exchemist

There are not one but two religious points of view on this. One is intelligent and recognises that Man is an animal, albeit one with particular special knowledge, attributes and and responsibilities. The other stupidly tries to deny evolution.

Lenski did that famous piece of work showing how bacteria evolve over generations, which was challenged by that Conservapaedia idiot Schlafly: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lenski_affair. It's worth a read if you want a chuckle. The correspondence with Schlafly was in 2008, so it could be this same work that @Luc Turpin 's LLM is referring to. As far as I recall there was nothing in that to suggest the bacteria anticipated the environmental challenge that Lenski exposed them to. It would have been newsworthy, to say the least.

That’s AI for you.

What is your evidence that these questions are hotly debated? And by whom?

I think he is the “God is dead”( oh and by the way Zeig Heil) man, isn’t he?

I’ve answered that for you. Would you care to go on from there( if and when you return)?

Surely the point about the Ten Commandments is that they are an example of a society formulating a body of law. Law is a systematising of your codes of behaviour, designed to enable a society to function smoothly and fairly, with agreed ways of settling disputes. This is also one of the (several) functions of religion in society. It is no accident, surely, that historically many societies have had religious laws and looked to religious leaders for dispute resolution. So when religious people say they get their morality from their religion, that's a bit naïve: their religion codifies the moral principles of the society, principles that were probably in large part already in implicit use before religion codified them.

Nitrates from fertilisers or manure are one issue in rivers, but these are not long-lasting. DDT was a persistent insecticide, but I don't recall it being a particular issue in rivers.

It's what would be expected in any country with a sense of national identity. In Iran's case their c.20th experience was of the US and the UK meddling in their politics to remove their popular leader Mossadegh and replace him with the puppet Shah Pahlavi. Such things leave a scar in collective national memory, just as American meddling in the Mexican Revolution has given that country a lasting distrust of the US.

My son read Ancient History, I’m afraid.

Answer my question, then.

Article in today’s FT says sentiment on the street in Iran is one of national solidarity against outside aggression (they have 627 dead thanks to Israel’s attacks), not one of rising up against the regime. They are particularly incensed by outside aggressors telling them what to do about their own politics, apparently. Well, well, what a surprise, eh, who could have predicted that? - apart from just about anyone with an ounce of feeling for history. So this operation has probably set back the cause of the moderates and modernisers.

I’ve asked you a question already. Kindly answer.

I was not aware of such a trend and would find it rather alarming. Where can I read about it?

No I think it drifted East down towards the Thames estuary on the prevailing westerly wind, where, according to legend, a police constable in S. Essex radioed the police station saying "Sarge, you not going to believe this but....."

I think KJW's point about wave functions representing a state of knowledge about a system, rather than set of physical properties, is key.

I think the point is that the non-locality of entangled states in QM does not imply any sort of interaction between different spatial locations, as you are suggesting.

In what way do you propose inertial mass varies in space, and/or time? Have you a mathematical expression for this? (Please note you need to post your answer here on the forum rather than referring me to an off-site link, as that is against forum rules.)

I remember that one. Melanin seems to act as a radical scavenger as well as absorbing UV. So it is apparently capable of mitigating the effects on the body - at least on the skin - of ionising radiation, by mopping up some of the free radicals generated.

Darwin’s principle, as I recall it, was variation plus natural selection. That seems a good description of both the cod case and the ash case. And also that of the peppered moth, too, which is often held up as the classic example. Fair enough. Here you go: https://www.science.org/content/article/incredible-shrinking-cod

Why not also post the report about N Sea cod evolving to be smaller, so they escape through the trawl nets of fishing boats?

If you suggest the radius decreases, do you mean the density increases, i.e. the mass remains constant, or do you mean the density stays constant and the mass decreases?

Yeah I just get tired of the facile scapegoating, when CO2 emissions are due as much if not more to Henry Ford and his successors as to Rockefeller and his. After all it's not like cigarettes when the product is inessential and promoted by the manufacturer as a fashionable lifestyle accessory. We objectively need oil and gas. Weaning ourselves off it is a huge collective effort in which all, including oils and gas companies, have a part to play. Demonising one industry to make the rest of us all feel better gets us nowhere fast. In fact, it just delays the realisation that we all need to make changes. Also if these companies have a role to play, let's encourage them to play it, not chuck bricks at them all the time. On CCS, I think it is pushed by various CO2-intensive industries, including fossil fuel power gen plants, cement, glass, steel, etc. All of them of course would prefer not to have to change their fuel source or, in the case of iron smelting, the whole chemical process, especially if government might subsidise the process. The thing that stands out to me, and this applies to shipping too, is the alternatives very largely require hydrogen. (Ammonia for ship fuel is a way of handling large quantities of hydrogen more safely, basically: you burn it to N2 and water.) The really transformative technology we desperately need is high efficiency electrolysis.

Ah yes, from your handle I imagine you must have a thorough grasp of all this. But I'm intrigued by your view that it's about excusing environmental degradation because we can tell ourselves it's not real. That's a new angle. But nothing to do with quantum computing and the measurement "problem" in QM.

Hmph. I don't trust anything emanating from Greenpeace. I know for a fact that they are happy to misrepresent the truth for publicity purposes cf. Brent Spar. They are also one of the prime actors seeking to blame the fossil fuel industry for our carbon-intensive lifestyle, a deeply hypocritical exercise in blame shifting to a suitable "other" we can settle back and safely hate, as we carry on driving our petrol cars, heating our homes with gas and whining about the price of "gasoline". Oil and gas companies are willing to do CCS because they know how to do it and have the depleted reservoirs to hand. Secondary extraction is not intrinsic to the economics. But it is not cheap, that's true enough. When I was at Shell we had a pilot project to do this for the UK government about 20years ago, but they pulled out after we had spent $1m on it. No secondary recovery featured in that. It's not greenwashing, it is real and it might help to bridge the gap during the technology transition. However I would always be worried that CO2 buried in this way might somehow find its way back to the surface over time, so I wouldn't want to see it become a major component of the moves to carbon neutrality.