Prometheus

It might be 'fake', but it requires a high level of athleticism, perhaps similar to that of a stunts person, and like that profession has some fatalities in its history.

Per year? I've not seen estimates that high before, id be interested to know how it was derived. Do you have any links to them? I've not heard of it. Isn't texting while driving illegal anyway, or is that just UK? Sounds like a lot of money - what's the data being used for,? How is it generating wealth for the buyers? But presumably the data is only worth that in aggregate? I can't believe unis are willing (or able) to pay that much for single stool sample - which uni is offering this? That's true. I wonder if in the future some types of data will depreciate. Take the stool sample example - once the human microbiome has been well documented and catalogued who would be willing to pay for it again? There is a current trend in machine learning to work with sparse data sets, meaning learning algorithms of the future won't need the enormous quantity of data current methods do. It's hard to imagine what form an automated economy will take, what markets will exist and how data can be used to generate wealth in that environment. There will also be a difference between the anglosphere and sinosphere, but perhaps that's a separate issue.

You could try setting an alarm clock to coincide with the REM part of your sleep cycle (there are apps that can roughly track the sleep cycle, not sure how accurate they are, otherwise just estimate and use trial and error). You don't want it so intrusive that it wakes you up, but you need to be able to hear it in dream: perhaps a favourite piece of music that invokes the kind of experience you are seeking. Avoid listening to it in the day: you want the sound to be a trigger let you know you're dreaming.

I know nothing about this, but i did come across the idea of neuro-morphic computing which seeks to mimic neuro-biology. Might provide some insight. As for the circuit diagram it seems like the kind of thing @studiot digs.

I can think of some more cons. I'm not sure how valuable our data will become. At present estimates vary wildly from less than a few cents to a maximum of $100, though most estimates seem to congregate around a dollar. Even at the most optimistic case that's not enough to be used as a currency. The value of data would have to increase massively if it were to become useful. And if it did increase much, i can imagine that most companies would just switch to scraping your data from elsewhere. They don't need direct access to your healthcare records, they could just access your shopping records and infer your health status from that (already possible). I also think you would need global legislation in place to deny companies the companies the legal grey areas they need to operate. That could take decades - if ever. Also i think the younger generations are already used to their data being all over the place and would resist change, even if it were in their interests, as companies make things less convenient for them and blame this new data legislation. I think this horse bolted long ago: which is something people working in general AI fields have been warning of (e.g. Nick Bostrom😞 changes could occur much faster than traditional social and legal institutions are able to keep pace with.

Lucid dreaming is a subtle skill, one that can take years to hone. I'd recommend just relaxing and enjoying the experience. Do something you'd enjoy, go for a fly or something. Pushing your finger through your palm sounds boring anyway. Don't try to force things. May i ask why you feel need to test at all. Do you find yourself asking those questions when you are awake? Questioning reality can be a bad habit to practice, especially for people at risk of dissociation type mental health disorders. There isn't much of a science of lucid dreaming, but there is a literature based on personal experiences, you might be better off asking these questions on a lucid dreaming forum. This is true of a sane person awake. But the question doesn't work so well during lucid dreaming. I've been lucid dreaming and experiencing false awakenings for decades and i'm still sometimes be unable to answer the question. Except when i'm awake, thankfully. You'd think that having any doubt at all would be enough to confirm i'm in a dream, but the somnescent brain (at least my brain) doesn't operate just as if its awake.

There are a number of misconceptions there, some of which have been addressed in this thread but let's visit them one more time. No one is disputing the average man is physically stronger than the average woman. How does this follow from men being physically stronger? Or is it a separate statement? Or it could be cultural conditioning with nothing to do with neurobiology. Why do you keep skipping over this possibility? Map reading isn't a defining characteristic of the sexes. But again, no one is disputing that there are biological differences between them. What we are asking of you is to try to disentangle those innate biological differences from cultural conditioning. That should be the starting point for any imagining of what a matriarchal society would look like. Do you acknowledge that there are some purely cultural differences between the sexes - it seems you just assume every difference can only be purely biological. We know this isn't true, and you've been given links throughout this thread if you want to follow this up. No one's asking you to do that (or imagine that). How do you know this? You've just assumed it's true. Provide some evidence to back it up. We don't have any societies that raise girls with boys toys so unfortunately it's not straight forward. I gave 3 types of evidence i would look for. There's probably more: for instance, there must be studies on child playing styles and toy preferences between the sexes. Have you tried to look for any of them? But we do have historical examples of some of the more matriarchal societies being famously warrior-like. Again, why do you keep ignoring this? I've only been talking in averages. There have been thousands of female rulers throughout human history across the globe, enough to give us the idea that they aren't so different to male rulers. There are also plenty of gay rulers, including Philip II, one of the greatest Greek (Macedonian) rulers and quite probably his son, one of the greatest rulers in recorded history: Alexander the Great. In the Greek and Roman golden ages, these weren't exceptions. Just to give an idea of the sort of things i was hoping you might submit as evidence i found this study. Turns out female rulers engaged in more wars than men. If you can't or don't want to answer these questions and points then i agree it's probably best to lock the thread.

Not really. I think you're trying to say that male hippocampi are innately larger than females', but that's yet to be proved. You're assuming way too much. What do animal studies suggest? Are there any studies on how sex hormones affect the growth of these regions? Any studies on neonate brains? These are the things i'd start off looking at. Even if we take something more obvious like the increased musculature of the average man and more aggressive impulses due to higher levels of testosterone, doesn't mean a matriarchal society would be less warlike (Sparta, perhaps the most famous warrior society in all of history, was also one of the most matriarchal). It might mean you'd still be sending men off to be cannon fodder, but the strategic decision to go to war could be made by a matriarchy. Decisions to go to war take months, balancing many factors, meaning impulses have less of an effect. I'm not convinced a matriarchy would be any less inclined to war than a patriarchy. There are historical precedents for this - female rulers have popped up quite often and didn't seem less inclined to war - but then they were still operating in a patriarchy. So that's another place to get clues: compare the number of wars engaged by kings vs queens.

Or men have larger hippocampi because they were encouraged to explore the world as boys, as girls were encouraged to domestic play (recently came across this with my niece who wanted a remote control car as a present but the mother over-ruled her to get a cooking toy). If we're imagining a society starting from scratch we'd need to know the direction of causality, at the moment we have only correlation (as far as i know - haven't delved into the literature). Again, how much of this is biological and how much cultural conditioning? My impression is that any biological differences are exaggerated by cultural norms. To imagine a truly matriarchal nascent society we need to strip away this cultural element, leaving us with a biological case from which to proceed (although it probably isn't as easy to separate culture and biology as i suggest given one emerges from the other). Maybe there are animal studies that could give us some clues?

I think a closer analogy is: Doc: I'm afraid you have COPD. Patient: Smokers lung? What do I do about it? Doc: Let's start with stopping smoking. Patient: OK doc... how do I do that?

So they have the carbon and hydrogen to make polymers but how difficult is this process: is it already established or would it require new technologies (aside from doing it all in space)?

While female and male brains have differences, it would be difficult to pick apart what is truly biological variance between populations and what is cultural conditioning. I vaguely recall a study that found female hippocampi were on average smaller than in males, which was said to explain why men were better navigators. But we also know parts of the brain less used will atrophy. So is it a case of their hippocampi being intrinsically smaller, or a result of gender roles directing its use (or lack of)? When women have risen to prominent historical roles they have pretty much done as men have done - Wu Zetian, Boudicca, Hypatia (but maybe that's because they emerged in patriarchies). There is also evidence of early societies that while not matriarchal, were more balanced. The Spartans are a probably the best documented example, and weren't significantly different from surrounding societies. I've also heard it said men more readily pursue risky pursuits, perhaps leading to voyages such as Colombus'. Assuming this is a neurobiological difference, it wouldn't necessarily preclude risky behaviour from men. Remember Colombus was sponsored by both Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, with the former willing to sell some jewels to fund it (thoough she didn't need to). War would still be conducted by men on the field; aside from differences in physiology making men on average more suited to those demands, sending women to fight would be a flawed strategy. The Romans lost ~300,000 men to Hannibal in the Punic wars from a total population of ~3.5 million - thats a huge proportion. If they had all been women of child-bearing potential Rome would almost certainly have fallen. Overall i don't think there'd be gross changes to the patterns of war, economic cycles, spiritual practices, technological development etc - just a lot of changed details which are impossible to guess at. They say men are from Mars and women from Venus, but we all know they're both from Earth.

How common would plastics be in an off-Earth economy? I've had a quick look around and it seems that plastic manufacturing heavily relies upon organic materials, from hydrocarbons to bioplastics. How hard would it be to make plastics from the materials found near Earth? Apparently Titan has an abundance of hydrocarbons, but i couldn't find anything closer to home.

Hard to comment without knowing his work, but it sounds like he was talking about the conscious experience of time, rather than the actual physics of it. If you want to study the physics of it, then do so. And if you want to use your experience of time in your spiritual practice, then do so. But chasing them both, thinking they are the same thing - it looks like you're chasing your tail - which is fine as long as you know you're not going to get anywhere.

I'm Buddhist. I've not heard of the philosophy/power of Now. Is it perhaps a Western interpretation of some Buddhist principle? It's interesting that the Buddha refused to answer questions regarding the nature of the universe. We don't need to know much about nature of time to strive towards a more wholesome life.

Medicine, particularly epidemiology, suffers from these same restrictions and is yet able to proceed. There are interesting parallels between the accumulation of evidence that inhaling tobacco smoke causes lung cancer and AGW, but one point of departure is that the basic physics seems far more well understood than the basic biology was for tobacco related lung cancer.

I think what is skewing your eye is that the nature of exponential growth is not intuitive: over a human life span we only see a small interval of the curve . Over geological times though, the nature of that curve is apparent. It started shallow, but now we're seeing just how steep it is: societies and landscapes changing within single lifetimes. It's an old story.

Sounds like a plan. Just some general comments that may or may not be helpful. Find something to love in the subject otherwise it will become a grind and you may end up resenting the subject. Understanding Euler's identity and writing a programme to generate the Mandelbrot set captivated me. If you're interested in history, you can tie any of the maths you learn to its historical context. If you're interested in science it should be easy to tie in some maths. Join a community. You already have by joining this forum, but there might be local ones too. Ask questions. Vent frustrations. I'd add exercise and meditation to the regime and adjust diet if needed. Look after yourself; the brain and body are a single functional unit, neglect one at the cost of the other. I'd also sprinkle in a few weeks off to allow your brain to fallow.

Thanks for the articles. I can only speak about UK practices. Here are the NICE guidelines for stroke, one type heart attack, a more dangerous type of heart attack, asthma and the Resuscitation Council's guidelines on cardiac arrest. The only explicit mention of sex in any of these documents was is in the MI document: 'Immediately assess eligibility (irrespective of age, ethnicity or sex) for coronary reperfusion therapy...' Which is not to say that there aren't differences in the sexes in how these present, only that at present they are not considered relevant: any differences are far too small to be relevant to emergency situations (emergency medicine is a blunt tool compared to the precision medicine in some other fields). That could change in the future, but i doubt it for one particular reason. The holy grail for medicine for some time now is personalised medicine, where treatments are tailored to the individual, as opposed to the one size fits all approach still prevalent. You might think using sex to guide assessments and treatments would be a step to this end, but the opposite is true. For instance, the asthma article you provided talks about the impact of sex hormones on asthma. One day emergency medicine may be good enough to take these into account when making treatment plans. However, human variability being what it is, if we just assume women and men will have a certain levels of relevant sex hormones we could be doing more harm than good - the fact is that men and women as populations exist on a distribution, and without more information we do not know where on this distribution they exist. We can only treat based on averages, which is the antithesis of personalised medicine. If emergency medicine is good enough to be able to take into account sex hormones in asthma treatment it should be good enough to directly measure these sex hormone levels, via a blood test for instance. In this case, sex would still be irrelevant as we have the direct measure of the pertinent factor - circulating oestrogen and progesterone levels in this instance. If you know of different practices outside the UK let me know, i find this interesting, although perhaps off-topic here.

Chest pain is one of the most common presenting complaints in A&E (~5%). You'll get assessed by a triage nurse or doctor ASAP, get an ECG, and your pathway determined based on those. Most UK departments still rely on The Manchester Triage system. It's old, but has been well validated. Not a single presenting complaint includes sex as a factor.

How? I never came across that in 6 years of A&E nursing. There's a difference in the presentation of abdominal and associated pains, but for the ones you have listed i can't remember any instances where knowing the sex made any difference to the patient's outcome.

False equivalence. Cutting off someone's leg is not the same as boxing. The former always increases morbidity, and quite possibly mortality. The latter sometimes increases morbidity and mortality, though sometimes improves it (through cardiovascular effects), although, as has been pointed out, the evidence isn't clear either way. For instance, this 2007 study on the life expectancy of professional boxers between 1870-1930, when the sport was far more dangerous than today, concludes: You've shown consent doesn't always justify actions that include some intention to harm. Now can you show why it is relevant to the particular case of boxing? I would like to see a more rational drug policy, but that's a different conversation. Does the fact some drinkers go out specifically to 'kill a few brain cells' mean alcohol should be banned?

In medical science it's not always possible to conduct a controlled experiment due to ethical and practical issues. In this case non-controlled experiments might be employed, like case-control studies. However, they need to be interpreted carefully, under the auspices of something like the Hill criteria. This article explores the history of tobacco and its link to lung cancer and shows the roll such studies had in establishing causation.

What? Sorry, i just don't know what you're trying to communicate. Maybe someone else who understands your point can try to articulate it in a different way. X increases health risk by a. Y increases health risk by b. a < b. Society will ban something if the health risk >= b. Therefore Y is banned. Tell me where intention comes into this equation.

I get there's a difference (though you greatly exaggerate it - 99% of a boxers time is spent outside the ring ), but you fail to address why it is relevant.