TheVat

I wondered what had happened in Camouflage thread. Then saw where the poster had taken offense, and retaliated for it. I cancelled about three of the neg reps, as they seemed unjust and based on spite rather than quality of the posts.

As is apparent from this selfie, I had my spouse add some beer to the vat.

Courts are not set up to remedy generational injustice. They can at best handle some of the fallout, like predatory rental practice and eviction, and there's work being done to expedite that. Legislative bodies exist to handle large-scale problems that courts cannot. With laws. Given the gridlocked and circus-like atmosphere of the federal legislative branch in US, some of these reparations could conceivably be implemented at the state level, one weird and histrionic skirmish at a time.

BBrain is just a solipsistic philosophical conundrum and not a serious theory. You can't argue against it any more than you can argue against Descartes's Demon or the flying spaghetti monster. Speaking as someone who used to post as BrainInaVat, I do appreciate Boltzmann Brain as a forum handle, though. Got a LOL from me the first time I saw it. Statistically, the vast majority of Boltzmann brains would see nothing but chaotic mush and internal confusion.

Musk tweeted: "I have this great move that I call 'The Walrus', where I just lie on top of my opponent & do nothing." He later tweeted short videos of walruses, which suggests he may not be all that serious about the cage match. In a possibly futile attempt to bring this post back to thread relevance, I will note that Mr Zuckerberg's penchant for profuse sweating tells me that he, like the ill-fated submersible, may lack the necessary hull integrity. Even if advancing age assists a change from cylindrical to spherical.

I much prefer being a brain floating in a vat. The vat, really. It doesn't require such outlandish fluctuations of entropy or a googolplex of years to first come into being and then another googoplex to recur as that same being subjectively feeling a few seconds later. Even though you don't feel the wait, it still seems tedious. For alpha, 1/137.036, I much prefer the Doug Adams puddle model. AKA the strong anthropic principle. Imagine one of those observerless universes where alpha is not between around 1/180 and 1/85 and so proton decay is not slow enough for life to be possible. Atoms the size of Dodger Stadium that don't last. What's interesting are the ones just a little bit off alpha, like 1/134. Could those be comfortable puddles, too?

@Commander has also not posted a solution to the "line n grid" puzzle.

Next in the series? Thor witty Existen Get hi Rufo ....

Sinema loves attention (she used to wear a pink tutu to political demonstrations, back in her Leftist days), and acting foolish or clueless seems her preferred method for getting it. She's been receiving corporate bribes since she took office. IIRC, Open Secrets, a group that tracks corporate donations to congresspeople, has consistently ranked her at the top, or near it , in the US Senate.

Civil war cancelled for Saturday. Maybe next week.

Yes, more than one type of selective force will drive coloration. Slow animals with bellies on the ground or near the ground perhaps have less need for countershading. And more need to look like rocks or other non-mobile surface features.

And some Byelorussians are getting stirred up about all the chaos being a possible opportunity for ouster of the dictator Lukashenko. From a Washington Post report.... Losing his Byelo puppet, now that would be embarassing for Putin, too. (probably little chance, but you never know what the chaos of internal strife will bring) Ypa. My favorite news snip this a.m. was from CNN, concerning a Wagner column seen on the move north of Voronezh. Witnesses said they had seen troops....shopping.

I would guess that deep-sea craft will trend back towards the spherical hull, and use the traditional titanium or HY steel alloys. Sounds like carbon fiber can delaminate. https://apnews.com/article/titanic-shipwreck-titan-submersible-search-deepsea-atlantic-implosion-90b9c54c3887c99099170a5afded15bc

Seems like experimental evidence was minimal until recently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countershading Despite demonstrations and examples adduced by Cott and others, little experimental evidence for the effectiveness of countershading was gathered in the century since Thayer's discovery. Experiments in 2009 using artificial prey showed that countershaded objects do have survival benefits and in 2012, a study by William Allen and colleagues showed that countershading in 114 species of ruminants closely matched predictions for "self-shadow concealment", the function predicted by Poulton, Thayer and Cott. If Thayer's Law is valid, then one would expect some predators to favor early morning or near sunset to hunt, when the countershading would be of less use.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.06301v1 Evidence for Near Ambient Superconductivity in the Lu-N-H System Nilesh P. Salke, Alexander C. Mark, Muhtar Ahart, Russell J. Hemley Download PDF Comments: 11 pages, 7 figures Subjects: Superconductivity (cond-mat.supr-con) Cite as: arXiv:2306.06301 [cond-mat.supr-con] (or arXiv:2306.06301v1 [cond-mat.supr-con] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2306.06301 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Nilesh Salke [view email] [v1] Fri, 9 Jun 2023 23:29:43 UTC (1,454 KB)

There were safety concerns raised several years ago, about the carbon fiber hull. And the viewport being only certified to a much shallower depth. https://www.npr.org/2023/06/21/1183408455/titan-missing-submarine-oceangate-submersible The rating for the viewport seems especially a red flag. From the NPR report... Lochridge said he first raised his safety and quality control concerns verbally to executive management, which ignored them. He then sought to address the problems and offer solutions in a report. The day after it was submitted, the lawsuit says, various engineering and HR executives invited him to a meeting at which he learned that the viewport of the submersible was only built to a certified pressure of 1,300 meters, even though the Titanic shipwreck lies nearly 4,000 meters below sea level. Lochridge reiterated his concerns, but the lawsuit alleges that rather than take corrective action, OceanGate "did the exact opposite." "OceanGate gave Lochridge approximately 10 minutes to immediately clear out his desk and exit the premises," it said. Some years ago I would hear a cycling friend and his fellow cyclists debating carbon fiber. Everyone agreed you could shatter it with a hammer so it wasn't good for bikes that got rough use like mountain bikes. The plus was that it didn't fatigue like metal and it was light, so in theory you could race it forever.

If there were engineering issues with the CC shell, I wondered if the Titan could have struck a piece of the Titanic debris and that added point of pressure precipitated the hull failure. However the location of the implosion is reported as one free of shipwreck debris. Maybe the submersible debris will shed more light on what happened. It is hard to wrap one's mind around an implosion at that depth, beyond that it would cause instantaneous death. So it was merciful, in that respect. What is sad is the confidence passengers had in the technology, so much that the Pakistani businessman brought his 19 year old son.

Of course they celebrate distinct groups. Columbus Day in Boston celebrates Italian-Americans and their culture (in other places, it may just celebrate Columbus himself, though that's receded in the past few years). The same with Chinatown festivals in San Francisco or Seattle. Or the Czech Festival in Wilber, Nebraska (Czech-American girls are insanely pretty, based on reports from sixteen year old me). African-Americans are not just a race (a vague and discredited anthropological term), but a group with shared history and culture that came mainly from West Africa. and endured a couple centuries of chattel slavery. Black Pride celebrates that particular ancestral experience, not melanin levels. It's a distinct ethnic heritage, and different from that of, say, British Carribean Africans - one of whom is our vice president's father.

When I was in 4th grade, I lived in one of the last US cities to desegregate. The change was not subtle. One day, every face in our classroom was white. The next day, there were three black children. Everyone was fine with it, except one kid who enjoyed crushing insects with a hammer and had a virulently racist Dad - he thought they smelled bad. No one paid him much attention. This lack of need is rarely expressed when it's some other ethnic group. Cinco de Mayo street festivals. St Patrick's parades. Columbus Day in Boston and New York. Czech festivals in Nebraska. Russian festivals in Ann Arbor, NYC, etc. Chinatown festivals and lunar New Year all over the Western US. In fact, I seem to recall we had an Italian-Canadian member here who seemed to be proud of his heritage and cuisine. But perhaps he didn't get too carried away and "celebrate."

3) A black bear. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2356845-reports-of-bigfoot-rise-when-at-least-900-black-bears-are-in-the-area/ https://www.iflscience.com/is-bigfoot-a-black-bear-new-analysis-suggests-case-of-mistaken-identity-67308 Bears often stand on their hind legs.

Ok, I see the problem, thanks. Crossing trips to the Marianas Trench and the Titanic off my bucket list.

From what I've read about submersibles, many do have some kind of tether to a surface support vessel, with a comlink and a physical support. But high tensile strength tethers have quite a bit of weight especially as depths go to Titanic depth, and many ships can't handle them. But a lighter weight FO cable seems manageable, and more affordable.

How do you propose to decrease the population of the US? And what are your criteria for "better"?

These ads were not on SFN up until around May 2023. And the planet had a large human population back then, as it does now. 😀 It would seem to me that the site owner made some sort of choice to add these new full page-blocking ads, i.e. it didn't just happen spontaneously. Maybe my question should be what would it cost to not have them.