TheVat

LQG is hardly being ignored. Dozens of research groups, led by prominent physicists like Carlo Rovelli, are working on it. It is very far from being ignored or suppressed.

It's quite alright- News was the better location for the topic. I buried mine in too specific a forum. And I like your OP. Thread should just import Peterkins post.

Mod: any chance we can merge this with the Wilson thread I started yesterday?

Thanks. I was tossing out bad ideas, in hopes a good one would appear. And, it occurred to me after posting, that the direction of coiling could simply be what Gould and Lewontin called a spandrel. It is just a byproduct of some other feature that is adaptive. (like, say, mooring consistency) Somewhere in the instructions for polyps attaching, as they evolved, it was simpler to have one instruction, like "extend a knot of cells for mooring the next fellow there on the upper right." If you had a binary choice of instructions, you would just get a less stable mess, so at that evolutionary fork in the road, selective pressure was strong for one path to be taken. It didn't really matter if it was left or right coiling, just that it was consistent all through the genome. BTW, I liked your Coriolis anecdote. Postscript on spandrels, for those who may be new to the concept: Gould and Lewontin defined a biological spandrel as a byproduct of evolutionary adaptation. Simply put, they’re like ‘leftovers’ of some other trait that evolved. This means that the spandrel isn’t an adaptation to anything in the environment. Instead, it is a secondary trait that arose from the development of another primary trait. The easiest spandrel to visualize is the human chin. One hypothesis about why humans are the only animals that have a chin is that it is merely a byproduct of the growth of different parts of the jaw. The word spandrel comes from the architectural feature that Gould happened to notice in St. Mark's Basilica. He wanted to distinguish between the way it was presently used and its actual architectural reason for being there.

Perhaps the common helical orientation relates to crowding effects? Where these helical strings cluster more thickly, a transient event like a storm would generate some currents even in this placid zone and the strings would bump into each other - when they have common chirality, they are less likely to get tangled in each other, and so each colony thrives more. (where they stay tangled, perhaps it's more likely some large swimming creature will run into the tangle and tear it up or uproot) This might (I know this is a stretch) exert a small selective pressure over time for a single chirality.

Linus Pauling was a brilliant chemist, he won the Nobel Prize, but he also championed the theory that Vitamin C in megadoses was a miracle treatment, which turned out to be nonsense. All the world got from Pauling's "vitamin therapy" was a mass increase in kidney stones for several years. This kind of thing, where eminent researchers stray outside their area of expertise, happens a lot.

https://apnews.com/article/edward-o-wilson-dead-biologist-bc3d64fceb5200dd88d67187ef2a5cee

The Sun is Murdoch owned tabloid garbage. You can use the paper version for birdcages, or your dog (if it is very undiscriminating in where it makes its deposits). I found this source, which might be a little less breathless. https://phys.org/news/2018-11-chinese-fusion-tool-million-degrees.html

Between the hemispheres is a description sometimes applied to Kiribati. Is that the general location? Chirality in some species, like molluscs, relates to members of a species tending to all spiral one way to ease reproduction. The adaptive advantage for coral is harder to discern. Would be interested to see larger sample than a few dozen.

My early training was in physiology, so I'm familiar with interfacial water. The author seems to have some grasp of the concept, but then seems to make a leap from electrostatics (applicable in cellular chemistry, as in all chemistry) to electrodynamics, which doesn't seem applicable. It seems like he wants there to be electrical charges in fast motion and some EMF radiation, such that tissues are "broadcasting." At that point, as Swanson noted, you need experimental support!

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/ayn-rand-writes-rudolph-the-red-nosed-reindeer

Spectral data? So you are suggesting that, though these are dark sunless planets, they could have some thermal signature that we would pick up if they were close enough? Would a weak IR signature provide any spectral data that indicated life? That's the part I don't understand. It would indicate either residual heat still stored after ejection from a planetary system or possibly radioisotopes in the planet's interior generating heat. But life?

What sort of people offered these recommendations and what were they recommending? What was the topic of "water on some shit"? Not really sure what that means, or how that relates to the OP article. Any clarification would be gratefully received!

I'm going to take a wild guess and say that we might have heard something in the media or in scientific journals, if life had been discovered. BTW, Andrew, given the indirect methods of observation used, what sort of remote sensing methods do you think could detect signatures of life on such bodies?

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.