sethoflagos

Absolutely. I was also intrigued by the efficiency with which it removed uranium from seawater. Up to present, the sequential order of serpentinisation reactions has been largely inferred from terrestrial ophiolites which have been strongly overprinted with later processes. It will be interesting to see how much of the old guesswork holds up now the geologists have an extensive fresh section to study. I wonder how much of that chapter will need to be rewritten. 🙂 I'd also be interested to get a little hint on how Abuja acquired our local landmark, Zuma Rock. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Abuja_monuments_36.jpg

A Long Section of Depleted Mantle Peridotite A pretty huge advance. This one will run for years to come, I think.

The 'brown note' is something below 9Hz at ~150 dB. It might make you vomit. The rest is urban mythology.

I have three young Nigerian nephews living in my Lagos apartment, and take an interest in their schoolwork. They go to quite a good school by Nigerian standards, but both their tuition and teaching materials fall short of those I received in an obscure Yorkshire farming village 60 years ago. And way short of those of my children. The Flynn Effect suggests that this 60-year+ lag will penalise them by oto 18 IQ points. So that figure of 70 is rather vital to your argument. When I challenge it, you disown it and run away. Your dishonesty is clear for all to see. It's a reasonable approximation when the gradient flattens out at the tail of the curve. To balance this, I deliberately omitted the detail that over 60% of the Nigerian population, dim and gifted alike, are below the age of 25 and therefore ineligible for the visa lottery. Your available 'pool of talent' is really only 0.06% of the population: ie less than the Nigerian American population. I certainly wouldn't. But you're the one who claimed that these high IQ types were the ones with the drive and ambition to be successful in their endeavours. You can't have it both ways: and whichever you pick now will obliterate your own arguments elsewhere. Go argue your case with the US Census Bureau. The critical population under discussion is 2nd generation Nigerian Americans. Their parents must have emigrated from Nigeria roughly ten years either side of 2,000 when the total population was ~122 million. You're clutching at straws here. Learn to read. I credited your immigration process with filtering out up to 90% of applicants. Don't forget, I know quite a few people who emigrated under this scheme. Some quite closely. Such as my best ever junior process engineer. We still keep in touch. As I said, irony wouldn't even give you a hair parting.

Okay. Let's have a look at your numbers. I'm guessing you just pulled that estimate from where the sun doesn't shine, but let's run with 70, a full 2 SD below the (US?) average. So simply meeting par, the Nigerian American community must have been drawn from on or around the 97.5% mark on the IQ bell curve. But since the 2nd generation exceed all others by some margin, they must either be ~15 points higher IQ than their parents (a possibility you have already rejected), or their parents were drawn from on or around the 99.85% mark on the Nigerian bell curve. Now 0.15% of the Nigerian population 25 years ago would be about 170,000 individuals or about double the Nigerian American population. So effectively, you're saying that the US immigration managed to lure half of the top 0.15% of the population to emigrate? From a country where top 1% of the country enjoy a standard of living in Nigeria far higher than anything they could afford in the US? And how did they achieve this remarkable feat? A selection process that correlates only weakly with IQ and would pass at least 10% of the population for lottery participation. Your numbers fail at the first glance of real scrutiny. As numbers made up in a dishonest attempt to justify deep prejudice always do. LOL

xeno = alien, g = general intelligence. That's my working assumption. Thanks for that little gem of knowledge. Though irony tends to go way over the heads of these people. Yes, very strange. But you have to admit, those odd little dances they do can be quite impressive. Natural rhythm?

Take climate change. The science is very clear, and has been for over 50 years. Stop burning fossil fuels or the planet's biosphere shall within a few short generations, be decimated. How does the US respond? It elected in an orange psychopath president. Science can only do so much. After that, it's either political solution or inescapable consequence.

You''re a bleached, inbred, hillbilly halfwit. Go on, tell me why exactly you find that such an objectionable comment. I dare you. Your username gives away exactly where you're coming from. A seriously low IQ error of judgment.

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.