TheVat

I'm always a little skeptical that people are fully accepting of mortality and concomitant view that biological death is the termination point. Though any evidence otherwise, like the people whose hearts stop in the OR and claim to witness events outside, seem to be apocryphal. No rigorous study, controlling for normal sensory information paths, has found any credible indication of people leaving their bodies. But most of us, I suspect, hedge our bets a little. Sometimes with exotic parallel world theories, quantum immortality theories, matrix theories, morphic resonance, panpsychism, etc. Stuff that lives along the fringes of science. And I think a similar dynamic drives the whole uploading "singularity" movement, folks like Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge. Sometimes derogatorily referred to as "geek rapture. "

Studio -- the latter just a wee joke. As in, gas can leak from pipes or from flues, but flowing electrons don't generally leak from wires and fill your bedroom or ignite. Was just a way of nodding to the safety factor for non-combustion sources. If heatpumps are viable in Scandinavia, that is encouraging. I will look into that. The principal objection you hear around here is that heatpump air is not as hot as furnace air, so you don't have the delicious fountain of hot air coming from the grates. This is part of the psychological aspect of comfort, I suppose.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/11/12/1053509795/long-covid-causes-treatment-clues So far there are more theories than clear answers for what's going on, and there is good reason to think the varied constellation of symptoms could have different causes in different people. Maybe, in some, the virus is still hiding in the body somewhere, directly damaging nerves or other parts of the body. Maybe the chronic presence of the virus, or remnants of the virus, keeps the immune system kind of simmering at a low boil, causing the symptoms. Maybe the virus is gone but left the immune system out of whack, so it's now attacking the body. Or maybe there's another cause. "It's still early days. But we believe that long COVID is not caused by one thing. That there are multiple diseases that are happening," says Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunobiology at Yale University who is also studying long COVID-19. But Iwasaki and others have started finding some tantalizing clues in the blood of some patients. Those include unusual levels of cytokines, which are chemical messengers that the immune system uses to communicate, as well as proteins produced by the immune system known as autoantibodies, which attack cells and tissues in the body instead of the virus. "We are finding elevated cytokines in long-COVID patients and we're trying to decode what those cytokines mean. We're also seeing some distinct autoantibody reactivity and are trying to find out what those antibodies are doing and whether they are causing harm," Iwasaki says.

I live in South Dakota, which has bitter winters with regular blasts of Arctic air, so heat pumps still seem problematic here. I doubt the external air has much available heat at minus 20 F. (-29 C.) I have recently considered switching to electric furnace, since this state is now 70% green energy on its grid, and rapidly adding more (I think we are rated the second windiest out of the fifty states). And I generally dislike forms of energy that can leak in catastrophic ways, both in the household and in the field. Very few die in their sleep breathing electrons.

My sense is that you also have a bias, against the psychiatric profession. I have not seen you describe professionals in other science or medical based fields as "hugely biased pushing their own agenda," but I guess it's possible you do. This website often has members citing expert opinions, so I find it helpful if there is evidence (when rejecting said opinion) that the expertise is questionable or compromised. Psychiatrists and psychologists I have known through my work seem mainly motivated to help people get better, and are not fooled by superficial charm or poseurs. If you have evidence they are scamming us, please post it.

In the complete post you quoted from, I had hoped to make clear my distinction and avoid confusion, but I think you are correct this was muddy. I was speaking of unambiguous and extreme cases, as in your horrific example case. I meant I oppose death as a penalty, as the satisfaction of some sort of debt, but that I feel that euthanasia can be done where it is bringing an end to suffering. An individual so sick and depraved that they would beat and rape a small child would be finding mercy in death rather than a penalty. I agree that there are many other cases of sexual offense where the danger of wrongful convictions is significant and a sentence of such finality would be wrong.

Looking in again, get the impression you are somewhat talking past each other. I think the pressured-to-quit example is being used as a sort of "representative anecdote" of a broad cultural repression of certain kinds of speech. Really could have its own thread, since it seems more about what Jon Ronson called the shaming culture, and less about legal restrictions on behavior. I don't think anyone here would disagree that learning institutions should embody free discourse and not doing dogpiles on unpopular opinions to where teachers feel forced out. So it seems like a red herring, really. But I may have missed stuff here - things got busy in the Vat household the past week or so.

The example of extreme sexual predators often comes up, since it is the most extreme test of any rehabilitative philosophy. My impression is that such persons cannot be cured, and some are so sick that a reasonable case for euthanasia could be made. While I object to the death penalty for several reasons, I would see someone raping a seven year old - as in @beecee example - as a candidate for euthanasia. As for the parents, I cannot imagine being them and not wanting the sick creature removed from the planet promptly. We cannot argue moral principles of justice solely from the wishes of angry and traumatized parents, but we can argue from the principle of mercy, both towards the perpetrator and the victims.

Bilingual but my ear can't keep up well in French conversation. Reading and speaking is no problem. I love Italian. Loved hearing it spoken when I was in Italy (and a predominantly Italian neighborhood in New England where I lived for three years) and hearing it sung. Italian also my favorite cuisine, so if there is such a thing as reincarnation I would be molto felice to be reborn in Italy. I suspect one cognitive advantage of bilingualism is that each language encodes certain ways of thinking, so your overall thinking is more versatile and better able to handle shifts of perspective. A propos of Geordief comment on too closely similar languages, I pick up some Spanish where I live, which I can see adversely affecting future Italian acquisition.

As long as Brits don't expect me to call a possum a possium, I'm good.

Yes, plus one, I think gods could function as proxy elders whose presence could be useful when no actual adults were supervising. Grab an anthropologist and you likely are offered quite a few positive social mechanisms that some form of theism provided. Helping parents, easing group's fears of nature's whims, promoting lawfulness, reducing anxiety about death, promoting stewardship of nature, etc.

Indeed. Studies find measures of intelligence well below average in prison populations, which might point to early child development as a place to focus assistance and reduce breakage. Better cognitive development through programs to stabilize home environment, improve nutrition, access early learning options, not parking little ones in front of a tablet or TV, remediation of lead in plumbing and old paint surfaces, better wages and benefits for single working parents so they don't have to work extra shifts and be absent from the home so much, etc. All that "ounce of prevention" stuff.

I bumped my head on a rafter in the attic last week, jostled my PAG region, and promptly had a spiritual transformation in which I called upon a deity to damn that rafter beam to eternal hell. I also suggested an unnatural sexual act involving the rafter, but that's less germane to the PAG region functions.

Stepped away for a couple weeks - thanks to Pete and Now for clarifying some types of atheism. I am always puzzled by the notion that either religion or science or personal mysticism can really "explain" the beginning of the universe. You seem to reach a turtles problem, no matter which you pick. If there is a creator, how did the creator come to exist? If a BB, what was before or is it just an endless bang/crunch cycle through eternity? Or bubbleverses arising from vacuum fluctuations going back forever and therefore of infinite extent? In a way, these issues are one where religion and science share the common feature of hitting an epistemological brick wall. (or what cosmologists call an event horizon) I was named after a large dark cloud of smoke. (this will confuse "Lost" fanboys, so let me make clear my name is not Titus Welliver)

That would be the only compelling motivation to rejoin this chat. 😀

A lot of reform attempts are undermined simply due to the fact of being in prison, a fairly corrupting and brutalizing ambience. IMO, more actual reform happens in community reentry programs, halfway houses, etc where some kind of positive connections can take place and give some ex-felons a quasi-familial structure. Similarly, pretrial diversion programs, which can get nonviolent persons (often first-time offenders) into a supportive community rather than prison, make a difference and are documented successes. They can help young people who made one bad choice not get locked into a crime lifestyle and not have a criminal record that severely harms job prospects. They also save taxpayers a small fortune.

Full disclosure, this was one of those posts where the OP really just saw something cool and wants to share it, but this website's rules seem to require you say something, advance some sort of opinion, conjecture, speculation, whatever. So I padded a bit. But really, I posted hoping that someone with far more of a math mind than I have would offer some interesting thoughts on why or why not a problem can be said to be beyond the reach of present mathematics. I know there are problems, like the four color theorem, where a solution only happened with some computer assistance, and so 18th century mathies with paper and quills would not have been able to solve it. But now, and this I do wonder, it is harder for a math layperson like me to see why something gets ruled as "beyond us."

BMI is just another failed attempt to categorize people with an algorithm. The idea that 157 would be an ideal weight for a six foot male, in this part of the country would be preposterous. Lots of Scandinavians, Germans, Ukrainians, and others from northern European peasant stock who are built heavier and would be nearly emaciated at that weight. One thing I notice, related to that, is that the younger generation now seems to be averaging a slighter build, which leads me to wonder about the endocrine disruptors in our environment and the junking up of the American diet in recent decades. There could also be developmental effects for a generation that largely lives in an electronic coccoon, which should be an area for active research.

Cancel culture, what I've seen, translates as: people are holding me accountable for my s-t and I need to deflect! Or, as Phi and others point out, it's a marketing gimmick or a politician's buzzword to rouse donors and voters. My question is this (for those who believe there are genuine instances of free speech suppression) : do you have specific cases? Are innocent people being harassed, made pariahs, forced from jobs? Are good-faith open dialogues on touchy subjects being stifled? Is intellectual freedom withering somewhere? I know there was that letter signed by 150-odd prominent intellectuals and authors and published in The Atlantic a year or so back...and it did seem to raise a genuine specter of suppression. When you get JK Rowling and Noam Chomsky on the same page, it does pique interest. But it all seemed pretty vague to me at the time and I had to wonder if there was a real trend or just isolated oddball cases.

Commercial fusion was just meant as example of something a ways off in the future. Note to self: do not post and try to listen to spouse at same time. (thanks for noticing the confusingness)

The Collatz conjecture concerns sequences defined as follows: start with any positive integer n. Then each term is obtained from the previous term as follows: if the previous term is even, the next term is one half of the previous term. If the previous term is odd, the next term is 3 times the previous term plus 1. The conjecture is that no matter what value of n, the sequence will always reach 1. Here's a directed graph showing the orbits of small numbers under the Collatz map, skipping even numbers. Anyway, mathematicians keep saying this is beyond the reach of present day mathematics. Wonder if humans will solve this about the time we get nuclear fusion to be a practical power source.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/11/05/1052961177/new-coronavirus-likely-from-dogs-infects-people-in-malaysia-and-haiti We found a coronavirus," he says. And not just any coronavirus, but one that many scientists believe may be a new human pathogen — likely the 8th coronavirus known to cause disease in people. Turns out, this coronavirus in the Haiti travelers has cropped up previously, on the other side of the globe. Back in May, scientists at Duke University, reported they had detected a nearly identical virus coronavirus in children at a Malaysian hospital. The researchers found the virus in the upper respiratory tract of 3% of the 301 patients they tested in 2017 and 2018. The genetic sequence of the Malaysian virus suggested it likely originated in dogs and then jumped into people. "The majority of the genome was canine coronavirus," virologist Anastasia Vlasova told NPR in May. Although the findings sounded alarming, the researchers had no evidence that the virus could spread between people or that it was widespread around the world. "These human infections with ... canine coronaviruses appear to be isolated incidents which did not lead to extensive human transmission," virologist Vincent Racaniello wrote on the Virology Blog. Now Lednicky and his colleagues have found an almost identical virus infecting people 11,000 miles away-- at the same time. The genetic sequence of the virus in Haiti is 99.4% identical to the one in Malaysia. Lednicky and his colleagues reported this past Sunday in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. And the big question is: How does a dog virus in Malaysia wind up in doctors and nurses in Haiti? (sorry about the enormous font -- cut/paste here seems to force weird font sizes on you and I don't know how to switch it off)

Not neglecting the thread I suggested, things just got busy at the Vat household for a couple days. Still catching up on the readings posted. Things do not sound too good for the Hijra in India. Having to be a "sex worker" to survive suggests the kind of limited options usually associated with the term slavery.

Plus one on the "rampant use of outliers." Sounds like the guiding editorial principle of Newsmax and Fox News. It's funny that when you drive on a road or eat safe food, no one complains that the government took "other people's money" and used it to build the roads and inspect the food. But when the government makes direct payments to people who can't afford rent or food (often a result simply of being born in the wrong womb -- see John Rawls, the ethicist on this risky misstep), it's characterized as theft and the recipients as lazy. "You revolution is over, Lebowski! The bums lost!"

Plus one. Yes, winds are a complex phenomenon where topography, uneven land surface heating, the earth's rotation and Coriolis effect, altitude, and an array of influences all play a role. We could never place enough windmills to have more than a miniscule effect on the overall transfer of thermal energy on the planet.