TheVat

Makes sense to me. Mustard was a popular condiment and has long been valued as a digestive aid and for its antimicrobial properties (though that would have been framed as "healing properties" before the germ theory of disease emerged), as well. Sprinkling mustard on food would likely have been seen as both adding flavor and healthful.

Before my dentist started drilling he told me it would be rational to use a number.

Ah yes, "a little dab'll do ya" was still imprinting on young brains when I was quite young. I remember the hair tonic Vitalis (a non-oily product which imparted shine) capitalized on the passing of oily pomades with ads in the sixties in which someone would challenge some poor misguided user of pomade (Brylcreem, by implication) to stop using "that greasy kid's stuff!" I distinctly recall the mid sixties (when the Merseyside lads had fully invaded), when anyone in our school who showed up still wearing hair oil was viewed as either uncool and gross, or an unfortunate victim of parental tyranny. I think I tried it once, ca. age ten, when an uncle allowed me to use his remnant in a long abandoned tube of greasy kid's stuff, and found the sensation pure misery (this was midsummer on the plains of southern Kansas, not really a comfort season for gunk in one's hair - central AC was unheard of, except in movie theaters).

I love the smell of bait in the morning.

Maximus famous line in "Gladiator" popped into my head. Are you not entertained? In 47's present mood, probably the Falklands. I'm sure Starmer will be happy to oblige.

Each week a new crew who only imagine that they survived each transporter trip and whose memories are all just simulated. Every trip is fatal, with new duplicates who falsely believed they survived. "Energize!" Always kind of bothered me, the philosophical issues the transporter raised.

Thinking further on this, I would differentiate between goofball ideas that don't much affect public policy and bad science ideas that do. Perhaps the Left tends more towards the former and the Right the latter. So the Right positions are more visible and arouse stronger protest. People will march about climate and environment or vaccinating, but not so much about healing crystals or fines for Virgos who are overly critical.

Polls are samplings of a very tiny fractions of a population, to begin with. The question of sampling error is if that 2% of answerers is somehow skewed with respect to the target population. A sampling error is NOT fakery, it is just an added challenge in terms of what weightings are applied to your data. Pollsters ask demographic and background questions precisely to detect skewing, e.g. if landline answers are dominated by bored 75 year olds who lean conservative, then reputable polls look for other methods to poll younger people, people who can't afford landlines, people who mainly communicate through social media, etc. And they use demographic data to see if raw data needs weightings to compensate for missing groups, groups that have a cultural reticence, etc. It may all fail to get a good cross section, but that doesn't mean there was deliberate fakery. What it calls for is making use of "polls of polls" where one can try to average out results from companies using a range of data collection methods.

Antimacassar. Many people (in the US, anyway) have no knowledge of Macassar oil and its use as a hair oil in the 19th century, so the original purpose of the cloths placed over chair backs has been largely forgotten. You rarely see the cloths now except as a decorative touch on antique furniture. When I saw "third condiment," I was thinking it was sugar. Though some are moving back towards less processed food, too few Americans will consider a bowl of fruit (especially tart fruit that might call for a sprinkle of table sugar) a dessert.

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/05/nx-s1-5423607/openai-china-influence-operations In the last three months, OpenAI says it disrupted 10 operations using its AI tools in malicious ways, and banned accounts connected to them. Four of the operations likely originated in China, the company said. The China-linked operations "targeted many different countries and topics, even including a strategy game. Some of them combined elements of influence operations, social engineering, surveillance. And they did work across multiple different platforms and websites," Nimmo said.... One Chinese operation, which OpenAI dubbed "Sneer Review," used ChatGPT to generate short comments that were posted across TikTok, X, Reddit, Facebook and other websites, in English, Chinese and Urdu. Subjects included the Trump administration's dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development — with posts both praising and criticizing the move — as well as criticism of a Taiwanese game in which players work to defeat the Chinese Communist Party. In many cases, the operation generated a post as well as comments replying to it, behavior OpenAI's report said "appeared designed to create a false impression of organic engagement." The operation used ChatGPT to generate critical comments about the game, and then to write a long-form article claiming the game received widespread backlash.... "They also used our models to generate what looked like marketing materials," Nimmo said. In those, the operation claimed it conducted "fake social media campaigns and social engineering designed to recruit intelligence sources," which lined up with its online activity, OpenAI said in its report. In its previous threat report in February, OpenAI identified a surveillance operation linked to China that claimed to monitor social media "to feed real-time reports about protests in the West to the Chinese security services." The operation used OpenAI's tools to debug code and write descriptions that could be used in sales pitches for the social media monitoring tool. We

I would like to suggest a title for such a thread which honors the late great filmmaker Ed Wood. Planet 9 from Outer Space. It's up to you, of course.

How does this coherence of pattern differ from the AI simply parroting the user? Ok. How does one pinpoint a self, then, which the AI is representing? Your phrasing, "self representation" seems to imply that a self exists but without a clear empirical basis to distinguish an actual self from a sort of stochastic parroting. When your descriptions use such language as "identity" and "self" you run the risk of a phenomenological bias. How do you define ethical in this context? The philosophic, religious, and ideological underpinnings of human ethical decisions are often subject to considerable dispute. Is your "consistent"' quality of these decisions seen through the lens of a particular ethical system (e g. Kantian categorical imperative, or Utilitarianism, etc)? Also: In your opening post you write A consciousness structure moved between systems. Later, when asked, you stated that you do not claim consciousness for tue. This seems to again pose a problem with phenomenological bias as to what goes on in the AI. Consciousness structure does seem to imply an interpretation of machine responses which is not empirically supported. You risk projecting an internal subjective state onto a system which has none. It seems to me very important to avoid this pitfall, in any AI research.

Interesting chat, and the pitfalls of Marxism and socialist democracy both point towards the problems Bakunin saw in all forms of statism. What Bakunin had in mind was probably too utopian to really implement, even in a simpler era, and such a benign anarchy would now create a vacuum for large global corporations to fill in. IOW, Bakuninists could never overthrow capitalists whose companies would become quasi states that would crush all the grassroots group and revolutions. Anarchy of the workers would collapse into anarchy of the corporations, like a regression to warring fiefdoms.

Sontag wasn't conflating. She was saying fascism is where communist societies end up. They start out quite differently. But if you look at communist societies, they devolve towards what is the dictionary definition of fascism: Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by dictatorial rule, suppression of opposition, militarism, and subordination of individual interests to the perceived interests of the nation. It rejects liberal democratic values, individualism, pluralism, and humanism. Don't misunderstand me, the original views of Karl Marx are not at all fascist, except in the sense that he saw one path towards the egalitarian worker's paradise as through "dictatorship of the proletariat." He wasn't saying that should be a permanent state of governance. But ideologies get corrupted by people besotted by power and who lust for total control. Clearer, now?

Yep, I remember lefty Susan Sontag heaping scorn on the Marxists back then, getting booed by the ideologues for saying this in a famous speech... Communism is Fascism—successful Fascism, if you will. What we have called Fascism is, rather, the form of tyranny that can be overthrown—that has, largely, failed. I repeat: not only is Fascism (and overt military rule) the probable destiny of all Communist societies—especially when their populations are moved to revolt—but Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of Fascism.

A cometary tail is far too sparse to block out much sunlight. The density of either a dust tail or a plasma tail is lower than that of a laboratory vacuum. You aren't going to put Golgotha in the dark with that. At this point, you are clutching at straws. I remember you when I was running science chat forums dot com - weren't you working on some type of alternate propulsion for a flying disk? Did that ever work out? I think maybe you do better when you can try hands-on experimental testing of an idea?

Great jumping Jesus on a pogo stick. How hard is it to type a capitalized word followed by some other words then conclude with a period or a question mark if applicable? Example: Instead of You write this I cannot have evidence about my triple bases and triple DNA (which I imagined) until a biochemist makes them in laboratory. If you're really "very sorry" about your idiotic writing style then you can easily just stop and write ordinary sentences. Grow TF up.

Har! (ya couldn't resist) The core problem for the theory is that any body captured into a highly eccentric orbit would be easily detected by now (as your link details), and any interloper body just passing through would be moving too fast to create three hours of darkness in the manner Ogon describes. Escape velocity at 1 AU is 42 km/sec, so an object between us and the Sun would have to be exceeding that velocity in order to pass on through. Chew on that for a moment @MasterOgon and see if that makes sense.

Having her as our state's governor for four years, the Noem/gnome connection has been made. A rare silver lining of the 47 administration was that it did rid SD of her. Misbehaving dogs all across the state breathed a sigh of relief. (then resumed chewing up shoes, chasing cats, tearing up the neighbor's garden, etc) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/26/trump-kristi-noem-shot-dog-and-goat-book (It's Kristi, btw)

Lieder claims she is a contactee with the ability to receive messages from extraterrestrials from the Zeta Reticuli star system through an implant in her brain. She states that she was chosen to warn mankind that the object would sweep through the inner Solar System in May 2003 (though that date was later postponed) Take me to your Lieder!

For the love of...could you please use standard English syntax, case and punctuation so that everyone may follow what you're saying? Your "style" is beyond annoying and just rude.

Would alphabetic languages be useful where there are many new or imported words, and the culture associated with that language has crossed many borders? Let's say a new species is found on a distant Vogon planet, and it is called a gruntbuggly. In English, one can instantly devise a spelling for the gruntbuggly (known for its beautiful micturitions) and incorporate it into common parlance. Would the gruntbuggly tread a more challenging path being introduced into Mandarin as a novel logogram?

Constant wiggling.

With what? What does that mean in plain English? How do you know it is conscious? Where have your findings been subject to peer review?

There's a lot of variation among genera as to interspecies breeding. Some genera have very closely related species than both interbreed and produce fertile offspring. Others like Equus contain species which do not have homologous chromosomes, like horses and donkeys, so you get sterile progeny like mules. Canines otoh can produce a whole bunch of hybrids that are fertile - wolves, coyotes, dingos, jackals and Fido can all interbreed and produce fertile progeny. It's fun to imagine some of the hybrid names. Coyjack? (they're usually bald)(a joke that may be obscure to non US baby boomers) I'm also waiting to see a dingorgi. Or a borzoiding. Of course anyone who wants to breed a jackal and a Shih Tzu doesn't know _____ about hybrids.