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TheVat

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Everything posted by TheVat

  1. The legacy papers, including WaPo, have been attacking Mamdani and as the Columbia Journalism Review put it, generally acting like scared suburbanites.... "purses clutched tight to their sides, their hands grasping pepper spray as they descend into the threatening depths of the Times Square subway station, vigilant to the possibility of an attack from a homeless person. These types of visitors, their view of the city shaped by too many urban crime dramas, are common. We welcome them. We do our best to soothe their fears. We even try to gently persuade them to go to Jackson Heights and try some Indian food. But we do not let them tell us how to run our city. " https://www.cjr.org/analysis/legacy-papers-have-been-weird-and-hostile-toward-zohran-mamdani.php The Post resorted to childish epithets in their Saturday attack on the mayor-elect, and I realized it was finally time to pull the plug on my subscription. As the writer notes, the Post is "a paper that has been the victim of an explicit ideological purge this year, in which owner Jeff Bezos made clear that the paper’s editorial stance will now reflect his own business interests."
  2. Indeed. And doesn't botulinum require moisture? Last I checked, baby formulae like ByHeart's are dry powders.
  3. Great critique. I hadn't known about his "9° from the Wow signal" claim, but that alone should unmask him and show the tinfoil. Invoking an instrument glitch from the seventies is almost desperate in its crackpottery. I liked the planetary science adage: “Comets are like cats: they have tails, and they do precisely what they want." And as Wright repeatedly stresses, comets are weird - also like cats. I do wonder why the awkward units, as when determining the comet's acceleration. "the actual precision is more like 10-7 AU/day2..." I would think km/day2 wouid serve, BHWDIK.
  4. The correlation certainly needs a little more probing. Most of the reported cases were in infants not using ByHeart. And I can't find any record of powdered formulas ever containing botulinum. I'd be more concerned about the organic feed the cows are getting. Ever since Robert Bilott broke the PFAS story around the turn of the century, I've heard some horror stories about organic farms using sewage sludge that was contaminated heavily with some kind of PFAS. I hope that this has gotten rarer since all the big penalties and settlements with DuPont, 3M, Saint Gobain, et al. and attendant phaseouts, but there are still shorter chain PFAS out there that haven't gotten regulated or banned. Even TFA, the ultrashort chain stuff, has several kinds of nasty going.
  5. Sounds like thumbnail GIFs that emit sounds. Or maybe not. Please give a plain language description of what you're talking about. Who are you talking to? This doesn't match anyone's profile that is participating in this thread so far.
  6. Wouldn't philosophy just try to analyze the core concepts of causality and address any special problems about feedback? I would think they just try to see that the definitions of fb are a good fit with the particular discipline. An organism interacting with its environment, or a cell interacting with a bodily system, or whatever functional level, would use both positive and negative fb -- often it's about slowing down or accelerating a process, as needed. Fb is when outputs of a system are routed back as inputs as part of a causal chain that loops. An example would be insulin oscillations. I think the challenges are there for biologists but I don't see much call for a philosopher. Causal chains can loop and it doesn't seem to cause any philosophical crisis AFAICT. Not in biology, anyway, or other fields where the thermodynamic (entropic) arrow is fairly clearly defined. Fundamental physics... maybe a little trickier.
  7. TheVat replied to DrmDoc's topic in The Lounge
    My TIL is, boringly, the same. Due to your posting this. The novel 11/22/63 is, as one might guess, stuffed with Jonbar hinges. Thank Ray Bradbury for the term. In "A Sound of Thunder" the time travel tourist in the Mesozoic disobeys instructions, steps off the levitating path and crushes a butterfly. Huge changes, on their return.
  8. You know Mamdani is from a liberal family of Indian descent, his mother Hindu and an award-winning filmmaker, and his upbringing mostly in the Bronx, right? So help me understand what this meme is about?
  9. Well finally I understand the phrase "all hands on deck." Apparently we exist in our hands and this is some kind of [insert gibberish here] which shows that I can't also exist in my left buttock. This resulted in the creepy feeling a stranger was scratching my butt this morning, back when I only existed there and hadn't transferred my existence to my hands yet.
  10. Or it means you have a nervous system.
  11. I was a little late for an appointment this morning, so I took Main Street at around 50 mph, swigging from my whiskey jug, and shooting pigeons and squirrels with my AR-15 as I drove. Given the lack of time, I took the bags of recycling I was going to drop off and pitched them out the window, and the fifteen cans of old paint for the hazardous waste facility along with them. I hope they didn't burst open when they hit the street... but they probably did. Oh well, that keeps the street cleaners employed, right? So I'm practically a philanthropist. Got home later, realized I'd forgotten the 55 gallon drum of a waste oil, but I didn't want to go back and then have to endure eating reheated food, so I just poured it all down the storm drain. I mean, who can keep up with every little nitpicky thing the nanny state forces on us, 'miright? Rules are for suckers and wimps! FREEDOM! Aw crap, I forgot to pick up cat food. OK, they can get along on Gatorade and corn flakes for one damn day. What am I, a f--ing cat butler?
  12. "During the 6 days of creation God placed the Earth inside a black hole to slow down time so the light from distant stars had time to reach us." Given the site's satirical jabs at fundamentalism, anti-science, pseudoscience, authoritarianism, and so on, and it being AFAIK on a US platform, do you think the current regime could have gone after it? I know they had to settle on some defamation suit earlier this year, which coukd have impacted them budgetarily. Also, given the site's role in a global conspiracy to kidnap children and brainwash them with pizza into Progressivism...just sayin'. ETA: the lawsuits might fall into the category of SLAPP suits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation
  13. Just remember, whatever you do, don't cross the proton streams! I tried to float "death penalty for littering" with my city council, but got nowhere. Nobody there values pragnatism. Or, IMHO, proportionality.
  14. I've used acetone, no problems. Scrape first, then let acetone soak in for a few minutes.
  15. Drooling already! I'll be interested to see their take on downward causation and the various challenge to reductionism. I'm also a fan of Sean Carroll's approach and style. Hope to get this read and back to this tomorrow. Wonder what Rovelli would make of this, with his relational interpretation of QM. His ontology, iirc, rejects any single level reductive reality. It's all "perspectival."
  16. The bot was definitely gherkin us around.
  17. MMT, eh? (I looked at the transcript synopsis, not in a place to watch a video atm ) Will try to absorb this, but in a context where it can make sense with respect to the enormous debt of the US and the perils of default (or US spending most of its tax revenues on debt maintenance). Might be separate thread worthy, later. @Ken Fabian might well be having a similar experience.
  18. May I suggest Hail to the Chief playing over and over as the soundtrack? You know, to keep the tone respectful.
  19. Thanks, yes 4-cutter and 4 flutes seems to be best. I have another project upcoming which will likely need a power chisel for demolition so maybe will just get a rotary hammer - will be overkill for drilling (10 joules per impact), but that's what's recommended for demolition with a chisel bit. None of it has rebar, but there are some granitic aggregates which seem to call for the 4-cutter.
  20. I was (I borrow one). It works fine on most modern concrete. But this stuff I mentioned dates to around 1905-1920. I've actually thought of consulting a geologist who lives a few blocks up the street, near a tech school campus. Stuff is like granite. Admittedly the SDS drill I borrow is kind of cheap, so an upgrade might also help. (the neighbor who loans it out is kind of amusing - he bought the drill, used it once, and now is saying, "please borrow this! It will never get used unless people borrow it." )
  21. TBH I thought the first premise such a nonstarter I quit reading the OP. Excuse me while I go climb my Escher staircase and feed the dragon.
  22. What? How come we can't do that over here? We have to issue bonds and run up the national debt. Or raise taxes.
  23. Yes. Look like for drill press chucks. What I've always wondered is if there is actually a masonry bit that will handle repeated use on early 20th century concrete. They clearly used a different formula, that stuff is like neutronium trying to get a hole in it (say, anchoring a new wall to an old foundation). I've thrown away several ruined bits, dealing with that stuff. And I'm talking carbide. I think some of that old concrete requires diamond bits. So, serious $$$.
  24. I did and it was pretty funny. I nearly split my pantaloons. ;) Nice, and now I know Prokofiev wrote klezmer - wouldn't have suspected. Now I'm wondering what American bluegrass and traditional music would have sounded like if all those fiddles had been violas...hmm, maybe such questions shouldn't be asked.
  25. TheVat replied to iNow's topic in Politics
    That is brilliant. Content downsizing is also horrific. You think the brand has kept their price steady, while they sneakily keep reducing the net weight an ounce at a time. Chip (crisp) mfrs are the worst. (a possible joke in this post is someone trying to decide what mfrs stands for...)

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