TheVat

(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.

Been eating more macadamia nuts lately. Sorry, almonds.

The role of mutagens (toxins, heavy metals, radiation, even viruses like Epstein Barr) in oncogenesis is pretty well established. Mutagens can cause mutation in the BP sequence, either by interacting with proteins that bind to the DNA or by halting the repair machinery of DNA. Either interaction can up the level of mutations and prompt tumorogenesis.

I respect that you modified your ideas in the course of this chat, and it speaks to your openness to trying different things. I would guess that the above quote in the OP has, unfortunately, led to the recurrent references to guard towers, barb wire, and other validations of Godwin's Law of Net forums. As you realize by this point, the OP restriction above would necessitate guards of some kind, and physical barriers, given that some would opt to leave for whatever reason. I like the HF approaches, in that they recognize that any person, once they have a secure sheltering space over which they have some control, is better situated to consider how/if they might work on goals of betterment.

Maybe there will be a fileted reaction. Wait tenor more minutes. Is @Phi for Alls sole purpose here to get us making puns? It's a bad halibut.

The Kantian distinction between phenomenon and noumenon still seems to serve physics with a guiding principle. Phenomena, those interactions that are accessible to our senses (or enhanced senses), do not provide a window to the noumenon or thing-in-itself, i.e. that which exists independently of human senses (our measurements). To borrow from @Genady s analogy, it's like observing gazelles roaming a landscape that is entirely invisible. Everything we can postulate about the planet they live on is derived only from their configuration and movements. The mystery inherent in this inaccessible ground of being is what drives some to religion and/or mysticism. If everything we see is contingent, then is there that which is not contingent, that which is eternal and immutable and always true no matter how a big bang plays out?

The release this week of the Netflix documentary on the MH370 mystery led me to think this thread could stand a little updating. The Guardian article I'm linking goes over the various theories explored in the docu, ranging across the plausibility spectrum from whackadoodle to sensible, and also looks at the next of kin ordeal the past nine years. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/mar/05/flight-mh370-what-happened-mystery-netflix-documentary And here is a summary (from early 2017) of the found debris, a flaperon etc, and the locations they were found around the Indian Ocean. I find the debris identifications to be strong confirmation that some theories, like the secret hijacking and landing, or soft water landing then sinking, are clearly wrong. https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2017/jan/17/missing-flight-mh370-a-visual-guide-to-the-parts-and-debris-found-so-far

He was from the beginning recruiting in provinces where poverty is high. Young men in poor families see fewer options.

Sabine has a nice take on all the physical reality of measurements in QM. Getting past the Wigner's friend conundrum.... http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/02/has-quantum-mechanics-proved-that.html ...The problem is now that according to Alice, the outcome of her measurement never was in a superposition, whereas for Wigner it was. So they don’t agree on what happened. Reality seems to be subjective. Now. It’s rather obvious what’s going on, namely that one needs to specify what physical process constitutes a measurement, otherwise the prediction is of course ambiguous. Once you have specified what you mean by measurement, Alice will either do a measurement in her laboratory, or not, but not both. And in a real experiment, rather than a thought experiment, the measurement happens when the particle hits the screen, and that’s that. Alice is of course never in a superposition, and she and Wigner agree on what’s objectively real. If that’s so obvious then why did Wigner worry about it? Because in the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics the update of the wave-function isn’t a physical process. It’s just a mathematical update of your knowledge, which you do after you have learned something new about the system. It doesn’t come with any physical change. And if Alice didn’t physically change anything then, according to Wigner, she must indeed herself have been in a superposition.

Have you noticed mistermack is an anagram of "smack miter"?

You could ask this one: There are several ways to intepret this, and one of them is very wrong. 😀

I found the article, from this January 30. It appears the metric was not based on unemployment stats, but on men who are not working or seeking work or on unemployment rolls. Hence the different number. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/30/whats-the-matter-with-men What should we make of the growing tendency of men to drop out of the workforce? In the past half century, fewer and fewer men have returned to work after each recession—like a ball that can never match its previous height as it rebounds. In 1960, ninety-seven per cent of men of “prime age,” between twenty-five and fifty-four, were working. Today, close to one in nine prime-age men is neither working nor seeking work. In the recently reissued “Men Without Work: Post-Pandemic Edition” (Templeton), the conservative demographer and economist Nicholas Eberstadt points out that men are now employed at roughly the same rate as in 1940, back when America was still recovering from the Great Depression...

His post is precisely on topic and the earlier posts are useful background in understanding glycine's low miscibility in organic solvents. All about the zwitterions.

Donkey is neither sterile nor hybrid. You are probably thinking of the mule, a hybrid of donkey and horse, which has an odd number of chromosomes and thus cannot produce haploid cells for reproduction.

Seemed like it was time to listen to one of my country's greatest poets again - Bob Dylan: Will this song ever not be timely?

Sigh. Thank you. I relied on a New Yorker article for that grossly wrong figure - a good magazine but you really have to factcheck them these days. Now I'm wondering where on earth the writer got that 11% number from. I wonder if that figure was some subgroup that would make more sense. Will delve further tomorrow.

It's a Frito with a piece of the chip broken off. And then got the F out of there. If there's any genetic predisposition it is likely to be the general tendency to personify, or vivify, unseen forces and inanimate objects - as found in anthropological cross-cultural studies. My personal take is that, as we grow and our parents diminish to mere flawed people, a lot of people are emotionally drawn to finding a big sky-daddy replacement. Otherwise one has to face the frightening prospect that, on planet Earth the lunatics have taken over and are running the asylum.

Western food on average travels farther to shelf, and is more packaged and processed, all of which adds layers of cost. A shopper in rural Uganda goes to market and comes home with a bag of unpackaged root vegetables, leafy greens, fruits, dried legumes and pulses scooped from big bins, etc. There is some depravity in the rates of food wastage tolerated in developed countries - don't get me started on fruit bowls put out just for show, or tossing leftovers - but wastage is also a problem in developing countries that still lack sufficient refrigeration and other means to keep pests out of food. I think a broader argument on whether or not western wealth leads to some forms of depravity (materialism worshipped, or ecologically insupportable McMansions, e.g.) could be another thread. The recent homelessness thread touches on disparities in access to shelter that could probably be called depraved. And may I say that Sandra Bullock, whose lovely smile blazes forth in that YouTube clip, does not strike me as a depraved and obese westerner. She is a classy person and a humanitarian who is known for frequently handing one million dollar checks to various worthy charities and relief efforts.

Everything I've seen so far suggests that the low confidence lab leak theory is being promoted in intelligence reports from intelligence officers, and not papers from epidemiologists or virologists. When you look at all the reports directly from scientists in relevant fields, they all state a much higher probability to the spillover theory. If the media is going to jump to a lab leak theory due to scientists at the DOE weighing in, an agency that runs labs like Livermore and AFAIK no bio labs, that seems like a stretch. And the FBI, while it does in fact have access to a bio lab at Fort Detrick, MD, that's just a unit with specialists in forensic research, and not epidemiology/virology. There is a virology unit at Ft. Detrick, but I don't think it is run by the FBI. It is strange that most of the "breaking news" on this seems to be coming from Right-Wing or RW-leaning media, news outlets that have previously fed a variety of Yellow Peril theories to their subscribers/watchers. For example, when I look at a more neutral news source, like NPR, their stories mention that the vast majority of the scientific community do not see the lab leak theory as supported by evidence and as far lower probability than the spillover theory. This bias in some media seems to have led to a cadre of bloggers and trolls who attack anyone who is dubious about the lab leak theory as "close-minded" and "opposed to science because you won't wait for more evidence." The problem is, the initial outbreak happened in an authoritarian dictatorship, so it seems really unlikely that there will be "more evidence" forthcoming that could either support or negate the lab leak theory. And the fact that spillover from zoonotic reservoirs is common and well-documented means that the Ockham's Razor candidate for strongest theory will likely remain the spillover theory. Nothing will ever be proved beyond a doubt, and that will feed the conspiracy nuts for years.