exchemist

Yes there is. LLMs are programmed to tell you what you want to hear. You can get an initial idea from them but to confirm something you need to go behind the AI and get to the references it is relying on.

That’s what an idiot would do.

Why not both? Most people are a mixed bag. Newton was by all accounts an unpleasant man, Einstein was sexually unfaithful, Mozart had a scatological sense of humour….. This notion that famous people must be pigeonholed as either saints or devils seems very naïve to me.

Whut?

What you leave out though, is that we continue to see Io for about 10 minutes after it has actually been occulted, due to light already in transit after occultation starts.

Surely it is occulted for the same time, regardless of the distance from Earth? Where are you getting your information from?

If the thrower drops 2 balls 5 mins apart when he is next to the hole, then sure, you will time them as arriving 5minutes apart. But if he then moves 50 metres away to throw the next one, you will note that the 3rd ball arrives slightly more than 5 minutes after the previous one. And if he then returns to his position next to the hole before dropping the 4th one, you will note that the interval between arrival of the 3rd and 4th balls is slightly less than 5 minutes. The differences are caused by the time of flight of the ball when it is thrown from a distance. What Rømer observed was the difference in timing of occultation of Io, depending on whether the Earth was at its closest to Jupiter or at its furthest away. He correctly attributed this difference to differences in the time of flight of the light, according to the variation in the distance it had to cover between Io and the Earth.

As others have also pointed out, that is not what we would see. Leaving aside the complication of what would happen when Io passed behind Jupiter, we would see the light on for 30mins and then off for 30 mins. You have still not explained what you mean by real time.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY REAL TIME?

No, answer my questions, please, first of all, without adding further complications.

Yes it would show the time 10minutes earlier, because that is the time it takes for the light signal to travel to us from Jupiter. But now we get to it: you appear to have some notion that this conventional understanding is wrong, because “the format of the light is different”. What do you mean by that? Format of light?? Kindly explain.

I think you need to explain what exactly you mean by "real time". This is something you constantly refer to and you have not explained what you mean by it.

When I was a tiny boy I loved beetroot and my parents did in fact once call the doctor because my urine went pink. Betanin: A zwitterion, apparently, at least at some pH values. P.S. Diagram has an error, the O substituent on the ring joined to the sugar should be OH.

Yeah definitely a 1st World problem, I grant you. But in France, everyone gets in foie gras at Christmastime. And so do my (half-French) son and I, for Réveillon on New Year's Eve, accompanied by Sauternes. (We also do boudins blancs with apples and a chenin blanc on Christmas Eve - though I can't drink much as I have to sing carols, Gregorian chant and a motet or two at Midnight Mass.) I'm now over 70, damn it, and these traditions are something I hang onto increasingly tenaciously. 😄

I'm sure it is the vacuum inside that is the chief issue. But then the difference in difficulty of apparently identically-sized jars must be due to differences in friction in the threads and seal. By the way, as we are approaching that time of year, those rubber seals on foie gras jars from France are a bastard. Sometimes I have to resort to pliers to pull the rubber tag enough to break the seal.

I used to have a rubber band that could fit the rim of the lid with a bit of stretching. That improves the grip considerably and makes opening easier. For many years I had the strongest grip in the house as a result of years of rowing, but it is weakening now that I am over 70. Must get another rubber band, before the marmalade jar defeats me…..

In view of @swansont 's comments, perhaps it would be worth you checking and letting us know where your image comes from. The thing about the craters is odd.

Haha. He survived somehow but it was a sweaty evening and we went somewhere else the following night. I'm actually gradually testing myself to see if the intolerance to oysters that I picked up about 20 years ago has gone. I tried a couple at the Loch Fyne Oyster Bar the year before last and was fine. It wasn't a full allergic reaction I used to get, just nausea and diarrhoea. Suspect it was brought on by one in France eaten in summertime (they don't seem to worry about whether or not there is a R in the month) and then I found every time I had them I would feel lousy for 24hrs, so I gave them up. These things do sometimes pass. One of my brothers became intolerant to crustaceans for about a decade - but now he's fine again.

Yeah but this photo has clearly been faked, by er,er, the shadowy cabal of paedophile Illuminati Lizard People, er, in a secret unminuted meeting of the Bilderberg Group......[repeat and fade].......😆

Yes I read recently that it is now recommended to expose young children to small amounts of peanuts in order to prevent them becoming allergic later. (I remember a terrifying evening in Amsterdam with a work colleague who announced he had a life-threatening allergy to peanuts.........just as we were sitting down to dinner in an Indonesian restaurant! ARRGH!!! What a fuckwit.)

You could get a job at the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. 😁

This seems to favour the Old Friends hypothesis and to distinguish this clearly from the Hygiene Hypothesis. In other words, early exposure of infants to a wide variety of non-pathogenic micro organisms is beneficial, but should on no account be confused with the popular notion in some quarters that catching childhood diseases is somehow good, which it emphatically isn’t. It seems to start with natural childbirth (contact with vaginal and faecal micro organisms from the mother), continue with breast feeding and then with playing outside on the ground, with pets or farm animals and so on. I also noted in passing that roasted peanuts are more allergenic than raw ones. (I’ve always rather hated roasted peanuts, as it happens, but love fresh ones. As a kid I used to eat the raw peanuts my grandmother had to feed the birds in the garden.)

You mean the EU, presumably. The UK is in Europe, after all 😉. (I submit herewith my entry for today’s pedantry prize.)

I was asking you about what information sources you were relying, when you spoke of information being available from countries of the former USSR. I suspect, you see, that the phenomenon you describe, of bloggers engaged by the state to promote the state’s viewpoints, does not really exist on a significant scale in Western Europe. In the US, I would have said the same until very recently, though this is changing under Trump, due to the power over social media wielded by people like Musk. Whereas in the former East Bloc, where for decades it was normal for the state to engage in disguised attempts to manipulate opinion, I can imagine this would be a concern people might have, causing them to make the effort to monitor it.

Yes I suppose that's true. Exhibit A might be the Pimlico District Heating Undertaking in London, which was built to use waste heat from Battersea Power Station, just across the river. When that closed, they had to build a separate boiler (coal-fired!) to run the system.