Much smaller than a human eye:

Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain (Nov 29, 2021) doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-26443-0

, OK, so "child rapist" was just your slant on it, not related to Rittenhouse's goings-and-doings. (Perhaps even to justify the kill (like a "good riddance" type thing)?)

Old school shootouts are in order. — Hanover

Hey, old-old-school fisticuffs are safer for others. :strong: ;)

I have a shelf of battle-ready swords sitting right over there. :point:
Were I to wield one out on the town, I might just get picked up by the cops.
Maybe not in Wisconsin?

The child rapist who first attacked Rittenhouse assumed, wrongly, that Rittenhouse wouldn’t defend himself. — NOS4A2

Did Rittenhouse know him?

Do we want kids seeking out such situations, armed with semi-automatics? :down:
We have an example here.
What's gone awry, and what to do about it?

, try yelling " :fire: " there. :D

Biotech is moving:

Team builds first living robots—that can reproduce
^{AI-designed Xenobots reveal entirely new form of biological self-replication—promising for regenerative medicine
Nov 29, 2021}

doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2112672118

'The Metaflower Super Mega Yacht' NFT Sells for a Record $650,000 USD (Nov 24, 2021)

12-Year-Old Earns $400,000 Selling NFTs to Idiots (Aug 26, 2021)

NFT: Non-fungible token; NFTs, explained

Maybe a philosophically oriented question could be how such things attain value.

Is this serious or meant to provoke? — Cartuna

Call it satire. Or something.

, does this direct link work? Or this? It display normally here.

In such scenarios, I might want something heavier.
Especially for defending my home, but also a deterrent in general.
Don't think 20mm will do. Grenades, too, definitely.
Yes yes, that's escalation, but I have a god-given right to defend myself. Against all of them.
Do you know how many heavily armed gangs are out there? And dangerous lunatics?
And, for proven deterrent, I'd want setups with mutually assured destruction.
That's safety. Then there will be peace. One way or other.

, I think placebos typically are part of trials.
Don't think they capture "their psychological state and philosophical outlook" though.
Both Robert David Steele (denier, QAnon'er) and Irfan Halim (active medical doctor), for example, died due to the virus.

, just noticed you tagged me, but never got a notice. Maybe a forum bug. Well, hopefully Ο just goes away quickly, maybe giving someone a mild flu. :) Getting SARS-CoV-2 stomped down would be great.

The Telegraph may not be perfect, but I doubt that Nature is much better. — Apollodorus

You should put that in your profile.

On the contrary! It seems plausible that the same conditions as around our sun prevail around the majority of stars. Life is bound to evolve around most stars. Maybe people there have six or seven fingers, or right handed bodies. — Cartuna

Right, energy input is needed for something to do things, riding sunlight seems the most commonly available. Other than that, I was thinking of a range of life that could include something substantially different (perhaps not carbon-based). Maybe there are more kinds of one-off events than those considered by Longrich, hard to tell.

My evolution is different from your evolution, then. — god must be atheist

It's not so much about me, but personally I expect some sort of life elsewhere, even if now extinct. (Religions don't have a say in the matter.) :smile:

3. Did R go well out of his way to unjustifiably put himself in harm's way?

Yes. — 180 Proof

This is what I would call an unclear statement without any attempt to mark out what is meant by ‘unjustifiably put himself in harm’s way’. Where is the line between justified and unjustified? To say he went ‘well out of his way’ is unclear. — I like sushi

Yeah, it was clear enough. Messed up kid in messed up society. (Didn't some cops also tell him to go home?)
Then again, doing hard time doesn't seem quite right either. Maybe that's one reason self-defense won, don't know.
A hero (of all things) he ain't. Someone needs to grow up.

Strictly speaking, the proper expression for existential quantification in mathematics is:

p = ∃x∈S φx

So, x is bound to set S.

(G) Gollum is more famous than Gödel. — Free Logic » 5.4 Logics of Fiction

Neat example. The statement is perfectly parsable and easy enough to understand, but not quite logical. I guess Anselmian ontology relies on such logic, just optimize/maximize x by a well-chosen φ, and even fictions come to life, "therefore Gollum exists".

Quick read:

Evolution tells us we might be the only intelligent life in the universe (Oct 18, 2019)

More things:

There is a chance that life emerged more than once in some sense, or perhaps some important pretexts to life as we know it, but was drowned out by existing life. Speculation of course, and would be difficult to find evidence of.

Convergence suggests higher probability, one-time events lower. That being said, we still just have the one sample, our own history, Earth. Photosynthesis, for example, is required for life on Earth, but could something else come about, something we'd still consider life? Being open-ended makes for a hard assessment.

Life as we know it emerging elsewhere, more or less the same as here, also seems implausible. It's all we have to go by, though.

A quick read

The universe may have answered The Last Question (Nov 13, 2021) by Tim Andersen

, thanks.

Yet another thing to read (Vacuum energy and cosmological evolution).

FYI, this stuff came up some time ago while discussing "symmetries" like this:



Things shrinking versus space expanding.
I haven't done the mathematics or other analysis.

EDIT ... :-/ the to-read list just keeps on growing ...

^{• Eternal inflation and its implications (2007)
• Our Universe May Exist in a Multiverse, Cosmic Inflation Discovery Suggests (2014)
• Before the Big Bang 5: The No Boundary Proposal (2017, 50m:47s)
• A smooth exit from eternal inflation? (2018)}

, , thanks lots.

Found something over here:

Dark energy might be neither particle nor field (Ethan Siegel; Big Think; Sep 22, 2021)



I guess relativistic spacetime geometry and quantum field theory has no good unification (at the moment at least), but that'd be needed to say much when experimental confirmation/falsification is unavailable.

Let it run. — Book273

Let SARS-CoV-2 replicate propagate mutate unchecked with no containment efforts, leaving whatever in its wake?

[...] I got the injection. It won't do shit anyway, but I get to keep working. Only now I have less respect for my employer, and I would love to park my truck on the CEO's face. — Book273

:D So you got the jab and are still around to whine about it huh huh...

Did you grow an extra arm yet? (pix or dint happen)

manifestly untrue — NOS4A2

Manifestly sweeping statement ignores context.

Say, once the virus has already spread wide, containment has already taken a turn for the worse.
Unfortunately, spread is often learned post-factum.

Say, the wider spread, the more likelihood of mutations.
Hopefully less transmissible/dangerous mutations, but it's kind of hard to say in advance (post-factum again).

Containment can be involved, and it's a team effort.
Presumably we agree on limiting the virus replicating, propagating, mutating?

:chin:

, or any of the physics folks, a quick question ...

The expansion of the universe roughly means that mass or matter density decreases over time, matter dilutes, spreads, thins out spatially, apart from what gravity holds together. With entropy, the density tends to "even out".

Yet, despite the spatial expansion, the quantum energy density remains constant, or the average micro-chaos, in lack of a better term, per spatial unit does not change.

So, matter dilutes, energy of space itself does not. It's like space isn't "stretching", but rather ehh "growing", in lack of better verbiage.

(The micro-chaos largely "cancels out", so that we don't see a photon flying off in one direction, and an anti-photon flying off in another, at least not normally, but, also, the background quantum-scale energy isn't exactly zero.)

That's from memory (i.e. not reliable). Anyway, if I'm remembering right, then I think there might be some implications to how we think of these things, including conservation.

Living gives value, flourishing, exploring, participating, ...

Everyone's doomed.
Those who don't learn from history, repeating the mistakes.
And those who watch them.

— David Linwood and George Santayana

The 2020 PhilPapers Survey is out:

• Survey Results
• Philosophers on Philosophy: The 2020 PhilPapers Survey (46 pages pdf) by David Bourget and David Chalmers (Nov 1, 2021)

And 2009:

• Survey results
• What do philosophers believe? by David Bourget and David Chalmers (Dec 18, 2013)

The word "being" is used in ever so many ways.
I guess it's up to linguists and philosophers to clarify them.
One way is to differentiate fictional/imaginary and real, where "exists" sometimes is used instead of "real", though fictions exist too, they're just not real.
We might speak of ontological categories, like substance, event, property, relation, ...

In a general sense, being can have no complement.
Which is also why you can't really miss it.

And how do we explain the Olber's paradox if it really is infinite? — Echoes

Doesn't Olbers' paradox just apply to a "static universe"?
An infinite universe could still expand, so there'd be no such paradox.
I think the steady-state universe is one such model.

:D

angryreactions at TikTok is cool.

With maddiekuzma.

Tool use and language skills are linked in the brain – and practising one improves the other (Nov 11, 2021)

If the past is infinite then the present is the end of an infinite period of time, but an infinite period of time has no end. — Michael

No start, in this case.
But the argument is usually phrased as "cannot be completed", except it can, it just takes an infinity.
Of course, if you presuppose otherwise, then you won't get anywhere.
It's not a (purely) logical thing, unless you include things like the principle of sufficient reason.

_{• James Harrington
• Craig Skinner}

An infinite past of sequential events is illogical, though. If we imagine each second of the universe as a person counting then the present is that person having counted every integer up to 0 which makes no sense at all. — Michael

I wouldn't say illogical, at least doesn't derive a contradiction.
Counterintuitive perhaps?
There'd be no sufficient reason that 0 was reached at one particular moment, and not some other moment, any other moment.
Yet, with a definite earliest time, we similarly appear to run into such a violation, in that there'd be no sufficient reason for the universe being 14 billion years old, and not some other age, any other age.
Maybe the counterintuitive "edge-free", not infinite universe is the more intuitive after all?
Weird. :meh:
At least we might admit that we don't know, and will just have to let the universe tell its own story (evidence).

_{• Surprise: the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the universe anymore by Ethan Siegel (Oct 20, 2021)
• The problem with the Big Bang theory by Don Lincoln (Nov 4, 2021)}

Found this fairly informative (has links to studies):

COVID's endgame: Scientists have a clue about where SARS-CoV-2 is headed (Oct 29, 2021)

I suppose this is as well, except in a different way, the way that makes you shake your head:

Big Bird got 'vaccinated' against COVID-19, drawing outrage from Republicans (Nov 8, 2021)

Energy vampire pirate ghost husband gave her sepsis, so she had to do the exorcism divorce thing.

Northern Irish woman who married 300-year-old pirate ghost divorced spirit because he was ‘using her’ (Jul 24, 2019)

That's a bit shallow, sought, don't you think, ? Drop "the common good" sloganeering, et voilà, sewage systems and clean water is common good. Not sure why you'd complain about that. It's not particularly about "the state" either, but about doing them. We can, and do, figure out common good.

, , *haha* that is kind of funny. :D (I mean, not as a political or defamatory statement or anything like that, just the flatulent incident, not a huge embarrassment either.)

, not quite so good after all, eh? Unlike infrastructure, electricity, clean water, sewage systems, respect as the default, organized health care, generally available education/school, whatever it all may be. We can, and do, figure out common good. Even if some sloganize and abuse verbiage.

“The common good” is a phrase collectivists and utilitarians break out now and again to justify their schemes. You pretend to know it is, how to attain it, and then stack bodies to reach it. — NOS4A2

Nonsense. :down:

Randians. :roll:


_{• Common good (Wikipedia)
• The Common Good (SEP)
• What Is the Common Good in Political Science? Definition and Examples (Robert Longley)}

Late Halloween entertainment

The Cult of Fools – “Trump Empire in Financial Trouble” – Oct 31, 2021

How to present nonsense to, and spread fear among, the gullible ...

Official Government Reports suggest the Fully Vaccinated will develop Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome by Christmas (Oct 27, 2021)

The executive summary: if you had COVID-19 vaccines, then you'll probably have AIDS before the end of the year.

What I assume you consider valuable members of society put everyone else at risk every day. They step in cars, they don't get their flu shots, they procreate, they smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol, etc.
To cherry pick one particular risk and assign it so much weight is completely inconsistent and unconvincing. — Tzeentch

Err two wrongs still don't make a right.
We still have to deal with the darn virus.

Chardin, a Catholic priest said, God, is asleep in rocks and minerals, waking in plants and animals, to know self in man. — Athena

Here are some snippets I know of, going way back ...

God sleeps in the rock, dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal, and awakens in man. — Ibn Arabi (1165-1240), scholar, mystic, poet, philosopher

The divine spirit slumbers in the stone, dreams in the animal, and is awake in man. — Schelling (1775-1854), Romanticist, idealist, philosopher

Live not the stars and mountains?
Are waves
Without a spirit?
Are the dropping caves
Without a feeling in their silent tears? — Byron (1788-1824), Romanticist, poet

Personification.

A lot of arguments ensue from the fact that empirical philosophy proceeds as if there is no observer to be taken into account. — Wayfarer

Or any observer?
Quantum weirdness is more about any interaction than a conscious observer consciously observing.
At least in experiments, minimization of (uncontrolled) variables tends to be desirable.

Schrödinger’s Cat – Still Not Dead (Hossenfelder; Feb 27, 2021)