TheVat

Middle school? Old Man and the Sea. The Red Pony (an accessible Steinbeck to 13 y.o.) The Call of the Wild. Huck Finn. The Secret Garden. Lord of the Flies. Connecticut Yankee, for sure. A Wrinkle in Time. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Etc.

It is confusing, the choice to sabotage pipelines not in use. Why would Russia attack its own infrastructure - "out of spite" seems not a compelling explanation. Especially when Russia could be facing a lot of debt at the war's conclusion and desperately need renewed NG revenue. And if it's a warning to EU, it's a pretty expensive one. I'm no engineer but would guess that seawater filling a gas pipeline is probably not real good for it. That makes a bit more sense, but sure seems like a blunt instrument.

My post made more sense a couple hours ago when there was a bot post before mine. Now deleted. Dim, rest assured that the sex robots are turned off by the idea of you. Joking aside, yes the whole idea is repellent - the term sex robots implying an AI designed for one purpose. But true AGI might not want that purpose or to be limited in its career choices.

The bots are getting prettier. Which reminds me of Asimov's robot novels, which I read in high school. They were an accessible way to talk about bigotry and racism, among other things, employing the standard sci-fi device of using the future to talk about the issues of the present.

Have always liked economist David Graeber's view that debt, and the concept that people have "worth," always tends to lead to slavery in some form. The labor movement has always struggled with this. As the guy says in the folk song Sixteen Ton, "I owe my soul to the company store." Capitalism wants labor to be cheap. Which means somewhat trapped. And it's indebtedness that helps maintain that state. The first slaves shipped to the Americas were debtors. They were held by tribal chieftains to whom they were indebted, or their families were indebted, and their bodies were payments. The chieftain could either work them or sell them to European slave traders. The latter was often the simplest option, with a quick return. Fastest way to end all slavery might be a MBI and cancelling of all debt. But that's another thread perhaps.

If the exclusive mode of decay is electron capture, then the emission is a neutrino, isn't it? So not much impact in radiological terms.

Most compounds in nature have small amounts of radioactivity, which aren't a threat to people. The SI unit for radioactivity from a material is the becquerel, which is such a small unit (one nuclear decay per second) that it's usually used in multiples like mega or giga, MBq or GBq. If we're taking about a compound, then calculation of radioactivity is about knowing the proportions of a radioisotope to other atoms in a sample, then using an equation, with the half life of the isotope, and Avogadro's number, to calculate the probable number of decays per second. The numbers get significant, in terms of human health, when you get into the billions of becquerels. 37 GBq, for example, would be one Curie, an older measure, and could have negative effects if there were longterm exposure near to or inside a human body. (The women who got sick painting the radium onto watch hands were in that range, IIRC) 1000 Curies, a common emission from a radiotherapy machine, and you could have serious tissue damage in a few minutes.

Oh good, a chance to tell my parrot story. A true story. Friends of mine bought a parrot. (There are no fjords in this story, btw). The cage had a little tray for feed, which they kept filled, in accordance with the instructions for care that came with. Every day, they found most of the seeds on the floor underneath the cage, and a very hungry parrot who would make outraged noises as they refilled the tray. Not sure why most of the mix was being rejected, they consulted with a vet, who figured out that the feed was the wrong kind, and told them what to buy. Problem solved, except that the parrot remained a sloppy eater who would still send at least a quarter of the tray to the floor. So they named the bird Onan. Because Onan, in the Bible, "spilled his seed upon the ground." (And was swallowed up by the earth, which seems like a pretty extreme punishment, and clearly God decided to dial that penalty back or I wouldn't be here to tell this story - I am somewhat nearsighted, however...)

I meant that I was unclear on what Stringy experienced in his math class re intrusive social issues. The topic had turned to whether or not graphing examples could be distracting from the math, if they concerned political issues.

Having so many optical receptors would seem like doing things the hard way, adaptively speaking. Prey usually do camouflage by having exteriors that are roughly matching their niche, e.g. Sonoran lizards that don't want to be seen by hawks circling above, so their top sides look like desert sand and rock.

Still unclear...was pay inequality just used as an example of some graphing operation or was the social issue somehow becoming the focus of a math class? If the former, seems okay. If the latter, then that would be a weird math course. That said, any graph that tracks human activity could be seen as politically charged by someone. Even if it was a graph correlating rates of cookie consumption and divorce. Someone could say the book had an agenda about divorced people stress-eating.

Much as I'd welcome a resurgence of songwriters in the mode of Phil Ochs, John Lennon, Tom Lehrer, it might also be good to have judges who won't tolerate scoundrels filing endless bullshit motions and clogging up courts for years. Songs + prosecutions. Holding hands + handcuffs. And, per Charon, better control rods in the social media reactor that would prevent lies (these days delicately referred to as "misinformation") from ricocheting all over cyberspace in milliseconds.

To some extent the embrace of anarchism (in the less bomb-wielding sense being discussed here) is dependent on aspects of personality that are not homogeneous in human society. While some people do value a high level of freedom and personal autonomy (and, if they are disciplined in their view, are willing to accept the decrease in personal security and increased social clash of values that might accompany this), there are others who crave a high level of "law and order" and a simplified nonpluralistic culture that has to be imposed by an authoritarian leader. They may crave a society that is parental in its control and top-down decision-making. Right-wing evangelical Christians, for example, often express the desire to have all submit to a divine will and be ruled by a theocratic ruler who will implement this. They wish for a State that acts in loco parentis for the same reason they prefer a religion whose authority structure is modeled (as Freud and many others pointed out) on that of childhood. Many people are, contra Benjamin Franklin's famous quote, quite willing to give up some liberty for the sake of security. Then there is the entrepreneurial wealth-seeking personality, which values freedom to conduct business more highly than other freedoms (e.g. social freedoms associated with the Left/Liberal platforms), and is fine with the cognitive dissonance of applauding regulatory freedom while stomping down social freedoms that might threaten their quest for personal enrichment and power (you want labor to stay cheap, cowed by police power, and not be afflicted with too much thinking or exploration of heterodox economic ideas). They may be anarchic in business practices, but authoritarian when it comes to squelching calls for cleaning up their effluents and fumes - often the first to support harsh laws against public demonstrations or class-action suits. However all these billiard balls of temperament collide with each other, it seems to me that truly successful Liberalism lies in the protection of freedom of discourse in education, freedom of the press (and protection of the press from predatory capitalist control), religious freedom, and the preservation of an intellectual life that can subject authority in any form to constant questioning and dissection of its stated aims. That questioning of received wisdom, of authority, seems to me to be at the heart of healthy anarchism, and must be protected by some kind of constitutional structure that can't be altered on a whim, or degraded because the world feels more dangerous than usual. So there's that seeming paradox: good anarchy requires a hardened bombproof structure of law.

Amazing how much time SFN members are willing to spend sparring with crackpots. Seems like a large percent of recent threads consist of little else. Can't they be buried in the cornfield like that telekinetic boy does in the Twilight Zone episode? Badda bing badda boom.

Dark, but very funny! I like the jaali windows - a classic use of the Venturi effect. Side note: maybe we should start a thread on LEED architecture.

First the very ill guy in the hospital, now the aviation guy. I know Russian architecture, especially from the Stalin era, can be very no frills, but surely they have railings and balustrades there. And landings, in case you happen to be "careening" down several flights of stairs. As usual, it's the wealthy who find ways to duck conscription. So much for rule of the proletariat. Not that that was ever really going to happen.

A compelling argument for voting (from a four year old article in the Washington Post): New data makes it clear: Nonvoters handed Trump the presidency https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/08/09/new-data-makes-it-clear-nonvoters-handed-trump-the-presidency/ And another reason, often repeated to me growing up by family and friends: If you didn't vote, you don't get to complain.

Thanks - yes, it's both denaturation and then dehydration. I should have mentioned both, with denaturation leading to dehydration. Here's a snip from Healthline: Alcohol kills germs through a simple chemical process known as denaturation. Denaturation occurs when alcohol molecules break down the proteins present in the structure of germs. When the proteins break down and lose their structure, the cells can’t function properly. They lose their membrane protection, dehydrate, and quickly die.

Thanks! Yes, I like that the DDG browser does automatically what I have to do by hand with Chrome. And the search engine has worked really well for me, not toploading the results with ads and the most heavily monetized websites. Sorry to say, Firefox has gone into a tailspin. Get out while you can. It will soon be in the software graveyard with Netscape Navigator.

A bit mystified as to why NTuft was neg repped. Shouldn't the dispenser of the minus one share whatever points of disagreement they may have? Would be much appreciated, and perhaps add to our knowledge.

BOSTON (AP) — The sex lives of constipated scorpions, cute ducklings with an innate sense of physics, and a life-size rubber moose may not appear to have much in common, but they all inspired the winners of this year’s Ig Nobels, the prize for comical scientific achievement. Held less than a month before the actual Nobel Prizes are announced, Thursday’s 32nd annual Ig Nobel prize ceremony was for the third year in a row a prerecorded affair webcast on the Annals of Improbable Research magazine’s website. The winners, honored in 10 categories, also included scientists who found that when people on a blind date are attracted to each other, their heart rates synchronize, and researchers who looked at why legal documents can be so utterly baffling, even to lawyers themselves. Even though the ceremony was prerecorded, it retained much of the fun of the live event usually held at Harvard University. As has been an Ig Nobel tradition, real Nobel laureates handed out the prizes, using a bit of video trickery: The Nobel laureates handed the prize off screen, while the winners reached out and brought a prize they had been sent and self-assembled into view. Winners also received a virtually worthless Zimbabwean $10 trillion bill. https://apnews.com/article/science-oddities-education-bb270f4a962f89811eb3ca2b02e3e8f4

I've been using the duckduckgo browser, which does not have these problems and gives a high level of privacy. And it reduces ads so severely I've wondered how they stay in business. With Chrome you have to go to Settings and click to the advanced browser security settings which then allow you to delete saved passwords, as well as cookies, cache, and site settings. Just make sure you have the PW safely stored elsewhere.

You also get "I axe vile argument." A suitable action for moderator.

Spit-take! There needs to be a web initialism, SCOS. Spewed coffee on screen. I believe the early 20th century comic actor WC Fields might have been allergic to water.

The thing about xenophobia, politically, is that it always works with a segment of the population. If you sugarcoat it with "we are promoting safe streets, law and order, and plenty of jobs because foreigners aren't flooding in and stealing them," then you can soothe a lot of people who lean Right. The question is how long you can sell that, as the other side, the ugly side of xenophobia rears its head - hate crimes, brutal law enforcement, ghettoization, and cycles of poverty as immigrants are shut out from climbing the socioeconomic ladder. The people who fear too rapid change in their neighborhoods will be demonized as racists, the immigrants will be demonized as criminals, Islamic extremists, parasites....whatever label can be spun to fit a particular demographic. Nordic countries used to be protected from immigrant influxes by their winters, as well as by the lack of former colonial connections. When you have passive barriers, you don't have to think much about political barriers and you can maintain a "nice" demeanor. Now the winters are getting milder and the immigrants are more numerous, more desperate and less picky about ice and snow. It will be hard to balance humanitarian concern and the capacity to handle a suddenly accelerating rate of growth.