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Everything posted by TheVat
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There is a special happy feeling knowing one is not part of a garbage fire. Didn't walk from Springer Mtn to Mt Katahdin, but I walked some of it in Vermont and NH. It's all common sense stuff - pick your time (e.g. not winter in the north, not high summer in the South), bring a partner you don't mind having inspect you for tics, bring mosquito repellent, sturdy hiking boots, etc. Keep food in a bag and hang it from a high tree branch when you sleep, never in your tent. Take increasingly long walks before the trip, for several months, to build up muscles and spot any joint/tendon issues beforehand. Keep socks dry. Watch out for the protozoan fiend of Appalachia, Giardia lamblia. Do your homework on finding a high quality water filter that will strain out Giardia - pump filters are the best. Boiling water is a monumental PITA. Ditto cooking. Dried fruit, oat bars, pemmican, peanuts, trail mix, powdered milk or powdered non dairy drinks, are all handy sources that don't need fuel to prepare. Don't gather trail sources of food unless you know exactly what you're doing. Blackberries yes, mushrooms no. No sustained eye contact with bears. Etc.
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Unclear to me what "any background geometry" would be here. As @Genady pointed out, causation can be defined operationally, e.g. I push two distant planets together and local curvature increases in "response" to greater local mass. The stress-energy tensor includes mass, right? Energy density is the whole thing in GR context - rest mass, pressure, momentum etc? I agree with @Moontanman on how interesting this thread is. I wish I had spent more time in my youth on physics instead of counting cougar scat.
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I knew. I was just being deliberately stupid. 🤔
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That is f-ing hilarious!
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Bat chocolate pudding panting with amblyopia? 😉
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Well it is the product of 11 x 22 x 33 so that's kind of cute in a Ramanujan and the London taxi sort of way. Also the product of the Supreme Court staff times an American jury. Also the sum of the "Lost" numbers: https://lostpedia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Numbers This way madness lies.
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They are back. This one is in Wales. I liked the one that was inscribed with the words NOT BANKSY on its side. I wonder if monoliths are what happens when a crop circle maker learns to weld. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-68547161 A mysterious monolith has suddenly appeared on a hilltop in Powys. The gleaming, silver structure was spotted by walkers on Hay Bluff, near the town of Hay-on-Wye on the weekend. Sprouting up out of the mud and measuring about 10ft (3m) tall, its discovery has led many to take to social media to question who put it there and why. Some have pondered whether or not the object could be of extra-terrestrial origin....
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Yes. Everything is just as described, without any semantic tricks or funny math or unusual marital arrangements. Sisters, born the same day, within a few hours of each other, of the same mother and father.
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No. This puzzle is very straightforward - no tricks, no biotech. What is interesting is that smart and educated adults sometimes struggle with this, but often you can show it to a ten year old and they will figure it out. And then the adult slaps their own forehead at how obvious the answer was.
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Merleau-Ponty construed existence as understood through the body. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Merleau-Ponty Merleau-Ponty understands perception to be an ongoing dialogue between one's lived body and the world which it perceives, in which perceivers passively and actively strive to express the perceived world in concert with others. He was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the twentieth century to engage extensively with the sciences. It is through this engagement that his writings became influential in the project of naturalizing phenomenology, in which phenomenologists use the results of psychology and cognitive science. Merleau-Ponty emphasized the body as the primary site of knowing the world, a corrective to the long philosophical tradition of placing consciousness as the source of knowledge, and maintained that the perceiving body and its perceived world could not be disentangled from each other. The articulation of the primacy of embodiment (corporéité) led him away from phenomenology towards what he was to call "indirect ontology" or the ontology of "the flesh of the world"
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No. Same parents = same biological parents.
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A woman goes to a company to fill out a job application. As the secretary looks it over, she says, oh we had someone apply yesterday with the same last name, same parents, and same date of birth. That's my sister, said the woman. So you are twins, said the secretary. No, we are not, said the woman. Explain.
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You Limeys and your fancy pants Universal Time time zone! 😀 Standard Time works well for me and the family - none of us get excited about rising an hour earlier in early March. I would lean toward permanent ST, after digesting all the research presented here. Sorry, golfers.
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MPB is polygenic. One study found at least 63 loci that were associated with the development of MPB, and only a few were on the X chromosome (which was formerly thought to be where MPB was located). I am unclear what "Ys pass it to the X" means, but it doesn't sound like any theory of inheritance I've heard of. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28272467/ Abstract Male-pattern baldness (MPB) is a common and highly heritable trait characterized by androgen-dependent, progressive hair loss from the scalp. Here, we carry out the largest GWAS meta-analysis of MPB to date, comprising 10,846 early-onset cases and 11,672 controls from eight independent cohorts. We identify 63 MPB-associated loci (P<5 × 10-8, METAL) of which 23 have not been reported previously. The 63 loci explain ∼39% of the phenotypic variance in MPB and highlight several plausible candidate genes (FGF5, IRF4, DKK2) and pathways (melatonin signalling, adipogenesis) that are likely to be implicated in the key-pathophysiological features of MPB and may represent promising targets for the development of novel therapeutic options. The data provide molecular evidence that rather than being an isolated trait, MPB shares a substantial biological basis with numerous other human phenotypes and may deserve evaluation as an early prognostic marker, for example, for prostate cancer, sudden cardiac arrest and neurodegenerative disorders.
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As I recall, what I was reading in the studies of student performance was more related to students having to get up early than to negotiating transit in the dark. The problem is that children respond to sunrise and seem to do better cognitively when the light is well advanced and they have had maximum sleep while it was dark or pre-dawn. (the DST effect was especially bad if they were located at the western edge of a time zone, where the sunrise is last to reach) These studies also drew the conclusion that later school hours would be beneficial, even where there was no DST. The Circadian rhythmn actually shifts later during adolescence, so the need there is especially acute. Here's one digest of that research: https://www.apa.org/topics/children/school-start-times
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As Charon said. A change in sleep rhythm is difficult because we get used to a certain bedtime and do not instantly find ourselves getting properly sleepy an hour earlier when the time change happens. Especially in a society already plagued with insomnia-inducing electronic stimulation. Then the waking time dictated by the alarm clock seems to come prematurely.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/13/japan-cat-toxic-chemical-vat-fukuyama-nomura-plating-metal-plant It could be the opening scene from a new Marvel film. Residents of a Japanese city have been warned not to approach or touch a missing cat that appears to have fallen into a vat of toxic chemicals before scampering off. The search for the unlucky feline began after an employee of a metal plating plant in Fukuyama, western Japan, arrived at work to find a trail of yellowy-brown paw prints leading away from a container of hexavalent chromium, a highly acidic carcinogen. Touching the chemical can cause skin inflammation and inhaling it can lead to respiratory problems. Factory employees wear masks and rubber gloves when handling the substance, the firm said, according to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. Security camera footage shows the cat leaving the factory, its whereabouts currently unknown. There does not appear to be any footage showing how the cat came into contact with the chemical, which was stored in a three-metre-deep vat. (end quote) I'm wondering how bad this stuff is. I know this was the chemical that was the basis of a huge class action suit in California, in the famous Erin Brokovich case (subject of an Oscar-winning movie with Julia Roberts), where it had contaminated groundwater that got into tapwater. There's still dispute from industry groups as to how concentrated it must be to be carcinogenic, and also an epidemiologic debate as to what actual exposures were. I would guess that the cat's level of exposure if it was falling into a vat would be lethal, especially given that a cat's instinct with anything in its fur is to bathe itself with its tongue.
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A woman's place is in the kitchen. Katie's true calling is wife and mommy - the Senator thing is just a hobby that the Patriarch of the Home has kindly permitted her to do. Never underestimate the regressiveness of the American right-wing. Sorry you couldn't access the SNL video. If I can find an all-region version, will post it.
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Where I live DST actually increases fossil fuel use for the first 3 months, because March-May are still heating months and people tend to turn up their furnaces upon arising in the morning. Since early morning is when the overnight low temperature happens, this time change moves morning activities one hour closer to that overnight low and so the furnace runs longer to get the dwelling up to room temperature. And old energy use studies are somewhat dated, given that the percent of our energy that goes to interior lighting has dropped quite a bit, thanks to LED bulbs that use, what, something like 15-20% of an old tungsten filament bulb for the same number of lumens. So basing a time change on the use of artificial lighting seems flawed to me. Student performance also declines after DST starts, due to the critical need for a full night's sleep that children and teens require for normal brain function - and teachers report an increase in groggy and unalert students especially in the first classes of the morning. IMO, if it's so important that people can go enjoy outdoor activities after work with plenty of daylight for that, then employers should get on board with more flex hours for those who want to pursue activities requiring daylight.
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IIRC, Y does vary somewhat between human males, though that is more in the junk coding than in the functional developmental genes. Groups of genes that govern fertility and normal development are not going to change much in their number between individuals, which is what you would expect given their critical roles in those processes. Any shift in number of those genes would likely be lethal or at least cause sterility and so would not be passed along. As for the slow shrink theory, I think that is based on a linear extrapolation that has been largely discredited.
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Scarlett Johansson is an amazing actress. She didn't just read some funny lines off a prompter, like some guests on SNL do. She starts with her Katie Britt impression about 2:30 into the video.
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Larry O. has one question for you.
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Scutch is Bermuda grass in American English. Me pop told me that "you have to keep the fescue happy" in order to discourage Bermuda grass from being invasive. Yes. It may be that some areas, where there are longterm changes in precipitation and temperature will lose the capacity to nurture a forest and best practice will be to assist a transition to grassland or savannah. We're looking at that now in areas of the American West, where forest wildfires are bringing a longterm change and recovering the original climax community simply cannot be done. Keystone species are no longer viable in some areas, either dying out or shifting northward. (one tiny silver lining, if I dare call it that, is that grassland sends more solar radiation back into space than forest, so areas may get what's called rangeland cooling)