TheVat

Interesting committee testimony yesterday in US Congress: Grusch told the House oversight subcommittee on national security that the American government has spent decades secretly recovering mysterious vehicles that have crashed on the ground, and has determined the material to be of “non-human” origin. The government also attempted to reverse engineer some of the technology, according to Grusch. And it’s doing all of this clandestinely, without proper supervision by Congress. In the hearing, Grusch expanded on his previous claims in response to lawmakers’ questions. If elected officials had never heard about this effort before, how did it get any funding? The military pilfered money that had been allocated for its other programs. A defense official recently testified before Congress that the U.S. military hasn’t found any evidence of extraterrestrial activity on Earth; is that statement correct? It’s not accurate. Has any of the activity been aggressive or hostile? My colleagues have gotten physically injured. By UFOs, or by people within the government? Both. After not holding a hearing on UFOs for more than half a century, Congress has recently held two in as many years. In that sense, we can count today’s events as historic. But as in the other hearings, this one had no big reveal, no grand answer to humankind’s most existential questions about our place in the universe. The hype surrounding the hearing—and there has been considerable hype—says more about the people who tuned in than about Grusch’s claims. Just as it did in the late 1940s, when stories of flying saucers over Washington state and crash landings in New Mexico captivated the nation, UFO fever today indicates that Americans feel that their government knows more than it’s letting on. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/07/ufo-fever-congress-hearing-aliens/674835/

The deadliness of the disease being treated factors in too. If the drug treated pancreatic cancer, whose five year survival rate is around seven percent, then the patient would likely agree to a drug or procedure with some serious risk of adverse effect.

Or maybe lazy journalism, misusing "extraterrestrial" as synonymous with alien civilization. Given the article's misleading title, no surprise.

Everything is a little easier with liquid nitrogen. Locks that resist a hammer may succumb if the metal is made more brittle. (offered in the lighthearted mode of @iNow - it may be hard to remain unobtrusive carrying around a tank of LN and deploying it) Demo at 4:40... There's also the "outside the box" method, with bikes, of unbolting the rack which the bike was locked onto. https://bikeportland.org/2022/12/05/video-thief-unbolts-rack-and-steals-bike-in-downtown-portland-367879 If you're a municipality or business installing a bike rack, be sure to have the bolts shielded in some way.

From the article... Well, this is on Mars, so I would say it is very probable they are extraterrestrial in origin. 😀

Maybe some esoteric type of event in geoscience or astrophysics? Asteroid impact or something impacting a point on a planet or sun?

A pitbull, chained nearby. Bikes with quick release wheel and saddle. (stops ride away thefts, anyway) Be Paul Erdos (scroll down to "Personality") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erdős

Good post: helpful. Seems more useful when one goes with gender based on descriptive criteria rather than causal ones - on observed phenotypic patterns rather than on the underlying causal process. Those patterns are an ongoing interaction with the environment it seems. And our present environment has gotten really strange, at this point in the Anthropocene.

Just called a spherical wave isn't it? Or maybe one could elaborate and say spherical wave originating at the pole of a sphere. If we were on Waterworld, Kevin Costner could drop a big rock in the ocean at one pole and the wave would travel in the manner described in the OP (in real world, obv, it would be disrupted by other currents and Coriolis).

Think about the handheld leaf rake. Steady improvements for a few centuries and then....Perfect for its job, quiet, low-maintenance, lightweight, fuel-less. Not every technology must necessarily keep advancing rapidly. Some plateau. Wiki "mature technology."

👍

Well that all makes sense, but then why are you participating in this thread? Clearly the fate of the biosphere is not critically dependent on inclusion rules in sports. It feels like you want to have the discussion but want to dismiss the issues. This thread is located in Biology, so I took it to be about the physiology of trangender folks and how that interacts with their engaging in sports. I was not weighing its importance relative to the issues of human survival and sustainable society. I was just curious about people who have made choices of self-identification that are quite different from mine. (mine can be accessed via Eric Idle's The Penis Song)

@mistermack I think I've seen that spot in your pic. On west edge of metro Denver? It had a different joke on the sign when we drove through there.

Thanks, I think the way this was quoted was what initially led to my surprise, because it made it sound like the stat was about severe conditions. Yes, once you include all with managed hypertension, asthma, common conditions of aging like osteoarthritis (something like 25-30 percent of population), and those who have had an extended period of depression, then that figure makes sense and could even be on the low side.

Seems to have some parallels to the Baltimore Affair, back in the late 80s. Cell biologist David Baltimore also resigned from the presidency of a university, was also connected to a researcher who had been accused of falsifying data (though she was later exonerated IIRC), was also criticized for not retracting a paper when irregularities came to light. It's been problem for decades, and medical fields are especially prone to such problems, with all the corporate pressures to find treatments in lucrative areas of research.

I thought several of your observations - the broadness of their category, the profit-focused trend in healthcare, the differentials between regions and socioeconomic groups, and the aging population - all helpful in understanding this lamentable stat. Also the aggressive marketing of cheap junk food. (go to France, hang with the locals, and try snacking on a bag of cheezits - they will emit horrified noises and toss you in the nearest river)(and if you eat lots of junk food you you will float easily) I've seen stark contrasts myself between states. When I'm in the Colorado front range, for example, it's really noticeable how thin and fit people look, compared to rural western Kansas and Nebraska, a couple hundred miles away. In Colorado, lots of bikes and bike trails, lots of hikers, lots of healthy food stores, great variety of outdoor activities, etc. IOW, a fitness oriented culture, and people who move there to be part of it. I saw this statistical study by state, of rates of multiple chronic conditions and found huge differences, with Arkansas at 60.5% and Colorado at 42%. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7199953/ Interesting that DC was the lowest, at 38%. (which may relate to factors like more walkable neighborhoods, quality healthcare, young healthy people who move there to work government jobs and then move away when older, etc)

If it's infinity how does it have an edge? - respectfully yours, Buzz Lightyear Seems like "geek Rapture" ideas always get some hard scrutiny at science forums. The question remains of whether a snapshot of a connectome is merely a recording of memories or an actual transfer of consciousness. I would posit that this uncertainty would make the initial pool of experiment volunteers really small. YMMV.

This CDC stat I saw recently in a news article was a bit of a shock. https://www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/index.htm "Six in ten Americans live with at least one chronic disease, like heart disease and stroke, cancer, or diabetes." This number really doesn't line up with my own experiences, with a variety of social and work circles in five different states, so clearly I have had sampling errors and perceptual filters that led me to think that number would be lower. Either that, or the statistic presented has been tinkered with in some misleading way. (if that figure was describing, say, all adults over fifty, I would find it easier to swallow)

Glad to hear that! I visited The Naked Scientists forum (UK based) for a little while a couple years ago. It was well-run, but I preferred SFN for its wide range of discussions and transparent structure. As for the evil twin website (scienceforums.com), best to avoid. I'm sure some here have visited there by accident when they were on a different computer and had to type in the URL. It is a shithole.

Phoenix, your paint has arrived.

I encounter this argument against a variety of reforms. The underlying logic seems to be that only some kinds of problems are worth solving. E.g. let's withdraw money for treating depression, because they're fine physically and other people are starving or sick. They should just grow a pair and quit whining. You see the flaw there? Just because you don't experience a certain category of suffering doesn't mean it's not a real problem for someone else. Human life can't be reduced to one short menu of problems. If I send money to the Nature Conservancy, it's because preserving wild lands is important to me and I believe it's critical to keeping the planet sustainable, it doesn't mean I don't care about discrimination or food insecurity or malaria.

That last line, from his Princeton roommate, was pretty funny. Thanks for sharing that. @John Cuthber

IIRC, a character created by a writer is part of their intellectual property and cannot be used by other writers without permission. The exception is when the copyright is expired. Anyone can use a Jane Austen character, or Captain Ahab.

What are your specific criteria for being (still) male? Not sure I've seen these in a post here in this thread. As for posting opinion polls, that is what Americans in some online forums call shouting "scoreboard!" The science of gender is not determined by popular opinion.

You have misread me. The nirvana point was quite opposite to a virtual space of infinite experience. It was a conjecture (hardly an "argument") that a consciousness in such a virtual space might reach a point where no further experience was necessary and so would not suffer from the finite menu of experience available to it. I was pointing to our present limited knowledge of what such a being might consider a bliss, not stating that the conjecture was inevitable. It is a possibility I felt worth considering that a being, in the fullness of time would achieve a kind of contentment and cease to see new states as its source of meaning. This is, it should be noted, a philosophy section, so an eschatological meander is permitted. If not of interest to you, that's quite okay, and I am happy to discuss other aspects of the OP questions. (see also my earlier post, above, about the possible evolution of AI to systems that incorporate both digital and analog processes, which could somewhat shift the limits)