TheVat

This sentence is either a dull tautology, or you are asserting that a gender transition is merely donning the appearance of the transitioned-to gender. If the latter, you would need some evidence because it sounds a lot like barstool blather. To the first questions, what does it matter? Are other adult's sexual encounters or how they handle them any of our business? Do we have a lot of rules for what prospective sexual partners are supposed to inform us about? Criminal records? Checkered pasts? Previous boyfriends? Bisexuality ? Political affiliation? I think adults are supposed to work these things out. Stephen Rea got upset and threw up in The Crying Game when he discovered his girlfriend's penis, but was okay after a couple days and having a good think on it, and was able to accept her as she was. I would think most good relationships end up there. ETA: Have spent several minutes trying to determine why all the text came out underlined and trying to get rid of it. Finally figured how to eliminate it in my text, but can't make that work inside Mac's quote boxes. Sorry, Mac.

So what is your own opinion on the topic? Would take terawatts, looks like, and deserts that border oceans tend to be that way because they lack onshore winds and tend to rapidly evaporate any water that does come their way. IOW, world's most expensive fountains. A mosaic of indigenous land use practices, however..... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/great-green-wall-stop-desertification-not-so-much-180960171/

My post on the use of tooth pulp was simply a reply to another poster on the type of DNA that can survive almost any kind of calamity. While I am not personally invested in bodily remains being found, I can understand their use in reconstructing what exactly happened. I don't think those who perished will mind if their bits serve a scientific purpose. I hope that speculation of mine is not too empty for you. If it is, you are free to move along.

The cladistic approach makes a lot of things clearer, regarding species and extinction. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/bf00144036 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cladistics (from Springer article) The correct explanation of why species, in evolutionary theory, are individuals and not classes is the cladistic species concept. The cladistic species concept defines species as the group of organisms between two speciation events, or between one speciation event and one extinction event, or (for living species) that are descended from a speciation event. It is a theoretical concept, and therefore has the virtue of distinguishing clearly the theoretical nature of species from the practical criteria by which species may be recognized at any one time.

In tooth pulp, very likely. (I'm a bit late catching up with this thread)

It was helpful when they added "the" or "truly" to the mnemonic, Dear King Phillip Came Over For Truly Good Soup . The addition of tribe, e.g. Hominins, was helpful in understanding our lineage and how we are more closely related to chimps than orangs.

This is not a porn website, sorry.

It really depends on what the taxon is, in a particular analysis. If you take the taxon to be genus, then Homo didn't end when Erectus did. Heidelbergensis followed and continued the taxon. If the taxon under discussion is species, however, then the species did end and would satisfy the definition of extinction. So no one is going to argue these points without the taxon being defined. If the taxon was class, then we could have a sixth extinction event that left only gophers in the entire class Mammalia and we would say mammals didn't go extinct. No. It's someone you can mate with and produce fertile offspring. Horses and donkeys mate successfully all the time. But their mule progeny are sterile.

The Church potlucks are better, too.

I think it was bare serpents, for the Greeks.

Maybe I misread you, but did you mean Brown v Topeka Board of Education, 1954? Marshall definitely argued for Oliver Brown on that one, when he was an NAACP attorney. The SCOTUS decision then partially overruled the 1896 Plessy decision. (iirc, another decision finished off the rest of it) The simplest tap dance I can think of is outreach to those who lived childhood below the poverty line and would be first-gen college students. This would also defuse the victimization narrative from the white rural poor. Where my spouse grew up, at the hub of a mostly rural area of Arkansas, this was a common narrative of resentment - If I were just black, they woulda given me a ticket to U of A! That grievance story has legs like you wouldn't believe. Sorry, the quote above belongs to @CharonY, but I must have clipped it from Stringys post and the software doesn't nest quotes.

I'm a Feces. It's a small constellation located under Taurus. We enjoy bullshitting. I could see testing the hypothesis that there are seasonal effects on people (being born when it's cold and days are short, versus when the pollen and humidity is thick), but the names of imaginary shapes formed by stars wouldn't have much to do with it. And the effect would be reversed, calendar-wise, in the S hemisphere. One of my children is a Gemini and fits the description disturbingly well. I have rarely had a phone conversation with him shorter than two hours. Not well-versed in the lore, but aren't Virgos supposed to be pretty logical? Anyway, yes, rubbish.

Amanda Marcotte amusingly and incisively details Trump's low energy state. https://www.salon.com/2023/06/29/gops-lackluster-frontrunner-seems-awfully-low-energy-lately/ Per forum rules, no need to read this, but it gets at some reasons he really only has his MAGA base at this point and little prospect of expanding beyond that crowd of simpletons.

Yes, similar. And can be induced with trans-cranial magnetic stimulation. Or even much weaker magnetic fields, as with the "god helmet"... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet

People used to grow up in more homogeneous communities, which tended to encyst belief systems. Now we live in an information-rich global village where it's more like going to a huge supermarket of beliefs. 14 brands, 87 varieties of pasta, and that's just half of Aisle 7. For my parents, growing up in small towns on the Great Plains, it was a big leap to go from being raised Lutheran to attending an Episcopal service. For my generation, it was much less a leap to go from Episcopal to joining a Buddhist meditation group.

From a different perspective, it appeared you were badgering a newbie, @Benjamin Karl, who was not making a claim but rather requesting opinions on the claims made in a video. Whose points he courteously summarized when asked to. While he could be encouraged to dig deeper for other sources, I am not sure that your tone was that of a friendly guide in that quest.

There is a sensed presence effect that seems to be generated in the temporal lobe. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-sensed-presence-effect/

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/06/nanograv-picks-up-signal-of-cosmic-choir-of-supermassive-black-holes/ Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, first detected in 2015. But an expected corresponding low-frequency gravitational wave background—a kind of "hum" comprised of a chorus of gravitational waves, most likely emanating from binary pairs of supermassive black holes—has proven more elusive. Now the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) has announced the first evidence of this gravitational wave background. The results and related analyses are described in several new papers published in the The Astrophysical Journal Letters. (....) The idea behind NANOGrav is that as gravitational waves stretch and shrink spacetime, this will disrupt the pulsars' ultra-precise "ticking." There should be a telltale signature in the form of a kind of “shimmering” effect, produced because pulses affected by gravitational waves should arrive slightly earlier or later in response to those ripples in spacetime. By studying the timing of the regular signals produced by many individual millisecond pulsars scattered over the sky at the time—called a "pulsar timing array"—NANOGrav tries to detect minute changes in the Earth's position due to the effects of gravitational waves. It just takes many years to do so.

When your country's name is White Russia, it doesn't help when you want to maintain a clear separation with Russia. Clearly they need to consult a marketing consultant and come up with something less Russian-y. Baja Lithuania?

Sometimes you see the perfect fruit showing underneath some others and you tug at it and it just won't....budgie.

Wonder if one reason the debate over theft v reparation never resolves is a basic tension between the conservative and progressive philosophies. Conservatives emphasize personal responsibility and prog/liberals lean more on community responsibility. So cons are more liable to view paying for someone else's need (if they themselves did not personally cause that need) as a theft from them. That feeling informs their views on a range of public amenities which they may object to. E.g. I get to work on my own so why should I fund a mass transit bond? Or, my kids go to private school so why should I fund a public school system? Or, I didn't get you addicted to drugs so why should I help pay for a drug treatment center in my city? The prog rejoinder to such views usually boils down to Society should try to help lift everyone up; that creates a more livable and safer community which benefits everyone. This difference in perspective is very hard to resolve. In America especially where so many idealize the mythos of the rugged individualist and the Self-Made Man.

Perhaps God has quantum hair. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269322001290#!

Couldn't you just put the credit card inside the wallet and then drag it across an RFID scanner/reader? Just go to an automated checkout at a supermarket where you won't be mystifying a clerk. If any signal got through, you would know it was not really RFID protected.

Interesting to hear of this study which suggests some people may be able to sense a rotation of an earth-strength magnetic field, around 50 microtesla, experiencing a shift in alpha rhythms... https://www.science.org/content/article/humans-other-animals-may-sense-earth-s-magnetic-field#:~:text=A study published today offers,can sense Earth's magnetic field. https://www.eneuro.org/content/6/2/ENEURO.0483-18.2019 Definitely needs followup study.