Old thread has too many comments. Need new thread. Brain fried. Don’t ask too much of me.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Old thread has too many comments. Need new thread. Brain fried. Don’t ask too much of me.
I’ve never made any “homebrew,” though I’d like to try my hand at wine some time.
I do have a kick-ass recipe for limoncello, though.
Boygenius, if the amide function converts to anything, it most likely hydrolyzes and becomes just lysergic acid. Wiki has some info on this, including the stability in the dark freezer.
As you may or may not be aware, the Royal Society has released all their content free until February 28th. So any recommendations of papers to grab while I can?
Holy crap!
*hogs all available bandwidth*
I’ll be spending a couple hours a day milking that for all it’s worth for the next couple weeks!
thanks for the heads up.
Thanks Nerd and BS. I shall commence reading.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salty_liquorice
I’ve had clear yellow liquid flow out of my nose after my head got glanced by a foot (in a consensual setting).
[No pee jokes, plz.]
Blind Squirrel@478.
Yeah, how many homebrewers hang out here?
I’ve been homebrewing for about fifteen years now.
I got started by acquiring a taste for really good beer when I was in the navy.When I moved back to my childhood home(south Alabama)there was nothing but domestic swill.I had to drive an hour to Pensacola,Fl. every week or so to stock up.
Well that got old fast,so I purchased all the ingredients and supplies etc. and have been crafting some fine beers and some that weren’t so fine ever since.
Right now I have five gallons of wort working based on a Dutch lager recipe. Hey a country boy can survive.
“fusel alcohol” is an actual chemical term?
that’s awesome.
for those who don’t know, “fusel” is also a German term for shitty liquor.
Be dammed, so it is!
BS
For all you rock/metal fans, here is a cover of Maniac. The band is The Great Escape and this is their first professional (as in paid for) video. My partner’s son plays the lead guitar.
Fusel oil is real term. Basically, any alcohols higher (longer chained, hence higher boiling point) than ethanol. They can have (pure) distinctive odors. Butanol is not one of my favorites. [/pedant]
windy wrote:
Martial arts, rough play or mosh pit?
The first one is correct!
Grace Potter, Joe Satriani, Steve Kimock, Reed Mathis, Willy Waldman and Stephen Perkins cover Cortez the Killer at the Jammy’s.
For years now, I’ve suffered under the delusion that Grace Potter might become my future ex-wife. :)
mmm, tapeworms:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tapeworm
don’t forget to find out your tapeworm carrying capacity by taking the quiz at the end.
I, unfortunately, could only support one sad little tapeworm.
David Marjanović (#461)
I had this philosophy class once where the teacher posed the question how do we know we’re dreaming from inside a dream. I said I can tell if I try to read something because what I read will change a second time through. I had to concede his point that it was theoretically possible to dream a dream where that didn’t happen, thus I wouldn’t know. However, I had a dream within a few nights of that conversation where I tested out the rereading thing. I chose to try a newspaper headline because I figured that would be nice and short, giving me the best chance of rereading without change. Not only did it change in meaning the second time around, it also changed from English to Japanese.
Ahh, a henna dream.
Hopefully I’m not providing TMI, but I dream so vividly that, on occasion, I have woken up in “mid-stream”, so to speak. My physical need to urinate melds into my dream-state and before you know it…
It may speak to my misspent youth and my misspent adultolescence that most of these dreams involve waiting in line for a Port-A-PottyTM at some music festival, somewhere, in some space and time, with far too few Port-A-Pottys available.
The same thing happened to me in junior high school, when I got tackled hard in football and my head clonked on the ground. I assume I’d had a clogged sinus that I didn’t know about, and that drained it. Yum.
hah, most of my bad dreams until recently involved re-living my last years of High-School: skipping class, worrying about skipping class, reallizing I’m gonna fail because I was skipping class, looking at the chalkboard realizing I don’t know WTF is going on because I skipped too much class, etc. and generally being miserable about it.
So yeah, if any of you have kids who need to be scared into finishing High-School, tell them if they don’t, it’ll literally scar them for years and years to come :-p
Otherwise, as for vividness of dreams… well, let’s just say that if I slept more, I wouldn’t need sex with real people at all anymore :-p
A few years ago I had to take a couple of exams again (I failed both, but not by much. So I had the chance to resit them a month later). This was a time when the next semester had already started, so I had 4 subjects to do assignments for as well as studying for those two additional exams. Anyway one night I dreamt it was the end of the year and that I was with my family awaiting my marks. In the dream I had the realisation that I didn’t remember doing my additional exams yet. So if it was the end of the year and I had no recollection of taking those examinations – it must have mean I missed them!
I woke up in complete panic and very quickly got on the computer to check the date. It took a bit for me to fully grasp that it was just a dream even if the surreal imagery therein somehow didn’t give it away (I was standing on a mountain in South Australia overlooking wineries).
Jadehawk,
Sooo, what do your recent bad dreams involve?
Perhaps if we had a more detailed description of the dream we may be able to more accurately divine it’s meaning?
it’s != its, dammit
OK, I have to call bullshit on David Marjanović ‘s amusing but ridiculous story about lymph
coming out of his hand.
I think we can all agree that lymph doesn’t exist, so why bother pretending it does? I’ve cut
myself loads of times and never seen anything other than blood pissing out. Why do people
order their steaks “bloody” but never order them “lymphy”?
I find the idea of this so-called “shadow circulatory system” about as preposterous as the
idea of a shadow government waiting for the right time to herd us all into FEMA
concentration camps. No wonder nobody believes scientists about anything these days.
Don’t bother trying to get Chris Mooney to build me a bridge over this. I’m not buying.
Richard Kemp by any chance? #429
No, much, much smaller scale. The whole thing probably never got beyond the local papers, and the conviction may be spent now (I don’t know the rules on this), so I certainly wouldn’t mention his name!
Spengler’s views are both influential and controversial. – ‘Tis Himself
Really? There are still people who take the civilisation-organism analogy seriously?
FFS, I make the effort to write something into Notepad so it’s not all full of typos, and what do I get? A bunch of phantom paragraph breaks…
*blink* *blink*
it’s threee in the morning, and I’ve been staring at nodes (hundreds of them! they’re everywhere!!!) for most of the day, so forgive me if I’m being dense…
…but #522 is a joke, right?
I think Chris Mooney wants to build David a bridge, not you. If only David would reach out to you…
Chris Mooney is an intelligent guy, why did he have to crawl up his own arse?
The colorless NO reacts with O2 and forms orange NO2. Nerd of Readhead, OM
Ha! I finally get the chance to tell my own nasty-chemicals story, though it’s very small beer compared to the professionals. In my 4th year at secondary (i.e. high) school I did a chemistry project with a friend for some sort of school open day. This involved taking photographs in a dark room, using the “flash” caused by igniting a mixture of NO and I think CCl4 – does this make sense? We had to collect the NO in open-ended glass cylinders (can’t even remember what they’re called – a something jar – from a reaction I can’t remember by bubbling it through water and slipping a greased glass disc under it. Of course some NO would usually get out and oxidise to NO2, which has a revolting smell. Then we’d add some CCl4 and leave it to evaporate. When we wanted the flash, we’d upend the cylinder, slip the lid off, and apply a lighted taper. I’m sure we wouldn’t be allowed to play with such quantities of NO these days, let alone CCl4!
Jadehawk,
I still find myself back at school in dreams, having for some reason to take an extra “A” level. This is only one of a number of dreams on the same theme – dreaming I never actually got my PhD, or have to complete another thesis, or have been in a new job involving teaching for months and haven’t actually done any. I suspect my final moments will be occupied with the thought “Oh, shit! I’ve got to give my thesis in tomorrow and I don’t even know what it’s about!”.
I’ve done a bit of lucid dreaming (knowing you’re dreaming while in the dream). Usually, I am dreaming I’m flying, often having taken off to escape a pursuer, and after the delight in finding I can fly, it occurs to me that in fact I can’t, so this must be a dream. I’ve tried manipulating the dream, which works to some extent, but usually I either wake, or slip back into a non-lucid state, fairly quickly. Apparently it’s possible to learn to induce lucid dreaming fairly reliably, and control content fairly effectively, so you might try that with your sex-dreams: go to sleep fantasising about whatever you fantasise about, but keep in mind some special “indicator” that will tell you that you’re dreaming if it arises. (I haven’t tried this myself.)
ambulocetacean
You’ve got to be winding us up right? You aren’t fucking serious in that you don’t believe a lymphatic system exists within the human body. Tell that to the dozens of post-breast cancer women I had to do regular lymphatic drainage massage on in my nursing career so they can, you know do all sorts of ridiculous stuff, like keep a fucking arm. Wanker.
Knockgoats,
I think that’s a bit too simplistic. Some commercial media outlets certainly do promote stupidity, prejudice and superstition, but others promote more enlightened values; it all depends on who owns the media outlet in question, and on the kind of people they employ. Ultimately, the media (like every other human endeavour) is run by human beings, and human beings do not always act according to deterministic class interests. Empirically, it’s pretty clear that “the media” is not a monolithic block dedicated uniformly to upholding the class interests of the wealthy and poweful.
The American TV industry, for example, spans a range of political outlooks from hardline right-wing (Fox) to centre-left (MSNBC), with most of the major networks somewhere in the middle. From your perspective as a socialist, I don’t doubt that they all seem comparatively conservative and dedicated to upholding the existing capitalist order (which is not surprising, of course, since successful TV networks are by definition beneficiaries of the existing capitalist order); but it’s rather silly to disregard the differences between these media outlets. They are certainly not all promoting the same message, and I think it’s a little unfair to see them all as dedicated to perpetuating “stupidity, prejudice and superstition”. Fox is not promoting the same message or the same values as CNN or MSNBC. They appeal to different markets and different types of people.
Similarly, in the UK, our press ranges from the Daily Mail on the right to the Guardian on the left, with a range of other publications in between. Again, you might say that none of them is left-wing enough for your preference; but that doesn’t mean you can disregard the differences in values and agenda between them. So I do think that a commercial media industry with heavy competition, such as we have in the UK and US, leads to value-pluralism and to the expression of a range of different beliefs.
I think you’re making the mistake of seeing “the wealthy and powerful” as if they were a single bloc who work together to promote a shared class interest. In reality, the wealthiest and most powerful people are often in competition with each other, and have no desire to promote one another’s interests. Ultimately, each media outlet is dedicated to making money for itself. This means it has to draw in viewers with sensational news; but sometimes the way to do this is, in fact, to attack the wealthy and powerful. Hence why news stories painting big corporations in a bad light are, actually, quite common.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not praising the existing situation. Indeed, the biggest down-side to the broad range of media outlets is that most people tend to get their news only from the sources which agree with their own pre-existing convictions. So a staunch conservative will read the Daily Mail or the Telegraph in the UK, or watch Fox News in the US; whereas a left-winger is more likely to read the Guardian or the Independent in the UK, or watch MSNBC in the US. This means that many people’s existing worldview is rarely challenged by new information, and their biases are consistently confirmed. Unfortunately, I can’t see any way around this. Ultimately, any kind of media industry, whether state-controlled or commercially-controlled, will incorporate some level of propaganda and untruth; human beings in general are corruptible, and those who run media outlets are no exception to this rule.
Sorry for the long, rambling post; I haven’t finished my coffee yet. :-)
Walton:
Because if you had, it would’ve been short and pithy?
(That was rhetorical, BTW.)
Yes, sorry, I was just kidding. And I know that lymphatic system is serious business. I had a friend who had her nodes taken out in a temporarily successful attempt to stop her breast cancer spreading around her body.
I was being silly, but I thought I was being silly enough for people to realise I was being silly. I do sincerely apologise if I caused offence.
If you were to be charitable to me, though, you might say that I was illustrating a point about how people find it hard to believe in things thaey can’t see or understand (apart from gods, obviously). I kind of had the anti-vax crowd in mind :(
which would that be? because the only mainstream media outlet I can think of at the moment that doesn’t pander to stupidity and the Lowest Common Denominator is PBS, and that’s not a commercial outlet (and even they do some stupid-pandering)
it does when most of it is owned by a single individual
and yet, they all do more infotainment than they do any actual news, most of them regularly do “both sides of the story” even when the story doesn’t have two sides, and they all do more Britney Spears than world affairs, or even investigative reporting (which is nearly dead, as far as I can tell). Just because their dumbing is aimed at different audiences, doesn’t mean it’s not dumbing.
*groan*
if no one else deals with this idiocy, I might get back to it in the morning. I can’t deal with it at this hour.
you lack imagination.
do you realize that these are not the only options?
Jadehawk, there’s a bunch of stuff there that begs for criticism… but I’m not about to do it.
Well, except for one thing.
Knockgoats: “[…] the rich and powerful do not want an educated and enlightened populace – except insofar as their education is necessary to generate profit.”
Walton: “I think you’re making the mistake of seeing “the wealthy and powerful” as if they were a single bloc who work together to promote a shared class interest.”
Which other options were you envisioning? The money to run and operate a media outlet has to come from somewhere.
ARTE is a great example : it is publicly funded (by France and Germany), but not “controlled” by any given government. Its decision making bodies include a mix of French and German leading personalities from the cultural, scientific and political spheres.
ARTE “strives to create thought-provoking, emotionally engaging programmes that enrich its multicultural audience’s lives.”
And so far I’ve seen, it’s the TV channel that is the best at doing this.
Meanwhile, both in France and Germany, purely commercial TV has clearly become synonimous with mind debilitating TV.
Probably the funniest subThread so far, but you’re making me realize that I’ve had a very sheltered lab training. I’m now trying to decide if that’s a good or a bad thing… :)
I have, and it worked…sometimes. It’s a wonderful experience, but it can get quite frustrating when you just can’t maintain the lucidity and end up waking up every time you become aware, or when you go to bed expecting to have a lucid dream and wake up in the morning not remembering anything. (It’s possible to lucid dream and not remembering it when you wake up, or only remembering it vaguely.) I gave up trying to induce them, but sometimes I still have spontaneous lucid dreams.
ambulocetacean: I took your post for humor from the first.
Knockgoats: Could the two gasses have been hydrogen and chlorine? They are about the only pair that would not explode a glass cylinder because the product formed occupies the same volume as the initial gases. A very strange experiment for kids to be performing as described. It could not have involved CCL4 in any case because it is quite nonflammable.
BS
And don’t get me started about dreaming. It is about the only form of sleep I get. I’m sick of it. My idiopathic insomnia means that I never enter deep sleep. (stage 5,or stage 4 by the Mayo clinic’s reckoning) Not any, not ever, for at least the last 5 years. It is almost completely disabling. I awake from 10 hrs of sleep exhausted. Ok,/personal problems.
BS
Sometimes Spengler is fashionable, sometimes he isn’t. Acceptance of Spengler’s historical conjectures is cyclic.
This experience, and/or the dreaming thereof, also seems to be common to the writers of Animaniacs. This episode is pretty much my most common dreams.
As for the exam dreams, once I started teaching I went through a phase where it was finals week in my dreams, but instead of not studying or attending the class all semester, it was that I hadn’t taught the class all semester and was about to get fired for it.
Carlie: Link borked.
BS
Walton,
Yes, the wealthy and powerful are not monolithic. They are roughly divided into two main groups in the US (Republicans and Democrats). However, while they may disagree on tactics they generally agree on goals*. Debate exists, but the views represented in the media are extremely narrow. The views of much of the population are either ignored or underreported in the mainstream media. With a state-controlled media the bias is obvious. However, with a media like that of the US there is still an agenda and voices being shut out, only it’s more subtle (except maybe in the case of Fox News). The system is still better than a state-controlled media, but fails the duties of the press.
_____
* Even when Obama was trashing the Republicans last week on their retreat he said that, unlike other countries, the differences between the two main parties in the US were small, as if that were a good thing.
I know it looks like this happened a long time ago but I had a busy week
and the next is probably going to be even worse and I don’t know why but I’m getting fucking tired of everything*… Well, I just wanted to congratulate John Morales on his long overdue Molly. Well deserved, John!*Yes, I think that was the beginning of a long, incoherent rant about my personal life. Sorry about that.
Walton says:
Damn it, thanks Blind Squirrel. I forgot to preview. Animaniacs Potty Emergency.
I’ve had the high-school-exam-I-haven’t-studied-for dream as well. I also sometimes get dreams where my teeth are falling out. I’ve read that this is common and may have to do with grinding one’s teeth while asleep, but don’t know if there’s any merit to that idea.
I also once dreamt that I was dreaming. I realized I was dreaming and “woke up” in my royal chambers.
Knockgoats: Could the two gasses have been hydrogen and chlorine? They are about the only pair that would not explode a glass cylinder because the product formed occupies the same volume as the initial gases. – Blind Squirrel FCD
One was definitely NO, because what really sticks in my mind is the stench of NO2 when it escaped. There wouldn’t have been an explosion of the cylinder because the lid of the (inverted) cylinder was removed as the taper was applied. I’ve got it! It was CS2:
2CS2 + 10NO -> 2CO2 + 4SO2 + 5N2
Thanks!
As I remember it, the reaction front took appreciable time to travel up the cylinder – long enough for the one doing the photography to react.
Me too, but I didn’t know it was common. Actually, I dreamed about that tonight. The first thing I did when I woke up was to check with my tongue if they were all in place and secure…
Knockgoats: That’s a real hell’s brew you had there. Carbon disulfide has its own stench, BTW. Like a rancid fart.
BS
Boy Knockgoats #549, I would want no part of that reaction. Almost everything is stinky and noxious.
Walton,
The BBC is not “state-controlled”, as you know very well. State influence on it could be greatly reduced, as I’ve suggested before, by having the board of Governors directly elected by licence-payers. Local community-owned media run by elected trusts are another obvious possibility. In any case, can you seriously argue that most of the British press is any more than a set of lie-producing machines?
As for the wealthy and powerful not being monolithic – yeah, right. Of course they compete among themselves, but – at least within most states – are quick to band together if any serious threat from below arises. We’ve seen exactly that with the successful class war they have waged against the rest of us over the last three decades – and before you pooh-pooh that again, do take a look at the vast scale of wealth concentration over that time in practically all rich countries. Do stop being such a sucker, Walton.
According to one online source Sulphides of Carbon, CS2 is “very poisonous and can have disastrous effects on the brain and nervous system” – gee, thanks for suggesting the project, Mr. Evans! – but has a “pleasant ethereal smell”. YMMV!
Scott Fitzgerald said, “The rich are not the same as you and me.” -a_ray_in_dilbert_space
According to Talk:F.Scott Fitzgerald:
“The full quotation is found in Fitzgerald’s words in his short story “The Rich Boy” (1926), paragraph 3: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”
I was going to quote Ernest Hemingway’s alleged response to the short version: “Yes, they have more money.”, but according to the same source, that’s esprit d’escalier on Hemingway’s part.
The most vivid dreams I had came when I was quitting smoking a few years ago and was using 24 hour nicotine patches. It seems nicotine patches are known to cause very vivid dreams.
The dreams all had a common theme. I was in the US, being driven around whilst chasing Kent Hovind with a giant (as big as me!) can of Raid fly spray. The idea was to squirt him with the stuff, but everytime I got near he did a runner.
I hate that one. Usually they’re not falling out so much as cracking into several pieces and THEN falling out.
LMAO!!!
arte is absolutely great.
Being both too cowardish and too lazy* to skip class, I occasionally fell asleep a little… Much less so than the party girls, though, who often appeared to sleep the entire morning through.
(None of them failed, to be fair.)
* Staying at home was not an option, and where else should I have gone? The university library** or something?
** Far away, not reachable for free.
<turning purple, or dark green, or something, anything…>
Man, is life unfair. This option isn’t even available to those of the male persuasion!!!
:-) That was deliberate, right?
My mind wanders too much for that. I never dream about the stuff I think about before I fall asleep.
Except in the rare cases when I basically fall asleep while dreaming – but in those, I always wake up very quickly and dream about other stuff later.
1) Invisible Hand, as implied in comment 535.
2) Evolutionary ecology. Competition is selected against, because it eats up so many resources. This is how niche partitioning happens, and it is how cartels form – it does occur that the wealthiest and most powerful people are utterly stupid, but it’s not very common.
3) Rupert Murdoch is not in competition with himself.
Number 2* is why capitalism is (on its own) a highly unstable, short-lived state of affairs and must be constantly protected from itself by a government. Once that stops, monopolies form one way or another, and people start paying through the nose and/or dying.
* No literary allusion intended. In fact, that would ruin the point completely. :-þ
Nice track. I have this idea that “Cortez” is to today’s improvising rock musicians what something like “Lady Be Good” or “There will never be another you” used to be to jazz musicians–everybody knows it and is comfortable with it and so it gets played (for at least a half-hour) at every jam session.
That made me feel a bit wistful about what might have been; a different decision or two and a little luck and I could have been that trumpet player. *wistful sigh at what might have been*
And Ms. Potter does seem like a very nice fantasy future ex-wife; I hope the two of you are mature enough to retain some semblance of a friendship in your future fantasy mind.
tell it to this guy. SFW?
Indeed not, and a pretty good clue to that fact is that the word “media” is PLURAL!
*looks for a hiding place from which to ambush Bill Dauphin*
Really? That’s fascinating. The role of nicotinic acetycholine receptors (which mediate all of nicotine’s physiological effects) in the brain is poorly understood. Interesting clue.
Along those lines, one might predict that a neuromodulator like THC might produce some interesting dreams. And maybe it does, but unfortunately I find that smoking weed before bed makes it impossible to remember any dreams in the morning. I have tried this experiment many times.
btw, uh, hmmm…
23004
carry on
OK, completing a multi-part response to Kausik Datta, but…
True Dream Confessions:
One of two recurring nightmares for me for years was of a plane crashing into something (water, usually) near me, and me not being able to get there to help the people out before it exploded. I’ve only had it once since 9-11 – not because the psychological issues underlying it have gone away, I’m sure, but I guess that scenario is no longer abstract/symbolic enough.
My big, memorable dream last night was that someone gave me a book I’ve been wanting to read – The Imperial Cruise. I was ecstatic. I am nerdy beyond repair.
I’m not always – or even perhaps the majority of the time – myself in my dreams. I was telling someone about one of my dreams years ago, and said “So, I was this guy,” and she was like “What?” and made it clear that she found this very strange. I’ve never mentioned it since. Well, until now.
***
Walton,
Have you seen this?:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/118171/manufacturing-consent
It is indeed, yes. Thanks!
My friends said it was much better than the commercial one. (Since I’m out of the lab, myself, they supplied the EtOH.)
Hmmmm. My brother-in-law is a plummer, and my sister gardens. I wonder if they have much leftover fruit in the Autumn.
I don’t think he’ll be able to see it since Hulu is only available within the US. YouTube to the rescue….
(Funny enough, I’m currently reading the book.)
Has anyone here ever played around with dimethyl sulfoxide? I haven’t, but it’s a… fascinating substance.
A few years ago there was a Soc. of Vert. Pal. meeting abstract about how this industrial solvent can help prepare bones out of hard sandstone. Some sandstones fall apart completely when treated with DMSO, leaving you to simply pick up the bone out of the dry sand; the least responsive ones still become soft enough that you can take the grains off one by one.
I was later told about a few other properties of DMSO. As might be expected from its formula (H3C–S(=O)–CH3 – like acetone with sulfur instead of the central carbon, and therefore less flat), it zips straight through the skin; sensitive people, the story goes, taste it on their tongue when they touch it with their fingers. The bad part is that it dissolves and takes with it everything that was lying around on your skin.
Which is why public-owned media corporations (most famously the BBC) tend to bend over backwards to avoid political bias in their reporting, because they know everyone keeps looking for bias in it.
Interestingly, I haven’t. What I get (once a year or something) is a dream where it turns out I haven’t actually finished school and need to go for another year… Exams come and go. Sitting in school and being bored is the horror.
(And don’t think I never found an exam hard! I failed a couple of math tests, for instance.)
I get that occasionally. It’s always depressing and uncanny. For instance, it’s always dark when I dream I wake up…
<envy>
You created two oxygen atoms in this reaction (10 on the left side, 12 on the right). But I suppose that just means the surrounding air participated in the reaction: 2CS2 + 10NO + O2 -> 2CO2 + 4SO2 + 5N2.
I still haven’t mentioned nitrobenzene, the “marcipan for mothers-in-law”. Almost exactly the same smell as benzaldehyde ( = marcipan odor), if anything even slightly better, but seriously poisonous.
Seconded.
Part 1:
Huh? How is that a response to what I wrote? I said I was trying not to get angry, so clearly I didn’t think it was desirable in this particular context. Then you ask me “Why? What purpose will anger have?” as though I had suggested it was a positive thing.
Nevertheless, on the broader issue of anger that some of your other comments have hinted at… I am not an angry person in any general way. There are a lot of things in the world that do make me angry, though. I think anger can be counterproductive if it’s disproportionate, all-consuming, or misdirected. However, I think it’s an important and “valid” emotion in general, and that some things should make us angry. A lot of the research I’ve done has been about people who have suffered at the hands of other people, and injustice and oppression in the present make me angry. It’s depressing to confront this stuff, and anger forces you to continue to do that. In my case I think it’s necessary. I’ve never really understood philosophical or religious systems that consider it of great value to deny or “transcend” anger and other emotions. I’ve always thought it better to try to understand these emotions, see their value, and control their destructive aspects.
I think you’re a little confused. In the Gee case, there’s the aspect that goes beyond personal victimhood and relates to general accusations about groups of people. Second, the “given circumstances” are what’s decisive here. More below.
OK.
Yes, you’re misunderstanding, and no, that isn’t correct. (Perhaps if you substitute “believe” for “feel”…) I see the source of the confusion. His accusations and predictions here were bizarre under the circumstances, for several reasons that I’ve enumerated several times (but will again if necessary). I object to the making of serious accusations like that with no basis in evidence, especially when it appears to be a rhetorical ploy and especially when it’s being done in a way that works to contribute to prejudice against and silence the voices of other marginalized people. The specific accusations I’ve seen from Gee against individuals or groups have in a general way been absolutely ridiculous, and he’s provided nothing (or something stupid) to clarify or support them, even when asked to do so (I’ll discuss them specifically if you’d like). There are certainly times that accusations or discussions of antisemitism are completely valid and necessary, and since I want to encourage people to speak out I try to give any accusations of prejudice or discrimination from people in groups that have long been victims the benefit of the doubt and try to learn of forms of bias in which I might be unwittingly participating. The historical context is often important (but not of sole importance) in assessing plausibility.
By way of comparison: I bring up gender imbalance and sexism frequently when I think they need to be raised. I’ve also raised issues of sexism related to myself, ranging from accusing people of being sexists or misogynists to pointing out unexamined privilege to looking at unconscious choices that have gendered effects and biased institutions. I think some people, reading superficially, might see some of this as “bringing up sexism at the drop of a hat” or a reflex based on my feelings, but I can argue with this by explaining what I’m saying and providing evidence. If in the course of arguments I wildly started accusing my opponents of being misogynists who wanted to harm me physically, that would be a problem, and counterproductive for my goals. If I truly believed that, it would be evidence of delusional condition. If not, and I was using it for rhetorical advantage, that would be vile.
His psychological state is only important here to the extent that it possibly provides a (perhaps partial) explanation for his bizarre behavior. If it really is a sort of paranoia and he believes what he’s saying despite the evidence, then that explains and does in my view justify it ethically. But its irrationality has to be pointed out and addressed, because the charge is serious and false.
People who have been victims of childhood sexual abuse often have great difficulty not regarding normal sexual activity as nonthreatening. If a victim, due to this irrational fear, accuses a person with whom she’s romantically involved of attempted rape when he wasn’t being coercive, that’s a problem. If someone who knows about childhood sexual abuse honestly believes there is evidence of it in a given case and makes the charge, presenting that evidence, that is not a problem (it’s what we want). If someone accuses the Catholic Church of conspiring in child-rape, that can be supported by evidence. If someone publicly and baselessly accuses his political opponents of being child molesters, that’s a problem. All strong accusations, but very different circumstances. In the first case, the person is not behaving immorally, but needs psychological help.
I’ve been talking about antisemitism here, including in the thread under discussion. The answer to your question should have been obvious before you wrote it.
Apropos of nothing: I sat on a panel discussion last week with the campus Unitarians (I guess on the atheist part of the panel, although the Unitarians had an atheist on thei side as well). The discussion was not exceedingly weird, although it could be likened to a discussion between those who love oranges and those who like to ride motorcycles…not too many specific points of disagreement, and a lot of “Yes, that must be exciting, but let me tell you why grapefruits are really not the same as oranges…”
Don’t get me wrong…the UUs seem to love the woo, but they also seem to realize that it is a game to some extent. I think they actually just like to go to church, and need to formulate woo to justify dragging their families off each wednesday night (or whenever it is the UUs meet).
I digress.
The important point is that the audience was composed partially of Christian students, and afterwards I was faith-healed. I was approached by a student who asserted that she could tell that I had been emotionally scarred as a child, and would like to heal me of that…to which I was like, “no, no, no…my parents are very nice people, I had an ideal upbringing, &cetera”. Then she said, Oh I might have been mistaken, are you sick in some other way?
Well, Jesus nailed it on the second guess, because I was fighting off an infection. Told her about it, and some incantation began with initially her touching me, and me backing away and asking if the healing could proceed assault-free…it turns out the touching is a formality and the power of Jesus can work equally effectively at short distances. Anyway, It turns out I’m better.
And coincidentally, I just finished taking my prescribed antiobiotics.
Praise his holy name!
And coincidentally, I just finished taking my prescribed antiobiotics.
Praise his holy name!
“Thou shalt bear a son. And thou shalt call his name Amoxicillin.”
Have you seen his head?
I suspect it has something to do with the wonderful filling feeling, and quite possible the sensation to his prostate when he blathers on and on and on.
woo!
I’ve been dreaming about school since I remember dreaming and being in school. Silly dreams.
I remember a dream in elementary school where I was in class and the teacher had asked us to do something. I don’t remember what it was, but it was something that got the whole class worried about not being able to do it. Then, for no apparent reason, I became aware I was dreaming. So, naturally, I stood up to inform everyone that, hey, that’s just me dreaming, we can all stop doing what we are doing and go play… ‘Cause, you know, it’s just a dream. Even if the teacher gets angry at us, *shrug*, it doesn’t matter because when I wake up she won’t know what her naughty students were doing in my dreams. Right?
It’s been a good many years since I last had to balance a redox reäction, but it seems to be needed here:
CS2 + NO -> CO2 + SO2 + N2
N: II -> 0 : -2 * 6
S: -II -> IV: +6 * 2
CS2 + 6NO -> CO2 + 2SO2 + 3N2
Is he actually smiling? I’d rather say he’s showing us his upper gums. He doesn’t look like he’s smiling.
Oh yeah, that’s even better than my version.
Look, cyberfriends, please don’t hold this against me, but I hate chemistry. I have hated chemistry since the 10th grade with a white-hot burning hate that only intensified during the horrible horrible college years of quantitative and organic oh god oh god oh god*
(It may or may not be a relevant observation that my father is a PhD chemist.)
(Note that I do not include biochem, which is fascinating, essentially physiology writ small.)
OK, so much of this subThread has had me gritting the particular tooth-clench that chemistry makes me grit. But I dimly remember an anecdote from Chem 10: Mr. Greenway (“there’s the right way, the wrong way, and the Greenway,” he’d always say, and I do mean always, though it never made any sense at all to me)(I will date myself by recalling that we learned how to use sliderules in that class) was absent with one of his migraines, and the substitute was neither knowledgable nor attentive. My buddy Mike Fox pulled two bottles from the shelf, declared “yeah, these should react,” put some of each in a flask and added water. It’s the color I remember, the gorgeous violet of the burgeoning cloud of what I think we later determined must have been pure iodine gas (I assume one of you chemonerds can correct me here).
*a relevant quote here: “Prease wea’ goggle.”
+1
But I suppose that just means the surrounding air participated in the reaction David M.
Nope. It means I misremembered it when I cribbed it from a website that wouldn’t let me copypaste, and didn’t check the arithmetic carefully enough!
Off the top of my head, mixing an iodide salt (potassium or sodium iodide) with something like 30% hydrogen peroxide or concentrated hydrochloric acid might give that effect.
Heh, very amusing. I fell prey to Jebus’s power over random coincidences the other day, too.
A mother with child in tow was knocking on every door in the neighborhood looking for a ride to the “post office” (in quotes because we ended up going to about five different locations). I obliged and eventually found myself taking her to a payday check cashing shack. She came back distraught because they wouldn’t accept her check for some reason and started rambling on about God, which I found slightly humorous.
I offered to take her somewhere else (the money was ostensibly for groceries), and she suggested a nearby grocery store, adding something like “They have to cash my check. God will provide for me and my child, I just know it!” “Well there’s your problem,” I replied wryly thinking the whole thing was hopeless on the weekend, “God doesn’t exist.” Her jaw dropped and she guffawed, “You are too much.” Little did I know she was wearing the Armor of God.
Shortly thereafter, I dropped her off at the grocery store where she would again try cashing her check. She had been gone about ten minutes so her kid ran in to see what was taking so long. About five minutes later they came out with a cart full of groceries. “Thank Jesus!” she exclaimed as she got back in the passenger seat, and then cheerfully added, “I told you He would help us. And here I was all worried when you got down on my game.” I inner-face-palmed. All I had done with my poor choice of words was reinforce her belief in Jebus and given her a story of Jebus making an ass of an infidel.
“[wake up] in my royal chambers.”
Be careful what you wish for! Stop me if I’ve told this one before – oh, you can’t, what a shame!
This guy buys an old lamp from a junk store and decides to polish it up. Scarcely has he started rubbing it with a cloth, when POOF! – a genie appears, and (having passed Genie-ality 101), bows low and says:
“Your wish is my command, O Master. You may have three wishes. Whatever you desire, it shall be yours!”
Well, he’s a canny sort of guy, and he’s read all the stories about how wishes can go wrong, so he thinks very carefully, and finally says:
“I want to be very rich, I want to be royal, and I want to be happily married to a beautiful woman!”
Next thing he knows, he’s waking up in a four-poster bed in what is obviously the Royal Suite – it is extremely luxurious, and he can see some sort of heraldic crest on the pillow. Sleeping beside him, sure enough, is a beautiful woman. As he gazes at her, she opens her eyes and smiles lovingly. He reaches for her, but she says:
“Ah, I’d love to, my darling Franz Ferdinand, but you know we have to be in Sarajevo in an hour!”
I can’t tell, since again I have no idea what you’re saying.
WTF? You shouldn’t have been, for any definition of “the Jewish people.”
Explain what you mean, please.
You’re getting very confused among different groups of people and sets of political ideas. I think the problem is that you’re conflating Judaism as a set of religious beliefs with Jewishness as an ethnicity with particular political positions on Israel and the Palestinians. These have no necessary relationship.
No one is advocating “focusing solely on suffering and oppression.” For some victims, it’s not possible to do anything else. People are broken by this kind of trauma. More generally, it shapes people’s lives and perspectives. [It does so collectively as well. I remember shortly into our friendship, my now best friend – hardly someone who dwells on suffering and oppression – made a comment to me to the effect that she wondered which of her non-Jewish friends would put her on the bus. I was shocked and insulted initially – couldn’t believe that she could think there was any possibility of that. But as I thought about it later, I realized that that was the effect of that history. (If she had said something like “I know you probably want to put me on the bus,” I would have been either very concerned or very angry, depending on where it was coming from.) Nor is it irrational to think in these terms. Antisemitism is very real. I’ve seen it, mostly among Christians. (I will say that I didn’t in the crazy Baptist church of my childhood. They were loons, and hateful in many ways, but I didn’t see or hear antisemitism, even when I brought my childhood best friend to Bible day camp. I think they were more perplexed than anything.) The Passion of the Christ and support for it were frightening to see. Later, the same friend made a comment about how my metabolism was such that I wouldn’t do well in a concentration camp. I think it signified a shift in our friendship in that I was now in the camp with her :), but the point is that this is how you can come to see the world if you’re from a group that has been terribly victimized for a long time. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. It may be necessary for our collective survival.]
I’m going to recommend this book once again, since it seems relevant here:
http://saltycurrent.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-much-things-have-changed.html
(The discussion of the historical inspiration I mentioned there I should really take on now…)
For people who want to reduce suffering and oppression, victims and others, facing – including talking about – both the past and the present squarely is important not only for helping victims to deal with the trauma but for understanding the causes and trying to do something about them. Ignoring or minimizing what has been done to people is not the way to fight oppression and violence.
If you really don’t want me to get angry, you’ll have to stop saying things like this. Do you realize what you’re including in that?
As I mentioned at Laden’s blog, I know a Holocaust survivor. She’s a very pleasant and kind person, who has a great family and a full life. She goes around to schools and talks about her experience. Is she chanting? Is the Holocaust Museum chanting? Is anyone calling attention to anti-Semitism chanting? You just can’t go around throwing out this kind of dismissive characterization in relation to a group that has been terribly victimized. You just can’t.
You implied it, and you continue to do so.
Oh. OK. :)
I forgot to mention this yesterday, but it has been a year (and a day) since The Comment That Started It All was posted on Pharyngula. Let’s recall it:
Who knew such a small, stupid, facepalm-worthy comment could lead to such a long, interesting and educational Thread?
Blind Squirrel (#540)
I have the same problem, though not quite as bad. I can sometimes get a night or two each week of restful sleep. Last night wasn’t one of those nights. I spent it running around an unending horror movie fighting monsters like this undead psychopath who wouldn’t stop chasing me even after I sawed his head off just above the lower jaw with a pruning saw.
~*~*~*~*~*~
SC (#563)
It’s only strange when being-a-guy dreams are also erotic dreams. But, um, anyways, I also frequently dream I’m some character who isn’t me. Weirdest was when I dreamed I was two different winos taking shelter in separate areas of a large, abandoned and supposedly haunted house. They could hear one another and each thought the other was a ghost. One of them threw his empty wine bottle in the direction of the noise the other was making and even though as the dreamer I knew it wasn’t a ghost, when I was the other wino, it was still terrifying to have a bottle come flying out of nowhere and smash all over the hallway.
~*~*~*~*~*~
David Marjanović (#566)
Never done anything with it myself, but I think that was the stuff they used at the vet I worked at that would make the entire treatment area smell like overripe pears or rotting orchids for days. Or maybe that’s the smell of what they used to clean it up. Hmm. Even if that wasn’t it, I know they used DMSO occasionally because there was always endless talk about not getting any on your skin.
Carlie:
My brother once played an audition for a trumpet position with the Dallas Symphony. A couple nights before, he had a dream that he went to the dentist, who put him under general anesthetic. When he woke up (in the dream), he discovered that the dentist had installed a self-tapping sheet-metal screw in the front face of each tooth. From then on, he had a great smile, but he couldn’t play at all.
A subject-mixing recommendation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Periodic_Table_(book)
SC, I loved that book. I should find whatever box it’s in and re-read it. The story that comes first to mind was the one about the prehistorical European dude whose family made their living as itinerant lead-miners/-smiths. It was so evocative.
As for dreams about teeth, I once had one where there was such thing as a tooth worm. It was actually some sort of arthropod that lived in people’s mouths. It had a soft underside but hard plates on its back and would etch a long groove in their teeth to hide out in with its hard plates facing out. When the person was asleep, it would come out and eat leftover gunk off their teeth. You could get rid of them by pulling them out of their grooves, but the damage was permanent. I got one smack in the middle of my central incisor. I can remember how it clung to its groove as it was being pulled out with foreceps and stretched out to five times its normal length. It was small consolation to wake up and realize those don’t exist but plenty of even worse parasites do.
I always used concentrated sulfuric. Works to make Bromine too.
BS
I wanted to come up with the film Bedazzled, but didn’t remember the name of the film or of any of the actors…
Pact with the devil (Liz Hurley), the main character wants to be rich & powerful & married to his dream girl… he wakes up, finds all this is the case, and finds he speaks Spanish… it goes quickly from:
“¿Establos? ¿Qués establos? … Mes establos. ¡Mes establos!”
to:
“¡Soy un narcotraficante colombianoooo…!”
…
:-o
Wow.
Next time, try a rock hammer. Or chlorine trifluoride.
My head spins.
Next time anything that bizarre happens, say “fuck this shit”, and stare at a fixed point till you wake up.
Don’t let it irritate you when the point changes in the process. Just keep staring.
The word on the street is that there is a new deity in town. The Flying Spaghetti Monster has been relegated to second place by the Flying Pasta Carbonara Monster. All the noodly goodness PLUS the power of pork!
The Porcine Pasta Deity has given us a meditation for the day here.
…eh…
I didn’t want to make that film or anything. I just wanted to mention it.
A. Noyd,
Dammit! Now my dreams about my teeth rotting out are going to be even worse. When I was in counseling a few years ago, my counselor told me that dreams about losing your teeth usually indicate anxiety. She asked me what I thought I might be anxious about. I said, “Isn’t it obvious? I don’t want to lose my teeth!”
A. Noyd: Have you been diagnosed?
BS
mmmmmmmm carbonara
I don’t know why I immediately thought of this critter when I read that, but I think I know what I’m going to dream about tonight. *shudder*
Huh. Interesting link fail. I have no idea why the link in my previous comment links to a comment in the post I wanted to link to and not to the post itself.
(Obviously, by “this critter” I meant the scary isopod, not Josh.)
ah, good, we’ve already seen the tongue-eating isopod and I can continue on to the off-off-topic portion of my comment.
I am listening to Pat Metheny’s new record Orchestrion. I had read about the project a bit over the last few months and sort of knew what to expect, but because of the, uh, manner in which I, um, may have (temporarily of course) obtained the CD, I have no liner notes, so went in search of confirmation that I am listening to what I thought I was.
A nice review, and check the video at the end, here. The gist is the Metheny is the only musician on the record, which he can recreate exactly live and on stage by himself, but the music is played by a huge array of robotically-played acoustic instruments: guitarbots, an electric bass, keyboards, xylophone and bells, a very cool “bottle organ,” all kinds of percussion.
The general idea is a player-piano at an orchestral scale (historical note: such “orchestrions” have existed for more than a century, as in the calliope organs with all kinds of instruments controlled electrically and pneumatically). What Metheny has done is to make the whole array of robot-instruments controllable digitally, by pre-written programs (which can be changed at whim) and/or by his guitar in real time. He can also get the whole thing up and running and improvise on top of it without direct interaction.
It’s hard to describe and pretty amazing.
Since I want to change the subject from tooth eating worms and which chemicals stink the most, here’s the Clancys and Tommy Makem singing “Carrickfergus”:
David Marjanović (#588)
I’ll keep those in mind! Given my dreams, the more diverse my arsenal the better.
Well, that wouldn’t have been much of an improvement in this case since there just happened to be an earthqake going on in the waking world at that moment. Talk about disorienting.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Blind Squirrel (#592)
Not for the sleep related stuff. For other things, yes. Or rather, I’ve been given various diagnoses but I don’t know that they’re very spot on.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Dania (#594)
I didn’t know about that thing when I had the dream, but that’s a great example of something both real and worse!
Finally made your Pear Crostini, ‘Tis.
Interesting combination of tastes, but I need to try it again, I think. I messed up a bit. My canned pears are pretty nice, but very mild in their taste, so I really topped them with far too much cheese. And I need to look up how much a tablespoon of butter is instead of winging it.
*munches*
A Christian group in Michigan has filed a lawsuit alleging that a package of hate crimes laws named after murder victim Matthew Shepard is an affront to their religious freedom.
BS
It is state-controlled. It’s true that it’s not controlled by the elected government; but the BBC is itself an organ of the state, with the power to tax. It is a state entity in itself. “The state” does not always have to be a single body; the fact that different state organs are independent from one another does not stop them being state organs. The judiciary, for instance, are independent of the executive and legislature; but they are still part of the state, and their decisions are still state decisions. Similarly, where you have an autonomous local or regional government that is not subject to the direction and control of the national government, it is still an organ of the state.
I don’t see how your proposal to elect the BBC Governors would improve things, since, as we have been discussing, many of the major problems in our society and political life are caused by the ignorance, prejudice and stupidity of the general public. The media already panders to the stupidity of the masses; giving the public more direct control would surely only perpetuate this problem.
It is state-controlled. It’s true that it’s not controlled by the elected government; but the BBC is itself an organ of the state, with the power to tax.
It does not have the power to tax: it does not set the licence fee, nor does it collect the fee (that is done privately – by Capita at present) nor enforce its collection (that is done by the criminal law). It is a public corporation – if you want to say that makes it part of the state, so fucking what? You now have to establish that that is in some way undesirable. The usual complaint against state-owned broadcasters is that they propagandise for the government (as many do); since you have conceded that this does not apply to the BBC, what have you got? Nothing but your tedious glibertarian whining, I submit.
I don’t see how your proposal to elect
the BBC GovernorsMPs would improve things, since, as we have been discussing, many of the major problems in our society and political life are caused by the ignorance, prejudice and stupidity of the general public.The mediaParliament already panders to the stupidity of the masses; giving the public more direct control would surely only perpetuate this problem. – WaltonThe point of the BBC is to have a broadcaster that cannot easily be bought by the rich and powerful in whose interest it is that the public remain ignorant, prejudiced and stupid. Evidently, that’s what you really dislike about the BBC.
It is state-controlled. It’s true that it’s not controlled by the elected government
mirrorspeak!
then, by your own admission, it’s not controlled by the state in any ideological fashion, which is the only thing to be concerned about, yes?
there are lots of state funded organizations whose work and conclusions are independent of state ideology and politics, at least in theory.
In practice, sometimes falls short, but that’s not due to the way they are constructed, but due typically to abuses of power by the state itself, and there’s little point in addressing that from the side of the organizations themselves.
From a site strange gods introduced me/us to a little while ago:
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2010/01/30/442-distilled-geography-europes-alcohol-belts/
I have lucid dreams regularly. Usually this happens when a dream starts turning bad because I don’t have something I need, or because I did something wrong earlier; and then I realize it’s a dream, so I can magically make the thing I need appear, or hit restart and undo whatever I did wrong earlier :-p
still can’t deal with this in detail; instead I’ll just point out that while those super-rich people may or may not “compete” with each other at the top, for this top to even exist as it is, it needs a particular set of conditions; as a consequence, all these rich people need the same conditions to thrive. And these conditions are inimical to the rest of the populace.
at the top of my head, there’s publicly funded but open channels; media cooperatives; and non-profit media. Most of them thrive primarily on the internet because that’s the only form of media with neutrality rules that make it a fair platform for everyone, but considering the waning of other forms of media and the ease with which a broad audience can be reached online, they are perfectly viable and wide-reaching formats
I usually slept an extra hour or two(My mom didn’t get up to get me ready for school, so she didn’t notice whether I left at 7 or 9), then went to McDonald’s with a book. In hindsight, I’m mildly surprised that at no point in the 5 years I was doing this was I hauled off by a cop, but I’ve been repeatedly told that I looked 16-18-ish since I sprouted a pair of boobs, so maybe they thought I was merely unemployed…
semi-deliberate: it was a typo, which I noticed, proceeded to fix, and then put back in because it fit so well.
well, I solved the boredom by
1)writing a novel during class*
2)reading books in class
3)not showing up
Interestingly, the “OMFG, I’ve no clue what’s going on!!” versions of the school-dream are exclusively about math, which is one of two subjects** I actually did lose the thread on. In all other subjects I was still getting at least passing grades on the exams themselves; I was failing them because missing more than 1/3 (I think) of the classes meant automatic failure.
——–
*which was transferred after class from the fat notepad onto a computer with a damaged floppy drive and no other output other than the printer; and the computer itself died as I was writing the last chapter, so I never finished it, and most of it (i.e. the handwritten parts, plus whatever I had not printed out previously) died with the computer. Traumatizing experience, that.
**the other was chemistry, but that had nothing to do with skipping class. I spent 11th grade in Canada, and so missed out on the entire Organic Chemistry module; and without that, none of the chemistry afterwards made any fucking sense anymore.
erm… let me try that part again:
“(everything except the handwritten parts plus whatever I had printed out at some point)”
anyway, that was traumatizing enough that I could never bring myself to re-type it on another computer; not that it matters, it wasn’t a particularly good novel, in hindsight (still better than Left Behind, if I may say so :-p)
Be careful, Kausik: SC is not left-handed either.
Organic chemists use it most frequently as an NMR solvent (hexadeuterated). It’s also used as a reagent for the Swern Oxidation, and I chiefly mention this because the by-product is wonderful, odiferous dimethyl sulfide…mmmmm.
Have you ever read The Drowned and the Saved? I am a huge fan of that book. In relation to this thread, the chapter entitled ‘Stereotypes’ seems especially relevant.
———————————————-
Re: dreams
I don’t exactly suffer from narcolepsy, but I have started dream-speaking mid-sentence, when tired. Apparently without missing a beat. As in:
Something I said to my wife once, late at night. Thing is, I remember it, and remember it making perfect sense. My doctor suggested I might have extended hypnagogia.
@David Marjanović:
I’ve used DMSO as a solvent for running NMR samples for some undergrad research. My prof would handle it w/o gloves, but I’m somewhat more paranoid, so I always wore latex gloves.
DMSO has been used as a media for drug “injection”, since it is absorbed by the skin, and anything in it is absorbed too. An ex-athelete swore on TV that DMSO helped his joint pain. But using DMSO as a medicine has a drawback. In-vivo, dimethyl sulfide is formed, which has a characteristic odor and taste. Some nutriceutical joint medicine has dimethyl sulfone (also known as methylsulfonylmethane, or MSM), which is converted to DMSO in the body.
Oh, and on the subject of dreams again, last night I had a dream about showing up to a paleontological excavation. I have no idea where that could have possibly come from.
You live in the Dakotas. Probably a dozen digs within a
couplefew hundred miles of you every summer.Awwwww. :)
I don’t think I ever mentioned it here, but I have a fascination with owls much like PZ has a fascination with cephalopods. I guess that if I had a blog I would have a Friday* Strigiform, which sounds cool.
Nightjars are pretty awesome too.
*It’s got to be Friday. I like Fridays.
um, Nerd? Are you kidding? Or not paying attention around here?
SC linked a European alcohol-belt map above. Wildly simplistic. For example, Slovenia is shown solidly in the beer belt, but when I was there I was plied with slivovitz so often and so generously that I staggered about the country for 2 weeks.
You mean besides doing a DVD project for the Redhead and looking at one of the cars (appears the rear shocks may need work after 13 years and 70,000 miles)? Yeah, I may have missed something. *hangs head in shame*
Sili #599
I’m glad to hear it.
I strongly recommend using fresh pears. I usually use anjou pears but bosc and passe-crassane are also good in this recipe.
About 15 grams.
!!!? That strikes me as far too much for a tablespoon. It’s over one half ounce!
BS
nope, you’re right. I wouldn’t have guessed.
BS
nope, 1 TBSP is around 15g, depending on what you’re measuring. more precisely, it’s 15ml.
and according to my handy fridge magnet, 2 TBSP = 1 oz, so you’re right.
But butter would have the density of triglycerides, closer to 0.9111. So 10% more volume, or 16.5 mL, would be required.
1Wiki
I was at my local bookstore’s science section the other day. I saw Unscientific America (with the infamous chapter 8) and a book by the esteemed Brown alumnus Kenneth Miller with a blurb at the back written by PZ Myers. However I failed to find PZ’s book. I want! When is that baby coming out? (No pressure.)
Also, please consider using this picture in the flap.
So my sister appears to be right after all when she mocks men for cooking by counting grams and milliliters…
(The older of the two sisters. Not the younger, formerly globular, Wing Tsun-practicing one.)
((The important scene from the first video, smaller and without subtitles but in higher resolution. Read the comments to learn where the subtitles of the first one go wrong.))
Too… cool…
When I notice I’m dreaming, I either get goofy (like just flying around) or decide to wake up. Or I forget I’m dreaming…
Heresy!
Someone messed with reality itself! What have they been doing at the LHC? Or will they do it next year, and the effects will spread backwards through time, or something!?!
I did some reading in boring classes, especially when I had borrowed something from the school library and when it wouldn’t have been too obvious… which, often, it would have been… :-(
And for me, too, math was the only real problem. I can teach you all the chemistry you need, I managed to do it with my little sister… :^)
Do tell us more about that novel :-)
:-D
Impressive. When I’m that tired, I’m too tired to talk, or to move at all…
Are you sure that’s not worse? Is latex, or some other component of the gloves, soluble in DMSO? Were the gloves powdered on the inside…?
Scuse me? Two weeks ago you agreed to participate in one! :-) I can hardly wait! :-)
And there I was, thinking you had meanwhile read all Krasiejów threads on the Czech paleontological forum…
(…Oh. Perhaps you believed you can’t read Czech? In that case, you’re wrong.)
Measurements are for wusses. :p
eh? isn’t a TBSP a measure of volume rather than weight/mass? the volume is always 15ml, but it would be less than 15g, not the other way round.
Isn’t butter an emulsion ? The water content would bump up the density slightly.
BS
Jadehawk, if you need 15 g, then the density must be accounted for. We do that all the time at work. We need 3.0 g, density 1.5, ergo 2 mL.
You are correct, but I did cite the density of butter using Wiki. Too many chemists around here to try bullshitting. I must be honest and truthful…
it was because when my mom still used to do the mom-thing and insist on getting up earlier and “helping” me get ready, it ALWAYS resulted in massive fights over absolutely nothing. For the sake of sanity for the both of us, we had to give up on this system.
And to this day it makes my mom feel guilty that she agreed to this, because she thinks I would have finished school if she had been mothering me more diligently. No amount of explanation of my mental health at that time seems to be able to convince her otherwise :-(
sarcasm apparently wasn’t blatant enough… of COURSE that’s where that idiotic dream came from :-p
I realize that it is way down-thread, but I wanted to get a particular comment through to SC: Thank you. I cannot emphasize this enough. I understand that I need to re-examine a lot of my perceptions.
Before coming to the United States about 8 years back, I had not known a single Jewish individual personally. My institution in New York was the school of medicine of a Jewish university, and that is where I got introduced for the first time to Jewish people of different sorts: some were ultra-orthodox, some orthodox, some reform, some observant and some not. They were among my boss, my departmental colleagues, my labmates and friends. That was the first time I started picking up information about the Jewish people.
I hope you can see now why my views are slightly confused (as you have noted a few times); what I got to learn was an essential mishmash of bits and pieces of the Judaic beliefs, as well as fractured points about Jewish ethnicity and political ideologies. At the same time, it was pointed out to me how the Jews valued scholarship above everything else, and how in America’s progress and day-to-day life, eminent Jewish individuals have played (and continue to play) a very integral and important role: in science, in the arts, in finance, in popular entertainment, media and politics. And many of them were bound to their Jewish identity by means of either their Judaic belief system, or their common and shared experience of a gruesome tragedy, or both.
You rebuked me by asking:
My unequivocal response to those questions is an emphatic ‘No’. The Holocaust is one of the worst (if not, the worst) instances of genocide, and it is a shame for humanity as a whole. Drawing attention to it and seeking to remember it should reinforce that shame, so that the same horrors are not revisited ever again upon any other group.
When I mentioned ‘chanting’, I was merely trying to imply that it may not be prudent to base the identity of an entire ethnic group – not speaking in terms of individuals, but the entire group – solely on a tragedy, however horrific. That this (equating the identity solely with the Shoah) happens is an impression I got from many of my Jewish acquaintances; they informed me that this is one message repeatedly conveyed to the observant Jews in their temples and synagogues. From what you told me, I now consider this to be an over-generalization. I hope I am not misunderstanding your words again.
You also wanted me to explain what I meant by hypocrisy from my interaction with certain Jewish individuals. Let me take one example (out of a few). I had a young lab technician, an American Jew, born of Ashkenazi Reform Jewish parents who were active in the Jewish communities in New York and Israel, as well as in other places around the globe. This young man spent some time in Israel, visiting his cousins, who – he told me – were all ultra-orthodox (Chasidic); when I met him, he, a very nice, intelligent young man, was nevertheless full of fire and brimstone against Palestinians and the Arabic people in general (so much so that he loathed, for no reason, an Iranian physician rotating through our lab as a fellow). Trying to understand the source of this vitriol, I found that he picked up these sentiments from his experience in Israel, as well as from his parents and his temples (where, apparently, the Rabbis were in agreement that historically the Jews have been oppressed and continue to be oppressed (by the Arab world) because they are the ‘God’s chosen ones’; this doctrine of eternal persecution is fed to each and every child in the temples). Would I be wrong in calling this ‘hypocrisy’?
I seem to have lost the thread of this conversation; weren’t we talking about how much a TBSP is?
it is 15ml, or the equivalent weight in g. no one in this thread is needing 15g of anything for anything, as far as I can tell.
Kindly disregard the unclosed <a> tag above. It didn’t do any further damage.
All of Austria in the beer belt? Morons.
Also, they forgot to color the Greek islands, and Turkey should be blue…
Heh. When I was there (de facto obligatory cave-bear dig), I narrowly escaped having to drink a home-distilled one with 60 % alcohol. Those who didn’t escape later described it as “evil. It’s not bad – but it’s evil.”
Butter is 82 % fat, at least where I come from…
Day saved.
I’m not a big beer fan. I usually drink hard liquor.* 151 for everyone.
But I’m underage. :)
From ‘Tis Himself #616
He may have meant a Tablespoon, but didn’t express it as such.
Oh, and I wanted to respond to Miki Z at #389:
I think I was not clear enough in my statement, Miki Z. I apologize for that. My statement was not intended to be comparative; it was an observation. As I mentioned to SC in my recent post, upon my reaching these shores, once I started to learn about the Jewish people, it was pointed out to me how the Jews valued scholarship above everything else, and how in America’s progress and day-to-day life, eminent Jewish individuals have played (and continue to play) a very integral and important role: in science, in the arts, in finance, in popular entertainment, media and politics. I have always found it amazing that members of one ethnic group could be engaged in activities pertaining to the life of a huge country in such large numbers, and in such widely diverse fields. I don’t know about Norwegians, or the Han Chinese, but it is certainly not true for Telugus (since you bring that up as an example).
huh? he was directly referring to how much butter a Tablespoon is:
and yes, it’s approximately 15g, in the sense that the generic translation of ml into g is always for water, where 1ml = 1g. if we’re being specific about it though, we’d have to figure out how much 15ml of butter weighs, which is less than 15g, right?
Historical trivia: 151 is the proof you get with 3 passes through a pot (simple) still. The voyageurs shipped rum to the Indians at this concentration and then diluted with river water at point of sale.
BS
Right. Too many years teaching. [/pedant]
Damn! I must teach myself to be more patient and clearer in writing. Before SC (or anyone else) misunderstands my badly-worded expression, here is the clarification (Ref. post #629):
‘This’ refers to the piece of information I received from some of my Jewish friends – about how some Rabbis equate the Jewish identity with the Holocaust, and how some Rabbis indicate that the tragedies suffered by the Jewish people happened because they are the ‘Chosen Ones’.
There. I am okay now. Whew!!
I got 1 tbsp = 15g from Good Housekeeping Cookbook. The Gourmet Sleuth conversion calculator gives 1 tsbp = 14.235g.
Hell, there are paleo fire pits and pig fossil skeletons laying around in the badlands. You don’t even have to dig.
BS
it gives 1 tbsp of butter as 14.19g, if you follow the link to their Weight to Volume conversion calculator
Americans use volume measures in recipes. Europeans use weight, unless we’re talking about liquids.
And of course, there are the differences between salted butter, unsalted butter, low-fat butter, margarine, that weird butter stuff made with olive oil, etc. and so forth.
I tend to think of a tablespoon of butter as a little under 15 mm off the stick.
I did wonder about it, but perhaps too late. Don’t remember, it’s half past 1, I should stop trying to work and go to bed…
The same holds for Germany, and the boundary running through Poland is way too similar to the political border between the world wars for my taste.
Historical reasons: throughout western Europe, most professions were forbidden to Jews in the Middle Ages and later.
At the same time, it was forbidden to Christians to lend money for interest – because of Old Testament law, ironically, while the Jews already had some Talmud commentary or other that interpreted that law in terms of the real world, which means they were allowed to do it. Hence the strong correlations between the times when a king was in debt and Jews were persecuted in his realm, and the origin of the prejudice that the Jew is a filthy rich, greedy, stingy, parasitizing money-grubber too lazy to do real work which was, for instance, official Nazi doctrine.
Should I laugh or cry?
The smell always reminds me of oyster sauce.
Yeah… “Scandinavians tend to drink more beer than before”. Before what?
Oh. I was too stupid to scroll down. The second map is considerably better, though it puts too much wine and too little beer into Austria and neglects the surprisingly high regional importance of apple wine in certain parts of Germany and of Austria. And, as the first comment says, it shows neither whiskey nor whisky… In general the comments are good.
Before they started drinking greater amounts of beer.
@ Sili:
I’m glad you liked it. I’ve seen the same thing done with other citrus fruits (I nearly made Mandarino last month) as well as cantaloupe and strawberries.
I really think the secret to the home made limoncello is the thicker syrup. And stronger lemon extract.
David Marjanović (#644)
Goes right with the zero calorie energy drink I saw advertised a few years back.
@ David Marjanović:
I used Nitrile gloves when we had ’em around, but latex was easiest to get a hold of. As to better or worse, I’m not sure, but if nothing else, they give you time to get them off. Hell, they saved me from more than one Sulfuric acid burn. That shit when concentrated is fuckin’ nasty.
Ramen, brother. Still, it isn’t as evil as concentrated NAOH. Sulfuric tends to char, but NAOH penetrates and turns one to something resembling lutefisk. But carbolic is worse IMHO; Destroys flesh and anesthetizes ahead of its self. Have you ever seen the CRC handbook of horrible laboratory accidents? I still have dreams.
BS
Everyone I’ve talked to who has gone to college has had the “oh shit, I’ve got a final tomorrow in a class I completely forgot about” dream.
AFAIK, my dreams of giant flaming super-fast tornados that attack as a pack, are mine alone.
Last week I had a dream about being on board a nuclear submarine which was having a Chernobyl type accident. The last time I was underway in a sub was 1972.
WTF? Could be a false rumor I suppose. Hope.
Horrible that this man abused his daughter, but ‘waterboarding’ appears to be hyperbole, as it mentions that he was ‘dunking’ her head, which is not part of any of the variations of the technique.
Miki Z: Bit of a fine point there.
BS
It is, and if the headline were “U.S. soldier ‘tortured his own daughter, 4, because she couldn’t recite alphabet'”, I would have no quibble with the word choice. If what they described were waterboarding, I would have no quibble with the word choice. As it is, the headline seems to have been written to feed an agenda.
“Holes in what’s left of my reason, holes in the knee’s of my blues.”
/stupid Vikings
I often have dreams in which I realize that I have been dreaming, but I never know that I am dreaming. I dream something, and then later on in the dream I find myself telling someone about this dream I just had.
I also am more than one character in my dreams. And other people change identities: I will dream about someone who is one of my co-workers at one point and then later becomes my older brother. Or sometimes the identities are mixed throughout the dream.
I do not know what this means.
Italics fail.
I often have dreams in which I realize that I have been dreaming, but I never know that I am dreaming. I dream something, and then later on in the dream I find myself telling someone about this dream I just had.
Nerd question: Did the computer itself die, or the hard drive fail?
There’s nothing preventing you from yanking the hard drive and trying to use an external enclosure or installing it on a new (working) computer.
Well, OK, it might depend on the drive.
about dreams…
for fun, those interested might want to look at the writings of Carl Jung on the subject.
note, i say, for FUN.
http://library.thinkquest.org/C005545/english/dream/jung.htm
Dreams
the hard drive failed. we tried to get the guys at the computer store to do recovery, but they weren’t able to rescue the novel (or anything else for that matter).
it really sucks, mostly because I’ve never been able to write that consistently and that much since; so my writing has significantly improved since then, but I haven’t ever written more than 20-30 pages before abandoning a project. So even though it was a pretty crappy story, finishing it would have been an accomplishment to be proud of.
consign to the “I should always back up my work” file.
hah, I’ve become rather paranoid about that. now, all my work is on my desktop, on my laptop, on my flash drive, on my external drive, and on the internet :-p
sounds good.
Butting in here…
I suppose this SB post is getting a little old, but have any Pharyngulistas seen
http://scienceblogs.com/casaubonsbook/2010/02/things_i_have_learned_from_blo.php ?
(Is Rob Monkey a regular here? He’s holding up the side over there…)
Ah, the second Monday in February, priceless !
I suggest that if you live in Australia you don’t get sick on this day, because this is the day where the subspecialty Registrars have changeover, noone knows what they are meant to be doing or that they are on call, in one study the in-hospital-incidence of serious adverse events and mortality are raised by 40 % on this day every year.
And it was indeed like that…:-)
And in slightly disconcerting news :
Palin would consider running for presidency in 2012
“Tried my hand at the bible, tried my hand at prayer, but now nothing but the water is gonna’ bring my soul to bear…”
Grace Potter at the Boston Music Awards.
PZ, the furniture spammer is now posting under the ID “funscience”.
Grr.
:-/
and in other disconcerting news, the weather applet on my laptop is telling me that it’s -6F and raining. I do not think that is physically possible…
-6F ? Holy shit, converter thingie tells me that’s -21C, that is rather unpleasant !
Makes the snot freeze in your nose, let alone the water falling from the sky if the laws of Physics apply where you live !
Watching Maher on Leno now, haven’t heard from him for a while since he had his ass handed to him in the vax and natural medicines issue .
Ah, here it is, from last night :
Maher on Leno
In further good news :
Ruling allows UC to reject admissions credit for creationist courses
Sven, RE: Beer @ #309
Turns out, what they had @ my local grocer was Indian Brown Ale and “90 minute IPA.”
Both very tasty, the 90 IPA was smoother than the Stone “Ruination” and sweeter on the palate. The “Indian Brown” seemed a much more ballsy & more complicated “Newcastle” or in league with a Rogue “Hazelnut Brown Nectar” but a little less sweet than the latter, yet no less tasty overall.
Cleansed the palate with a Sam Adams’ “Noble Pilsner” and then got going on the “90 Min. IPA.”
Bill D. OM, I guess my Billy Connolly comment with the links is still in moderation limbo. Ah well.
Sniny monkey.
Sniny monkey one and all.
Rorschach@677:
One of the choice quotes from the linked article is this:
Wouldn’t want students reading entire books. They might read the whole bible.
The plural of synopsis is synopses.
</pedant>
“had students to read” is a fairly awkward construction as well. The apostrophe on synopsis just baffles me. I just cut/paste, so the mistakes are in the original.
Miki, I figured¹. To be generous, perhaps it was a hypercorrection to try to indicate that each book was evaluated on a single synopsis.
—
¹ I have faith (heh!) that when you write that you quote, you quote, not paraphrase.
*shrug*.
Typical irrelevant complaining. No sense paying it any heed.
[Copypasta from the Criticism deferred, but building. And no, my name is not Fermat. thread]
Posted by: redliterocket4 Author Profile Page | February 8, 2010 5:27 AM
This distinction between “perception” and “intuition” is not all that clear to me. Maybe it’s bad pedagogy, but I talk a lot about “doing the work to develop the intuition” in my professional life. I’ve seen the same type of talk about sports performance, psychological counseling, music criticism, etc. The entire book “Blink” (Malcolm Gladwell) can be read as being about this.
Also, what does “strange attractors” mean here?
I’m having trouble unpacking the metaphor.
On Australian tv, the brilliant Tim Minchin is singing All the Single Ladies. It’s quite disturbing.
Miki Z,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor
redliterocket4,
1. I didn’t mean to imply merely important, I meant necessary — otherwise, interlocutors will likely be talking past each other.
2. Well, no, I don’t agree with that. That new forms of language are realised is not in question, but that this is the modus of cultural evolution seems rather fanciful and unsubstantiated.
I was responding to your contention that interlocutors would “reach an aporia” regarding semantics, and indicated that this is not inevitable (given honest engagement and time).
What? I submit that, were there no other people in the world, I would still have some knowledge of the world, however flawed.
So, no. I can’t agree with that, nor with what follows that is based on it.
Well, yes, they’re abstractions; but this refers to whether they’re mind-concepts, not to whether or not they’re named or spoken of. They do not require expression to be such.
Remember, you originally wrote
I cannot but interpret this as you meaning that they belong to the same category; however, you’re presumably responding to my own response that “I doubt that. If every sapient being were to cease to exist, would time and space do like[w]ise?”
I think you’re confusing the map with the territory (that is, our conception of time and space with whatever time and space really are).
But I submit that ‘truth’ and ‘goodness’ are only judgements (roughly, the former is that which corresponds to reality, the latter that which matches our moral criteria); unlike ‘time’ and ‘space’, they’re.
But not only! I think that space and time are both that which are perceived through the external senses and interpreted via cognition; truth and goodness are only that which is perceived through cognition as an interpretation of the senses.
In my ontology, the former are thus not just ideal, but also concrete forms; the latter are only ideal forms.
Again, I take this is in response to my “If every sapient being were to cease to exist, would time and space do like[w]ise?””
I did say if every sapient being; the intent was to express that these concepts relate to objective, not subjective entities.
Let’s make it easier then; what is your definition of each?
Please elucidate.
—
PS I’m about to retire for the night (work tomorrow), but will respond when I can.
Wowbagger,
any recommendations for a particular weekend to come down during the Fringe festival ?
Never read her blog before; now sure I wasn’t missing anything.
btw, is redliterocket4 Matthew Segall?
Rorschach wrote:
Er, probably the weekend before the GAC (the 6th/7th) – a lot of stuff doesn’t start until March 2 so that’ll probably be the biggest one in terms of options. I still haven’t worked out what I’m seeing yet…
redliterocket4,
I know what a strange attractor is. Part of my graduate degree in mathematics was spent studying deterministic chaos.
I’m wondering where it means here. Do you think that there is some absolute and singular Truth and Goodness which you will inevitably reach or inevitably not reach after enough time but that it is impossible to know whether or not you will reach it from looking at your environment?
If not, could you explain the metaphor? This is why I used the word ‘metaphor’.
Oh shit, forgot to watch tonight.
If only GNW wasn’t such a shadow of its former glory back in 1996.
redlitelrocket4,
Wordsalad.
You mean Kant succesfully refuted Physicalism ? That’s new to me.
Oh, and in Physics, space and time can be defined and measured. Why isn’t this sufficient ?
I’m doing night shifts until the Sunday morning that week, so not ideal for me, might have to be the weekend before that, but I think I will definetely come down for a couple days.
Yawn, sophist philosophers say nothing, take pages to do so. Define your terms gents, stick to them, and be concise. That helps to get your message across. Exactly what scientists do.
Cool, drop me an email when you know you’re going to be here and we can sort out plans – if you haven’t already got something lined up. However, Soundwave is that Saturday so I’ll be there rocking out to Jane’s Addiction, Placebo and Faith No More ’til 11pm or so…
Wowbagger,
Looks like it might be the weekend 27/28 Feb since I have the following Monday/Tuesday off too, should be good, I mail you the details once I book !
There is the same smell of inane sophistry and imprecise thought in the air.
This pissed me off big time this morning http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8500712.stm(should't really listen to such stuff when driving to work)
Note many years ago members of the Sikh religion were exempted from the leagal requirement to wear a helmet while rding a motorcycle (in the UK). I was a biker at the time and would no more have dreamt of riding without a helmet than breathing underwater but it still pissed me off.
Here we go again
Screwed that up royally
Try again
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8500712.stm
New to this – be gentle
Been there, done that, learned from it. Just like you. Mistakes happen, and if acknowledged, are forgiven.
Gems of insight culled from redliterocket4’s comments on the “Criticism deferred” (or “Frodo’s journey to the heart of the Dark Empire of Dardor”) thread:
Autopoiesis is related to abiogenesis, but should not be conflated with it. It is more a
systematic description of living organizationload of handwaving than an explanatory theory.Fixed.
My point is that it is incorrect to suppose scientific research doesn’t always take place within certain sociopolitical climates. Science is a cultural activity subject to the same human motivations that guide, for better or worse, all our other endeavors.
Wow! None of us had ever thought of that!!!
To recap, philosophy is concerned with the universal aspects of experience, some examples of which are space, time, and consciousness. Physicists cannot measure or observe any of these three, because they are universal forms of intuition and not particular sensory objects.
So how is it that physicists came to discover that space and time are not distinct, and in fact are warped and twisted by the presence of matter, when this was absolutely contrary to the pre-relativity intuition? As for consciousness, it’s simply the relationship aspects of mental activity have to each other, and to the external world. Mental activity is, roughly, the computationally-interpretable activity of nervous systems and their proximate surroundings.
I tend to think that the materialism taken for granted here is just as misguided an understanding of the complexity of our universe as intelligent design. Neither takes seriously the implications of a thoroughgoing evolutionary philosophy. Yes, complexity emerges from simplicity over time without the need of an external designer. But when put in a cosmological context, the mechanistic assumptions of both materialism and intelligent design fail to adequately account for our current experience as self-conscious animals.
No, materialism does so quite adequately. Mental phenomena are computational.
To speak of “matter” (or exteriority) as if it might exist in abstraction from “mind” (or interiority) is to employ a form of substance dualism.
No it isn’t.
As for an account of self-consciousness as epiphenomenal to the brain, I refer you to my reasoning (#222) concerning the incoherence of any definition of matter in abstraction from mind.
There wasn’t any reasoning there.
Observers don’t have magic powers to alter reality, but reality independent of experience cannot be conceived of but as an empty abstraction.
No it isn’t. (If you keep making these false and unsupported claims, I’ll keep simply denying them.)
I agree that our minds are what our brains do, but I’d add that what our brains do in any given moment is in no way separate from what the rest of the universe is doing. Mind is not contained in the human skull, but leaks out to participate in the realization of the world.
This is the first apparently quasi-sensible thing you’ve said, although I’m sure you mean something completely absurd by it. Mind doesn’t “leak out”, because it’s not a stuff (but I think you agree with that), but humans (and to a much lesser extent other animals) make use of cognitive prostheses. This is entirely compatible with materialism.
Either redliterocket4 is Matthew Segall (after the drubbing he got here under that name, I’d not be surprised if he came back under another), or someone’s been cloning evolutionary mystics, which I would consider a seriously unethical use of biotechnology.
I choo-choo-choose a new thread.