scientator

I saw a production of Twelfth Night without ever having read it. Also didn't know the plot. And unfortunately I didn't ever get the gist of what was happening. I have a hard time imagining how other people are able to get the gist of the plays if they haven't read them beforehand.

It's not just the Shakespearean language. It's also the constant references to Greek and Roman mythology, via Ovid, that presents a real barrier. That mythology is no longer part of mainstream culture.

Water policy can often be deeply counter-intuitive. So a case can be made that the solution to the west's water problems is actually to encourage more urbanization and manufacturing. Why? Because they use so much less water than agriculture. Replace an acre of farmland with an acre of homes and the water use plummets. Even replace it with manufacturing and the water use goes down. Agriculture is at the root of all the west's water woes.

Arguably the resources are tight because of too much agriculture, not too many people. Specifically, too much alfalfa, used to feed cows. I think the numbers are something like 70% of the water in Arizona is used to grow alfalfa. Reduce the production of alfalfa and the water scarcity disappears.

I had a gas tankless heater for about 20 years and hot water came out of pretty much instantly. But it makes sense that electric tankless heaters wouldn't have the same kind of speed.

The author of the article seems to think that tankless heaters will deliver hot water more slowly to taps than a traditional tank heater would. That's not the case. Having to wait for the hot water to come out of the tap is due to the distance between the tank (or tankless heater) and the tap. Nothing else. You'll also have to wait a long time if you're trying to get hot water from a tank that's on the other side of the house.

One solution are recirculation pumps, which the author goes on to describe, which keep pulling hot water through the pipes. Another solution would be to have a mini-tankless heater directly beneath the sink. For some reason those are much more common in Europe than the US. If the tankless heater is very close to the tap then you're going to get hot water almost immediately.

The title is misleading in the sense that the article concerns the cosmological principle, which is (as the name suggests) a principle, not a law. That is, it's a guiding assumption, or paradigm. It's been guiding cosmology since the time of Newton. But I'd argue that cosmologists didn't adopt the cosmological principle based upon observations of the cosmos, but rather because if they didn't adopt it, then making any hypothesis about the cosmos as a whole would be next to impossible. The fact that observations may now be suggesting that the cosmological principle doesn't apply to the large-scale structure of the universe suggests that there may be hard limits to what we can know about the cosmos as a whole.

>>why wouldn't this logic also apply to every other primitive particle: there is only one muon, one tau, one up quark, one down quark, etc?

When Wheeler came up with his idea, antimatter had just been discovered and positrons were the only known form of it at the time. So he was trying to explain why electrons/positrons are so alike, and yet not alike. In other words, just a historical accident that he applied his idea solely to electrons.

But yes, as new antimatter particles were subsequently discovered, his idea could be applied to those as well. In fact, if you're a believer in string theory, one could imagine that there's one fundamental string particle that's moving back and forth through time, creating all the other particles as it does so.

I think you mean guerrilla advertising, but I like gorilla advertising better.

There's also not any science behind the assumption that all matter is inherently dead, and that by complex arrangements of atoms it can become conscious. These are questions that are beyond the ability of science to currently shed much light on.

There were all kinds of competing legends about Homer back in ancient times. Many cities claimed that he had once lived there. And there was even an ancient legend that both the Iliad and Odyssey were written by a woman named Phantasia, said to have been the daughter of Nicarchus who lived in Memphis. She supposedly left the texts of the two epic poems in the library of Memphis where Homer found them and then took credit for them as his own. This legend was brought to Samuel Butler's attention following the publication of his theory, but he insisted he hadn't been aware of it.

You should also include dogs in your list of damaging things:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25433840-800-how-a-bi...

"Birds, it turns out, seem to be particularly sensitised to dogs – even on leads. In woodlands outside Sydney, for example, a study found that people walking leashed dogs caused a 'dramatic' reduction in the diversity and abundance of birds – more than double that caused by the same number of people walking without pets."