TheVat

An adjacent atom can make a measurement. Schrodinger himself was annoyed that people focused on the cat, when his point was about Copenhagen and its antirealist implications. And its awkwardness in defining an observer or measurement. He could just as well have had a box with a sheet of paper and a bottle of ink that's broken if a particle hits the detector. Would have saved us a lot of pointless fuss about cat consciousness. Is the paper white or ink spotted? Same deal. Decoherence has happened, it's one or the other.

Yes, very likely. Joe was outlining a stepped-up cyberwar capacity last spring, which was to include clandestine "warning shot" intrusions onto Russian networks. The thinking IIRC was that economic sanctions have limited power, so we needed a bigger stick (as well as developing better shields) if Putin escalated. At that time, Biden was concerned that these kinds of cyber attacks not cross certain lines. Meaning, I think, how to inflict pain on bad actors without, say, shutting down hospitals or turning traffic lights all green all day. I remember a couple/three years ago, our cyberwar division made incursions into the Russian power grid, as a warning to Putin. Given the possible consequences for civilians during a Russian winter, I wonder if Biden might be more reluctant to escalate that.

That was disturbingly on-topic for an off-topic rant. You keep veering into relevance. Plus one. What always amuses me is that people laser-focus on dangerous side effects of a technology when they already have an axe to grind. Cellphones, when held to the ear in extended use, have been linked to brain cancer and acoustic neuromas, and I have seen not one placard-waving fist-shaking demonstration against cellphones. And no one has refused to use a cellphone when their occupation requires it. What further erodes the honesty of the mRNA bogeyman argument is that there are other Covid vaccines that use a more traditional simian adenovirus vector, like JJ and AZ, so the mRNA resistant do have options that will not cause the dreaded butt wings or whatever the trending phobia is. I live in the boondocks, and pretty much every pharmacy in the area had the option of a non mRNA vax.

I suspect one way we come to understand meaning is when isolated sentences present as ambiguous, like "The bark was painful." Someone rubbed against a rough tree, or a dog's vocalization conveyed its distress? To find meaning we seek a context that we share with the speaker. When we read a story, we tend to be fascinated by ambiguity. Like the conclusion of The Lady or the Tiger. The short story ends at this point when a man has either chosen a door behind which waits a tiger or a beautiful woman. His lover, the princess, has indicated which door he should choose, but it’s up to the reader to decide if she wants him alive and married to another woman, or is jealous enough to prefer his death. Meaning, for humans, is interesting when we are made uncertain as to what a word or gesture signifies in another person's mind - what was the true motivation of the princess's gesture towards one of the doors? There does seem to be an underlying logic that appears in all human languages, which clarifies meaning and removes ambiguity from ordinary sentences. When I say "my house is yellow," any human listener infers that I am speaking of the exterior of my house, not its interior walls.

I've noticed the faraday cage idea keeps cycling to new generations. When I was young, I knew someone who had an orgone box (he was also big on magnetic shoe inserts) and followed the theories of Wilhelm Reich. Now I notice that faraday cages are again popular among new age health nuts, but less elaborate than Reich's design, and without the orgone theoretic basis -- now the claim is simply that it's shielding your delicate tissues from excess EMF. And, as always, the reason we haven't heard of these dangers is because powerful people are suppressing the TRUTH! ( the conspiracy notion helps the faithful promote this pseudoscience, since there are genuine instances of corporations and governments who do withhold facts from the public)

I hope the at-home antigen tests can keep improving, given how immediate results are often extremely helpful. I have had a nasty bug since Friday, which matched the symptoms of omicron, so I took a rapid antigen test and got a negative. But now am hearing that it's less sensitive to omicron, so false negatives are higher, so I feel the need to take it again. In the UK, they recommend you do the second one with swabbing your throat instead of your nares, because omicron seems to concentrate there more. (my USA test instructions rule out throat swab, but I've seen a couple preprint studies saying omicron may be three times as concentrated in throat!) I want to get this right because the spouse has an important meeting this week and she does not want to be a spreader. And there is a pregnant woman in the group that's meeting. (The PCR test does me no good, because results here in the American outback take 3-5 days, and the meeting is in two days)

Yep, the workers in healthcare who are vaccine deniers would seem to be already out of step with their workplace ethos and its priorities for patients.

😁 It helps to follow up on the actual numbers of healthcare workers who make good on their promise to walk off their jobs. In the US, most of them seem to realize they need a paycheck, so the actual numbers land around 0.5-2% of those who promised they'd quit. So the spectre of huge labor shortages has so far been a chimera. And arguing from that is pretty unpersuasive. Ha! Looks like Swan and I parallel posted.

Ah yes, the elk-man of Jan. 6! AKA the Qanon Shaman. Yes, "freedom" has become more a brand than a concept. One bought with the same level of deep thought as Trump holding up a bible.

What?? Please clarify what is meant by "auto fire" and "bond" in this context? Do you mean bond as a type of paper, that you want to have spontaneously combust? Or is this some prank where paper gives off something that reacts with potassium chlorate, etc? If so, sounds dangerous. Chenbeier may be right.

Good video, very clear, as it takes a hard look at the value that would be f(l) in the Drake equation. I'm guessing the second video looks at f(i). I recall reading Ward and Brownlee years ago, which was especially pessimistic on f(i) and complex life generally. A universe that teems only with microbes will still be a lonely one for sentient creatures. (Imagine finding a promising spectral signature in the future that indicated photosynthesis on an exoplanet, but we get there and it's barren except for some lakes and seas full of cyanobacteria. A bit anticlimactic to our anthropocentric viewpoint!) Oops, sorry, did not notice a second page had formed and lengthened in the past hour. I was responding to Mac's posted Cool Worlds Lab videos. This is what happens when I set down an open page on my tablet and go off to do chores. Me too. I also thank @Arthur Smith.

Isn't Bestchance a sock puppet of Erik2014, and this is a clone of this earlier thread?

I am baffled that this seemingly obvious point keeps having to be made. But I guess it does. Governments for many centuries have restricted personal freedom where public health, especially contagions, is concerned. And democratic ones have not strapped people down and forced them to receive shots - just made shots a requirement for entering certain public domains where transmission is likely. Same conditional approach as requiring shoes be worn into buildings in the American South, where hookworms were prevalent. Or polio vaccines for school attendance. Or requiring a blood alcohol level below a certain percent to legally drive. All freedoms are relative to a social contract. You can eat a box of candy bars - it's you who gets sick. You don't walk in to the room, breathe sugary fumes on me, and give me diabetes.

I think they redid the Miller-Urey xp recently and one issue raised was about the original flask material, which was a borosilicate glass. IIRC other flask materials didn't work nearly as well, not having silica. The pH of the original xp was high enough (despite Pyrex's reputation for inertness) to dissolve out some of the silica(!). Will see if I can find the article... Here it is, in SciAm.... https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/redo-of-a-famous-experiment-on-the-origins-of-life-reveals-critical-detail-missed-for-decades/

My pic said "Tonga Geological Services" on the right margin, which I figured was fairly self-explanatory. However, your reasonable comment did remind me that if someone looked at this in a few years and didn't see the margin credit, they might wonder what event they were seeing. The figure I heard for the force of the explosion was ten megatons, btw. As for PhD dissertations, I wouldn't be surprised if a grad student somewhere will write one using data collected from this eruption.

At least give a CONDENSED version, so this thread doesn't EVAPORATE. Sorry.

I have two grandparents born in Scandinavia, but am not sufficiently fond of cold (live in South Dakota, so it's nothing new to me, either), 20 hour nights, or those countries. In a civil war here, I would probably just hunker down. (what's a bit ironic is that one of my relatives was a polar explorer)

You mean like, say, 90 posts on Jesus clogging up a science website? I think I would value such a block, too. 😀

I get occasional visits from the black dog. From personal experience, and observation, I would say vitamin D is a help (winters can be quite intense here, so the need is there). B complex helps some - had a relative who found them very stabilizing of mood. (He had had alcohol issues, so I think B12 was particularly helpful in his case) I also am impressed by the therapeutic value of humor (UK and Upside-down people feel free to add a "u"). I was recently listing funny moments from film/tv with an online group which was assembling a sort of antidepressant viewing regimen, everything from Buster Keaton and the Marx brothers, to Seinfeld and the Coen brothers. What was interesting was how we all found that simple recollection, alone, was quite a mood elevator. And it's often material that is quite silly (M Python, e.g.) and/or quite transgressive, that sticks in the mind and produces belly laughs. One should not shy away from the low brow (Three Stooges, Abbot and Costello, e.g.) just because it lacks sophistication. The monumental idiocy of Otto in "A Fish Called Wanda," or the campfire flatulence scene in "Blazing Saddles," often have powerful antidepressant qualities that witty repartee may lack. I remember laughing insanely at Eric Idle's famous reply in MPatHG, when someone asks how he could tell Arthur was a king. "He hasn't got s-t all over him."

You would think a tennis player could grasp the social contract concept of "your freedom to swing your arms stops at my nose." Then again, my country produced John McEnroe so I'm aware of the ease with which tennis stars turn into brats.

I loved "Longitude"! Sobel made more sense out of navigation, timekeeping and related topics than anything else I've read. I second BC's recommendation.

I think signal transmission does, yes, have a digital aspect, but the neuron itself is analogue. While it is true that a neuron generates an action potential or it doesn't, which is the digital aspect, there are subthreshold voltages that seem to play a role... https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaj1497 Here is a less technical article on that... https://neurofantastic.com/brain/2017/4/13/brain-computation-is-a-lot-more-analog-than-we-thought I agree that AI is achieving better digital models of a brain, but just saying we should not rush to any conclusions that analog function is not significant in conscious brain activity. This is a good thread. I will try to get back to this with a little more preparation, as I'm a little rusty.

What is Real, by Adam Becker. Fascinating history of quantum foundations, with particular attention to those who pushed back against the long dominance of Copenhagen.