swansont

It’s racist when you paint all people as the same, based on the actions or traits of an individual. As far as “any other culture” goes, I think that’s just a fabrication. Other cultures are going through similar things and seeing the same kind of reactions, pro and con. You also say “the British” when it’s “some British” which is also stereotyping. It deflects individual responsibility for the racism when you can say everybody is doing it, just like it makes it easier to treat people a certain way if they're all painted with the same brush.

It definitely depends on what you mean by pop icon. If you think of the tent as “entertainers” then singing and acting are just two parts of it, so having successful singers being successful as actors shouldn’t be a surprise, even beyond films merely used as vehicles to promote music (e.g. The Beatles, Elvis, back in the day) But if you also include comedians, Robin Williams did some fine acting in non-comedic roles.

Included video of a modified trebuchet whose projectile at the release breaks the sound barrier Popular ScienceMan builds supersonic trebuchet in his backyardThe customized siege weapon hurls projectiles at 776 mph.

Musicians singing in a musical production shouldn’t be the metric for “film star” since films are about acting, and even if you consider musical numbers as acting, it doesn’t address the range of acting. Cher, Barbra Streisand, Bing Cosby and Frank Sinatra (and more) won academy awards for acting For “film star” you might also consider how many films they made and how big their roles were.

And probably more importantly, GPS. Google maps is a matter of convenience as compared to paper maps, but still requires some navigation skill.

“Rarely” might be headline exaggeration “After adjusting for age, sex, race, ethnicity and education, roughly 1 in 100 taxi and ambulance drivers died of Alzheimer’s, compared with 1 in 60 people overall.” There is mention of a study showing that the brain is changed “under sustained navigational demand” in support of this result The news article https://theconversation.com/taxi-drivers-rarely-die-of-alzheimers-how-complex-mental-maps-and-spatial-reasoning-protect-your-brain-286650 The paper https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-082194

(PETM = Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum)

How about you address questions asked of you before asking ones of your own

The number of people needed to run it would be a factor, as well as the firing rate. Also, I imagine boulders to fling are easier to come by than oversize arrows

More trebuchet-related science Shattered skeleton in Scottish castle is first confirmed death from trebuchethttps://www.science.org/content/article/shattered-skeleton-scottish-castle-first-confirmed-death-trebuchet Accounts of the battle don’t mention any trebuchet casualties. But Buckberry says Skeleton 150’s injuries strongly suggest at least one defender was hit from behind by a flying boulder, launched by War Wolf or one of the other siege engines arrayed outside Stirling Castle’s walls. “It’s a huge amount of energy delivered in milliseconds,” Waltenberger says. “In skeletons from past times you rarely see this.”

(since this doesn’t belong in the lounge I’m moving it. I chose ethics for lack of a better idea, though psychology might be a fit) That’s a decent description of MAGA. There are ones not toeing the party line who get cast aside, and the enemy is the dumbocrats. I think the traitor aspect speaks to the fanaticism and initial focus one one or two aspects of the ideology, but as the movement matures you find that not everybody shares the same vision for a wider range of issues. Dissent is probably a distraction and has to be stamped out. As fanaticism, though, it’s emotion and not reason so good faith doesn’t make an appearance

In the US we’ve actively been taking it to an even worse level - cutting aid for countries, making their living conditions even worse, while shutting down immigration.

Yes.

Then stopping immigration isn’t the fix.

I gave the results based on percentages, not raw population. You said “One might also have expected at least some of these immigrants to have dispersed throughout Europe.” and I confirmed that they, in fact, have done so. Several counties have taken in more, relative to their “native” population That “the asylum convention require the seeker to seek in the first free country they reach, not the last.”? I didn’t see how it comes into play. Please explain how it’s relevant.

I’m not sure how that’s relevant to the point I was making, but part of it was that minorities are often segregated from the existing society, not integrated. Even when they went past NY, they tended to do it. Haven’t they? It’s not like this is the only place that has an anti-immigration stance. I’ve read about similar sentiments in Germany (AfD) and France (National Rally). The Fidesz only just lost power in Hungary According to the Wikipedia article, Germany, France, Sweden, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium and Ireland have a higher percentage of immigrant population than the UK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_immigrant_and_emigrant_population I know that in the US, polls have shown that people overestimate the fraction of the population that belong to various subgroups (Muslim, Jewish, transgender, Asian, etc.) I wonder if that same effect is going on here - people perceiving more immigrants than there actually are. https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/41556-americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population

Are they threatening to kick out the Germans, French, Russians, etc.?

The issue is not inherently white vs brown/black, it’s inside vs outside. You pick what constitutes”inside” and everybody else is outside. In this case it’s skin color, but that’s not always the case. In the US, similar things happen. New York City had Little Italy and Irish neighborhoods. Other nationalities settle(d) in groups, too, in various parts of the country. Immigrants tend to congregate, with others of a common language and culture - the very thing that the insiders are leaning on to exclude the outsiders. I think there used to be a divide between Normans and Saxons across the pond. I wonder why that’s not still a thing.

Is there any evidence they read and understand these books? I’ve not read the books by the authors in question - are they proposing theories of everything or describing the state of physics and why we don’t have one?

Why is it important? I’d like to know actual reasons, not the ones tied to racist political fear-mongering.

OTOH I dislike big sites, since it reduces the chance to contribute. I’m not a fan of posts that cover the same ground that previous answers have covered. Also ones with poor moderation where shouting can be used in place of reasoned discussion, and there’s little to deter that behavior.

To me, that’s ego. I think the reason it’s ToE rather than other areas of physics is that any specific area, e.g. relativity or QM, requires some amount of detailed knowledge but a crackpot ToE is often more of an overview, lacking detail, which is one of the reasons it fails to gain traction. I don’t recall who started it, but one standard response here is to ask to calculate the parameters of a geostationary orbit, which they can never do. The ones who dabble in relativity and QM often have somewhat more of a clue about how deep the rabbit hole goes. The ones building perpetual motion devices don’t, though, but I think most of them are tinkerers If you go outside of physics, to evolution, most of them are driven by ideology and have little familiarity with the details of the theory

Oh, why do crackpots focus on this? Ego, perhaps? Dunning-Kruger, to some degree, is fairly common. People who are unfamiliar with the subtleties of a subject tend to overestimate their mastery. I think the “theory of everything” crows we see here are generally neophytes in terms of science. They don’t know what a theory is and most are of the “don’t do math” variety. They’ve just fixated on science instead of, say, politics. I’m sure there are equally clueless folks who “know” exactly what’s wrong with the world and how to fix it.

Who is “we”? I don’t think all that many are working on such efforts. I think there’s a certain satisfaction to identify principles that govern how the universe behaves, and knowing those can allow us to predictive power that might not manifest itself with smaller, unconnected parts. Epicycles worked, but Newton’s gravitation is more powerful. Same thing for showing that electricity and magnetism are connected

I have to decline. Dealing with the board software is not in my wheelhouse, and my long COVID issues are a huge impediment in this old dog learning new tricks