TheVat

My memory of London this time of year (when visiting in the eighties) was that it did not offer optimal viewing conditions. Orion is prominent in the winter sky, arcing across the southern sky in the evening. I don't know which direction from London would get you away from light pollution the quickest.

Yes, for sure there are exceptions that a reasonable person would carve out. Young children who might not have the capacity to process some harsh truths. Or someone with dementia, paired with an anxiety disorder. Thanks for pointing out - I wasn't aiming at absolutes. Twelve below zero when I walked downtown this morning. If my toes are gone I don't want to know!

You mentioned expense, Shivaji. Music is a wonderful stress reliever, and there are instruments less expensive than a guitar. https://www.amazon.com/YRS-24B-Plastic-Soprano-Recorder-Natural/dp/B00EJF5Y26/ref=asc_df_B00EJF5Y26/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=198057701162&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=17332029863741598566&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=t&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9020641&hvtargid=pla-380354557370&psc=1 Not spam, just an example of an easy to play instrument that is affordable. Other ways to ease burnout and fog...take long walks, avoid caffeine after 5pm to improve your night sleep (good sleep cures a lot of mental fog problems), avoid sugar and refined flour-based foods (both produce mental fog and mood swings, as well as other negative effects), intensive "explosive" exercise (kickboxing, fast tempo dancing, racketball, karate, etc), and last but not least, regular sexual release of whatever variety is available.

Most societies value truthfulness because it is a part of social reputation. As civilizations developed credit and trade, trustworthiness became more important because it was vital to know someone would keep their word, keep promises, supply what they said they would. Lying robbed communities of trust and undermined collective action. Lying about a commodity (false advertizing) can lead to overt harm, even death. In the OP, I noted the medical frankness with a spouse. In that case, honesty is important because each individual has a right to know their situation and be able to plan their last days and prepare themselves. No one has the right to censor medical information about your body and I would certainly hope when I am dying that people are truthful with me. I would remind Calranthe that Greta Thunberg, who has autism, credits her truthfulness with greatly helping her be an effective activist. In interviews, it's always clear she sees the positive values of Asperger's. As do I.

Your posting name seems apt, given that the Fabians promoted vegetarianism. I agree the flexitarian approach seems most viable for an omnivore species like ours. I think smart vegans can see flexitarians (especially the "eat meat rarely" sort) as allies in the movement towards humane treatment and away from factory farming.

As David Graber and other anthropologists have noted, the desert cults tended to be conservative because they were developed among rural pastoralists (herders and farmers and support trades) many who had fled the urban centers of the ancient world and rejected the worse aspects of them, like multi-generational debt obligations, debt peonage, usury, rigid heirarchies, and the tendency to go to war for filling royal coffers and acquire slaves. It's no accident that desert cults like Christianity had prophets who preached communist values and egalitarianism, and pushed back against materialism and wealth acquisition. It's interesting to see how such a religion gets later coopted by economic/political entities and gradually starts to shy away from collectivism and embrace mercantilism and then capitalism.

The parrot always remains as a 4D structure in the Block Universe. For thermodynamic reasons we cannot get to him. Really, he's just resting. I'm sorry, but how many more wacky dark energy tired light threads are there going to be this week?

I could have posted a similar OP when I became active here last summer. One of the best general science forums out there. Glad you are here, Genady. And thanks to the mods here, who are a big factor in the quality of SFN.

Quite a star(t)ling sight! I'm sure Uri Geller is envious.

Plus one. Are you quite sure English is not your native language? You could have fooled me. In discussion, this argument for the effectiveness of models is sometimes called the evolutionary argument. To adapt to a challenging environment, our modeling of reality has to maintain a high degree of correspondence with what is "out there." At least, insofar as it helps us navigate the macro world of tigers, waterholes, snakes, poison plants, wire coral, etc. The small pitfall of the evolutionary argument is that it only requires models to be effective on a very pragmatic level. We could imagine a creature that needs lots of water. It perceives a pool of water as a jiggling purple tetrahedron that sings "I Feel Pretty" in a lovely soprano voice. It responds by going towards the singing, and drinks, and lives another day. Now, though adaptive, we might assert that this model of a pool of water is not very realistic, and is more like a useful hallucination than a good map of what is out there in the world. That illustrates why we have to approach our mathematical representations of reality with healthy caution and not be carried away by Tegmark-ian notions like "the multiverses are composed of math."

Hi, "Kevin." You started the thread. What do you think, based on your own research on the topic and careful thought?

Max Tegmark, a modern neoPlatonist, seems to find a mathematical universe reasonable. His book is very provocative and carefully argued, though not persuasive to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Mathematical_Universe

Have replied twice here, seems like the points I tried to offer aren't really penetrating, so moving on. If the forum heading changed vegan to vegetarian, I think the answer would be yes, beneficial. Countries like India, where 31% of population is vegetarian, it definitely makes a difference in the footprint. And countries like Germany and UK, where vegetarian population is growing rapidly (10 and 14%, respectively), the impact is growing. Germany also has 42 million who describe as part-time vegetarian. Similar growth is happening in many parts of the world, especially in younger cohorts.

I am currently designing an interocitor, which emits dark light by inducing a current of anti-plasmons through some bendy plastic straws and a chronosynclastic infindibulator. Science!

Yeah, the value of drain-out faucets is learned in one lesson. Before they were prevalent, houses here all had to have an interior shutoff valve for outside faucets. Am in South Dakota, so PEX is popular. It can balloon two to three times its nominal diameter without bursting. I was happy to live in a PEX plumbed older house... until all the dread over plastic nanoparticles ratcheted up. Now we're advised to only use the cold tap for cooking or drinking, and let it run ≥ 30 seconds first.

Well, extreme vegans are probably one percent or less of the population, so I don't see them having the power to halt the use of bees for pollination. Plus there's the absurdity of them making plant farming more difficult, when plants are what they depend on. Plus there's the fact that using bees for what they are naturally meant to do, pollination, means their chances of survival are actually enhanced if farmers are paying apiarists to keep and manage healthy bee colonies. As I said, most vegans I'm familiar with don't take the hardcore philosophy and are willing to carve out exceptions.

I don't think all vegans are opposed to using bees for pollination. There are a range of vegans. Some vegans in India call scallops and oysters "sea vegetables" because they lack a CNS, and allow them in the diet. Some vegans eat honey, some don't. A recent article mentioned vegans who will move to eating eggs if they are free range and certified cruelty free. There's lots of carving out exceptions among vegans, when they can see an ethical path to it. Realistically, humans are probably not giving up apples, melons, almonds, berries, and other foods that require bee pollination. Unless CCD (colony collapse disorder) wipes out too many of them, and even then there are alternative artificial methods.

Or perhaps because the satire was about as subtle as a sledgehammer, and none of the scientists seemed at all believable as real people. Broad caricatures are less relatable, for many viewers. And the Trump caricature was low-hanging fruit. Yes, science denial is dumb. Message received! They milked the public apathy joke for all it was worth, and padded a half hour sketch into a feature-length movie. Meh.

Would finding low prime factors be of any use? Maybe not.

I'm a bit unclear on how earth/moon would cast shadows large enough, at that distance, to much restrict the visible area. Especially if the Webb is following a system that's in orbit around the sun, which is shifting the star field for it anyway. Wouldn't the sunshield itself also impede the view in that direction, and again the star field would shift throughout the year such that no area would be blocked for long? Also: how does an "orbit" around a libration point use less fuel than nudges at the point itself? I'm sure it does, but there's something counterintuitive about it.

Well established science that grazing herds are beneficial to health and biodiversity of grassland ecologies. TBH, I had no idea this was even slightly controversial. I would Google "how grazing animals help grasslands," to get a rich sampling on this topic. I cannot tell if you read my entire post, but I exampled an indigenous species to American grasslands in the last paragraph. I did not mention how the bison recycles nutrients, grazes to prevent biodiversity-reducing overgrowths, mitigates wildfires, and other functions as well. Carbon capture in naturally grazed (not overgrazed) grassland is also helped.

There are grazing lands that are ill suited for cropping, are ecosystems that benefit from a grazing ungulate, where small herds will probably remain justifiable. Culling would yield meat as a luxury item. The present situation, where croplands that could feed people or are better off fallowed are cultivated to grow livestock feed to maintain enormous herds and daily meat consumption by 90-95% of the population, is not sustainable. And the harsh confinement conditions of animals raise big ethical issues. (I eat oysters, which lack a central nervous system, for B12, which plants do not reliably provide. I can't tolerate soy, so tempeh is not an option for B12. Also eat sardines, which have a low eco load, and are developmentally pretty close to unsentient.) The biggest issue may prove to be water per gram of protein, however. It takes a lot of water to produce meat, and we are already draining aquifers to keep pace. And with red meat, there is the methane problem, especially at present herd sizes, and types of feed prevalent. Vat (heh) meat would solve many of these problems. But the Great Plains of the US still need grazing herds, which are vital to that ecosystem. The bison, in particular, is a perfect fit, and its hooves are especially good at breaking up and aerating the soil. It would also make sense to restore wild boar populations in the Eastern woodlands, ecologically.

Nothing, but then there would need to be a splitting off of a new timeline, one in which you never existed. The original timeline would have to still exist, else how would you be there shooting Dad in the first place? And any pastward time travel that even just displaced a few molecules would create a new timeline, in this way. Time travel of this type only seems possible if Everett's Many Worlds interpretation is correct.

I had an interesting time explaining to a relative why an object at L2 couldn't "just use the Earth's shadow to keep cool." I sent along your first link, which clarifies the issues much better than I did. I did point out that at the distance of L2, the apparent disk of Earth would be too small to cover the sun adequately (even if it were possible to hold such a position). L5 is ideal for a colony, hence the name of the famous L5 Society.

Yep. Not sure Dehaene is paying attention to complexity theory there. And the human body is not an isolated system, so any supposed paradox would have to ignore the fact that it interacts massively with a complex environment and biochemical history of the planet, as it develops. This all goes back to guys like Warren Weaver and "organized complexity" and emergentism. The house analogy doesn't apply, either. A stud is a complex artifact, with complex structure produced by a tree and its ecosystem, but the blueprint doesn't have to code for all that. It just says basically "go buy a pile of studs, 92.5 inches long (USA)."