TheVat

Not really. But I'm sure plenty of people with IBS wish that constipation and diarrhea would cancel each other out. When things are in actual regulatory balance, that's an indication of good health. Like, normal BP is not hypertension and hypotension cancelling each other.

What Captain Renault said. And PEBKAC reminds me, when I did IT work back in the early nineties, we had a cat who liked to play with our desktop at home when we stepped away from it. Things would be weird onscreen when you returned. Though the cat had another name, I started calling him Pebkac. And that caught on, and he was Pebkac for the rest of his mischief-filled life.

Sigh. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home https://www.statista.com/statistics/1102816/coronavirus-covid19-cases-number-us-americans-by-day/ https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/health/coronavirus-us-maps-and-cases

Fans of Vogon poetry (Doug Adams) would enjoy the OP link.

Sigh. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/12/23/covid-omicron-variant-live-updates/ (This page always free to nonsubscriber) (Literally hundreds of US news outlets have similar free coverage)

One approach to this sort of metaphysics (no Nolan Ryan pics, I promise) is to see angels (or equivalents like bodhisattvas, also intermediary between man and an ultimate being) as metaphors for a connection with the divine. If the divine is something beyond our neural capacity to perceive or understand, then some stepped-down sliver of that could present itself to the human brain as a singular entity, viz. an angel. By analogy, if there were a race of sentient creatures whose only perceptions were tactile and auditory (like smart moles, say), to create a pathway for vision into their minds would likely result in terror, confusion, possible mental illness. So you might have to start with very simple impressions, like a tiny monochromatic moving dot combined with an auditory message to make it more comprehensible. For them, an "angel."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hail_Mary Details how communication could be established between species with very different languages. The aliens use musical tones, and do not use vision to perceive their environment. They create auditory "pictures" with extremely fine hearing. Good read.

Cannot be certain, but wings are not visible in this image. While extending them may have intimidated batters, i am not sure how they would affect the mechanics of pitching. Would probably be tucked in for base running, being a source of drag. This one suggests no wings to speak of. Though there is a slight bump, possibly just bunched fabric, above the 30.

That seems off. Average solar insolation is 1.36 kW/m^2. And that's top of the atmosphere directly facing sun. IIRC, at ground level it's more like one kW.

I should explain: P's Ls was assembled from much older stories, some of which the author wrote and published in mags in the late sixties and seventies, which were added to some other chapters to unify it all into a more epic story. The one you remember, with the "loptails" reference, was indeed a separate story back then.

Seem to be several questions today that Dakotans are well-positioned to answer. Almost any snow can partially melt then refreeze as slick ice later in the day. Clear snow ASAP. Unless you are fond of lawsuits from older pedestrians. Prompt clearance of walks, all the way to each edge, also means less need for salting them, a practice which is not good for your soil or for urban runoff which makes its way from storm drains to streams. Towns here have moved to non-salt alternatives for roads.

As is the case where I live, and Peterkin up in Canada, (and in South Park) late Spring snow is not uncommon. When the grass greens up in May, in South Dakota, we will often get a wet snow that melts rapidly and will leave the grass still green. As Pete said, a couple days won't hurt it. Latest estimate I've heard is that this area has lost at least two weeks of meteorological winter, due to climate change, and so we are seeing fewer May snows. There are very few tears shed over this, for some reason.

P.T. Barnum was really far too conservative in his famous estimate.* * for those across various ponds, Barnum was a famous American showman who is best known for saying "there's a sucker born every minute."

If the hydrogen isotope in a water molecule makes a difference as to the properties of the molecule, then it would seem that the neutron number makes some difference in that atom's physical properties. So I was questioning your original statement that "physical properties...are not due to the number of neutrons." How an atom interacts with another atom would be an aspect of its physical properties, no? Deuterium and hydrogen interact differently, a bit, in a water molecule.

@studiot It's a section of Pandora's Legions, by Christopher Anvil. I find that scenario (aggro oriented races stay stuck in their solar systems because they drain resources and sabotage themselves squabbling) easier to believe than the creepy "Dark Forest" one in The Three Body Problem. (referenced in @swansont linked video and article)

Heavy water has a different refractive index, viscosity, BP, heat of fusion, etc.

Full disclosure: have not read the posts following this one, so sorry if any redundancy. I understand body autonomy. My point (perhaps clumsily expressed) was that you are missing a full definition of that self-determination if you do not include the free choice to avoid situations that may infect you with a dangerous virus. Those with great wealth, or telecommuters, or retirees, can do that. But those who MUST work and who may face firing if they don't show up (and other potential consequences like eviction), cannot make the free choice to avoid the virus if their job forces them into contact with mask scoffers, anti-vaxxers, et al. For whatever their reasons, they feel they must assume the risk, and they are given no choice as to who may violate their personal space with contagion. And many of those front-liners (surprise!) also started out with greater health vulnerabilities to begin with. From what I witnessed the past almost two years, it seemed to me that society placed a differential value on the bodies of the poor and the bodies of the affluent, insofar as the covid virus was concerned (and, for sure, in other respects too for a long time). So, yes, body autonomy (in terms of how one chooses healthy environments) proved to be something of a luxury item. I'm not saying some of them possibly didn't freely make bad choices of diet, smoking, whatever, but they were forced into a situation of no real choice as regards the covid virus. I hope this clarifies a bit. I don't expect agreement, but I do like to be intelligible to others. 🙂

I didn't misunderstand, just wanted to get across that the decisions about one's body include the decision to take care of one's health. A decision which requires the cooperation of others when a highly contagious strain is at large and one doesn't have the option of being recluse.

Well, sure, you can refuse any vaccinations and then accept consequences, like having to homeschool children or not work with the public. My perspective, fwiw: A virus taking over a person's body and killing them or making them quite sick, possibly for months or years....now THAT seems like an infringement on body autonomy. I would think requiring people to get two shots or three to fend that violation off, would be at the heart of a social contract and any sane government. And it seems to be what 95% or more of the US population accepted until about a year and a few months ago. Before then, how many people were refusing to work or keeping their children out of school because some shots were required? How many street corners had soapboxes where they could proclaim their freedom and bodily autonomy? I just don't remember much concern about that.

Thanks. I was just trying to relate the clearcut cases of violation with getting a couple jabs after you have spent your life, from early childhood, getting jabs as a routine thing. There seemed to be a difference between that and things like assault, molestation, abduction, forced pregnancy, etc.

Body autonomy? It's two shots in the arm. Just saying maybe some clarification on what body autonomy means, and why it outweighs stopping a pandemic that's killed 800,000 Americans, and millions globally.

The muon experiment is one of the few I really have understood, as an example of relativistic contraction. When I have too much to drink, I take on the perspective of a muon, because I seem to reach the ground more quickly than expected.

I would see a practical line of demarcation being: do you come into contact with other people who have no knowledge of your vaccination status. If so, then you should be required to vax. If you work at home and only hang out with people you know and who have full awareness and acceptance of your position on vaccination, then you can do what you want. Otherwise, not vaxxing is somewhat akin to getting out on a public road after dark without headlights. Your personal risk becomes other people's risk.

You misunderstand. There are other threads, in at least two he promotes a commercial website called spaceadventures.com, using language that is not "typos," but which puts the lie to him being Kevin Hall from the UK. (as for "polution," is it a typo if you repeat the misspellings in the OP and elsewhere?) I don't give a rat's ass about credentials or harmless typos, but I don't like being bullshitted, and I am going to call people on posing and fakery about who they are. It is distracting and insults our intelligence. After a president who bullshitted and lied for four years, and encouraged millions to do that same, my patience with this kind of crap is wearing really thin. Here is how "Kevin Hall" writes in another post in a "Space News" thread. That's not a typo. That is Asian-style spam English. If I'm wrong, fine, you all can sue me or whatever. I will eat crow and flagellate myself. And that is my such interesting news for today's moment!

It is a reaction to the disparity between between posts and profile claims. He teaches school in the UK, but not really, and cannot spell pollution. Other hints in posts elsewhere suggest poseur to me, and I have been at online forae long enough to understand why people dislike that. This post is deletable, and I will say no more.