CharonY

Naah, what is the point of making rules if you yourself have to adhere to them?

Not quite, viral remnants are less than 10%, a lot of the noncoding are variable in structure but duplications are fairly common (about similarly frequency as viral remnants). The biggest chunk, are the transposons are mentioned by Endy (maybe around 50% of the genome). One should also be noted that amount of coding regions have been increased with newer research, as some presumed to be non-coding areas actually do encode things like sRNA or small proteins.

Also, if you are the only user of the the laptop, you will be mostly exposed to what you are already in contact of. In shared use there is a bigger worry, if the person before you had some infections while touching it. But then washing your hands before you, say, pick your nose, should be enough for most scenarios.

Unless it is a Russian product, perhaps?

I think part is marketing, as folks are getting more health conscious. My guess for the p would be phtalates, which are common plasticizers. But I don't think that you would find them in typical pencils (mostly part of plastic products). I don't think they are banned anywhere, though and compared to other sources I would think that stationary are a very small exposure risk (unless you chew on plastics a lot). Faber-Castell is one of those old traditional companies who managed to corner a particular market, while they provide affordable products, they also produce really expensive high-end products. I think the family holds the majority of shares of the company, which gives them significant stability.

This probably falls under Occam's razor.

I think that might not what OP might talking about unless I am mistaken, this is a fairly old standard ink (at least I had in in grade school). I believe a German company developed an eraser which essentially disrupts certain dyes, rendering them colorless. OOTH, most of the really erasable dyes are not used for fountain pens, so there is that (i.e. not enough info). However, since then there have been a few developments, to create truly erasable dyes. One that I know of is a ink (I think made by Pilot) that is heat sensitive. Using friction with a hard eraser it renders the ink colorless (IIRC it was basically an acid reaction, but required a heat sensitive activator). Generally speaking the dyes themselves are often somewhat toxic as they often contain heavy metals, for example. But on the other hand you do not really ingest them in large amounts either. Chemicals in erasable dyes fall under the same category. Certain permanent markers use solvent (hence the smell) which are likely a bit more harmful as the VOCs can be inhaled. But again, unless one works in an environment that produces those dyes, everyday exposure is probably too low to be a concern either way (outgassing of building materials or cooking will be much higher). Edit: I remember now the other pen, it was called erasermate and contained a rubber cement (must have been over 30 years when I last saw/used them). So the rubber with ink would be mostly on the paper rather than incorporated in it and you erase it similar to pencil marks.

I think that time has passed. As you know, ID was a tactic to shoehorn religion into the evolution teaching debate and Behe's arguments (though faulty) could pass the calm and logical test. Mostly the premise was outright wrong, leading to wrong conclusion. But pretty much after it was shown that ID is not really science (in court no less), the arguments became much more ideological, as nothing else was left.

Regardless of the number of senses, sensation is generally interpreted in the brain. Thus stimulation of areas can create sensation without the involvement of senses. Conversely, there are literal blind spots in our senses and/or transmission of the information to the brain can be impaired, preventing signals from sensory organs to reach our brain. So sensing (or not sensing) something is not an ideal way to establish reality.

Great, thank you! Edit: I think I saw the Blocker paper earlier, and while it was interesting to see a historian's perspective, it was overall light on public health effects. This is not a specific criticism as in contrast to now, data was much scarcer to come by. But the vox article has provided an interesting paper.

Do you have literature showing the health effects of the prohibition?

Yeah you cannot do that easily anymore. I mean, there is a process you can start (and get the various levels of academic administration involved. And after a lot of time investment, they tend to pass anyway after a stern warning (i.e. nothing). Mostly because administration needs their money as government funding gets slashed.

That is not logical, and the premise is flawed. Cost depends on more than speed, and arguably the overall infrastructure (and scale) is more important.

Even on the sensory levels there are differences. Depending on how many and what types of each chromophore you have in your retina (at the areas where the light is reflected from the object) you will have various levels of excitation. Roughly speaking you will see similar reactions (such as signal going up through the visual nerves to the visual cortex), but it does not really how it is perceived.

Well it does, if you do not know how things interact with each other. For example, in case of weather, we have a generally idea e.g. temperature trends, factors influencing precipitation and so on. So you could just take the recent history (or even just the model) and try to predict things. In the brain our knowledge is much more limited so if we reconstruct what is happening at any time, we have to move back further and further to see how things are connected. The other issue is that things might be handled very differently by each respective brain. For example an apple might be associated with food in one brain, but with a traumatic even in another. Without knowing that, the different activities in a brain in response to showing an apple might not be understandable.

To figure out the misunderstanding here, where do you see the difference between what you describe here and: I suspect the issue might be in the details and/or phrasing.

Well, yes and because the brain constantly changes, you need to know the history of the brain if you want to reconstruct what things mean from a snapshot. Or think of it that way, cognitive functions are a process and in order to understand what is going on, it is not enough to see what is happening right now. You have to understand the full context, as the brain keeps changing (unlike a crystal perhaps?) to interpret what is happening at any given time. This is not entirely true, as there are areas of the brain that are somewhat fixed and can be associated with certain activities, but I think the author refers to more complex cognitive activities.

Well, it will affect its current state, but it depends a bit on perspective. Basically, memory formation is an active process that is associated with some sort of changes in structure and activity patterns. However, the precise activity is highly dependent on the state the brain is currently in at time of creation, as well as retrieval. I.e. if you stimulate the same pattern in different brains, the results for most cognitive elements will be different.

This seems to suggest that the number is somehow hardcoded in the crystal, and it is a matter of finding it. This likely not how it works in the brain, though. There are quite a few different models, created by disciplines ranging from cognitive psych to more neurological sciences. One is called memory engrams , and the idea is that connections and activities in the brain (classic examples are LTPs and LTDs) are changed upon learning and acquiring information, and that activation of those patterns results in recall (i.e. it is an active and creative process as these pattern are themselves plastic and the patterns do not recreate themselves fully). So memorizing a number does not necessarily store the number itself, but it may be part of a the context in which the number is stored. One example is passwords, for example. If you often type complex password, you might note that typing it in sometimes requires little thinking, here the memory is linked to movements that have been strengthened or otherwise activated over time. Yet trying to recall them verbally can be a bit more challenging, especially if one uses many of those. Also, depending on type of memory, those can be quite distributed across the brain, so it requires many parts to recreate memories.

I skimmed the essay (or at least a similar one) quite a while ago, and I think most of the time I had the term no shit sherlock in my mind. I agree with the general gist, the way the brain works is not the way a computer works. It is also true that the way we describe cognitive activities are superficial narratives (including specifically "information processing theory", as we do not really understand the underlying biology. And that is in my mind the overall issue, we have mostly a black box, we can see what comes in and what comes out and we make a story about what might happen in between. Bits and pieces are known, but we do not really know how they fit together. I think with respect to memory, we do not store memory, we (re)create memory, in part when certain paths are activated in certain combinations. I think a claim that memory does not exist is overreach, but memory as expressed in information processing theory, which was and perhaps still is something that has been heavily promoted, in cognitive psych. It also has resulted in quite a vast arrays of self-improvement theories (usually with little evidence) and which also has been liked a lot by tech folks.

Oopsie

I do not understand the question. How do you want to convert molarity (i.e. a concentration) to a volume. Something is missing here.

! Moderator Note Thanks for providing a summary. However, pointing to the same rule, if you intend to discuss specifics (e.g. claims made by politicians and or a research group) it would help to provide a quote that highlights the issue you want to discuss. It is your topic after all and having folks search for whatever you mean to discuss is not really conducive to for a discussion.

I thought I did, there was no sudden collapse in engineering, the Eastern Roman empire continued on with similar feats for a few more hundred years, and decline in engineering capabilities are linked to societal challenges (including not having large entities around to fund infrastructure in many areas), and other challenges (e.g. global cooling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Antique_Little_Ice_Age, the Justinian plague, loss of trade networks and so on. So it is true that these were challenging times for most, which would slow down innovations. But it is not that there would be inevitable loss of technology or any form of progress. I am not sure about the history of aqueducts (which is a fairly specific thing to anchor a general narrative on), but some were maintained until modern times, from what I understand, but I have not seen any evidence that folks did not know how to build them. Just because something was not done it does not meant that folks did not know how to build them. I will note that at least to me the examples that you have provided are rather selective, and also not really precise. I looked up the Wells Cathedral which was built in the 12th century (so a bit after what at least some folks used to call the dark ages) but the foundation was a church in 705. So if in the period between 705 and the 12th century engineering all but vanished, how did the foundation survive for 400 years? There is also a nifty list on Wikipedia showing all the (surviving) buildings between 500-1000 AD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_church_buildings#Europe_2 And again, considering the length of time these buildings have been around, suggests that folks did at least know how to keep buildings standing for quite long times. I will also note that the collapse of the Roman empire hit Britain worse than elsewhere, so there might be a bit of a bias there. Some key developments were made toward the end of this time period (e.g. heavy ploughs, I believe associated with Teutonic tribes), mills saw improvement and spread in that time frame throughout Europe and so on. So really it depends on which specific examples one want to select to build the narrative. It is a time period where written records were sparser and times were tougher, but there is a reason why modern Historians reject the usage in the broad sense.

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