TheVat

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.

Had some training in physiology - as I recall, joint stiffness when immobile is about the synovial fluid that lubricates the joints not circulating as well. It tends to thicken in place and not lubricate well, so those first minutes of resumed motion are stiff. IIRC, joints are not usually vascularized so they depend on passive flow and oxygenation of the fluid. (Spinal disc is also not vascularized, so it's quite vulnerable to long immobility - people with spinal issues are often encouraged to periodically stretch and rotate, to help oxygenate discs) Ischemia could affect collateral muscle groups, in the car trip scenario, but it's mainly non-vascularized tissue in joints, as I mentioned, so ischemia wouldn't be the main culprit. Tissues like discs and joints can handle long periods without oxygen, and so aren't prone to ischemia. They are tissues which, by definition, lack a blood supply. This is part of why physical therapy is so important to coma patients - passive non vascular oxygenation and refresh only happens with manipulation of those joints and spinal discs.

I've been to a couple of the sites, which extend into ND and SD (about an hour north of me), as well as Montana. The Tanis site in ND has areas where you can see a layer of glass tektites along the K-T boundary (now called the K-Pg) from the Chicxulub impact. I've also been to the museum in Bozeman MT which has some beautiful specimens from the original Hell Creek site (not Hell's, just Hell) near Jordan MT. The major way to die, along the K-Pg boundary, is to starve and freeze, due to the Chicxulub strike and ensuing asteroid winter. I do not recommend this period to would be time travelers. And FFS don't step on any butterflies.

(How much!!!) "Coffee!!!" "Do" you!!! Drink!!!???????

Yep. Then there's outright fakery by AI, as in yesterday's MAHA (from RFK Jr's Department of Health and Human Services) report which cited research studies that don't exist. The fake citations appear to have been generated by AI. Probably best not to use an hallucinating LLM as your researcher?

Interesting, thanks. I had not realized that pinyin was so insufficient. English ambiguities seem trifling by comparison, like unionized (easily resolved by context if you are talking about uncharged atoms or organized workers). Q. What happened to the man who fell into an upholstering machine? A. He is fully recovered.

And when you are old, your cells have undergone more mitotic divisions, and there is a greater chance of cellular mutations with a greater number of divisions. This effect is actually heightened for persons with longer telomeres. While they may age more slowly, their cancer risk also goes up. Cells with very long telomeres accumulate mutations and appear to promote tumors and other types of growths that would otherwise be put in check by normal telomere shortening processes. I invite you to run "cancer and long telomeres" through a search engine. Here's a bit (in fairly plain English) about a study at Johns Hopkins on the matter: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/long-telomeres-may-heighten-cancer-risks

Meanwhile at the national zoo, Emily watched as... One nudnik panda has nematode redo tame NSA, had napkin dune, no? OK, officially ending my little sojourn in palindrome land. Weirdly addictive and somehow borderline dyslexia inducing. Hoping others may carry on, and with more coherence than I can muster. Adios, so Ida! Bonk a knob!

AI often gives flat out erroneous answers on food science questions. Its sources on such topics are heavily contaminated with commercial material promoting a brand.

Yes, I wouldn't think they would abandon it lightly. That said, the pinyin system does use diacritical marks to handle the tonalities, so doesn't seem impossible. Yikes. The cow shoe seems especially daunting to a Western learner. Re: brain areas...have heard handwriting does use different mode than reading, which. iirc was correlated in a study with enhanced creativity and cognition overall. Writing longhand v typing seemed to unlock ideas. I know some famous authors and posts swore by it.

I wonder if countries with logographic languages will eventually shift to Roman - I would think the simplicity would be tempting when you have new generations less inclined towards the rigors of literacy all over the world. Who knows, even the Roman alphabet could end up reduced in letter numbers, J tossed out, with G covering two sounds (as it already does in many words, gelatin gorillas), S picking up all the Zs, hard C handling all the Ks, Q discarded (cwite cwicly), i handling the Ys, etc. That speculation aside, there would be both gains and losses from a global alphabet...there might be nostalgia for the variety of old pictographic ways - which would look like impressive feats of memorization to a romanized world. ETA - there's sort a mild version of amnesia now in the US, where a lot of (misguided, IMNSHO) school districts are only teaching pupils to write block letters. Students are now reaching adulthood unable to form cursive letters (and reap the benefits of its greater speed in writing) or, as I encountered recently, READ cursive. Those who did have some exposure to cursive early on are now experiencing the amnesia where they can sort of recognize cursive but have forgotten how to form cursive letters.

My dislike of shellfish was somewhat culturally acquired and should be viewed as the culinary bigotry it is. Growing up, our family lived in a largely Jewish community for three years, where shellfish violated kashrut, and so were to be avoided. I tried them (scallops) on an outing in Boston, found them rubbery, and let my mind harden against them. What can I say, it was early teen years and I wanted to fit in with my circle of anti-bivalve pals. When we moved back to the goyische depths of Nebraska, I did slide back into an occasional clam chowder but to this day have never mixed milk and meat in a meal (also proscribed in kashrut law). My friend's uncle once showed me a concentration camp number tattooed on his arm - when you're twelve and someone shows you that you tend to listen to their advice. Wildly OT, though I could bring it back sort of to topic with Jewish burial law, which requires the body in the ground in 24 hours, partly to avoid the decomp odors which arise when embalming is proscribed. The casket must also be untreated wood with no metal.

Oh, I understood what you referred to. Twas joking on the "she seems to prefer to see them written in all caps." A dumb joke, yes. And I'm trying to remember the name of a coworker many years ago whose entire name was a palindrome. Will post if it ever comes to me. You've probably noticed memory works better if you leave it alone for a few hours.

(spotted this thread; not old enough to be "necro posting" but maybe necro in another sense...) I briefly worked in a stink environment and one of the recommended methods was rubbing Vicks Vaporub (camphor, eucalyptus, menthol, cedarleaf oil, etc) under the nose. Intense but effective. And they're not all that great even fresh. 😁

Emily has high standards for musical events she attends in Wisconsin. Tin Madison orchestra farts, eh, Cronos? I damn it!

Another inference might be that more than one person perceived weaknesses in your theory. Aren't you here for feedback? Cognition is a complex process with multiple functional levels. You don't provide any grounds for making homeostasis fundamental in a way that makes that particular to brains and not other internal organs and systems. I don't "explain" how a deep ocean submarine works by saying it has a thermostat. We don't fully explain something with emergent properties by pointing at one causal element in an intricate web of such elements. No doubt the thalamus is a critical hub in the brain. As is the fuse box in my house. But I cannot understand the fifth season of Game of Thrones playing on my television set simply by checking the breakers and how they're wired. That would ignore a vast web of other processes that allow talented and often blood and filth-coated British actors to manifest in our bedroom. Extreme reductionism has great difficulty accounting for emergent effects of complex causal webs.

Perfect. Might be what they call a universal joke - funny in all times and places. (A common example of the UJ is the one with the hunters and the 911 call, which I suspect everyone has heard - they did some cross-cultural study where that joke had the broadest positive reception - String's parrot joke would be a close competitor I would wager)

It's a good question. I think it's more anti-Darwinian, as Dim suggested. In the sense of maybe decreasing dog piles upon those who offend, allowing speech to be countered rather than suffocated. As an American jurist said, sunlight is the best disinfectant. But yeah, if we're talking cruel hate speech against someone young and vulnerable...then maybe sometimes you do have to just shut it down. When does intolerance become abuse is a question that arises.