TheVat

Icy beards and eyelashes, minus 42 C., Baku to Moscow for first time, minus 35 C. bus wait - all sound fairly unpleasant. When the cold gets to things like ears and feet and hands, the misery is great. I find feet the trickiest to maintain warmth. As, apparently, did members of Robert Falcon Scott's tragic expedition. Any warming tips anyone has to offer (that aren't the usual obvious ones)? When I was a child, carrying a freshly baked wrapped potato was a common one. Handy for at least 20 minutes, and if your mittens got wet or your hands just got frozen anyway, you could wrap hands around the spud. Now they've got the exothermic hand warmers that use sodium acetate or similar. But you can't eat them later.

Wow. That joke really succeeded in going a different direction than I expected. I bet funeral directors love that joke.

A leading cause of habitat destruction (e.g. coral reefs, temperate zone forests, etc.) is warming, caused by CO2 rise. And the carbon rise is caused by a vast array of human activities that also cause collateral damage in addition to changing the atmosphere. When we extract carbon for fuel, boreal forests are razed, mountains are flattened, groundwater contaminated, seashores ruined by spills, and on and on. So, no, it's not a small part.

The demographic transition is so far the only known way that fertility rates show sustained drop. Wars, famines, pandemics, are all temporary and often lead to a reaction bounce later which cancels out their effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition So while we must help that transition happen wherever possible, with measures like erasing heavy debt for third world countries, we need to also get serious about transition to green energy, methane-reduced rice and other agriculture, rainforest protection, etc. There's not a one most important thing that fixes everything

Ha! Perhaps she felt her husband's carrot was in the wrong place.

I used to have a quip something like: what if global warming isn't real and all we end up with is cities full of clean air?

But wouldn't a planet similar enough (in its surface environment and solar wind protection) to be terraformed also be a planet likely to have developed its own biome? It might take a lot of searching to find sterile planets that also happen to be in our Goldilocks zone. This is all highly speculative, of course, but maybe survey projects like the JWST can gather more data on Earthlike planets and biosignatures. (Like certain ratios of oxygen and methane, and traces of phosphine, et al). Reminds me of Isaac Asimov's classic story, Breeds There a Man?

I was reminded this morning, walking outside, that -10 F. is roughly where my nose hair freezes and crackles if I don't put on a face mask or neck gaiter and there's some breeze. We are headed to minus 20 tonight, and possibly minus 22 tomorrow, which is about as cold as I've personally experienced since Dec. 3, 1970, which was minus 29 in Lincoln, NE. We children were out that day, but since it was a week night (and school was rarely cancelled there for just cold), the parents vetoed staying up into the wee hours to have the full Shackletonian experience. The windchill tomorrow night could reach that magical number that is the same temperature in both Celsius and Fahrenheit, minus 40. In most of those years since 1970, I did not solve the extreme cold weather problem of wearing both a scarf or neck gaiter, and glasses. Some breath always worked its way upwards from the scarf and fogged the glasses. It was the discovery of the securely fitted and valved N95 mask that finally fixed that. Not stylish, but it does the job.

"Know" is a really vague and context-dependent verb in English. Many languages have multiple and specific terms, like German with wissen and kennen. Wissen is used for knowing something for a fact, while kennen means knowledge that is based on experience and familiarity. This kind of specificity probably makes languages like German especially suitable for philosophy. And if you were translating "I know Hanna, and I know how much Hanna weighs," your mind would have to take the extra step of finding two different verbs for know. (Interesting sidebar on language, given how much it shapes our concepts like reality and the self)

I wonder if there are multiple reasons - and if any one had particular selective importance - that hair remained thick on the head - sun protection on area most exposed to midday sun, sexual attraction, extra cushioning for blows to vulnerable braincase and nape, etc. I would guess a hominin having, in youth, a visible growth that somewhat indicates one's quality of nutrition (thick lustrous hair v thin patchy dry) might serve as one signal of health and vitality in a potential mate. Would be further confirmation on top of other signals like facial symmetry, height, muscular development, etc.

You can get a tan, sitting in the English rain.

Let me see if I'm following this so far: you got a coin sooty and this will get you into outer space. If you send me five hundred dollars, I will propel you into a higher plane of wisdom.

If I can broaden the topic to include other dangers down under, am curious to find out what was the toxic weed that got into Aussie spinach... https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/news/Pages/20221217_00.aspx It sounds a lot like Jimson weed (Datura stramonium) effects, and I hear that Datura has spread (as an aggressive invasive species) to Australia. Here in the US (where it is native, and throughout the Americas), horses and livestock will occasionally get sick from it, and some native tribes have used it as an hallucinogen (carefully dosing to avoid the anticholinergic toxicity) in spiritual quests.

The popular name of that tick seems well-crafted, in getting people vigilant to its possible appearance. I wonder if the greater sensitivity is what SJ Gould called a "spandrel," something that was not initially driven by adaptive needs and was not itself selected for. I.e. the selection process of losing bigger hairs was driven by better heat dissipation during running after game, and the creepy-crawly sensing was a spinoff byproduct that was not itself selected for but, as Gould et al noted, could later prove to be advantageous to fitness. Population migration could play a role in this. A band of humans lives in a savannah where mosquitos and ticks were not much problem (either few, or the particular species are harmless nuisance, and do not decrease reproductive prospects) but it's quite hot. So follicles shrink and produce tinier hairs to help handle the heat, and the sensing enhancement is a Gould-ian spandrel. However, later migration into forests where ticks etc are dangerous, turns the spandrel into part of the suite of adaptive advantages.

I think the early thinkers were evading the question of what the "something" is - leave that to the field of ontology. It only asserts that thoughts are about something, without asserting what that something might be. For some those somethings might be objects that exist in the mind of a deity. For others, they might be somethings that can be later moved from the subjective column to the objective column, agreed upon things in a physical world that lies independent of mind. I'm not up on my philosophy history enough to name all the usual suspects, but I know Kant, Berkeley, Hume, and Locke all grappled with this migraine inducing stuff.

As I was getting at in my previous post, this was simply defining where the starting blocks were for any future phenomenology. Studying subjective thoughts can lead to understandings of how the Self, if there be such, is constructed, how thoughts about objects are constructed, how intersubjective agreements on objects might he derived, and so on.

This, if I recall my college philosophy courses well enough, was one of the major objections to Descartes' cogito. Descartes posited that some "mischievous imp" could deceive us about any aspect of the physical world (hello, The Matrix) and we could only be certain of our own existence in that given moment as a self that thinks. His later critics pointed out that even the self, the "I," could be illusory and therefore there was only warrant to say that consciousness happens. The only epistemically confident statement would then be "there is thinking, therefore something exists." Pretty hard to argue with that. 😀 Starting from that seed, the discipline of phenomenology proceeds, trying to understand experiences as they present to consciousness and how consciousness is directed at apparent objects. Fellows like Brentano and Husserl got the ball rolling with the idea that consciousness is always about something, a quality that is known in philosophy as intentionality.

Always liked John Wheeler's line: Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve. Reality is what's out there. Language and math are mental operations to approximate that. Hopefully in a useful and predictive way.

I think the already low rate of smoking is why lawmakers thought they could get away with this. As @Sensei noted, you would have absurd situations. In 2050, the forty year old can't buy cigarettes. But his spouse is 43, so he just has them pick up a carton when they're at the store, since they have a legal right he lacks. Unenforceable. If you are going to ban something, just ban it, period.

You think you are joking...but when I gave up coffee (dealing with an inner ear issue that caffeine worsens) I came pretty close to that. Which reminds me, veering back to topic, how remarkable I find directional hearing. Quite a neat trick of our acoustic wiring, given the small distance between our two ears.

My thought too. Nanny laws just sweeten criminality. And what about nicotine gum, Skoal, vape cartridges, and other unhealthful nicotine habits? This is a silly law for, what, eight percent of the NZ population?

The lion sucker does sound like great fun. But keep a firm grip as you walk past if you're carrying a ticket or paper money in hand. I think the reality check here, speaking as someone who once lived one block from a high school, is that the world will always have teenagers going through the angry rebelling phase. Unless we want to expend enormous resources prosecuting them all, it seems better to invest in refillable containers and meal boxes you bring to a fastfood counter to be filled with your order. No container, no service. Sandwiches and fries (chips) and such would just be wrapped in a paper made from something like corn(maize) husks that starts breaking down rapidly (but not too rapidly)in the presence of moisture or oils.

Where there's a culture of tidyness paired with a nature aesthetic, positive messaging seems better than the rather dystopian idea of litter vigilantes pouncing on every slob. Instead of bounties on the heads of litter bugs, maybe a program that helps youth make a little fun money gathering litter. More foundational would be, as others note, ending single-use packaging and promoting refillable containers. Well put.

I like the boat analogy in that it makes the point that affirmative action programs were never intended to be permanent. They are supposed to be implemented, I'm using college as an example, to help get minorities who start with some academic disadvantages into the college system. Course corrections on the boat. The idea was always that the following generations, raised with the advantages of college-educated higher-earning (sometimes) parents, won't need AA at all. That was the whole point of Senator Daniel P. Moynihan's concept of breaking the cycle of poverty. AA is a ladder out of a hole, not a permanent fixture everywhere you go. If a smart kid has trouble keeping up in school because parents (or a single parent) can't provide homework help, a quiet study space, extra cash for lessons and tutoring, a big shelf of books, trips to museums and arts events, and an array of other amenities that help kids do well in school....well, it's in society's best interest to give him some extra help, because it's in society's interest to have citizens that reach their intellectual potential.

The comparison is mainly about gender difference, so the key fact is that the female heart is smaller in proportion to total blood volume than in men, therefore needs to beat more frequently to circulate that volume of blood. Age is less relevant, given that the heart grows as the whole body and its blood volume grows. (any difference there is more related to youthful metabolism, as it handles growth) Children's hearts don't beat that much faster, since their smaller hearts are pumping a smaller volume of blood. You misread the paragraph, which was simply comparing male and female at all ages.