joigus

Of course they're found in Andronovo. They're found in the Sahara too. And they made their way to America through the Bering Strait. It's one of the oldest techniques that comes from hunting and has been used on and off in warfare. You don't think it's true that I mentioned bows and arrows in connection with hunter-gatherer societies? I did. I know what I've mentioned, and in connection to what.

That's very well known. The Tuthmose pharaohs brought it to Egypt. The Romans also copied Carthaginian ships. So what? What's the point? The point is military build up (resting on both professionals and part-time soldiers) seems to be a requirement of agricultural societies. Agriculture brings large-scale war and preparation for war for obvious reasons. Although this is lateral to your reasoning, it's one of your premises. That's why I'm dwelling on it.

No. It is a universal phenomenon: Hittites, Egyptians, the Mitanni, the Hycsos... Quite simply: agriculture implies warfare on a grand scale. Study some ancient history. Bows and arrows I mentioned in connection with hunter-gatherer societies. They sometimes are present in agricultural military societies, sometimes not. Moot point. The Luwians, the Spartans,... it goes on and on. The Spartans are an interesting case: They managed to enslave a whole population to do the agricultural job, while they indulged in their militaristic activity.

Here's your claim: Large-scale military activity came about because of agriculture, not in spite of it. Hunter-gatherer societies are involved in periodic squabbles, rather than military power build-up. In hunter-gatherer societies, the same bow and arrow, slingshot, etc. that are used for hunting are put to alternative use in those squabbles. Agricultural societies, on the contrary, nurture specialists: artisans, peasants, blacksmiths and potters, textile workers and administrators. Your premises are plain wrong. The famous fyrd that Harold Godwinson mobilised against Hardrada and William the Conqueror were peasants.

Nobody's saying you haven't. And stop playing straw-man, please. I can see right through it. And if you have, then you know, no doubt, that once an organism's genetic makeup is set in motion, so to speak, developmental biology takes charge to determine how it's going to develop, right? The environment interacting with this genetic conditioning does that. Right?

That's why I didn't do that. Apparently you need some help to read and understand simple sentences in English. Maybe repetition can do the trick:

Of course not. Many genetic conditions can affect your muscle composition. But the cases of women looking more muscular than in previous generations --that you brought up-- is easily explained by factors having to do with a person's lifestyle, not with evolution. IOW, you have not proven that we as a species are evolving towards sexual dimorphism. People are changing their muscular development because of the gym and the diet.

My emphasis. Be careful with what is 'generally accepted.' And we didn't even start talking about the effect of hormones.

You missed @Prometheus's excellent point about hippocampi. The answer to this is a similar argument applied to muscles. Although muscles can change more easily than nervous tissue. Even for hippocampus. In fact, the kind of muscular tissue you get depends very directly on the kind of exercise you do, or whether you exercise at all. Astronauts that spend a long time in outer space suffer a rapid deterioration of their muscular tissue if they don't exercise regularly. That has nothing to do with evolution, but with adaptation of your tissues to varying environmental conditions.

It could be a value not accessible by elementary operations. It could be pi, or e. In that sense, it's at the core of space, rather than at the edge. The "camera lens" is made of deltas and epsilons that I defined for you before. Calculus allows you to forget about the lens and operate with the points.

Exactly, you're getting closer. Literally. Calculus is about formalising the operation of "getting closer." You can use it to calculate the gentlest slope on a mountain, where the summit is, etc. It's not necessarily about "orbits." It's no coincidence that KE=(1/2)mv2 (Newtonian kinetic energy) reminds you of E=mc2 (Einstein's kinetic energy). One is obtained from the other by means of... guess what. Calculus!

The ancient Egyptians used a primitive version of calculus to make the pyramids, rather. (Small incremental sums.) Maybe you mean "similar to KE=(1/2)mv2 Or perhaps F=ma? F=mv2 is no standard physics.

It's hard for me to understand what your point about the point of calculus is. But as I can't sleep very well tonight, I've thought I might as well tell you a little bit about what your problem may be. Your problem may be that you don't understand real numbers. Real numbers go beyond what intuitive numbers (numbers you may be used to) are. They're not like the number of people in a room, nor like the reading of a ruler, nor like the money in an account or exchange rates between currencies. These numbers can be classed into a list: Counting numbers: 1, 2, 3,... (natural numbers) Whole numbers: ..., -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3,... Ratios: 2/3, -1/5, 10132/11, (plus all the whole numbers), etc. (rational numbers) In order to define real numbers, besides all the usual algebraic assumptions, you need this axiom: It is impossible to approach a number arbitrarily closely without that number being part of my system of numbers. This is called "completeness." You can rephrase it as "limits of numbers must be numbers." Calculus was being used very fruitfully by many mathematicians and natural philosophers for almost 200 years before mathematicians like Cauchy and Weierstrass defined it rigorously. <ignore if you don't understand> Another way to understand an idea could be to understand when it fails and how. This link may be interesting in that regard: https://amsi.org.au/ESA_Senior_Years/SeniorTopic3/3a/3a_4history_4.html There you can find a function (Weierstrass' function) which cannot be differentiated meaningfully: \[f(x)=\sum_{n=1}^{\infty}\dfrac{1}{2^{n}}\cos(4^{n}x)\] And a graphic representation to an approximation by taking only 50 terms of the sum: \[y=\sum\limits _{n=1}^{50}\frac{1}{2^{n}}\cos(4^{n}x)\] </ignore if you don't understand> Now let's go with your example. First, you've copied the formula wrongly. It should read: \[\lim_{x\rightarrow0}\frac{x^{2}-25}{x-5}=5\] What does that mean? (what you wrote has no meaning.) It means you can get as close as you want to number 5 by substituting in the expression for f(x), \[f\left(x\right)=\frac{x^{2}-25}{x-5}\] a number x as close to 0 as you want. The key that may be confusing you is that "as close as you want." Now, when x is not 5, the expression, \[\frac{x^{2}-25}{x-5}\] of course simplifies to, \[x+5\] And it is obvious that you can get as close as you want to 5 by substituting x in x+5 for a number as close as you want to zero. That's the key to the "delta" that seems to ring a bell to you, but not the right bell. Here's the rigorous definition of limit: A function f(x) of one variable x as limit at x=a, and the limit is L if, \[\forall\varepsilon>0\;\exists\delta>0/\left|x-a\right|<\delta\Rightarrow\left|f\left(x\right)-L\right|<\varepsilon\] Literally read: for all positive epsilon there is at least one positive delta such that, when x is closer to a than delta, then f(x) is closer to L than epsilon. In other words: You can get as close as you want to L in the expression of f(x) by substituting x for a value as close as you want to a. I hope that helps. Derivatives come later.

Force doesn't make much sense when dealing with quantum mechanical systems, but if you want to get an idea of the magnitude of the interaction in Newtons, there's a trick you can do. You take the Coulomb force law and substitute the distance r by the Bohr radius. Somebody's made the calculation for us here: https://www.toppr.com/en-es/ask/question/calculate-the-electrostatic-force-of-attraction-between-a-proton-and-an-electron-in-a-hydrogen/ I've roughly checked the calculation and it is correct. About a tenth of a millionth of a Newton. It must be interpreted as an average. The strong force doesn't play any significant role in this.

Sorry, I meant "vacuum energy". It is a part of Einstein's general theory of relativity. It is a term responsible for expansion. The farther away galaxies are from each other, the faster the recede from each other. So the "repulsion" (it's not really a repusive force, it's rather space itself expanding) is proportional to the distance. It also depends on time, increasing exponentially with it, so you would never be able to compensate for it by gathering mass locally. Expansion of the universe will always win eventually, no matter how much mass you cluster together to compensate for it.

Not enough in the visible universe. You would have to go beyond the cosmic horizon (3-odd billion light years away) and pick up a lot that was lost when the universe was inflating more than a 3-odd billion years ago. And that's impossible. We suspect lots and lots of matter to have been lost forever beyond the cosmic horizon. Other users are suggesting different ways of understanding your question, though. That's interesting. Black holes are usually associated with very intense gravitational fields, but that's because they are behind their horizons; they are extremely compressed. But as pointed out by MigL, the outer field at a distance far enough away is indistinguishable from the field of any other source of the same mass. Be aware though, that the farther away you go, the more intense is the effect of energy vacuum, and the feebler is the "source effect" one. So you would never be able to compensate by accreting local mass. I hope the argument is clear. They pull, not only in different directions, but with opposite varying tendencies depending on the distance. I think that's key to say; no, it would not be possible. Still IOW, you're trying to compensate for k'r with a -k/r2 by playing with k. There will always be a distance r such that your "compensation" breaks down.

The point of calculus is studying change and balances of change. The point of Cartesian coordinates is to parametrize space.

I don't understand what you mean. Can you rephrase? On a humorous note, the point of calculus is x.

Black holes are very small in relation to their mass. The whole Milky Way is somewhere between 100-200 thousand light years across. Yet its Schwarzschild radius is about 0.31 light years only. On the contrary, the accelerated expansion is only noticeable beyond the range of billions of light years. So black holes would never overcome expansion. The mass would have to be ridiculously big. You can do the comparison yourself. G=6.674×10−11N⋅m2/kg2 c=3×108 ms-1 1 light year = 3×108 ms-1 × 365×24×3600 s M = (1 billion light years)× c2 /2×G Somewhere around 6 × 1042 kg I think. 1030 Milky Ways... Ridiculous A million million million million million Milky Ways. No way.

Maybe it is.

Buddhism/Taoism have no faith, no concept of justice, it's a regression to where all concepts come from. It's observation helped by action, and action helped by observation. The fulcrum of all of it is that we all live under the illusion that "I" is some-thing. By continuous practice you get to see that "I" is no-thing. Compassion towards others is the only possible consequence of this realisation. Justice is more of a consequence than a goal in these traditions. So my qualms are over faith-based religions. I started the discussion with "religion" as synonymous of faith-based religion. Then I corrected myself. But I don't think that just any practice will get you to be at peace with the world, or with "yourself." It is no coincidence that most religions have a tradition of retreat, renounce, and observation. Faith and narratives play no role there.

That's historically (almost)* true, I think --the monotheistic concept of justice dispensing is probably later than the idea of karma. But karma is law of cause and effect (more akin to science's view of events.) So karma is more of an "ultimate" kind of idea, for me at least. Substituting the law of cause and effect for a conscious being that handles justice is the mistake humanity lapses into again and again. True --AFAIK. Science doesn't have a handle for that yet. But maybe some day. The scope of science excludes nothing. The Buddhist and Taoist traditions have a very good answer for that. Paraphrasing Bodhidharma: "My mind is troubled" "Bring me your mind and I will put it at ease" (something like that) * If we're talking about monotheism. Taoism and Buddhism are probably older.

I could hardly agree more. The only religious elements I've meant to reject here are faith, any concept of god, and any concept of permanent ethics. Rituals are alien to me, but I have nothing against them, and I recognize some value to them, for some people. I practice zen meditation and listen to dharma talks myself, and they're both of great value to me. If that's what religion boils down to, I have no problem with it.

Confirmation... I dodged that bullet. As well as matrimony. Last Rites don't seem likely. Anyway. I see I have more work than usual in this thread. @MigL, I promise to give due answer to your comments, and zaps' too. You guys deserve a good, respectful, intelligent answer. Maybe tomorrow. I'm tired today. As I tell my students: First think, then talk. Not the other way around.

I've also noticed the same pattern. Although I must confess there are exceptions. One of my best friends was very religious (Catholic Christian). He suffered from multiple sclerosis, was younger than me by five years, and died last May. He was always happy, very optimistic. I attended the requiem mass and I saw her widow. She looked quite upbeat too. They were more committed than average, I have to say. Yes, but in other thinking systems there are loopholes, you can argue your way out of them. And nobody's taught political thinking at 5. Come on. I suppose you mean things like politics, the "be a winner" ethos, I don't know. Is something like that what you mean? Ok. I see. Well. It's not the same. It should be obvious. Edit: Some of these things you mention are skin-deep. Others have powerful underlying reasons based on common sense. Others still are arguable, but not presented as mandatory.