TheVat

To whoever neg repped John C, I think he was joking. And his jest reminds us that male fertility drop is, as the paper notes, quite "multifactorial" in its causation. Indeed, I find it really hard to pinpoint much beyond fuzzy correlations there. For instance, the cohort of young men in one of the studies could likely include many men who are temporarily unemployed (i.e. they have free time to volunteer for such a medical study, especially if they were compensated). Unemployment might present other causal factors towards reduced sperm count, e.g. certain leisure time activities that reduce sperm count, or psychological factors that correlate with a drop in fertility. My sense is that sample randomization is extremely challenging in such studies. @Alfred001 Thanks for the citations!

Got citation? Would like to see the data.

I agree with @zapatos tips - useful for a somewhat less minimalist approach than mine - and I can't argue with the joys of hot beverages. I would suggest boiling water and plastic bowls don't always interact well, in light of concerns on leachates from plastic, so I would prefer aluminum (with insulated holder) for that. Like this? https://www.amazon.com/Burn-After-Reading/dp/B001D243WU

I am guessing you never played the telephone game in childhood.

One historical theory I've heard is that the A-bomb, because of its incredible destructive power, allowed Japanese command to "save face" in their surrender. Had the US simply continued with conventional artillery and firebombing, the warrior culture of Japan would have seen this as something they could try to stand up to and therefore a surrender would have been shameful. We can never really be sure how a non-atomic invasion would have played out, given we have no alternate timeline to look in on.

I've heard history buffs say that Luther and the Reformation wouldn't have happened without the invention of the printing press. (which wasn't solely about the written word - Luther also used woodcuts, to present simple stories to those less literate) I really can't think of anything that wasn't advanced by the press, given its role in dissemination of information and promoting knowledge. It eventually shifted literacy from a tiny elite to a majority of the population. Sure, it was double-edged - easier to spread propaganda and libel, too - but what technologies haven't had a double edge at some point? Societies that do well have information gatekeepers who filter out the lies, nonsense, sophistry, etc. The US Supreme Court just heard oral arguments yesterday on litigation over what such gatekeepers should do in social media companies.

There is a special happy feeling knowing one is not part of a garbage fire. Didn't walk from Springer Mtn to Mt Katahdin, but I walked some of it in Vermont and NH. It's all common sense stuff - pick your time (e.g. not winter in the north, not high summer in the South), bring a partner you don't mind having inspect you for tics, bring mosquito repellent, sturdy hiking boots, etc. Keep food in a bag and hang it from a high tree branch when you sleep, never in your tent. Take increasingly long walks before the trip, for several months, to build up muscles and spot any joint/tendon issues beforehand. Keep socks dry. Watch out for the protozoan fiend of Appalachia, Giardia lamblia. Do your homework on finding a high quality water filter that will strain out Giardia - pump filters are the best. Boiling water is a monumental PITA. Ditto cooking. Dried fruit, oat bars, pemmican, peanuts, trail mix, powdered milk or powdered non dairy drinks, are all handy sources that don't need fuel to prepare. Don't gather trail sources of food unless you know exactly what you're doing. Blackberries yes, mushrooms no. No sustained eye contact with bears. Etc.

Unclear to me what "any background geometry" would be here. As @Genady pointed out, causation can be defined operationally, e.g. I push two distant planets together and local curvature increases in "response" to greater local mass. The stress-energy tensor includes mass, right? Energy density is the whole thing in GR context - rest mass, pressure, momentum etc? I agree with @Moontanman on how interesting this thread is. I wish I had spent more time in my youth on physics instead of counting cougar scat.

I knew. I was just being deliberately stupid. 🤔

That is f-ing hilarious!

Bat chocolate pudding panting with amblyopia? 😉

Well it is the product of 11 x 22 x 33 so that's kind of cute in a Ramanujan and the London taxi sort of way. Also the product of the Supreme Court staff times an American jury. Also the sum of the "Lost" numbers: https://lostpedia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Numbers This way madness lies.

They are back. This one is in Wales. I liked the one that was inscribed with the words NOT BANKSY on its side. I wonder if monoliths are what happens when a crop circle maker learns to weld. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-68547161 A mysterious monolith has suddenly appeared on a hilltop in Powys. The gleaming, silver structure was spotted by walkers on Hay Bluff, near the town of Hay-on-Wye on the weekend. Sprouting up out of the mud and measuring about 10ft (3m) tall, its discovery has led many to take to social media to question who put it there and why. Some have pondered whether or not the object could be of extra-terrestrial origin....

Yes. Everything is just as described, without any semantic tricks or funny math or unusual marital arrangements. Sisters, born the same day, within a few hours of each other, of the same mother and father.

No. This puzzle is very straightforward - no tricks, no biotech. What is interesting is that smart and educated adults sometimes struggle with this, but often you can show it to a ten year old and they will figure it out. And then the adult slaps their own forehead at how obvious the answer was.

Merleau-Ponty construed existence as understood through the body. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Merleau-Ponty Merleau-Ponty understands perception to be an ongoing dialogue between one's lived body and the world which it perceives, in which perceivers passively and actively strive to express the perceived world in concert with others. He was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the twentieth century to engage extensively with the sciences. It is through this engagement that his writings became influential in the project of naturalizing phenomenology, in which phenomenologists use the results of psychology and cognitive science. Merleau-Ponty emphasized the body as the primary site of knowing the world, a corrective to the long philosophical tradition of placing consciousness as the source of knowledge, and maintained that the perceiving body and its perceived world could not be disentangled from each other. The articulation of the primacy of embodiment (corporéité) led him away from phenomenology towards what he was to call "indirect ontology" or the ontology of "the flesh of the world"

No. Same parents = same biological parents.

A woman goes to a company to fill out a job application. As the secretary looks it over, she says, oh we had someone apply yesterday with the same last name, same parents, and same date of birth. That's my sister, said the woman. So you are twins, said the secretary. No, we are not, said the woman. Explain.

You Limeys and your fancy pants Universal Time time zone! 😀 Standard Time works well for me and the family - none of us get excited about rising an hour earlier in early March. I would lean toward permanent ST, after digesting all the research presented here. Sorry, golfers.

MPB is polygenic. One study found at least 63 loci that were associated with the development of MPB, and only a few were on the X chromosome (which was formerly thought to be where MPB was located). I am unclear what "Ys pass it to the X" means, but it doesn't sound like any theory of inheritance I've heard of. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28272467/ Abstract Male-pattern baldness (MPB) is a common and highly heritable trait characterized by androgen-dependent, progressive hair loss from the scalp. Here, we carry out the largest GWAS meta-analysis of MPB to date, comprising 10,846 early-onset cases and 11,672 controls from eight independent cohorts. We identify 63 MPB-associated loci (P<5 × 10-8, METAL) of which 23 have not been reported previously. The 63 loci explain ∼39% of the phenotypic variance in MPB and highlight several plausible candidate genes (FGF5, IRF4, DKK2) and pathways (melatonin signalling, adipogenesis) that are likely to be implicated in the key-pathophysiological features of MPB and may represent promising targets for the development of novel therapeutic options. The data provide molecular evidence that rather than being an isolated trait, MPB shares a substantial biological basis with numerous other human phenotypes and may deserve evaluation as an early prognostic marker, for example, for prostate cancer, sudden cardiac arrest and neurodegenerative disorders.

As I recall, what I was reading in the studies of student performance was more related to students having to get up early than to negotiating transit in the dark. The problem is that children respond to sunrise and seem to do better cognitively when the light is well advanced and they have had maximum sleep while it was dark or pre-dawn. (the DST effect was especially bad if they were located at the western edge of a time zone, where the sunrise is last to reach) These studies also drew the conclusion that later school hours would be beneficial, even where there was no DST. The Circadian rhythmn actually shifts later during adolescence, so the need there is especially acute. Here's one digest of that research: https://www.apa.org/topics/children/school-start-times

As Charon said. A change in sleep rhythm is difficult because we get used to a certain bedtime and do not instantly find ourselves getting properly sleepy an hour earlier when the time change happens. Especially in a society already plagued with insomnia-inducing electronic stimulation. Then the waking time dictated by the alarm clock seems to come prematurely.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/13/japan-cat-toxic-chemical-vat-fukuyama-nomura-plating-metal-plant It could be the opening scene from a new Marvel film. Residents of a Japanese city have been warned not to approach or touch a missing cat that appears to have fallen into a vat of toxic chemicals before scampering off. The search for the unlucky feline began after an employee of a metal plating plant in Fukuyama, western Japan, arrived at work to find a trail of yellowy-brown paw prints leading away from a container of hexavalent chromium, a highly acidic carcinogen. Touching the chemical can cause skin inflammation and inhaling it can lead to respiratory problems. Factory employees wear masks and rubber gloves when handling the substance, the firm said, according to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. Security camera footage shows the cat leaving the factory, its whereabouts currently unknown. There does not appear to be any footage showing how the cat came into contact with the chemical, which was stored in a three-metre-deep vat. (end quote) I'm wondering how bad this stuff is. I know this was the chemical that was the basis of a huge class action suit in California, in the famous Erin Brokovich case (subject of an Oscar-winning movie with Julia Roberts), where it had contaminated groundwater that got into tapwater. There's still dispute from industry groups as to how concentrated it must be to be carcinogenic, and also an epidemiologic debate as to what actual exposures were. I would guess that the cat's level of exposure if it was falling into a vat would be lethal, especially given that a cat's instinct with anything in its fur is to bathe itself with its tongue.