sethoflagos

Hardly. You raised 'overcrowding' in response to @swansont 's questioning of why 'white Caucasian' immigration to the UK was being overlooked. Nobody seems to be clear on your reasoning. Perhaps you misunderstood the question.

On the face of it, a very reasonable point to make. Yet I contrast this with the more than a quarter of a century I've lived as a white British man in Nigeria - permitted to do so currently purely on the grounds of having Nigerian born dependents (a wife and daughter). How many times in that considerable period have I been verbally abused because of my skin colour? Or criticised for having no religion; not speaking a word of Hausa; dressing unconventially; eating 'foreign' food (frequently, bacon); playing Pink Floyd or Frank Zappa loudly whenever I felt like it; or some degree of responsibility my ancestors may have had for the the slave trade, or other heinous crimes of the colonial era? In a word: never. Not once. Now compare that with the experiences of my wife (a naturalised British citizen) living in London where she is about to be awarded an upper-class 2nd honours degree in Mental Health Nursing from Kingston University to sit alongside her other upper-class 2nd honours degree in Public Administration from the University of Lagos. The poor girl is nervous taking the night bus home after a long shift caring for the demented population of the Surrey stockbroker belt for fear of racial abuse. An abuse encouraged by the fascist Reform Party; the rancid dregs of a Conservative Party that are now indistinguishable from the fascists; and a largely foreign-funded mass-media promoting their toxic ideas. I don't know about you, but for me this is a very personal matter. There isnow, I believe, no sitting on the fence on this one. You either condemn racism unilaterally wherever it occurs, or you don't. Which is it to be? Anyone? Which at 286 people per square kilometer compares with the 250-266 estimate for Nigeria. Huge difference, eh?

Why? @swansont seems to be making a perfectly valid point.

The family were from Huddersfield! 😂 (where I lived for twenty years) Mind you, it was only a few miles from the site of the Halifax Gibbet on which the Paris Guillotine is said to be modelled. Spent many a fine evening in Gibbet Street - though more for an excellent nearby curry house rather than historical site-seeing.

Because they were on the same side of the real divide. See Harrying of the North

Maths helps see the full picture unbefuddled by the ambiguities of verbal languages. This video popped up in my feed today. A bit popsci, but it presents ideas that have been strongly influential on my belief system pretty well. I say 'belief system' since (as it explains via Gödel) in any consistent logic system, there must always be some objective, necessary truths that are impossible to prove. You just have to accept them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q82eArp0e7s

Matt Goodwin, a racist you promote in your post, stood in the recent Gorton & Denton by-election, finishing a long way behind the victorious Green Party. Time was we just left you lot to the tender care of Albert Pierrepoint, if they'd managed to evade the end of a bayonet (great British tradition). Oh, I do miss the old days.

Yes, I saw that one in my feed this afternoon. Nice little alpine!

mkpụmkpụ TIL that Ụlọ Mkpu is Igbo for termite mounds (or anthills) Also that the IPA symbol for the kp phoneme is [ɓ̥], a voiceless bilabial-velar plosive that does not exist in any European language. Really difficult for a Yorkshireman, especially when you get two in quick succession.

Given the maturity of technologies we now have for chemical analysis back to Archaean times (e.g. Organic geochemical evidence for life in Archean rocks identified by pyrolysis–GC–MS and supervised machine learning), it will become increasingly difficult for evidence of such civilisations to stay hidden. The challenge remains that it only takes one measurement to confirm a presence: Haldane's Precambrian rabbits spring to mind. Proof of absence can never be absolute.

I'm fine with your usage of the term 'facts' in both of these posts. However, the implicit/explicit relegation of 'truth' to a mere woolly human construct really doesn't square with my experience of the English language up until I left the UK in the 1990s (which meant I missed most of the Science Wars and New Age post-modernist brain worms that most of the West now seems to be infected with). Are we that unhappy with the traditional absolute meanings of 'TRUE' and 'FALSE' in boolean algebra? Must we replace them with 'fact' and 'fiction'? Consider the definitions of deductive and inductive reasoning: It seems to me that those who deny the validity of an objective, absolute truth must also deny the validity of any form of deductive reasoning (it's woefully absent in most views presented). How many times has it been claimed in the above posts that 'no truth can be 100%' as if inductive reasoning were the only game in town. Quietly (and ironically) oblivious to the FACT that the latter requires its input premises to be TRUE for its conclusions to be CONGRUENT (the 'in all probability' of induction that contrast with the VALID conclusions of deduction). Perhaps I might also point out that all my posts here are based on the premise that I don't inhabit the Matrix. This makes them CONTINGENT (bounded by some scope of application) rather than NECESSARY (unbounded and universal - as in most of pure maths); this doesn't impact their VALIDITY, or magically convert deduction to induction. (I'll teach you to bring Quine into the discussion!) Probably answered this in the preceding rant. Strictly speaking, a "fact" always exists independently of human consciousness, and therefore is never a "human construct". The contents of this thread indicate that for many, "truth" can mean whatever they want it to mean. I prefer to keep it as close to "fact" as possible, but that may be a "spectrum" leak.

Excellent point! Another example maybe: 'Seth made a proposition concerning absolute truths that some believe may not be absolutely true'. Try sitting on the fence with that one!

By comparing them to π. A real number context is clearly implicit. The category error is your own invention.

No, I didn't. I picked selected values from the set of real numbers, two of which happened to be rational for purposes of clarity. Your argument is contrived, null, and void.

I wouldn't argue with any of this.

Ref: Number Line Of course! But I can still call out bad faith arguments where they crop up, can't I? In a practical sense, sometimes - yes. But why use fuzzy logic in cases where absolute logic is readily to hand? An example of an absolutely true statement. Of course there are many different points of view on this. I've stated my position which is orthodox scientific realism. If someone else prefers unscientific antirealism, solipsism, or whatever than so be it. I'm happy to defend my case until the cows come home. targhlIj yIngagh, yIruch!

That's not what I asked. We are not dicynontids. We are cynodontids, so there must have been at least one cynodont taxon that survived the Permo-Triassic extinction event, yes?

No. I'm presenting it as an example of (a pair of) true statement(s) in the context of the number line. Base 10 can be understood by default by any reasonable person. Since at least Immanuel Kant, it has been understood as an a priori truth (ie self-evident to reason alone: not requiring of empirical factual support). So describing it as 'factual' is a misnomer in a strict epistemological sense. It's a truth. And an absolute one at that. See Epistemology for more on that rabbit hole. I think some of the confusion here is that such truths are not immune to wilful misinterpretation. I'm waiting for @TheVat to pop up and say it's actually Klingon for 'my hovercraft is full of eels'. However, that's clearly not the intended context. Insisting in all seriousness that it could be is bad faith I think.

Since Lystrosaurus was a dicynodont, and there is strong evidence that we are descended from a contemporary Permian cynodont lineage, then how can this be? They are not closely related.

Absolutely! Especially to an engineer whose duty is merely to meet the applicable specifications: anything beyond that being a case of gilding the lily - an unprofessional waste of time and money. But note that the example given was not concerned with providing a perfectly accurate value for π - it was concerned with specifying bounds within which we know that value to lie. There's quite a significant difference. Like I can't give you a precise value for the wavelength of green in a rainbow. But I can state with confidence that in every rainbow I've ever seen, the green bit lay between the yellow and the blue. Courtesy. You should try it some time.

I try not to write TLDR posts in this format of forum. Please take it as understood that any necessary applicable space definitions are in place to establish uniquely that the statement I gave is to be taken to apply within the everyday understanding of school level geometry and number theory. This is after all the 'absolute truth' a former school maths teacher once presented to his former students, is it not? In that space, I maintain that it's a pretty good example of an absolute truth. I accept without reservation that the statement may have limited applicability in cloud cuckoo land. Or Grok.

In what sense is: 25/8 < π < 22/7 not both the absolute truth and factual?

This led to a major reduction in the production costs of manufactured items. Ref: Industrial Revolution I'm not sure your use of 'deflationary' matches the meaning you intend. I've assumed your intent is better served by 'disinflationary'. An understandable confusion but they're quite distinct and can have very different impacts on the overall economy

Domestication and selective breeding of plants and livestock Urbanisation Copper & bronze smelting Iron smelting Horse riding The wheel Steam power Steel-hulled shipping Industrial mechanisation Mechanisation of farming Internal combustion engine The Haber process... Silicon-based computing is definitely up there with them.

And the oddest trick is seeing Elon Musk being bewitched by hardcore Communist fiction.. It's a long video (based on his interview crash with Zanny Minton Beddoes) but hilariously tragic