TheVat

This seems to be a repackaging of the OP question you asked, which was extensively answered by several of us last month. You replied to none of them, nor absorbed apparently any of their points. Why the hell should I bother with this again?

In philosophy, emergence usually is defined in terms of two classes, weak and strong. From SEP: Though diverse, accounts of ontological emergence can be usefully grouped by a basic division between those that are and are not compatible with physicalism, understood as the thesis that all natural phenomena are wholly constituted and completely metaphysically determined by fundamental physical phenomena. This thesis is standardly understood to entail “the causal closure of the physical”, according to which (roughly) any fundamental-level physical effect has a purely fundamental physical cause. “Strong” emergence accounts are inconsistent with physicalism and causal closure (as just elucidated) while weak emergence accounts are consistent with it. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/ My sense of these terms is that weak emergence lies in observations like "water is wet." Though we cannot easily deduce wetness from a single H20 molecule, it seems possible in principle to get there from fundamental physical causes. The loose joinery of molecules, the latent heat of vaporization, etc. Some theorists believe that there are some phenomena, like consciousness, volition, or spacetime, which require strong emergentism in which higher-level functions take on unique and fundamental causal powers which micro-constituents do not have. It seems to me that this more robust definition of emergence is where the controversy is thickest. Many emergent phenomena are simply our macro level experience of them, and do not really provide any reason to imagine special macro level causal powers.

https://apnews.com/article/science-glaciers-antarctica-e9687077d7295e8218ba7cbcb9246ca3 A team of scientists is sailing to “the place in the world that’s the hardest to get to” so they can better figure out how much and how fast seas will rise because of global warming eating away at Antarctica’s ice. Thirty-two scientists on Thursday are starting a more than two-month mission aboard an American research ship to investigate the crucial area where the massive but melting Thwaites glacier faces the Amundsen Sea and may eventually lose large amounts of ice because of warm water. The Florida-sized glacier has gotten the nickname the “doomsday glacier” because of how much ice it has and how much seas could rise if it all melts — more than two feet (65 centimeters) over hundreds of years.

Thanks, Zapatos. I found the roulette wheel analogy quite helpful. Just curious about the downvote. It would be greatly helpful if someone could alert me to which part of the post was problematic, and how I could remedy that? The first portion was responding to an article posted here earlier which did state there was an advantage in avoiding earth/moon shadows. I was just seeking a bit of clarification, and was not trying to push any opinion. A bit mystified by the minus one. Please clarify? Since I don't give downvotes here, I would prefer some directness when someone casts one. This situation is actually why I don't downvote. Without an explanation, it can be perplexing and thus counterproductive.

My memory of London this time of year (when visiting in the eighties) was that it did not offer optimal viewing conditions. Orion is prominent in the winter sky, arcing across the southern sky in the evening. I don't know which direction from London would get you away from light pollution the quickest.

Yes, for sure there are exceptions that a reasonable person would carve out. Young children who might not have the capacity to process some harsh truths. Or someone with dementia, paired with an anxiety disorder. Thanks for pointing out - I wasn't aiming at absolutes. Twelve below zero when I walked downtown this morning. If my toes are gone I don't want to know!

You mentioned expense, Shivaji. Music is a wonderful stress reliever, and there are instruments less expensive than a guitar. https://www.amazon.com/YRS-24B-Plastic-Soprano-Recorder-Natural/dp/B00EJF5Y26/ref=asc_df_B00EJF5Y26/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=198057701162&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=17332029863741598566&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=t&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9020641&hvtargid=pla-380354557370&psc=1 Not spam, just an example of an easy to play instrument that is affordable. Other ways to ease burnout and fog...take long walks, avoid caffeine after 5pm to improve your night sleep (good sleep cures a lot of mental fog problems), avoid sugar and refined flour-based foods (both produce mental fog and mood swings, as well as other negative effects), intensive "explosive" exercise (kickboxing, fast tempo dancing, racketball, karate, etc), and last but not least, regular sexual release of whatever variety is available.

Most societies value truthfulness because it is a part of social reputation. As civilizations developed credit and trade, trustworthiness became more important because it was vital to know someone would keep their word, keep promises, supply what they said they would. Lying robbed communities of trust and undermined collective action. Lying about a commodity (false advertizing) can lead to overt harm, even death. In the OP, I noted the medical frankness with a spouse. In that case, honesty is important because each individual has a right to know their situation and be able to plan their last days and prepare themselves. No one has the right to censor medical information about your body and I would certainly hope when I am dying that people are truthful with me. I would remind Calranthe that Greta Thunberg, who has autism, credits her truthfulness with greatly helping her be an effective activist. In interviews, it's always clear she sees the positive values of Asperger's. As do I.

Your posting name seems apt, given that the Fabians promoted vegetarianism. I agree the flexitarian approach seems most viable for an omnivore species like ours. I think smart vegans can see flexitarians (especially the "eat meat rarely" sort) as allies in the movement towards humane treatment and away from factory farming.

As David Graber and other anthropologists have noted, the desert cults tended to be conservative because they were developed among rural pastoralists (herders and farmers and support trades) many who had fled the urban centers of the ancient world and rejected the worse aspects of them, like multi-generational debt obligations, debt peonage, usury, rigid heirarchies, and the tendency to go to war for filling royal coffers and acquire slaves. It's no accident that desert cults like Christianity had prophets who preached communist values and egalitarianism, and pushed back against materialism and wealth acquisition. It's interesting to see how such a religion gets later coopted by economic/political entities and gradually starts to shy away from collectivism and embrace mercantilism and then capitalism.

The parrot always remains as a 4D structure in the Block Universe. For thermodynamic reasons we cannot get to him. Really, he's just resting. I'm sorry, but how many more wacky dark energy tired light threads are there going to be this week?

I could have posted a similar OP when I became active here last summer. One of the best general science forums out there. Glad you are here, Genady. And thanks to the mods here, who are a big factor in the quality of SFN.

Quite a star(t)ling sight! I'm sure Uri Geller is envious.

Plus one. Are you quite sure English is not your native language? You could have fooled me. In discussion, this argument for the effectiveness of models is sometimes called the evolutionary argument. To adapt to a challenging environment, our modeling of reality has to maintain a high degree of correspondence with what is "out there." At least, insofar as it helps us navigate the macro world of tigers, waterholes, snakes, poison plants, wire coral, etc. The small pitfall of the evolutionary argument is that it only requires models to be effective on a very pragmatic level. We could imagine a creature that needs lots of water. It perceives a pool of water as a jiggling purple tetrahedron that sings "I Feel Pretty" in a lovely soprano voice. It responds by going towards the singing, and drinks, and lives another day. Now, though adaptive, we might assert that this model of a pool of water is not very realistic, and is more like a useful hallucination than a good map of what is out there in the world. That illustrates why we have to approach our mathematical representations of reality with healthy caution and not be carried away by Tegmark-ian notions like "the multiverses are composed of math."

Hi, "Kevin." You started the thread. What do you think, based on your own research on the topic and careful thought?

Max Tegmark, a modern neoPlatonist, seems to find a mathematical universe reasonable. His book is very provocative and carefully argued, though not persuasive to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Mathematical_Universe

Have replied twice here, seems like the points I tried to offer aren't really penetrating, so moving on. If the forum heading changed vegan to vegetarian, I think the answer would be yes, beneficial. Countries like India, where 31% of population is vegetarian, it definitely makes a difference in the footprint. And countries like Germany and UK, where vegetarian population is growing rapidly (10 and 14%, respectively), the impact is growing. Germany also has 42 million who describe as part-time vegetarian. Similar growth is happening in many parts of the world, especially in younger cohorts.

I am currently designing an interocitor, which emits dark light by inducing a current of anti-plasmons through some bendy plastic straws and a chronosynclastic infindibulator. Science!

Yeah, the value of drain-out faucets is learned in one lesson. Before they were prevalent, houses here all had to have an interior shutoff valve for outside faucets. Am in South Dakota, so PEX is popular. It can balloon two to three times its nominal diameter without bursting. I was happy to live in a PEX plumbed older house... until all the dread over plastic nanoparticles ratcheted up. Now we're advised to only use the cold tap for cooking or drinking, and let it run ≥ 30 seconds first.

Well, extreme vegans are probably one percent or less of the population, so I don't see them having the power to halt the use of bees for pollination. Plus there's the absurdity of them making plant farming more difficult, when plants are what they depend on. Plus there's the fact that using bees for what they are naturally meant to do, pollination, means their chances of survival are actually enhanced if farmers are paying apiarists to keep and manage healthy bee colonies. As I said, most vegans I'm familiar with don't take the hardcore philosophy and are willing to carve out exceptions.

I don't think all vegans are opposed to using bees for pollination. There are a range of vegans. Some vegans in India call scallops and oysters "sea vegetables" because they lack a CNS, and allow them in the diet. Some vegans eat honey, some don't. A recent article mentioned vegans who will move to eating eggs if they are free range and certified cruelty free. There's lots of carving out exceptions among vegans, when they can see an ethical path to it. Realistically, humans are probably not giving up apples, melons, almonds, berries, and other foods that require bee pollination. Unless CCD (colony collapse disorder) wipes out too many of them, and even then there are alternative artificial methods.

Or perhaps because the satire was about as subtle as a sledgehammer, and none of the scientists seemed at all believable as real people. Broad caricatures are less relatable, for many viewers. And the Trump caricature was low-hanging fruit. Yes, science denial is dumb. Message received! They milked the public apathy joke for all it was worth, and padded a half hour sketch into a feature-length movie. Meh.

Would finding low prime factors be of any use? Maybe not.

I'm a bit unclear on how earth/moon would cast shadows large enough, at that distance, to much restrict the visible area. Especially if the Webb is following a system that's in orbit around the sun, which is shifting the star field for it anyway. Wouldn't the sunshield itself also impede the view in that direction, and again the star field would shift throughout the year such that no area would be blocked for long? Also: how does an "orbit" around a libration point use less fuel than nudges at the point itself? I'm sure it does, but there's something counterintuitive about it.

Well established science that grazing herds are beneficial to health and biodiversity of grassland ecologies. TBH, I had no idea this was even slightly controversial. I would Google "how grazing animals help grasslands," to get a rich sampling on this topic. I cannot tell if you read my entire post, but I exampled an indigenous species to American grasslands in the last paragraph. I did not mention how the bison recycles nutrients, grazes to prevent biodiversity-reducing overgrowths, mitigates wildfires, and other functions as well. Carbon capture in naturally grazed (not overgrazed) grassland is also helped.