TheVat

Yeah, I wondered if a family member worked in a healthcare facility, had put a sample in a pocket and then forgotten it was there. Couches tend to acquire items that fall out of pockets. The fact that you know it's a 1.5 ml microcentrifuge tube would suggest you have some acquaintance with that line of work.

"Natural" pb will get rancid after a year or two. You'll notice it right away - oxidized fatty acids will give it an unpleasant somewhat bitter taste, like old cooking oil. We found this out when we moved here from another state where we still owned a house. That house wasn't sold until a few years later and there were a few canned goods and an unopened jar of pb that the relative staying in the house hadn't opened. It had gone off. If you want the natural pb to endure, it should be refrigerated. As for mold, conventional pb has additives that inhibit mold. Natural doesn't, so once it's opened it's capable of going moldy. But it won't be aflatoxin, unless you're in some country with lower regulatory standards for peanut processing. IOW aflatoxin won't get in there from spores in your house.

Tribeca Bob has not been pulling punches, re TFG, for years. But people seem to be getting their MAGA panties in a twist lately as if it's a new thing. RW cancel culture is in full bloom now, with the National Association of Broadcasters rescinding their public service award to Bob a day or two ago. It was quite the blinding display of hypocrisy given that the NAB is supposed to be big on free speech advocacy.

Clever phrase. The voters that seem to matter now are that narrow sliver of swing voters who will have to decide if they can entrust their future to a convicted felon who lies constantly - except for when he truthfully outlines his plans to be a dictator. I marvel that such a bloc of voters can still exist. As others have alluded to, it might be more a bloc of nonvoters - people who voted for Trump before but can't pull the lever again. I.e. those who change the margin by one instead of two, sitting it all out instead of switching sides.

They sound so anonymous. Were you left in a basket outside an orphanage? https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-reshaping-race-debate-21st-century/ A landmark 2002 study by Stanford scientists examined the question of human diversity by looking at the distribution across seven major geographical regions of 4,000 alleles. Alleles are the different “flavors” of a gene. For instance, all humans have the same genes that code for hair: the different alleles are why hair comes in all types of colors and textures. In the Stanford study, over 92% of alleles were found in two or more regions, and almost half of the alleles studied were present in all seven major geographical regions. The observation that the vast majority of the alleles were shared over multiple regions, or even throughout the entire world, points to the fundamental similarity of all people around the world—an idea that has been supported by many other studies (Figure 1B). If separate racial or ethnic groups actually existed, we would expect to find “trademark” alleles and other genetic features that are characteristic of a single group but not present in any others. However, the 2002 Stanford study found that only 7.4% of over 4000 alleles were specific to one geographical region. Furthermore, even when region-specific alleles did appear, they only occurred in about 1% of the people from that region—hardly enough to be any kind of trademark. Thus, there is no evidence that the groups we commonly call “races” have distinct, unifying genetic identities. In fact, there is ample variation within races (Figure 1B)....

I hope that the sentencing could include some hours of community service, perhaps cleaning the bathrooms in the subway. And no letting him just toss rolls of paper towel to the other cleaners.

"37% of quotes on the Internet are misattributed." - Geoffrey Chaucer

Starting to sense that our collective leg is being pulled. Funny stuff! This just in: bicycling may cause body odor. Also, earlier you said you might be traumatized if you reincarnated into a world where you lacked your nice semi rural home and personal car with AC. Mixed signals, dude.

Reportedly Cohen doesn't blow kisses, or ex-presidents, as well. Failure to recuse would be sufficient for me. We seem to in an epidemic of judges refusing to recuse when professional standards scream for it

At this point, everything would have to break Smith's way to get a trial before November. After that, Congress would have to step in, I think, which doesn't look probable. So the hope is that Trump loses the election. I think Family Embarassment Jr. might help with that, siphoning off more Trump votes than Biden votes. And the other state case, from Georgia, is limping now, so who knows where that will be by late summer. Aileen Cannon, the judge in Florida, was a really lucky break for Trump, in terms of getting sympathetic delays.

Jack Smith's federal prosecutions are the big ones, for the January 6th actions and for the documents theft and obstruction. But this is an okay appetizer and it is a conviction which cannot be federally self-pardoned, being a state action. And it also showed that attacks and harassment of court officials is not the best strategy for a defendant. Who knew?

Featherstonehaugh is pronounced Fanshaw. Thank heavens for that consistency! And as George Bernard Shaw pointed out: "Ghoti" spells fish. The gh in rough, the o in women, the ti in action.

groan!

I am so sorry, Memsahib! My elephant has been given a stern warning and will avail herself of the proper elephant waterclosets in future.

Hehe. Acronym universes collide! (DDG is Duckduckgo.com)

This thread is a 𝖋𝖔𝖓𝖙 of wisdom!

Yep, it's a chrome thing again, on an android os. (though it also manifested on a Windows desktop yesterday) I've turned off trackers and toggled on the popup blocker, with no deterrent effect. Finally switched to DDG, that took care of it. Price paid is DDG's slowness. Not too bad.

Beet juice is great. Associated with increased mitochondrial activity. I find the lift is similar to a demitasse of coffee and seems to last most of the day. I recall Sterno aka Canned Heat was sometimes consumed during Prohibition in the US. Denatured by adding methanol to the alcohol portion, plus a gelling agent, so that people would not drink it and (post Prohibition) the company didn't have to pay the alcohol tax. But desperate people would squeeze out the gel through a sock and then drink the liquid, suffering toxicity and sometimes blindness. I remember it was nicknamed "squeeze" because of the filtering method. An amphoteric oxide was used to gel the mixture. Which one IDK. Footnote: I learned the term "squeeze" from Crichton's novel The Andromeda Strain, wherein the village drunk is a Sterno drinker, and as a result, one of the only survivors. The alien bug is apparently not able to grow in a person who is acidotic, so the drunk and a screaming baby are the only survivors. Methanol causes tissue acidosis.

I don't need my oil changed at SuperLube, but thanks for suggesting it , Incredibly Obnoxious Full Page Blocking Ad!!!!!!

This is your take on a spiritual path that postulates reincarnation? Keeping the stuff? Seriously? Somehow I don't see the Wheel of Karma as focused on real estate. With that attitude, maybe your soul needs the bracing spiritual challenges of surviving in some future Gaza. Or at least some place where helping your community is valued more than marble countertops and bling.

I've seen research that says the great decline in smoking rates (and secondhand smoke exposure) has been a large factor in this. Smoking is the most clearly demonstrated accelerant of the aging process (and its effect on capillary circulation in the face makes its effect on appearance of age especially noticeable). As my parents used to point out, pretty much everyone smoked at social gatherings when they were young. Now it's more like a small fraction that will step outside for a cigarette break. At the 18-20 YO end of the scale, however, there may be other factors in play. Endocrine disruptors may be affecting maturation, and not in a way that would enhance health at later stages of life. This is an area where research is only beginning.

Labor shortages relate to the age structure of a population, the inverted pyramid as it's called, and not absolute numbers. We don't yank grannies off the rocking chair and put them to work. Overpopulation is a symptom, ironically, of poverty and regressive social structures. Fertility rates tend to drop below replacement in prospering liberal democracies. Pop "demographic shift" into a search engine. (mod: don't we already have this basic thread somewhere else?)

It's a Gaussian function. I can plug numbers in, but I am not qualified to explain it. It does look as if shorter wavelengths would be advantageous, at least WRT to beam divergence. But then there's the question of optimum wavelength for ablation of asteroid surface. Here's a summary of the laser ablation concept.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_laser_ablation

I am not anti-children or anti-schoolteacher, but I think the unreliable witness problem is significant here. It feels like the Zimbabwe sighting all over again. Do you have a link to witness reports? Maybe I can look through the wikipedia footnotes and find them.

Attenuation, as I mentioned, is the big question. I think beam spread can be greatly reduced, since it is a laser. But I don't know how the imperfect vacuum of the solar system would affect that. When people say "it's not rocket science," they are definitely not describing this discussion. I will have to learn more about the tractor concept, which sounds incredibly slow-acting to me on first view.