TheVat

Emily suggests that three word palindromes can provide an enjoyable entry level to the craft. Nag, anal Flanagan! Oi, burdened Rubio! Gnaw a wang. Sues Syd, Odysseus?

Thanks to both you and @sethoflagos for... clarifying. I hadn't heard of Flora plant butter - it sounds fairly awful. Though a marketing slogan just popped into my head, "All Flora, no Fauna." The only plant butters I've liked usually involve a lot of coconut oil. From what I've followed of the issues in the US, immigrants seem to bring the solutions to some of their problems. For example, there is a labor shortage in construction and renovation, which immigrants help fix, so they actually help to bring housing supplies closer to parity. (Zoning laws and local politics and builder incentives remain problems) And immigrants provide cheap labor in agricultural industries, doing the hard work native born don't want to do, helping an affordable food supply. Also, UK and USA fertility rates are both well below replacement (2.1), which means immigration prevents the extremes of the inverted population pyramid problem.

Well I do get that some of her claims as to why she helped BP Charlie might have been viewed as rather insincere or even duplicitous. And the unmelted butter expression is familiar to me, despite my geographic limitations. If there is some other layer of meaning or double entendre there, then I will simply wave the white flag.

Thus 150 is catapulted to fame, thanks to this bare bones description. A rock star, of sorts. I found this, "The individual is pinned to the ground quite quickly afterwards," quite credible if this was in fact a boulder ~ 100 kg. Watching the final season of Game of Thrones, it was interesting how they used another projectile device, the ballista. Apparently it was less popular than the trebuchet in medieval times, which makes sense - a springed launcher would probably be more prone to mechanical problems than the elegantly simple counterweight system of the trebuchet. And the trebuchet could hurl more mass, so more useful for knocking down structural elements of a castle. (I suspect the GoT writers selected the ballista because it looked cool, like a giant crossbow, and more suitable for piercing dragons or other moving targets)

It's more widely known now that Trump is a container, and of what. Is that referring to the old movie "Sea Devils"?

Frau Vat and I had a chuckle over the notion that the No Foreign Aid/DOGE Super Lean Gubment crew think the British educational system could use extra funding and input from US. Or that Britain would turn to Turnip's administration to help "deepen public understanding of the constitutional principles, rule of law, and democratic norms that underpin both nations”. "Yeah, teach us poor Limeys about democratic norms, Herr Turnip!"

Well, if one has really run out of land on which to build housing, that would be the definitive state of overcrowding. It seems there are degrees of that. If a country has insufficient arable land, e.g., then more subdivisions sprawling into farmland worsens what's already a bad situation. In developing countries, there can be favelas growing up the sides of hills which feature dirt streets with raw sewage flowing down the middle, shanty neighborhoods which can wash away in a mudslide. If I lived in a place like that, wealthy nations with more abstract problems like arable land shortage would probably look pretty good to me. At present human settlements cover ~ 1% of land area, but I'm sure it's a little higher in the UK. These questions of crowding are somewhat cultural, aren't they? Those that value extensive wilderness and big swaths of natural landscape think the US, with far lower population density, is already too crowded. When I was born the US population was half what it is now, and I can recall people of my parent's generation lamenting how crowded some areas of the West had become.

Not sure what you are answering there. My post in no way ruled out the role of hostile politics, poor agricultural policies, etc. in hindering or blocking food access. I'm quite aware of that, having ancestors who barely survived 1845 Eirinn. I was seeking to sharpen the definiton of "overcrowded," factoring in things like carbon footprint per citizen, global transport and industrial farming, unhindered shipping, and how that can affect nations that greatly exceed biological carrying capacity. I also pointed out that immigrants, often from places with lower carbon footprints, can bring in helpful and much-needed approaches to using less energy/resources for daily life. Another factor which I didn't get into is the degree to which one's geography provides a biological reactor. Some tropical areas can produce more food, construction materials (fast-growing bamboo, e.g.), and other bio resources per unit of land than an area in chilly northern Europe. (others, due to desertification, may provide less) I didn't articulate this in my other post, but sometimes it has seemed to me that "assimilation" might better work in the opposite direction, where those from a culture with less material goods and high-carbon diets might be the one for multigeneration "natives" to take onboard. As a mostly-vegan (occasional pescetarian), I am sort of disappointed when immigrants from vegetarian cultures settle in red meat countries and "assimilate" by loading their plates with meat dishes and shrugging off the old traditions. I'm not judging, just wishing the cultural gravity pulled the other direction. I'm not sure, but I might be the only current member who has worked in a slaughterhouse/meat packing plant, and had some visceral experience (sometimes literally) of what goes on to put a steak on your plate. When Frau Vat and I were young (several centuries ago, it seems like), we had some finesse with seeing through divisiveness but often only at the lofty level where it's not as useful as sympathetic understanding of your immediate neighbors. This was brought home to us by a year in married student housing at a large university with a large international student population, when the ME family above us decided to eat a goat and invite people over to share. The goat was brought out on their balcony and its throat slit. It seemed they had not fully prepared for the volume of blood that would flow out and so my (then 2 year old) son was somewhat mystified by this stream of goat blood coming down from overhead splattering over our walkway and immediately drawing thousands of flies. This is the sort of scenario where cultural openness and tolerance falters. It all worked itself out, actually with a considerable amount of amusement - some things are so "over the top" all you can do is laugh. The neighbors, to their credit, realized they had somewhat miscalculated and stepped on some toes, and by the end of the academic year we could all chuckle about it. Especially over the look on the housing complex manager's face when he arrived on the scene. On one other occasion where a goat was in need of sacrificing, the manager did find a suitable location and a way to bend the health laws so long as they were tidier about it.

Side note, which is that viable populations of nations are not tied to biological carrying capacities as they were pre industrial revolution. For sure, remove fossil fuels, cheap fertilizer and global transport and places like UK or Belgium would see mass starvation while Oregon (roughly same land area as UK, but with 1/18 of the population) would probably do okay. Such matters of carrying capacity are more relevant when modern nations are blockaded. Given that a lot of immigrants to the UK or EU or US are from cultures where personal carbon footprint is massively lower, they would seem to bring some useful perspectives to the crowded wealthy places. @sethoflagos 's life experience, moving between the poles of Nigeria and England, certainly added something to this discussion.

I really enjoyed the line in that wiki, "Pierrepoint knew from an early age that he wanted to become a hangman..." 😄

Heheh. Well, that's just a speculative leap that the Broadway librettist took. In the original movie script, Audrey 2 was the result of seeds obtained from a Japanese gardener. Perhaps another Asian invader like kudzu? 😉 Not a carnivorous plant, so forgive the OT, but my late father-in-law apparently chronicled and photographed a kudzu vine which grew nearly a foot in the space of one hour, in northern Arkansas. And, one of my favorite bits of trivia: the largest kudzu rhizome ever excavated weighed 800 lbs. (363 kg)

Have heard that mixotrophs (the term for autotrophs that "supplement" their nutrients with heterotrophy) tend to evolve where soils are nutrient-poor. So harsh alpine areas makes sense. Coming up short on N, K, or P, for example, might bring some selective pressure for absorbing from other than the roots. Audrey 2 is the most extreme example, to date. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Shop_of_Horrors_(1986_film)

Reading the Cambridge article, note there's a footnote. Re: I see it's kind of a numbers game. Also in the mix is tectonic movements that cause uplift and exhumation, which can reverse some burials. And how widespread the Silurian civilization was, and what percent of land they used, and how much was in proximity to subduction zones, and so on. I want to dig further (npi) into the possibilities of isotope anomalies, reading the paper a little more closely. I thought there was a good point there about how some industrial changes are self-limiting as societies, to survive, have to move back towards sustainability and hence less impact. Silurians could go crazy on Haber Bosch, bomb a lot of agricultural surface with nitrogenous fertilizers, but then shift towards something else that's better for the watershed. Etc.

Just passing along a message from @pinball1970 that he has been unable to login in here for a while. He mentioned this over in the dot com forum. Can someone look at his account, make sure everything is functioning? @swansont @Cap'n Refsmmat

Emily has spoken out against a surveillance society, albeit somewhat cryptically. "Tele-monitoring is a sign I rot in omelet."

I've thought about this a bit FTtT, and tried to question every assumption we might make about what trajectory a technodevelopment takes. (Also, from a more SF angle, how technodevelopment might happen on a metal-poor planet) I don't know if there are many paths for alt-tech cultures to leapfrog fossil fuel use, though I guess it's impossible to rule out some kind of "artisan science" path which relies somewhat less on brute-force industrial revolution - say, still managing to smelt smaller amounts of metal, tinker with chemicals and make batteries, etc. Without mass production, I would think things like generators (from wooden windmills or water wheels) and devices that could run on them, would be more novelties, perhaps part of special exhibitions. The expense of smithy-produced copper, e.g., would mean that specialty electrical devices would tend to cluster around windmills or dams, as it would be too expensive to develop grids. There might be science colonies, widely separated places where people might flock in from the countryside to observe the wizardry, paying a fee to support it. If the Silurians had something like that, they might attain something which left no trace, as large-scale alterations of the planet would be beyond them, and certainly they'd be unable to develop nuclear technology or industrial-scale chemistry which can leave more longterm footprint. We'd be unlikely to find a copper-wound armature, i.e. EM coil, or anything like that. High tech industrial society, however, would seem to inevitably leave traces not hard to find, as @npts2020 suggested. Having just watched a cat bury her product in the litter box, I do wonder how well tectonic action could disperse, grind up, and effectively hide the tech traces. Dispersal would be especially relevant to the ease of random discovery. Would there be preserving bubbles formed around some tech objects by, say, volcanic events like an ash fall or sudden lava inundation? E.g. could a reactor core, encased in ashfall, in the middle of a stable plate, remain fairly together in one lump?

I'm not, and was just mentioning Quine (often paired with Duhem) as a nod to the need to sometimes bundle scientific hypotheses. And the facts that may come from them. That's really a whole other thread. Anyway, we can still falsify things so long as we bundle them with the background assumptions they rode in with. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhem%E2%80%93Quine_thesis Sorta makes the point about articulating and bundling in all the background assumptions in our statements. And some of them are semantic, yes.

Antfarm.

Fortunately an imperative - in this case telling me to go and mate with a targh - has no definite truth value, since it is not a proposition about some state of affairs in the RW. Now, if we were to tease out implied statements from that, e.g. A targh is a real entity which lives on Qo'nos and resembles a terrestrial wild boar. (which statement, in turn, could imply that Qo'nos is a real planet and the Klingon homeworld and having a culture that prizes insults and so on) Then we can examine a whole web of beliefs (see Quine for elucidation on this, the "web" being a philosophical metaphor describing human knowledge as a vast, interconnected network of statements and convictions rather than a collection of isolated, independently proven facts) that might roughly be assembled as "the Star Trek universe and timeline originating from the OS." Categorizing all these facts as fictitious (and sparing you, gentle reader, from my stomach-churning account of my romantic evening with a targh - they can be quite alluring if you're lonely) then would at least allow us to assert that one premise of Seth's imperative is definitely false: there can be no mating with a fictitious alien animal in any sense that corresponds to the external world. Now, what does a definitely false statement (Targhs exist and inhabit a Klingon home world) imply about truth values? Does it imply the converse, that there are other statements which are definitely true? I.e. absolutely true? Well, for starters, simply make a statement which negates the Targhs are real etc statement... Did you watch "Bodkin"? That series came perilously close at one point to filling a hovercraft with eels. I absolutely recommend this series even if you are not smitten (as I am) by Siobhan Cullen.

Hoverkraftimin içi ilan balıǧı ilə doludur.

Some products also require factoring in hidden costs - like social or ecological detriment from them. Plastic is an example - on the face of it, it has gotten massively cheaper to produce containers, but we're now contemplating massive ecological costs from the enormous waste stream it brings, especially single-use containers. We don't really yet have a handle on the hidden costs.

TIL that Ceuta, Spain is NOT an exclave, because an exclave is a portion of a state or district geographically separated from the main part, by some surrounding alien territory. Since Ceuta can access Spain directly across the sea, which is not alien territory, it doesn't qualify as an exclave. Nor as an enclave, since it is not surrounded by Morocco - though it does share a land border with them. So I was incorrectly calling Ceuta an exclave. (Kaliningrad, however, is one, being separated from Russia by Poland and Lithuania) Since I'd never heard of Ceuta until a couple days ago due to thousands of desperate migrants swarming in from Morocco I didn't make the mistake for very long.

Eva, can I gnaw tit I twang in a cave? Eva, can I drag sad Asgard in a cave? Eva, can I draw "Pudenda had Ned Upward" in a cave?

Indeed. Sorta funny given the breathless claims of AI and smart microgrids that can take renewable energy and set up base power and peak use management. They should be leading on this. As several here noted, there's a regressive partisan political dynamic that seeks to give a black eye to RE.

Conspiracist hogwash. Show us evidence that NASA is doing this. The lack of comment is most likely due to SCIRP being a predatory Chinese scam show.