass to graze a cow. Swarm over, Death! Come, bombs and blow to smithereens Those air-conditioned, bright canteens, Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans, Tinned minds, tinned breath. Mess up the mess they call a town A house for ninety-seven down And once a week a half a crown For twenty years. And get that man with double chin Who'll always cheat and always win, Who washes his repulsive skin In women's tears: And smash his desk of polished oak And smash his hands so used to stroke And stop his boring dirty joke And make him yell. But spare the bald young clerks who add The profits of the stinking cad; It's not their fault that they are mad, They've tasted Hell. It's not their fault they do not know The birdsong from the radio, It's not their fault they often go To Maidenhead And talk of sport and makes of cars In various bogus-Tudor bars And daren't look up and see the stars But belch instead. In labour-saving homes, with care Their wives frizz out peroxide hair And dry it in synthetic air And paint their nails. Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough To get it ready for the plough. The cabbages are coming now; The earth exhales.

Need to take my sandals off to count how many times someone's stated something along the lines of 'Thermal energy is the sum total of particle kinetic energy' or some such. The refutation is a work in progress. Please chip in if I get some of the maths wrong. Apologies for expanding tensor matrices out in full. It's the only way I can get my head around them.

I provided examples of intraspecies conflict, and you respond with wildly inaccurate speculations on interspecific 'genocide'. Seems like a diversion tactic rather than argument in good faith. And when you're cornered by argument in good faith, you lash out and yell 'infamy!'. You're not POTUS are you?

How much international warfare do animals engage in? Do animals ever practice genocide on continental scales? Do you not consider the various ancestral genetic ratios found around Europe of hunter-gatherer, to agriculturalist, to pastoralist evidence of evolutionary change? Do you not think that capital punishment over the millenia caused shifts in genetically based propensity for violence, burglary, or being Welsh in the wrong place at the wrong time. Do you not think that enslaved sections of society may not have been 'domesticated' to a certain extent in much the same way as aurochs became cattle, wolves became dogs etc? Or are you just going to glibly dismiss these as examples of 'unnatural selection' to save yourself the bother of thinking about them?

Eva asks how to illuminate a cave. Tile tin bits, Eva, hot as Siraha harissa to have stibnite lit.

My thoughts exactly. The OP appears determined that this is problematic, yet seems incapable of stating exactly what those problems may be.

All species have metabolisms. Not my job. Your's is to provide the evidence.

So? We've found a way of maintaining genetic diversity, and hence our adaptability to meet the challenges of rapid environmental change more so than competing species. What point are you trying to make?

I too have a profoundly deaf uncle (German measles) who was able to forge a valued place in society through being a skilled carpenter and very entertaining company. Caring for the 'weak' is far from unknown in the natural world, particularly if the individual is closely related. See how parents across a host of genera will fight to protect their offspring. Perhaps you should consider more the individual's potential contribution to the society they live in than their vulnerability as an isolated individual. ...and how it may be that I can guess your nationality without checking your profile.

You've never visited Nigeria, have you? Screwdrivah? Wetin be dat?

The early stages might be quite straightforward: a pioneer probe to determine if the target was ripe for exploitation; a secondary wave of chemotrophic microbe based units for basic raw materials extraction; a tertiary wave of bespoke enzyme based purification units... At some point there will be a rate controlling step: possibly the reduction of diatom generated silica to silicon; or the subsequent purification of impure silicon to the 99.9999999% purity required for efficient semiconductor performance. But we know such steps are possible because we've done them ourselves: we cracked the Czochralski process (or rather Czochralski did) over a century ago. Beyond that, most of the complexity is software driven, and software is energetically cheap. Perhaps it takes eight generations, perhaps ten to produce a self sustaining system (rather like the hierarchy of symbionts in terrestrial life). But I don't see this as an impossibility. Yet.

Okay, a word on thermodynamic equilibrium and my cryptic invitation: The thermodynamic Free Energy path leads ultimately to the well known partition function of an equilibrium canonical ensemble: Z = sum(states) exp(-Estate/(kBT)) The Lagrangian path leads to the general quantum path integral, which after Wick rotation can be expressed as: Z = integral(paths) exp(-Spath/h) D(path) The similarity is striking, and suggests some inverse correspondence between temperature and imaginary time along the lines of: 1/(kBT) ~ it/h I suspect this may be behind the recently announced unification of quantum and classical statistical mechanics though I've yet to get around to downloading that paper to confirm or otherwise. Intriguing though. (The embedding of maximum system entropy into the realms of quantum field theory, that is). By definition, thermal equilibrium at temperatures approaching absolute zero. I'll buy it. Since I'm not going to buy into proton decay, then the very occasional collision of structures may continue indefinitely.

I'm insisting that these energy states that the hadrons of the Earth could be redistributed in, are simply not available states, because the hadrons would require an input of energy to move to those infinitely many states. Consider a book with 1000 pages. There are many more ways to arrange the pages of that book so that they are not in order, than the one way in which they are ordered. Yet when the book is 'bound', only the ordered state is available; to access the other state you need to supply energy, and rip out all the pages. Firstly, good response! Game on! You introduced the term 'Maximal Entropy' without specifying what exactly you meant by this. There are as many different interpretations as there are permutations of possible constraints on system development, and external influence. When @swansont interprets it as the maximum possible entropy available to ni=1,k free particles of k different species at some arbitrary V, T, you challenge my response to him on the grounds that it is inconsistent with your preferred interpretation, which seems to constrain the system to one of bound particles in an effectively closed system. This is hardly fair argument. You are trying to have your cake and eat it. Please explain exactly what you intended by the term 'Maximal Entropy' so we can make some positive progress. If you like, we can digress on the apparent symmetry of the evolutionary paths of system Free Energy and system Lagrangian. I don't have a good fix on that one and would appreciate a clear explanation from someone.

No. At least it's certainly not adiabatic: except for black holes (within limits), thermal energy is free to escape the system. Follows naturally from the above. If it were thermodynamically available (for reasons given in my last post, I can't see how it can be) then one would (depending on where you're prepared to draw the line of incredulity) have to accept that all subsystems upstream of that line would dissipate. There are near-infinitely more ways of redistributing the hadrons of the earth-moon system than their current state. If as @MigL insists, even the hadrons are up for grabs, then we're in some sort of featureless Penrose land.

I also omitted Black Holes for simplicity (and also they're not in my field). However, I see them as a special kind of structure where the heat generated by infalling matter cannot escape the event horizon making them rather skin to miniuniverses of their own. Of course, I've come across Hawking radiation which rather muddies this comfy little rationalisation, but then one has the apparent loss of quantum information to explain. I suspect the 2nd Law will survive intact. Do you gain spiritual comfort from the thought? 😄

Love this. A metathesis combining Darwinian evolution with cosmological thermodynamics! Perhaps we have the beginnings of an explanation for that image of a broken transistor radio at the end of a block universe that's haunted me since H2G2 first aired. Gravitational stratification occurs without this surplus free energy as it releases enough heat to activate the process on its own. Decaying nucleides merely help accelerate the process. I omitted them for brevity. We're saying the same thing. Here's the paradox: The universe as a whole progresses through states of ever increasing entropy in conformance with the 2nd Law. Bound matter progresses through states of ever decreasing free energy into low entropy structures. Conformance with 1st & 2nd Laws requires that theoretical 'Maximum Entropy' states are eternally unavailable. That broken transistor radio remains viable.