Title ("Price") is misspelled.
2,449 karma · joined November 27, 2022
> In the American context, my personal view is that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush presided over Bust Out 1, Barack Obama orchestrated Bust Out 2, and Donald Trump kicked off the lulz period, which we are now squarely in. I mean, how can you understand Trump and Biden as anything other than lulz?
Those BBY bust-outs were its leadership sucking the company dry. How did Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump suck the country dry? I'm not saying those leaders were effective but rather asking the more specific question about the connection between those administrations and the BBY serial vampire syndrome. The article seems to be saying that wealth/vitality was somehow sucked from the US into the leaders themselves or their cronies. If so, name names. Or at least offer a single example.
Instead, the article ends up with a much less interesting message. The US is going down the tubes and has been for a long time. That's a very old idea that may go back to the country's founding. It doesn't offer new insights. It doesn't open new perspectives. It just riles people up for a time. It's the kind of thing that politicians looking for new slogans to congeal a base of support turn to in campaign speeches so they can portray themselves as the only one who can drain the swamp.
It's hard to imagine how Japan can keep on the current path. But it's also hard to imagine how they'd adapt to normalized immigration. Seems like an adapt-or-die situation.
The hallmark of an incorrect model in science is that it makes incorrect predictions about the natural world (experiment). What incorrect predictions has psychology made based on the incorrect triune-brain theory?
I'm going to guess zero, not because the model works, but because psychology has made no experimentally testable predictions based on it.
> He claims he spotted a bullet resting on the top of the back of the seat. He says he picked it up, put it in his pocket, and brought it into the hospital. Then, upon entering Trauma Room No. 1 (at that stage, he was the only nonmedical person in the room besides Mrs. Kennedy, and both stayed for only a short period), he insists, he placed the bullet on a white cotton blanket on the president’s stretcher.
> ...
> Yet the bullet that Landis now claims to have discovered that morning emerged largely intact and only moderately damaged, its base having been squeezed in.
This is a reminder of how quickly things are forgotten. In this case, the presence of the time capsule was forgotten within the span of less than 200 years. I suppose those who placed the capsule could have done so under complete secrecy. More likely a few people knew about it, but that knowledge just disappeared with those who knew it.
This is the actual article:
https://www.cell.com/cell-chemical-biology/pdfExtended/S2451...
I recommend replacing the link and the title with what appears on the Cell website.
It seems this is not exactly new:
> Around 1800, large swathes of the Harz were deforested. The less resistant spruce monoculture, that arose as a consequence of the mining industry in the Upper Harz, was largely destroyed by a bark beetle outbreak and a storm of hurricane proportions in November 1800. This largest known bark beetle infestation in the Harz was known as the Große Wurmtrocknis, and destroyed about 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres) of spruce forest and lasted about for 20 years. The woods were largely reforested with spruce. Continuous problems with bark beetle and storms were the negative side effects of mining in the Harz Mountains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harz
> In the longer term, mixing other tree species into the forest could be a solution, Ahrenhold said. “It makes sense to plant other conifers that can cope better with these conditions, especially on south-facing slopes and on very dry soil,” he said.
The AP article fails to mention the massive amount of deforestation and animal depopulation that's occurred for centuries now, but which is well-documented in the Wikipedia article. This gives the misleading impression that what's happening now is somehow unprecedented.
The issue, it seems, is that trying to "manage" the land doesn't work. It may even be more the root of the problem than the solution.
> Climatologist and weather historian Maximiliano Herrera went so far as to call it [35 C+ temperatures in winter] one of the most "extreme weather events the world has ever seen".
Assuming the quote is not taken out of context and Herrera did say it, I'm not sure the facts are on Herrera's side. The world likely saw more extreme "weather events," such as the one that happened at the end of the Pleistocene. That's when the half-mile-thick layer of ice sitting over the northeastern part of North America melted to expose the land beneath.
> People only really learn when they’re surprised.
The idea that people learn when surprised is not surprising. The idea that people only learn when surprised could be surprising, but only if substantiated. I would be surprised because I can think of numerous times that I learned when not surprised.
Surprise is fine as a technique to draw the reader in, but it puts you on the hook to support the surprising claim. And the act of whittling that claim down to something supportable could very well leave you with nothing very surprising at all.
I feel like I should have figured out this was a gag sooner...
Toe what line?
It does note a correlation, and from that a possible cause. And there, the link between observation and putative cause is not supported:
> The hardest hit were grassland birds, down by more than 50 percent, mostly due to the expansion of farms that turn a varied landscape into acres of neat, plowed rows
The article mainly reports a numerical finding.
> An analysis of the composition showed that the spherules are made of 84% iron, 8% silicon, 4% magnesium, and 2% titanium, plus trace elements. They are sub-millimeter in size. The crew found 50 of them in total.
Everything in the description could have been produced on Earth using existing technology.
Isotopic composition of the metals could be a very simple way to differentiate the terrestrial from the alien. It's an easy analysis to perform. The fact that it isn't reported at all suggests that Avi Loeb may not have the extraordinary evidence to back up the extraordinary claim.
> Aspartame was discovered in 1965 by James M. Schlatter, a chemist working for G.D. Searle & Company. Schlatter had synthesized aspartame as an intermediate step in generating a tetrapeptide of the hormone gastrin, for use in assessing an anti-ulcer drug candidate. He discovered its sweet taste when he licked his finger, which had become contaminated with aspartame, to lift up a piece of paper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame
But the Washington Post seems to disagree:
> It has been 17 years since chemist James M. Schlatter, who was tinkering with an anti-ulcer drug at the time, dipped his finger into a mixture of asparatic acid and phenylalanine and, for reasons that remain unclear, brought the result into contact with his tongue. Now, after a long legal and scientific struggle, the stuff that was on Schlatter's finger that fateful day in 1965 can be on your finger too, or dissolved in your coffee, or stirred into your yogurt, or sprinkled over your cinnamon toast.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/food/1982/0...
There was a time when reporting the taste of a newly-synthesized organic molecule was not uncommon in the literature. It's possible that Schlatter was just doing something that was not unusual at the time.
An account of the discovery, written by one of the authors of the original research paper reporting the discovery (Mazur), and reportedly based on an affidavit gives this account:
> In December 1965 I was working with Dr. Mazur on the synthesis of the C-terminal tetrapeptide of gastrin. We were making intermediates and trying to purify them. In particular, on an occasion in December, 1965, I was recrystallizing aspartylphenylalanine methyl ester (aspartame) ... when the mixture bumped [spilled over while boiling] onto the outside of the flask. As a result, some of the powder got onto my fingers. At a slightly later stage, when licking my finger to pick up a piece of paper, I noticed a very strong, sweet taste. Initially, I thought that I mush have still had some sugar o. my hands from earlier in the day. However, I quickly realized this could not be so, since I had washed my hands in the meantime. I, therefore, traced the power on my hands back to the container into which I had placed the crystallized apsartyl-phenylalanine methyl ester. I felt that this ... was not likely to be toxic and I therefore tasted a little of it and found that it was the substance which I had previously tasted on my finger.
- Aspartame: Physiology and Biochemistry, edited by Stegink and Filer
This is a great article, but there are many, many people for whom this advice is going to lead nowhere or worse. They have often been to fancy universities and have often earned fancy degrees. But what they don't realize is that they've also been trained to respond to the praise of authority figures. The article touches on this point later, but emphasizes a different outcome.
If there's one thing that authority figures absolutely hate is a project that makes you excessively curious.
I'll speculate that those most affected by this perverse reward system will deny its influence over them most strongly. They won't realize that their motivation for projects stems from the enthusiasm that authority figure show or withhold. They will therefore conclude that the warning above does not apply to them. And they will have a very hard time.
I saw this first-hand in graduate school. At least half the students had never learned to disregard the level of the greybeard's enthusiasm when choosing projects. Unsurprisingly, they also did not understood the process of formulating a project idea. This was the half that had, by far, the hardest time. At the slightest hint of graybeard apathy for a project idea, they were onto something else.
> Astronomers wielding the James Webb Space Telescope have detected methyl cations – important precursor molecules needed to create proteins and DNA and therefore fundamental to carbon-based life forms.
No study to date spells out a plausible path to abiogenesis - the creation of life from non-living chemical precursors. Without such a path, claims that any particular molecule is a "precursor of carbon based life" are suspect at best.
1. Is it too much to ask for a link to the original research in an article like this?
2. Given that every human alive has detectable levels of PFAS in blood, 63% elevation after eating every single day of the year doesn't seem like a lot.
3. Those advocating popping in pans/pots might want to consider what that pan/pot is coated with.
To top it off, the focus of the story, David Charles Grusch, is a "a former intelligence official."
Pardom me for disregarding this as the diversion it appears to be. The US military has quite a track record on this kind of thing. It's not hard to think of reasons why such diversions might be deployed right now, either.
Maybe some kind of physical evidence - any physical evidence - will be presented. If so, I'm happy to change my mind. Until then, there's zero compelling reason to believe any of it and every reason to think Grusch either a liar or a stooge.