TheVat

Yep. Not inclined to think science is, or should be, a purity bubble somehow unattached to philosophy, and those institutionalized bits of philosophy that we call ideology. The real problems come from people believing that they can't question ideology or have public conversations about how it should shape our science/tech. The science genies are out of their bottles - nukes, AI, turbocharged carbon releases, environmental chemicals that kill, Kessler Cascades, bioweapons, plastic nanoparticles, etc. This would be the worst time in human history to be backing away from the sweaty, dirty work of politics and public policies on what we do with science and where we point its products. Saying let's not talk politics is like saying let's not discuss traffic patterns while we're trying to cross the freeway at rush hour.

Thinking of HMS Beagle. Darwin was picked because he had the backing of a rich uncle (of the Wedgwood dynasty) and so could pay his own way. The expedition was about the Navy gathering information to consolidate political control of new territories. Darwin was there to provide the Captain a dinner companion. Without politics, would we even have a theory of evolution? Same thing for Wallace - without British power and political control of far-flung places would he have been able to develop the same basic theory? Would vitamin theory have emerged without British political power being dependent on long sea voyages where one quarter of sailors were being lost to scurvy?

There was an old man of Srinagar Who tried cider with mother of vinegar Alas, over time It devolved to a slime Which poured out like a thin agar.

Fortunate the French are less dependent on frozen foods than some nations. (As someone who enjoys a little cooking, I'm notice how many items in freezer sections here seem like things one could make with about ten minutes of simple assembling of ingredients. Stuff where all you have to know is how to boil water. And the frozen things often seem to be multiple times more expensive per serving. C'est ridicule!) As for bots, does seem like Yandex data center attacks would primarily decrease spiderbots and engines and not so much effect on very widely distributed socmed influencer trolls. Bear in mind that Russians have access to many other web browsers like Atom, as well as many of the global ones like MS, Safari, Chrome, Mozilla, Brave, Duck, etc.

If Trump stood on the WH balcony and shouted "I'm a Russian tool!" through a bullhorn, it wouldn't be any more overt than these recent signals from him and his cohort. And I just see in this morning's feed that his DHS has raided a Dem congresswoman's house (on spurious claims about her immigration status), three weeks before the midterms. ФУКИНГ АССХОЛ.

I've had multiple beards (though tidy short stubble has been my dominant mode) since age 17. They biggest help imo is a gadget called a beard scrubber which you gently massage your face with 2-3 x/wk. Doesn't need special soaps or other potential irritants. Living a large fraction of my life on a cold windy semiarid steppe or montane region, beards are also a good seasonal adaptation. Winter beards have far less prickle factor.

Fifteen quatloo fine - for mixing franchises. 😄

IIRC, Fermi's "paradox" is just him asking during a lunch at Los Alamos, "where are they?" So not so much about rarity but about visibility. And even the Rare Earth guys, Brownlee and Ward, only suggest that complex multicellular life is rare - their theorizing had room for widespread microbial life. So the chirality path stuff doesn't really affect their main thesis all that much. Yep. Only the peace prize is selected by a committtee in Oslo.

Yo, Beryl, yo! Minstrel alerts: Nimoy - lyre boy.

Yes! (seeing your reply belatedly) Now reading a collection of illustrated stories (based on personal reminiscing) by Allie Brosh, "Hyperbole and a Half" . I had known nothing of her work. This chapter was my introduction (courtesy of Frau Vat), and very funny... http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/ ETA: The "Richard" story I excerpt above is, in fact, from her later (second) graphic book, Solutions and Other Problems. But it's excerpted in the website for her aforementioned first book.

You mean after the Marxist revolution of the proletariat is complete and money no longer buys acquittals? Expect delays. 😀 Seriously, I had the same thought.

There's no breeding ground for philosophical mischief quite like semantics.

Perhaps Navi can cap her string of successes with Turmp. A nice swan song.

For sure, Turnip rallies have never been about MAGA policy positions or real issues. What impresses me (in a negative sense) is his ability to shape public outrage into being oppressed, even when he's suggested something like the sick trolling in the OP. Maybe somewhat similar to the office manager who makes sickening rape jokes or racist jokes, and then tells everyone he's being cancelled by the "humorless" employees who reported him upstairs. Unfortunately we don't seem to have an "upstairs office" for dealing with bad presidents anymore. Will be watching the returns peering out from between the fingers over my eyes.

The thread OP could use a little more information on the research which earned the prize.

Yes. Because it can provoke emotion, and maybe thought, e.g. is the small person just a golf caddy or does he represent the common man or maybe something other? And what are tiny scales and the giant golf club about? Maybe the disgust is like a narrative hook to take the viewer towards some larger theme.

I always knew someday that manly could become an adverb, as well as an adjective. To manly go, where few adjectives have gone before! "Let me start this discussion by pointing out that I am not anti-gun. I'm pro-knife. Consider the merits of the knife. In the first place, you have to catch up with someone in order to stab him. A general substitution of knives for guns would promote physical fitness. We'd turn into a whole nation of great runners. Plus, knives don't ricochet. And people are seldom killed while cleaning their knives." - late great American columnist and author, Molly Ivins

I dimly recall an interview where Niven acknowledged that the RW concept had technical problems and a Dyson Swarm or similar would be more feasible. (Dyson was one of the ones who pointed out that neither shells nor rings would work) That said, as a teen who loved the Ringworld stories, it did make for a rich and fascinating setting, so there's a part of me that wants to imagine some ingenious techno solutions could somehow save the Ringworld. Could ramjet thrusters really keep a stable configuration? Could a real scrith have the tensile strength of the strong nuclear force (needed for the rotation speed of RW to maintain ~ 1G force)? Can the absence of plate tectonics and vulcanism allow a functional carbon cycle and longterm photosynthesis in an ecosystem? These issues, and more, all need really big patches. The second book, RW Engineers, applied some duct tape, but I'd have to reread it to recall all the details.

He has dementia. And one effect is that his trolling the libtards (which is what the faithful come to these rallies to hear) gets more OTT. Back in the eighties, he still managed some superficial charm and capacity for filtering himself. I think most people even then knew he was a sociopath with $$$, but he could navigate social circles where that was accepted if you were housebroken. As for that's really more the Bay Area, in most right-wing ideological maps.

Heh. Paramedic, briefly. So basically about 1/100 what a nurse knows.

A telekinetic arm. (e.g. Larry Niven's Gil Hamilton stories)

Yeah, braking that doesn't flash brake lights doesn't sound like it would be legal most places. Failed brake lights get a serious ($) traffic citation in the States.

I wonder how many reading these first lines, not yet knowing the mechanics of his survival, were imagining someone with an extraordinarily thick and muscular neck. (Or a breach of quality control in rope fabrication at that time) If they had trained professionals doing this, they would know perfectly well to use a central line (CVC) or a PICC line in such cases. Anything else certainly meets the Constitutional criterion of banning of "cruel and unusual."

Damdifino. Seth might have a plausible reason. I will spare y'all my rant on one pedal EVs, but...not my cuppa. What makes me wistful sometimes is the way the whole conversation in the US about EVs changed since the first Earth Day. I can remember from then how the future for a clean environment was seen as more in mass transit systems and less in personal vehicles. Then a lot of the movement gave up on that and tacked more to the center. The suburbs kept growing and that culture was welded to the private vehicle concept that went with that, "soccer moms" and all. (Now that all vehicles are so expensive, I'm starting to notice Zoomers and Millennials headed back to the older paradigm.

I talked to a sufferer today, and she told me it seemed likely to be the regen braking. She said that if one has motion sickness, the braking has a weird pulsation to it and, as you said, can feel like deceleration is happening for too long or where you don't expect it. (And she confirmed most MS happens to passengers, because drivers get more feedback and are controlling changes in motion so likely expecting them. I asked a family member who used to get MS and they also agreed that being the driver alleviates most of the symptoms.)