In a related research paper, scientists proved that water is wet.

I wonder how these kinds of papers get funding at all…

Big Aqua.

I really don't understand why Israel has such animus against Iran. Didn't Cyrus the Great, the Iranian emperor, free the Israelites from bondage in Babylon, and to boot, rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem? Don't the Israelites owe a long-standing debt to the Iranians?

Israel wants to create "greater Israel" and they despise Muslims. Iran has helped defend Palestinians and is a regional power. Israel is a lot like Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan, attacking other countries to grow their "empire", driven by racial supremacy. Zionism is a European ideology from the late 1800s and doesn't really have anything to do with ancient history.

No. There are lots of colors that our eyes can see, but which no 3-color device can produce. They're usually highly saturated, and many of the deep greens can't be produced by 3-color devices.

What's going on here is different. The researchers managed to identify individual cones in the retinas of human subjects. They then shot tiny pulses of light at ONLY the M (green-sensitive) cones. This avoided stimulating the other cones, and subjects saw a color they could not have seen otherwise.

The issue here is that the S, M, and L cones have overlapping sensitivity curves: normally if you shine green light on the retina, all three cones will respond, and your brain will say "green". But here they are stimulating only one cone, not all 3.

That's because you probably are using gmail, and Google is reading your emails and harvesting your shopping history. That's why Amazon is being secretive: to deny Google that information.

I am not using Gmail. I like having the actual order details in my email so I can keep track of various orders without needing to go to Amazon's increasingly sluggish website.

Not to mention that finding previous orders via email is much, much faster than going through their website.

I.e you’re saying AWS values hiding data from google more than customer satisfaction.

That doesn’t sound like being customer focused or obsessed at all.

I'm ok with Google having that information. Where is the checkbox to enable including useful details in emails?

I see quite the opposite. On the left side of the plot, for countries with the lowest cvd rates, there is a whole range of dosages for statins. In other words, countries with low and high statin usage have low death rates from cardiovascular disease.

Diet & lifestyle? Leftmost Low statin has some high fish intake high veg diet. But probably not low salt. Far right has some high salt, high smoking rate econs. I selected AU, NZ and UK to compare as high health budget, high statin use. average Western diet to AR,UY which have good health systems, meat dominated, lower statin and see a weaker but present horizontal separation.

Maybe I'm being to optimistic about the signal. I do tend to a default position of belief in western medical science consensus and it tends to "take statins if old" according to "big statin" funded pop science at least.

But no country with high statin use has high death rates.

You can have low death rates without using statins, but using statins does prevent high death rates.

Or countries with enough money for statins also can afford other interventions. Or whatever.

My favorite is

"Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice's Lenten fast in the desert."

Walter Miller's "A Canticle for Liebovitz"

Tom Murphy a "recovering astrophysicist" from UCSD, would beg to differ. His basic thesis is that, in order to build human settlements in other worlds, we would have to construct, from scratch, a large part of the ecosystem on which our life on Earth depends. That ecosystem is huge, interconnected, and largely unknown to us. We can't build it ourselves.

You can't just strap on oxygen tanks and take protein pills and expect to live very long, away from this planet.

I agree with him that the moon landings and the current batch of people living on the ISS are part of extremely expensive and unsustainable stunts. They're not steps towards living off-world.

See https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2025/10/2025-a-space-absurdity/

I'm glad it's a push-button phone, and not a rotary phone. There's a hilarious YouTube of today's teenagers tasked with making a phone call on a rotary phone:

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OADXNGnJok

The interface on a rotary phone isn't self-explanatory.

From what I’ve heard on “the history of English podcast”, after the Norman and invasion written English disappears completely for about a century. This is because the clergy and lawyers were the only literate people at the time, and they were all French. When it re-emerges, it doesn’t have much French in it yet, because only the common folk spoke English, and the norman upper class spoke French, and they didn’t interact that much. It actually took another 100 years or so for French words to percolate into the language.

What I learned from the podcast was that what really changed old English into Middle English was the viking invasion around 800. Danes and anglosaxons had different grammar and as a compromise a lot of the germanic cases on nouns, which allowed for arbitrary word ordering in a sentence, got discarded, and English developed the current emphasis on strict word ordering that we have today.

This is a tax on wealth. Since many wealthy people don’t want to share their money, maybe it’s reasonable for some of it to be taken away from them and redistributed. That’s the real issue.

As Pikkety pointed out, vast fortunes distort the democratic process, because a few rich people can manipulate politicians to pass laws that favour them. Moreover, the growth rate for investments is always greater than the growth rate of wages, so exponential growth means that wealth inequality will only worsen with time. One way to reduce inequality is to tax wealth more than income.