TheVat

Me too. I think the self-loathing relates more to the feeling that it got less repertoire from composers and less glamorous parts. I'm told it was sometimes also seen as a consolation prize for musicians who couldn't gain mastery of the violin. It is a lovely sound, and I imagine a lot of the oniony jokes are mostly in jest, and maybe self-deprecation. The writer is advancing the opinion that overuse of a slang or diminutive form of a word can debase proper usage. We all pushed back and pointed out how the word cello had long ago become accepted, and the usage should be seen as a normal part of the evolution of language. The same with pianoforte becoming piano a couple centuries ago.

I don't know what Canada would do, and I'm starting to wonder about their umpires. Really weird definition of a ground rule double, last night. It did favor the visiting American team, which was certainly polite.

Yup. Akin to the use of pf for piano, even though it hasn't been called a pianoforte for centuries. The innovation was that, unlike the predecessor keyboard instruments, it had dynamic range, hence pf meaning "softloud." So, yes, we're now calling it a "soft" even when someone's banging away in a honkytonk. I have a full-sized Ivers and Pond upright which weighs over 500 pounds and can make the house shake when a heavy bassline is played. When just goofing off on the keys, it becomes a pianofarte. Old viola joke (usually told by violists themselves): What's the difference between a viola and an onion? No one cries when they chop up a viola.

In the words of Mance Rayder, I do not bend the knee. The elbow, now that a different matter...;)

I could, on the same solipsistic basis, say all existence began in the mid-1950s. Both our claims have equal empirical support, i.e. worthless. I feel like you brought this up before, either here or at another website, under another nom de plume. And you didn't answer to problems of logic or evidence there, either. Like, for starters, why must there necessarily be a first cause, or logos? Philosophers have been pointing out its logic problems for millennia. Quantum physics has rendered it an antique concept.

Agree, and I mos def was referring to O&G in the States. And I know the shift to NG as a bridge has been a major carbon stepdown. My major complaint, as always, is with governments...and their unwillingness to sign and honor international protocols - the treaties which should be getting all global industry on the same page. But that's a bit OT, so will leave that for now.

I had that same problem! I've wondered if the republic would fragment several ways, with a west coast which joins up with BC, and a Northeast with Quebec and Toronto, wherever that is. If BC is taking hipster refugees, please know that I am hip, Daddio, not like these squares down here in Dullsville. I love hanging with all the cool hepcats, if you can dig it, man.

Ok. Will check that out. Though wasn't there this same patter about the need for interim projects while moving towards wind/solar...25 years ago? Seems like we've all had a generation to get off fossil fuel and that steady adaptation hasn't happened because the big energy companies really didn't embrace renewables - it's drilling and pumping that keeps shareholders comfy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Piddle I note that the stream which passes near the village of Shitterton flows into the River Piddle. Anyway, original Marxism doesn't seem much like a religion, even if its Leninist or Maoist offshoots did take on some quasi-religious features. Really seems more a philosophy of class struggle and societal modes of production.

Carbon capture and burial still smells scammy to me. Expensive, and that money is better spent on green energy installations. Pellets are a scam, causing deforestation up and down the Eastern US. "Strip miner" operations are jumping on the pellet bandwagon and using various loopholes to dodge replanting that would match the harvesting.

Well it's certainly been useless in physics! 🤨

So math wouldn't be useful in, say, physics then? Mapping, description, measurements, those sorts of endeavors where math tools are used? No?

I would imagine that, to British eyes, shitton would look more like the name of a town..."It's an hour by train from Reading to Shitton." 😄

I think calculus resolved Zeno. IIRC the concept of limits and infinite series in calculus provides a way to resolve such paradoxes by showing that an infinite number of steps can be completed in a finite amount of time.

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.