TheVat

Respectfully disagree. A sentient cloud of gas and ash is a good look for me.

I saw an AP story this morning about people evading censors to register outrage at the Party over that fire in Urumqi, support the protests, etc. I learned that the phrase "shrimp moss banana peel," in Mandarin sounds very similar to "step down, [banana peel is same initials as Xi's name]". Sounds like there is a lot of creativity there. And some people have a VPN, so they can vault over the "great firewall of China" and follow foreign coverage of events suppressed in Chinese media. Then fire off screenshots to friends. My guess is censors, in these times, just cannot keep up.

In case y'all are wondering where the Drag NATO Into War theory is coming from.... https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/11/17/pers-n17.html (World Socialist Website) I had a chuckle at the bit: And why were they able to precisely target an inhabited building in a sparsely populated rural area? Syllogism.

While I am usually one to lean towards diplomacy, I think this might be a Teddy Roosevelt situation (i.e. walk softly and carry a big stick), given that Putin and his inner circle seem to be inoculated against diplomacy and appeals to humanity. The fact that he has no problem with the new Death by Winter strategy, which is leaving millions of noncombatants in the dark and cold, with a potential for catastrophic loss of life, suggests that it's time for some tough love. If that doesn't mean military action, then we would have to, along with NATO and other allied nations, take economic warfare to the next level. Start turning sanctions not just on Russia, but any nations that continue to transact business with Russia. Tell India, China, Iran, et al: if you support a war criminal, then we will deem you complicit in war crime and slap you with massive sanctions.

I like it, which means I'm tempted by its seductive promise of dispelling illusions. And I'm open to such ontological flights, though I sometimes fly into the whirling blades of what, then, is a field, be it a field of force (a vector field) or a field of potential energy (a scalar field). If everything that "is" is just a field perturbation, or a gradient, or a vector, what is being perturbed, waved, pointed, attenuated, quantized and so on? What the heck are fields anyway? (Rhetorical question, don't answer) I'm saying, mainly, that any metaphysics is possibly hopeless, and that maybe physics tends to attach a particle term to any quantized jiggle in the jello of reality because anything else feels like chaos and madness. Even David Bohm couldn't get rid of solid particles. Still, I'd love to look into any speculative take on a world of just waves.

Thread seems to draw from the long debate between scientific realism and anti-realism (going back to Carnap and the logical empiricists and then onto other antirealist views, Feyerabend et al). The common form being instrumentalism (SUAC). (Clip from SEP, with my boldings) In the historical development of realism, arguably the most important strains of antirealism have been varieties of empiricism which, given their emphasis on experience as a source and subject matter of knowledge, are naturally set against the idea of knowledge of unobservables. It is possible to be an empiricist more broadly speaking in a way that is consistent with realism—for example, one might endorse the idea that knowledge of the world stems from empirical investigation and contend that on this basis, one can justifiably infer certain things about unobservables. In the first half of the twentieth century, however, empiricism came predominantly in the form of varieties of “instrumentalism”: the view that theories are merely instruments for predicting observable phenomena or systematizing observation reports. (End clip) Some empiricists of the more antirealist persuasion would insist that the word "particle" can only mean, say, "white streak in a cloud chamber" and have no ontological force as to whether particle-like interactions actually involve discrete particulate entities. LIke @Lorentz Jr I am leery of reifying interactions as The particle paradigm is so powerful because of its utility, and because it is so hard to visualize anything else, like say field perturbations or knots of field strength or wave packets or what have you. It's also worth asking: can we speak of a truly "elementary" entity as having properties within itself? The macro scale concept of an object is one that implies a thing that could be split, subdivided, crushed, etc. a concept which has no validity in the realm of elementary particles. At that level, we seem to be in a realm where things only take on meaning interacting with something else - in the macro scale, this would be like a table that is only a table when you set a fruit bowl, or lunch, on its upper surface. Elementary particles are bundles of interactive properties - but no substance. They are particles in a specific and peculiar way that bears little relation to the word's usual usage where we speak of "particles of..."

You mean like "Scrotal Recall" ? Yes, let's hope he doesn't mention that.

If there are sci-fi buffs here, any interest in starting a dedicated thread for the genre?

An idiosyncratic list from a film buff - films that provoke thought and explore the human condition via sci-fi tropes... Looper. Source Code. Primer. 12 Monkeys. Ex Machina. 2001. Blade Runner. Arrival. Moon. The Martian. Total Recall. (Some hokey science, but still...) The Abyss. (Love you, Mary E. Mastrantonio!) Children of Men. District 9. (from the director of Chappie, IIRC) Silent Running. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Minority Report. Gattaca. eXistenz. (have to get one David Cronenberg flick in here) Star Trek II (because why kind of cockamamie list leaves out the wrath of Khan??) Solaris (the original Russian one) and last but not least, World on a Wire (Fassbinder, and definitely not everyone's taste...it also inspired The Thirteenth Floor, another good simulated world movie that's not The Matrix but every bit as good...)(am currently watching a German miniseries that also is influenced by Fassbinders WoaW, called 1899, which I can already say I like better than The Matrix, not least for its gritty and haunting sets and clever use of a period drama framing...)

Last I heard, most tic disorders of that kind are related to either damage (stroke, TBI) or developmental problems in a set of control and inhibitory circuits in the brain in the basal ganglia. The brain bubbles with impulses that the BG normally controls and filters with oversight from the prefrontal cortex. Emotions, voluntary motor movements, eye movements, action selections....the BG is involved with controlling them. Most Tourettes for example is fairly minor dysfunction so you just get throat clearing, blinking, facial tics. Coprolalia is less common because it involves the greater complexity of speech actions and therefore greater dysfunction in the BG and poorer coordination with higher cortical centers. No real cure, just management of the particular form and comorbidities a person has. Basically it's an exploration of techniques to instill some control mechanisms in the brain.

@joigus I recognize that Gisin's math would really be replacing a foundation under the building, in order to resolve things like the black hole information paradox. (that does have to happen with actual buildings, like those seaside condos in Florida which are threatened with collapse due to salt intrusion). I admit I don't understand a lot of this... In quantum mechanics, information can be shuffled or scrambled, but never created or destroyed. Yet if the digits of numbers defining the state of the universe grow over time as Gisin proposes, then new information is coming into being. Gisin said he “absolutely” rejects the notion that information is preserved in nature, largely because “there is clearly new information that is created during a measurement process.” It feels like playing fast and loose with the concept of information. As @studiot mentioned earlier, "Maths information is about subjects which are carefully specified. So there is no mathematical definition or description of indirect forms of information...." Yes. The reality of these entities and their correspondence to mathematical models is always questionable. One may well ask after the ontology of real numbers. In what sense does Ahmeiri say that they cannot exist? Like Gisin, he says that you can take the digits only to a finite number in the physical world, like the .49999 that may or may not ever become one half. We don't know if a 7 may appear in the string.

I am familiar with his end of time theory, and would be glad to follow any thread you start on him. And I recognize that formula you posted earlier as Heisenberg's quantum conditions formula.... though time will be needed for me to understand the implications of a revision with a non-continuous sort of math. I didn't have probs, thanks. Still catching up. The Stanford entry is a good starting point, and I will get back to it. If only to get some grasp on what someone means when they say real numbers can't exist inside black holes...as this fellow at Princeton did: Several experts agreed that real numbers don’t seem to be physically real, and that physicists need a new formalism that doesn’t rely on them. Ahmed Almheiri, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study who studies black holes and quantum gravity, said quantum mechanics “precludes the existence of the continuum.” Quantum math bundles energy and other quantities into packets, which are more like whole numbers rather than a continuum. And infinite numbers get truncated inside black holes. “A black hole may seem to have a continuously infinite number of internal states, but [these get] cut off,” he said, due to quantum gravitational effects. “Real numbers can’t exist, because you can’t hide them inside black holes. Otherwise they’d be able to hide an infinite amount of information.”

Hard for me to judge, though the rebuff to David Hilbert has an aesthetic appeal to my sense of the fuzziness of things. I am always finding the concept of information as a physical thing quite slippery, as in the part where the article addresses the problems Gisin has with the universe's initial conditions leading to a block universe... Now expand this idea to the entire universe. In a predetermined world in which time only seems to unfold, exactly what will happen for all time actually had to be set from the start, with the initial state of every single particle encoded with infinitely many digits of precision. Otherwise there would be a time in the far future when the clockwork universe itself would break down. But information is physical. Modern research shows it requires energy and occupies space. Any volume of space is known to have a finite information capacity (with the densest possible information storage happening inside black holes). The universe’s initial conditions would, Gisin realized, require far too much information crammed into too little space. “A real number with infinite digits can’t be physically relevant,” he said. The block universe, which implicitly assumes the existence of infinite information, must fall apart. Yes, thanks, the dependence of intuitionism on time - that statements could evolve towards validity over time - is rather mind bending and I have to acknowledge it could be nonsense. I'm only scratching the surface on this, and want to read Brouwer further to get some historical background. Like @Markus Hanke I am open to all this but need to see what kind of evidence there could be.

Act as if it's extremely important that every human on the planet have a good education, one that sets a high value on literacy, critical thinking skills, scientific understanding, ecological awareness and social intelligence. End predatory capitalism and third world debt. And yes, corruption. No nukes, ever. Value having experiences over having material things. Round up fascists and billionaires and make them into a nutritious protein drink. JK on that last one.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-time-really-flow-new-clues-come-from-a-century-old-approach-to-math-20200407/ (This is a pull-quote, but I have to warn that reading the full article may be necessary to follow what Gisin is up to. I can't cut/paste everything on this device, sorry.) Over the past year, the Swiss physicist Nicolas Gisin has published four papers that attempt to dispel the fog surrounding time in physics. As Gisin sees it, the problem all along has been mathematical. Gisin argues that time in general and the time we call the present are easily expressed in a century-old mathematical language called “intuitionist mathematics,” which rejects the existence of numbers with infinitely many digits. When intuitionist math is used to describe the evolution of physical systems, it makes clear, according to Gisin, that “time really passes and new information is created.” Moreover, with this formalism, the strict determinism implied by Einstein’s equations gives way to a quantum-like unpredictability. If numbers are finite and limited in their precision, then nature itself is inherently imprecise, and thus unpredictable.

Such cornea jokes are the myopia of the people.

Sometimes people get psychology, which remains a mix of art and science, confused with neuroscience, which is more the scientific approach. Seems like there are branches that are closer to neuroscience, like psychopharmacology, where they draw on disciplines like biochemistry, genetics, etc. Other branches, like Jungian analysis, tend more towards an intuitive art of observing a human psyche. There are interdisciplinary categories like behavioral science or cognitive science which, as their names imply, lean more towards the array of techniques called "the scientific method." There's a fairly wide spectrum in how all these branches work, with counselors whose primary tool is empathy at one end, and neuroscientists whose primary tools are technology, clinical studies, and rigorous data sifting, at the other.

Driving a car here in the winter (Dakotas), we definitely put that waste heat to use, warming the cabin space. Recovering heat from the coolant jacket is easy, getting it from the exhaust would not be economical as others have noted. Hardly anyone up here drove the old VWs in the winter, with the air-cooled engines, because the cabin heating systems simply couldn't capture enough radiated heat from the engine through passive airflow. And on hot summer days, the Beetle would overheat and vapor lock.

Count me among the dubious. What happens if a jet accidentally flies through the beam? (Murphy's law cannot be violated) Why wouldn't ground solar arrays with battery or gravity storage (to even out the supply) be orders of magnitude cheaper? A kilo to geostationary orbit is estimated around $7000(US). And they're talking an array that's a km each side, plus all the maintenance, robots, stabilizing jets, flare shielding, etc. In any case, with research progress on ambient temp superconductors, I would think there's a brighter future for grid distribution on the planets surface.

This thread has massaged loose a recollection of enjoying Sam Kean's book, Caesar's Last Breath, which touches on many aspects of gas diffusion, entropy, and atmospheric chemistry... as the title whimsically suggests. I thank Studiot, Ken, Seth, and Exchem for illuminating some of the tricky aspects of concentration gradients and a possible fresh excuse for avoiding retrievals of boxes stored in the attic (not well ventilated, and a perilous trip via ladder is required). I hope I am correct in understanding that the troposphere tends towards homogeneity, where longterm gases are concerned, while the stratosphere is a bit different with a higher ozone concentration.

Not sure what that means. Sorry - a minor language confusion. In death cults, people believe they will die and are okay with it because they are rewarded in heaven or their souls are harvested by benevolent extraterrestrials or whatever.

I think a lot depends on how Ukrainians hold up in the winter. If infrastructure is destroyed to where many are freezing to death and Western aid can't get through, he may feel there is no moral choice other than negotiating.

Doubt it's anything but a cult overfed on propaganda. They might be Millennarians who believe it's inevitable. Somewhat akin to that doomsday cult Mike Pompeo and Pence are members of. https://www.rawstory.com/2019/01/mike-pence-mike-pompeo-belong-doomsday-cult-may-trying-bring-apocalypse/?mc_cid=d1d2f0da07&mc_eid=7bd263b041#.XD4aPp1NIMQ.reddit

I would hazard a guess that many people in the central Front Range area of Colorado are getting tired of mealy-mouthed politician responses to mass shootings. Littleton, Aurora, Boulder, now CO Springs - I haven't broken it down statistically, but that seems like a high concentration there. And the latest shooting, at the gay nightclub in CS, it seems the shooter evaded the Red Flag law that should have taken his weapons from him a couple years ago. I hope this tragedy will prompt some modifications in enforcement of such laws. In any case, heroic job done by the fellow who went all Liam Neeson on the guy - probably stopped the body count from going into double digits.

Fasting for a week, it's not uncommon for fasters to drink lemon water with a tiny pinch of salt. Metabolically, it doesn't have enough to activate calorie absorption (or stop ketosis), and it helps keep electrolytes up.