sethoflagos

Never knew until today that Curved Air named themselves after a Terry Riley album. O my, Sonya Kristina...

C #11 is the lydian dominant form - CGBDF#. Pretty good shock chord depending on how it's voiced. Afaik it has no common name but it brings to mind a bunch of screaming berserkers charging full tilt, axes raised. Wouldn't use it in a ballad.

Depends which C9 and its context. If it's a dominant triad over a tonic base, then it's bright, masculine, and elated so yes, 'messianic' would be a fair description. But beware, that D has only to slide up to Eb and you've gone full Norman Bates (see Hitchcock chord). Further denials of the darkness, femininity, and melancholy of the subdominant roots and minor modes simply increase the psychotic nature of this end of the spectrum. Or 'Berserker' (C #11).

Nice! I've always found it easier to express my feelings through music than words. This old effort is a setting of Shelley's "Ozymandias" and expresses a similar sense of humility before the vast and eternal glories of existence. https://soundcloud.com/seth_of_lagos/fantasia-on-ozymandias-for-brass-quartet

Isn't even this a case of looking a gift horse in the mouth? I'm with Sartre and co. on this; just accept the absurdity of it all at face value, invent whatever life-purpose you feel most comfortable with and run with it.

A wild stab in the dark. Just plain facts. I've met many of your kind over the years, and with very few exceptions, they've been bleached, inbred, hillbilly halfwits. Though I admit, most were actually crap on the banjo so the sake of good science, I withdraw that inaccuracy.

You and your kind. In what way? Our local word is 'oyinbo' which literally means 'peeled'. Would that make more sense to you?

No. The first generation of that population mainly gained entry to the US via the Diversity Immigrant Visa lottery scheme. ie. by luck. Try again.

Which would clearly exclude the Americas, for example. By what measure?

I wonder how you excuse away the findings of The Socioeconomic Attainments of Second-Generation Nigerian and Other Black Americans: Evidence from the Current Population Survey, 2009 to 2019 How is it that such a cognitively challenged group as Nigerian American women outperform both their menfolk and second-generation Asian men, never mind you bleached, inbred banjo-plucking hillbilly halfwits?

After a week in the decanter and three days secondary fermentation in the bottle, the green eventually settled out in the lees, leaving a typical ginger beer colour. Obviously, a taste test was necessary, and that took me straight back to a job I had in Catalunya over 30 years back where I spent most evenings in a small expat bar in Salou necking Cava brut by the pint. (Ah, those were the days!). In hindsight, that's essentially what the yeast I used (Lalvin EC 1118) is expected to do - produce sparkling wines up to 18% alcohol with fermentation temperatures up to 30oC. I guess it was a success then, but not quite what I was expecting. Questions remain.

Because when a bimetallic strip bends or straightens in response to changes in ambient temperature, I'm inclined to accept differential expansion of the two metals as a better explanation than mood swings. Granted, biological dynamic behaviour tends to be a bit more complicated than this example, but the same principles apply. Macroscopic effects arise though physical and chemical interactions at the atomic level plus a limited subset of emergent properties that arise at certain higher levels of complexity. Occam's razor demands that emergent properties are only valid propositions in a) systems that are sufficiently complex to give rise to them, and b) where they cannot be readily described in terms of more fundamental interactions. An emergent property like 'joy' (however you care to define it) would I believe require as a bare minimum a nervous system within which to manifest itself. So when you imply that e.g. cyanobacteria are only able to evolve if they can experience joy in doing so, I'm inclined to disagree. Bimetallic strips do not experience mood swings.

Now that my lousy internet connection has decided to let me see this image... For those unfamiliar with the design, this is a (small) Kilner jar as mentioned recently in another thread. Don't be too hard on the French on this one. It was invented in Yorkshire.

That's sort of the idea of noise cancellation headphones isn't it? Inverting the output of a microphone sampling ambient noise is effectively adding a half-wave time delay to the input (in order to neutralise it through destructive interference). It's the most basic form of feedforward control, though personally, I would tend to call it open-loop control. Many use the terms interchangeably.

Minecraft random block ticks used for crop ripening sequences etc. run on the hypergeometric distribution. For many trials of low probability events, the Poisson Approximation is remarkably accurate.

It only takes a fraction of a millisecond to equalise pressure so a hole is a bit of an overkill. Usually a firm knock with a blunt object (eg hefty screwdriver handle) is enough to momentarily break the seal. At risk of being Captain Obvious, I trust everyone knows that the left hand is much the stronger for applying anticlockwise torque. Tighten with the right, loosen with the left. If all else fails, it's worth purchasing a small selection of large jubilee hose clips from your local hardware store. It gives you something you can give a judicious belt with a hammer. Something will give, but quite satisfying either way.

No. The phenomena you describe are examples of homeostatic and closely allied responses which are classic feedback loops. They respond to the effects of external influences in such a way as to restore equilibrium. Consciousness is not a prerequisite for this much less such anthropomorphic concepts as feelings and emotions (in plants??!). My post was concerned with feedforward control which is much more of a challenge for evolution to implement.

Blond? To spare a hurt to souls too tender 'Tis safe to use the other gender

For me, these symptoms remind me that the great enjoyment I gained out of rugby and motorcycling in my teens and early adulthood do have their costs.

Given the sort of temperatures available, TH~375K, TC~300K the Carnot efficiency would be a mere 20%. After losses, they'd struggle to achieve a nett positive power output. Reading between the lines, my guess would be that the data centre is cooled by a heat pump that discharges into a hot oil circuit that in turn supplies the domestic heating. Maybe wrong, but that's the approach I'd go for.

Domestos is a pretty concentrated solution of sodium hypochlorite and probably overkill as an oxidising agent. Could it bump iron into one of the higher valency ferrate states? My money is still on @exchemist 's intense green citrate complex. Given the suboptimal nature of my bucket chemistry, and the fact that the species of interest must be barely into the millimolar regime, perhaps there simply isn't enough oxidation product to be visually detectable.

... resulting in the ste being inaccessible for a few hours around midday when Cloudflare had a hiccough.

@Patch Cabbage , stop feeling sorry for yourself, and follow this advice. We're not doing brain surgery here.

For me (and my point of interest here is low temperature thermodynamics) the crossing the Rubicon moment was the confirmation of my instinctive feel that spherical coordinates were a much better framework for these essentially circular functions than Cartesian coordinates. Trying to bang square pegs into round holes and all that. I'm a lot more comfortable mit Dackeln, die auf Deutsch heulen.

Before baking soda After baking soda Bit of a fizz and little else. After Domestos Moreorless instant change. No dark precipitate.