exchemist

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, a.k.a. ME? I have a niece who suffers from that, as does the daughter of a friend. But this is the first time I've heard that a faecal transplant is something that can help that. The only applications I was aware of are things like long term gut infections e.g. with clostridium difficile, in which a one-off reset of the gut microflora can often help the patient get out of the cycle they got into as a result of antibiotics killing everything off. Is there research showing this can work for CFS? I'd have thought it would be something really newsworthy if there were. This is what I found on the subject in response to a query to the British ME association: QUOTE There is limited research evidence indicating that changes to the gut microbiome (i.e., the bacteria and viruses that normally live quite happily inside our intestines) might have occurred in people with ME/CFS. However, this has to be regarded as no more than interesting research findings at the present time. We need more reliable and significant research in this area before we can deterime the extent of the microbiome's involvement. It is too early to conclude that any of these gut microbiota abnormalities could be diagnostic biomarkers, be involved in the causation or maintenance of symptoms, or that people with ME/CFS can effectively be treated with probiotics or faecal microbiota transplants. The theory behind faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) is that it can be used to restore gut bacteria back to their normal composition and diversity and so improve gut function. The process involves implanting normal or beneficial intestinal bacteria and yeasts from a healthy donor into the colon of a person where there has been evidence of harmful changes to the gut microbiota. FMT is a highly speculative form of treatment in our current state of knowledge and there have not been any proper clinical trials to establish that FMT is a safe and effective form of treatment in ME/CFS. It is not available on the NHS and to go privately will cost quite a lot of money – in the region of £3000 according to the fees on one clinic website that I looked at – and will carry no guarantee of improvement. This is not an approach that I would want to endorse or recommend. And on a website for another such clinic, I could not find any medically qualified gastroenterologists – which was rather worrying. UNQUOTE From: https://meassociation.org.uk/medical-matters/items/microbiota-faecal-microbiota-transplantation-me-cfs/ It seems to me one has to be careful this doesn't turn out to be scammy, like ivermectin for covid. When people have debilitating long term conditions they can understandably be tempted to try unproven or even quack remedies.

While I have some sympathy for your friend's predicament (though limited by a lack of information in the thread about what the medical condition is and why FMT might be thought to help) I must say I would sincerely hope this place is and remains a "crappy" place for marketing. That is not what it is for. It's for discussing science, in which scepticism plays an important role.

And where is nuclear physics explained in the bible? It is idiotic to suggest that any science that is not in the bible is therefore incompatible with Christianity. But I’m close to giving up with you. The allegorical reading of the two Genesis creation stories has been perfectly respectable, orthodox theology since 200 AD. I have already pointed this out. As for the concept of a soul, others on this thread have pointed out this is not a scientific idea, as there is no observational evidence, of the kind science requires, to support it. Nor indeed is the concept of God. Science simply does not deal with such ideas. And that is fine. Such metaphysical or religious concepts are outside the remit of science, that’s all. Science is about the natural, physical world.

A nice architectural example, but the explanation the article gives of the venturi effect makes no sense. It says the air is compressed as it passes through small holes in the jaali screen and cools when it expands on the other side. That is not a venturi effect, it's just adiabatic compression and expansion and I am not convinced it is either significant or would have the effect described. The towers on the other hand would provide cooling by the stack effect and possibly some venturi suction with a breeze blowing across the top.

OK but as I understand it that is not the problem. The problem is with circles of finite radius you have a maximum packing density <100% due to the area of the interstitial gaps. The problem is what happens to the proportion of the area filled by the circles, as the radius reduces, and in the limit r->0. I had expected that proportion to be independent of the radius.

I remember decomposing the wave function into radial and angular parts, certainly. But tell me, if the packing density of spheres is independent of radius, how can the packing of circles not be? Or have I perhaps misunderstood your earlier response?

I recall from chemistry that the packing density of close-packed spheres is a fixed proportion, irrespective of the radius of the spheres. On that basis I think I would expect the same to apply to your 2D problem. Though I agree if one reduces the radius so that it ->0, one would seem to have a conundrum, since spheres of infinitesimal radius would, at least intuitively, seem to fill the space completely. Perhaps a mathematician can help.

In principle yes, especially if painted matt black. This is known at the Stack Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_effect You can also get help from any ambient breeze by mean of the venturi effect, with a suitably shaped cowl on top, to create a slight pressure drop at the top when the breeze blows. And then there are these rotating cowls that spin in the wind and create suction by means of the design of their blades. My neighbour has those at the top of his 3 storey house.

Well exactly..........

No, you are way off. Have a look at this table of ages in the Levant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_archaeological_periods_(Levant) The Book of Samuel, in which the story of David and the Palestinians (=Philistines - the Arabic for Palestinian is "Filistin", there being no "p" sound in Arabic.) occurs, is through to have been written about 600BC. So late Iron Age, bordering on the historical periods (i.e. when people started to write history down). The Israelites would have fought the Philistines with spears with iron tips and with swords. A sling would have typically been used by shepherds, who could not afford expensive weapons, to keep wolves etc off their flocks.

Aha, thanks. I see these started to be released towards the end of last year, perhaps in response to the "stochastic parrot" criticism of LLMs. Evidently they are expected to be less crap at maths and other problems requiring reasoning, presumably including scientific problems. So far so good. But I see, according to the Wiki article, they use even more computing resources, between 10 and 100 x what a "simple" LLM uses. So even more disastrous for the energy economy and the climate.

What makes them slow down?

The point, in this case, is that the up-front investment is gigantic.

I am very sceptical that the demand for space tourism or these completely undeveloped ideas like space art, music, ballet and sport (!?) would justify such a massive engineering exercise. What would be this low gravity medical treatment you have in mind? So-called microgravity, in Earth orbit, has some applications but that is because one is in free-fall, equivalent to zero-g. Mars has ~40% of Earth gravity. What medical procedures would benefit from that?

I notice this is about "reasoning" models. But also they mention LLMs. Is there such as thing as a reasoning LLM, now, or are these reasoning models distinct from LLMs?

That is superficial and wrong. Christianity has generally been supportive of science and indeed many early scientists were clerics or people with religious training. There have been a handful of incidents e.g. Galileo's house arrest for espousing Copernicus's heliocentrism (although Copernicus was a cleric), and the c.19th kerfuffle - among some Protestants - over the age of the Earth* and Darwin's ideas. But that's about all. For much of its history, modern science has been broadly seen as revealing the handiwork of the Creator, not opposing religion. The "Conflict Thesis" was dreamt up by two academics (Andrew Dixon White and William Draper) at the end of the c.19th - shortly after the (temporary) Darwin controversy - and is now discredited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis Regarding Man being in the image of God, this has been explained already on this thread, not least by me, yet you seem unable to grasp the point. There is no conflict between Man being, as he undoubtedly is, a hairless ape and him being in the words of Genesis, made in the image of God. Go back and read the thread again. It's about Man possessing an immortal soul and being (or becoming) morally aware. Nothing to do with what physical shape his body is, or how he evolved. *Cardinal Wiseman gave a series of lectures in Rome in the 1840s about science and religion, in the course of which he showed the new discoveries of the age of the Earth were not in conflict with scripture. (In light of the Galileo affair, the Catholic church made sure it did not again make the mistake of opposing scientific discovery.) https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=4BMPAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

It's not a matter of taking sides. Science does not conflict with sensible versions of religion. If you think I am not discussing science, why don't you take a look at the posts I have made in the last couple of weeks?

What would be the point of settling Mars, in your opinion?

Both St Matthew and St Luke's gospels have Jesus making a joke about this, saying John the Baptist came, not eating nor drinking and you say "He is possessed!". And now I come, eating and drinking, and you say "Look, a glutton and a drunkard!". In other words, there's just no pleasing some people.

Yes, the creationist often makes the error Cardinal Newman warned against, of treating absence of a current scientific explanation as evidence of God's intervention in Nature. Newman quite reasonably observed that the Christian who builds his faith on that (what Prof. Charles Coulson was, much later, to refer to as "The God of the Gaps") is liable to having it destroyed, as science advances! However those creationists to whom I have pointed this out tend to brush it off, possibly because they nearly always are evangelical Protestants, who would rather die than concede that a Catholic cardinal had a point! 😄 What does Webb look for? I imagine spectra of key species in the atmospheres of planets, but I wonder what those would be. Free molecular oxygen might be one, but photosynthesis may not have developed in life elsewhere so one can't rely on that. Simple gases like ammonia and methane are widespread, so presumably not those.

Yes, I quite agree with both of you that it is a false argument to suggest that a low probability event is equivalent to an impossible one. I'm less sure I follow you in your comments about the evidence for life arising naturally. We have no theory of abiogenesis as yet. We have plenty of evidence that modern life forms arose from earlier, simpler ones. One can reasonably extrapolate that back to the idea of some original life form or life forms, which were the first to be "alive", but we don't have any actual evidence of the existence of these. All we have to go on is the commonality of much biochemical architecture across all modern life, which might suggest evolution from some common ancestor. I think it is important in arguing with creationists (not "theists", please note, as plenty of theists accept life can have originated without special supernatural intervention) not to overstate the evidence. One thing I find creationists often don't understand is that science, being evidence-based, does not pretend to have all the answers already.

In what context?

Perhaps it’s not quite as daft as it sounds. You think you know a subject, but the more you delve into it the more you come to question what it is really about. But I was glad this Edwards guy seems sharp and to have a sense of humour, still. Sometimes modern academics can seem po-faced, strait-laced and serious. Unlike my Physical Chemistry tutor, who died last year. He used to muck about on Concorde before it entered commercial service (researching its effect on the ozone layer), used to drink far too much, once tried to get my then girlfriend into bed, broke into the cathedral at 2 am to play the organ, got the physical chemistry lab computer to play Handel’s “Arrival of the Queen of Sheba”……etc. I only found out, in the college report, that he was actually involved in the design of the cathedral organ when it was revamped. A bit of a headbanger, really, but certainly enlivened college life.

Just read the annual report for 2024 and was depressed to read, first of all, the Dean's report, which was full of the trendy, dull, corporate-sounding platitudes that I tend to think indicate a 2nd rate mind. I was resigning myself to the idea that this is what academic institutions have become nowadays when I started reading the report on the college in 2024, written by the college theology tutor, Prof Mark Edwards. What a relief. The donnish sense of waspish humour is still alive after all, I'm pleased to say. I quote one passage that amused me: ...we have welcomed two new Canon Professors, Andrew Davison as Regius Professor of Divinity and Luke Bretherton as Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology. Professor Davison, a former undergraduate in Chemistry at Oxford, has written with distinction on the sacraments, but has also become known as an expert on Science and Religion; his recent study, "Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine", explores the possibility that intelligent life has more than one chance of survival in the universe. Some fear that it is now breathing its last in American universities, but Professor Bretherton's welcome return to his native England took place before the impending exodus. He has written six distinguished books, of which five are about political theology; the fact that he waited until the fifth before asking "What Is Political Theology?" suggests he has already mastered the Oxford approach to teaching. I must admit I was tickled by the suggestion that this guy wrote four learned books before sitting up and asking himself, "WTF am I talking about?" 😄

This is also true of all manner of skills a child learns, from multiplication tables to French vocabulary, or sport. There is a certain amount of hard work needed to achieve mastery and the child has to realise that. Fortunately, children are quite good at that sort of thing and generally do understand and accept it without a great deal of “forcing”.