exchemist

Spot the non-sequitur. This has, of course, bugger all to do with climate change. London has been found to have poor air quality, especially along busy trunk roads where poorer people tend to live, sufficient to have adverse impact on health. The fact that it was worse in the 1950s is no kind of argument for saying it is acceptable now. Please provide substantiation of this allegation that does not rely on a YouTube video. YouTube is full of crap. (And that fat git with the glasses is the moron who said you can grow concrete, so we can safely discount anything he has to say.😄) By the way, it's called Imperial College, not The Imperial College.

There is research showing the effect of air pollution on health and also research showing the improvement in London air quality since the original central area ULEZ was created. It's probably too soon to have research directly on the impact on health of ULEZ, as these health effects become apparent over a period of many years, but it would seem quite reasonable to infer from the above that ULEZ has a beneficial impact. (I'm in London and the air is still filthy: I can wipe a black film off the glass topped table in the garden after only 24hrs.) P.S. It looks from this link that there is a study now in the works to see what difference to health ULEZ is making: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.04.21251049v1.full.pdf. But we'll need to wait for some years before it reports, of course.

The government of Mexico is not saying any such thing. They are conducting an enquiry, that is all, and this apparent fraudster* Jaime Maussan has presented these objects as evidence. It should hardly need saying that you need to be extremely circumspect about YouTube videos. * QUOTE: In 2015, Maussan, who reported the existence of the "Nazca mummy," led an event called "Be Witness," at which a mummified body, purportedly of an alien, was unveiled. However, Maussan's alleged "alien" discovery was later debunked, and the mummified corpse was shown to be that of a human child. UNQUOTE From: https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/09/13/alien-corpses-mexican-congress/ P.S. I see, from later on in that linked article, that Avi Loeb has got in on the act again - though not in relation to these dodgy dolls - airing his speculative ideas about Oumuamua.

I'm not a mathematician but I think you may be confusing inputs and outputs. As I understand it the domain of a function is the set of inputs it can accept, i.e. the values that x can take. What you seem to be saying is the output, in the case of the function you have chosen, is imaginary rather than a real number.

Christians use church bells, though.

Slightly lazy shorthand for the government of Israel. I take your point about the distinction between that and the people (and a fortiori you of course, personally). But Israel is (so far) a democracy, after all, so it is to some extent fair to hold the citizens accountable for the government they elect. All power to you, your friends and the demonstrators. May you prevail at the ballot box before too long.

The Hitler bit is hyperbole (an attack of Godwin's Law?), but the rest I think is fair comment. One neg rep unwound. It is hardly a new observation that the treatment of the Palestinians by recent Israeli governments is particularly shocking, considering the experience of the Jews in the first half of the c.20th. Not only are these Arabs second class citizens but their land is being taken by force - which has unmistakable echoes of lebensraum. One might have hoped that, of all the people in the world, the Israelis would show some understanding of that. But apparently not, so the occasional comparison with Hitler should not be surprising (though most comparisons seem in practice to be made to apartheid era South Africa.).

This was the message of Lord of the Flies, if I remember correctly. There were quite a few explorations of human nature after the war, trying to make sense of how it happened, especially in a supposedly civilised European culture. Even Dr Who revisited the idea, with the Daleks.

I expect Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged could tell you how to do it. As I recall, it involved a particle accelerator, a liquid lunch and two rubber bands.

Seems a very unremarkable reaction. Like @Genady, I don't see what being Catholic has to do with it. Just about anyone with respect for human life would be appalled.

Purely from the SR viewpoint, I presume that, in the frame of reference of the cosmic ray, it is the dwarf that is moving fast relative to it, so it should see it exhibit time dilation, i.e. cool slower than an observer in the frame of reference of the dwarf. However, this thing also has a big gravitational field, so I presume GR may also come into it. But I don't have a good feel for how GR works- especially from the frame of reference of the entity affected by the field it - so I'll need to wait for the right answer to be revealed, I suppose.

Reminds me of the fagging scene in the 1960s film “If”: “Oh, and warm a lavatory seat for me - I’ll be be down in five minutes.”

Total internal reflection, by the look of it. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zctmh39/revision/1

In my experience glass doesn't seem to heat up to any noticeable degree, and with ceramics I've found it depends on the glaze: the ceramic itself does not seem to heat up. Oil may heat slightly, but I feel sure the dominant process will be heating the water content of the food.

I struggle to see how frying can be possible at all in a microwave oven. It will heat the water in the food only and thus can’t exceed 100C, whereas the essence of frying is hot oil, which is at about 200C. It is this that browns the outside of what you are cooking. I think you are just boiling your garlic in its own juice , with a covering of cold oil. Doesn’t sound very appetising.

This actually raises a basic point about government. If you want rural and remote communities to thrive, rather than die, you have to use some of the wealth generated in the cities to reduce the disadvantages these communities suffer as a result of distance. Allowing market forces to apply to every detail, as you suggest, will increase poverty at the periphery and concentrate wealth at the centre. Too big a disparity will then lead to alienation, loss of trust in government and, in the extreme case, the breakdown of the consensus that allows democratic government to continue. This is apart from the loss to cultural life of the nation when traditional rural ways of life are allowed to atrophy, because everyone moves to the cities to reduce the expense. So there are reasons why one should not do as you suggest.

My understanding is that quite a bit of bread intolerance is due to modern bread-making processes, which do not allow time for yeast to break down the proteins that cause trouble. Traditional bread such as French baguette tradition, or made by artisanal bakers, is a lot easier on the stomach, as well as tasting far better. Bread quality is one of the things that has become immeasurably worse over the course of my lifetime.

No, it just smells of the usual credulity and yearning for mystery and occult knowledge that is such a tiresome feature of all societies.

Einstein’s formula says that for massless entities E=pc, where p is momentum. His E=mc2 only applies to objects with mass that are at rest relative to the observer. More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy–momentum_relation As for entropy, you don’t seem to have a very clear idea of what that is. Nothing about thermodynamics, let alone quantum theory, suggests individual atoms or their constituents will somehow increase in entropy with time. Entropy is a statistical property of collections of entities, to do with the number of ways energy can be distributed among them.

This is begging the question.

Why then do people speak of the metric, in the context of expansion? Or am I wrong in thinking that they do?

Are you seriously suggesting the pressure of a syringe could be enough to force deuterium nuclei together sufficiently to cause fusion? That is insane.

Actually, this is something that has always bothered me too, about the concept of expansion of the “metric”. I’m hoping someone can explain.

90% is bullshit, unless you count utilisation of waste heat in industrial processes. Shipboard steam turbines can’t compete with diesel, which is why they are no longer used on ships, since fuel became expensive after the Yom Kippur war in the 1970s. There is something wrong with those numbers. A huge supercritical turbine installation can get over 50% I think, from memory, but you can’t install that on a ship.