TheVat

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.

It has been "forever" since I read Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, so I am trying to recall if there are any descriptive passages about going into a BH. I know the BH is part of a transport system, but don't recall if there are details about entering. There remains a nagging memory of a shorter work where some group of scientists figures out how to avoid spaghettification and enter intact but I cannot find it atm. In the meantime, take care of your liver.

(chuckle) I myself am currently tutoring various members of the royal families of Europe in quantum field theory!

Emergence reminds me of Lee Smolin and his emergent space ideas. A blog of his, in SciAm... https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/space-the-final-illusion/

Prometheus, it does seem like BH are used more as devices or sentient beings - Greg Benford's Eater was what first sprang to mind. Fredrick Pohl's Beyond the Blue Event Horizon another famous use of a BH -- as a hiding place for aliens. What you are after seems rarer and I have only the vaguest dimmest memory of a short story, read decades ago, which fits your description. I will look around, see if I can bring anything to light. Did Paul McAuley write something like that?

What strikes me about the dispute is the way that expressing grievances has changed in recent years. At one time, a drunk boss saying something stupid, would be fodder for commiserating elsewhere... wow, the boss is a mean drunk, and starts spouting bullshit. Maybe you meet a coworker in a break room and share some venomous comments about your stupid boss, no one is turning it into deep angst over being marginalized. We wouldn't be reading about it on BBC. I mean "transwomen are a danger to actual women in toilets," sounds like the kind of drunken idiocy that should give underlings something to mock at, not launch some sort of public official inquiry or attack campaign. And if said director claims to be open and egalitarian, then party attendees should just openly push back on her remarks, then and there, or later one-on-one. If her clueless views are ever amenable to modification by facts, that is more likely to happen if she is not publicly horsewhipped and has her worst moment paraded around the nation. The time for lawyers, sharp knives, and publicity, is if the director is called on her behavior by people at the party and she then punishes them at work or fires them. IOW, real discrimination. Real oppression. If that was happening in this case, the report is not clear about that.

If our furnace starts to fail, you will probably hear about it here first. I am listening to my furnace, going zhhreeeee-kachunk!-umgggghhhh.

My reference to The Byrds was a lame attempt to maintain topical relevance. Back to topic: Sorry to hear about Bronski. Too soon. As a Gershwin fan, I recall Bronski did a tune of theirs, It Ain't Necessarily So, back in the eighties. I wonder if Bronski influenced The Eurythmics. Had a similar synth sound.

https://www.wikihow.com/Replace-a-Washing-Machine-Belt In all the houses we owned, this seemed to be the most common washer problem. You can listen to Turn Turn Turn by The Byrds while fixing.

Fascinating. Clarity was achieved on the first page of this thread, but it took eleven more pages for it to sink in. Long live the cyan lizards!

As someone who went through a sculpture phase that involved plumbing parts and misc. metal stuff, I really dig this lamp. The room is pleasant, too, though I would have heart arrhythmia if our coffee table was ever that uncluttered. The spouse likes her teetering piles. Plus one.

There is always a tension inherent between democracy and government mandates. I think it was someone like Edmund Burke who pointed out that you have to, in order for government to impose a top-down rational scheme for a public good, assume that some people are somewhat "childish" and will not voluntarily act in their own best interest or that of the community. Philosophers like David Hume and Burke pushed back against that. Unfortunately, Burke et al did not anticipate the sort of turbocharged mind-control and propagandistic powers of the Net, and lived in a much simpler time where events happened at a much more local level. Pandemics are the classic large-scale event that our normal local perceptions and moral sentiments (to use a Burkean phrase) really are not equal to, and so history shows over and over that you have to go Draconian (a word that itself derives from a famous solution to an epidemic, IIRC) and somewhat violate the usual social and political norms if you really want to save lives. My guess is that societies that have a cultural foundation built more on conformity will have an advantage in fighting pandemics, because public health mandates will be received with far less distress and ideological debate. I find it ironic that the social movement in the US that most resists public health measures, and howls the loudest about their freedom, seems also to be the group that is most plagued with unthinking conformity.