CharonY

I think with comedy it highly depends on the craft and also we (as we the society) have also deal with the fact that things are not easily forgotten as they used to. Fundamentally comedy is all about context, and context changes. Comedians often try to walk right up to the edge, but where the edge is, will change over time. This used to be much less of an issue when shows where either not widely broadcasted and/or were discussed about but then forgotten again within a few years. With the internet and social media, all utterances are there forever (or close to it). A related issue which folks increasingly have difficulty with to separate the art from the artist. Again, I think the offensive part is highly dependent on how well the joke is constructed. However, I agree that deriding those disagreeing is a bit weak. After all, jokes are not universal and they may bomb with different audiences. As comedian they have the choice to try to appeal to a more specific group and/or adjust for broader consumption. But complaining that their jokes do not have mass appeal or that there are folks who just don't get it, does not show a lot of craftsmanship, in my mind. It is of course more annoying if folks take things out of context, but then they are unlikely to be the target audience, anyway.

The question wasn't whether tracking is feasible though (especially as folks are getting tracked voluntarily, though) but rather whether Bill Gates is using microchips to track and change human behaviour. The background there is that the Gates foundation has supported vaccination efforts (but is not building cell phones or other tracking devices, afaik).

A big challenge is that so many folks are infected at any given time that we get tons of lineages and sub-lineages at a rate where new vaccines might not keep up. It is possible that over time there will be few main lineages sticking around, which would be more similar to what is happening with influenza. But right now we are still in mostly unchartered territory. It also depends a lot on the potential of immune evasion. I.e. how many mutations can the virus undergo to evade recognition, but still remain infectious.

Asked and answered. The last sentence is just stupid. Also regarding natural immunity: Note that breakthrough infections refers to vaccinated individuals who get infected. In other words, the highest neutralization titers was found in individuals who were vaccinated and got infected with Omicron. Suryawanshi, R.K., Chen, I.P., Ma, T. et al. Limited cross-variant immunity from SARS-CoV-2 Omicron without vaccination. Nature (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04865-0 You need to learn to follow evidence to come to a conclusion, not the other way round.

Just to take a break from US crazyness and considering that quite a few folks here actually are Canadians (or live in Canada) I thought it is worthwhile to look at Canadian crazyness. While overall higher competency and not having a professional grifter as the leader, Canada fared better through the pandemic (a bit higher than world average in terms of death rates, for example), we have encountered a fair bit of conspiracy theories among the population when it came to COVID-19, which we had (perhaps unfairly) associated mostly with the US. The question whether vaccines contained tracking chip from Bill Gates was a question that came up too frequently for comfort, for example. A recent poll on Canadian beliefs on conspiracy theories is a bit worrying: https://abacusdata.ca/conspiracy-theories-canada/ There, pollster found that over 40% of the responders believe that big events are controlled by small secret groups that work against folks and that much of our lives is controlled by secret plots. Moreover 37% appear to believe in the replacement theory where native born Canadians (I kind of assume that it ironically does not include First Nations) are going to be replaced with immigrants. 13% think that Gates is using microchips for tracking with an additional 21% think that it is at least possible. These beliefs are most common among PPC voters (the far right party in Canada) with close to 70% agreeing to some of the conspiracy theories, followed by CPC voters (conservative party, ~50%) and with most other parties around 30-40% agreeing. These contrarian beliefs are also associated with vaccination hesitancy (which has been explored in a number of studies, though perhaps often with more focus on the US). While these beliefs are still considered fringe I do see a real risk of a general shift as we are seeing in the USA, if they become weaponized e.g. by media or other (semi-)traditional outlets. So what are you thoughts? Do you think that there better in measures in Canada to keep it in check? Or is it simply a worldwide, likely social media driven trend? And if so, is there a way to combat it, or is that going to be the new normal?

That is seriously backwards reasoning. You cannot just assume that something is true and selective search for evidence of it. I mean you can, but you will end up with false assumptions and conspiracy theories. In most cases this is just sad, but in an ongoing pandemic you are part of the legion of folks who are endangering others. It is rather sad, really.

Considering that you do not seem to understand the studies you linked yourself, using a more accessible source is a good idea.

Bipedalism is not that uniques. There are bipedal dinosaurs, and their descendants. It is rare among mammals, though some at least can be transiently bipedal. From there having few species (including humans) specializing in locomotion using their hind legs is not that unique. One of the rarer qualities is probably the lack of a tail as counterbalance. With regard to brain size, it is not that great of an indicator, as in total size, we are eclipsed by many larger animals and using brain to body ratios typically favours smaller species. In neither measure are we on top of the rankings.

Eh, there have been a lot of issues in Canada, too and at multiple points the conservatives did object a fair bit with regard to things like vaccination mandates and certain provinces (especially conservative ones) had big clashes with their health authorities regarding health messaging (or lack thereof). While in Canada the overall situation is still saner, I am not entirely convinced that it is not only starting to move on that trajectory. The politicians are less pants-on-crazy (yet) but there are definitely fan clubs springing up who are hot for the type of stupid found south of the border. The question is only whether the parties are willing to cash in on that. In the US after the last president left, there were movements in getting some things done and I believe that for some measures there were bipartisan votes.

Nothing you posted suggest that they are dangerous.

Forgot to add, similar as the training argument, the individual circumstances are increasingly recognized as drivers for outcomes, rather than genetics. IIRC the editorial made such an argument.

Part of it, yes. But there is also another issue regarding overall genetic diversity. Due to the bottleneck out of Africa, the genetic diversity for non-African population is lower than for African populations, however in most studies European cohorts are used as reference, which makes comparisons a bit difficult. I probably have to think a bit (or get more sleep) to make a better analogy, but it is a bit like using Chihuahua biology as reference and try to scale all other dog breeds to its specifications. The observed differences are likely going to be a bit biased. Or perhaps it is a bit like going to the urologist and they treat their patient like a person having a hysterectomy and seriously enlarged penis (OK I definitely need to think about it more). But the background is that using a special case as the standard skews basically all comparisons, if that makes sense.

What is wrong is that quite a few studies in the past were set up with the pre-conceived notion that e.g. minority participants were likely outgroups. Together with some general issues of reproducibility in human cohorts (and associated statistical issues) a range of ethnicity-based assumptions have found their way into clinical practice. Some of these have also found their way into medical algorithms, which I have mentioned in another thread. The big issue is that the idea of such studies is to improve health outcomes of everyone involved. If e.g. a certain group benefits more from a particular treatment, then of course it would be better do it. However, over time it was found that many of these assumptions actually deepened race-based disparities. As it turns out, many aspects are likely not genetical (which is or was the default assumption for racial differences) but more of lifestyle and environmental nature. And even in cases with more genetic implications, using race is a very crude proxy (there are also some issues related to the fact that European is seen as a a norm and often dominate a cohort, whereas higher variability in black cohorts are not really accounted for). As such, the mounting evidence suggest that race-based medicine is simply doing more harm then good . See e.g. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2022-057998 for one of those articles, and https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/2021/0800/p122.html for an editorial. As such, increasingly medical specialists call for an end to it. That is not to say that this is an universal move. In some areas (e.g. hypertension treatment) some suggest that there are racial differences that one should take into account. A big issue is again that the mechanistic understanding of these differences are often somewhat poor. The third option, which I have to admit to be biased towards due to my research, is trying to really get to the point of precision medicine (also called personalized medicine but got somewhat refocused and rebranded) in which we try to get away from crude generalizations but trying to find markers that actually guide what treatments we should apply. With regard to the Kenyan studies there is by now a fairly large body of lit trying to figure out from the early assumptions of physiological superiority to look at genetic markers and the studies generally came up short. It is not to say that there are none, but even after two decades of research we still are not really closing in convincingly on genetic targets (beyond GWAS). Even ignoring genetics and focusing on physiology and biomechanics, a fairly recent review is not really that provide that much more evidence than the studies years prior, which really just means that it is really complicated: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbmt.2017.11.004 Edit: I should mention that it is probably not that recent, I was working on a related topic quite a while ago, and while it occasionally it my radar, I am not up to date on it and I kind of forgot that it is quite a few years later now.

You can call it bias all day long, but it has become clear that the GOP as a whole has abandoned reality and has been successfully using this tactic to create a devoted cores set of voters. Rational Republicans have been marginalized. They generally only go against the party when they are not facing re-election (as also shown with the recent bill on gun contol, which will die in the senate). The big issue really is that this tactic has been so successful that it basically removes any kind of responsibility. Folks that have been on record condemning the resurrection now suddenly have to lie that they did, just to get in the good graces of their voters. I am not sure how you can compromise with someone who is willing to reverse themselves on some very basic facts that they admitted to before? If some deranged youtube video is considered to be equally valid as careful research, what is the middle ground? I mean, I am happy not to be part of this political system, but I do wonder how fast it is leaking (or is already present, see Hungary) elsewhere.

I need sleep but since I can't get any I might as well say that I don't really have any expertise, well to anything in this thread, really. There are atmospheric gases that are associated with biological activities in conjunction with certain properties of the planets (phosphine was shortly discussed with regard to Venus), for example. But whether those would even be theoretically detectable is beyond my knowledge and would also depend on the available technology of the fictitious alien civilization, I guess.

As mentioned, access to training and popularity have a huge impact on generating talent. There is a reason why the US has been dominating basketball but less so in volleyball. Also there are a lot of African American basketball players, but African teams are not really on that level. For sports where certain genetic advantages have been suspected (e.g. for Kenyan endurance runners), genetic analyses have failed to reproducibly find factors to be associated with performance. And many suspected loci are more associated with relationship (i.e. found in folks in a certain region) rather than being more common in the highest performers. It is part of a trend that came with more access to genetic data. In the past, many thought that we would find clearer associations between populations and certain traits. But increasingly we find that yes, we can find markers which delineate folks typically in a given geological area (i.e. identify relationships) but those are (with few exceptions) not great at explaining traits that were associated with certain groups. It is also increasingly clear that the historic classification of human groups (aka races) does not really follow genetic diversity, either, which of course made many assumptions rather suspect. There is a bit of some slow reckoning of that in the medical field which will take a while to sink in. That is not to say that there no genetic components that could have made an impact on performance and that those are more common within a given population. The issue is really that the being good at a particular sports is multifactorial and isolating the genetic element out of it has been shown to be surprisingly difficult.

That is certainly fair enough, but I was thinking more in terms of biological signatures in general. I mean, intelligent life would be great, but I would still think that any strong evidence of biological activities would be exciting. Though of course if something else was around that is more accessible it would likely be prioritized higher, even with less evidence. Perhaps what I am trying to say is that I am all for alien ants (I may have missed a couple of points, though. Sleep deprivation does that).

I think that is a slightly different argument than this one: The latter seems to be more an argument that life forms must reach a certain complexity to be interesting (which I would argue against), whereas the former takes accessibility into account, which makes a lot of sense. In fact, accessibility would remain the biggest issue. Generally speaking, life is comparatively rare, and while I doubt that anyone can make any reasonable claims regarding alien psychology, I suspect that any life form originating from a different planet would be fascinating to most (except for physicists who are disappointed by the lack of intelligence, but then I suspect teaching more undergrad courses would lower your threshold a fair bit). If we happen to be the only rock where there is some measurable evidence of life, I would think we would stick out. If there are closer ones around, not so much.

If the whole plate changes colour, it is more likely some kind of component in there. Whether that is likely or expected depends on the medium, of course. Often, metals can be involved. Darkening of bacterial colonies can also caused by metals or by pigments such as melanin. If you have bacterial or fungal contamination you would see them on growing on the plates (which is kind of the point of agar plates in the first place).

More likely is that they'll endorse more police shootings. After all, a black person (kid or not) cannot play with a toy gun without risk of getting shot by police.

As mentioned, it seems that you do not understand some basic biology concepts. Mutations are changes in the genetic makeup of an organism. They can be caused by external factors (radiation, chemicals) but are also frequently caused by errors in the replication of the material. These errors are especially common in viruses, as they tend to have fewer systems to control for fidelity during copying. Conjugation, transformation and transduction has little to do with mutations per se, they are modes of horizontal gene transfer. These can lead to mutations e.g. by recombination events, during which external DNA is integrated into the genome, but they are something else entirely. Also btw, transduction is a mechanisms of horizontal gene transfer that relies on virus. Here, the virus accidentally puts some sequences from their host into their capsule and transfer it to a new host. But again, random mutations are not reliant on any of these mechanisms.

It is quite a bit more complicated and as so often, things are not intuitive. The gangs in question were predominantly street gangs and the path to decriminalization is not, as you might imagine, to allow the criminal acts to happen, but rather it is an attempt to move gangs away from criminality. See, the classic (and often unsuccessful) approach to criminal gangs is policing. However, that does not address the issue of why gangs are formed. They are not simply an association of criminals who want to do criminal things, but there is a combination of various factors (poverty, social connections, marginalization) that promote criminal behaviour. By legitimizing certain organizations, they became eligible to state funding for social initiatives, that either disincentivized criminal activities. (a couple of short reads on the initiative: https://www.iadb.org/en/improvinglives/inside-ecuadors-surprising-gang-violence-strategy#:~:text=In parallel%2C juvenile arrests spiked,youth group" by the state. https://insightcrime.org/news/analysis/ecuador-legalizes-gangs-slashes-murder-rates/ For more details and insights there are a couple of studies e.g. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-020-09505-5) Of course this is not a magical solution, but the initiative is one example of trying out something new and see where you lead us. And sure, things may not work out the way as intended. But I doubt you are actually arguing that the revolution should not have happened and we were better off living under monarchies? The critical point in my mind is to study these outcomes and decide new policies based on them. There always will be failure and successes but the risk of future failures does not in my mind justify the acceptance of clear existing failures. In the end it becomes a cost-benefit analysis.

Ants are highly interesting for a huge range of topics. A surprising number of biologists I know turned became fascinated with biology after observing ant behaviour. They are models for a huge range of neurobiological and behavioural aspects, including colony behaviour and related emergent properties. Even engineers, physicists and mathematicians have been looking at ant hill to look at how simple rules can create complex structures, avoid traffic jams and so on. If we are only somewhat as interesting, I fully expect that someone will pour liquid metal over our cities to make a pretty cast and marvel how such simple organisms are able to make such pretty structures. What I am trying to say is that ants are awesome and any disagreeing is just objectively wrong. Also, I have no idea how one would even try to speculate about motivations and patterns to a psychology that is literally alien to us.

As you are looking for an unbiased microbiome analysis, filtration and centrifugation are the standard methods. While one can add steps to it (e.g. flocculation) different bacteria tend to behave slightly differently and can bias your results.

I think we can cut down on a lot of speculations by looking specifically at the findings instructions: https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/circuit/sites/circuit/files/assets/documents/pdf/high-profile/depp v heard/cl-2019-2911-jury-instructions.pdf They refer to these three statements made by Heard in her article: and decided that these statements were false, directed at Depp, made with malice and created damages. What makes it difficult in this civil case is the scope of the decision. While it does imply that the jury does not seem to believe that Heard was abused, it is not an explicit decision on it (or at least it reads to me like that, someone with actual legal expertise might want to correct me). Perhaps confusingly there is also the counterclaim in the same sheet where Heard won on liability (page 3). From what I read the jury specifically agreed that this statement from Depp's lawyer was false: