mistermack

Modern sport is all about catagories. You have all of those different weight catagories in boxing and weight lifting, to give different sized people a chance to compete. And various catagories of disability too. Those lacking a leg or a foot get classified. I would have a category for those lacking a Y chromosome, and an open category open to anyone.

Yeh, that's a debateable one. Powered on or off, the reaction to stimuli is different, you could say it differentiates between the two. But it's more accurate to call it unconscious. It brings up the question of whether sleeping is the same as unconscious. It's really a question of degree, rather than binary.

As far as the OP goes, I find it a huge word-salade, full of statements with fuzzy meanings and impossible to follow. The first two definitions of intelligence and consciousness I find weird and unclear, and certainly not self evident. If it's not self-evident, then you need to establish it from basic self-evident principles. Consciousness is a word. But unlike other words, it doesn't have a meaning that's blindingly obvious. I had a look at the wikipedia definition, and they seem to be describing the human experience of consciousness, which is a bit specialised. For me, the meaning comes from the contrast between being conscious and unconscious. Describe the difference, and that's what consciousness is. I think awareness of self is a highly developed state of consciousness, it's not necessary or vital for consciousness to exist, just as anti-lock braking isn't necessary for a car to exist. Artificial consciousness is here and working as far as I'm concerned. My computer is conscious of my mouse and keyboard input, it's conscious of what programs have been opened and closed, my monitor is conscious of what's coming or not coming down the cable, and whether it is powered on or not. Animal consciousness is just a huge increase in the range of stimuli that are monitored, and how they are processed. But at the end of the day, the difference between a conscious rat, and an unconscious rat, is the level of reaction to stimuli, and the amount of processing going on.

Diet is one aspect. There is evidence that it's not just your diet, but the diet of your parents, and even grandparents, that can affect your physical development. Thats why you see each generation getting a bit bigger and taller. And in sports where the difference between gold and bronze can be half a second, or even tenths, then factors like that can make a difference. But it's easy to get things wrong. I'm about 70. I can remember, back in the 1970s it was widely stated by people who really knew their boxing, that there would never be another white heavyweight champion. And it look at the time that it was stating the obvious. The domination of the heavyweight class by people of African descent was so great, that nobody dreamed that it might change. But that's gone out of the window now. It's tempting to say the same thing about sprinting today. It might even be true. But the chances are, someone will come along and blow it out of the window.

I do get the argument that villifying the other side might be counter productive, that it might make them more determined than ever that there should be no movement towards any kind of gun control. It might be true. It's hard to forecast that kind of impasse. But if you look at the example of apartheid in South Africa, all of those arguments were made at the time and were quite persuasive. It seemed like the entrenched white south african devotion to "seperate development" was unshakable. But in the end, the sheer contempt of the rest of the world and the constant expression of it DID break through the determination not to move. And I'm pretty sure that being nicer, and friendly debate with the pro-apartheid faction would never have caused a shift. In the end, nobody knows what will or will not work. You have to take a punt. Where a country is run by a small loony band, like North Korea, then what the world thinks is of no interest to them at all, and isn't going to make any difference. But with the US, I think that public pressure can slowly change things. After all, you no longer have whites-only cafes or toilets. It did change, even though it was slow.

Exactly the same reason we do. To keep up with the neighbours.

That actually raises another question. How could a water-living intelligent creature ever work with metals or plastics in the way that we can? It pretty much excludes planets or moons that have full covering of water or ice from ever doing technology, as least in the way that we have done it. If you can't work metals or plastics you might as well not even start. Imagine there was no land, but in the water, there were super-intelligent dolphins, far brainier than us. How do they go about making a transmitter? Or even just a tv or a vacuum cleaner?

The other really weird thing that's happened to me was a hallucination, I know that. Apart from dreams, it's the only one I've ever had, but it was astoundingly real at the time. I was in Ireland on holiday, I was on my own, fishing for trout along the local small river. I was on my way home, walking along a narrow leafy country lane, and coming up to a sharp bend, I could hear, absolutely clearly, a full marching band, coming towards me, but out of sight, around the bend. The sound was so loud, and so crystal clear, that I kept in to the side of the road as I walked, to give them room to pass. I was amazed that there was a marching band, out in the middle of nowhere, but if you hear it so clearly, you don't question it. But as I went further round the bend, expecting to pass them, the sound sort of tailed off, and it became the sound of a waterfall that was right there next to the road. The further I went, the more it was the waterfall making the noise, and by the time I got level, there was no marching band at all. It had been so real, I was absolutely stunned, asking myself, "did I hear that, or imagine it?" so I decided to walk back around the bend, and sure enough, there was the sound of the marching band, absolutely clear. I walked back again, and again it faded and became the waterfall noise. I was so amazed , I repeated going back and forwards slower and slower, and the effect gradually faded, as I concentrated on what I was actually hearing, so that after three or four repeats, I stopped hearing it. What stunned me was the sheer clarity of the experience. The real sound of the waterfall obviously sparked off something in my brain, and the brain filled in the missing detail to an amazing degree. I know it can't have been anything spooky, because I recognised the tune later, and it was a tune from a tv commercial for Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes, a real rousing military marching tune that was a popular ad at the time. Not a likely choice for spooks. There was no drug or alcohol connection, I was stone cold sober, so although I didn't see anything, I can appreciate just how real a hallucination can feel. If it wasn't for the postscript of the girl, and her Sfarts, I would 100% put my friend's experience down to a hallucination sparked by a trick of the light, or possibly sparked by an owl, gliding across the road. The gliding bit does sound a bit owl like, but it's stretching credulity for people on Haresfield Beacon to be having the same hallucination, and often enough to be giving it a name.

The freakishness of our species doesn't begin and end with the big brain, either. It doesn't feel freakish to us, but walking on two legs was an incredibly unlikely adaptation. Take away birds, which are a special case with the wings, and there's nothing on Earth like us. And it was the change to habitual bipedalism that led directly to evolving the big brain. The fossils show that we first became upright, and then started the brain expansion. So you have not one freakish development, but two, and without one or the other, we would just be still apes in Africa, rooting around for our next meal. And of course, you have to multiply the odds against either happening together, to get an idea of just how unlikely our path to a technological civilization really was.

I've posted this before on another thread, but I think it's relevant to this one. Living on this Earth, with a sample size of one to go by, it's very tempting to get a false idea of the likelihood of intelligent life-forms capable of technology evolving. We are so used to being human, in a human world, that we end up thinking that we are normal, and therefore, there's no reason something like us wouldn't arise on another planet. But the truth is that we humans are anything but normal, we are absolute freaks, when it comes to intelligence. Our nearest cousins have brains just a third the size of ours. And most of their brains are just there for the minimum bodily functions of living. The reasoning part of our brains is at least five or six times that of a chimpanzee. And our cerebral cortex is also twice as densly packed with cells, and the way that the cells are networked are also quite different. So even compared to our nearest relative, who is sometimes classed as the same species as us, the difference in intelligence and reasoning power is truly gigantic and freakish. If you picture an Earth without humans, if we freaks had never evolved, or had become extinct, then you have a planet where the chimpanzee is the ultimate in intelligence. And if you go back seven million years, to our last common ancestor with the chimpanzee, you are looking at an animal that has roughly the same brain power as today's chimpanzee. In other words, the chimpanzees, gorillas and orangs have not really evolved any more intelligence in the last seven to ten million years. They seem to have reached a plateau. It may be that normal evolution only goes so far and no further in the intelligence stakes. Just far enough to ensure the maintenance of population levels. The same might apply on other planets. There might be billions of planets out there, with animals like chimps and dolphins at the top of the intelligence ladder, but none, or nearly none, with the equivalent of humans. And having read qute a lot on the evolution of humans, I think that could be a very likely picture. We really ARE freakish, in so many ways.

I've often puzzled over that story, and how it can be explained. I don't believe in spooky creatures, but it did happen as I said. I noticed a while back that she definitely said Sfart, but that svart is a germanic or swedish word meaning black. And the description is definitely of something black. I doubt that she would have known that, so there must be more people than her who have heard the story, and come up with the name. My own "best" guess would be that there are people going out at night, setting up some sort of rig to perpetuate this myth. A bit like the crop circle people. If they are, they must be very dedicated, to hang around a deserted old church yard at 2 in the morning, to wait for a car, to give people a fright. It's not a very likely picture, but I can't do any better.

This qualifies as spooky, every word is true as I experienced it, though you can make of it what you like. I treat it as a mystery, not proof of spooks. This is one of only two "odd" things I've ever experienced. Odd it certainly was. But it didn't strictly happen to me. I'm including it here because I was sitting right next to the guy it happened to. The two of us had been to a nightclub disco in Nailsworth in the Cotteswold hills. We were travelling home at about two am, the road was completely empty. We'd had a few drinks, nothing excessive, and I was driving, he was in the front passenger seat. I have to mention now that my friend was 0% superstitious, a totally non religious, non-superstitious individual, and I'd known him years. He was a down-to-earth son of a farmer. As we drove, along the tops of the local hills, I was looking ahead and noticed how much like an arch the trees were, above the road, in my headlights. I was looking up, admiring that arch effect. Suddenly my friend sat bolt upright, and shouted "what the fuck was that?" at the top of his voice. Then he shouted "stop the car, stop the car!!" I stopped and asked him what the hell he was talking about. He was saying "didn't you see it? You must have seen it" and stuff like that. I said "see what? I didn't see anything". He said that a weird little creature crossed the road, right in front of the car. He kept saying I must have seen it, but I saw nothing. I know I was looking up at the arch above the road made by the trees, right at that instant. He sounded so genuinely shocked, I asked what it was like, and he said that it was 'horrible', less than a meter in height, black, shiny, and smooth, with a body rising to a peak at the front, and then gradually flowing down towards the rear end. And he said it didn't run, like an animal, it "flowed" across the road, and "glided" up, and over the stone wall. I was laughing at him, and ribbing him, but he was really shaken. I said, OK, lets back up and have a look. So I reversed up about 100 meters, to where he swore it happened, and he pointed to a wall on our right, and said it came from there, and then pointed at another wall on our left, and said that it disappeared over that wall. With me still taking the mickey, we got out of the car, and walked up to the wall it disappeared over. It was very very dark, no moon or street light, just my headlights pointing down the road, so I couldn't see much to start with, but when my eyes got used to the dark, we could see that there were gravestones, and then I made out the shape of an old church. I have to admit, my confidence was a bit rocked then, but I still took the mick, and told him it must have been the devil, and we both ended up standing on top of the wall, shouting "come on out, you bastard". Pure bravado, fuelled by a few pints of beer. Anyway, nothing 'came out', and we got back in the car and drove on home. Nothing more happened, except that when I called at his house the next day, his girlfriend asked what the hell we had been up to, because he woke her up in the middle of the night, babbling about seeing a weird creature, and wouldn't shut up about it till it was getting light, and she got no sleep. I know this guy so well, I know for a fact that he saw something that really shook him. I told him it must have been a fox, but he was adamant that he saw it really clearly in the headlights, and he was a farmer's son, and knew a fox or deer if he saw one. Anyway, that is an odd occurrence, especially if you knew how cynical and skeptical this guy is, but not that mysterious I guess. But the story has a postscript. About two or three years later, I was housesharing a flat, and a new girl moved in. A few of us were chatting one evening, about Stroud, the town she came from. ( not too far from Nailsworth ). She was talking about superstitious stuff that went on in the area, evidence of witchraft and such. I could tell that she was a fairly superstitious person herself. Then she said, "and of course, there are the Sfarts on Haresfield Beacon!". We all laughed at the name, and I said "what the hell are Sfarts?" And she said "they are little creatures that people say they have glimpsed at twilight on Haresfield Beacon. ( A local beauty spot ). I said, "what are they like"? and she said " they are about two and a half feet tall, black and shiny, with a point at the top, and flowing down gradually to a tail. And they don't run, they 'glide' across the fields. We were still laughing at the name, and the description, but something was nagging at me, like I'd heard something similar before. This was a good two or three years later, so it didn't immediately dawn on me, till the next morning, that it was practically word for word what my friend had seen. And this girl had definitely never met my friend, I hadn't seen him for ages, and she had only just moved in, and she came from a town ten miles away. I must admit I haven't got any decent explanation for why she should give such a detailed description, that so accurately matched what he said he saw. The end of the story is that I've asked other people since from that area if they have ever heard of Sfarts, or of weird creatures on Haresfield Beacon, and the answer has always been "no". And one more detail, I didn't connect the two initially because I knew that you would need to drive about seven or eight miles to get from where it happened to Haresfield Beacon, but I looked at a map once, years later, and if you travelled overland, along the ridge of the hills, it was actually less than a mile! Anyway, make of that story what you will. I can assure you every word of mine is true. (although I can't guarantee that other people didn't invent). It was frustrating that I wasn't looking, at the very instant it happened, maybe that would have been the end of it, if I didn't see anything, or maybe I would have seen that it was a fox, or bin liner in the wind. (although I do remember that there was no wind that night) But anyway, I didn't see it, so that's all there is.

I'm not convinced that life would get extinguished as often as they think. I just looked up the safe distance from a supernova, the estimate is 60 light years. Our nearest star system to us is about 3.4 light years, so you would have to be very unlucky to have a supernova go off within 30, even in a more densely packed part of the galaxy. The description of a 30 light year distance supernova sounds nasty, but not necessarily a TOTAL extinction event. https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/safe-distance-from-a-supernova-earth/#:~:text=Bottom line%3A What's a safe,away from the exploding star. On Earth, our evolution has taken 4.5 billion years. But much of that time was going from nothing to the first multi-celled organisms. If you have a massive extinction event that wipes out the larger organisms, you aren't starting again from zero. You have a head start of billions of years, in the life that survived. On Earth, we went from arthropods and molluscs to dinosaurs in a (relative) flash. So a lot would depend on what survives the supernova. If you have deep oceans the chances are that fairly advanced creatures would survive in the depths, kicking off rapid evolution to re-populate the planet.

I don't see why you need and Earth-like planet to produce intelligent life. Any planet or Moon that has liquid water on it's surface is a possibility. Also, what is the Galaxy's "narrow habitable zone" ? I didn't know that there was one.

We have multiple documents on the events of Harry Potter's life, and the miracles he performed. A document is just a written-down thought. If you accept all thoughts just because somebody wrote it, you're basically a mug, wide open to any loony theory. And in fact, all of the documents that you refer to were written by people who never met Jesus. The one exception is St. Paul, who met Jesus "in a vision". Your documents are worthless as evidence.

I have a feeling that each balloon gets an internal coating of some kind of lubricant when they are made, to stop them sticking together. Maybe a very fine talcum, or something sprayed on. Just a guess. Have a look at the inside surface of a popped balloon. I can vaguely remember noticing that there is something there on the inside surface. I'm not 100% sure though.

They should have worked. I suspect that something in the bios prevented them from booting. Maybe something needs to be enabled. Did you just get a message saying "missing operating system" ? That normally means that the bios did not direct the system to the drive. I have UBUNTU on a memory stick that will boot to a USB, so I can use that to test if the bios is enabling USB booting. I have noticed that with windows 8 and 10, if you put a hard disk in with windows set up on a different machine, when it starts up it automatically starts re-setting itself, adjusting to the different hardware. Windows 10 does it especially quickly. With older versions of windows, it used to take hours before you got a desktop. Now it's minutes. ( depending on the speed of the pc ). Of course the drivers in many cases would be basic windows ones, and would be better when updated but you do get a working system pretty quickly. I wouldn't be happy doing that though, I would prefer a fresh windows installation every time. Just being cautious.

I've had windows and Linux operating fine from a memory stick, or even SD cards in a usb adapter. A laptop 2.5 inch SSD drive through the above cable would be the quickest though. You need about 20 gig or more capacity for a bare installation of windows 10. Linux is smaller. The easiest way to get a working operating system on the drive is to install Macrium Reflect free edition on your system, put your external disk in the USB, and choose "clone this disk". Select the usb as the destination, and it will clone your working operating system to the disk with one click. AOMEI Partition Assistant is another free one, that will do the job in the same way. They work perfectly for me. Then you just have to adjust the boot options in the bios so that USB boots first. You need to check first that your external disk is big enough to take all of the C drive that you are cloning.

The USB slots are likely to be 2 or 3 unless it's an old pc. On my laptop, the usb 3 sockets have a blue coloured insert, don't know if that's standard. edit : Another option is a USB memory stick. Less cabling and works fine with the USB supply voltage. Might be a bit slower, but ideal for occasional use. https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/QvAAAOSwuAtfSSYK/s-l1600.jpg

Those cables are about five dollars on ebay. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/175241911041?hash=item28cd3b5b01:g:4lgAAOSwH9tiWB31 Problem is that they take the power supply directly from a USB slot, which will not run a 3.5 inch sata hard disk, and very rarely is enough to run a 2.5 inch laptop disk, it's very hit-and-miss. They do usually run an SSD disk ok, but it's not guaranteed. Depends on how worn the USB slot is. You can buy a "docking station" which is basically the same thing, but with it's own power supply. Even these are not brilliantly reliable, especially if you try using a 3.5 inch hard disk in them. They are supposed to handle it, but very often don't. They rarely come with a power supply that's got enough juice for the bigger hard disks. Solid state disks are a much better bet. Edit: As far as speed goes, USB connection speeds don't match the internal SATA connection, but you can maximise it by using a USB 3 slot and ensuring that the cable you get is USB3 compliant.

In a way, Zelensky if very like Saddam Hussein. Saddam had NO weapons of mass destruction. Zelensky had NO chance of joining NATO. Both were threatened with invasion. Both were offered a deal that would cost them NOTHING. Zelensky, to abandon NATO membership that was never going to happen. Saddam, to allow inspectors full access, looking for WOMD that were not there. Both refused, because looking macho was more important than the lives of their people. And both ended up fighting a catastrophic war that need never have happened.

You have to make them a bit more obvious for Americans.

You do know my post was of a humerous nature I hope ?

My premise faulty? Take a look at yours. My wish was that Zelensky had been enough of a leader to do a deal to AVOID an invasion. I never said that he should have surrendered once invaded. It wouldn't be relevant, if he had done the deal. I WOULD surrender if I was in charge of Mariupol right now. But then, if I was in charge of the Russian invasion, I would never have attacked it any way.