TheVat

And possibly a fan of "Jaws," going by your moniker? Welcome. Perhaps the next time we have someone hyperventilating over 31 Atlas, or some other interstellar interloper, you can talk them off their Alien Invasion ledge. I'm a life sciences guy, dabble in astronomy and cosmology a bit, as do several of us here, so having some expertise aboard couldn't do any harm. Which end of the telescope do you recommend looking through? 😀

Hint to DV giver: it's a pun on the word "one."

Baltics? But I still have doubts that there's a list of EU states he wants to poke with a stick. Russia has a small struggling economy, labor shortages, and their military machine is struggling to keep up with supplying munitions (and there's a shortage of TNT) and released criminals for cannon fodder.

See A Doctor.

I know where the trash files are. It wasn't hard to find. And I find the substitute of AI output for learning composition skills, along with grammar, syntax, and spelling, not at all funny. Educationally speaking, that is self harm. You should stop using AI to jerk off, and going back to doing it manually.

Glad we're keeping you amused. You mispelled "independent," btw.

Ha! Here in the US, there's a hybrid of that berry with corn. Capri-corn.

Just the phrase aubergine ravioli makes me salivate. My children are millennials and also eat a lot of vegetarian, and have similar disdain for pseudo meat. I think @sethoflagos partly addressed @swansont comment about ingrained liking for meat - kids need to be introduced to the real wealth of plant flavors and spices out there so they don't end up thinking of plant choices as drab boiled vegs and rabbit food. And I was with you all the way, drooling a puddle, until you got to goat liver. Chacun á son goat, I guess. 😀

This article in today's Guardian made me want to necropost here. It's a reminder how people make food choices on taste and pricing, and not so often on ecological impact or bioethics considerations. https://www.theguardian.com/food/2025/sep/12/vegan-burgers-meat-vegetarian As my extensive posting here made clear, I really hope more realistic flexitarian (like me, with five days per week vegetarian and two days with a bit of fish) approaches can gain traction. I thought the article touched on one thing I see as important, which is to spend less effort on trying to emulate meat and more on just making a tasty plant alternative that makes no pretense of being like meat. This might reduce that "uncanny valley" where you bite into a plant burger and realize that it's just not like meat. I much prefer the ones that say upfront that it will taste like nuts and/or grains and/or flavorful vegetables. That seems achievable.

Mille grazie, both @MigL and @exchemist for restoring Archimedes to his correct location. As exchemist did I wondered if the AMOC was a factor. There's also the fact that Earth perihelion falls between Jan 2-15, so a northern landmass gets a little more insolation in the winter. It seems sufficiently complex that I would lie down and apply cold compresses until any notion of having figured it out passed.

I also thank you for a helpful data dive. And the reminder on buoyancy: melt a large iceberg and the ocean level is unchanged, thanks to that naked Greek fellow who was running around Athens shouting eureka. Ice only matters when it melts off a landmass - Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets being the two major potential contributors. A complete melt-off of Antarctica alone would raise sea level 58 meters. Greenland, 7.4 meters. That's a dramatically different world map. Though from what I've seen going on in Florida, it's hard to get quite as alarmed as I once was about its possible vanishing beneath the waves. 😁 https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/what-is-the-global-volume-of-land-ice-and-how-is-it-changing/

Another excellent question. In physics, where you have some kind of centralized phenomenon, like a field around a concentration of mass or charge, or object moving around a central point, it can be useful to use a spherical coordinate system (which is the 3D version of the polar coordinate system). Since this is, again, where my rusty college math hits a wall, one of the physics grownups here would have to address how such a system would work for spacetime stuff. I would think that whenever you have rotations, there would be an advantage of polar/spherical over a Cartesian coordinate system. Dimly I recall a professor saying it doesn't matter which coordinate system you use, they can all work, but it's more a matter of which takes the least time and fuss. I like @studiot comment that it all hinges on what is meant by distance, as to what is wanted from a math tool. For some reason, I am drawn more to the term "separation," which seems to me more neutral, maybe. When people say distance, it's too easy to get stuck thinking of it as linear.

Yep. Reasonable to request a cite, in keeping with forum rules. And one should look at average temps in the center of Antarctic and underneath how both altitude and latitude affect what happens as currents of warmer, moisture laden air move in. One complexity of GW is that some places get greater precipitation and some get less than before as you pump more energy into the system.

Trump saw the word "Republican" and said, Let's get the L out of there! Oh, and I want to thank you, Mr President, for thoroughly corrupting our supreme court with RW partisans. I see that yesterday they approved mass racial profiling for ICE officers detaining people on the street.

Metric just means a math tool which allows one a way to calculate a separation or distance between points. AFAICT, that's all it is. Instead of using something simple and algebraic, as one would for euclidean space, for a Riemannian manifold one might use a tensor. Or, as in the case of spacetime with an energy density, a tensor for a pseudo-Riemannian manifold. This is where my college math stopped, and my impression is that if we don't marinate in this stuff pre age 25, it's a really rocky road.

That's what I was clumsily trying to get earlier with an inept analogy. Is maybe one way to express that is that something like a metric tensor will describe what happens with moving particles AS IF there is a curvature, AS IF there is an inherent geometry that causes photons and fermions to move along a certain path? What the "as if" means to me is that measurement can lead to accurate predictions of future action without asserting anything metaphysical. I'm not sure quite where @KJW lands on this.

There seem to be very few with neutral opinions on Ballard. I liked my first Ballard short story, The Drowned Giant, which gave fair warning to readers of delicate sensibilities that his other fiction may harbor matters grotesque, shocking, and offensive. Crash is a case in point. I have a film buff friend who rarely criticizes any film that shows some originality, but who described the Cronenberg adaptation as "loathsome." I recall a review of the book which said that Ballard was "beyond psychiatric help." I thought The Drowned World (1962) was brilliantly prescient in regard to climate change. And Empire of the Sun is the novel which draws on Ballard's experiences you describe - and adapted by Tom Stoppard for a film which hoovered up awards and raves. Another British writer of about that generation, who only wrote a couple science fiction novels outside of a mostly mainstream career, is Anthony Burgess. I can't really recommend his End of the World News (aside from the clever wordplay), but Clockwork Orange is a classic. Another mainstream writer who moved into dystopian SF is Margaret Atwood. I think her most popular one, The Handmaid's Tale, has gotten so much attention that it tends to obscure other fine novels like Oryx and Crake (giving up on italics here, the new web host software seems to want to fight with me every time I try to use my them) or The Year of the Flood.

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/09/florida-vaccine-children-mandate/684110/?gift=43H6YzEv1tnFbOn4MRsWYvvHnIIHE0ylBpktPumLdME&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share Florida Decided There Were Too Many Children

I think somewhere along the way, you got the impression that the north pole analogy was meant to be an example of physical forces. The analogy was for the benefit of another member and was specifically about how geometry (in the analogy, of a sphere with designated poles) can create the illusion of a force. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear. All the stuff you're posting about free fall and so on I'm well aware of, as I had thought my posts had made clear. The polar trip analogy is only about imagining a mysterious force (i.e. an illusory force) which seems to be drawing two objects (starting at different longitudes) together and seeing how the illusion arises from converging lines of longitude. As an analogy, it is in no way, shape or form intended to provide some comprehensive bookkeeping on the actual forces acting upon northward moving objects. Hope this clarifies it. The experience, on my end, has been something like showing someone young how seasons work by shining a lamp on a globe and someone keeps objecting that the sun is really much farther from the earth and the globe should really be much smaller. All true statements, but not really germane to the simple concept that is being demonstrated.

My analogy was to the difference between a force and a pseudo force, with reference to geometry, not really about the details you speak of. It's an analogy I've heard pro physicists use. If it works better for you some other way, that's cool. If you reread my original comment, I hope this will be clearer in this context. If I'm speaking of G as a pseudo force, then of course there is still the electrostatic force from atoms of the earth on my atoms, resisting my normal free fall along a spacetime geodesic. ETA: if you're more comfortable with, say, the coriolis effect, that can also be used as an example of an analogous pseudo force. As the missile launched towards the north pole seems to veer off-course this is not an invisible force but the effect of a rotating reference frame.

Irrelevant to my analogy which is that there's no invisible force pulling objects towards each other as they go towards the north pole. Forget the bumping part. It's just the geometry of a sphere.

Seems like many scientists opt for methodological naturalism, which is to take an "as if" approach to math descriptions of phenomena...the math works "as if" objects are following a curved spatial path in the areas where there are large masses. One can use the math but remain agnostic as to spacetime actually being curved. So one can call G a pseudoforce or a force, depending on how far you are willing to go with the curvature description. @zapatos and I start walking towards the North Pole and we will eventually meet as we travel a curved surface. Since we believe the Earth's curvature is real, the "force" that causes us to bump into each other at 90° N is understood as a pseudoforce. If you don't like breaking Ockham's razor, you probably would prefer to take curvature as real rather than devise some complex scheme where space is actually flat but all these things keep manifesting redshifts, delays, lensing and deflections that weirdly imitate a curvature of spacetime.

Well, all the news reports are that Gaza is sealed up by Egypt and Israel. Where did you see reports of Gazans being allowed to leave? The only leaving I've seen is people being forced to evacuate Gaza City and flee to temporary refugee camps elsewhere in the Strip. Where many are now starving.

Not well read on Pratchett, but possible that Going Postal might be more accessible than some of his others. I recall the second Sprawl book, Count Zero, did this rather well, and rather audaciously imagined AIs which broke up into splinters that manifested as Haitian voodoo gods. Also rather prescient in its view of techno-billionaires struggling for dominance. Yep, Ringworld (and early sequels) were the sort of imaginative romp where you might like the vast setting and adventure and mind boggling engineering but would have to "take the best and leave the rest" -it's very much of its time. I own the first paperback printing, which has a famous error in which Louis Wu goes the wrong way around the Earth to prolong New Year's partying, and there are only a few copies extant (most of that press run was recalled by the publisher and shredded). Apparently it's worth something. It's fortunate that I've kept it sealed in cling wrap and in a cool dry basement for decades, since its high-acid pulp paper deteriorates pretty fast.

Glad you mentioned them. I'm not sure Gibson stills owns up to being American, having fled to Vancouver long ago. Agree that his cyberpunk novels do have that nostalgic element. Same goes for Bruce Sterling. I still haven't read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, which apparently makes me only semiliterate in cyberpunk circles. Also should mention the whole transhumanism SF subgenre, of which Charles Stross is a notable example. Absolutely mind-blowing stuff.