TheVat

I heard some Chaucer scholar in college reading Chaucer as he said it would be done in its time period, and it was somewhat intelligible, though it took some help from accompanying text. If you were listening to someone actually speak that way at normal speed of conversation would you catch that "drooocht" was drought if you missed any context earlier? My guess is basic communication you could manage, but you would fall behind fast in more sophisticated chats. As a time traveler you would have to tell people you were from some remote country, to account for your accent and difficulties. (Full disclosure: I've always had trouble with hearing certain speech sounds - there were characters in "Trainspotting" that I needed subtitles for.)

Will the pothu see the kettle as highly light absorbing?

Though the blonde rider in that hoverbike video has some potential to disrupt pants.

I think this has been said many times in these forums (often by you)(🙂), and repetition doesn't hurt. My own experience, at work, with younger relatives and acquaintances, is very much that the loss is spending hours with one book or other source, reflecting carefully on its meanings and so on. A lot of real knowledge can't be found in a web soundbite or wiki entry or AI summary, and cannot be absorbed in some intuitive augenblick. The other problem arising from so much information, a virtual firehose pointed at us, is not having the techniques for filtering out what's important - filtering is such an important aspect of comprehension. (If one reads a long novel, for example, there comes a point where you realize how to focus on who the characters really are and have less need to recall every setting description or minor plot point)

As someone observing from across a large puddle, I wonder how much of the Andrewvian ferment reflects a general fatigue with royals. But maybe that's an American bias, which tends to see royalty as irrelevant to a modern world. Or as some wit once described celebrity, "famous for being famous."

Usually not a problem, given it's nonfriable asbestos, but black mastic in old houses would be applied to floorboards and then get dry and brittle over the decades. When renovators pry up the tiles and find mastic, they are tempted to try scraping or even sanding the boards (if they they want to restore a wood floor). This sort of action can break up the now brittle matrix and release some fibers. So remodeling experts advise either putting on a sealant (then painting), or adding a new layer of flooring. Or, as I did once when the exposed boards proved to be in wretched condition, pull up the whole floor and nail down a new one. Which sounds more fun than it actually is.

The goal of a corporate capitalist system is shareholder profits. That's it. It's up to government to counter this with ethical and moral guardrails, so any society where government is primarily answering to corporate donors and lobbying will suffer erosion of human values. AI is a textbook case of this. The main driver of economic growth in the US is now digital tech, software and AI, so You Know Who will do anything he can to favor those sectors and take personal credit for rosy GDP figures, etc. Students won't return to that deep, long-attention-span learning that is so vital to knowledge and competence unless forced to do so by what will likely be seen as Draconian measures. Maybe some crisis will bring that kind of change, e.g. vast numbers of employees who can't think critically, solve problems, or innovate, confronted by some disaster where those are sorely needed. Companies will maybe enter choppy waters where they discover AI is as likely to bring paperclipmageddon as to do any nuanced problem solving. MIT Technology ReviewOur Fear of Artificial IntelligenceA true AI might ruin the world—but that assumes it’s possible at all.

Veritasium has provided me some TIL moments, too. Will look for that vid, as I am interested in building materials, and what to watch out for. I recall finding some black mastic under some old floor tiles while doing a reno, and learning that stuff sometimes had asbestos. (I couldn't be sure if it did, but I handled the sealing process as if it could)

Passing along something Geordie posted on another forum, from an FB feed. Hypothetically, if someone was accused of having sex with goats by over 30 different people and regularly denied it, but also dropped very public hints about how much he liked to have sex with goats for decades, and ran a goat pageant to find the best looking goats, and was best friends with someone who who got convicted of fucking goats and trafficking goats to friends all over the world who also liked to fuck goats, and his name was in the classified goat fucker chronicles 5,000 times, and he wished other goat fuckers well in prison, what do you think the odds are that person is also a goat fucker?" Ragnar Blackwolf

I've been down that research alley. Yeah, quite a contrast. I turn off AI search on my Chrome browser. Wind turbines are the least offenders for powering data centers, IIRC the atmo physics analysis. @sethoflagos might know more on that. Don't understand that "simply". PV converts Sun that would have heated rural ground (in most installs). PV, via the computers it's powering, is turning solar radiance into hot air venting from the server building. Is that more warming than heated soil radiating? Seems like albedo would need accounting for, plus some other complications.

Deep spots, golf on a familiar trail, I'm a fan of log's top speed.

Yep, I had checked to see if there were conference proceedings, but those won't be out for a while as it's only been four days since it ended. I was hoping Fowler might have something on a preprint server like bioRxiv, but nothing like that so far. I'm having trouble finding a detailed AAAS conference schedule which mentions an Anna Fowler. She's listed as a grad student at ASU, but the pop science coverage only makes reference to her doing an analysis of more than 20 studies on people’s near-death experiences, as well as studies conducted in animals peri- and postmortem. So she did a systematic review with some meta-analysis and not actual lab or clinical research. I notice media bottomfeeders like The Telegraph included some of Ms Fowler's more outrageous claims, e.g. (regarding prompt organ harvesting) "This is done to ensure the organs are fresh and not damaged for their transplantation into a patient in need, but Ms Fowler says that in these cases a donor may still be conscious while their organs are harvested." I can see why she drew a cluster of reporters with such horror movie speculations. Rather irresponsible - that kind of thing gets amplified in the echo chambers of the Web and you could get people changing their organ donor status.

Can't find the original paper or the data it contained. There's lots of "may" in this report, but I don't see how the dots are being connected to leap from random neural firings to consciousness. This needs the cited study. And there's a larger body of research showing synaptic connections (the connectome) breaking up within a few minutes, so Fowler needs to show how countering forces could keep the connectome intact. Cellular autolysis and ion deregulation would seem to make any continued functional neural activity quite difficult.

The New YorkerThe BoyosphereOn today’s episode of the podcast, why mommies are obsolete and naps are for the weak.

Not my field, but there is a branch of developmental psychology that studies cognitive and emotional maturation from birth to adulthood. While individual timelines for all that varies on an individual basis, there do seem to be markers that are fairly consistent within a specific culture which highlight vulnerability to manipulation, coercion and abuse by an unscrupulous adult. Probably one solid empirical foundation are studies of those who do suffer mental health problems stemming from such exploitation in their early teens. IOW, it's not just about cognitive tests of situational judgment or impulse control or that sort of thing - it's also about case histories of adolescents and pre-adolescents who have been preyed upon. My own daughter I didn't have much to worry about, I'm happy to report. There was one manipulative BF when she was quite young, and she ended that chapter by grabbing his motorcycle helmet and whacking him over the head with it. Maybe not the ideal way to resolve differences, but I think it was a useful life lesson for that fellow.

A minister, Ronno Connor, received a plan for Panama which seemed less ambitious than the canal project... A man, a plan, Rev. - draw pup, martyr electrons, snort celery, tramp upward, vernal Panama.

One option a friend found in India was that many vegetarian restaurants in India, especially in tourist areas and population centers, are kosher certified, which is a more strict regulation of vegetables, grains, and fruit than halal. Halal just avoids contamination from pork products or alcohol, but kosher (kashrut) also requires specific treatment of plant foods. Also, this approach means you will (a) be better acquainted with how many Indians eat, and (b) avoid meat, which is where contamination is most serious. You may even find that vegetarian dishes are delicious, and your bowels will thank you.

And how does one obtain a rate, for any natural process?

My sense is that some kind of picayune technical definition of pedophilia is being used in order to somehow lessen Epstein's crimes. Even if a 14 yo girl is not precisely a child, there can be little question that someone middle-aged exploiting someone clearly not an adult in this way is committing an act deservedly labeled as a crime. Good grief I can't believe I even have to point this out. With regret, I must put this poster on ignore.

Sometimes Turnip's "foreign relations" are really just him flexing for a fellow billionaire, as with his recent blockage of opening the Windsor-Detroit bridge. The only deal here is not really about Canada, or their paying tribute to his orange magnificence, but about showing how he can toss treats to the oligarchs. (Gift link) The AtlanticTrump Has a Bridge He Wants to Sell YouThe president’s closure of a trade route from Detroit to Windsor will help a billionaire and hurt basically everyone else.

Given the POTUS' fondness for CO2, perhaps a nice gift could be pumping his office and suite full of it? I myself have heard it's an excellent sleep aid. Things like allowable tailpipe emissions are set by the EPA, which has federal regulatory authority. States are allowed to have stricter emission limits, and CA has done this often. But the EPA regs do not carve out exceptions for states to be less strict. Whatever Turnip does, some states will retain stricter regs. And since they are populous states like NY and CA that will still prod automakers to comply.

Some clarification needed. Didn't James Patterson (who wrote the source material for the series) use some media sources for parts of his book? Which media sources are you accusing of lies and manipulation? You need to back up your bashing of media with some documented examples.

Abraham Lincoln and Darwin were born the same day, same year. Darwin had somewhat nicer accomodations, at that time, than our log cabin president. Thanks to mom's being from the wealthy Wedgwood family and father being an eminent physician and FRS. And a grandfather was Erasmus Darwin, a well-known naturalist who anticipated evolutionary theory with his writings on survival of the fittest. These inspired his grandson to develop a fuller and more robust theory.

Haven't checked recently but I know the US has bought a massive quantity of sheetrock from China. If tariffs are affecting that supply path, it could also effect carbon emissions - sheetrock (gypsum board, or "drywall") is pretty carbon heavy. IIRC our purchases have switched more to Mexico and Canada. (And that path is also plagued with supply chain problems and raw material shortages, and now some tariffs, so it's been pretty crazy when I go to a building supply store recently.)