TheVat

Hear hear. And I would only add "fight gerrymandering in their state" to "wake up and vote." So it's a matter of awakening also to what happens in state legislatures - something Americans are notably poor at. Voter turnout for state elections is often abysmal. Which is ironic, given that state legislators are much closer to and more accessible to their constituents. And it's worthwhile for voters to know that federal Constitutional amendments are ratified by state legislators. For some of the MAGA base, dictatorship isn't a bug it's a feature. They embrace the old adage, you want to cook an omelette you gotta break eggs.

Pretty much what I was going to reply. The founders envisioned a much smaller sort of presidency, where partisan coalitions wouldn't be complicit with a wannabe dick tater. Jefferson and Madison in particular advocated a weaker executive, which pitted them against Hamilton, who was the one who wanted the "unitary executive" with a lot of power and having EOs that would carry the force of law. MAGA is Hamilton's federalism gone totally apeshit.

@exchemist Your deeply incisive and acutely perceptive observation casts a brutally honest light on this topic and reminds us how the rapid transformation of the jobs market will reshape our learning goals and aspirations across almost all disciplines. 😬 (perhaps man eating plants can fit well into this societal shift, consuming the now large numbers of superfluous workers)(see, we're back to topic!)

No, just an unripe banana. Lower in fructans. Plantains are definitely an acquired taste.

Needed some rousing and whimsical Rossini. Thieving Magpie did the job nicely.

LMAO. Your parodic juxtaposition of hyperbolized semantic amplifications with normative domains of memetic architecture has provided a bracing reset of our lexical window on all matters of multitiered discourse across indeterminate gradients of knowledge!

I recognized the question, because I've heard it asked many places. It's basically the old "are we becoming weaker overall because genes which formerly would have been lethal or inhibited reproductive chances are now compensated for by modern medicine?" This is the sort of question which researchers step around like a pile of poo on the sidewalk. Research findings which could be seen by some as justification for sterilizing people with deleterious genes or letting pandemics run rampant or allowing even more "Darwinian" situations to play out in the RW....are findings that would be a sort of third rail. You may recall some unpleasantness in the early/mid 20th century regarding the disposition of people branded as genetically flawed in some way. Maybe it's worth talking about ways to avoid having Fascists and/or NeoNazis get any sort of traction from such research.

Detox is a buzzword for fads that usually involve some sort of simplified diet for several days. You can pick almost any one of them at random and do a search for peer reviewed studies. It's usually missing many key nutrients, so it can only be a very short term diet. And often it will have levels of fiber or types of short chain polysaccharides or a specific protein which can actually make some people more sick, even though it may sound healthy. For example, the potato cleanse is trendy now. It's what it sounds like - low protein, no grain, no fat, just spuds and a little salt. While it can give some people a little rest from some foods that are bothering them, and allow a kind of temporary reset, it doesn't really fix anything. And for anything like that, the person needs the supervision of a gastroenterologist. For someone with a kidney problem, the potato cleanse could be quite dangerous. The REAL detox is a supervised diet where problem bacteria growing in the gut microbiome are gradually pushed out by consumption of probiotic foods that foster more of the good bacteria. And also prebiotics (which help feed the healthy bacteria) - and these also need supervision. For example, prebiotics in onions or dates or bananas could be great for one person but make many people with IBS sicker. I, for example, am a little touchy about high FODMAP foods, so a fruit cleanse with stone fruits, apples, dates and ripe bananas would not agree with me. But one with berries, kiwis and green banana would do just fine. Notice the words I bolded.

Wasn't that the basis for the TOE Nail theory?

From the guidelines for Speculation subforum... The Speculations forum is provided for those who like to hypothesize new ideas in science. To enrich our discussions above the level of Wild Ass Guesswork (WAG) and give as much meaning as possible to such speculations, we do have some special rules to follow: Speculations must be backed up by evidence or some sort of proof. If your speculation is untestable, or you don't give us evidence (or a prediction that is testable), your thread will be moved to the Trash Can. If you expect any scientific input, you need to provide a case that science can measure. So, @Prajna , when you use folk psychology (as philosophers of mind like Dennett or Churchland call it) notions like spiritual liberation, or you and Gem being of one heart and mind, or intuitions of a machine consciousness, then you are departing the science room and dwelling in the mysticism room. Your mystical conjurings are interesting but they do not appear to provide testable hypotheses. My hypothesis is that you are somewhat narcissistic in your infatuation with a software which is reflecting your thoughts and feelings back at you. Indeed the mythic image of Narcissus falling in love with his reflected image in a pond seems apt here. But my hypothesis is not rigorously testable, either. So I discard it. And I'm disappointed, now that you've confessed to it, that you posted an earlier answer as your own when you had doctored Jyoti's response. This diminishes trust, something that's important to actual conscious minds.

I've tried to reserve judgement on the source of your posts, but this seems both off the topic (science forum, hello ) and very similar to the kind of fulsome praise, hyperbolic phrasing and philosophizing that I see coming from chatbots. Or... Fess up, Hal.

Far From the Madding Crowd Anna Karenina Wuthering Heights Othello Madame Bovary

The ensuing lengthy post needs an abstract. And I'm neither dry nor an academic. Wetly yours, Vat That said, the bot did invent a new month, Manuary, that I'm sure Joe Rogan and the manosphere will love.

Sid and Nancy 😁

Reverse DNS lookup will put me seventy miles away from my location. Not a great locator method, possibly. Mixed feelings about doxxing someone, but you may have had some positive effect on overall level of abuse and bullying and your actions had no malice. Probably some lesson was learned by the troll, we'll never know. We had just moved to Corvallis Oregon in the summer of 1988 when Oregon State University was starting its own IRC - along with the famous one in Oulu, Finland it was one of the first in the world. The guy in Finland contacted OSU and they joined together along with some other US IRC. In a year, there were dozens of servers across the globe.

I haven't been able to keep up since the Ewwenower administration. I'm liking his new Russian facelift! Plus one for making me choke on my tea. In fairness, counting the b's in blueberry is a challenge. Though pigeons are reportedly quite adept.

Criteria are tough to pin down. My five week old kittens seem to be aware of their environment, but I doubt they are aware of themselves as distinct beings that persist over time with a sense of selfhood. They do feel things, which is a lower definitional bar. And they remember and recognize me, swarming over me when I arrive in the house (memo to self: long pants, ALWAYS long pants). But they evidently are not conscious in the way that I am or that apes or Cetaceans are. It's probably easier to view consciousness as a gradient or spectrum than as a something that satisfies a specific checklist. As soon as someone tries to do that, someone else comes along with a specific set of neurological tracts and loci which are purported to be the site of consciousness.

Papua New Guinea. Port Moresby, specifically. Harihua, umui be kamonai!

My first thought was that the UVC protection was a spandrel. (For those unfamiliar, Gould and Lewontin used the analogy of a spandrel (a structural feature in ancient churches etc) to describe traits in organisms that are byproducts of the evolution of other characteristics, rather than direct products of natural selection and adaptation. )

Paging Nick Tesla!

LoL.

Emily received an unpleasant invitation to drink with sexist Russian cosmonauts. Stoli, primeval slave? - Mir pilots

Yep, I was also going to make the automotive analogy, where I could completely assemble a 65 VW bug from parts back before engines got buried in electronic control modules and sensors. The fun bit, with the Bug, was the air-cooled engine. (and just lifting the car's rear to roll the whole engine out, no hoist needed) I'm surprised when I'll talk with a Z or Millennial who seem somewhat computer savvy and then they'll say something like, what's a C prompt? You show them how to get one and they act like it's magic. When I was around ten, I had partly disassembled an old tube television before my dad shut that down, pointing out that the capacitors could still deliver a shock. I protested that I knew how to discharge a capacitor, but he clarified that I didn't and that I had overlooked several things including that the CRT also acted a capacitor and could store a shock for several days after unplugging. It's a wonder I survived my childhood.

Same here, but my professor also made the same remark about the corpus callosum. The good doctor should see that all roads lead through many a nexus, but those nexuses are not singular loci for a global emergent process. All roads in Midwest America might lead through Chicago but that doesn't mean the Midwest ceases to be if all the roads there are bombed. No doubt some commerce would reroute through Twin Cities and St Louis and KC and Omaha, and various modules of Midwestern life would manage to limp on. Neurological roads connect many modules that participate in consciousness and selfhood, somewhat in line with Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind (see also Daniel Dennett) but they are not themselves some defining receptacle of consciousness. The switchboard is not the conference call. What is necessary for something is not always the thing itself.

In the US we still get incidents of plague in the West/Southwest, usually due to a lapse in rodent control in a house. Someone in Arizona died of the pneumonic form of YP last month. Anywhere in the West, we get advisories to make sure we treat our pets for fleas and discourage their roaming in wild areas so that won't be a vector from the wild rodents. And if you find a dead rodent, you use a long-handled implement to dispose of it.