TheVat

One reason this thread is so hard to resolve is because of the multiple layers of misdeeds (as @Peterkin sharply observed back there in the welter of yesterday's posts). To talk about justice regarding illegal parking is to be in a domain quite different from the justice directed towards crimes of great personal harm. I'd say the former probably doesn't need a lot of sifting in an ethics forum, and it's the latter that calls for the heavy machinery of philosophic analysis and deep psychological understanding. I see a rough consensus here that we shouldn't harm people as some kind of retributive penalty for harming others. This seems to be in accord with an idea that justice shouldn't increase the harm in the world but seek to reduce it and give each person a redemptive chance at understanding their harmful acts and making amends for them. And those that cannot do so must be kept separated from society, in the most humane way possible (especially given the fallibility of any criminal justice system and thus the possibility of a period of wrongful incarceration). This humane approach also reduces the chances of the State becoming an embodiment of hypocrisy, i.e. we aren't putting people in harmful and dehumanizing conditions in order to teach that harming and dehumanizing is wrong. This move away from hypocritical vengeance was supposed to be one of the markers of progress when humans shifted from what anthropologists call an "honor society" to "the rule of law." The rule of law aspires to be one where fairly adjudicated moral principles are seen as more value than personal autonomy in settling scores. It aspires to have moral principles be more powerful than any individual or group. If we agree that rape is morally abhorrent, then we cannot in good conscience have prisons where inmates are regularly subjected to rape, unless they're rich enough to buy themselves protection. And so on.

Welcome to the Pyrocene.... https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-wildfires-climate-change/31429880.html https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/08/24/wildfires-near-russias-nuclear-research-center-spark-state-of-emergency-a74878 I hadn't realized that the area burned in Russia is roughly the size of Florida. That makes the western U.S. wildfires, which have been making us cough and sneeze and have itchy eyes here in the Black Hills, look rather puny by comparison. There have been several days when I cancelled my walk, or hike, and settled for bounding up and down the stairs in the house, an alternative form of exercise which is pretty tedious without some good music. (I was contemplating making a western wildfires playlist.... Marshall Tucker - Fire on the Mountain Sanford & Townsend - Smoke from a Distant Fire The Doors - Light my Fire James Taylor - Fire and Rain Jimi Hendrix - Fire Bruce Springsteen - I'm on Fire The Clash - London's Burning Jerry Lee Lewis - Great Balls of Fire Talking Heads - Burning Down the House ....but the results were looking to be too whimsical for a situation of such gravity)

If the two ships are moving together (passing our Earth observatory as they pass by) in a shared FoR, and one shoots a coherent light beam at the other, then each "sees" the light beam as a straight line that is the length of their distance apart, right? If they are a light-minute apart (about 11.5 million miles), then a "ping" can be sent and replied to in 2 minutes. However, from Earth, we see (humor me here, or imagine dust in space that makes the laser beam visible) a beam that crosses a longer apparent distance, because the ships have moved some distance in space between emission of beam and reception. So, from Earth FoR, the ping and its reply (given c as constant) must take longer. The ships are moving a large fraction of c, so maybe the ping/reply interval will be three minutes. But that can't be, can it? Can I resolve this with the Lorentz contraction that I, the Earth observer, see in the ships? Is everything in the two ships' shared FoR foreshortened from my perspective?

Regarding teaching.... Only small penalties can really ever be "teaching" -- pay a $400 fine for parking at a bus stop, and you will stop parking at bus stops. It's a very simple teaching (you're not attending a class that develops empathy for bus drivers and riders), along the lines of Hello, this fine is letting you know that this action constitutes a nuisance. If you really weren't aware of that, consider yourself now fully aware. One reason small penalties are small is they presume a lack of awareness rather than presume criminal intent. Where there's criminal intent, there's nothing to teach - the person already knows they're doing something bad and have chosen to do it anyway. The only approach there that would be true teaching would be some experience that gives awareness of what the victim had experienced, something that (with a nonsociopath anyway) grew empathy. Perhaps in some future we'll figure out how to do that -- maybe a virtual reality immersion in which your are victimized and powerless to deal with it. (this sounds like a science fiction story I may have read somewhere)

While I could play with the Drake equation all day, regarding the incidence of tech civilizations, my gut tells me that the intersection of intelligence, manipulating appendages, metal-rich planetary crust where the metals are accessible to fledgling techies, a planetary chemistry and atmosphere that allows combustion to occur and be controlled, varying weather conditions (e.g. seasons) that stimulate inventiveness and proficiency in fabrication, food consumption that is amenable to agriculture (so not everyone has to expend a lot of energy on just getting fed)....the intersection of all those might be pretty rare. But we don't have to find techie civilizations in order to not be alone. We could maybe develop some practical method of interstellar travel and go to planets where we learn to communicate with intelligent jellyfish-whales or tentacled creatures that communicate in a chromo-language, and have fascinating insights into life, the universe, and everything. My guess is that this question of other life, and the nature of abiogenesis, might be the two easiest to answer. But I can't rule out that consciousness is also easy to explain and I'm just not taking the right drugs...

It was never clear to many of us in the US how "rebuilding" a country that's a patchwork of five different nationalities that didn't much like each other was worth soaking American taxpayers for two trillion dollars because of terrorists who can melt across remote borders whenever things get sticky. As @Alex_Krycek and others note, the war certainly provided a nice welfare program for what Pres. Eisenhower called "the military-industrial complex, " with companies like Halliburton and the defense contractors (listed above) doing quite well. Everything else was window-dressing for gullible Americans, a fairy tale about promoting liberal democracy and protecting our citizens.

I see how these discussions start circling endlessly. Once we have humans reduced to terms like "monster" or "evil " or "animal," then many feel the work is done and there is no need to examine their nature further or try to understand what degree of choice they have or ask if they have any prospect of redemption. In the study of psychopaths, in behavioral science, it's usually discovered that the psychopathic actor is also a victim, someone subjected in early life to profound neglect, abuse, and the general withdrawal of love. When evil seems to overtake an entire group of people, as in Nazi Germany, there is what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil," where we see that no one sets out intending to do evil but rather curtails the process of thinking and awareness to uncritically and obediently follow the group ethos. I think endlessly citing awful deeds, provoking and stoking our emotions of repulsion, as if that's an argument in itself for retribution, is missing the process of understanding what sort of person we are dealing with, and if punishment, for its own sake, has value.

Has anyone looked into the matter of flavor, BTW? There are many many plants that provide calories and are edible, but humans don't bother with them because they have an unappealing taste. (or only use them during a famine, like Swedes who used to grind up certain tree barks) I note Endy's first link cites them as having potential for biofuel (made into combustible pellets, say) but not being considered viable as a food. Thanks for the links, @Endy0816.

And Keith Richards still lives. Amazing.

Anything that resembles a hotdog on a stick deserves some research into its potential. Calories aside, what is it's protein content, and what other nutrients does it have?

Biological structures have been known to arise from some orgasms. Could some meteorites come in at a very shallow angle and therefore skip along, picking up some material from the ground, then bouncing? ....or even skipping like a stone does on the surface of a lake or sea? If so, this might result in unusual deposits on the surface.

I generally am conscientious, but dotting every "i" on a job is not always that much fun. Some work is drudgery I'm happy to see getting over with. With age, and a meditative cast of mind, I seem to enjoy the drudgery a bit more. I do make every effort to finish senten

DR: I reckon a lot of altruistic sentiments have some selfish element to them. As your video (thanks!) said, we're only human. Still, it's a bit of a struggle for me to believe the comp-, erm, humane regard apparent in your posts is "purely selfish. " I would say, on the extreme and rare scenarios of monsters who rape and torture children, that I find my own empathy system shuts down, goes dark. And the thought occurs to me, hey, it might be merciful to just put such a depraved being down. But as Reepr points out, the situation in real life is usually more nuanced. Rag n Bone Man has a great blues baritone. This quote somehow didn't appear atop my reply, so here it is. Somehow I thought page six was the end of the thread, and my reply would be next. A brain fart.

I really appreciate your compassion towards people who have been damaged and poorly nurtured. Some are so broken that they don't seem to be repairable, and so can only be sequestered. Agree that punishment provides no remedy. I remain unsure if it gives some consolation to a victim (or victim's family) to punish. Is just knowing the perp is locked up enough? Some victims want revenge, others say that enough harm has happened, why add more. Which impulse should society validate?

There is, overall, a problem when purely scientific empirical standards are applied to the domain of art. We don't really have an objective handle on how much better is the judgment of a trained musician ear than an ordinary listener (except in regard to pitch identification, which can be objectively measured). And the musician may be moved by the player's artistry when judging tonal qualities, which blows in more subjective smoke. And so many of the descriptive terms, like "resonance, " don't have rigorous definitions. It is telling that the trained listeners in @zapatos linked study seemed unable to accurately distinguish old and new instruments.

I mean no offense, but having lived in the United States through the horrific decisions and policies of the Bush/Cheney administration, I was aware long before "Vice" was made of the ways in which our VP took control of the administration and manipulated the President. I will leave it there, for now, and let wit and humor continue to reign supreme in the thread.

That raises a good point. One reason we have prisons is because other social structures that have been around for thousands of years have fallen apart or don't scale up well. In small homogeneous societies, based around villages, humans used to deal with crime by shunning or other forms of ostracism. These methods were likely more effective than prisons, because most people want to be part of their group and not shut off from connections. And exile, the most extreme form, could mean eventual death. It helped that you knew and had continued contact with any people you might consider wronging. It's still the case that more homogeneous societies, like Japanese or Norwegians, have less need of prison, even though they're long past the village stage.

Dick Cheney.

Yes. The difference between two woodwinds is keenly dependent on the reeds (which is why reed making is an especially big part of being a professional oboist) more than other parts. A poor reed will ruin a woodwind. But string instruments seem to depend on a much wider range of factors, involving contact points, parts and acoustic surfaces. Fascinating study. I liked both sound clips, new and old violin, and didn't find one to be better. But hearing it live, in the hall, would be more useful than sound clips on a tablet. I think the comparison of a Strad to a Picasso might be valid. Buyers aren't shelling out millions for a Picasso because his painting is superior to others, they pay because they value his cultural impact and reputation and power to influence. They value it both because it's good art AND because the artist is an iconic figure.

I note the article carefully refers to the tonal qualities of these violins as "unique" and not "better than others." Also, I don't see the claims made as "spectacular, " but rather fairly restrained, in the article cited. As a musician myself, I have heard string players (string theorists, if you will) speculate for years that it was the varnish that made Cremona violins stand out, so I found it interesting to hear that old canard tossed, and that perhaps it was the anti-worm treatment that made more of a difference. This makes sense, and I agree with the researchers that further research is needed to see how these chemicals change (and then preserve) the tone.

https://phys.org/news/2021-08-secret-stradivari-violin.html New research co-authored by a Texas A&M University scientist has confirmed that renowned violin maker Antonio Stradivari and others treated their instruments with chemicals that produced their unique sound, and several of these chemicals have been identified for the first time. Joseph Nagyvary, professor emeritus of biochemistry at Texas A&M, who first proposed the theory that chemicals used in making the violins—not so much the skill of making the instrument itself—was the reason Stradivari and others, such as Guarneri del Gesu, made instruments whose sound has not been equaled in over 200 years. An international team led by Hwan-Ching Tai, professor of chemistry at National Taiwan University, has had their findings published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. About 40 years ago at Texas A&M, Nagyvary was the first to prove a theory that he had spent years researching: that a primary reason for the pristine sound, beyond the fine craftsmanship, was the chemicals Stradivari and others used to treat their instruments due to a worm infestation at the time.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/19/weather/greenland-summit-rain-climate-change/index.html Lots of tipping points to teeter on out there. Apparently, the albedo of the Greenland sheet drops a bit when it gets rained on. At least until fresh snow falls.

Not sure what you're saying here. I wasn't opining on specific tactics (not my forte), just agreeing with your Hanlon's razor -- i. e. that our intentions have not been malicious so much as misguided by bad intelligence (in Vietnam, the MacNamara report would be a case, if you've looked at that era) and meager cultural understanding. If I misunderstood you, I am sorry. Full disclosure: I'm an American, and any critique I offer is made from a place of loving my country and always wanting it to grow fully into its principles of freedom and justice. Fifty years of watching our foreign adventures (I come from a family of journalists) has led me to the opinion that we might do better with a more hands-off approach militarily, and stick with economic support that helps struggling states not become failed states.

Panda walks into a bar, orders lunch and a beer. When it's finished its meal, it draws a pistol from a holster and fires it into the ceiling, then walks out. A patron nearby yells, "what the hell was that about? " Bartender produces a dictionary, shows patron the entry for "panda. " Patron reads panda (n) : an Asian mammal that eats shoots and leaves... Anyway, with all the adaptive complexity of thriving in some ecological niche, I think a key factor may be the challenge of producing new neurons (they don't replicate, recall, but are grown from ESC) when struggling with the challenges of being ex utero. So if a hundred billion is adaptive, they are best in place from Day One. ( if you've followed research on stroke and TBI victims, you have heard that new neurons can appear in some areas, but this is a slow laborious process that uses stem cells)(so wouldn't apply well to newborns who are quickly developing their "software") Remember that babies first develop their brains by growing (then pruning, after age two) synaptic connections rather than by neurogenesis.