TheVat

Well, really, contempt for human life and murdering medical staff does have some parallels with Israel's current tactics which are ignoring clauses of the Geneva Convention (1949, btw) quite thoroughly. I know you are a careful observer of news, so you can't have missed this. But I wasn't trying to make a perfect analogy, just point out that saving lives doesn't require some binary choice where the only choices are mass starvation or an entire city is annihilated. Others here have pointed out that there were other options to bring a Japanese surrender. But those didn't provide a way to show Russia how big a stick we now had. I wasn't saying they were completely noncombatants. No city in Japan could possibly have been so, given the massive national mobilization in that war. Again, I was making a different and broader point - that when you annihilate a city, you will kill mostly civilians, and violate that Geneva clause mentioned above. How can we Americans claim moral superiority over the Japanese if, after condemning them for indiscriminate mass murder, we then engage in same? As an American, I've given this some thought, and I feel strongly that this was a barbarous and shameful chapter in our history in which we cannot claim a moral high road. I will simply not validate Hiroshima and give the monstrous atrocity of a nuclear attack some veneer of moral value. That's a Strangelovian step I cannot make, so we may have to disagree on that.

It is the sort of point that dissolves like cheap toilet paper on scrutiny. To offer a quick exposure of the absurdity, consider the situation of Palestinians especiallly those facing starvation in Gaza. Clearly, dropping a high-yield nuke on Tel Aviv would save thousands in Gaza from the kind of death you describe. They will likely be dead if Israel continues its present mode of warfare and obstruction of UN aid for another six months. And most of them are not soldiers who have had some preparation for facing death - most of them are women and children with zero involvement in any aggression towards Israel. Generally, all of these "saving lives" arguments operate on the morally abhorrent principle that "our lives are of more value than their lives, so yeah, let's nuke a whole city full of noncombatants."

I was going to mention this. I experience schadenfreude more often than I'd care to say. And sometimes a touch of weltschmertz. Recently, I was feeling a sort of lethargy and sleepiness which I get intermittently in the Spring. The German word for this is Frühjahrsmüdigkeit. Generally, I can see how Germans have that penchant for fields like philosophy and psychology, because they will develop very precise and specific terms for so many things. To help out those cunning linguists in Germany, I have coined a term for @geordief s experience with potato eating: Notwendigkeitkartoffelnzufertigmachenschmertz.

It is unfortunate that most observation stations have been set up like this one at Hooper, Colorado.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_Watchtower So instead of attracting scientists who can set up proper recording arrays, it attracts the true believers (or tourists looking for something offbeat). Or nuts, e.g. Me too. I figured "providence" was provenance.

Could just be a vestigial thing from parents encouraging a clean plate (or no pudding!). Maybe as we get old, ancient memories and responses from early life surface in our minds. And create such peculiar emotions that are hard to identify. (x-post with Peterkin)

I am curious why you would not answer, if you don't believe in a personal creator being, in the negative? Why not just say that you see God as a human symbol of those moral teachings you see as universal? This whole topic is fraught with multiple definitions, which makes surveys shaky. I wonder if some people who do not believe in a creator being, which would fit the term atheism, call themselves agnostic simply because they can't rule out some kind of pantheism or panpsychism. Or, as iNow likes to suggest, they are afraid of driving away religious people (who dominate their community) by identifying as atheist.

😀 Yep, global shutter is still pretty high-end for CMOS. Generally, phones have moved away from CCD (which do have global shutter) toward CMOS due to its lower cost and other technical aspects like direct pixel access. Generally phone cameras have a lot of distortion because of both CMOS rolling shutter and the choice of wide-angle lenses which leads to barrel distortion. And also pincushion distortion if a zoom is used.

@CharonY I was just pointing out how top and bottom levels aren't always distinctly separated functionally, as in the whale fecal detritus pathway. (also decomp pathways from larger animals) That is what I meant by a loop rather than a simple hierarchy. But yes, for sure there are hierarchical levels as nutrients pass up through trophic levels and isotopes concentrate.

I am not able to tell if it's a cylinder or just something angled to present a narrow side of itself that is somewhat rounded. A photo analysis expert on those five frames would sure help. Yeah, do post more videos/pics if you want. If mods think not here, then maybe a thread devoted to photographic material and its interpretation? I have a photo expert in the family who can weigh in now and then.

Pecker stands in court today to discuss porn star Stormy Daniels. https://apnews.com/article/trump-trial-hush-money-national-enquirer-d44d4a7ce66cc08edb5981b3afb882ba

Looks like a drone that strayed into forbidden air space near LaGuardia. It's apparent speed looks to me like an artifact of it and the plane's relative speeds. I would expect UAP sightings to jump as more people are playing with drones, some not responsibly.

See my previous post. And learn about trophic cascades. The chain is more like a loop, where autotrophs and heterotrophs interact in complex ways. Please read all replies, you can learn a lot.

I find it interesting that many hunter-gatherer peoples did not believe in a personal god, but saw nature as alive, in various blends of animism and pantheism. The notion of a powerful Boss deity seems to have emerged along with more hierarchical societies and, as others note here, used for controlling hoi polloi. As a person in touch with my inner HG, I find the pantheist view to be prima facie less delusional. We seem to be hard wired to view nature as alive, and then unlearn that in western culture through indoctrination. Basically, one can be a dualist, in the sense of attributing a spiritual aspect to matter, without being a supernaturalist. The current philosophical stance of panpsychism seems closer to this, where matter is hypothesized to have some intrinsic consciousness however rudimentary.

We love our carbs! Maybe a better way to get the nuances of food chains is through trophic cascades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_cascade Also, in understanding how large heterotrophs also "produce," look at fecal detritus pathways. Whales have been studied, regarding their importance in this kind of pathway.... https://marinesanctuary.org/blog/whale-poop-and-climate-change/

I should have mentioned that house loads like tv and computers are more capacitive, and motor stuff (washers, vacs, fridge compressors, induction stoves, ballasts, anything with lots of coils of wire) are inductive loads. So impedance would depend on which dominates a circuit. And in houses it is mainly inductive reactance, given the heavy current draw of appliances, furnace blowers, AC, etc. Good question. And beyond me, given am not sure how compressibility is defined in this context. Smaller holes? 🙂 I understand that In AC circuits where there are reactive elements the V and I may not reach the same amplitude peaks at the same time. This time difference, AKA phase shift, which ranges from 0 to 90° - Seth is saying this isn't significant in the length of a house circuit (usually a single phase circuit, unless your home contains some sort of cottage industry), if I'm following this. I am mainly (NPI) a guy with some cable and a Klein multimeter who tinkers with house wiring, so I just aspire to be less stupid and not burn the place down.

Is there a load on the circuit, and is it a dumb load (lightbulb, e.g.) or a smart load (electronics)? When your current passes the load in a series circuit, there is a voltage drop from hot to neutral (the return leg). Even without a service load, more than 50 feet of cable (like 12 or 14 AWG in a house) will cause a voltage drop. Good old R. (well, Z actually, in an AC circuit) The voltage drop across the load is proportional to the power available to be converted in that load to some other useful form of energy. In an AC circuit we speak of impedance. Several factors at work there. Besides resistance, AC voltages have a second opposition to current flow called reactance. The sum of resistance and reactance is the impedance. (Z) Z will depend on the frequency of the AC and the magnetic permeability of electrical conductors and electrically isolated load elements.

It's worth considering that playground social dynamics are not the best road map for nuclear geopolitics. I thought I had made clear that was a thought experiment, or an intuition pump (to borrow a phrase from the late great Daniel Dennett) to consider if a nation that retained nukes could actually use them. And also, if nations with large conventional militaries can benefit from reduction or elimination of WMDs. I wasn't suggesting only one answer could exist. Sorry if I gave that impression. This earlier comment was to indicate awareness that any future is uncertain:

It would be interesting to imagine what other facts would come to light, as far as the conventional militaries and their future capabilities are concerned. I don't know if the Ukraine war would end or not - it's being fought with conventional weapons. And the military budget would effectively increase for Russia, absent the cost of maintaining and manning a nuclear strike force. I've even wondered if all the nuke talk lately from Putin is just hot air, and they stopped taking care of their missiles some time ago. Could there be Potemkin silos, filled with rusting equipment and non launchable rockets? How good is our intelligence in the West? This is all a bit out there, but I try to remember that Russians are excellent chess players.

Ehrfurcht vor dem leben (3 genders, 4 cases, how do Germans do it?).I hope folks here won't conflate that desire to lay groundwork for global zero with a naive sensibility. We all know how far away a true START agreement is, let alone global zero. As that Brookings fellow pointed out, the latter goal is pragmatic WRT to a longterm winding down of proliferation. Why would all those dictators abandon nuke ambitions so long as the big boys have them? Nothing really happens until Cold War (and hot war) issues are resolved with the big three, and that would require regime change in Russia and liberalization in China to even get parties to the arms reduction table. Well that has been the standard assumption. I think maybe we should test that against the current reality, maybe a thought experiment. What would happen if, right now, one of the big three dismantled all its nukes, fed the fissile material into power plant reactors, and said hey we're done. And then, one assumes, put some of the billions saved into more conventional weapons. (maintaining a large nuclear arsenal is expensive)

A couple of cannibals are sitting around, and one says: “I don’t like my brother-in-law very much.” The other one responds, “Then just eat the noodles." When I entered high school, I got my sister's hand-me-down calculator that didn't have a multiplication button. Times were hard back then.

Also an advocate for Global Zero here. The Brookings paper makes some strong arguments for continuing to work on this - the mountain seems steeper now, alas, with Putin rekindling the Cold War and saber rattling crazily. I hugely appreciate your passion on this - the world needs to be aware of that Damoclean sword over its head and agitating for its removal. Bingo. Yep. And that's part of why Global Zero is, however distant, a pragmatic approach to global security and species survival. When the stakes are this high, gambling on continued good luck is a bad idea.

No, but I will. Thanks. Sounds like a less comedic approach to a plot setup similar to Eureka. With possibly also elements of the German series, Dark. You are welcome. A really unusual neo-noir. People who knew her have speculated that the author of the originating book, The Talented Mr Ripley, was a nonviolent sociopath - this would not always be for me a plus in an author, but Ms Highsmith also happened to be a brilliant writer and it seems possible her own worldview added to the story's realism. (I looked for a What are you Watching thread but didn't see one, so apologies if this is too much digression for TIL thread)

I don't know if concerns about radionuclide residues and their longevity (iodine 131 is brief, 8 day HL, cesium 137 is a 30 year HL) are still the main locus of concern about nuclear weapons. At least not since the TTAPS paper (and Sagan's popularized version which appeared in Parade Magazine) drew wide public attention to sweeping ecological and climatic changes from even a quite limited nuclear exchange. IIRC that paper, detailing the nuclear winter scenario (prolonged dust and smoke, a precipitous drop in Earth's temperatures and widespread failure of crops, leading to massive famine, etc) was what gave momentum to the Nuclear Freeze movement in the eighties. The concerns raised seemed to rise well above the level of phobia (granted, some concerns about peacetime nuclear power do verge on phobic). Again, we have been incredibly lucky. And it might take only one rogue general somewhere to fire up the apocalypse. Happy Earth Day, y'all.

I have wondered if the moral equation, when nukes enter into a seemingly practical cost/benefit analysis, changes in a way that is unique as equations go. When conventional weapons are used, it doesn't open a special door through which a vision of apocalypse is visible. To use a nuke is not merely to conduct warfare, but to decide to use a principle of deterrence which, if widely applied, would end us. (there's kind of a Kantian categorical imperative aspect to this) So, ethically, using a nuke seems to require a kind of myopic view of reality: sure, you showed those [insert adversary name here] bastards not to mess with us anymore, but you also crossed a line where the unthinkable is now an instrument of foreign policy. Maybe we were able to step back over the line after Hiroshima, but there's little chance that could happen now.

That it is still possible to find slow television - a series that doesn't have to land a narrative hook in you in the first couple minutes. That takes its time. Lots and lots of time, looking around at everything in sight, no constant buzz of dialog. Ripley. (the new series) Utterly spellbound. Hitchcock would have liked this series.