TheVat

Research didn't find evidence of fomite transmission of COVID. The antiseptic industry made out like bandits, though. I suspect research will discover COVID did create a generation of germophobes, who will suffer lifelong immune impairment as a result.

It seems to me that defining free will in a deterministic universe is a semantic trick. I have never much liked compatibilism for that reason. If the choice I freely made was determined by events set in motion by the Big Bang then it is not really free, and no amount of folk psychology (it felt free!) (no one stopped me!) will change that. And randomness doesn't really rescue free will, either. If my decisions happen at the whim of random antecedent events then I am not really exercising free will in making a choice. My feeling of free choice is an illusion. I just don't think a physicalist view can ever allow us to be truly volitional agents - our selves cannot be an instigating cause that moves downward through functional levels. We are not causal agents. But it's necessary to our mental and social health to proceed with life as if we are. Quite the conundrum.

I'm definitely planning to reduce my political sausage intake. Too much political sodium nitrite. I think Robert Plant should send Congress some mayflies from his hedgerow. They'll last longer. Or maybe that head of lettuce that was competing with Liz Truss is available?

I have never had a clear understanding of how random micro events can even do that. How do we know they don't just cancel each other out and devolve into white noise? The lines and webs of causality could skate above that. As many of the people replying to Heisenberg (who famously wrote of the failure of causality) for the past century have noted, the fact that something cannot be determined or is uncertain by an observer does not mean that the underlying physical phenomena is not causal. In an act of Introspection, we tend to see influences as multiple forking paths, and we create the impression of our Self having agency in selecting from those paths. I cannot tell if that's an accurate impression or not. It does seem that causality is not linear and I have much doubt there can only be one way the Big Bang plays out in me now typing the word "heteroconsanguineousflurb."

Not to be crude, but doesn't Blike give his RW name on the ICANN registry? So deep privacy would seem not a huge issue with him. Would it be overstepping for an admin to simply call his office and leave a message with the receptionist? I'm not exactly Sherlock Holmes and I figured out his office location in about five minutes. He has described his profession in old posts here and the last name is unusual. Dots easily connected. (being not a mod or admin, I just used the privacyadvocate.org contact form, which relays an email message - the problem there, I suspect, is that people will neglect old email boxes when they set out on a busy professional career)

Swansont is a collective of professional naval gazers.

I think you accidentally produced a wormhole that moved the site forward in time one week.

Not well braced. I had a question about hydraulics and household plumbing on last Monday, so I removed my SFN ring and dallied with two other cute science forums. Some exciting moments of cross-fertilization. As a gentleman, I cannot share further. I also discovered that Blike uses privacyadvocate.org as intermediary, so I filled out their handy little form yesterday, which then relays him the message. No idea if that made a difference or if someone else reached him first.

I advise reading Dim posts in moderation. Life is short. Agree. There is a lot of imprecision when people talk about emergent properties or processes. Wetness, for example, is just a perceptual shorthand for talking about more complex properties like strong polar bonding between molecules. Things look different at different levels of scaling.

The one you select was determined 13.7 GYA. Thank goodness for Dewitt's Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum theory! Kind of exciting to imagine there's a universe where you chose to have "I" be the fourth word of your first sentence. I have goosebumps.

There's been some scare-mongering here in the States over glyphosate in corn, given that researchers testing non-organic corn could not find detectable levels of glyphosate. As a lawn treatment in "Roundup" I avoid it because it's so indiscriminate in what it kills. I like a fairly natural and diverse range of plants in our groundcover. We opt to yank and tug, in lieu of chemicals. Keeps you limber. What specifically do you want to discuss?

Read. The. Answers. Already. Posted. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-have-solved-mystery-how-wombats-poop-cubes-180976898/ Science!

This is now added to my list of favorites. Another was a story about wombats having rectangular poo and using it, like bricks, to make protective walls around their burrows. Amusing to watch someone have the sleep apnea/drugs factors explained over and over and it having seemingly no effect on their single-minded fixation.

This is an area where I did some research for a company I used to work for. One thing that stood out is how many supplements offer little or nothing to a person eating a balanced diet. Zinc is one to avoid unless there is some pathology causing deficiency. Also, bioavailable forms of zinc, like picolinate or citrate, tend to block absorption of other minerals, especially copper. Have some oats and nuts, maybe some pumpkin seeds, and you will be fine. Where dis you get those figures? My source (Chan School of Public Health at Harvard) has it around 8-11 mg for adults. Anything over 40 mg is potentially toxic.

Thanks, I had not been aware of the rough seas problem. And that would make a fast ferry difficult. My experience is limited to calmer Pacific waters, and also one that ran from Cape Cod to Nantucket. Sorry to hear notaries are such a pain there. As in UK, notaries here are a very simple thing, just witnessing and stamping documents. And they are everywhere. I used to shop at a supermarket that had a notary. Libraries, banks, post offices, municipal offices, etc all have notaries.

I was surprised so short a distance (60-70 km, from the map I looked at) would need a flight. Is there not a ferry boat of some kind? Flying seems like an expensive method for inter-island travel.

Screwing is sometimes more literal than I had realized.

Yes, there are no Good Guys in this conflict. And Israel didn't have to lower themselves very far - they have always paid lip service to "warning civilians in advance," so they could evacuate, but that's just putting lipstick on a warthog, it's clear they have no respect for innocent Palestinian lives. Or, apparently, the lives of Israeli hostages. All is collateral damage.

Looks like Hamas crossed that line, in terms of atrocities against civilians, where the two state solution is essentially dead. I am sorry for the Palestinian people, most just trying to survive, whose future has been torpedoed by Hamas. Like many people in the world, the desecration of corpses and other Geneva violations erodes my sympathies.

When all else fails, play dead... https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/oct/11/female-frogs-fake-death-unwanted-advances-study When it comes to avoiding unwanted male attention, researchers have found some frogs take drastic action: they appear to feign death. Researchers say the findings shed new light on the European common frog, suggesting females do not simply put up with the male scramble for mates – a situation in which several males can end up clinging to a female, sometimes fatally. “It was previously thought that females were unable to choose or defend themselves against this male coercion,” said Dr Carolin Dittrich, the first author of the study from the Natural History Museum of Berlin...

I what you mean. Maybe one could combine Clarke's space elevator and a magnetic mass accelerator so that one could accelerate a shuttle without the use of onboard engines until it came off the rails already at some velocity. You would have some engineering limits, e.g. crushing passengers would not be permitted.

As former HG peoples, we have a deeply felt need for mobility - any sense that we cannot move about freely (as is felt by, for example, most residents of Gaza) can arouse a trapped anxious feeling. We have an instinctive grasp that prisons and prison-like states are places we do not want to be. People cope with such conditions of confinement by finding interior freedoms to compensate. You don't have to be Mandela to do that. That was the point of some of the cruelties of Guantanamo, to try and deprive detainees even the freedom of their imaginations by blasting music at them, depriving them of sleep, etc.

Trump keeps cementing the view of him as a monumental human turd, so it reaches the point where any claim of Trumpian perfidy is plausible. It is certainly possible that Trump's big mouth could have resulted in Iran assisting Hamas, via Thom Hartman's Russia - Iran - Israel chain. But I doubt that Trump's cognitive processes have ever been sufficiently organized to actually transmit anything useful, with specific technical details re Iron Dome.

There's some irony, when one reads Arthur Balfour's letter of 2 November 1917... His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. Sigh...

Yeah I'm wondering how the hostages will work out. Hamas already has said it seeks the release of all Palestinian prisoners (4500 is the number I've seen) in Israeli jails. Some of the insiders are saying all the Israeli hostages will severely limit Bibi's response, some are saying they will bomb the crap out of Gaza anyway. I would think public sentiment, in a country where people formerly marched in the streets and rended their garments over one Israeli soldier hostage (Gilad Shalit), would mean they'd have to tread very lightly. PIJ alone says they have 30, and Hamas has dozens more. Yes, maybe not stupid.