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swansont

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Everything posted by swansont

  1. Plus food quality; Deborah Blum’s “The Poison Squad” is a compelling look at all the junk that was put onto food before we had government protections.
  2. ! Moderator Note Come back when you can describe your successful experiment
  3. ! Moderator Note You haven’t presented nearly enough for this to be in speculations. No testable predictions, nothing falsifiable. Don’t bring it up again.
  4. Appearances can be deceiving. Everybody, and I mean everybody, is dealing with something. Some are dealing with lots of things. It’s easy to think that you’re the only one. Consider this example: in a country with a constant population of 36.5 million people, and an average lifespan of 100 years, a thousand people die each day, on average. They have friends and family, so tens of thousands of people are dealing with news of this loss. Every day. Many more are dealing with lesser crises. It’s just that most of them don’t show it. You not seeing it doesn’t mean it’s not there.
  5. swansont replied to Externet's topic in Engineering
    The added precision isn’t linear in cost. Not that mechanical timepieces are bought/sold for their timekeeping precision; there are reasons we went away from them.
  6. Maybe it’s the repeated mentions of celibacy?
  7. Ref. my Atwood quote. Women run the risk of being hurt or killed when she’s with a man, even more so when he’s a stranger. Survival is enhanced by listening to any mental warning bells, and erring on the side of caution. So, as MSC notes, if you give off a bad vibe, her safe option is to run away. Same if you remind her of anyone with whom she had a bad experience.
  8. Reduce your quality of relationship? The only aspect of “relationship” you’ve brought up is sex. When that’s the extent of things, you’ve automatically narrowed the field of women who might be interested in you.
  9. You haven’t defined what you mean by “turned inside out” You haven’t addressed issues others have raised.
  10. This, and to recognize the irony of allowing yourself to be picky, but complaining that women are doing the same thing. It’s almost like there’s an asymmetry in what agency men and women are to be permitted.
  11. John Oliver discussed Schedule F in his latest episode
  12. I’m not aware of “fairness” being an element of evolutionary theory, or even that this is an issue of fairness.
  13. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/04/07/ask-ethan-how-fast-could-life-have-evolved-in-the-universe/ Turns out that it’s not too long, but unlikely for carbon-based life, since building up carbon takes time — carbon is from stellar cycles, not supernovae “the very first stars of all should form somewhere around 50-100 million years after the Big Bang.” “It's quite likely that only a few hundred million years after the first stars turned on — by time the Universe is 300 to 500 million years old — we had rocky planets forming around the most enriched stars at the time.” —- The next step would be to consider if life could continue, since you’d have a fair number of supernovae going off in the early universe, which isn’t conducive to life if they happen nearby. You certainly don’t want your planet to be orbiting a huge star that’s going to blow up just as the planet has cooled down and is ready for life.
  14. The eccentricity makes it elliptical. The axial tilt gives us the figure-8 shape https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/this-is-how-the-sun-moves-in-the-sky-throughout-the-year/ “If we only had axial tilt to contend with, and our orbit was a perfect circle, the path the Sun traced out in the sky would be a truly perfect figure-8: symmetryic about both the horizontal and vertical axes. If we lived on an untilted planet that had an elliptical orbit, the Sun’s path through the sky would simply be an ellipse: where the eccentricity would be the only contributor to how the Sun moves.”
  15. You put these statements in quotation marks. What is the source? Quantum tunneling is not electron excitation
  16. Hydrogen is not a fuel, in this sense, it’s a storage medium, like a battery. You need to produce the hydrogen (in most cases), and it’s net energy negative. It’s only as “green” as the method of production; hydrogen made via burning fossil fuels isn’t a solution.
  17. ! Moderator Note Where is the speculation (that complies with the rules of this section)?
  18. Just in case you missed it, the suggestions you have been getting use air for insulation. A key is that the air doesn't circulate, so there's no convection. The solid material in insulation, bubble wrap and foam, etc. is for structural purposes (maintaining air pockets and possibly holding itself up)
  19. And if crackpottery like flat-earth tried to do the same thing it would fail miserably. To have a flat earth but the same observations, requires changes in physics, which has a domino effect (to mix our metaphors) because now even more pieces don't fit together. You might possibly find a working model of gravity for a flat earth, but you need the sun to revolve around the earth, which doesn't fit with our models of gravity, and now you have an issue with planetary orbits. If the sun isn't a sphere, you now need to fit that with nuclear physics and why fusion is occurring. If it is, why is that so, but the earth is flat? This doesn't work, and the ideas perpetuate either because the adherents don't do this closer inspection of how the idea fits in with the rest of science, or they simply ignore the problems
  20. That doesn’t deny the existence of incels; it points to a possible cause and also perhaps a solution. Ah, a Dale Carnegie graduate, I see.
  21. The OP made no mention of being in any of these institutions, so that seems irrelevant, and I don’t see where the existence of involuntary celibacy was questioned. And the OP’s question was not ignored; there were responses pointing out that this is not an issue for legislation. We could discuss why in further detail, but nobody went in that direction.
  22. This is not at all clear to me (and I’m thinking you meant latitude, since we don’t have time zones based on altitude) If the sun is overhead at one location over a flat surface, it would not be overhead at some other location some distance away. This is the reason we have time zones. Why wouldn’t the sun would rise and set on a flat earth?
  23. But the underlying issue is the datasets. The algorithm can’t discern veracity of information; it relies on what it’s fed, and those choices are made by humans. The “AI” isn’t intelligent. It’s not thinking. It’s just a fancy search engine.
  24. Interesting use of “only” The “past few centuries” encompasses post-Newtonian physics, cosmology, a fair amount of geology, most of chemistry and all of modern biology IOW, the bulk of science. The author takes the same approach as you; “mind” as a proxy for all of science, and no concrete examples of how these alternate approaches would lead to success or how this “proactive role for human consciousness” would have any impact on any other fields of study. Since this is just a repetition, it does nothing to illuminate the issue or answer any questions.
  25. Alter2Ego has been banned for preaching. (but not for saying, “Hark!”)

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