TheVat

The usual objection is the human brain cannot host the quantum phenomena required since it is considered too "warm, wet and noisy" to avoid decoherence. But Orch OR, as Penrose and Hameroff's theory is called, is intriguing. (most forums like SFN have an old thread somewhere on classical brain v quantum brain) Yes, that is one of the better counters to the idea that no real transition of consciousness is possible. I have heard the example of the coma patient who has been completely unconscious and her brain has changed enough since last being awake that we could not say the same person is awakening. Yet we do assume a continuity. And the same goes for the "little death" of sleep. (I know little death means something else in French)

Raised body temperature activates the immune system and helps it work more efficiently. It also creates a less receptive environment for bacteria and viruses that are very acclimated to a specific narrow temperature range and will replicate more slowly if it gets too warm. The trick is to get these good effects without driving the temperature so high that it harms or kills you. Which is why fever management, figuring out when to hold off on fever suppressing drugs and when not to, is an important part of modern medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7195085/ The Fever Paradox.

So, to make sure I'm following, this is like I read a novel where some scene took place at Cawker City, Kansas, home to the world's largest ball of string, and then I later opened YouTube and its homepage prominently places a video on this very roadside attraction in Kansas. Is it possible that, as you read the book, you stopped and did a quick Google search on the place/agency and then forgot you had done so? Or mentioned the story element to a friend via social media? (either that or, as others suggest, the place/agency is trending in popular culture these days and this led the author to use it. It could have been on previous YouTube homepages you opened and you didn't notice it until you read the novel) If your example had more specifics, this could be helpful in gauging the degree of coincidence.

https://apnews.com/article/humans-epcoch-anthropocene-climate-change-power-4699002bbc3b60ade715ee94a7b7567d This puts the power of humans in a somewhat similar class with the meteorite that crashed into Earth 66 million years ago, killing off dinosaurs and starting the Cenozoic Era, or what is conversationally known as the age of mammals. But not quite. While that meteorite started a whole new era, the working group is proposing that humans only started a new epoch, which is a much smaller geologic time period. The group aims to determine a specific start date of the Anthropocene by measuring plutonium levels at the bottom of Crawford Lake. The idea of the Anthropocene was proposed at a science conference more than 20 years ago by the late Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen. Teams of scientists have debated the issue since then and finally set up the working group to study whether it was needed and, if so, when the epoch would start and where it would be commemorated. Crawford Lake, which is 79 feet (29 meters) deep and 258,333 square feet (24,000 square meters) in area, was chosen over 11 other sites because the annual effects of human activity on the earth’s soil, atmosphere and biology are so clearly preserved in its layers of sediment. That includes everything from nuclear fallout to species-threatening pollution to steadily rising temperatures.... Seems tricky, as to where to draw the line. I've heard anthropologists try to put it back there when aboriginals burned huge tracts of forest in order to create more open savannahs better suited for hunting. But I can see the point here is that none of those earlier alterations of landscape were really global in scale.

Moreover, how is that immortality? How do we know that after your brain is precisely copied by some as-yet unknown (and implausible) method for a "quantum snapshot," then you will die, and a distinct consciousness will awaken that has all your memories? It will tell everyone that "you" survived and are just fine, but that subjective report does not eliminate the possiblity that the original biological you lost consciousness and is gone forever.

Makes sense. British are helping preserve the historical roots of those words. Most of those ones we Yanks drop the U from were probably French imports, like colour, honour, valour, humour, etc.

Haha. Like the superfluous "u"? It's odd behavior. Or behaviour. My guess is that English will change towards more phonetic spellings. Mass marketing tends already towards that in the US, e.g. doughnut to donut. Perhaps not a good trend in a language that has so many homophones. At least now I can distinguish write, right, rite and wright. Yes, there's a line in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion - "Her English is too good, which clearly indicates that she is foreign."

Why assume all personalities fit that scenario? Some love repetition, some don't, and a lot of research suggests human personality is fairly malleable as life circumstances change. Perhaps a Matrix dwelling mind would become more like the gamesters of Triskelion in that famous ST episode, whiling away the eons playing games of chance. 300 quatloos on the human! Even if repetition is inevitable, this planet has hosted around a hundred billion human lives, and no two exactly alike. The same might be the case for other planets with sentient species. A robust universe simulation could offer trillions of years of unique experiences of sentient lifetimes before one would "start over." By then, one might have forgotten a lot of them. Or there could be other experiences to move onto beyond our present imaginings.

The irregularities of English must be a challenge to those who learn ESL. One ought to know it's tough to cough when you eat dough on a shaky bough in a slough. VtT is possibly also a culprit, in cases where the misspelled word has a homophone. (like the there/their example) I wood never use it bee cuz of that. There once was a girl in the choir, Whose voice rose up higher and higher, Till it reached such a height, It went clear out of sight, And they found it next day in the spire.

Will put half a hotdog in a small storage dish rather than just finish eating it. Sorted! Now the thread can move on.

A lot of the arguments against XY participation seem to me structurally similar to someone arguing against Swedish-American girls in sports. Those girls are big-boned and strong, it's really an unfair advantage and they're going to break the delicate bones of the other girls. I'm sure there are anecdotes. I'm sure we could have sixty pages of homing in on detailed analysis of Swedish girls, and there would be many anecdotes about brutish Swedish girls annihilating other girls on playing fields and the awful spectre of driving out non-Swedes from elite sports and Olympics. Just saying there is a reason regulars withdraw from this thread. Just not worth it to watch the endless reycling of arguments and parading of anecdotes. Skoal!

Guess I didn't win the lounge suite. Last time I looked into the chess world, Magnus Carlsen was the world champ. I don't really keep up with chess, except a couple times a week I solve the daily chess puzzles at chess.com. The end of the week ones are usually the hardest.

LoL! It's quite a different ecosystem in the human GI tract.

That analogy suffers in that Darwin was looking at scientific data about speciation, whereas this is more an issue of social acceptance. People identify themselves in society many ways - outdoorsy, bookish, cat-adoring, devoutly religious, athletic, metrosexual, etc. We tend to defer to their self-ID, I guess on the principle that they are somewhat self-aware. We might question someone on an individual level if they seem to be a poseur, but we don't dismiss a whole category as delusional, e.g. all bookish people are just pretending, they just skim wikipedia... ETA - just read Zapatos post, looks like arrived at that point already.

Be great if that worked. And realistically I don't see many SA ranchers opting to let cattle graze in the rainforest (though forest grazing is a real thing now), so soil modifications of cleared pasture is a more likely approach. Which hopefully would reduce the forest clearing by creating longterm pastures.

I think many youtube songs, you can type in the song name followed by the word lyrics, and you will get a video that shows the lyrics. (with better quality than some of the CC) This all raises a question, perhaps for another thread, which is about the viability of a fly that a person has swallowed whole. Would the low pH environment of the stomach quickly kill the fly, if the muscular action of swallowing didn't? If the stomach were empty, could there be sufficient air and space for the fly to buzz around in there for a while? Or would the coating of saliva and mucus have already incapacitated it?

A humorous folk song by Burl Ives, which has the woman swallowing successively larger creatures, until she swallowed a horse....she died, of course. No one knows why she swallowed the fly. 😀

The GBR experiment is different in several ways from what we are discussing, so it does not address the issues I was talking about. BTW, any positive results reported on that experiment? One of the reasons environmental groups have pushed boycotts on S American products like tinned beef. Forest clearing gets beef producers a couple years of grazing, then the land is a ruined mess and has to be abandoned.

The article you later posted doesn't support your assertion of "most straight people...." All the article does is reflect someone's opinion that present rape statutes could be interpreted to pin "rape by deception" on a sexual act with a trans person. I don't see either polling, or expert legal opinion, or actual incidents reported, on this. Given the facial bone structure (and ghost of 5 o'clock shadow) of the opining tv personality, I feel confident that her sexual partners will be quite aware that she is trans.

Makes no sense. If wind and sun aren't doing it, the nozzles of man aren't going to do diddleysquat. Expensive fountains. Like the Bellagio casino in Vegas. It's mainly sun that evaporates, and the shore waters are already having their surface increased by the wind roughing them up. Even if you did miraculously lob a few tiny clouds landward, the desert air would just boil them away and you would, as I mentioned in previous post, just have a slightly more humid patch of sky retaining slightly more insolation heat.

It may help to research the enthalpy of vaporization of water. The sun pours terawatts on that water and the adjacent deserts remain desert. I looked up the thread and see you were not interested in pursuing that when Seth suggested it, so I'll leave it be. Another error I spotted was the assumption that water vapor is cooling. Water droplets are cooling (we call clusters of them "clouds"), but vapor is a GHG and magnifies the GH effect. Without megatons of condensation nuclei, you could end up making that desert a hot sticky hellhole. You also have the sinking branches of the Hadley Cells suppressing rain at the subtropic latitudes where many of these deserts are located. Would not money be better spent encouraging farmers to decrease their goat flocks and try the various measures in my linked Smithsonian article on the Sahel? Building vegetation and enriching soils may be the better longterm solution.

This sentence is either a dull tautology, or you are asserting that a gender transition is merely donning the appearance of the transitioned-to gender. If the latter, you would need some evidence because it sounds a lot like barstool blather. To the first questions, what does it matter? Are other adult's sexual encounters or how they handle them any of our business? Do we have a lot of rules for what prospective sexual partners are supposed to inform us about? Criminal records? Checkered pasts? Previous boyfriends? Bisexuality ? Political affiliation? I think adults are supposed to work these things out. Stephen Rea got upset and threw up in The Crying Game when he discovered his girlfriend's penis, but was okay after a couple days and having a good think on it, and was able to accept her as she was. I would think most good relationships end up there. ETA: Have spent several minutes trying to determine why all the text came out underlined and trying to get rid of it. Finally figured how to eliminate it in my text, but can't make that work inside Mac's quote boxes. Sorry, Mac.

So what is your own opinion on the topic? Would take terawatts, looks like, and deserts that border oceans tend to be that way because they lack onshore winds and tend to rapidly evaporate any water that does come their way. IOW, world's most expensive fountains. A mosaic of indigenous land use practices, however..... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/great-green-wall-stop-desertification-not-so-much-180960171/

My post on the use of tooth pulp was simply a reply to another poster on the type of DNA that can survive almost any kind of calamity. While I am not personally invested in bodily remains being found, I can understand their use in reconstructing what exactly happened. I don't think those who perished will mind if their bits serve a scientific purpose. I hope that speculation of mine is not too empty for you. If it is, you are free to move along.

The cladistic approach makes a lot of things clearer, regarding species and extinction. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/bf00144036 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cladistics (from Springer article) The correct explanation of why species, in evolutionary theory, are individuals and not classes is the cladistic species concept. The cladistic species concept defines species as the group of organisms between two speciation events, or between one speciation event and one extinction event, or (for living species) that are descended from a speciation event. It is a theoretical concept, and therefore has the virtue of distinguishing clearly the theoretical nature of species from the practical criteria by which species may be recognized at any one time.