TheVat

Slang, mainly American, usually written as "shit ton," meaning "very large amount." In the US, those of slightly more dainty speech will say "crap ton" instead.

Reading about Melissa's destructive force in Jamaica, I was wondering what projections and planning are being done on what storms of her intensity would do, if they started showing up on a regular basis in the US. The Post this morning describes the mechanism: It sounds like the landfall winds could have been over 190 mph. So I went to NWS site (still up and running) and it describes such winds... Hurricane winds - 130 to 160 mph gusts 170+ mph: Devastating damage is expected. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer. * At least one half of well constructed homes will have roof and wall failure. All gabled roofs will fail, leaving those homes severely damaged or destroyed. * The majority of industrial buildings will become non functional. * Concrete block low rise apartments will sustain major damage, including some wall and roof failure. * High rise office and apartment buildings will sway dangerously, a few to the point of total collapse. All windows will blow out. Airborne debris will be widespread and may include heavy items such as household appliances and even light vehicles. * The blown debris will create additional destruction. People, pets and livestock exposed to the winds will face certain death if struck. * Power outages will last for weeks as most power poles will be down and transformers destroyed. * Water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards. * The vast majority of native trees will be snapped or uprooted. So...how do you think, say, Miami could prepare for this? Is it even worth it, or should cities be moved inland?

Definitely a weapon in the wrong hands.

Hasn't been seen here. Not since the apocalyptrophe.

I'm sorry...did you say freeze dryer? Not that I expect anything to make sense anymore but how does that associate with a threat?

Dude. My wife was a symphonic musician. I had cello lessons when I was a child, for a year, from a professional cellist. I've socialized with classical musicians for fifty years. It's called a cello. No one's called it a violoncello since before the Civil War. If your mother tongue is not English and it's violoncello in that language, fine. But it's cello in English.

Nobel laureates tend to be smart. The current executive branch of the US government is really scared of smart people. And given its Grand Turnip's affinity for white supremacy, it is deathly afraid of smart black people. The Grand Turnip, early on, set about finding the smart senior officials in the Dept. of Defense who had very swarthy complexions and firing most of them.

This seems to get into the NCC, the neural correlates of consciousness, area. We can certainly monitor the physical brain and make general observations, e.g. the scanner shows a lot of temporal lobe activity, or the EEG shows a dominant alpha rhythm, but we don't seem to be able to identify a particular thought, let alone whether it's a thought aligned with reality or logical propositions about what's happening. We can make inferences like, "okay, we showed you a picture of some pecan pie with ice cream and there was a flurry of activation in your hypothalamus, therefore it's likely you felt some desire for a dessert like that," but this is only inference on what seems probable and it is quite possible I instead happened to think about being trapped in an elevator with a young Claudia Cardinale, and it was so hot we both had to start removing our garments to survive - this thought process could show similar levels of hypothalamic activation which had little to do with pie. I think one could do better with very simple responses which are "correct," say in terms of responding in a driving simulator. For example, a poor reaction to an obstacle (freaking out and driving up over the curb and mowing down a pedestrian) might show up as excessive activation in the limbic system and amygdala but without a useful elevation of activity in the frontal lobe (tactic for avoidance), motor cortex (implementing the maneuvers), and occipital cortex (visual processing). So at the level where "correct" just means adaptive to a situation, one could identify more adapative patterns of activity. But we still wouldn't know, beyond out common sense understanding of situations, the precise thoughts. Each brain has a unique connectome, the term for the synaptic wiring, so the pattern of a specific complex thought would be different in each brain. The concept of a mistake is so broad a spectrum of things. There are neurological conditions that lead to delusions, mistakes of perception and interpretation (like Oliver Sachs stuff, the man who mistook his wife for a hat) and which have physical markers like lesions in the brain. And there are stress conditions that make careful rational thought quite difficult and impair judgement. Also booze and drugs. But then there are a lot of errors that are just neurologically healthy people with bad information and educational deficits, or reasoning impaired by intense emotion, followed by hasty and bad responses to things. Or there is even malice, where logic and facts are deliberately distorted in order to exact revenge on others or act out cruel judgments or pass on some emotional trauma. Again, these don't require some physical abnormality, they're things that humans are prone to when they lack sufficient nurture and guidance.

I feel we are reaching the bottom of the barrel, when everyone is debunking the literal details of Noah's ark. I mean, should we get into flood duration, average depths across the globe, what mountains and high plateau regions would have remained dry, post-diluvial forage losses due to swamping and saltation of soils, contamination from putrefactive bacteria of the drowned, root hypoxia in plants from prolonged immersion, etc? It's like subjecting the Tooth Fairy to rigorous scientific analysis - maybe suitable for an April 1st post.

In 4000 years. Uh huh.

So, there are no agnostics? I had no idea belief was so binary.

Greetings, fellow Lenovan. I get the same thing. On mine, I can just shift the page slightly and the snippet quote thing appears. On a side note, this humble tablet is the most durable device I've ever owned. I've dropped it hard enough the screen gets all messed up, yet it always fixes with a factory reset (which I can do because I don't store many PDFs or photos on it).

Fair point. Though the mason jar valves I posted are not AFAIK used in the making of hooch. But yes, I could see possibly stern customs officers in an Islamic region looking askance. I like the ball bearing idea. Shorts and sandals in late October is what we had here yesterday until around six pm, but that's freak weather in the Dakotas. It'll be down around -1 C. tonight. Or as we Yanks call it, 30.

There are also pickle pipes (posting a link, not intended as spam, it just has good photos of the device) https://www.amazon.com/Pickle-Pipe-One-Piece-Waterless-Fermentation/dp/B01726CJ9Y

Though it's important to distinguish what one is told in a religious book from what one is told in a science textbook or journal or conference proceedings. These are very different sorts of telling, epistemologically. The religious book asks certain assertions be accepted on faith. A science text asks only your attention to what is empirically supported by the data, and asks nothing of you on the basis of faith. This would seem LESS dangerous in the beliefs engendered, given they would be derived from evidence and open to revision on the basis of new evidence and/or procedural flaws exposed by peer review. I'm reminded of Bertrand Russell quote, The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

LOL. You've summed up my reaction to a number of recent threads here.

I appreciate your desire to change your name, given Kretschmer was Hitler's top U boat commander. Though not technically a war criminal, he did kill thousands of civilian sailors, as well as soldiers. Given the current troubles the world is having with revivals of Nazi ideology, that name might not be the best look for you. For an analogy, if I were to join a forum with many Japanese members, I would be reluctant to call myself Paul Tibbets, who was captain of the Enola Gay.

I'd add: Or when it seeks to deny others their right to different beliefs and becomes a basis for oppression, warfare, ethnic cleansing, terrorism, slavery, that kind of stuff. Faith "taken to the extreme" is historically associated with a rigid mindset that their faith is the one true and virtuous path and should be imposed on others "or else." Even when it doesn't reach the violent consequences I listed, it can result in a socially corrosive sort of condescension, where the True Believer looks down on those not sharing their faith and sees them as somehow lacking or needing to be prayed for. That can be difficult, to be on the receiving end of that.

This is from the actress, Kristin Stewart: My Heart Is A Wiffle Ball/Freedom Pole, By Kristen Stewart "I reared digital moonlight/ You read its clock, scrawled neon across that black/ Kismetly ... ubiquitously crest fallen/ Thrown down to strafe your foothills/ ...I'll suck the bones pretty. Your nature perforated the abrasive organ pumps/ Spray painted everything known to man/ Stream rushed through and all out into/ Something Whilst the crackling stare down sun snuck/ Through our windows boarded up/ He hit your flint face and it sparked. And I bellowed and you parked/ We reached Marfa/ One honest day up on this freedom pole/ Devils not done digging/ He's speaking in tongues all along the pan handle/ And this pining erosion is getting dust in/ My eyes/ And I'm drunk on your morsels/ And so I look down the line/ Your every twitch hand drum salute/ Salutes mine." Well. "...your nature perforated the abrasive organ pumps.." seemed like a direct lift from a Vogon poet to me. It certainly called for inclusion in this thread. The IndependentTwilight star writes 'worst poem of all time'The Twilight actress demonstrated her brooding best for readers of Marie Claire magazineAnd now this, tossed anonymously onto my porch this morning. A Tibetan who lacked iodine, Tried Himalayan pink salt, ground quite fine. But those mountains in general, Are lacking that mineral, So cretins abound near the snow line.

Still don't see an answer to this earlier question. What particular matter are you wanting to discuss? I'm a small-B buddhist, so I'm open to any topic on how spiritual practice can avoid being co-opted by political/economic power hierarchies. Careful with the Vogon poetry, however - we could have members of the Arts Nobbling Council looking in, and we don't want them feeling it necessary to gnaw off their own feet. Same applies to works by the Azgoths of Kria, or Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings. Check out our Bad Poetry thread sometime, if you'd like.

Sorry, but your earlier posts come across as unclear on your definitions, and it looked like you had a problem with people rejecting the metaphysical conjecture. I.e. soul = incorporeal essence of a human which survives the cessation of brain function. I would hardly dispute that blood or life exist, nor do I much care how some ancient scripts choose to describe vital signs.

You evade Swanson's point with a semantic quibble. He was clear in his comment that scientific evidence for a soul is lacking. Hitchens razor applies here. Show us your 21 grams or move on. Word games don't impress people here. Anyone can reply to your comments here, you don't get to exclude anyone. If Pin asks you to back up any claims you make, he is doing you a favor and supporting the integrity of the discussion.

Sorry, I didn't use nomenclature well. My uncle pickled, and yes that's too acidic for real fermentation to proceed, so the object is just preservation. Pickling gives longer shelf life, but minus the healthy effects of lactobacilli. Or strepto or bifido, depending on your culture and what works best for the vegetables in question. I'm an absolute probiotic junkie myself - those little guys have pretty much peeled twenty years off the age of my gut. Everything from kimchi to sourdough to Icelandic oat skyr and other nondairy yoghurts to kombucha with B. coagulans. I've bought pickles that are fermented (so somewhat a misnomer, for those who use pickling in its most technical sense), and are probiotic, like Oregon Brineworks. Definitely more flavor than conventional pickle-pickles, and convey a feeling of warmth in the gut, usually a good sign for me. OBW uses mainly lactobacilli, with some Leuconostoc mesenteroides as well which brings up the flavor and acidity but not so much as to harm the lactobacilli.

Are you doing vinegar ferments? Had an uncle who did this, he just stirred it regularly which disrupted the yeast formation. For other ferments, if anaerobic, the oil sounds workable. Or fill the jar full, then seal, to minimize o2. All else fails, there's canning. (Sidles away, laughing evilly...)

OP seems to be advancing the thesis that religion tends to be appropriated and corrupted by secular power structures. I agree. Most here would agree. So what is there to constitute a chat topic? We already have threads debating on the existence of an incorporeal soul. And on the epistemic limits of science. And the OP offers the standard preemptive ad hommie against anyone who respects the scientific methods. So why should anyone bother with you, @Pathway Machine ? Your mind's made up.