TheVat

He's comparing the pursuit of GAI to Captain Ahab's obsessive pursuit of Moby Dick, the great white whale. The whale ends up eating him. Not sure that analogy works well, but I sorta can see it. Edit function really leaves something to be desired.

Toxoplasmosis is a champ. Half the world has it, and most never have symptoms, and it spreads from cat litter boxes. The parasite's survival is dependent on a balance between host survival and parasite proliferation. T. gondii achieves this balance by manipulating the host's immune response, reducing the host's immune response, and enhancing the parasite's reproductive advantage. Once it infects a normal host cell, it resists damage caused by the host's immune system, and changes the host's immune processes. As it forces its way into the host cell, the parasite forms a parasitophorous vacuole (PV) membrane from the membrane of the host cell. The PV encapsulates the parasite, and is both resistant to the activity of the endolysosomal system, and can take control of the host's mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum.

Somehow I am reminded of an old Peter Cook / Dudley Moore skit, in which Moore was interviewing Cook, who claimed to have stopped WWII. PC: I was against it, you know. DM: Yes, I think we all were. PC: Yes, but I did something about it. I wrote a letter. "Dear sirs: Stop it." DM: Thank God you wrote.

Depends on size. I meant mass extinction wallops, the kind that have come every 50-100 million years, most recent 65 MYA in the Bay of Campeche strike. It was really just to example the concept of low probability (within a lifespan) events with very high stakes. The impactors of several kilometers diameter, as in the est. 10 km Chicxulub impactor.

I should have added to my post that avoidance diets are best done with medical supervision. I did mention that in the second paragraph but didn't stress that enough. I appreciate that you did. That said, the low FODMAP diet can be tried for a little while since it still allows a nice range of complex carbs. It's mainly wheat and rye that is avoided during the most restrictive phase, along with beans, milk, onions, tomatoes, apples, dates, pears, plums, cashews, pistachios and cruciferous vegetables. Some on the diet can eat wheat if it's an authentic sourdough, which is more digestible. Oats, rice, quinoa, sorghum, buckwheat, all fine. And there are many fruits and vegetables that are low FODMAP, e.g. berries, oranges, green beans, avocados, chickpeas (in moderation), carrots, potatoes, bell pepper, potatoes, zucchini, sweet potatoes, sprouts, etc. Nuts like walnuts, almonds and macadamias are okay. The problem with lack of supervision is if you don't know much about nutrition and you oversimplify the diet, like just eating potatoes and meat after tossing out all the whole wheat and cabbage and broccoli. A nutritionist can help with healthy substitutions like rolled oats for whole wheat, or blueberries for apples, or bell pepper for cabbage...that kind of thing. IOW, if you are knowledgeable you can try substitutions, if they don't short you on needed fiber, fatty acids, vitamins, minerals etc.

Onions are a high FODMAP food, which means sensitive people will experience gas and bowel irritation. Cooking onions into a soup tends to concentrate FODMAPs and so you are more likely to react. Especially when garlic and tomato puree (again the puree has more FODMAP than other forms) are added. People who have IBS often are put on a low FODMAP diet. You can Google search and find a list of high FODMAP foods to avoid or at least minimize. And be sure to check with a doctor if such strong symptoms continue. You don't want to have some other GI tract issue go untended. And they might also look at other suspect foods like cow's milk or yeast (which were also in that bloaty soup). Both are foods that people can develop intolerance for.

I always feel caught in the middle, when chats polarize along these lines. I'm open to most astonishing hypotheses, so long as there's as a path to clean data, Ockham's razor is handy, and basic logic and probability isn't molested. I would speculate that scientists are more likely to sneer at ET reports, not because ET contact seems so improbable but because of the history of tainted data, hearsay, biased data collectors, and eyewitness reports that always seem so precisely fit whatever popular culture is generating at that time and place. God(s), OTOH, seem beyond the purview of science, so maybe there is less sense of scientific principles being trod upon - there's no data involved, and it's generally understood that someone's god beliefs are metaphysical intuitions or faith-leaps. God beliefs don't involve science, so they don't involve sloppy science. I agree with @Alex_Krycek that, given the high stakes for humanity, if there were alien contact or alien observation, that any such hypotheses deserve more attention even if low-probability events are being considered. Just as with asteroids - an asteroid strike is highly unlikely within a human time frame, but the consequences could be so catastrophic, we really need to know as much as we can.

DK what the AS uptake is with corn, beans, and squash. I guess it's a case of agri experiment stations trying the sargassum out, seeing if there are elevated AS levels in various crops. (and I would guess that different areas of sargassum have differing levels of AS, depending on what blows their way) For the insulation use, I guess the important test would be flammability (or its ability to be treated with something cheap that makes it nonflammable) and moisture absorption (if used in walls or roofs)?

See the post I was replying to. It's use as a fertilizer was under discussion. Arsenic leaches into soil and is absorbed, especially by rice.

Caution - it has a high arsenic content. Depends on population density and winds near populated areas of shore. The hydrogen sulphide releases from rotting are a problem some places. I guess systemic solutions aren't gonna fly, like getting soy farmers along the Congo to control fertilizer runoff.

And yet here are some scientists discussing him, he has several widely read books out, and his seven experiments have gotten quite a bit of peer review. (see my earlier post on those experiments) I don't think he can legitimately complain that people trying to poke holes in his theories (which is the basic and essential gauntlet of all scientific research) are shutting him down. I've heard people in various scientific fields talking about Sheldrake for nearly forty years. Methinks he doth protest too much. Yes. Francis Crick, a towering eminence in molecular biology, wrote a book in the eighties about earthly life starting with microbes that were intentionally delivered by a visiting alien spaceship. He fully expected many scientists would poke holes in the idea ("directed panspermia") and had the integrity to say he wasn't wedded to the idea. Perhaps Sheldrake could take the resistance and critique he receives with similar grace.

The chopper shares the Earth's momentum. As does everything on the planet. If you jump high on a trampoline at the equator, the trampoline and yard doesn't shoot away from you at 1000 mph (460 m/s) and drop you a few blocks to the west. Galileo's boat is a helpful google search.

Still need a clear definition of the "self-regulating mechanism" that is referred to here. And what social science data supports that billions of people can self regulate. Or curb the power of a dominating oligarchy.

I think these are not dogmas so much as false impressions. In fact, there have been research groups, like Princeton's PEAR group, that studied paranormal phenomena. And holistic medicine, and investigation of ancient techniques in Ayurvedic medicine, indigenous peoples herbal treatments, etc, is an active area of study right now. Sheldrake has always styled himself as a maverick who is stifled by a rigid orthodoxy. (sound familiar, science forum regulars?) The only positive thing I can say about him is that he has proposed several scientific experiments to test his hypotheses about morphic resonance. Anyone can look at his nineties book, 7 Experiments that Could Change the World, and try doing one of them. I don't see how positive results would prove his particular theoretical framework of morphic fields, however. They would, at best, show there's something unusual going on, and maybe lead to better experimental setups in the future. Do dogs telepathically know when their humans are coming home? I would think clean data would be really hard to get on this. Sheldrake seems to forget that interpretation of animal behavior, where nonverbal creatures are concerned, is quite tricky and observers can deceive themselves quite easily.

It's possible that arts are a significant barometer. Once people have free time, and there are options to pursue other paths besides getting food and shelter and not getting killed, then arts will flourish (provided human rights are well secured). Several of the metrics presented - civic engagement, freedom of press, poverty eradication, peace treaties, etc - will tend to foster also a thriving artistic life and public engagement with artistic works. Also think @joigus makes a point about autonomy. Small "weak" countries may benefit from doing their own problem solving, without the over-involvement of World Bank, NGOs, multinationals et al. Or crushing debt loads to rich nations.

Side question - in a field theory of gravitation, it is also a fictitious force, isn't it? Akin to a Coriolis force. Mass is distorting spacetime and objects are just following their curved paths naturally (until electrostatic forces in, say, the ground, stop them from continuing.)

I think that "etc" in my comment was meant to convey that the simulation would involve all that and ergo be impossible. So, yes, compression and loss is inevitable. In fact, the perfect simulation of Idaho would have to occupy the same precise space as Idaho, and therefore would just be Idaho simulating itself. 😀 And, as @swansont noted, windshield bugs would be integral to any meaningful description. Perfect. The line from your Coleridge clip, caverns measureless to man, seems an apt and fitting description of the epistemological boundaries.

While I can see value in defining social development with metrics other than capital, this then opens up the larger question of what cultural factors there are in "development" and how they should be weighted. A society built on Buddhist principles would look quite different from one built on Consumerism. Deep Ecologists imagine an optimal human society quite different from Rand Libertarians. Collectivists and Anarchic Individualists see very different goals. Is it possible your Index is imposing strong biases on the world, and focused on a narrow value system?

(posted before reading the next eight hours of postings, so hope not to be redundant) I think the key, with abstraction is to see it as a form of compression. You could say, describe Idaho and I could laboriously recreate Idaho, simulating every tree and animal and rock and chewing gum wrapper etc. on an Idaho-sized stretch of Antarctica or the Sahara. That would be a full and uncompressed description of the Gem State. Or I could describe it by presenting a map, and a few facts as to its mountainous terrain and many potato fields. Highly compressed, quite "lossy." Hopefully the compressed description would provide an understanding of significant underlying patterns to the life and essence of Idaho, which would be congruent with anyone's experience visiting Idaho, just as sound physics descriptions would show underlying patterns to the universe and its most fundamental attributes and dynamics. If my dog eats canned beans and then farts all day, simply describing this provides no insight into the disturbing acoustic effects we experience. Causality is obscured. For that, we need description that goes down to the level of Bernoulli's principle, and the chemistry of fermentation of oligosaccharides. Good description matches abstraction to its proper level, and compresses by removing what is extraneous to the understanding of "how it works" i.e. root causality. Yep! Because models describe causal relations and patterns, not objects in themselves. "Reality" then is nothing more than "what can be realized," and that is a compressed model/map of the noumenous territory. Any reality beyond these causal maps is in a realm of metaphysics and not physics. The word "real" endures so much abuse. Which I suppose is how we get theorists who posit a "universe made of math." Confusing mapping systems with the territory.

It seems worth asking if other external reality modelers can always help us reliably. Another being could appear to agree with us that we've come to a watering hole and that the water appears clear and smells fresh and potable. But it could use different sensory models to arrive at those conclusions, while still using our shared language. It might see "clear" as shimmering purple dots, and "muddy" as swirling pink fractals. Our "blue" could appear orange to it. It might also be able to perceive an electrical current running through the pond that was invisible to us (and potentially lethal) and the perception would be a moire pattern strobing from the pond surface that it called "bleeb" and struggled to communicate to us beyond that it was bad for us. There could even be some holistic effect of large numbers of water molecules that the creature and its species perceive, and found adaptive, that remains utterly obscure to us and all our science. Perhaps it is called "groove" and one reason we find a bath refreshing, in addition to holistic effects we do perceive like warmth, wetness, getting clean, is that water in our bodily cells get more groove. Completely obscure to us, and science as we do it simply never looks in that direction. Anyway, thanks for a thoughtful essay on reality mapping, and slippery things-in-themselves. Or ding an sich as another modeling system might refer to them.

Still interested in a reply. I was responding to your conjecture I realize that nonresponse is usually a form of reply, so of course you are under no obligation here, if you feel the question can't be addressed. I will say I am skeptical that aliens could become aware of us so quickly.

Due to brevity of my post i did not include the obvious, which is that such bans be paired with compensation programs for landlords. I didn't flesh out that post because of time constraints this a.m. Hope that clarifies.

Simple (but take as ininformed) opinion: stop picking entirely. If you want to loosen boogers, breathe deep over a steaming pot of water or tea until things loosen enough to blow them out.

Elder homelessness seems to me criminal, when the person losing a dwelling does not have another shelter provided. Evictions, where the evictee is 65+ and has no place to go, should be banned by federal law.

Always curious, when this theory pops up, how ETs hundreds or thousands of light-years away could detect a nuke test on a tiny ball of rock sitting close to a massive and continuous thermonuclear blast (Sol). I guess one possible is a galaxy permeating mesh of nano sensors - a nearby sensor picks up early testing, passes the intel on to the mesh, and....centuries later, ETs get the memo. So it's a question how the response was so quick. Trinity blast, 1945. Kenneth Arnold sees saucers, 1947.