Let's Help Save NFT Technology, Together!

As we enter the second quarter of 2022, it seems the value and popularity of NFTs is starting to slump. Stored as virtual "deeds" to digital properties, on a distributed blockchain ledger, these types of tokens have been heralded as a godsend, by the likes of Mark Cuban, Steve Harvey, EA's CEO Andrew Wilson, and even voice actor Troy Baker! In order to help bolster this seemingly important technology, and save our precious metaverse from devastation, I am introducing a BRAND NEW INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY for all of my friends and followers; or for anyone who wishes to redefine "ownership" as something that could actually transcend that of actual, physical ownership! And to redefine "art" as something even more programmatic and procedurally procured than ever before!

I am calling it the Meta-Social License NFT! These brand new MSL-NFTs are a type of digital document that grants you certain rights, to improve your stature on social media sites, in the form of virtual license papers. These rights can include:

* The ability to make a controversial political opinion and/or factually inaccurate statement, without getting hampered by negative comments, for a certain number of posts.

* Robotically acquire a bunch of reactions of your choice, such as Likes, to a post no one seems to be otherwise responding to.

* Buying the permitted use of a cheat code, or acquisition of an extra loot box, on multiplayer games.

* And More!

Plus, these rights are designed to be transferable to any and all social media and gaming platforms! Or, at least the ones willing to develop and enable the appropriate, compatible cross-site APIs to do so!! And, it is aimed to work within all Virtual Reality interfaces, as well. This technology is currently considered to be perfectly legal, in some certain parts of the world, where all of the actual back-end processing takes place!

Confused about what all of this actually means, and how it is all supposed to work?! Well, that's no problem: Once you buy into it, this entire venture should sort itself out, for you, automatically. You can trust me on this, because of the unique nature of this unprecedented, groundbreaking revolution in speculative markets! And, it has lots of data science behind it, as well!

Buy now, and then sell them off to others, who might believe these things actually have value, and you could potentially make tons of money! If and when this special promotion kicks off, we can begin minting soon! Don't wait for it to be too late! Get in on the ground floor! Ask me how to reserve your first MSL-NFTs *TODAY ONLY*!

Attached Images

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Evolution: Rothschild's Plot

Apparently, this is the Darwin conspiracy our suspended interlocutor was referring to in the flat earther/alien thread.

Quote:

Fox Nation host Lara Logan pushed an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Charles Darwin was funded by the Rothschild family to invent his theory of evolution during an appearance on a right-wing podcast. Logan, a former correspondent for CBS' 60 Minutes, questioned what the origins of Darwinism are during an interview on And We Know, a conspiracy theorist show which has also promoted the radical movement QAnon, reported Media Matters for America. "Does anyone know who employed Darwin, where Darwinism comes from?" Logan asked. "Look it up. The Rothschilds." "It goes right back to 10 Downing Street, the same people who employed Darwin and that's when Darwin wrote his theory of evolution. I'm not saying that none of that is true. I'm just saying Darwin was hired by someone to come up with a theory, right?" Logan said. "Based on evidence, okay, fine. But even the people, the scientists, all of the people who can take you back to the Big Bang, what is the one question they can never, ever, ever answer? They can never tell you what that was. Whether it is the molecules or the energy, or, you know, all that stuff.

They can never tell you what it was.

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Russian Soldiers at Chernobyl, Acute Radiation Sickness?

So as to avoid hijacking the thread on the Russian invasion of Ukraine:

Russian soldiers occupied Chernobyl. There are now reports of entire busloads of Russian soldiers being transported out of the area who are suffering from acute Radiation sickness:

https://twitter.com/raging545/status...89458310410242

Quote:

IMAGE of some of the 7 buses with Russian soldiers suffering from Radiation Sickness arriving at a hospital in Belarus from the radioactive Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine. These were the ones who dug trenches in the highly radioactive Red Forest.#Russia #Putin #Ukraine

My impression? The area is not nearly radioactive enough to cause Acute Radiation Sickness (ARS), at least not outside a few locations inside the containment structure. During the worst of the meltdown and cleanup, only something like 140 people got enough exposure to show symptoms, and most of them survived.

That said, the Russian soldiers seem to have been digging trenches in the area (including the red forest) and were probably also burning firewood from the area, eating meat from game they might have shot in the area, or fish caught in the waters. That's going to result in ingestion of enough material to pretty much guarantee cancer down the road.

There are reports that many of the soldiers sent to Chernobyl had not heard of it, not heard what had happened there. Full state control of the press can make that happen, especially if you're talking about 18-19 year old kids from small rural towns in the east.

Chernobyl employees say Russian soldiers had no idea what the plant was and call their behavior ‘suicidal’

And, back in the day, even as the USSR was fumbling along and avoiding any international discussion of the event, the scientists in the area were having some impact on how the emergency response and containment was handled. (even if it were far below western safety standards). So they wore respirators, showered soon after potential exposure, rotated staff to reduce time spent in the zone, all that.

This time around, it seems as if the Russian military viewed the staff on the site as if they were the enemy, or were naïve children to be ignored. No respirators, nothing. So there might be hundreds or even thousands of young Russian men who breathed in radioactive particles in dust or smoke, or consumed radioactive particles in water or meat or fish. These poor guys are pretty well doomed to get cancer in a decade or two or three or five.

ISF has some pretty science savvy people, I'm curious to know what others here think.

Is it plausible for these poor recruits to get enough exposure to get ARS?

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Dyson Zone™ Air-Purifying Headphones

A twitter thread on why they've also been dubbed the "Snot Cannon" and the "Wearable SuperSpreader Event"

briefly

Quote:

The problem is the Snot Cannon is worse than no-source control, it's far worse than no mask at all- because it uses high-powered fans directed at the wearer's nose & mouth which project exhaled aerosols outward. If you wanted to weaponize a virus host it would be perfect.

https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/s...xcI9AFF1cwd7ug

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The Great Fentanyl Freakout

Fentanyl, we all know fentanyl. The highly potent synthetic opioid.

You can't even look at fentanyl without even dropping dead of overdose.

Perhaps you've seen the stories. Cops insta-overdosing from incidental contact with someone who has used fentanyl. Perhaps a story like this:

Quote:

While searching a vehicle where suspected #fentanyl was found, 3 deputies became dizzy, deployed Narcan on themselves & were taken to the hospital. They are doing well. If you question the dangers of fentanyl, this is how deputies must suit up to handle it. Thanks, @OCFireRescue !

https://twitter.com/OrangeCoSheriff/...82143468044296

Cops in class B hazmat suits (supplied air respirators, fully taped up chemical resistant suit) to clean up fentanyl crime scenes.

https://www.clickorlando.com/news/lo..._content=wkmg6

only one small problem, it's all total BS. Fentanyl is indeed potent, but it doesn't jump across the room to OD people.

Fentanyl isn't airborne. It doesn't readily pass through the skin.

Quote:

But overdosing "from transdermal and airborne exposure to Illicitly Manufactured Fentanyl (IMF) is a near scientific impossibility," according to the Harm Reduction Coalition. In other words, fentanyl can't jump through air or the skin to suddenly kill you. The drug can be administered through skin patches, but these patches require moisture and work over a long period of time. Similarly, someone would have to stand near an industrial-sized concentration of fentanyl for more than two and a half hours to feel the effects of the drug through airborne exposure. The difficulty of overdosing by touching fentanyl didn't stop law enforcement—including the federal Drug Enforcement Administration—from warning the public that fentanyl could be "absorbed through the skin." Meanwhile, many alleged "overdoses" by first responders seemed to be caused by panic—and the more they happened, the more panic they spread. One state trooper was responding to an overdose in Sussex County, Delaware when he was suddenly struck by "an accelerated heart rate and light headedness," which turned into "a tingling sensation in his legs," according to an October 2018 bulletin by the Delaware Information & Analysis Center, the state's fusion center. Rapid heartbeat and dizziness are symptoms of anxiety—not opioid overdose—but the Delaware trooper was rushed to the hospital and "treated" with naloxone.

https://reason.com/2020/09/01/the-fe...reakout-worse/

Cops across this country, and credulous news agencies, are endlessly repeating these fantastical myths about the danger of fentanyl.

Medical workers are baffled by the popularity of these myths. They have been working with the highly potent drugs for a long time now, and while it must be treated with caution, it's not the airborne insta-death that the local news would have you believe.

Quote:

Common sense also invalidates the possibility of casual exposure to fentanyl resulting in overdose. People who use, sell and transport drugs often come into environmental contact with fentanyl without incident. The authors of this op-ed provide services in the Bay Area; we interact with people at syringe exchange programs and encampments where fentanyl is present, in some cases touch samples of fentanyl the drug ourselves – all without incident. Fentanyl has been used by the medical system for treatment of pain and anesthesia since 1968. There are some formulations of fentanyl that are specifically designed for transdermal absorption (patches), yet there is technology involved in changing the drug to be absorbed this way, and even handling transdermal patches does not cause overdose. The fentanyl in the illicit drug supply comes in powder or solid form, and must have direct contact with mucous membranes or the bloodstream via snorting (inhalation), smoking, or injection to take effect. Yes, even carfentanil. IMF is handled with bare skin throughout much of its travels to the end user, and by the end users themselves, causing no adverse reaction until the drug is ingested via the above-mentioned routes—and even then, fentanyl and fentanyl analogs are used routinely and do not always result in overdose. More recently, there has been some media refuting the veracity of these stories, including The Fix, Slate, and EMS1.com, a website targeting first responders who each published myth-busting pieces about casual fentanyl exposure. The New York Times published an opinion piece about fentanyl hysteria by Drs. Jeremy Samuel Faust and Edward Boyer, both instructors at Harvard Medical School and emergency physicians and medical toxicologists at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. A recent paper in the Journal of Prehospital Emergency Care clarifies proper procedure for first responders who may be exposed to fentanyl and other ultra-potent opioids. Media accounts that are not based in evidence and journalists who fail to do their due diligence to ensure accurate reporting further perpetuate this dangerous misinformation. These stories cause very real harm—they perpetuate fear and stigma against people who use drugs resulting in negligent care, isolation, and diversion of resources toward law enforcement and away from life-saving programs.

https://harmreduction.org/blog/fentanyl-exposure/

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Will Smith perpetuated racist stereotypes?

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/...145518033.html

So Kareem Abdul Jabbar believes that Will Smith's attack on Chris Rock helped perpetuate the racist stereotype that black people have less control of their emotions and are more prone to violence. Is he correct?

I don't know how I feel about this criticism. Part of me says yes, part of me says no. Part of me says racists and Conservatives will always look for excuses to justify their racism against blacks, and Will's act is just an excuse to do it, rather than a cause. Part of me says Smith's actions is a terrible role model for young black AND white boys.

Huh.

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Utopian Ideas

Do you have any?

Here's one thought that occurred to me today:

What if everyone who works full time were allowed to take a sabbatical every 5 or 6 years or so? Your job will be waiting for you when you get back.

Right now, I think it's one of the perks of being a tenured professor at a major university, but wouldn't it be nice if every working could have something like that? Maybe six months of extra paid leave every 6th year. Could the economy survive this? Could the government even encourage companies to introduce such a system by giving a subsidy of some sort to encourage it?

I understand that something like this comes with a price, but I personally feel like it would be worth it.

Feel free to discuss this or your own utopian ideas.

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IT “Product Manager” vs “People Manager”

Hope you techies get my inexpert terminology.

My 40 year old son is high up in IT at a large Australian University. So high that he is at the top salary rate of a tenured staff and would have to give up tenure and become a contractor to get paid more.

Anyway he is in demand and has been offered two internal “promotions” without a pay rise. One involves leading a team of technical staff doing god knows what, which will give him the management experience he currently lacks. The other is a Product Manager. If I asked him what that means I would be baffled in seconds.

A complicated issue is that one of his sisters is high up in HR Australia’s broadband agency, NBN Co. She showed him the rates they paid Product Managers, which is $100k more than him. So that is the job he will take, with the blessing of the CIO.

I hope he stays at the University as a tenured job is breathtaking.

Anyway, what’s your call on People Manager vs Product Manager.

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Conspiracy Theorists Anonymous

Just ran across this on Youtube and thought it amusing:

[yt]x5x1sSjfknM[/yt]

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How does General Relativity conclude that there is a Big Bang?

The mods can merge this with the other currently active thread but I thought that this specific question should be considered only from the GR point of view without all of the other baggage that generally gets thrown into "origin of the universe" debates.

We are constantly told that thanks to GR, we know that the universe has an origin. We refer to that origin as the "Big Bang". Descriptively, it says that all space-time existed as a singularity and started expanding and hasn't stopped expanding since.

To me, that suggest that there must be a series of calculations in GR that suggest that the point (0, 0, 0, 0) actually exists in this universe (and presumably it is the same point in all reference frames). This point represents the origin of the universe at t=0.

However, in my research, I find no such calculations. Instead, I find that data shows that the universe is expanding and if we extrapolate backwards, we would at some point get the singularity. Maybe GR loops time into all of this but I don't see how we could say that if it wasn't for GR we would not be able to extrapolate the data backwards.

Maybe some people more knowledgeable than me could weigh in.

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Coming to your radio soon: Excess Votes for Biden in 2020

Will this study have legs? Will stupid people everywhere be spouting it soon?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...df7f3bb9e3be46


Brief summary: Economist and noted gun expert John Lott Jr.* has performed a statistical analysis of votes in the 2020 election and has discovered that in key battleground states, like Georgia and Michigan there were 255,000 excess votes for Biden, and possibly as many as 368,000.

How did he find them?

Well, lots of ways, but especially:

"In the study, Lott reviewed voter registration rolls, actual in-person vote counts, absentee voting and provisional ballots in counties where fraud has been alleged or suggested. He compared those counts to neighboring counties, arguing that the percentages should be similar."


WTF? No. Just no. No they should not be similar. The voting patters, absentee and provisional ballots in Wayne County (which consists mostly of Detroit), and Oakland County, the suburban county to the north of Detroit, should not be similar.

I'm guessing that every other point made is just as stupid, but I haven't read the study, which I guess is posted on a web site for a peer reviewed journal called "Public Choice". I know nothing about it, but I'll look it up if I can.

I decided to start this thread just to see if we can track sightings of this data in other media sources, and if we can critique it and discuss the methods used to come up with the "excess vote" total. This article showed up in an MSN news feed, from the Washington Examiner (not exactly an unbiased source,) It might provide a great example of lying with bad data, or bad analysis of good data.

Or, who knows? Maybe he really has something here. I shouldn't judge before I read it, right? I mean, he might have found the smoking gun that proves election fraud on a massive scale. He is, after all, a noted gun expert, so if anyone can find a smoking gun, he ought to be able to do it.




*That's actually how he is described in the article. Economist and noted gun expert.

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Man Tries to Hang Himself, Cops Shoot Him Instead

Title really says it all, per the article:

Quote:

A 29-year-old man being held for his mental health in a Florida hospital was fatally shot after he grabbed a pair of scissors and threatened to stab sheriff’s deputies. ... The man’s family brought him to the emergency department of the Cleveland Clinic Indian River in Vero Beach on Friday after he tried to hang himself, Flowers told reporters on Sunday.

The hospital is facing a lot of mental health patients (it is Florida after all) and there were no beds at any nearby clinics. The man was there for a day and a half, and must have had an episode. He grabbed a pair of scissors and got blasted.

Quote:

Deputies began chasing him, and he raised the scissors over his head. “At that point our deputies begin to retreat back,” Flowers said. “Again, a small narrow hallway, gurneys, all kinds of stuff in there. They draw their weapons and two of the deputies fire, shooting and killing this man.”

It's ******* pathetic that our police can't even handle a pair of God damned scissors without killing someone. Then, of course, how absolutely terrible this country is at providing any form of mental health services. I mean, seriously.

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[Split Thread] Why do people think that US police incidents often involve racism

Quote:

Originally Posted by DevilsAdvocate (Post 13767324) You have unwittingly jumped straight into the deep end. He certainly should have gotten out of the car. The likely reason that he didn't gets into a large complex narrative about race relations in the United States particularly as it applies to police actions and criminal justice. Maybe I will take on the challenge tomorrow. Maybe not. A simple explanation would likely result in continuous objections of bias and interpretation. I don't think there is a way to address this without a complete explanation, which would be rather more extensive. Even then, there would probably be endless debate about true motivations and details of statistics and pushing certain agendas and such that would detract from any simple explanation.

Cheers.

I just find it a bit odd. I work at a Uni. Work with quite a few US expats.

Even the couple of ones I think are the biggest jerks I could pretty much guarantee would not do some group thing if one dumped a student just because they were Maori or whatever. Pretty much all are cool, cruisy people.

Having said that, maybe that is why they left lol

Just never understood some US peoples jumping to all their cops are racist.

split from http://www.internationalskeptics.com...d.php?t=357687

Posted By:jimbob

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Are post-feminism women happier?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Emily's Cat (Post 13766062) Normal <> Allowable

No, indeed.... a certain amount of deviation from the norm is tolerated in all societies. However, functioning societies are geared towards the interests of the norm, since they are the ones that keep society going. I suspect the more counter to the interests of the norm some deviation is, the less tolerated it will be in a functioning society. A society that privileges the deviant over the norm is engaging in cultural suicide.

I wasn't talking about "allowable" though, I was talking about things being "normalised". The progressive programme has not been to accept that there are a few CEOs who people keep mistaking for secretaries, or that some poor benighted men wander around the fringes of society wearing wigs, bad makeup and enormous stilettos. The project is to queer society so that there is no normal for these people to be excluded from, or better still to invert the pyramid and replace what was normal with what was deviant.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Emily's Cat (Post 13766062) Which side of your mouth are you planning to argue out of? On the one hand, you're arguing that attempting to overcome socially imposed prohibition of behavior on the basis of sex is irrational and a losing argument... and on the other hand you're arguing that acknowledging evolutionary instincts is also irrational and a losing argument. I don't see how you can possibly hold both views without some sort of massive cognitive dissonance.

I'm losing the thread here a little. I was attempting to follow the logic that was of wanting to escape the societal baggage of femininity and then claim that "woman" is some special category that needs protecting. What is special about women that I should care about them more than short wimpy men? If you define women in a materialist way, you ditch all the stuff that makes them special and worth defending.

I don't think I said anything about acknowledging instinct as being irrational. Sure, women have all these instincts and feel threatened by men blah blah blah. But if you have reduced women to some materialist definition, then as I said, you have ditched everything worth defending about women. At that point why, beyond you not liking it, not count trannys as women? The category is debased anyway.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Emily's Cat (Post 13766062) You seem to be extending all of my views to a black-and-white end point of absurdity, rather than engaging in my actual views.

The thing is that I disagree with you about where your views lead. I think they lead to particular endpoints. You saying "but I don't like that endpoint" isn't an argument. I probably don't like that endpoint either.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Emily's Cat (Post 13766062) I'll be honest - right now, what I am inferring is that you hold a rather traditionalist view.

Certainly. Wildly traditionalist by the standards of the forum.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Emily's Cat (Post 13766062) You aren't supportive of transgender policies, not because you have any concerns about the erosion of female rights, but because they transgress the hard line gender roles of what is acceptable male behavior and comportment and what is acceptable female behavior and comportment.

No. This is the problem with liberals. Because liberalism is founded on these "rational" self evident universal principles and somehow everything stems deductively from that you assume that is how everybody else operates. Again, no! I think counting trans-women as women will make men and women unhappy. I'm not deducing that from moral principles, I'm looking at the world and trying to understand what men and women are actually like. Has feminism made women happier?

I have no moral vision for men and women that I want to realise. I'm not offended by the idea of a female general, or a female CEO. However, I think this is a road that leads to unhappiness and chaos if it's perused as a moral good. If I thought there was a pot of gold over the rainbow where progressivism delivered what it promised and a happy stable socanety came out of it I would view the whole thing completely differently.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Emily's Cat (Post 13766062) You appear to be arguing that males should NOT be allowed socially to dress in female clothing, or to use female spaces...

I don't know about not allowed, but I am deeply sceptical that anything good is going to come out of encouraging that.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Emily's Cat (Post 13766062) while also arguing that females do NOT merit any accommodations or protections due to our reproductive role and vulnerability.

You have completely misunderstood me. I don't believe females, when reduced to some materialist idea of what a woman is, are worth any special consideration at all. That isn't how I view women though. I am not a materialist. From my perspective, it is insane and a sign of the collapse of some critical aspect of society that there is even a conversation about whether women should have to accept unwanted men into their changing rooms and that we should be expected to pretend that men are women.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Emily's Cat (Post 13766062) Please feel free to assuage my concerns by restating your position.

I hope I have clarified things. I tend to argue by trying to reframe other peoples positions and following them through to their conclusions, I think sometimes it comes across as if the position was mine.

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Odd Radio Circles, aka ORCs

New Radio Images of Bizarre “Odd Radio Circles” Which are Vastly Bigger Than the Milky Way

Quote:

Based on the observations, the light is consistent with that of synchrotron radiation. This occurs when charged particles are caught within a magnetic field. As the particles spiral along magnetic field lines, they emit a faint radio light. This often occurs with diffuse plasma, and it suggests a spherical shell gas was pushed away from the galaxy either through a rapid period of star production or the merger of supermassive black holes.

Follow the link to see the latest hi-res image. The idea that they might be the remnant of the merger of supermassive black holes intrigues me.

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Fat-Positive Studies Prof dies from Obesity

Ok, so it's not been shown what the cause of death was, but given we know that extreme obesity causes extreme and fatal disease, I don't think it's too slim a limb to stake my hat on. Died suddenly and unexpectedly screams heart attack, which is a major risk for the criminally obese.

Another of my favourite targets for scorn croaks, and I can't say I'm sorry. To me, the idea of fat-positive studies is identical to cigarette-positive studies.

And yes, her name really was Cat Pause.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/edu...-dies-suddenly

The irony is so thick I don't have a knife to cut through it:

Quote:

A fat studies researcher, Pause's work focused on the wellbeing of overweight people and “the effects of spoiled identities” on their health.

Maybe she'd still be alive if she'd concentrated on "the effects of extreme obesity".

Note: the photo on the article is 6 years and several broken sets of scales ago.

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Kid dies on amusement park ride

A 14-year-old boy fell out of his seat to his death on a 430-foot-high tower drop ride in Orlando. There apparently are videos of riders questioning whether they were belted in properly, and another showing the actual fall. Absolutely chilling.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ic...ide/ar-AAVukKJ
https://www.clickorlando.com/news/lo...o-thrill-ride/

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The Seed of Origin

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mojo (Post 13762142) Introducing yet another entity who you claim lived before the alleged creation of the universe doesn’t solve your problem.

I suppose you can tell us what happened before the Big Bang?

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[Split Thread] NATO borders impacting the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Swoop (Post 13765007) and the borders with Finland, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and their arctic and Pacific coasts?

It also has a border with Norway.

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History is like the wheels on the bus ;)

So,

- invading a much smaller country that used to be yours
- motivated by a fear of enemies getting too close to the attacker's borders
- invasion based on outright wrong intel that created overly... optimistic expectations
- try to instigate the invaded people to be on your side, fail miserably
- enemy gets international volunteers and whatnot
- incompetent military leadership, mostly based on political reasons
- ... including following doomed "rush B" kinda plans, even when it should be obvious it won't work
- ... and pressure from the top to keep doing it, before other countries get too involved
- getting bogged in snow and mud
- major logistical nightmares
- ... including the enemy getting behind your lines and ambushing the supply convoys
- expensive tanks destroyed by cheap molotov cocktails
- ... and those tanks turn out to be nowhere near as great as previously propaganda made one believe
- using masses of poorly trained and unmotivated conscripts
- major morale problems, resulting in soldiers surrendering or running away
- ... and the enemy snipers don't really help with that morale problem
- talks of political purges
- has the nasty side-effect of telling everyone else on the globe, "wait, these guys are much weaker than we thought"
Etc.

Right, I'm talking about the Winter War (talvisota) :p

Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat the year ;)

Well, to be fair, at least Stalin did manage to establish air supremacy from day zero. So, yeah, it's not an exact repeat. It's kinda like a Hollywood reboot: it's even worse than the original :p

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Easy App Development language/environment

Back in the 80’s and early 90’s, I used to do some simple programming using Basic, HyperCard and Access/VisualBasic. Nothing crazy, just little programs that helped with little tasks wherever I was working or maybe some weird text-based “games.” Since then, the programming world has evolved so much that I wouldn’t know where to start.

Now, I have a lot of ideas for some things to automate processes at our medical clinic. Does anyone have any suggestions for an easy HyperCard/Basic-but-modern language that I can learn and start trying to make some of these ideas real? Maybe I’m being too ambitious, but I would like to at least try.

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Driving an Electric Car on Autopilot

My dual-motor long-range Tesla Model 3 electric sedan was delivered on March 2. It had its first moderately long road trip on Monday. A 150-mile round trip for a visit for a doctor to consult regarding return to health from an accident in my old car two months ago. I passed all tests and am returned to normal. That accident would never never have occurred, if my old car had autopilot, cameras and rapid acceleration like a Tesla to avoid a side swipe from a semi truck. For the first time Monday, I switched on Tesla autopilot with beta full self driving; what a marvelous experience. Yet the car is still a dream even without it.

However, as still is the case with many folks, the doctor repeated the FUD about EV range anxiety. That's nonsense, as any Tesla owner will tell you. Mine is rated with a range of 358 miles. The car recharges in my home garage while I sleep with elecricity from a solar farm. If you drive long trips (I don't; I fly), Tesla has Supercharger stations everywhere, and its touchscreen navigation guides you to them. After several hundred miles, you need to stop for food and a restroom. A Tesla recharges in that time. And far more inexpensively than with gasoline.

Over a century ago, automobiles replaced horses. Now drivers are transitioning from ICE (internal combustion engines) to EVs (electric vehicles). Within five years, I suspect almost all new cars will be EVs. :cool:

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Article on forensic “dowsing”

I don’t know if this has been brought up elsewhere, but I was just pushed this article on forensic “dowsing”:

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2...-bodies-police

The more thing change…

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[Split Thread] Finnish military terminology

split from http://www.internationalskeptics.com...d.php?t=357417

Posted By:jimbob

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Swoop (Post 13764628) Encirclement has been a standard tactic of warfare since almost forever. Ask General Paulus what happened to his 6th Army. Or ask Field Marshall Kluge what happened to his Army Group B in the Falaise Pocket. They are the two famous ones, but there are other, smaller examples.

They were in the 1940's. As was Siege of Leningrad (in which Putin's mother nearly died). The Winter War was 1939. Of course nobody invented military strategy - which in mediaeval times consisted of laying siege to castles and forts - however it is a Finnish word that has entered the language to describe it.

Quote:

Motitus is Finnish military slang describing the tactic of totally encircling an enemy unit, in effect, an entrapment.

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The Seed Of Origin

Q: Is it possible that the infinitesimal super hot object preceding the Big Bang, didn't in fact contain the vastness of the matter within our universe but rather, was the event in which the energy from the blast resulted in the formation of Galaxies and everything else which we call "The Universe" from the field of inert material which already existed as 'space'?
Matter + Energy + Space = Time.

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Madeleine Albright, first female US secretary of state, dies

Madeleine Albright, first female US secretary of state, dies

Quote:

Madeleine Albright, the first female US secretary of state and who helped steer Western foreign policy in the aftermath of the Cold War, has died. She was 84 years old. The cause was cancer, Albright’s family said in a statement Wednesday. Albright was a central figure in President Bill Clinton’s administration, first serving as US ambassador to the United Nations before becoming the nation’s top diplomat in his second term. She championed the expansion of NATO, pushed for the alliance to intervene in the Balkans to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing, sought to reduce the spread of nuclear weapons, and championed human rights and democracy across the globe. President Joe Biden paid tribute to Albright in a lengthy statement Wednesday, calling her a “force” and saying working with her during the 1990s while he was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was among the highlights of his Senate career. “When I think of Madeleine, I will always remember her fervent faith that ‘America is the indispensable nation,’” said Biden, who ordered flags at the White House and all federal buildings to be flown at half-staff in Albright’s honor. “Few leaders have been so perfectly suited for the times in which they served,” Clinton said in a statement. “As a child in war-torn Europe, Madeleine and her family were twice forced to flee their home. When the end of the Cold War ushered in a new era of global interdependence, she became America’s voice at the UN, then took the helm at the State Department, where she was a passionate force for freedom, democracy, and human rights.”

She was very passionate about democracy, having spent her childhood in a place where there was none. She had to flee from both Nazis and Communists. People with such backgrounds often have a greater love and fervor for democracy than those who were born here in the U.S. She left behind a great legacy. Rest in peace.

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Being Asian While having a Soft Skull

A Black man punched an Asian woman over 120 times, head stomped her 7 times and spit on her multiple times while calling her an Asian bitch. The attack happened in the lobby of her apartment building as she was trying to enter.

In this oppressed man's defense, there were words exchanged between the two outside of the building before they entered the camera frame. She possibly could have said something he found offensive so she probably deserved it.

The victim suffered from bleeding of the brain, facial fractures and multiple lacerations on her head and face.

You may want to scroll down past the video in the link if you don't do well with seeing a woman get sucker punched in the head from behind by a Black man who is probably double her weight.

https://nypost.com/2022/03/14/yonker...n-asian-woman/

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Locked-in patient communicates with family via implant

… A completely locked-in patient is able to type out words and short sentences to his family, including what he would like to eat, after being implanted with a device that enables him to control a keyboard with his mind.

True mind reading! Really interesting to see how much progress is being made, this guy would have been condemned to a solitary life with no way to communicate, now he can express himself, albeit slowly.

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Why did Ukraine discriminate against Russians?

Its come to my attention that in the years after the Euromaiden Revolution, Ukraine passed various laws discriminating against their large Russian minority.

They passed laws banning the use of Russian language in govt. affairs. They required all Russian publications also have pages translating all the Russian into Ukrainian. Russian businesses had to also use Russia. Several much lesser used language in Ukraine such as Yiddish were exempt from these regulations.

Why would Ukraine do this, and how did they expect Russia and the Russians in Ukraine to react? Did they think they would just sit back and allow themselves to be oppressed? I think this was a MAJOR mistake by Ukraine, and it has helped lead to the current disaster.

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I told you the Babylon Bee with ******

I remember I once made an off-hand remark that the Babylon Bee is a rubbish. Basically just Boomer memes where the joke is some sarcastic questioning of why people don't take right-wing talking points seriously. Things like, "President-Elect Joe Biden with totally no question of voter fraud, blah blah blah"

Or "Conspiracy theorists watch in shock as they turn out to be ahead of the news cycle on ivermectin"

or some other crap.

Well, now they have taken to explaining their own weak-ass attempts at jokes.

Attached Images

Babylon Bee.jpg (60.4 KB)

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China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735

Boeing 737 carrying 123 passengers and 9 crew crashed in the countryside near Wuzhou in southern China.

There is some amateur footage from people nearby showing the aircraft nosediving towards the ground as well as video of the immediate aftermath.

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Weapons, poll

I propose that all countries get rid of weapons including those that we buy in stores, agree or disagree? What interest to invade a country which is not armed, one can have their resources by the trade. If the Ukrainians were not posing a threat to Russia with arms, they would not have been invaded. Let's start here in Canada by getting rid of all our guns. We will end up destroying ourselves if this continues, we are in 2022 we can get everything by trade, no need to want to steal from others as was the case in the past. Weapons no longer have a purpose and never have had a purpose.

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SC man shot dead after being rescued from drowning.

Great strides are being made in the field of being a belligerent jerkoff. SC man is blazing new trails here.

Quote:

Rescuer acted in self-defense when he shot South Carolina man who fell into lake, prosecutors say After he was rescued by a pair of pontoon boaters, Nathan Drew Morgan began assaulting his rescuers, officials said in a statement. Then, one of his rescuers shot him.

A man and woman were thrown from a jetski and were not wearing life jackets. A nearby pontoon boat came to their rescue, pulling the couple from the water. The rescued man responded by becoming belligerent and making demands of their rescuers. The man was pushed off the boat by their fellow jetski rider, pulled from the water again, and shot dead by the rescuers after he tried to attack them.

Quote:

Once he was on the pontoon boat, Morgan became agitated "and began assaulting the couple on the pontoon," the release says. Officials said it is believed Morgan wanted to return to the watercraft, which continued driving through the water with no one aboard. To de-escalate the situation, the rescued woman pushed Morgan into the water, authorities said. After he brought Morgan back onto the pontoon a second time, the man on the boat shot him, fearing for the safety of those onboard, they said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...cuto-rcna20779

Sometimes the only response to greatness is to stand in awe.

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Type One diabetics some good news

Quote:

INSIGHT The diabetes cure: A century after Banting and Best’s ‘message of hope,’ science is actually close Several “very, very promising” biomedical trials suggest that a full cure for diabetes is in sight, 100 years after Frederick Banting and Charles Best announced the discovery of insulin.

Quote:

Sernova says the first two patients in the study, amazingly, no longer need insulin.

My son is a Type One and this is very good news - hoping to get him into a trial if his brain cancer does not get in the way . Poor kid.... :waah:

https://www.thestar.com/news/insight...lly-close.html

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Does SCOTUS deserve its exalted status?

I think we all kind of grew up being instilled with the belief that the law is the LAW. And every dispute will be adjudicated fairly and without prejudice at the highest level.

SCOTUS has been fairly immune from media scrutiny and questioning (for the most part); justices rarely do interviews...but sometimes they do. Obviously they're careful with their words.

Do we accept this branch of government as non-partisan and untouchable? Because it is certainly partisan, no matter how you cut it. One can argue any position one wants, just like Congress or Executive. Not seeing a huge difference. Oh but hey, I'm a judge! I can write it better than them and make it sound authoritative, dissents included (insert judicial activism arguments here) :).

I'm starting to wonder why they're so precious, and how weakly mainstream journalism really goes after them directly. Could be that most people don't care that much about it because they believe whatever they decide doesn't affect them. Not sure.

Might sound like I'm venting, but it's a serious question.

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Ex-fundie diaries - homeschool indoctrination

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An interesting video.

The title says it

Christian Nationalist Propaganda | Inside my Homeschool "Science" Binder

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Hypersonic missiles. E.g. Russian "Kinzhal" - how does that work?

Those interested need no links:

Russia has claimed to have attacked Western Ukrainian depots (ammo, fuel) with hypersonic cruise missiles, launched from planes inside Russia, so like 2000 km away.

How does this work?

From what I gather, the talk is of the Kh-47M2 Kinzhal:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wikipedia ...a Russian nuclear-capable hypersonic aero-ballistic air-to-surface missile.[10][11] It has a claimed range of more than 2,000 km (1,200 mi), Mach 10 speed, and an ability to perform evasive maneuvers at every stage of its flight. It can carry both conventional and nuclear warheads[12] and can be launched from Tu-22M3 bombers or MiG-31K interceptors. It has been deployed at airbases in Russia's Southern Military District and Western Military District.[13][14] The Kinzhal entered service in December 2017 and is one of the six new Russian strategic weapons unveiled by Russian President Vladimir Putin on 1 March 2018.[15][16] The missile was reportedly first used in 2016 during Russia’s military campaign in Syria.[citation needed]

Wikipedia has a list of hypersonic cruise missiles, with the above being the only Russian design currently in service that meets the news reports' characteristics.

I learn from the article that it can carry a payload of 500 kg and is propelled thusly:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wikipedia ...Within seconds from launch, the missile accelerates to hypersonic speed and performs maneuvers at all stages of the flight to evade enemy missile defenses.[23] The high speed of the Kinzhal likely gives it far better target-penetration characteristics than lighter subsonic cruise-missiles, such as Tomahawk. Being three times as heavy and almost twelve times as fast as Tomahawk, the Kinzhal has more than 3×122 = 432 times the on-cruise kinetic energy of a Tomahawk missile (~17.3 gigajoules, or equal to 4,100 kg TNT explosive energy).[citation needed]

Assuming that the missile is self-propelled using a solid rocket fuel, and knowing that there are no solid rocket fuels that have a much higher specific energy than TNT, this means the Kinzhal needs to have close to 4 tons of fuel aboard just to reach its top speed (if chemical energy is converted to kinetic energy 100%), and far more to maintain it over a distance of 2000 km. Add 500 kg payload, 500 kg shell and electronics, double the fuel for range, and we quickly reach a launch mass of 9 or 10 tons.

A Tomahawk has a mass of 1,300 to 1,600 kg, so according to Wikipedia, a Kinzhal would weigh 3,900 to 4,800 kg. That's not consistent with the above...

Let's compute:

The Kinzhal supposedly reaches a speed of at least Mach-10 = 12,300 km/h = 3,420 m/s.
1 kg of mass at 3,420 m/s has a kinetic energy of
KE = 1/2 m v² = 0.5 * 1 kg * (3,420 m/s)² = 5.85 MJ

This is already near the upper range of the specific energies solid rocket fuels, AFAIK.
So I just learned that a single stage solid state fuel rocket could never attain Mach-10 on its own.
And sure enough, the Kinzhal is a two-stage design.

But how does that work? Is it realistic that a fighter-based Air-to-surface missile could exceed Mach-10 and fly 2000 km?

---

In addition, the Russian claims imply some degree of accuracy in hitting targets. How credible is that, given that other modern weapon designs out of Russia appear to fall short of expectations, and this hypersonic stuff is new?

Is Russia bluffing?

Surely, one purpose of hitting targets in Western Ukraine is to demonstrate to NATO that Russia could easily take out targets deep inside Europe with such weapons with conventional warheads or tactical nukes.
Is there a defense? What's the response?

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A Bible! A Bible!

[







































Here is what the Lord has to say about the relationship of the Bible to the Book of Mormon:

[

Quote:

Book of Mormon: CHAPTER 29 Many Gentiles will reject the Book of Mormon—They will say, We need no more Bible—The Lord speaks to many nations—He will judge the world out of the books which will be written. About 559–545 B.C. 1 But behold, there shall be many—at that day when I shall proceed to do a marvelous work among them, that I may remember my covenants which I have made unto the children of men, that I may set my hand again the second time to recover my people, which are of the house of Israel; 2 And also, that I may remember the promises which I have made unto thee, Nephi, and also unto thy father, that I would remember your seed; and that the words of your seed should proceed forth out of my mouth unto your seed; and my words shall hiss forth unto the ends of the earth, for a standard unto my people, which are of the house of Israel; 3 And because my words shall hiss forth—many of the Gentiles shall say: A Bible! A Bible! We have got a Bible, and there cannot be any more Bible. 4 But thus saith the Lord God: O fools, they shall have a Bible; and it shall proceed forth from the Jews, mine ancient covenant people. And what thank they the Jews for the Bible which they receive from them? Yea, what do the Gentiles mean? Do they remember the travails, and the labors, and the pains of the Jews, and their diligence unto me, in bringing forth salvation unto the Gentiles? 5 O ye Gentiles, have ye remembered the Jews, mine ancient covenant people? Nay; but ye have cursed them, and have hated them, and have not sought to recover them. But behold, I will return all these things upon your own heads; for I the Lord have not forgotten my people. 6 Thou fool, that shall say: A Bible, we have got a Bible, and we need no more Bible. Have ye obtained a Bible save it were by the Jews? 7 Know ye not that there are more nations than one? Know ye not that I, the Lord your God, have created all men, and that I remember those who are upon the isles of the sea; and that I rule in the heavens above and in the earth beneath; and I bring forth my word unto the children of men, yea, even upon all the nations of the earth? 8 Wherefore murmur ye, because that ye shall receive more of my word? Know ye not that the testimony of two nations is a witness unto you that I am God, that I remember one nation like unto another? Wherefore, I speak the same words unto one nation like unto another. And when the two enations shall run together the testimony of the two nations shall run together also. 9 And I do this that I may prove unto many that I am the same yesterday, today, and forever; and that I speak forth my words according to mine own pleasure. And because that I have spoken one word ye need not suppose that I cannot speak another; for my work is not yet finished; neither shall it be until the end of man, neither from that time henceforth and forever. 10 Wherefore, because that ye have a Bible ye need not suppose that it contains all my words; neither need ye suppose that I have not caused more to be written. 11 For I command all men, both in the east and in the west, and in the north, and in the south, and in the islands of the sea, that they shall write the words which I speak unto them; for out of the books which shall be written I will judge the world, every man according to their works, according to that which is written. 12 For behold, I shall speak unto the Jews and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto the Nephites and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto the other tribes of the house of Israel, which I have led away, and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto all nations of the earth and they shall write it. 13 And it shall come to pass that the Jews shall have the words of the Nephites, and the Nephites shall have the words of the Jews; and the Nephites and the Jews shall have the words of the lost tribes of Israel; and the lost tribes of Israel shall have the words of the Nephites and the Jews. 14 And it shall come to pass that my people, which are of the house of Israel, shall be gathered home unto the lands of their possessions; and my word also shall be gathered in cone. And I will show unto them that fight against my word and against my people, who are of the house of Israel, that I am God, and that I covenanted with Abraham that I would remember his seed forever.

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Amateur physicist uses Aether, solves Theory of Everything, awaits peer review.

I probably could have gone pro, maybe if I hadn't fallen in with the cool crowd. I think of those days and I wouldn't mind to give high school Nakani a slap. Bohring indeed.

I never did needed that class, until I came to the JREF (You were right Mr. Martel!). In R&P, I thought I might join in on a conversation explaining the universe. I figured, I had things hashed out but the good members were kind enough let me know, I was missing a few details and I'm not Galileo.

I wouldn't mind to try again.

First things first, the obligatory anti mainstream rant.

Chasing the notion that time is a piece in the fabric of the universe is ridiculous. Mr. Einstein fell in love with time on a train, and just didn't let it go. You know how some physicists are with their theories. This simultaneously made thought experiments hip and put physics on a timeline to misunderstanding.

Due to an anomaly and a vivid imagination, time is a thing. Without us though, the cosmos doesn't care. Time can be a human tool, not a force of nature.

I know everyone is chomping at the bit for me to say the 'A' word, lets get to it. Keep in mind, this ain't yer Grandpa's stuff, this is as pure and smooth as can be. Try a whiff, it will solve all your problems.

When it comes to the universe, it is the lack of time, aka, the instant, which is the player here. A series of cascading instances, if you want to break it down, or just one if you can see that far.

Logic would dictate that solid matter does not exist, so it starts with nothing. This nothing though, is not true nothing. There is a space, still nothing but not quite.

This space is as small as can be, right next to all the other spaces. One space is the necessity for two, three and the rest. This is happening in an instant, until all the spaces are there.

If we treat the spaces like points, the first shape is triangle and the first form is tetrahedron. Space is quantified, arranged in tetrahedral matrix.

Tetrahedron don't quite fit together tiling space. This causes a shifting of the pieces, movement of space. The instant holds the size of the spaces but not the position. These movements multiply until the little storms commonly called protons and neutrons are formed.

Yadda yadda yadda, here we are.

Creation story or not, I'm proposing that the Aether is quantified space. It is pieces of the smallest space, which make all this possible.

The spaces, when pulled upon, can't separate, they are already the smallest space. Pulled in opposite directions, neighboring spaces slide in to absorb the tension.

Circular motion can disrupt space, circles and triangles don't mix well. At the center of the circle, the pieces are turned into a circular space. This abnormal space pulls the surrounding spaces in, to fill the void.

This would snap together in an instant if some how this happened in static space or the motion stopped. The circular motion holds the circle and causes a bit of a traffic jam on the way to the center. The spaces pull out from the pack, in towards the center. Spaces that become contained are cut off from the originals and disappear into a new instant.

Spaces are the same no matter what the size, the smaller pieces inside the larger become the larger(but don't add to the size). The center grows with the jams, eating at the walls, until the motion shifts to a flow spiraling towards the center. This is gravity.

As the flow filters through matter, spaces don't push 'down' on the atoms.

Each atom is a spherical system of spaces. The gravitational flow passes through matter, around the atoms. Downstream behind each atom there is what could be called an eddy but is more of an area of tension. Due to the strong resistance to separation between the pieces, matter moves in the direction of the flow, pulled along by the tension created behind the atoms.

Flowing spaces are moving tension. A direction gives the tension a structure that static spaces don't have. Matter moving through space which is not gravitating, behaves differently.

When space is moving, it pulls on the matter, when it's just matter that moves, it pulls on the spaces. Space is pushed aside by the atom and comes back when it passes. Tension on the opposite side of travel is still there but the static spaces offer little resistance.

Resistance from static spaces does increase with speed. As speed increases, the disturbance of spaces grows. Matter pulls against the resistance to separate until the sort is completed.

When it comes to Planets vs. the Aether, the pieces of outer space don't encounter the planet itself. Gravitating space is already flowing through the matter and extends out around the planet. The pieces of space in a planets path, only interact with the gravitational flow and magnetic field, not the matter it is made of.

I feel like there might be a few questions already. If not, I'll try Magnets next.

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Gullible Skeptics

A friend of mine wrote this here. I was wondering what people on the forum think about it.

Quote:

There are two equal and opposite errors that take up way too much of people's time: gullibility and skepticism. I have friends who have a tendency to be dismissive of all things "spiritual", and not without reason, as exemplified by this image: On the other hand, I have friends who say they can see "auras", and Mrs Wonders is an expert in various more-or-less deadly martial arts whose ontological language is--if taken literally--is not consistent with a great deal of what we know about physical reality. And I myself have witnessed quite remarkable things. For example, as part of an improv theatre workshop a group of ten or twelve people stood in a circle with gaps between us that were wide enough for someone to walk through, while one person went out of the room. We then decided that between two people there was a "doorway" into the circle, and elsewhere there were walls. We all tried to stand as neutrally as possible while remembering our respective roles. The person who had left was brought back into the room by the workshop leader and told to find the door. The first guy got it right on the first try, the second person on the second. Then we ran out of time, but the leader assured us that this was typical performance, which is credible, because they'd hardly run the exercise if it took the average person five or six tries to find the "door", which is what you'd expect on average. The game was set up to allow only three tries, which would predict on average only a quarter of the participants would find the way in. There are various ways of describing this. One is to say something is complete gibberish, like, "We are spiritually atuned to the invisible fields of energy that emanate from our anahata." Another is to say: "That didn't really happen." The first is gullibility, which is taking folk ontologies literally. An ontology is a belief about what exists. A folk ontology is what people come up with on the fly as a convenient, lazy, and usually incorrect explanation for an observed phenomenon. The second is skepticism, which I define as denial of phenomenon, but which often happens for a surprisingly gullible reason. The impulse to each is understandable. We're used to a world were "What you see is what is there." So when someone behaves as if they can "see" a doorway that exists only in the minds of a group of people, we jump to the false assumption that there is something simple going on, like an emanation of "energy"--a folk ontology--which is nonsense. And because the most popular explanation is nonsense--and a hugely expensive and dangerous form of nonsense at that--there are people who are understandably apt to deny the phenomenon as a way of sweeping it all away. This is especially appealing because--although it will come as shock to some--people have been known to lie and fake this sort of unusual ability. That said, we know the literal explanations, the folk ontologies, are nonsense because we are stupidly good at detecting energy of all kinds, but we can't detect this supposed "energy field" by any means whatsoever, and seriously: we're really good at detecting energy fields. A fair bit of my pure physics career was spent detecting neutrinos, which are fantastically difficult to convert into something we can sense with mundane instruments. There are roughly a million neutrinos passing through an area the size of your thumbnail every second, but only one or two neutrinos will interact with your body in your entire lifetime. Even so, the existence of neutrinos was inferred in the 1930s and they were directly detected in the 1950s. Most neutrino detectors are huge: mega-grams of water or similar, and buried deep underground. A few--including one I designed as part of the San Onofre neutrino oscillation experiment--are just a hundred kilograms or so. My work on San Onofre was sometimes made difficult by electrical interference that was eventually traced to an adjacent lab, where the LIGO collaboration was using powerful lasers to perfect their gravity wave detector, which has now been operation for over a decade and has detected something even more subtle than neutrinos: elastic deformations of the space-time continuum that are so tiny they displace the detector elements by less than the diameter of a proton, which is about a millionth of a nanometer. So when we go looking for the supposed "energy field" that is used to describe many subtle perceptual phenomena, and we don't find it at anything like the magnitude that would be required to alter the activation in synaptic connections either in sensory nerves or in the brain itself, we can say with some confidence that it does not exist. "Proving" negatives is one of the easiest things to do, and a great deal of science is based on it. The logic is always the same: "If X exists, it will necessarily produce Y as a consequence. We do not see Y, therefore X does not exist." There's always wiggle room--and some people have made entire careers out of wiggling--but people without a pecuniary interest in selling ******** are rarely willing to buy it. Ergo, any claim whatsoever by anyone that there is any kind of "energy field" responsible for anything unusual around the human body or senses is nonsense because it requires the field to be strong enough to affect our synapses, which require easily detectable amounts of energy to trigger, and which triggering happens via perfectly ordinary electro-magnetic interactions. Any such energy thingy cannot at the same time be so weak as to avoid capture by a bevy of scientists armed with detectors that can catch phenomena that deposit a fraction of an electron-volt in the apparatus. But: this does not mean the phenomena don't occur, which is the skeptic's error. Human beings are incredibly complex systems, and our senses are subtle and multi-dimensional. We are highly evolved to detect the tiniest deviations of posture and muscle tone and more... if we open our minds to them. And some people are no-doubt more sensitive than average, or just sensitive to different things. The problem with skeptics, in fact, is that they are too gullible. They take the folk ontologies of the gullible as literally as the gullible do themselves. This is a general problem: my friend Ray has an education in religious studies and points out that critics of religion often take scriptures as literally as the most fundamental of fundamentalists, ignoring all the more challenging metaphorical interpretations. In a non-religious context, consider James Randi's examination of "dowsing" for water, which involved asking dowsers to wander around the upper story of a warehouse where there was a vat of water in the lower story, and see if they could detect it. The problem with this is it assumes that dower's accounts and understanding of what they are doing is accurate, and we have no reason at all to believe that. That is: we don't have any reason whatsoever to believe that they have any especial sensitivity to water. None. What we know is they claim to be able to tell people where to drill wells. Why would that have anything to do with a sensitivity to water? Hydraulic engineers tell people where to drill wells all the time, and no one things, "Ah, they must have a special sensitivity to water." In my work as a scientific consultant I often meet with prospective clients who think their problem is that they need a particular bit of technology: a device, an algorithm, a thing. They think this because they've conceptualized their problem in a particular way. The consultant's job in this case is to talk them through the background and figure out what problem they actually have. In maybe half the cases it's not related at all to what they initially presented with. Recognizing you have a problem doesn't mean you know what the best direction is to go for a solution: figuring that out is part of the consultant's job, and this is generally true. We go to doctors not just for treatment, but for diagnosis. Likewise, being able to do something does not imply you know how you're doing it. A tennis player is not the best person to talk to about materials science, even though materials science is integral to what tennis players do, from the court surface to the ball, the racket, the shoes, the whole deal. Most lay people have a variety of folk beliefs about how they do what they do that don't stand up to systematic scrutiny. I probably do myself, although practically by definition I've got no idea what they are. This doesn't mean they can't do the things they have erroneous explanations for, though. So assuming that dowsers have an ability to detect water is unjustified, no matter what they themselves think or say. Put them out in a real landscape, full of subtle cues as to what's going on underneath, and see if they beat a professional hydrologist. That, and that alone, will test the phenomenon. Anything else tests the explanation for the phenomenon, which we know from the outset is probably nonsense, because almost all folk ontologies are. Taking folk ontologies literally is a mistake, and it's a mistake that is too often shared by both the gullible and the skeptics. Instead: be a consultant. Be an explorer.

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The Agile beat up thread

Agile just seems like another IT fad to me.

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Whose Speech Is It Anyway? 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis

Quote:

The Supreme Court Agrees To Hear Yet Another Case Pitting Anti-Discrimination Law Against Free Speech In The Context Of A Same-Sex Wedding CADA makes illegal both statements that signal exclusion and actions that refuse, on the basis of sexual orientation and other protected characteristics, “the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of a place of public accommodation.” Prohibiting Smith from publishing the statement of her beliefs and requiring her to create unique, custom websites celebrating same-sex weddings, she contends, would violate her First Amendment guarantees of free exercise of religion and freedom of speech. Consequently, Smith sought a declaratory judgment to prevent Colorado from enforcing the law against her prospective wedding-site expansion. The district court granted summary judgment in favor of the state, and a divided three-judge panel of the Tenth Circuit affirmed. The majority recognized that Smith’s “creation of wedding websites is pure speech” that triggers strict scrutiny, the most difficult form of judicial review for the government to meet and thus the most likely to strike down a law as unconstitutional. Nonetheless, the ruling adopted a novel theory: CADA ensures equal access not to custom-made websites in general but specifically to Smith’s custom websites. In effect, the appellate court treated artistic works as entirely nonfungible and artists as monopolists, giving Colorado the green light to compel Smith’s expression. Chief Judge Tymkovich dissented, characterizing the majority’s holding as “staggering” in its breadth, potentially forcing all artists “to promote messages approved by the government in the name of ‘ensuring access to the commercial marketplace.’”

I haven't seen a ruling on this case, but the NFT part really attracted
my attention.

Personally, I think they'll cut this baby in half. And send it back down
to the lower court for a rethink.

Smith can publish her beliefs but she cannot bar others from publishing theirs.
Or, smith cannot publish her beliefs but state cannot force her to make web
sites for clients.

Anyway, has anyone seen anything recently on this case?

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Pentagon event 911/CON

Richard Gage Pentagon virtual meetup is in session.
10:30 AM PDT to 10 PM PDT
https://event.eventee.co/event/11757...n-detail/66874

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Randomly Attacked by Plainclothes Police While Black

Didn't see this one here, but if it is already being discussed in other threads, please merge or delete, Mr Mods.

A black guy went into his car that was parallel parked around midnight, while grabbing a thing of tea and talking on his phone.

A sedan pulls up and four masked dudes jump out, smashing the drivers side window and shooting Henderson in the neck, paralyzing him.

Sounds like a mob hit from a movie scene, yeah?

Nope. It was four undercover Trenton police in an unmarked car. No explanation yet why they attacked and nearly killed this man out of the blue. Not only did they paralyze my man when opening fire against the unarmed and sitting Henderson, but they initially charged him with...you guessed it...resisting arrest and assault on police, among other ridiculous charges. Bodycam footage exists, and is expected to be released soon.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...d-la-rcna20640

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Guess what? Psychics are no good!

Well, who would have thunk it, but it turns out that psychics are a bit rubbish and no better than chance - https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2022/03/t...random-chance/

Colour me surprised.

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The Smearing of Ketanji Brown Jackson Begins

This is just comedy gold:

Quote:

The GOP concedes that in her role as a Washington, D.C., public defender, Jackson did not choose her clients, but nonetheless accuses her of being too enthusiastic in their defense. “Jackson’s advocacy for these terrorists was ’zealous,’ going beyond just giving them a competent defense,” the Republican National Committee says on its website in a takedown of Jackson.

Brilliant!

No problems with serial sex abusers, but defending people well is a sin too far.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/supre...b0f1e82c47775b

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[Split Thread] Is Ukraine to blame for Putin's invasion

Arnold Schwarzenegger's message (its text may be found here: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...essage/627100/) was fairly good.

But it does contain some approximations and inaccuracies. Perhaps he has been told lies himself. If he was still in Germany, he could not read the Russian information website RT.com (without a VPN) because of European censorship. Having just one source of information is not ideal.

If he gets his information from forums, then he might get a distorted view because of censorship done by "moderators" who have a political agenda.

He said:

Quote:

I know that your government has told you this is a war to de-Nazify Ukraine. This is not true. De-Nazify Ukraine? It is a country with a Jewish president—a Jewish president, I might add, whose father’s three brothers were all murdered by the Nazis. Ukraine did not start this war. Neither did nationalists or Nazis. Those in power in the Kremlin started this civil war; this is not the Russian people’s war. ... To President Putin, I say: You started this war. You’re leading this war. You can stop this war now.

So he said that "Ukraine did not start this war". But is this true? (or only half-true)

A reminder of a few facts:

Quote:

Ukraine cut off the fresh water supply to Crimea by damming a canal that had supplied 85% of the peninsula's needs before Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014.

(https://www.reuters.com/world/europe...ia-2022-02-26/)
(possible crime against humanity by Ukraine)


About sanctions imposed on Russia before 2022:

Quote:

... sanctions have hit the Russian economy badly. Since 2014, it has grown by an average of 0.3 percent per year, while the global average was 2.3 percent per year. They have slashed foreign credits and foreign direct investment, and may have reduced Russia’s economic growth by 2.5–3 percent a year; that is, about $50 billion per year. The Russian economy is not likely to grow significantly again until the Kremlin has persuaded the West to ease the sanctions. ... As part of the two last defense bills, the US Congress adopted severe sanctions on suppliers to Nord Stream 2, the Russian gas pipeline from Russia to Germany through the Baltic Sea, which are likely to stop the completion of that pipeline. The United States and the EU responded to the Russian annexation of Crimea with sanctions against Russian officials, individuals, and enterprises held responsible for the annexation, as well as anybody pursuing business dealings with Crimea. They were joined by several allies, such as Australia, Canada, and Norway. Ideally, these sanctions would have compelled Russia to withdraw from Crimea, but nobody believed that would happen in the near term. Their impact was limited to Crimea, and did not harm the Russian economy. Instead, the more realistic goal of the Western sanctions on Russia’s annexation of Crimea, understood within the Barack Obama administration, was to persistently isolate Crimea economically and politically, and that goal has been accomplished. Crimea’s foreign trade plummeted by 90 percent. Housing prices slumped, while prices of goods and services rose because of supply problems. Annual tourism shrunk, and now comes almost entirely from Russia. The biggest Russian state banks, Sberbank and VTB, have stayed away to avoid the US and EU sanctions. Instead, the already sanctioned Bank Rossiya, owned by friends of Putin from St. Petersburg, and a few minor Russian state banks, notably the Russian National Commercial Bank, operate there.42 The prominent Russian economist Sergey Aleksashenko assesses that Russian financial support to Crimea has so far cost about $5 billion per year.

(https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-d...ons-on-russia/, date: May 3, 2021, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine)

So Ukraine (with its Western allies) waged a humanitarian and economic war on Russia in 2014, after its annexation of Crimea, even though it is well known that Crimeans wanted to join Russia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_C...ferendum_polls).

In addition, after the Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics (of mostly Russian-speaking Donbass) declared independence in 2014, instead of dialogue and granting them self-governance (perhaps after a honest referendum), Kiev chose to start a military offensive against them ...

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The impact of economic sanctions on Russia and Belarus

My international professional body (which includes USA) has just announced:

Quote:

stands in compliance with the imposed economic sanctions. To that end, we are suspending indefinitely the sale and delivery of services to Russia and Belarus,

...including marketing and membership services (incl student exams).

How effective are economic or business sanctions?

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