Comments by "Stephen Villano" (@spvillano) on "Sabine Hossenfelder"
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I'm reminded of well, a press debacle and actually, a high quality paper on superluminal neutrinos. The press billing it at times as faster than light particles being discovered, largely because reading wasn't the correspondent's forte.
The actual paper basically said, to paraphrase, "We know that the results are nonsensical and erroneous, but we cannot find what is wrong with our experimental setup and configuration. HELP!"
A butt ton of researchers examined the setup, some figured out what was defective and suggested checking and the problem was resolved and everyone pretty much forgot about it. Pity, because that was one of the great successes of science. Not some epic new discovery, collaboration to overcome a problem that one team couldn't resolve and collectively, science resolved.
Then, we get the cold fusion dweebs...
Yep, as Sabine mentioned, lukewarm fusion in the form of neutron generators abound, hell, they're reasonably affordable for fairly small physics labs. I can build a more expensive type without the titanium by ginning up a fusor and generate tremendous amounts of electricity bills. Both will produce a fair amount of neutrons though.
Alas, electricity bills are not energy generation. If they were, my computers would be making me tons of money. Instead, I get to twirl my electric meter and watch Debbie Does Donuts in the parking lot on TV.
And there is a non-zero chance I could wrangle plain actual cold fusion, just on plain probability alone, one or two atoms over a long amount of time, just based on random chance. Still ain't generating power, only bills.
Just once, I'd love to see one of these announcements and papers be released with a "Folks, this isn't making a damned lick of sense to me, but here is my apparatus, these are the conditions and observations, please pop by and see what I fouled up". Added kudos if they'd throw in lunch.
That makes science look credible, rather than some other fly by night idiot blathering about how they discovered Harry bleeding Potter's magical screw stick.
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That's the joy of sugar alcohols, they're laxatives. The EU placed limits on content due to that. The US says, "Oh, eat as much as you want, while you're proving how full of shit you are, run for office".
I was oddly lactose intolerant for around 9 months, right after I had my gallbladder removed. Given it's the brush cells at the entry to the small intestine that generates lactase, neither doctor or I ever figured that one out.
But, boy was it an interesting time, I'd forget and have butter or well, anything milk related, off to the races!
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Yes, the endless expansion of economies, the bane of every empire that ever was. Once they reached their maximum expansion, conditions stagnated, then decayed. Every time.
The stress of agriculture properly applied would be minimal, but that means adapting to drought and relying upon areas not experiencing drought, not wasting pesticides and fertilizers, for every ounce in the river is wasted and harmful downstream.
But, we can and will hit resource bottlenecks and stops, where, for example, copper mines become exhausted and new sources have to be discovered and recycling geared up a lot more. Most of what we say we recycle ends up collected and dumped in a landfill. Most plastics - landfill. Paper, mixed. Metals, again, mixed and most exported and reimported once recycled. Glass, poor to mixed, although the chances of our running out of silicon is next to nil. Oil, don't get my laughing, we're going through that like a teen on their first job's payday.
Don't get me started on solar panels pollution and energy requirements to manufacture, let alone our new high energy density batteries and efficient motors that rely upon rare earth minerals.
Food isn't much of a problem yet, mostly we have distribution issues that we refuse to resolve, as "it isn't our nation's problem", so we in the US literally dump good food to keep pricing stable for the farmers. Well, until a few disasters, droughts and disruptions hit us...
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What she missed was feral honeybees and she glossed right over production hive collapses, "Oh, you can buy more". With many, their budget's as stressed as the rest of us, so it'd be like telling a physicist that an accident that drops CERN off for a decade is OK, because they can just go build another one.
But, she did brush on one thing I've been harping on for ages: Monoculture is bad in agriculture. One crop, one source of failure when a pathogen it's sensitive to arrives, as Florida is finding out, as are the Cavendish banana plantation owners are as well.
As for cheese, might have a bit each day or every other day, but I rotate what I eat quite often, from fish to chicken to pork, all meat servings being palm sized or smaller, had asparagus and green beans tonight, was planning on sliced beets tomorrow, but I've depleted my supply, so it'll be pickled beets instead and spinach sauteed with garlic, onion and chili in a chicken bouillon stock. Given the heat wave we're starting here, I'll also be adding salt to some of my foods.
I'll probably also boil up another cup of barley in chicken bouillon, with garlic and onion and add some stewed prunes into it again. That made for a wonderful breakfast or lunch!
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@@Fern00352 Hope is indeed thoroughly lost. So, someone kindly give her a map! ;)
Every generation says much the same about some shiny trinket of technology, oddly, we still keep slogging onward.
I suggest one adopt my terminology for AI.
Artificial Idiocy.
Or stay with The Croods, it's new, avoid it...
And remember, regardless of technology predictions, we remain singularly and uniquely incompetent in predicting the frigging future.
You know, household nuclear reactors, flying cars (good Lord, but they can't drive worth a shit on the ground...), voice controlled computing (we got kitten videos instead), need I continue?
Artificial Idiocy meets Organic Idiocy, a match made in hell. :P
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The plants are expensive, concrete is expensive for a reason. Look up what it takes to make concrete, tons of baking rock...
Then, it takes around 60 days for concrete to cure. Concrete doesn't dry, it hydrates and forms carbonate rods to form its matrix, that takes time to do.
And I actually do like nuclear power. A lot. But, construction takes a long time, due to complexity and well, curing of concrete.
Although, I am a bigger fan of thorium power. Alas, the leader of the world, the US isn't leading, as usual, India is leading that push. We'll continue leading by defaulting, as usual, we trailed Europe in germ theory, physics and well, everything social. Now, we've eroded our industrial base, so we'll continue to lead in the only way we've ever done, leading in mediocrity.
Off of the political front, it'll take around 5 years to build a nuclear power plant. With significant effort and minimal time to cure concrete and put the massive erector set from hell together. Think royal pain in the gonads to build properly, yeah, that's it. Doesn't make it worthless, just a pain in the gonads to build.
Look at how long it takes to build a sizable dam, pretty much the same thing, with a bit less complexity.
Oh, we've established gainful fusion at the National Ignition Facility. When I was done laughing and giving a mental pat on the back, yeah, not useful, just gainful.
I live only a couple of miles from the now shuttered TMI power plant, of infamy claim for their massively non-destructive meltdown. Watched it live at 5 in high school, with some significant interest, as at the time, well, two hours drive time to TMI, yeah, kind of important to us. Everything worked as designed, save for a human factors engineering error, which made things get really, really, really expensive and well, zero casualties.
Miss the cooling tower plume though, the plant was shuttered because burning natural gas makes the world more like Venus, erm, is cheaper. Some think we'll get sex goddesses from Venus, we'll just get a baked penis. But, it's cheaper to die and all.
Here's a fossil fuel slogan that's a winner, "BAKED BABIES IS THE WAY TO GO!".
And Two and a quarter mile island is still there. A pet joke from the region among engineers.
Chernobyl's decontamination, Fukushima's as well, bioremediation and vitrification. Oh wait, plants are expensive, totally impossible to grow.
For those with blown sarcasometers, I've got a pallet full of them.
Oh, there is a leading injury common in nuclear power. The most significant number of injuries in nuclear power plant injuries, a paper cut.
Go paperless!
I'll just get my coat...
Oh, Fukushima had two volunteers to open valves, who are casualties. Selection criteria was over 50. I'd have volunteered too, both on age, exposure and it was the right damned thing to do. Much the same happened at Chernobyl.
Both plants built out of specification, Chernobyl, entirely with a flammable roof, Fukushima, updates not applied that'd have prevented the hydrogen explosion.
And I'm worse on my own failures than the scathing review of others failures.
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It was the 4G rollout - they all had strokes trying to get a decent signal, when even 3G, which 4G was to save us from, barely worked in so many areas.
Oh wait, that was me, now experiencing the same disorder with 5G...
Seriously though, some inverse rocket scientists blamed 5G for CCD, which would require a time machine to achieve that one, given CCD began a fair bit before 5G was even out of the testing lab.
And in a way related to my joke, that's been a confirmed issue in a number of species. Rather than one stressor causing a decline, it's more often a handful of issues that synergistically impact their survival. In the southern and eastern US, feral honeybee numbers have dropped precipitously over the past decade. We're starting to see a rebound, which suggests a combination of a parasite and virus stressing the hives into collapse and likely, the lower numbers broke the infection chain long enough to allow recovery to begin, just as with corvid numbers after West Nile virus became endemic in the US.
As for 5G, in some ways, it reminds me of the early days of cell phone popularity. Get into a suburban and toward a rural area, you run around looking like a Star Trek landing party with your tricorder scanning away for lifeforms. :/
My other primary stress source was easily eliminated. I moved all of the mirrors out of the house. ;)
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Superchemistry, wait a bit for more sensitive equipment and see ringing.
Really, it's in the math.
Eliminating contrails is good, eliminating chemtrails is better, as the exhaust is pollution. Anyone figuring out that one, well, my hat off and a Nobel prize for them!
Model the same thing with a plastic ball, but changing plastic with neutronium, learn a lot more. I'm serious. The math's a cast iron bitch, but it's illuminating.
Downside to replaceable batteries, water resistance. Not a big barrier, given USB/thuderthud connectors.
Gilling a mushroom is easy. Genetically sterilize the mushroom. No clue where the next mushroom is coming from...
Hurricanes are easy, God-Trump said to nuke them and hand wave...
I'll just get my hat...
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CO2 is good, it made Venus the garden world that it is today!
More seriously, CO2 is one component in photosynthesis, at night plants consume oxygen and exhale CO2. Meanwhile, photosynthesis also requires phosphorus and nitrogen for the cycle to work, so soil nutrients remaining the same becomes a problem. Add in, we need O2 to live, so O2 is people food in the same non-rationale. Pure O2, not so much, at standard atmospheric pressure and temperature, pure O2 verges on toxic, elevate its partial pressure more, you're talking actual burns of the respiratory tract. Something everyone that works with oxygen and especially hyperbaric oxygen therapy knows quite well.
But, nothing can be done about disinformation? OK, nothing can be done about greenhouse gases. Enjoy Venus mkII.
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@absalomdraconis the additive in question was called Olestra. Not especially relevant, given it was dairy products, specifically milk, butter, cream and many cheeses that all contained lactose.
Additionally, lousy example, as the only people who did suffer that seepage were those who consumed ridiculous amounts of potato chips with Olestra as their fat. Every investigatory study found that one, not a one had such problems with average consumption, only with those who ate absurd amounts.
I actually tried the products, including Pringles potato chips with Olestra, didn't have a problem with them. Still, a moot point, as Olestra was never a milk or other dairy product adulterant.
But, there was one further thing against Olestra, it suspended fat soluble nutrients, such as vitamin D, vitamin E, vitamin K, and vitamin A, along with carotenoids. Those then had to be added to the product as supplements to offset what otherwise was excreted.
Olestra remains in use today - as an industrial lubricant and paint base, as well as a deck stain base, as it is environmentally friendly.
Laughably, lobbyists against Olestra used chemophobia to fight the product, long before excessive consumers complained. One attack, calling it what it is, a polyester. So is cooking oil, of course, but one does have to shake one's head over proclaiming general health and championing knowledge by capitalizing upon ignorance and the promotion of said ignorance.
And a tidbit of later follow-up studies, those excessive consumers had the same seepage with regular fat chips, as there are limits to how much fat the body can digest, process or absorb.
Rather like those who consumed low calorie sodas to lose weight, but turned around and drank hundreds of gallons of the swill, then complained that their weight remained the same or higher. They offset the caloric loss by overconsuming and obliterating that otherwise health gain.
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@nothanks9503 have yet to see a palatable algae product, counting gelatin products containing agar.
I do enjoy edible seaweeds though!
Lacking access to affordable edible seaweed, I'd happily fight seven strong men for a basket of broccoli rabe or curly escarole for soup. Alas, can't find even a leaf fragment in my neighborhood, our stores largely are geared toward Caribbean cuisine. Which has its own delights. Oh well, guess I'm stuck with collard greens and a few other greens (big grin).*
With either, I'd be unlikely to ever be zinc deficient or magnesium deficient though. I tend to run deficient on magnesium, occasionally on zinc as well, but a dish of mussels fixes the latter. Haven't figured out why I run deficient on magnesium (yes, proton pump inhibitors and all, but even months after being off of them, I was still deficient), so I boost foods with both in them.
*Lost my wife of 42 years a couple of years back this March. Still, for Thanksgiving, I cooked a full thanksgiving dinner (albeit with a smaller turkey), complete with collard greens. One of my neighbors, while discussing our dinner preparations scoffed at this white boy making collards and asked, "What do you know about making collards?!". Gave her my recipe, ended up having to share some of the greens with her, much to her delight. Learned how from my mother-in-law, who came from rural Kentucky. :D
And this Philly boy loves his greens! Meats get a small serving for me, around the size of the palm of my hand or so.
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@richardhauer7354 hmm, do you mean like the Irish blight? The citrus greening pandemic? The Cavendish Panama Disease pandemic?
Oh, it's spelled wheat, not wheet. Just a bit of help, English is a royal pain that I honestly believe is a weapon of psychological warfare...
With monoculture in place, the vulnerability is increased for any pathogen to wreak havoc over time, whereas with multiculture, assuming proper planning occurs, disparate crops prevent the easy spread of disease between fields. Better to lose one field than one province or state, let alone primary cultivar of a food.
Not that I consume much of citrus or banana, getting vitamin C more from other food sources and potassium from a wider assortment of fruits.
Which reminds me, gotta hit the store soon. Down to one white yam and canned goods. And the decision of green beans or asparagus with my leftover ham and mashed potatoes for dinner... Overstuffed on spinach the last two days and I was sure I had another can of beets, but seem to only have pickled beets left. Probably use those for dessert... :)
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@davidgalea6113 odd, I didn't see any decline the last few times I was in the UK and various EU member nations. Indeed, considering the migrations that have happened throughout Europe and the UK, I only see another migration for much the same reason - warfare in homelands.
Still, perhaps the UK should've stopped before allowing Celts and Picts onto the island, let alone those bloody Romans. Or perhaps, Great Britain could've had a smaller empire, so that folks from throughout the realm wouldn't have migrated to the island.
As for invading, having been part of an invasion or two, you confuse immigration and invasion. Immigration is a legal process by which one relocates to another nation and despite claims to the contrary, every nation on earth has had its waves of immigration. Invasions are rather violent affairs and typically are beyond obvious, what with all of the weapon play and mass deaths involved. Perhaps, you'd like to ask the elders at Normandy about what an invasion looks like. Or perhaps, an Iraqi or Afghan about more current invasions.
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Let's look at one popular sugar alcohol that's used on tablets and caplets, as well as in emergency medicine. Mannitol.
It coats, in tiny quantities, those "pills" so that they won't stick to one's mouth, retain their shape better and oh, slide down smoothly. Most people won't even notice.
On the high side of the scale, say 10 grams+, well, you'll literally urinate like a garden hose is attached, as it opens the kidneys wide open. Good for a few medical conditions, coupled with dual large bore IV infusions with normal saline and electrolyte monitoring and adjustment.
As a coating, pretty much unnoticable.
Unless you're sensitive to it, then all bets are off, but the races to the bathroom are most assuredly on.
I've had some similar issues, finally traced it to a non-dietary source, my thyroid. I have Grave's disease and control can get a bit funny at times, in some very un-fun kinds of ways. Diarrhea being the least of the issues that can arise, but quite messy and annoying, as we're talking brown water projecting out. On the worse side, had severe tachycardia, tectonic hypertension and CHF that required hospitalization twice. Oh, also gave me an abdominal aortic aneurysm.
Wee!
Dietary tracking helped tremendously, cooking food from scratch also helped a lot. The thyroid being absolutely no help at all. Guess it was getting too tired to help, what with all of that trying its level best to kill me.
Adjusted the methimazole dosage, went from an SPO2 of 80 on room air, pulse in the 150's and BP of a Hulk (235/190 at one point), with fluid filled lungs, which also partially collapsed to complete a set of problems on a Saturday night admission to hospital to driving the nursing staff nuts walking the halls on Wednesday.
Charting diet helped ward a repeat, as the GI tended to act as an early warning alarm.
Oh, there's another extremely common sugar alcohol in foods, cosmetics and even soaps, glycerol, aka glycerin, if you want it to sound scary, 1,2,3-Trihydroxypropane. Yeah, I'm not a fucking chemist either, but their names for various common chemicals can be quite entertaining - do look up the many different chemical names for just plain water.
Causes bloating in some, largely typically based on dosage, because too much of anything can make life miserable or shorter.
I'm fortunate that I don't have issues with sugar alcohols, straw mushrooms can make me projectile vomit, wood grown mushrooms won't do that, don't look at me, I only live here.
Sabine did get one thing wrong. Most sugar alcohols are not absorbed at all, they pass right on through and bacterial growth/overgrowth is variable, depending upon species and still poorly understood, as is our microbiome (it's now under intensive study, someone's gonna make a ton of money on Rx biotics eventually!). I am sensitive to some cholinergics, such as atropine that's an additive in some medications, burn through my beta blockers early, CNS depressants just bounce off of me, anything processed by my liver tends to have an extremely short half-life, so ethanol tends to have minimal effect in under legendary dosages. Opiates and opioids, no thanks, get a massive MAST cell dump of histamine, just under allergy level, but enough to make me feel like I'm dying and that pain is better than taking those.
Everyone's physiology is different, if it was the same, we'd all be clones and well, we'd all be the same and conversations would be boring.
Now, excuse me, dinner is calling me. Pasta, with home made pasta sauce, cooked with fresh pork hocks until they fell off of the bone, home made meatballs and probably a fruit cup that'll likely have some sugar alcohols in it naturally. There is an upside to being a reformed chef, I make the sauce in two gallon batches and can it. Next batch will have some pork, but mostly be goat meat, got a good price on that, I've also used lamb and oxtails. The bones add gelatin, thickening the sauce and flavor, the meat, more flavor and well, meat. I've also done it vegetarian, largely when I was out of meat and new in country, then I used olives in place of meat.
Tomorrow, something entirely different, with tons of green veggies and some potatoes in some preparation to be determined tomorrow.
I do a small carb load in the morning, minimal and variable mid-day and larger carb load for evening. Keeps my weight sane, which keeps my glycemic levels sane and well, I'm by far the eldest in my father's side of the family to not be type 2 diabetic, largely insulin resistance caused by high body fat index.
We also run high on triglycerides and cholesterol, all in bad numbers as a family. Because, that's not a chocolate bar at the bottom of my gene pool and some SOB urinated into it for good measure.
And I studiously avoid kryptonite. ;)
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5G remains a significant health hazard. It's still not fully implemented, so the risk is having a stroke trying to get and retain signal. The same risk of every other G, aka Generation.
Huge pain in the gonads at times.
The frequency, well, look at the sun with an antenna and receiver tuned to the griped about band or frequency de jour, obviously it's harmful and we're long extinct, so STFU.
I never figured out why the State Department declined employing me as a diplomat...
Want to start a bar fight among physicists, ask when an RF field becomes a photon, rather than a wave. Still being a competitive math contest. ;)
Tissue warmed, well, consider it cooking, because it is. Heat a steak to room temperature, enjoy watching it rot. Heat it enough to denature proteins, it's called cooking. Microwaves tend to do that whole thing between 600 watts of energy to 1500 watts of energy used, microwatts griping is like complaining that the sun cooked all life on the planet to death long ago and STFU.
There is a danger to microwaves - to radioastronomers.
Toxicology 101, the dose makes the poison, as even oxygen at high levels is infamously toxic.
Now, when the frequency starts at UV-B and shorter wavelengths, there, the jury's still open.
Slightly, given oxygen's intolerance to ionizing radiation passage.
So, wanna get rid of the "risk"? Put out the largest source first, the sun.
Hope you enjoy around 4 degrees Kelvin.
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I entirely advocate for the colonization of Mars.
Difference between President Musk's idiocy and my idea is, the colonists are short term, as the colony would be for research and study of Mars and low gravity environments, not some inane notion of permanence that's utterly unsustainable.
Tours would likely end up being only six months at most, due to the debilitating effects of the lower gravity and radiation (some mitigation for the radiation would be below ground facilities, allowing regolith to protect against the radiation).
Might as well go with a megastation in orbit, with a large centrifugal gravity system, since I'm going moonbeams for funding such a money pit.
Why actual humans? Versatility. Robots aren't anywhere as versatile as a human chemist or geologist, as was instantly proven when we put the first geologist on the moon and basically as soon as he set foot on the lunar surface, he discovered a sample that was groundbreaking.
A robot can't gin up a chemical test, a chemist or geochemist can. Let the robots stomp the surface, little can be achieved by personal stomping about - usually and the unusual is also where humans excel. And thankfully, the unusual is infrequent, so leave the squishy humans inside the labs and the robots outside to get broken.
As for Musk the innovative dreamer, he's invented nothing, developed nothing, everything he's gotten has been bought, save for an inherited emerald mine. I'd not have sought advice on electricity from J. P. Morgan and the Vanderbilt, I'd speak to Edison and Tesla, who actually did invent and develop the technologies personally.
And nuking the moon? Oddly, Russia never suggested such an absurd thing, that was the US Air Force and Carl Sagan's first assignment, which got kiboshed once Sagan's report was submitted showing how tiny a nuclear detonation would be visually from earth.
But, orbials would be a good idea, remember that mega station notion? Still obscenely, beyond the fever dreams of insane in expense, but more sustainable if properly designed and well, can be protected from major harm from holes getting occasionally punched through it. In much of earth orbit, it'd be magnetically shielded to a fair degree. Water can be the additional shielding/thermal regulation/water supply that's recycled. Use lunar regolith for soil for grow beds, although use for organic life support would require immense amounts of space.
Achilles heel, maintenance of such a behemoth would be a cast iron bitch.
Still, I volunteer President Musk's billions for funding the project. Should take only a few hundred trillion to design, construct, launch, assemble in orbit and maintain for a decade or so. I'm sure his fans will happily fill that modest gap between the two figures... I'll wait.
And wait.
And... Huh, black dwarfs sure are hard to find, even up reasonably close at 1 AU!
Until then, I advocate for Musk to personally colonize the surface of Venus.
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The reality of it is, most journalists don't understand science in general and any specialty field is lumped in with The Professor from Gilligan's Island, a polymath of polymaths and full time engineer, so all science is the same and magic.
So basically, you have someone who has absolutely no damned clue about what the item being reported upon actually is, trying to explain it without seeking anyone conversant in that subject. I might as well get a medical study interpreted by my barber, at least that would have a historical relationship, if utterly unrelated today.
But wait, it gets better! For major, long playing events, they'll get science populisers, like Bill Nye, explaining why they were injecting cesium-137 into the reactor to stop reactions and how boron is a fission product (I'm not joking, Bill really fouled that up about as badly as I'd expect an engineer to foul up a field he never worked or studied).
So, we get reports about a study performed somewhere, by someone, on something, at a time indeterminate and for all I know was conducted 1000 years ago, some scientist's life story and family history reporting on one modest discovery (yeah, I fell asleep too) or other inanity that is the reason that I still keep a lead pipe next to my driver's seat.
Science is fuchsia. What? You saw it.
Science explains our universe and how it works. We started out explaining colors in really unique, precise ways, red, yellow and blue. Yay! Then, someone found the color fuchsia, which ain't all that hard to find in nature and boom, there's a new color called fuchsia. If we listen to the antiscience types, language has to be abolished, since fuchsia never exited at one point and language is hopelessly defective because now it can define what fuchsia is and worse, science can give us a specific code to reproduce that color.
You know, better is really worse or some idiotic bullshit. OK, I'll just slap a mauve on the idiot.
An oddity in myself, I perceive part of the UV-C spectrum as an odd shade of iridescent fuchsia. UV-A and B are just deeper shades of violet. I see those with the eye that had the natural lens removed and an implant that is uncoated installed and when I discussed it with a biologist, he theorized that it was likely a fluorescent effect, which would also explain some of the other effects when seeing those shades.
No, I am not about to allow anyone to start poking my eyes to see what proteins are doing what oddity with light, you're welcome to those after I'm dead and they likely have denatured.
Besides, we have plenty of similar examples in technology and nature. Why, I've got some fun crystals in the drawer that emit different colors when lit by an IR laser... Fluorescein dye is another fine example, discovered in 1871, used in ophthalmology in 1882, tagged proteins with it in 1941, actually started to understand how the shit worked in the 1990's. I laugh about how many drugs I carried in my Army medical bag that we really didn't understand how they worked!
Just as well, it'd be boring as hell if we knew everything!
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I remember one credulous reporter going on at great length in a comment online about how natural things aren't harmful.
I asked how much hydrogen cyanide he wanted mixed with his ricin, both being toxic substances in the plant kingdom. The former, we prepare out of some foods, the latter, best avoided entirely if you like having a functional endoplasmic reticulum (specifically, ribosomes). The idiot promptly wandered off to kick a rock somewhere.
After all, asbestos is natural too, as is lead, arsenic, strychnine and well, we could keep that list growing all week. ;)
I of course, keep such substances in stock only in my nightmares.
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Big rip? OK, spacetime ceases to exist as we know it, hence all of our natural laws are out the window. Matter won't matter any longer.
Basically, if it happened, one wouldn't have the chance to notice it, given it'd be spreading at the velocity of light.
Somewhere in the universe, some poor creature would arrive at, "I think, therefore I - ain't".
So, basically, it'd wreck one's vacation plans.
So, this is cool, my vacation plans are still on in a few dozen trillion years, by then I'll probably be able to afford it.
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