1

New Theories / Re: An essay in futility, too long to read :)

« on: Today at 15:35:41 »

hitting the biggest driver of it existing today, our fossils use.

By 2040, the population will have increased a bit and they will all need feeding. So you have 18 years to develop, build and sell around 40,000,000 electric tractors, the windmills or solar panels you need to make them go, and the capacity to make 2,000,000 a year to replace the ones that break. But you may not use fossil fuels to make them.

And that's just the surface of the problem. You need trucks to transport the food from farm to consumer, even assuming that everyone lives at home and has food delivered. If not, you will need to make another 1,500,000,000 electric cars and vans, plus all the infrastructure to generate and distribute the electricity. But you can't burn any fossil material in their manufacture..

Fact is that the present population cannot be sustained at its current standard of living without fossil fuels.

2

New Theories / Re: An essay in futility, too long to read :)

« on: Today at 15:24:52 »

So, what is your solution?

Sorry I missed this bit of the conversation. I am actually in favor of representative democracy for reasons of efficiency, but the means of selecting and mandating those representatives needs to dynamic and responsive. The model I prefer was described by Marx and Engels and is used by trade unions everywhere. We can discuss where it went wrong, later.

Quite simply, you divide the electorate into groups of 20 neighbors - street committees. Each SC mandates one member to the parish committee, which now represents 400  electors, say around 1000 humans, with some level of common interest in publlic services. Now mandate a rep to the district committee, which has financial authority and liability on behalf of 20,000 people to organise primary health care, waste disposal, etc. and is encouraged wherever possible to collaborate with adjoining districts, particularly with regard to primary and secondary education. And also to mandate a representative to the county, organising services for 400,000 folk, with significant local tax-raising powers. Each county now mandates two representatives to a national parliament of around 300  people - quite enough to ensure informed debate and decide  on major national policies.

The difference is that  nobody represents a political party. Your job it to represent the mandate of the geographical committee that selected you. Every delegate can be recalled and replaced by those who sent him, if they don't think he is representing their best interests. The 300 choose their own chairman (who doesn't make policy or pretend to be head of state, but signs the Acts on behalf of a simple majority)  and specific departmental heads, whose job is to implement the consensus policy in each executive ministry. Failure to enact the consensus leads to replacement unless said "minister" can explain the failure to parliament.

3

New Theories / Re: what is temperature?

« on: Today at 11:33:08 »

You did!

Like the man said, if you are trying to efficiently stimulate a quantum phenomenon, you need to use tightly specified photons. LED spectra are fairly narrow but difficult to modify, unlike a tuneable laser. 

4

New Theories / Re: An essay in futility, too long to read :)

« on: Today at 11:26:26 »

the factory, which is planned to employ 3,000 people by 2028 in an area previously left behind by industry. "

"left behind by industry" is a rubbish excuse. I presume they are talking about the battery megafactory intended to replace Coventry airport. Fact is that manufacturing died in Coventry because The Glorious Thatcher raised bank interest rates and encouraged people to "invest" in second-hand houses instead of re-tooling primary and secondary industries, and the airport which used to employ a few thousand folk building testing and repairing all sorts of military and civilian vehicles (not just aircraft) went downhill along with the car and truck factories (another 100,000 employees) nearby.  The phenomenal wartime output of Coventry (the Luftwaffe had good reason to try to destroy the town) sustained an entrepreneurial ethos into the early 1970s but with German and American banks lending at 5% and UK bank rate at 15%, there was no way that local manufacturing could afford to modernise and sell at a profit.

So who will determine the specification and reap the profits of these new batteries? The only volume car manufacturers in the UK are Japanese, German and Indian.

Interestingly, the above economic analysis came from the CEO of a battery manufacturer in the 1980s, when asked to justify moving his entire production of rechargeables to Germany! 

5

New Theories / Re: An essay in futility, too long to read :)

« on: Today at 11:10:04 »

Methane is once again considered a immediate threat

But it's highly combustible (you use it to cook and generate electricity!)  so it won't survive a forest fire.

6

Just Chat! / Re: Best self-defense for women?

« on: Yesterday at 23:31:30 »

.....once you have managed to open your handbag and found it among......er.......whatever it is that The Boss apparently needs to carry everywhere.....

Which brings me to a serious point. Why don't women have pockets? Or when they do, why don't they keep important stuff in them? Anyone old enough to remember "Cagney and Lacey" probably wondered how Lacey always got her man by running in heeled shoes whilst extracting a gun from her shoulder bag. 

And on the subject of movie cliches, how on earth did plots evolve before mobile phones? Shakespeare limited himself to one "enter a messenger"  per act, but "I've got to take this call" now occurs even more frequently than "he has a right to know" and "I don't want to involve the police".

7

The Environment / Re: Will there be another ice age?

« on: Yesterday at 17:46:09 »

Since the CO2 curve always lagged behind the temperature record, history suggests that CO2 is not the driver of temperature. And the seasonal variation of recent Mauna Loa data suggests that temperature still drives CO2, not the  other way around.

8

Physiology & Medicine / Re: Spammy meds- Enjoy Awesome Sex With Your Sex Life Partner!

« on: Yesterday at 17:42:44 »

No, it is a genuine contribution to medical knowledge. Sadly, Spam is neither kosher nor halal, so I am experimenting with corned beef and tuna. At least, that's my excuse.

9

New Theories / Re: what is temperature?

« on: 11/08/2022 22:35:15 »

Imagine we have sheep in a field. All wandering about in different directions and doing different things. Lots of entropy.

Now introduce an energetic dog who rounds them up into a pen, where they all stand still and face the same way. He has done work and reduced their entropy.

Therefore if you define temperature in terms of entropy, T = (dS/dE)^-1, he has reduced the temperature of the sheep by doing work on them, so T_sheep is negative.

10

Physiology & Medicine / Re: Can primates with longer necks and hips and shorter torsos take many roles?

« on: 11/08/2022 22:20:56 »

The impressive characteristic of primates is their grasping hands and feet. Animals with long necks need them to feed, but primates carry the food to their mouths, so can wear a bigger head (hence bigger brain) with less musculature than swans or giraffes. 

Homo sapiens has proportionately longer legs than the other apes, that allow long-distance walking, striding over obstacles, and efficient bipedalism. But it comes at a cost - a huge amount of unconscious brain power  is involved in standing and walking upright.

A shorter trunk would compromise lung capacity or the ability of the digestive system to recycle water.

Gorillas and chimps have deeper skeletal ridges that provide anchors for more powerful upper body muscles: great for climbing trees and potentially amazing for playing wheelchair cricket or tennis, but they don't have the hips and brain capacity to play the able-bodied game.

Horses for courses! Design your environment, then optimise the species to exploit it.  Worked OK for God and Darwin!

11

The Environment / Re: Is global warming man-made?

« on: 11/08/2022 22:05:14 »

a slope that's going up faster than ever before.

...than ever before Mauna Loa began to collect data, true.

If you remember vinyl records, you might recall that the microscopic scratches in an inch of one groove didn't look much like Beethoven's Sixth. At the time of recording, they may have been very important to the trombonist playing at that moment, but they don't tell you where Beethoven fits in the grand scheme of music.

12

New Theories / Re: An essay in futility, too long to read :)

« on: 11/08/2022 18:48:27 »

Going by climate models, this wasn’t supposed to happen for a hundred years or more. And yet it’s happening now.” "

Yet another example of the difference between models (prejudice and arithmetic) and science (observation and explanation).

One to two billion people would be indefinitely sustainable with a western standard of living.

GDP is an awful parameter. It includes all financial transactions, with estimates for drugs, prostitution, and the price of houses, which is driven by speculation and shortage. It has absolutely nothing to do with human wellbeing.

13

Physiology & Medicine / Re: Can primates with longer necks and hips and shorter torsos take many roles?

« on: 11/08/2022 18:35:39 »

Long necks have no aerodynamic advantage. A long tail, or a long neck furnished with vertical and horizontal stabilisers, reduces the force needed to maintain attitude and direction, but at the cost of increased weight and surface drag.

The length of the torso is unimportant. If you are going to fly by flapping, or even gliding, what matters is the quantity of muscle attached to the sternum, whci his why birds have a very deep sternum and humans can't fly by waving their arms.

Strong legs are used to propel man-powered flight. In various competitions it has proved easier to teach a racing cyclist to fly, than to train a glider pilot to generate 300 watts for more than a few seconds. But all these machines use an external propellor and gear system as no biological machine can have rotating parts.

You might consider rockets and pulse jets, as used by many aquatic animals, but you'd have a job to design a flying mammal that didn't look like a bat.

However if your fictional planet has a very dense atmosphere, you might find it already populated by whales and dolphins with gills instead of lungs.

14

The Environment / Re: Is global warming man-made?

« on: 11/08/2022 18:22:13 »

No. Humans generate more CO2 in winter, not summer. That's what makes the Mauna Loa  data so  interesting: it suggests that CO2 is a thermometer, not a thermostat,

15

The Environment / Re: Will there be another ice age?

« on: 11/08/2022 18:16:18 »

All depends on what you mean by "start"! The usual reference is the Vostok ice cores, which show how temperature and carbon dioxide have varied over the last 400,000 years. There are other ice core studies that show similar 100,000 year cycles in other parts of the world. What happens is that temperatures rise increasingly steeply of about 10 - 15,000 years to a fairly consistent maximum,  then decrease asymptotically towards an equally consistent minimum. The range is about 10 - 12 degrees.

Right now we are approaching the historic maximum, but "ice age" is not clearly defined: is it the point at which temperatures begin to decrease, or when the global mean temperature falls below the range mean, or when it is, say, within a degree of the minimum? 

The unmentionable truth is that the carbon dioxide level actually follows the temperature level, about 500 years later. It's currently out of sync a bit, thanks to farming and industry, but the historic record  suggests that it is irrelevant anyway.

16

New Theories / Re: How does Noether's theorem apply to moments of time?

« on: 10/08/2022 23:02:54 »

This is a public warning. Cool it, guys. Please stick to the subject and avoid personal accusations.

17

New Theories / Re: An essay in futility, too long to read :)

« on: 10/08/2022 20:28:18 »

Humans have directly modified 77% of the land surface and 87% of oceans (Watson et al., 2018).

That's pretty remarkable, considering that less than 25% of the land and less than 1% of the sea is inhabited or even regularly visited by humans.

We have indeed modified the 25% we occupy. It's called agriculture. Every animal modifies its environment. It's called living.   

18

Just Chat! / Re: Energy and healthwise, what is the best thing to eat for breakfast?

« on: 09/08/2022 21:13:51 »

Monday to Friday: Porridge, eggs, bacon, sausage, baked beans, black pudding, fried bread, coffee.

Saturday: Grapefruit, devilled kidneys,scrambled egg, white pudding, toast, champagne.

Sunday:  Orange juice, kedgeree, asparagus omelette, haggis, clouttie pudding, Guinness.

Substitute oysters, raw or cooked, for any item at any time. Add spinach and/or Hollandaise sauce to taste - eggs Benedict if you are in a hurry.

Breakfast is the key to good mental health. Best if it lasts for at least an hour, after which you spend the rest of the day outdoors digging, shooting or fishing for your dinner. Substitute coffee for alcohol if your weekend pursuit is flying: you can always turn up drunk at the office - nobody will notice.

19

Physiology & Medicine / Re: Is extreme lifestyle changes a primary cause of postpartum depression?

« on: 09/08/2022 20:59:10 »

The environmental factors are all important but to some extent also applicable to male partners, most of whom step up to the plate but a significant number run away. I wonder how the male statistics stand up against those for female PPD?

"Brain chemical imbalance" looks like pseudomedicine, to be followed by a list of ancient curative herbs and potions. There are certainly profound hormonal changes throughout pregnancy and early post-partum, but a species (or even a genetic line within that species) in which these ultimately led to the incapacity or unwillingness of the mother to nurture the baby,  would quickly  become extinct. We know of occasional rejections among farm animals but their lifestyle changes are far less profound than for humans, and the inherent commitment to the newborn is much shorter.

In summary, I've seen it, I don't know the answer, a bit of statistical analysis might be interesting, and I'd counsel against using language that might be construed as "alternative".

20

New Theories / Re: An essay in futility, too long to read :)

« on: 09/08/2022 11:08:31 »

And link those facts please.

google "gridwatch templar UK"