exchemist

No, but close to a majority voted for a dictator at the last presidential election. Not just the hardcore MAGA morons.

For this to be a scientific theory, you would need to be able to describe exactly what a "unit of polymorphic spacetime" is and how one could, at least in theory, test for its existence. In other words you should be able to say what observable consequences there should be from their existence. Can you do either of those things?

Yes my expectation is that riots will be stirred up on some pretext or other (and blamed on pinko woke libtard Democrats), so that a state of emergency can be declared and the mid term elections suspended. It is what we have seen all over the world in similar situations, where an authoritarian wants to hold onto power without explicitly abandoning the fig leaf of democratic process. But maybe they hope the gerrymandering of voting districts will be enough. We'll see.

While this has already been adequately covered by others, I think one concept that could help understanding is what used to be called in my day "dative" bonds. These are bonds in which both electrons can be thought of as coming from only one of the two atoms, instead of the more standard idea of one from each. Dative bonds were shown by an arrow, e.g. O=O->O indicating from which atom the 2 electrons notionally come. Thus for your ozone diagram, the central atom donates one of its lone pairs to share with the oxygen on the right, thereby completing its octet, but at the expense of acquiring a +ve charge, because both electrons would need to stay on the central atom if it were to remain electrically neutral. This charge separation (polarisation) is observed experimentally, by the way, so it is real. The second idea is the notion of so-called "resonance hybrids". This is the idea that as the single bond can just as well be on the left as on the right, the bonding in the molecule will actually be a mixture of the left and right options, with one and a half bonds to each and half a -ve charge on both the outer oxygen atoms. (You may know that the bonding of benzene is likewise a mixture of the 2 Kekulé bonding schemes with alternate single and double bonds, the real molecule having one and a half bonds between all atoms, indistinguishably.) The term "resonance" hybrid is now out of favour as there is no physical "resonance": it's just a static mixture of the 2 bonding options. If you do the bonding with "proper" quantum mechanics, using the "molecular orbital" method, you get exactly the same result, viz. an electron density across the molecule that corresponds to a "mixture" of the two structures. So it's an easy way to represent the bonding that gives the right answer, most of the time at least, without getting into MO theory.

That sounds like a quite likely explanation. Ah so that's it. Quite nice in a way that old Tube stock gets a new lease of life on the Isle of Wight. I've never been there, though I visit Portsmouth regularly to catch the overnight ferry to St Malo. I should go one day. They have a lot of fossils, I understand. Apart from ancient Underground trains, I mean......

I know. But for some reason those always seem to have been Tube stock. This one is ex District Line, so built to the full BR loading gauge rather than having to fit into a 12ft diameter tube: The pic shows A stock which served on the Metropolitan Line, but the dimensions are almost the same. I can't think why the Isle of Wight chooses Tube stock. They're not all dwarves, are they?

The operating principle is fast recharging at termini, from connectors on the track. Not battery swapping, which would be far too slow and laborious, and probably could not be done alongside a busy railway platform. No, it must be something to do with the discharge characteristics of the battery system, I think. Could be the heat issue mentioned by @StringJunky .

Being an Underground train it’s an Electric Multiple Unit carrying passengers, rather than a locomotive hauling a load. But indeed, they don’t say how many people and what weight of monitoring equipment was on board , compared to a full complement of passengers. The branch lines in the Thames Valley are fairly flat, I think, so I don’t think there would be many steep gradients. But in real service I’ve no doubt the inefficiencies of stop start operation would bring the effective range down quite a lot. There’s a YouTube video of the run which I watched. I was interested that they depleted the six battery packs sequentially rather than all together. I don’t know why that would be an advantage. They finished with one pack almost unused.

I thought this was interesting: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2l7ry7zp5po The run was a bit artificial, in that they ran the train at ~40mph rather than its top speed of 60mph, but I think it has to be seen as a proof-of-concept demonstration for the public (and doubtless for the politicians who may need to come up with funds to build battery trains and install charging equipment.) The idea is for GWR eventually to replace its ageing diesel multiple units, used for local start-stop services on non-electrified branch lines, with battery trains. This train is very familiar to Londoners like me, as it is converted from a withdrawn District Line Underground train. It normally runs, as a battery train, on a trial commercial GWR shuttle service, which has now been in operation for a year. There are contacts between the running rails at each terminus, which allow fast charging while the train is waiting between scheduled journeys. The shuttle route is only about 3 miles long, on a branch line between West Ealing and Greenford. However the aim has been to test the robustness of the charging system and batteries over many cycles, in all weathers, rather than run long distances which would give comparatively little useful information about the critical components of the concept. The 200 mile route was Reading-London Paddington, then Paddington-Oxford and back, then return to Reading. The first time an Underground train has been to Oxford! The previous record was 130 miles, in Germany. I suspect to implement this at scale they may want a train able to reach 70-80mph, with a range between charging termini of 50-80 miles or so. It looks to me as if the batteries on this train could just about do that, in a train with more powerful motors.

This whole thread is about a psychological condition. So bye bye, eh? 😁

The OP, which proposed a role for natural selection in determining the prevalence of narcissism. Natural selection is founded on relative reproductive success.

No it didn’t. But you hastily deleted your first offensive response (thank you, I appreciate that), though not before I had read it, and now, later, you have come up this instead.😁 You make a good point. More men seem to have NPD than women* but there are women with it too. I suppose I didn’t consider them in the context of an evolutionary mechanism, as being child-bearing their scope for spreading their genes around is a lot less than for promiscuous men. And being less physically strong, their capacity for forcing themselves on someone sexually is less. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_narcissism

Haha, H G Wells's "War of the Worlds" in reverse?

Ah so your thought was that maybe natural selection should have eliminated narcissism. Is that it? Well I can see a few difficulties with that hypothesis. First, do we know that a tendency to narcissism is a hereditary trait? If not, e.g. if it arises chiefly through factors in upbringing, then natural selection would not operate on it. Second, supposing for the sake of argument it is an inherited trait, is there any reason to suppose that narcissists have, over the course of human evolutionary history, had a lower rate of reproductive success than non-narcissists? After all, they are perhaps more likely to be sexual predators, which would have increased their success. Third, the lack of empathy that seems to be a feature of narcissists may have given them an advantage, socially, in ruthless in pursuit of their objectives. So they may have tended to rise to positions of social power, enabling them to mate with more females. P.S. Bear in mind that evolutionary process typically take a long time to change the characteristics of a whole population, so one would have to look back to prehistoric times when considering the mechanisms at work. P.P.S. It is hard not to think of Trump, when considering this subject😁

OK, but what then did you mean?

"Invent"? There are all manner of disorders in all kinds of organisms. Surely there is no need to invoke any idea of design here?

Seems to me from the discussion this comes down to dispelling the simplistic, wrong (and potentially nazi-like?) notion that there is a gene for "strength" and another for "weakness", so the "weak" should be allowed to die off. Whereas in fact it doesn't work like that, because it's a multidimensional issue, so"strength" along one axis tells you nothing about other axes.

Sounds to me as if they may be falling into what I think of as the "Dawkins Trap" of treating religion and science as alternative accounts of the physical world, whereas their roles in human thought are in my opinion quite different. Science provides an account of the natural, physical world. Religion is not about that but is a guide to help human beings live their lives. So the undeniable fact that science can and does make errors is beside the point. Of course it does, like any human enterprise. But it isn't trying to guide people as to how to live their lives. Its methodology depends on scepticism in its older sense (e.g. as in Robert Boyle's "The Sceptical Chymist"), that is, requiring observational confirmation of phenomena to justify hypotheses, before accepting them as explanations. It is undeniable that applying this principle has met with enormous success. Without it, we would not have modern science at all. Moreover this reliance on confirmed observation is the mechanism by which the inevitable errors and false leads are corrected, over time. Conversely, if and when religion strays from its purpose and purports to explain the physical world, it is often shown by observation either to be wrong or else to be proposing ideas that can't be tested by observation. In the latter case such ideas are ipso facto not scientific, so science has nothing to say about them one way or the other. You, by the sound of it may be a physicalist, that is, one whose worldview is that the physical world as portrayed and investigated by science is all there is. That's a point of view, but it is not the only position that followers of science can take. Many scientists are also religious believers. In fact historically this was normal. Quite a number of scientists in the c.19th and c.18th were clergymen.

Well, all biochemistry has a quantum mechanical basis. So that goes for mental processes, i.e. brain function too. But what do we mean by intuition? As I understand it, we mean a process of understanding something without a conscious train of reasoning. I think we actually carry out a lot of mental processes without that, though most of them are fairly simple. I further suspect quite a bit of what we are taught about reasoning is to stop us jumping to conclusions, intuitively, because a lot of the time we would be wrong if we did that. So we learn to break issues down into steps and evaluate them sequentially, to have more confidence our understanding and conclusions are sound. So maybe intuition is what we call it when we fail to apply a reasoning process and, by luck, turn out nevertheless to be right!😀. On that basis I think I would say that quick "intuitive" mental processes without a conscious train of reasoning are the default method of thinking and just, well, normal, not special at all.

You haven’t noticed the changes in the last decade then? Renewable power generation? Electric vehicles? The switch to almost all domestic admin done on your mobile phone? m-RNA vaccines? Anti-obesity drugs? Sometimes changes can occur under your nose without you even realising.

Is that what you have to do in order to be sure an LLM doesn't feed you botshit?

What @Sensei may be trying to say, I suppose, is that a lot of cultures make use of flat breads, either unleavened like the pooris and chapattis of S Asia, or leavened like naan or the pitta bread of the E Med These may be cooked on the floor of a hot oven, or on a griddle or pan. They are typically made simply from flour, yeast in the leavened versions, water, salt, and often some oil. (I make pooris at home sometimes.) The distinguishing feature of pancakes however - at least in modern English usage - is a recipe based on eggs and milk as well as flour, to make batter, as in fact @Sensei 's recipe indicates, which is poured into a hot pan where it spreads out into a thin sheet (e.g. in crêpes) and is cooked very quickly on both sides. Thicker batter can make smaller, thicker pancakes, such as the Scotch pancakes I had as a child. (Batter is also used in Britain for other purposes e.g coating fish before deep-frying, or making Yorkshire puddings.) The basic recipe seems to have originated in Northern Europe - and hence is now found in N America. No one in the English speaking world, so far as I know, would describe pancakes, as described above, as bread. The thread title and discussion up to now have been about the leavening process in ordinary bread-making.

The thread is about bread, not pancakes. And most of the rest of the world does not eat pancakes.

Looks as though Honest Bob has just shown up, at last.😁

Thanks all for the advice. I’m having a second look at bluetooth, as it appears one can get long range bluetooth now that can send a signal >50m. If true, and if it can get through a brick wall, that may work. These transmitters seem to be fairly inexpensive, though I would of course need to buy bluetooth active speakers to receive the signal. Any comments on this?