TheVat

Yep, and to take a WAG, I would say the earliest empirical gathering of observations were probably more in the area of seasonal changes, solar and celestial bodies positions, animal behavior, and plants. (i.e. astronomy, zoology, and botany were "mothers")

Just standard social media hot air from Gasbag 47. There's zero legal basis for going after a philanthropist who's been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Turnip is just embarrassing himself. Unless Turnip develops the craft to stuff grand juries, and maybe establish a military junta, this is just another distraction.

It may interest you to know that I put fog harvesting into the Google AI, and got a summary nearly identical to that post. The new member may wish to read the site rules on AI use. And perhaps they could tell us what they want to discuss.

I know this area, it's basically Sioux City, and it pivots more readily than the truly deep rural Iowa. I've seen places like that go for a Rethuglican president and then vote for a Demo state legislator. This relates more to local levels of knowledge on state compared to national issues. But there can also be a disgruntled-by-clownocracy current there, too. And they could show up on that hook in 26.

Hadn't heard that particular one, but heard ones like that. That's room 23, scrambled egg? I think I only got that because we had a Filipino woman as neighbor for couple years and her accent was like that. Anyway (mod approaches, slapping baton against his palm) I think it's questionable how pyrolysis ovens (self-cleaning ovens) would be an answer to carbon reduction. And the other concept, "grow lots of trees to fix carbon," doesn't seem like breaking news.

How does one relate this anomaly, if it is one, to climate generally? This seems to border on an anecdote, given that weather often presents brief anomalous events.

Domo arigato...

Bohm's 1980 book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, seems to be the most Plato Cavey of the theories I've encountered. AFAICT the thrust of his argument is that it would be a cool explanation and somehow ties in with Karl Pribram's brain research and evidence for holographic (v localized) memory. Given that Bohm is anti reductionism, he has not gained a lot of traction with most physicists.

I had the same thing yesterday, telling me I was blocked and that I should contact the website admin. And I was using a chrome browser. The "contact the admin" message is sorta funny given that most online forums have a mail relay system such that you have to be logged on to reach an admin.

I know what you mean - I've had phone conversations where I occasionally have to say "gotta deal with traffic for a minute" (or if I had to respond in the moment to traffic I will just explain I need them to repeat what they said) and they always understand. I always prioritize my attention to the road when conversing, either way, but I don't assume everyone does that. I recall being a passenger with someone who would look at people in the car while talking with them, and it was pretty unnerving. Contracting out has several woes. In prisons for example there may be a push towards profit which results in guards getting rewarded for catching inmates out on petty infractions because that can be used to extend their stays and ensure filled beds. Anything profit-centered in legal enforcement can encourage excessive zeal to ticket people or detain them as much as possible. There's an implicit pressure to judge harshly and be inflexible - this in turn reduces public respect for the law.

I guess one problem with this is where funding cuts lead to labor reduction resulting in some photos not being reviewed by humans, so a ticket (which could be quite an imposition on someone with long work hours, limited funds, etc) is sent before common sense ("he just popped a mint in his mouth, he's not eating a meal") can be applied. Also I'm a bit puzzled that talking on the phone would be a ticketable offense - texting I can see, and that's illegal in most states AFAIK, but not sure how much conversing on a cellphone differs from talking with a passenger (especially if one is using speaker or Bluetooth, and so both hands can drive). Same reservations about telling people how to secure their pets. Some cats are calmer in someone's lap rather than a carrier - do we need Big Brother to make all those decisions for us? Also, given that many people don't actually like to be surveilled, announcing that you are installing AI cams on a stretch of road could cause a sharp rise in motorists taking alternate routes (I would definitely be one of them) and in turn making those routes overcrowded and more dangerous.

What??

Time to squeeze in a couple more weeks of light summer reading. Today it is the quintessence of fun, mirth, and ripping good adventure with likeable characters which is almost any John Scalzi novel. "Kaiju Preservation Society"

On the battery use I wondered if their batteries don't deep cycle too well, so it's seen as better to run each down to say, 20%, then switch over to the next one. If they all drained at once there might be temptation to dip into the bottom 20% whereas sequential use means you're low when five of six are done but you've got that reserve battery if you're a little before the next recharge stop. Just guessing here.

Apparently this question was not considered, mainly in deference to an earlier study by a Liverpool group which determined that "you can get a tan, from standing in the English rain." One of multiple hypotheses formulated as part of the Eggman project. It seems unfortunate that a result confined to England would inhibit research across the globe.

A recent paper in The Albanian Journal of Atmospheric Physics and Wicker Cultivation has falsified the hypothesis that thunder only happens when it's raining, in a classic Popperian "black swan" disproof. The paper offers a definitive rejection of earlier results published by the Fleetwood Mac research group in 1976 in an obscure British meteorological journal (then released the following year as a song). The FMRG had also conducted a test of the hypothesis that players only love you when they're playing, which did not survive peer review due to methodological concerns over how players were defined as a distinct cohort and what specific behaviors constituted play.

You seem unfamiliar with forum rules here. Topics are not two-way conversations and any member may participate and request clarifications and supporting citations for any claims made. If you can be courteous and tell us what a "Narcissists Supply Three" and "psychologically gay" refer to, you will help advance the discussion for everyone. Clarity and definition of terminology is of vital importance to all chats here.

No one wants bored intestines.

Humans are living beings not androids designed by a crack team of engineers who carefully debugged them. Natural selection (assuming that's even in play here) sometimes results in messy flawed solutions in the brain, especially the brain of hominins who ran a gauntlet of environmental pressures and tripled their brain size in a couple million years. And then had to deal with extremely rapid change and elaboration of social structures in only a few millennia. We might have a Google translator glitch here. Can you explain what that means? Before we look into that, can you tell us what that means and offer some supporting research for it. I really have no idea what you're talking about.

That college students really do do better if you ban cellphones from the classroom. And they actually like it, once they're used to it. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/opinion/mobile-phones-college-classrooms.html (I'd already had a sneaking suspicion....)

Yes, similar answers from several of us on genetic diversity and multiple axes of fitness. My conjecture along one such axis would be that a lot of us do now have more robust immune systems which arose from that shift of human populations from widely dispersed to urban concentrations.* Cities, especially crossroads type cities with lots of international traffic and frequent bursts of new pathogens, were likely crucibles of intense selection that favored a fairly "multilingual" immune system. I would say that modern times, if anything, are amplifying that selective effect, especially in teeming metropolises of developing nations where there are now both "efficient" (from the microbial perspective) global conduits for rapid introduction of exotic pathogens and higher infant/juvenile mortality. The millions living in and sometimes circulating out of crowded refugee camps also face these Darwinian pressures. This painful reality in no way argues for perpetuating such conditions, but it does suggest that we humans are continuing to have selective pressures towards fortifying "close quarters" immune systems. But it seems to me likely that rural life, especially in the third world, also offers selective pressures from the incursions of novel zoonotic pathogens. * festering warrens in my own family tree include ports like Belfast, Odessa and Karlshamn, and a nod of thanks to these grimy petri dishes for their contributions to a pretty tough immune system.

CERN gave us the Web. The United States DoD gave us the Net, specifically through their Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), later DARPA. Sorry, bit of a nitpick.

It's an hour to go, until lunch here, and am not sure I'm going to make it. For me, one thing that distinguishes pan-based cakes or crepes from breads is that the former usually depend on chemically generated C02 for their fluff rather than yeast. (though some breads like Irish soda bread (bliss!) don't use yeast)

There's a latke to be said for recognition of cultural variations in naming!