mistermack

I think it might be more of a mental thing. I've noticed that the tiniest draught, nowhere near enough to affect my temperature, immediately makes me feel the cold, so changes in humidity might have a similar out-of-proportion effect. I use humidity to make my place more comfortable. The kitchen opens up to my tv room, and I just leave a huge pot on the gas ring simmering as low as it can go. If I don't do that, I find I need to turn the heat up a bit. That's at comfortable room temperature, of about 22 dec c on my digital wall clock. So for me, at that temp, raising humidity does make me feel warmer. In a cold room, judging by the study posted, it would probably have little or no effect, and just cause condensation.

They certainly do act. If your egg had had no genes, it would have been flushed years ago. If you take the example of Neanderthals, the species is extinct, but the genes live on in modern humans. They don't necessarily benefit our species, in fact some modern genetic problems are blamed on Neanderthal genes. But they live on. I read somewhere that you could assemble the entire Neanderthal Genome, from the current human population. I don't know if it's true, but billions of people carry the genes.

What he doesn't mention is that infant mortality is falling much faster than the birth rate, and people are living longer. That's why the population level is still rising.

I always thought that a humid atmosphere feels warmer because perspiration evaporates a bit slower.

You could say the same about a virus. They act in a selfish way, even though they are mindless, and don't have an independent existence. The term "selfish" is more of a marketing ploy. Genes have no intentions, but they act in a way that a selfish one would act. Like the way the eye looks designed, but isn't.

On my pc, the "map" view is always oriented N/S in line with the side uprights of the monitor, and obviously E/W to the top and bottom rails. But if I change the view to street view, you can spin it around, and if you zoom out of street view, it stays spun. I can re-normalise it by going back to map view which is always N/S straight up/down.

I would rather go by what Dawkins said. It's genes that count. (selfish genes)

It's gradually going that way. In the field of work, you can be sacked for discrimination, or sued for sexual discrimination, for constructive dismissal etc. in this country, if you employed a he who demanded to be treated as a she. What do you do as an employer, if you have men's and women's toilets, and some man wants to use the women's, against the wishes of the women employees ? These cases can involve big money, whoever ends up winning. In any case, you asked for examples, I gave some. I'm not too interested in the finer points. Well, if nobody is inheriting anything, you wouldn't be disadvantaged. I would use the money to level up education quality for all, and free healthcare, and keep the threshold where you start paying income tax as high as possible. So you might miss out on a lump sum, but you could keep more of your wages from day one.

Well my initial comment was about what could be regarded as "centrist" in rights. I didn't claim that centrist was my own stance in everything. But LGBTQ turns up a lot of conflicts. Does some man's demand to be referred to as a woman interfere with my right to free speech? Does someone's determination to be offended interfere with my right to free speech? Do men demanding to use the ladies toilets interfere with women's rights to privacy and a safe space? There's arguments on both sides. The ones I feel most sorry for, are straight men who look a bit feminine, and straight women who look a bit male. In the old days, they would never get asked if they were a man or woman.

They tried communism and it didn't work. If you have a very rich country, with a big surplus of the basics, I guess a free-to-all would work. Elsewhere, people think it's right to reward work and talent. Where I am hard left, is I don't believe in the right to inherit capital. I'd like to see a 100% tax on your estate when you die, with the proceeds going to levelling up opportunity for all. Some people might view that as abusing their human rights. I don't. I think the right to equal opportunity trumps the right to inherit.

But I think you are still viewing the word Centrist as the centre between extreme opinions, and ignoring the word "rights" and what that means. To me, it means having a power, because it's right that you should have that power. Not just because you want it. And when you have a situation where it's right that one person has a power, but it interferes with a power that another person ought to have, then it's probably time to look for a compromise. And sometimes it's not an easy decision. I wouldn't define centrist as the middle point between fascists and commies, but if that's your thinking, then we are at cross-purposes.

Well, there are all sorts of weird beliefs in the US, and people have a right to believe them. But seizing power adversely affects the rights of others, so has to be stamped on. In a democracy, nobody has a right to seize power, right or left. You can believe what you like, but when it comes to power, it's obvious that that affects the rights of others. That's why you have laws.

Well, I was talking about a balance between rights, not a balance between what two different parties think. Rights are arbitrary to some extent, but I wasn't suggesting a balance between rights and wrongs, but between conflicting rights.

If you keep it simple, by ignoring ripples and waves, then the force on each particle is effectively the force of gravity, so each particle tries to get as low as possible. That's what gives you a flat horizontal surface. Tilt the bottle, and the same thing applies. Any particle that's higher than the one next to it will sink a little, so you still end up with a flat horizontal surface. (relative to the Earth) When the car is just rolling, without braking or accelerating, the same applies. But when you brake or accelerate, you add an effective sideways force to the pull of gravity, so you still get a flat surface but it's tilted. It's as if you've tilted the pull of gravity, by adding the sideways force. Turning left or right has the same effect.

Or maybe god is a sadist.

Well, what often happens is that one person's rights impacts adversely on another's. I would interpret the centrist view as trying to find a fair balance between the two.

Pain is there to notify you that you are being damaged. Without it, you wouldn't notice when a thorn jabs into your flesh, or you are standing on a burning ember. Suffering is inevitable, because most animals produce many offspring, to cover for natural hazards. They can't all survive. If every individual frog spawn lived to old age, there would be a plague of frogs, and there would be no food to feed them. A human couple can have ten kids. Some have to die, to prevent overpopulation. In the natural world, most will die before they get to sexual maturity.

I'm so angry, I'm going to divert the planet Mercury and smash it into New York. Are you going to flee in panic? Because Hamas has pretty much the same chance of killing you and everyone you know. As I'm sure you're well aware. Your standard of reasoning is pathetic. Israel on the other hand, with it's nuclear weapons and religious nut leadership, is more than capable of killing you, by kicking off a nuclear exchange that might end up making you history. But using your logic, of going by what people say, then of course they have no nukes, no sir !

I'm not taking your word for any of that. The only thing you can be sure of, is that Gaza is a modern day concentration camp, 25 miles by six approximately, with about 2.5 million people confined in misery. Of course there will be Hamas, or similar. It is a certain creation of millions of people being kept lifetime prisoners in disgusting conditions. The state of Israel created Hamas. They need bogey men to justify their so-called "self-defence" to a gullible public. And it's worked. At least on you.

That's idiotic. Words are meaningless from either side. The facts are the dead bodies.

What they say is irrelevant. What they actually did is kill about 15,000 innocent Palestinians, mostly women and children. America went doo-lally when twenty kids were murdered in Sandy Hook. But 8,000 Palestinian children are slaughtered and they don't give a toss. Since Israel is the 51st state in all but name, it's vastly hypocritical. The BBC news did a piece the other day that reported that Hamas had been openly preparing that attack for a couple of years, in full view of the USA spy satellites and all of the Israeli security apparatus. Which makes the claim that the lax defensive measure were deliberate even more obvious. The obvious motive is the "final solution" to the "Palestinian Problem", which is being done gradually, in a drip-drip process, to make it less obvious to a gullible public.

I often watch people on tv, and imagine them talking to me in real life, using those gestures and that way of speaking, and it would be ridiculous. But we see it so often onscreen, that it becomes normal, in that environment.

But then you get politicians and media presenters who study this, and end up all over-using the same body-language, so they all start to look the same and it all looks a bit false. But then we, the public, get used to that, and begin to expect it, so that ordinary people end up looking a bit lifeless, and tv people are selected for freakiness.

Are you working for Donald Trump? That's why during wars, we are fed stories of heroism and glory, and the miserable deaths and mangled bodies are kept behind the scenes.

If you have a deep hole drilled for deep geothermal energy, the info and expertise is already there about how quick heat will flow etc. as it's all being done already at shallower sites, where you have hot rocks near the surface. You don't have to pump water down, and then lift it back up. It should be in balance, the weight of water going down balancing the water coming up. So you are basically pumping to overcome the friction. On drilling costs, it's always been an expensive business. When drilling for oil, the prospect of a giant payoff is what pays the bills. Extracting heat isn't in the same class as an oil strike at all, that's why there's not much deep drilling for heat as yet. As you go down deeper, the pressures in the soil and rocks get enormous and it's all pressing on the sides of your bore holes, trying to cave them in, so the deeper you go, the stronger the lining needed for the hole. In oil wells, I think they use a concrete sleeve. At the moment, the economics are dicey but not completely forbidding in areas where there are very hot rocks relatively close to the surface, like in Cornwall where they are two or three miles deep. This is going ahead, but even the people pushing it are acknowledging that the eventual economics are an unknown quantity, so drilling deeper is probably not really on the cards as yet. Cornwall is lowly populated, so there's not much of a market for warm water, but if you could find shallow hot rocks near a big city, (like Southampton) then the potential is there for district heating using the waste water. The combination of a supply of warm water, and household heat pumps is then a very economic option. Drilling starts to tap geothermal power from Cornwall's hot rocks | Energy industry | The Guardian I believe that you can generate electricity from low-level warm water, if you also have access to lots of cold water close by. Cornwall fits the bill for that, I'm surprised that they aren't planning that sort of project at the same time. Energy-efficient engine turns waste hot water into electricity | New Scientist Makai’s Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) Power Plant, Hawaii - Power Technology (power-technology.com) The economics might be a bit marginal for such schemes, but I'm surprised that they are not being subsidised, as they have the capability to supply year-round energy that's not relying on the wind blowing or the sun shining, so it's much more valuable in that sense than wind-farm energy or solar.