exchemist

Yes, I @geordief sent me a PM about the domain lapse. Perhaps my ability to see the site was just a cached screen my end (is that possible?) rather than a connection to the actual site. But I think the domain once lapsed even here, due an oversight on the part of whoever had to pay the subscription. So it may be up again in a few days. On thread content issue, yes something contentious seems to be the key. That's my argument for tolerating a few cranks and nutters, provided they are civil and to some degree responsive to the reactions they receive. Incidentally, my impression on the other place is that recently moderation policy has changed, to be more tolerant, presumably in the hope of retaining more visitors.

It's not down down, but limping. You can get the site up but if you try to post you get that infuriating, smug "Oops, I just forgot [sic] how to use auxiliary verbs" message. So it looks like a glitch rather than anyone pulling the plug. Or else one of the mad Trumpies, trying to bring the evil libtard site down with some sort of IT attack, I suppose. If they have the brains. But on the thread topic, as you know, I believe you need a sprinkling of cranks and nutters to keep these forums lively. One can debunk some craziness, maybe even teach a bit - and sometimes one learns titbits one didn't know. For example I learned about Tyndall's fascinating and ingenious c.19th experiments with IR absorption, from that Doogles character we had, and about Carnot's deeply insightful work with caloric, from Tom Booth. Really interesting stuff. (Not to mention that Tesla had bonkers ideas about thermodynamics, which I had not realised.) I also agree with @OldChemE that many of us don't start many threads or, if we do, they are so uncontentious that nobody comments. For example I started one last week on the biochemical building blocks found in the sample returned from the asteroid Bennu. And got one sole reply. Presumably because while true and sort of interesting - at least I thought so - there wasn't really a lot more to say about it. So as a discussion topic it had limited potential. I guess that as scientifically minded people we don't pose questions that much. We mainly wait until there is an answer to some question.

Exactly. We had a scandal some years back in the UK Labour Party, due to opposition to Israel's actions in the West Bank morphing into generalised antisemitism. It even started to resurrect old conspiracy theories about world banking being dominated by Jews (Rothschild) etc. Starmer had to expel quite a few party members over that, including the former leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

Not always trivial in the popular imagination however. The failure to make this distinction leads either to antisemitism or, as I know from personal experience, to unjustified accusations of antisemitism. British, and a fortiori US politics, are both full of distortions due to confusing the two, sometimes by accident, sometimes by design.

Any better? (This is a "medium" .PNG file):- I thought "State of Israel does not represent world Jewry" is a sentiment we can all get behind.

OK , I may have overdone it. When I get up I’ll have another go, using an intermediate size.

I'm doing this on a Mac, having imported the photos from the iPhone. Let's try a version "Exported" to my desktop as a .PNG file, with the "small" size option selected: Al- Hamdulillah! Mumtaz!

They could well have been. I tried to upload a photo I took of them, but the forum website said the file is too big. I have never found out how to make a smaller (lower resolution) version of these photo files , which are taken with my iPhone. It takes good pics, but the file sizes can be enormous. Do you know how to make the file size smaller? It would be nice to post the picture so you can see. But yeah the shtreimels were quite something. The first time I came across them when when I was doing the Capital Ring circular walk around London and we passed through Stamford Hill (a very Jewish, but not prosperous Jewish, district of outer London) on a Saturday. These guys were everywhere, in their huge furry hats. My friend and I stopped for a pub lunch, where we ate a selection of smoked sausages. I remember feeling a bit guilty about doing that in the circumstances.😁

In London, marching. I went on a couple of these myself last year. Here is one girl, with poppy earrings as it was Remembrance Day. I had one in my buttonhole and lots of the marchers had them. The then Tory government tried to make out it was "disrespectful" to march on that day but as Remembrance Day is all about honouring the dead killed in combat, I couldn't think of a more appropriate day to do it. On another march there was a group of orthodox Ashkenazy Jews, complete with their Sabbath day shtreimels, joining the procession. None of the predominantly muslim crowd were at all hostile to them. The marches are continuing this year.

Yeah, it's a mad and repulsive idea. Trump looks at the world as real estate. The suffering of 2 million destitute people, whom he now airily proposes to deprive of even their homeland, gives him no pause for thought at all. He's a psychopath. As with the stupid tariffs, he seems not to have through it through either. What will the Saudis, whom he is trying to get to increase oil production, have to say? This even has the potential to bring Iran and KSA together in fierce opposition, not to mention the rest of the Middle East, including Turkey. He claimed he would extract the USA from foreign entanglements. This could easily enmesh the USA in another Afghanistan. China has carefully positioned itself as opposing the idea. As with the tariff fiasco, China now poses as the responsible Great Power, upholding the rules of international behaviour, while Trump's USA increasingly looks like a Great Power in decline, highly aggressive, vicious and untrustworthy as a partner.

This source: http://www.solarelectricityhandbook.com/solar-angle-calculator.html. suggests that the optimum angle is to be perpendicular to the incident rays when the sun is at its zenith. Obviously this varies across the seasons. However, given that the user's demand for electricity will also be seasonal (as will also be the price of electricity paid by the grid), there is a preliminary question to answer, which is whether the user simply wants the max annual kWh, irrespective of when in the year it is produced, or whether it is better to optimise for the season of maximum demand (and highest electricity price). That only works if the area of the lens is greater than the area of the panels, i.e. the lens intercepts more radiation and directs it onto the panels, concentrating it. A lens does not magically increase the amount of energy in the radiation (conservation of energy). In practice, a lens that size would be very heavy, expensive to make and unwieldy. I feel sure it is more practical to simply install more panels, to intercept radiation across a bigger area.

Yes, the metaphor of a spreading area of what we understand has some appeal, I agree. However I think what the chatbot was spieling about is the idea of successive models for the same set of phenomena which may be thought to progress towards - or even reach - a description of an ultimate physical reality. Let's see if there is any follow up from the OP. I doubt there will be.

No, it's none of your business.

This reads like a rather naïve false antithesis. Nobody sensible thinks scientific progress is tidily "linear", as you put it. It often seems to move in a rather zig-zag path. But that does not mean it is not progressing towards a true picture of physical reality. Equally, the idea that science builds models that approximate physical reality and are never final does not mean that science is not progressing towards a true picture either. But I have a feeling, based on your earlier posts which were short and ungrammatical, that what you have posted is not your own words. If you are quoting a source you need to say so.

Exactly, it has no meaning except in relation to a proposition, or a collection of propositions judged to be true.

The question you originally asked seems to me to make a category error. "Truth", as @joigus observed back in July last year, is a value applied to a proposition. In other words, truth is not an entity in itself, but "true" or "false" are attributes of a proposition. "Truth" cannot contradict anything, because it is not a verifiable proposition.

Post-apartheid S. Africa and N. Ireland would appear to be useful case studies. Why not take a look at them and consider the common features of their approaches to the problem? I don't know what academic advice their respective governments may have taken, but I feel sure they must have sought out expertise in conflict resolution.

First of all, I note this new crapbot displays the same grovelling servility towards the user as its predecessors. 😁 It gets one thing right, though: wavefunction collapse is nowadays regarded as being caused by interaction, not by "observation" by a conscious entity. The language of QM, at the time it was being developed in the 1920s, spoke in terms of "observable" properties and thus of "observers" and "observations". This was to focus on what could be measured about a QM system, and to avoid "legacy" classical assumptions about what might go on in between observations. Unfortunately this language had the side effect of misleading some people into thinking consciousness, on the part of a conscious "observer", played a fundamental role in physics. Nowadays we speak of the interaction of a QM system with the detection or measurement apparatus as being what causes the wave function to resolve into measured values of physical properties. So to argue machines must be sentient because they can cause wavefunction collapse is to get things backwards. Sentience is neither here nor there when it comes to QM. It is interactions that count and no sentience is implied anywhere.

Interesting. Sounds a little bit like (a very muffled version of) Teilhard de Chardin.

Haha. Well, if you read Jim Baggott’s “Farewell to Reality”, or Peter Woit’s blog, you will see that some people think at least some (drunk?) theoretical physicists have ceased to do science. 😁

One has to be careful with restorations. The Sistine Chapel seems to have been ruined by careless restoration. But I don't know if these paintings you show were originally as dark as they appear today. I suspect they were, as the intent seems to be to "illuminate" the figures portrayed.

OK I suppose there is the issue of whether radiation counts as "matter". I generally think of matter as distinct from radiation, but I suppose as a real physicist you will tell me both are in the end excitations of fields, so there is no substantive difference. As for conservation of energy, it's true that can only be spoken of relation to a physical system of some kind, whether it consists of fields, radiation or matter (in my narrower usage of these terms).

OK I see what you mean. But if the contention is that living matter could have arisen from something other than inanimate matter, I think we are into such realms of fantasy that consideration of Ockham's Razor for even a second would dismiss that.

Well that's rather a nice point. Is E=hν a principle of nature? Or is the conservation of energy a principle of nature in the absence of any matter to apply it to?

One could argue the "laws of physics", perhaps better described as the fundamental order we see in nature which we express through our "laws" , are physical principles that apply whether matter is present or not. And, as we are in the Religion subforum, this order is, I understand, what thinkers like Spinoza and Einstein seem to have identified with "God". Of course this conception of god is far removed from the personal God of the Abrahamic religions. It is just an orderly principle of nature itself.