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A few sites I've stumbled across recently....

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green slope / black diamond?

Jun 11, 2025 at 8:07 AM | Registered Commentertomo

tomo,
Well, yes. We can hope for the green slope, but you seem to have slipped onto a black diamond.

Jun 11, 2025 at 4:41 AM | Unregistered CommenterRobert Swan

tomo,
Well, yes. We can hope for the green slope, but you seem to have slipped onto a black diamond.

Jun 11, 2025 at 4:40 AM | Unregistered CommenterRobert Swan
Jun 11, 2025 at 2:27 AM | Registered Commentertomo

The USA approval process for a hepatitis B vaccine in 2018 is, um, impressive.

Perhaps it's reassuring to know that the same problems were around a couple of millenia ago:

  quis custodiet ipsos custodes (Juvenal)
  sic omnia fatis in peius ruere (Virgil)

And Virgil's was a bit on the pessimistic side. Things occasionally improve before resuming the steady march downhill.

Jun 11, 2025 at 1:53 AM | Unregistered CommenterRobert Swan

tomo,
I do enjoy cosmology stuff, but as light entertainment. It helps to underline the deeper jokes in Red Dwarf. For the business of light/EMR being a wave in the aether, it starts getting a bit like Feynman's "Oomph" explanation for everything (that really explains nothing).


Thought this sounded a more plausible explanation for the violence in the Gaza relief supply lines. Perhaps just confirming my biases...

Hope Greta enjoyed the film presentation.

Jun 10, 2025 at 7:53 AM | Unregistered CommenterRobert Swan

What I enjoyed about the cosmology video was the circular thing where it seemed to me that in attempting to fix acknowledged issues with the mainstream explanation consequent from fresh observations an explanation was offered which - if logically applied and followed through seemed to blow up the settled explanation...

or something ... I think I've that about right?

Some people have difficulty saying "that's odd, I don't know"...

Another one that entertains is anomalous red shift in quasars that defies explanation and has generated lots of conjecture (mostly conjecture!)

Jun 9, 2025 at 3:16 PM | Registered Commentertomo

Bonus picture. (King's Birthday long weekend here, so I'm going wild)

Jun 9, 2025 at 2:09 AM | Unregistered CommenterRobert Swan

Mailman, tomo,
There might be quite a lot in parallel between Starmer cosying up to the Muslims in the electoral base and General Motors cosying up to SAIC. Seemed so clever to begin with...

On the CO2 business: it's always seemed strange how often we're told CO2 is a well mixed gas. In what sense? On average it is, because that's what averaging *is*, but obviousy there's going to be more CO2 near a smoke stack or a volcano, and less under the canopy of a rainforest. The OCO2 plots bear it out very nicely, but I don't think the climatologists want to see those, lest they be asked to explain the climatic effects.

The alternative to the big bang video didn't really grab me. Yes, QED involves a lot of magical mumbo jumbo, but so is the notion of "aether". I felt the video was just offering alternative nomenclature for the existing theory — that instead of Feynman QED diagrams, you'd have very similar looking Feynman Aether diagrams, etc.

Perhaps if they offered a suitable test that QED should fail and Aether theory pass...

Economics is (reasonably enough) known as the dismal science. Cosmology strikes me as being in the same class. Sciency, but not science. More interesting than economics, but still not in touch with reality. Perhaps the psychedelic science.

Jun 9, 2025 at 1:56 AM | Unregistered CommenterRobert Swan

A hint of some unsettled science

https://youtu.be/cj-7vdYij6U

Jun 8, 2025 at 9:19 AM | Registered Commentertomo

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