cowboysauce

This is incorrect, meteorites can skip off the Earth’s atmosphere. The 1972 great daylight fireball is an example of such an object.

Not really. Phosphine is broken down by UV light so having it be concentrated higher in the atmosphere, where it's exposed to more UV light, would be difficult to explain via transport from a lower altitude source.

>Given that Venus' atmosphere is a complex mixture held at very high temperature and pressure, the "sign" seems pretty weak here.

The phosphine signal is coming from a portion of Venus' atmosphere that has pressure and temperatures similar to that of the the Earth's surface, according the the Earth and Sky article.

>The history channel is not complete trash. They have good experts on there and their productions are beautiful

The History channel uncritically presents any wild ideas that get them viewers. Here are some of the things they presented during an episode on Native Americans and aliens:

* Native Americans are descended from aliens

To start, I'm going to gloss over the unsavory implications of saying something that could be re-worded as "certain ethnic groups aren't fully human". They gave absolutely no evidence for this, no explanation as to why native Americans in particular and not Europeans or Asians. The entire thing reeked of the "noble savage" trope. Plus the ignorance in assuming that there weren't dozen of different native tribes.

* Alien spacecraft use native reservations as refuges from the government because of existing treaties

The evidence they gave for this was an eye-witness who claimed to see a craft that was being followed by a government helicopter, only for the helicopter to break off its pursuit after the craft crossed onto native land. So, these crafts can travel between stars, but can't outmaneuver a helicopter? Also, call me cynical, but I can't imagine that the government would deign to respect native treaties in such a situation. What could the tribal government even do to protest a violation of such treaties? Who would take them seriously?

* Native Americans can telepathically summon/control UFOs, allegedly due to their alien heritage

I'm an American and yet I can't summon predator drones. I can't even summon an Uber without a credit card. Seriously, what kind of authentication system is that?

* The aliens gave the natives medical knowledge

Except when it really matters, like during those smallpox epidemics. They couldn't even share knowledge about variolation?

>Yeah, the guy who invented Newtonian physics believed in an all-powerful Creator-God who created the world in a week or so. It would be fun to see you sit down with him and explain to him that the basis of his worldview was, in your opinion, 'woo'.

And yet you never see chemistry textbooks based on Newton's alchemical theories. You do see textbooks on Newtonian physics because the work that Newton started was empirically tested over centuries and when its predictions failed, new theories were created and empirically tested to supersede them.

>Actual science also doesn't explain very much.

Science explains the ebb and flow of the tides. It explains the dance of eclipses and the never-ending cycle of the seasons. What explanation comes from a psychic who claims to channel the spirit of a 10,000 year old alien who lived in Atlantis?

> The first known radar observations of a confirmed tornado were made at the Illinois State Water Survey on the 9th of April 1953.

http://www.chill.colostate.edu/w/CHILL_history#The_First_Tor...

One thing that the article hints at, but doesn't explicitly say is that "children" probably doesn't mean literal children, but may mean something more along the line of "citizen" or "young adult".

Was the existence of tornadoes really ever in doubt? I mean the connection between tornadoes and hook echos on weather radar has been know since at least the 50s and Ted Fujita is well known for his work on tornadoes during the 70s. I was really into meteorology as a kid during the late 90s and early 2000s and I don't remember ever reading anything that implied that there was doubt that tornadoes existed.

Growing up I was really into UFOs and watching UFO documentaries is still a guilty pleasure of mine. One of the things that struck me is that people who investigate UFOs are their own worst enemies. Often, while watching documentaries, people will say "I've never believed in UFOs until I saw one". For the longest time statements like that really confused me. How could you not believe that people sometimes see things that they can't identify? Then I realized that to most people UFO means alien spacecraft. UFO people have pushed the "I'm not saying it's aliens, but it's totally aliens" narrative to the point that the entire field is tainted.

As the article mentions, it seems like the idea of aliens visiting the Earth has become almost some sort of religion. The other thing is that actual science isn't very sexy. I'm reminded of the Hessdalen lights, unidentified aerial lights that have been appearing over a valley in northern Norway for several decades. There's a monitoring station there with all sorts of instruments, but there still isn't a definitive explanation for the lights. "These are alien spaceships" is definitely a much more thrilling explanation than "we have several possible explanations, mostly involving some sort of plasma in the atmosphere".

One of the documentaries I was watching was by the History channel and it was really bad. They didn't even attempt to present prosaic explanations and took everything at face value. One episode even talked about native Americans being descended from aliens and being able to summon UFOs. I know the History channel is complete trash, but this series was apparently done in collaboration with MUFON.

The entire thing has been tainted so completely that it can actually interfere with real science. The study of upper atmospheric light was likely held back for years because pilots who saw it were afraid to mention that they saw lights in the sky.

These things are almost certainly worthy of study, but the entire field of interest needs to be completely cleansed of the woo and pseudoscience that plagues it.

In this context irreversibility means that once the drug binds with its target, it's done. It can't unbind.

I would 100% live in a tornado prone region over an earthquake prone region. Tornadoes, by their nature are small and very localized. An EF5 tornado could pass within a few hundred feet of your house and you'd come out essentially unscathed. Earthquakes can inflict damage in a massive area. During the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake, the fracture happened along several hundred miles of the fault and the resultant tsunami devastated large stretches of coastline.

Since tornadoes are so localized, recovery happens quicker. Additionally, if your area was struck by a tornado, nearby areas likely weren't, which can provide you a place to buy supplies.

I'd rate them from worst to less worse as: * earthquake * hurricane * tornado

The warning a hurricane gives is invaluable. You can evacuate, you can gather up important documents, you can get a refill on any medications you take. An earthquake gives no warning. Even tornadoes give a lot of warning when compared with earthquakes. Not to mention the tsunamis that earthquakes can cause.

Bob Lazar has never produced any evidence that corroborates his story. He has never demonstrated that he has the level of knowledge in physics that he claims he has. He has never produced a copy of his master's thesis. The colleges that he claim to have attended have no records of him graduating and no classmates nor professors have said that they remember him, nor can he provide the names of any of his classmates or professors. His claims are more or less star trek technobabble and they're full of holes. For example, the location he gives for the location of the S-4 base puts it right on the edge of the restricted air space around area 51 which is extremely odd for a top secret project that involves flying alien craft. He claims that a bus took him to this secret base, yet there don't appear to be any roads that are suitable for use by a bus. There's absolutely no evidence for any kind of underground base there. The list could go on and on.

Are any of those from sun-like stars? The ones listed all seem to involve white dwarfs.

>"We haven't picked a place yet, but it's going to be closer to the East Coast than the West Coast,” Karp said during the interview. “If I had to guess, I would guess something like Colorado."

Geography is apparently not his strong suit.

You seem to have some pretty fundamental misunderstandings about strength training. Even very intense programs can be undertaken without turning into an immobile blob of muscle. Strength is gained not only through hypertrophy but also through neurological changes, particularly those related to motor unit recruitment. Technique is also critical and fixing flaws there can lead to large improvements.

>I have 2 friends who bulk up and are actually in a very bad shape mobility wise, their arms are so big that they can't reach arms behind their backs

Bodybuilding is only one type of strength training. Furthermore, the primary goal of bodybuilding is aesthetics, not necessarily strength. That's not to say that they're not strong, but there's a reason why body building competitions will involve flexing in front of the judges while olympic lifting competitions won't.

>Outdoors is not only safer but also more pleasant.

Speak for yourself. I live in a hot and humid place and exercising outside is incredibly unpleasant. It's 10 times worse if you're standing in direct sunlight.

>Calistenics aka exercises with the weight of your body are quite efficient and don’t make one look like an ogre

What if I want to look like an ogre?

I tried doing body weight workouts during the lockdown and it all felt extremely unsatisfying and ersatz after being used to my normal strength workouts. I also struggled not to lose muscle mass that had taken me a long time to build up.

Being outdoors isn't the same as sun exposure though. In particular, I can imagine that homeless people cover up more to prevent sunburn. Additionally, just being homeless might cause a depletion of vitamin D.

In general, I can imagine that people who spend a lot of time outdoors could get very little sun exposure since they would be more cognizant of the effects of the sun and more likely to wear sunscreen and protective clothing.

I always thought that was exactly the point, an acknowledgment that children and teenagers sometimes do stupid things, but there’s a big difference between doing some graffiti vs raping and murdering someone when you’re 15.

How is HCQ's effects on malaria even remotely relevant? Malaria is caused by a eukaryote parasite and SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus. They're radically different and unless you have some sources demonstrating some sort of biochemical pathway that is common to the two that HCQ affects, I don't see why you would even mention it.

I mean aspirin relives headaches, is part of the gold standard treatment for Kawasaki disease and prevents heart attacks and probably has fewer studies showing that it's not effective in the treatment of COVID-19, but that's no reason to speculate as to whether it'll prove to be another miracle cure.

I've seen extremely cheap guitars that will noticeably fall out of tune after playing them for only a few minutes.

I'm extremely skeptical about the claims that COVID-19 is going to cause a long term mass exodus from cities. Of course cities are less attractive places to live when everything is closed down. But if that makes city living less attractive, then why would moving to a place where those bars, restaurants, etc don't even exist be attractive? I grew up in a place where the population of the entire county was only 25,000 people and there are downsides to living in such a place.

The biggest thing is that there is simply less to do. I remember that meetup.com and similar sites had maybe a dozen things listed within 50 miles and they were generally things like "Senior Citizen's nature walk" and "Small Business owner social group". Finding a D&D group? Much more difficult and you'd better be prepared to drive long distances? Makerspace/hackerspace? non-existent. Your favorite musician is generally going to stop in the big cities and you're going to have to drive to get there.

If you're a foodie then your choices are going to be restricted to fast-food, a few traditional local places and maybe one or two Chinese restaurants. Food trends might reach you a year or two after your friends in the city. And hopefully the only Pho place within an hour drive will be decent. Museums will be small and limited and sporting events will be limited to the local recreational/high school teams.

Buying things will be more difficult. Your amazon packages will take longer to there. Socially, you're much more limited. The dating scene is much more difficult (which goes 10x if you're not straight). And the existing social groups can be insular and difficult to break into.

That's not to say that it's all bad. Such places can be incredible if you tend to be more introverted and love the outdoors.

Overall it strikes me as an "the green is always greener" situation. I think that, at best, most people will try it out for a year or two and realize that they miss trivia night at the bar/concerts/sporting events/parties and move back.

> How come, since we know so much, not produce a mechanism that counteracts the virus?

The virus hijacks existing cellular mechanisms for its own purposes. Interfering with those mechanisms could halt the replication of the virus, but it could also kill you. As an example, the virus enters cells through the use of the ACE2 protein. That protein plays a part in regulating blood pressure, so you can imagine the danger that could come from doing playing around with that.

However, SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus and its genome codes for an RNA polymerase enzyme that copies its RNA genome. Human cells do not use RNA polymerase and so it could be a target for a drug. This is how remdesivir works, but you have to find a compound that can effectively interfere, but that isn't too incidentally toxic to humans.

> I suddenly got an urge to learn how I can program proteins to do the stuff I want to do. From reading material around proteins, it seems they are nothing more than mechanical devices.

Good luck, I'd argue that our ability to design functional, non-trivial proteins de novo is essentially non-existent. The function of a protein is highly dependent of its shape and the process of how a string of amino acids folds into the final shape of the protein is extremely complicated and requires supercomputers to simulate. Not to mention that proteins may require help from another proteins to properly fold. Proteins may also be modified after they have folded and a lot of proteins require things like metal ions or other cofactors to actually be functional.

In the exact same way that every country in the world operates. The tribal government sets the criteria that must be met to be a member of the tribe.

> Because computers operate on the rational numbers instead of the real numbers,

Computers are just devices that perform computations. It's perfectly possible to construct computers that operate on values that are continuous and not discrete. In fact, such computers have been constructed before. They are know as analog computers and were used for things like numerically solving differential equations.

All those things that you've mentioned provide data that is used to measure the health of bird populations and can serve as an early warning if those populations start to drop. Tagging also allows biologists to determine the routes taken by migratory birds. This in turn allows them to determine what areas serve as habitats for the birds and determine if their migratory paths are changing.

How do you propose monitoring the health of bird populations, making recommendations for areas that need to be protected, or a myriad of other things without having the relevant data?

It's easy to smugly talk about how developed nations are obsessed with numbers and figure when you ignore that those numbers and figures are used to form policies that have tangible effects.

The article is behind a paywall so I'm curious as to how the authors of the paper distinguished between "introverts prefer mountains" vs "introverts prefer solitude and mountainous regions are more likely to be less populated".

>How does the spent fuel get aerosolized and into the atmosphere?

I'm not an expert, but fuel reprocessing is generally done is an aqueous state. The widely used PUREX process, for example, starts with dissolving the spent fuel in nitric acid. Splashing or boiling the liquids involved will cause the formation of aerosols. In particular, concentrated nitric acid tends to react with things quite vigorously, generating a lot of heat. The process also uses flammable liquids like kerosene and hydrazine.

Some radioisotopes also have compounds that are volatile. Ruthenium, in particular can form Ruthenium Tetroxide which boils at only 40C.

Ruthenium-103 has a half-life of 39 days.

In the United States, there were periods of time where Irish and Italian people were discriminated against. Yet today, the idea that an Irish people is part of the out-group and wouldn't fit in a workplace is completely out-dated.

The Rwandan genocide was Hutus killing Tutsis, yet the distinction between the two was very arbitrary and in a lot of cases boiled down to "the Belgians liked your ancestors more so declared you to be Tutsis".

Nazi Germany was allied with Japan despite all their racial purity rhetoric and some Jews were designated as "honorary Aryans". White supremacists today will gladly talk about the portion of white people who are "race traitors" and deserve to die.

Humans might have a natural tendency to favor those in their "own group", but exactly what that means is completely arbitrary.

Almost certainly not. A nuclear detonation would also produce noticeable seismic effects as well as release iodine-131, which was not detected.