TheVat

I have seen the critique from more neutral sources than Greenpeace, so sorry to use them for a quick link. It seems like greenwashing to me mainly because only oil companies are pushing it - usually not a good sign. I was tempted to counter your "hmph" with "hmph, I don't trust anything emanating from oil companies." I will agree that a more economical implementation of CCS might be a bridge, but the potential for future leakage is there and quite scary. As for hypocrisy, yes organizations like GP and Sierra Club do a lot of that. I prefer groups like The Nature Conservancy which seem more practical and about The Art of the Possible.

The movie only clouds the issues, anyway, given its absurd premise that aliens would use our bodies for "batteries," while connecting our vatted bodies to a virtual reality. Plenty of science people have ranted about the gross inefficiencies and preposterous biophysics, so I'll leave it be. The storyline was really just a vehicle for cool martial arts sequences and people intoning pseudoprofundities. I see a lot of the matrix stuff as a way to excuse dirty technology and eco degradation because, hey, we can all get ourselves back to the Garden by moving into a virtual world and ignore that icky old RW. We'll either be in cozy vats* underground or, far more efficient, uploaded and our biological shell discarded. * Mine is really more cramped than cozy, don't believe the brochures.

@JoeyJoystick Reposting, awaiting a reply from the OP. I also wanted OP to acknowledge another potential serious consequence (the CCN uncertainty and effect of particulates on plankton I already mentioned), which is some deposition of deorbited graphene on polar ice and glaciers thus lowering their albedo and hastening melting. No matter where it orbits, air currents can take it to places one might not anticipate.

"Yet to prove itself" seems to me like understatement. More like "ridiculous scam," that would be insanely expensive to implement on any scale that matters - money that could be hastening the vitally important transition to renewables. The only reason oil companies were interested in this was because CO2 injection into oil wells could help to extract more oil (you are probably familiar with this, but I'll post a link for those who might not be) while greenwashing at the same time. Greenpeace InternationalThe Great Carbon Capture Scam — Rex Weyler - Greenpeace I...Oil companies hid knowledge of global heating for decades, but the captains of petroleum also schemed to turn the ecological crisis into a profit centre. 😆

New Republic writer Greg Sargent (another refugee from WaPo) talks with veteran national security expert Bradley Moss about the 47 admin Iran scam. https://newrepublic.com/article/197284/transcript-maga-dope-pete-hegseth-tantrum-exposes-trump-iran-scam President Donald Trump and his top advisers have worked themselves up into a pathological fury about the leaked intelligence assessment that casts doubt on the success of Trump’s bombing of Iran, a story that has consumed Washington. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ranted wildly about it during a press conference with Trump at the NATO summit, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went full North Korea in praise of Trump with one of her most absurdly obsequious performances yet. Both of them went full throttle in attacking intelligence officials for leaking the assessment. All of which raises a question: Will this administration ever officially tell the truth about the Iran mission, given that everything always must serve the cult of Trump above all else? Today we’re trying to unravel all this with someone who lives deep in the bowels of the deep state and can explain it really well: veteran national security lawyer Bradley Moss....

What is wrong with you? Use one of them?? And what are these "attempts" you speak of? Were these in the labs of Dr. Mengele or Frankenstein? Sorry, I just kind of lost my shit there for a minute. I suggest you go and acquaint yourself with the basics of bioethics and, well, basic human decency, before posting this kind of garbage.

Sounds expensive, and there's enough gas at LEO to cause atmospheric drag on anything moving at orbital velocity. My guess is your graphene cloud would deorbit quickly and require continual costly recharging with enormous expenditures on rocket fuel and graphene production. Money better spent on long-term solutions like improved distribution and storage of wind/solar/tidal/geothermal etc. Also, think about what happens when graphene particles deorbit and enter the troposphere where they serve as CCN, cloud condensation nuclei. Whatever cooling effect that might bring, it will also potentially destabilize the atmosphere in ways difficult to predict. Lastly, the Earth's surface is 3/4 ocean - what effects on, say, phytoplankton does thousands of tons of graphene particles have? You don't know? Nobody else does either!

Looks like the war games will include Hide and Seek with the centrifuges and partially enriched uranium. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/24/jd-vance-trump-iran-nuclear-program But Vance insisted it was not a concern that Iran could have moved it and claimed the bombing represented “mission success” because he said Iran no longer had the capacity to turn the stockpile into weapons-grade uranium. “And that was really the goal here,” he said. The former UN nuclear weapons inspector David Albright told CNN on Monday there are centrifuges that are “unaccounted for” that must still be dealt with to consider the US mission successful. “I think that part of the mission has been accomplished,” he said. “Stocks of enriched uranium are one of them. I wish those stocks were buried, but our understanding is that some of them were taken away by Iran, and we don’t know where they are.” Albright added that the question of the remaining, unaccounted-for centrifuges meant that “this problem isn’t over yet, but it is a manageable problem. Partly because turning that enriched uranium into weapons-grade uranium is not going to be a fast process”.

Given the aspects of brain function which are analog and not digital (though they do handshake with digital operations), I don't think our present computer architectures could get us to a robust simulation with conscious agents and all that. As Joigus says, that could all change in a few years. And, btw, that video does seem to have some relevance to the thread, and being an Asimov fan from age eleven or so (and met the man several times in the Newton neighborhood in which we both lived, as well as stepping on his foot once in the coffee hour room of the Unitarian Church causing him to laugh) on a par with those panel members, I will watch it avidly. I note that one panelist is arguably the world's cutest physicist, Zoreh Davoudi. I also note that the AMoNH website does also provide transcripts, which might be a better way to home in on the meat of the discussion.

Dismissing criticism of some of your premises with an hominem (they're not deep thinkers, they have cognitive dissonance, they just don't understand, etc) is a shoddy and weak argument. But keep the insults coming. It just assures me that you can't really support your theory with any empirical evidence. E.g. solid evidence for quantum computation in cellular microtubules that gets us around the decoherence problem as it applies to quantum mechanisms in the brain.

But you are making the argument that the HPOC is real and that you've solved it. People are warranted in asking if you can "solve" a non-existent problem. Just as if I were to tell you, "I have solved the long enduring mystery of how Santa Claus fits down 6 inch flue pipes." You might point out this isn't a real problem because (SPOILER ALERT) Santa Claus doesn't exist and ergo there is no mystery to be resolved. If you construct an interpretation on certain assumptions, then those assumptions may be questioned legitimately. What if consciousness works perfectly well on classical mechanics, in the warm, wet, and noisy tissue of the brain? Max Tegmark, for example, has calculated that the decoherence timescale of microtubule entanglement in the brain would be extremely brief, on the order of femtoseconds, which is far too short for meaningful neural processing to occur.

What predictions does your theory make which could be put to the empirical test? I'll wait.

It might be useful to acquaint oneself with the idea of a category error, as it applies to the invented "hard problem" of consciousness. The fact that we study some things with cognitive science and others with phenomenology shouldn't really be that strange. Houses look different from the outside than they do from the inside. That doesn't mean there's a Hard Problem of Architecture. Subjective experience, or qualia, are how brains appear from the "inside." That's just a different category of experience from looking at a PET scan or an EEG or other analytical tool used in neuroscience. Saying that the Hard Problem is universally agreed upon in philosophy is simply wrong and reveals that you have not sufficiently delved into the field. The HPOC is quite controversial and debate on this has raged for many decades. You could at least follow up on the Pigliucci essay which @exchemist linked for you, and look at the ideas of some of the main players in this ongoing area of debate. The author "gestures" - science doesn't just gesture. It makes observations, forms an hypothesis, then tests it. Simply pointing at some speculative and unevidenced connection is conjecture, not a real theory. That the author claims internal coherence has zero probative value - fairy tales may have internal coherence. You don't ground anything in octonion algebra, you ground it in a correspondence to cosmological observations. If some octonionic construction maps well onto those observations, then you might have something.

Look out, Austin! https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-tiptoes-into-long-promised-robotaxi-service-2025-06-22/ If I were in Austin today, I would (a) look carefully before crossing the street or traveling by bike, and (b) petition City Hall for a test mobilizing a large team of pedestrians (in heavy body armor) pushing empty baby carriages and suddenly and randomly crossing streets.

I remember long ago reading a paper on false correlations and pseudoscience that used Canadian hockey as an example. Some kook had come up with a "proof" of astrology which was that Canadian hockey teams were dominated by Scorpios and Sagittarius. The debunker pointed out that Canadian kids started hockey in some early grade and that coaches picked mostly the kids born right after the school system's age cutoff, at an age (say, seven) when the oldest kids in the grade had a distinct advantage in strength, speed and motor development. Compensate for that effect and the whole skew vanished and distributions became Gaussian around seasonal birth rates.

What are Ritter's sources on that? His rant just makes that assertion - do you have other intelligence to back that up? He's a nonfiction author, so I would think he's used to providing footnotes. And where else would the Iranians have that could provide such a deep subterranean location or be somehow invisible to all remote sensing? I'm not disagreeing with Ritter about 47's penchant for theater and shallow displays of "winning.". I just need to see his beef.

Interesting how 47 always pivots wildly after campaign promises are made. He ran in 2024 on a platform of isolationism and US non-intervention. Wonder how the MAGAs who voted for that are handling this. There is certainly no guarantee that Iran will now just make peace. Both they and their client states could start setting up some kind of reprisal. It could be narrow, like attacking a US base in the region, or it could be broader - block Hormuz strait, get various proxies on a terrorist path, etc. That's what I'm wondering about. Does that program, which cost billions to start, just reboot or are their finances depleted to where they will just try other methods that give more bang for the buck? My guess is that the super bomb the US used is actually capable of drilling down in there and took out the facility. (And two others). Will they do that all over again under another mountain or decide it's not worth all those billions for what could end up with the same outcome?

Curious...not being of the Limey persuasion, is that a broader Beeb problem that you all are seeing over there? I doubt anyone here is taking sides with Iran. The Middle East seems generally to be suffering a paucity of peacemakers. And an abundance of defensive finger pointers.

For sure, that kind of propagandistic fakery is always to be watched out for. I'm pretty sure the Weizmann attack is a real story, given that the Institute is so high profile in an international scientific community, is easily found on Street View to match with the photographs of damage, and that multiple sources are reporting the same thing, including biologists who work there or do work in collaboration with them. At this point, it would be really hard to fake all of that with such massive coordination. I sympathize with the biologists, but less so with an Israeli government that has done so much to inflame the situation with their neighbors.

Not sure if you're familiar with my postings or family information I've shared, so let me just briefly cover that. I come from a family with two professional journalists and myself worked for a daily newspaper for a year as a college job. I always (ok, let's say 99% percent of the time because no one's perfect) check my sources, and try to find coverage in reputable news outlets which corroborate. You will note my link was from AP News and included photographs of the damaged campus of the institute. You will also find corroboration at the Weizmann website, and: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/06/19/israel-iran-scientists-weizmann-strike/d60ae498-4cfe-11f0-8fff-262d6ec54ab9_story.html https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/us/iran-destroys-israels-50-million-science-treasure-weizmann-institute-marking-one-of-the-wars-most-costly-strikes/articleshow/121977506.cms https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/israel-iran-attack-news/card/israel-s-weizmann-institute-buildings-damaged-in-iran-attack-1KFe6Nmj0kQPFpl3lbNf I had come to think I had a good relationship of trust with regular members here, so if I've done something to tarnish that, PLEASE DO NOT HESITATE to PM me with whatever concerns you have. Regards, Paul As do I.

Cold storage can slow changes, but it's effect are forensically detectable. Yes. Above freezing there are still types of decomposition going on. Below freezing, the formation of ice crystals will rupture cell walls and other structures, and this is discernible to forensic analysis. Yes, very likely. PMCT, histological study, microbiome analysis (certain bacteria will show changes even in very cold conditions), tomographic location of ice crystal artifacts, etc. Much depends on you obtaining a warrant or some kind of court order to perform such an examination. Try to conduct yourself in a calm manner and avoid language like "cornered like a mad dog," even if you're justifiably upset. Good luck.

Weizmann Institute damaged by Iranian missiles. AP NewsIranian missile strikes Israel's 'crown jewel of science'For years, Israel has assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists, hoping to choke progress on Iran’s nuclear program by striking at the brains behind it.Many of those labs focus on the life sciences, whose projects are especially sensitive to physical damage, Fleishman said. The labs were studying areas like tissue generation, developmental biology or cancer, with much of their work now halted or severely set back by the damage. “This was the life’s work of many people,” he said, noting that years’ or even decades’ worth of research was destroyed. For Schuldiner, the damage means the lab he has worked at for 16 years “is entirely gone. No trace. There is nothing to save.” In that once gleaming lab, he kept thousands of genetically modified flies used for research into the development of the human nervous system, which helped provide insights into autism and schizophrenia, he said. The lab housed equipment like sophisticated microscopes. Researchers from Israel and abroad joined hands in the study effort. “All of our studies have stopped,” he said, estimating it would take years to rebuild and get the science work back on track. “It’s very significant damage to the science that we can create and to the contribution we can make to the world.”

https://apnews.com/article/gaza-palestinians-food-aid-israel-284fa12b037db604342be1b3ea2120b4 Still killing civilians, still starving them, still blocking medical aid, nothing has changed. Still funded by the US, still demolishing infrastructure with US manufactured bombs. I have no intention of letting anyone forget this reality. And, as with all of these articles, the perennial Israeli attempt to sound like they give a shit: "The Israeli military says it is investigating." Really? And what are you finding, Israeli military? Anything you would care to share with the world?

SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft exploded ahead of an engine test late Wednesday, sending a large fireball into the South Texas sky and dealing another major setback to Elon Musk’s company. It was the fourth time the company has lost a Starship spacecraft this year. In three previous test flights, the vehicle came apart or detonated during its flight. Wondering if Musk's "rapid iterative development" approach is really such a great idea for space travel. Maybe leave the "move fast and break things" to Zuckerberg.

So this was encouraging... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/19/no-kings-how-many-protesters-attended If this first large scale protest did indeed bring nearly 2 percent to the streets (including me, spouse, daughter and her BF), then that may encourage more to show up next time.