TheVat

...that the world was slightly saner today for about four hours when FB, instagram and whatsapp all went down. (bet someone tried to reconfigure a DNS server and it crashed)

Likely philosophers who focus on a specific branch (usually numbered at seven: metaphysics, logic, axiology, aesthetics, ethics, epistemology and political philosophy) that pertains to specific methods or objectives of science will get more respect and fewer sixteen ton weights. Ethics is one, as several noted. Epistemology is another, as it looks at what can be known in the interpretation of data and what can be said to be known in advance of that interpretation. And good old logic is handy when you kick the tires on any conclusion. I've found epistemology the most useful branch when it comes to making sense of areas like NCC (the neurological correlates of consciousness) or quantum theory.

I blame the excessive chiming of cuckoo clocks.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/10/big-companies-are-funding-campaign-kill-climate-bill/620278/ Doubletalk from large corporations on the climate provisions in the major infrastructure legislation currently being thrashed out in the US Congress. (This magazine provides three free articles before a PW drops down. )

Intelligence is an umbrella term to cover a vast range of cognitive skills, and seems far less relevant to assessing job fitness than more precise measures of competence, sometimes called aptitudes. Competencies vital to a national leader would include social skills, big picture comprehension that sees beyond giant fields of data, sound judgement and quick decision skills, and capacity to empathize with people from all walks of life. It's a failure of democracy, of its filters, of its guardrails, when someone gets through whose competencies are only conning people and covering up their own lapses of judgement, empathy, decision-making, etc. Of course, Clinton was a smart guy who had most of the competencies I mentioned, and still somehow couldn't quite grasp that the POTUS is someone who lives in a fishbowl and can't sneak off and be a horny college boy again. Or that making juvenile excuses makes it far worse than just owning up and apologizing. Maybe the competency I left off the list was: being a fecking grownup. Grownups don't have to be moral paragons, but they do have to own up when they're not. I haven't followed Bo enough to know where he falls on the grownup spectrum, though I suspect he finds it a challenge. On first sighting I'll confess I said something unkind and petty about "village idiot hairdo, " and I regret that.

I think, until some things are clarified, there will be a natural tendency to poke some fun here. My first question: how does someone discover that battery acid is a solvent suitable for washing greasy hands? I mean, at what point do you say, hmm, no soap around, gosh maybe I can pour off that old car battery over yonder, little sulfuric acid never hurt anyone! Second question: if you aren't getting pain signals from a deep cut or strong acids, have you considered seeing a neurologist? That kind of insensitivity could pose some real danger to you. They could determine possibly where nociceptor fibres may be damaged or if there is some other issue with interpretation of pain in the brain. And suggest ways to protect yourself from tissue damage and infection.

Is there a path to such couples having children which are their biological offspring? What I mean is, if a cis-male and a trans-female wish to have children that share both their genes, then you would need to create an egg with haploid nuclear material from the former cis-male (I presume that would be from sperm she had donated/stored prior to SA surgery?) And then you would have both parents with XY chromosomes, so that seems to raise some technical problems, too, at least 25% of the time. Seems like you would need some kind of sorting process of sperm, if the objective was a fifty/fifty chance of either gender of the child, and not getting a double-Y (which sounds nonviable). And then there would be the fact that the egg's mitochondrial DNA would be...my head is starting to ache.

The mitigating factor (I hope) is that Trump appointed federal judges who would turn out to harbor a belief in the rule of law and have professional scruples, and then turn around and toss some Trumpist nonsense out of their courtroom. That's happened enough times to make me think that donning the mantle of office in a federal district court can have a bracing effect even on staunch conservatives.* Another factor is that the Trump admin left many posts unfilled in the DOJ, which means that Garland can now start filling them with competent public servants instead of cultists. *That happens with the Supremes, too. Justices like Anthony Kennedy took their professional duties quite seriously and moved away from their partisan pasts.

I'm thinking of a recent leader who made Bojo look like Benjamin Disraeli. That said, I think playing the fool can undermine confidence - when the leader of a nation appears to be a fool, that can make citizens, and stock markets, anxious. If there is aggression from other nations, or threats of, it can be pretty scary if your perception is that a fool is at the helm. I won't name names, but say a president, let's call him Ronald Mump, is dealing with a rogue nation, let's call it North Borea, and starts talking as if nuclear war were a viable foreign policy choice (and had said nukes were a viable tactical option in other parts of the world, in previous interviews)....

White freedom. A lot of the legislative agenda in Red states is either about vote suppression of minority groups or about giving legislatures power to nullify elections by either statewide fiat or removing county election officials and replacing them en masse. As the saying goes, you know your party's policies suck when you have to cheat to win elections. I think the battlefield on which democracy is saved will be the courts, where all these terrible laws are challenged.

Yep. That's why I listed shrinking of cryosphere first. Arctic ice does cover a lot of ocean most of the year. Max extent is historically around 6 million square miles. The minimum, iirc, is recorded around September 1, and that figure has been dropping.

Not that I can see. I have to wonder if the albedo drop is more than just from thinning low level clouds. Shrinking of cryosphere, increased diesel soot on snowfields and other pale surfaces, increased soot from wildfires, submergence of coastal lands, etc. This is definitely not in the category of good news. The only countering effect I've heard about is the replacement of forests with grasslands -- grasslands have a higher albedo than forest canopies. And that's not a good way to raise abedo, ecologically speaking.

In the immortal words of Roy Scheider, in Jaws, "you're going to need a bigger boat."

There's a possibility that anything harvesting hurricane force winds would need degrees of fortification that would render it economically impractical. My WAG is that underwater flaps (or similar) that harnessed the accompanying tidal surges for power would last longer and also do regular duty with regular tides. Given that hurricanes form far out to sea, I doubt that any practical mechanical system could arrest their development.

I haven't seen the last three seasons, so I've only ever seen that speech out of the show's context. The spouse and I have recently started catching up at season five, so I guess we'll find out what that's all about. It's funny, seeing just the clip alone, it was sort of inspiring and idealistic. (you've now got me burning with curiosity) Anyway, plus one, and I am now alerted to an ironic subtext.

I am reminded of the Matt Santos convention speech on The West Wing -- here's a snip: We all live lives of imperfection and yet we cling to this fantasy that there’s this perfect life and that our leaders should embody it. But if we expect our leaders to live on some higher moral plain than the rest of us, well we’re just asking to be deceived. Now it’s been suggested to me this week that I should try to buy your support with jobs, and the promise of access. It’s been suggested to me that party unity is more important than your democratic rights as delegates. That’s right: it’s not. And you have a decision to make. Don’t vote for us because you think we’re perfect. Don’t vote for us because of what we might be able to do for you only. Vote for the person who shares your ideals, your hopes, your dreams. Vote for the person who most embodies what you believe we need to keep our nation strong and free....

Obama's third term, then. I seem to recall a third of the electorate got pissed when he put his feet up on the desk.

Depends on the mass difference and distance between planet and moon. If the moon's mass is great enough that the barycenter is outside the moon's sphere then, as with Pluto and Charon, both bodies will be tidally locked to each other as they both orbit their common center of gravity which lies between them. The effect will override any tidal locking from the primary, the M star. I'm afraid I don't have the math handy on locating the barycenter. The question is if, unlike Pluto and Charon, a close-in planet could possibly be close enough to a dwarf star to disrupt the mutual lock between the planet and big moon. Seems unlikely, but we could use a second opinion.

Saw some complaint back there about people posting one or two liner comments. I think that's partially explained by some of us having exhaustively researched and discussed the issues around AGW, and being reluctant to keep "reinventing the wheel" in terms of discourse on a forum. IMHO, the time for chat is over, and it's time for everyone to look hard at their own carbon footprint (and methane footprint, if that's applicable) and promote green praxis. Population is going to grow for a while - that's "baked in," as @swansont noted - so it really comes down to accepting the obvious: mitigating our production of GHGs is of paramount importance, to reduce whatever climatic changes are coming (and are here) and buy us some time to prepare for the changes that are inevitable. As @Peterkin noted, and I may have mentioned earlier in this thread or a similar one, the population problem will only start to be resolved when women's rights are universally promoted and implemented. So, no, I'm not going to be rehashing Tyndall's experiment, or revisiting Arrhenius, or doing massive citation dumps on how human-produced GHGs and PM pollutants are warming the globe at a rate unprecedented in geological history. It's happening. Dust off your damned bicycle and start cranking. As some wit once said, "Cranks start revolutions."

Antivax = superstitious death cult. A brief take on the issue. When you have people who are unable to grasp why we no longer suffer (or rarely suffer) from typhus, polio, smallpox, tetanus, diphtheria, pneumococcal, rubella, meningococcal, etc, then you are looking at minds in the powerful grip of a cult.

The caption for Archaea also seems erroneous, defining them as "similar to bacteria but lacking a nucleus." Erm, bacteria also lack a nucleus and are a domain of prokaryotes. Archaea have metabolic pathways that bacteria do not. I agree their mass is very tricky to gauge, given that they include extremophiles and are also among plankton.

I had to get my eyeglasses Rx changed after my Moderna shots. I think maybe it was trying to read the three pages of small print they handed me when I left. Or possibly the weeping when I didn't receive a lollipop.

It's amusing to contemplate a Drake Formula for the number of time travelers from the future we might encounter. Also Jinn objects... https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/the-philosophical-complications-of-time-travel-and-how-to-solve-them/

The least uncertainty might be with livestock, where herd sizes and poundage of marketed animals are closely tracked by most nations. Greater uncertainty would be with sampling methods applied to species that are small, widely spread and mixed in with other media, like bacteria, nematodes, fungi, etc. And such categories are more likely to have species not yet identified. And also marine species, because, well, the oceans are so vast and deep. Mollusks, for example, would seem to call for a lot of guesswork. Cool thread and graphics.

Canadians have a coin with a loon on it. I don't see how we can trust them.