fwiw, this story is also covered here, imho a more credible source: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/1/palestinians-demand-international-inquiry-after-mass-grave-found-in-gaza

gotta admit, that is a lot safer approach than trying some shit on the real thing

wrong, western philosophy is often based on dichotomies - something is either this or that, but it is more of an analytical tool (I am not nature despite that I am a part of nature). Eastern philosophies are often mystic, though there is western mysticism - that some aspects of existence are incomprehensible on a rational basis and therefore dichotomies are illusory. But such a perspective does not inherently make people better stewards of the environment - in fact they might conclude that their every action is “natural” by definition.

the ultimate run-away train! No matter how impossibly big it is, it just grew infinitely bigger in the past second.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/36/37/42/36374294e5183a96de3e3e6696f4d3ad.jpg

maybe space is the graviton field itself(!), but maybe there is a graviton field (or is it the Higgs field?) and gravitons (and Higgs particles?) are excitations of that field; like other particles are excitations of their various postulated quantum fields

In that case, Krasnodar and Rostov to Ukraine as buffer zones - maybe Belgorod and Kursk too?

“the necessity always to have been” could mean that for something to BE permanent, it is always necessary that it has existed previously. Whether any thing in this universe can be said to be permanent under such a criterion (within the perspective of spacetime) is doubtful. But if time is a feature of this universe, then there could be perspectives beyond it where all of this universe is permanent, I suppose.

I think there was a time when he could have apologized for a dumb mistake and everyone would have moved on. It is world news now because HE chose another and unfortunate path - which probably has no route back to the sunlit lands.

when I was young, I read a bunch of “Eastern” philosophy and thought mysticism was really cool. I guess I still do, but it also feel like a little bit of a copout to say the Tao which can be explained is not the true Tao. I mean, come on! We are verbal creatures and we ought to be able to verbalize our understandings of things. We ought to be able to identify our motivations and desires and act on our principles.

In my later years, I have come to be a “hard determinist” based on my understanding of modern physics. The past and the future exist deterministically - they are immutable. And yet, we are agents of causality - the eternal immutable future that exists does so because of what we choose to do in each moment. So that is kind of a return to some eastern mystical shit I think. Sort of a Zen koan for the 21st century if you like: how can the future already exist when we are causing it by our choices in the present? Some say it is because we are only imagining we have free will and our actions are not really free; but we all know that we FEEL free to choose - so let’s take it as axiomatic that we are free; then can hard determinism be the case? It is like the sound of one hand clapping . . .

I am not “a philosopher”, but really we all are. If you never wonder about the nature of your own existence, are you even fully conscious? If you start asking about existence, then you will also have at least passing interest in what some wise predecessors may have considered. If your philosophical musings pertain to more practical and mundane matters like ethics and sociology, the same applies. As a member of society, I am inevitable oriented to be aware of “normative” perspectives - what is right-and-wrong, how to behave, etc. - but these norms have a lot of breadth; what path is “right for me”? Maybe the paths available inform your philosophy, but I think we all at least imagine that our philosophy should and sometimes DOES govern the paths we choose. If you have not thought about your philosophy, choosing paths is nothing but random motion.

could be Phenomenology; we only know what we sense - but we cannot know if what we sense is accurate or complete; in fact it is neither. We have no way to truly “know” the nature of reality or if it is independent of our own existence. By “we” I of course mean ME, because I only sense your presence tangentially - only MY existence is certain (to me).

The relativistic effect that gives rise to red-shifting will equally give rise to time-dilation and foreshortening, so not only are quasars red and slow from our perspective; but I hereby predict they are also flattened! I guess if they had NOT found evidence of slow quasar clocks, the headline would have been on MSNBC and CNN instead.

whatever does not kill us, makes us stronger? LOL I think it might be OK if you rinse it very thoroughly - in a way it might be like beer-brewing. In olden times, the quality of water was not easy to assess - it might make you sick. But beer, if it tastes good, is proof that conditions have been achieved for fermentation and therefore, bacteria could not be present in significant numbers (else the beer would sour!). Maybe a healthy spirulina population in a pond is like that? I suspect it is true, but I have been unable to develop a spirulina culture so far (and partly from lack of serious effort).

I watched some youtube videos about people growing spirulina in backyard pools. They tell all about how to do it. One guy says normally he would dry it to powder and add it to “regular” foods. But he sometimes just eats it as-collected. It has no taste, or sometimes a faintly “fishy” taste

well, I put on my thinking cap and came up with an image area of 0.12 square parsecs at the distance of Sag*, so roughly an image span of 0.3pc, or about a light-year or 70k astronomical units, if my ciphering is on track.

I went to https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac449a to try and learn the size of these various weird shapes, naively supposing they are all AT the Milkyway center. But of course the radiotelescope “sees” whatever is on that line of sight. So some of the objects are thought to be active galactic nuclei in the far distance, and one particulary circular ring is thought to be a newly disovered supernova remnant - though whether closer or farther than the center I did not glean. The image covers 6.5 “square degrees” so at a distance of about 7.7kpc, that corresponds to some particular area I don’t know how to calculate and thus some linear scale could be estimated - albeit some of the objects, not being at the 7.7kpc distance will be larger or smaller than the scale would suggest. Anyone know how to do that?

The issue with marine algae is not mercury, but arsenic. We know inorganic arsenic is toxic, but marine algae accumulate arsenic in organic molecules, which some studies seem to show that is less toxic or even non-toxic. But some effects of arsenic toxicity are long term, like cancer, and apparently it is not a decided issue yet. There has been arsenic in the sea for a long time, and marine creatures of all sorts have evolved to deal with it in various ways.

yep, these are all marine algae. I think the market will develop and more consistent products (and no doubt thorougly coated with preservatives) will become prevalent once dear old General Mills, ConAgra, and their like enter the fray.

This could be for marine algae, which might have high iodine and sometimes high organic arsenic (though there is some debate over how toxic that is) - but freshwater algae are not necessarily high in iodine. Like spirulina for example.