TheVat

Don't forget double duty as a tent pole! Ahoy, Pinball!

Edward Teller, Richard Garwin and Stanislaw Ulam were inventors of the H Bomb. It's so sad that so many people hate H Bombs and want to dismantle all of them!

Wow. A man, a plan, a Cadillac, a dairy motor, Oto, myriad, a call ID, a canal, Panama! See thus: Noriega, sage, irons, uh, tees.

The situation in Gaza...I was thinking about the way that everything is being kept at a distance and shot through a soft lens by most of the media these days. The death figures, for example: not included in the MOH figures are those people who have died because of the war, but not directly from IDF military action. Several analyses suggest that at least 200,000 people in Gaza are dead today that would still be alive if Israel had not attacked and blockaded Gaza. That is decimation, in the original Roman meaning of the word: one in ten Palestinians. These deaths have arisen though lack of medical care and drugs, exposure, increased risks from malnutrition, epidemic diseases, lack of sanitation, extreme exhaustion from constant displacement, outright starvation, etc. And with the current starvation program that Israel has instituted, that number will grow massively. That's genocide. Mostly women and children and noncombatants, people just trying to live their lives and not terrorists who would cross a border and start killing people. I much appreciated Arwa Madhawi's column in The Guardian this morning, pointing out what's going on and asking how people will justify their inaction (or confining their actions to strongly worded letters of other statements which are sufficiently anodyne as to not imperil their careers or social circles). https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/22/israel-gaza-genocide Now, when Israel is executing a “final solution” in Gaza, when it is far too late for dissent to make any difference, the tide is slowly starting to turn. Now that Gaza is flattened, turned into mass graves and rubble, people who have kept quiet for the past 19 months are slowly starting to speak up. Now that Israel and the US are not even trying to pretend that they aren’t intent on emptying Gaza and the West Bank of Palestinians, of “taking control” of all of the land, some criticism has started to trickle in. Over in the UK, they’ve pulled out the “e” word. After 19 months of genocidal violence and almost three months of a starvation campaign the UK has decided to describe the situation as egregious. The UK, along with France and Canada, has threatened – and I’m sure Israel’s leaders are quaking in their boots over this – that there might be a “concrete” response if the mass killing and starvation continues.... ....The criticism we are seeing now is simply an exercise in ass-covering. Performative opposition, so that in the future, when the true scale of the slaughter in Gaza is clear, the politicians and media figures responsible for enabling and justifying this horror for 19 months can say: “Look! I said something! I didn’t just stand by!” And what will you say? When future generations read about Gaza with horror and wonder how the western world, with all its moral superiority, its rule-based order and its focus on international human rights law, allowed a livestreamed genocide to happen, what will you say? When future generations learn that, for 19 months, we woke up every morning to videos of children being burned alive – bombed with weapons that the US taxpayer helped pay for and the western world helped justify – will you be able to say that you spoke up?

Natural building materials are generally "solar powered," and I hope will continue to be innovated. Hempcrete is one - much lower carbon than concrete and superb R value. In some areas, rammed earth and adobe are good options, needing minimal energy input. In the southern US, pine forests are grown as a crop - lots of board-feet per acre and fast-growing. And there's the Scandinavian trend now with using wood laminate beams to build tall buildings that would conventionally be steel, concrete, and glass. I would imagine countries with high population densities and slow-growing northern forests would want to import some of their wood from warmer regions where growth is rapid and constitutes a cultivated crop. OTOH, wouldn't want to be cutting down the rainforest ("Lungs of the World") to be putting in construction wood plantations. My guess is that earthen blocks and hempcrete will emerge as the least problematic, provided they can be made moisture-resistant. IIRC, the other big challenge in terms of carbon load, is roofing where asphalt shingles predominate. Metal roofs seem like the best option, given their longevity and the relative ease of application, and of recycling the metal. As far as IT solutions go, I can see it more useful on other planets or remote locations where labor is in short supply, but feel that the economics on most of Earth will favor factory-built modular homes, where structural units are built on a factory assembly line and then quickly assembled on site. That has become the cheapest option in the US, and I know some municipalities are looking at factory-built for affordable housing projects.

What a splendid safety rule. If that bit of culture shock were applied in the USA generally, I have little doubt the accident rate would drop significantly. The thing that makes 700 psi phosphine jet like a blowtorch from my ears is when I see a pedestrian nearly mowed down because the driver is making a turn across the crosswalk and too busy yakking away on their cell to notice pedestrians. BTW, did you say you worked for Shell? Do you remember those old hand calculators, where you could type in a certain number, flip the display upside down, and it would spell out ShELLOIL. (71077345, but only worked with those old displays with the numbers very crudely formed)

The phrasing of this is interesting. You haven't said that you don't use clips from an LLM, but rather you say things like "you can't prove that" or "no way to confirm." This signals equivocation to some people, and not transparency and good faith. If you have used snippets from AI, it's best to own up to that (and identify them as such when you do use them).

We have? How am I reading this?

In my state, there's a program to build 3D printer houses on Lakota reservations. (this story is about three years old - I think the project is now well underway)(unless the #47 insane clown administration has withdrawn funding) https://www.aberdeennews.com/story/news/local/2022/02/14/nasa-plan-to-build-3-d-housing-includes-rosebud-reservation-college-native-american-sinte-gleska/6750546001/ Sinte Gleska University, a tribal college in Mission, may soon enter into a partnership with NASA that would result in new science education programs, more affordable housing for state reservations and the development of 3D housing that could someday be used on the moon or Mars. The National Aeronautic and Space Administration has already committed to the partnership and allocated an investment of roughly $250,000 to the project that has a working title of “Enhancing Research in Additive Manufacturing Processes for Lunar Application and Planetary Use in Tribal Housing Development.” IIRC, they squirt the walls and then bring in prefab roof trusses, but I'll have to check.

McD is the bottom of the FF barrel. On the rare travel occasion when we can't picnic from storage dishes, Subway is okay, with a couple veg options. Wendy's used to have a tolerable chili. I used to have hope that some FF chain would figure out how to make hash browns, but they're usually too greasy or just mushy and flavorless. Many trips, it's just some nuts, sections of orange and banana, handfuls of oat granola. When you're seated in a car for nine hours, fiber is your friend. FF places tend to minimize fiber, unless it's one of the high-end chains that is more serious about salads.

The fact that you still can't decode what Ex actually meant, and the context, suggests a kind of social disability that may be netting you downvotes. Perhaps more careful listening and less bidding for constant attention (and drop the memes) will improve your reputation. Opening yet another thread, and one that yells for attention, is the wrong direction. Please do not ever post anything like this again. You come across as a 12 year old.

Emily has a favorite car mechanic. Yo, benign engine boy! she shouts, to call him. And admires her postman Liam, who is very conscientious: Liam stops traffic, if fart spots mail. And shares them with her brother, Emil. Limes, Emil? Her late father, Harry, died in a sewer in Vienna. I saw the Orson Welles movie, about him.

Yep, whenever I try to formulate some idea of a long running cohort study, it crashes into the massively multiple vectors for plastics exposure and difficulty of clearly identifying a cohort. Say one looked at people who had copper plumbing (and drank tap water ) and another group that had PVC or PEX plumbing - well, people in N America move around and live in several dwellings, so they may get their water through various kinds of piping over a lifetime. And some drink bottled water, some eat and drink in restaurants more frequently, some heat microwave dinners that come in plastic trays subjected to heat as they contain the food, some cook only in steel or glass, etc. And as you note, the lifestyle purity would be rare and it would be hard to find willing participation. How many people live in cabins in backwoods Montana, growing their own food in low-plastic residue soil, using copper/steel plumbing, buy no groceries with plastic packaging, and of course get no more exercise and have no other healthy habits that stand out from a more conventional cohort? It would be hopeless, a mess of cause and effect, a Gordian knot. Formaldehyde off-gassing really grew into a problem in the eighties and nineties here, as new houses were better sealed and more pressed or composite wood products were used. At this point, my partner and I are outliers, living in a 1906 house that is inherently leaky to outside air no matter how much I do. (well I guess I could tear it down to just studs and rafters, and then rebuild all the walls and foundation and replace all the windows, but it might be cheaper just to buy a newer house with better sealing) So we have little concern about VOCs, but also more vulnerable to smoke infiltration from wildfires. And wildfires are proving to be a hell brew of PM 2.5 particulates. Again, discerning causes and effects is quite the challenge. Appreciate your post - if you've done work on PFAS, then you've really grappled with all these issues. If anyone hasn't tried valerian root infusions, please be sure to blend only small proportion of valerian with other herbs that are flavorful. By itself, valerian tastes like s-t scraped off sweaty feet. And it is quite potent. Small proportions, unless you like waking up on the floor.

Me, too, but I'm curious about foreign materials that don't seem to depart tissues once lodged in them. Diesel exhaust of the sub-micron variety is one, plastics another. Many things that are nasty can be expelled after a time, like chelation of heavy metals or flushing out of toxic chemicals. Submicron particulates raise questions of where they go after passing through alveolar membranes or intestinal villi, and how long they stay. That seems like an area for further research, given that the plastic nanoparticles just keep coming no matter where you live. Antarctic samples have this stuff.

I also wondered if calling it an hypothesis was inaccurate. It struck me as more an untestable conjecture. The WOW signal, for example, its intensity variation represented by 6EQUJ5, appeared to be an unmodulated continuous wave. Nothing digitally coded, nothing promising an information density that a "legacy of our species" message would certainly require. The ONLY reason it caused interest was its location at the Watering Hole frequency, 1420 MHz. And other explanations immediately presented themselves as stronger and more satisfying Ockham's razor. But really, anything in science that fails replicability is essentially failing testability in this sort of observation based methodology. And my other objection didn't feel well answered - if your civilization is in its death throes, then the terawatts needed to send out a final Story of Us with any hope of being noticed are very unlikely to be allocated. And it fails the Popperian standard of falsifiability - we can't really sit around hoping a tech civilization somewhere in the MW will collapse in just such a way as to send out a legacy signal that demonstrates the Farewell Scream Hypothesis. Sure, it could happen, for weird alien reasons, as could many other anomalous events which we also can't test.

It's not branded - a local tea shop makes various blends with names like "vanilla almond," so I will have to ask my partner if further leaf identification is possible. My nose says there's jasmine in there, with a pekoe leaf grade, and possible touch of hibiscus. Ours is definitely a FOP, and very possible there's Darjeeling in there. 5 minutes is usually good, 3 minutes yields colored hot water that smells pleasant.

As someone commented earlier (been a while since I looked at the thread), loose leaf steeps a little slower. Well worth it imo and it seems to taste better, though this could be an overactive imagination at work. I admit I do spend a little more time scrubbing tannin crud from the cups, but why should environmental stewardship be expected to be easy? Maybe someone should write a book called 50 HARD Ways to Save the Planet. And win a Pulitzer prize in a special honesty category.

I've taken a similar approach. Encouraging plant fiber based packaging seems more effective and, from the data I've seen, lower carbon footprint than recycling plastic. Petro industry is really pushing plastics and construction options like vinyl flooring and fencing, as they seek ways to keep pumping crude oil from the ground while the world's transport shifts towards EVs.

Yes they're the worst kind of quacks. The son should be facing criminal charges, and not anywhere children or the levers of my country's healthcare system. This appointment is like putting Ted Bundy in charge of a women's shelter. RFK Jr's brain worm has clearly won.

Assume your opening paragraph is an abstract (I had TLDR issues), I see a conceptual weakness, which is that a techno civilization would realize that due to light speed limitations no other civilization could respond to an SOS in time to assist. Also, wouldn't they have already broadcast powerful signals, if their orientation is towards interstellar messaging? Why wait until a time of collapse when all available wattage is desperately needed for keeping infrastructure going a bit longer?

LMAO. Such an awakener would likely beg to be returned to their coma. AFAICT, 47 sees government as primarily military and police who serve to defend the property and business operations of the wealthy.

As Emily would say, Emo, held dumb, all Lab muddle home. (yes, I like Labradors - smart and good companions)

Well put - and Wordsworthian. Wordsworth wrote that poetry came from emotion recollected in a state of tranquility.

I believe Emily's response, in her biochemistry class was: "Cire to HPM, aminos acidic, a son? I'm amphoteric!" Emily, btw, worships dogs. Because, as she put it, "God deified dog."

With Milk's album, "So many dynamos," a close second.