Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, July 14, 2024
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16 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Happy Bastille Day everyone.
And Cracker, this one’s for you:
https://youtu.be/3kyn9Es4HoY?feature=shared
WTF! How does this compute?
“NBC”
Why would this affect the “Dump Biden” exercise? Unless the whole thing were not really about winning an election anyway, other motivations for the various players.
ETA: Time is ticking by, and the Dem convention is soon. So suspending this exercise pretty much kills the “dump Biden” exercise.
Amazing’ new technology set to transform the search for alien life
I have no doubt there is life out there, but that does not mean there is intelligent* life out there. Millions of species have arisen on this planet but only one had the intelligence to develop advanced technologies.
* and we aren’t intelligent enough to not destroy our planet, so maybe not that smart after all.
@charontwo:
Because all communications efforts stop. It is unseemly to be continuing any campaign activity (including, you know, attacking your OWN candidate), when something like this happens.
This is basic PR/Communications 101.
Shannen Doherty, who was on Beverly Hills 90210, has died at age 53. She’d been fighting cancer on and off for years.
For a Sunday morning pallet cleanser, there’s still at least half an hour left of the Wimbledon men’s final on ESPN. Djokovic seems off a quarter step, but Alcaraz has been a man on fire, impossible gets and absolute confidence in his shots.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Miles below the ice in Antarctica there are lakes and rivers of liquid water. (For reasons.) These are environments isolated from the larger ecosphere for millions of years. Scientists recently drilled down into one such under-ice river and found krill.
I have no doubt there’s life, ‘out there.’ A lot of doubt that we’ll be finding intelligent life any time soon.
@Michael Reynolds: Douglas Adams made a big joke out of just how big space is, but he was right. The biggest barrier to discovering other intelligent life is that anybody out there is too far away for us to hear them, or them us. The inverse cube law is a bitch.
@Jen:
Damn.
I can’t say I followed her career much. The thing I remember her most for is an SNL skit on The Salem Bitch Trials.
@DrDaveT:
There’s a map, somewhere, showing the pitifully small reach of human radio waves since the invention of radio. Signs of human intelligence are a grain of sand on a very long beach. Unless someone’s living in the Oort cloud, no one is listening to old Amos and Andy broadcasts.
@Michael Reynolds:
The Oort cloud, while extensive, is not that extensive. It stretches around 1.6 light years at the outer edge.
Radio waves travel at the speed of light. This shouldn’t be surprising, since they are light. The first use of radio at scale dates back to 1897 as wireless telegraphy. So those waves have long since left the Oort cloud behind.
Yes, the universe is as big as the universe*, and radio waves spread and will eventually become incoherent. But the one sure fire way of finding nothing is to simply not look for it.
*Coincidence.
@OzarkHillbilly:
SETI has admitted they would be unlikely to be able to detect ourselves if we were just a few light years away. The omni-directional RF stuff we spew is far too weak in the background noise of the thermonuclear furnaces we call stars everywhere. A few military high powered directional beams might be detectable but it would be a crap shoot of one being aimed exactly right.
Even in the RF bands we are transitioning away from “high” powered transmission just a handful of decades after inventing the stuff. Might as well keep trying though, as there seems no other viable way at the moment.
Rice in coconut water: meh.
I’d have liked it a lot more had I not made it in coconut milk first. There is a noticeable coconut flavor to the rice, but not as much as when using coconut milk.
The marinade/sauce for the chicken worked exactly as intended. The recipe was:
2 Tbsp. soy sauce
1 tsp. honey
1* Tbsp. peanut butter
3/4 cloves of garlic minced
1 small nub of ginger, also minced
1 tsp. ground white pepper
Juice from one orange (didn’t measure it).
Orange zest.
Whisk everything in a bowl big enough for the chicken.
I let six thighs marinade for some hours. Then baked them in the oven at 180 C until they reached the right temperature.
Later I removed the thighs, and poured the sauce in a pan. I reduced it for a few minutes, then added about 1/2 tsp. corn starch dissolved in maybe 1/8 cup of cold eater. Let the thing start to boil, stirring all the time, then take off the heat. Last, pour the thickened sauce on the cooked thighs.
I also cooked/charred some green onions. to go along.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I completely agree. I’m sure that there is life every place that liquid water exists. Intelligence is going to be a much rarer thing. Communicating with other intelligent beings? Now that’s going to be nearly impossible unless everything we think we know about physics turns out to be completely wrong.
My husband and I went to a friend’s for dinner last night. She’s a very good cook but we had a few moments of concern and quiet conversation before eating. The meal contained bacon. We don’t eat pork in any form. We decided to put aside our usual habits and ate the meal without comment because this isn’t a religious objection or an allergy, just a decision we made for reasons that seem good to us.
It did make me stop and think for a moment how difficult things must be for people who do have dietary allergies or sensitivities. We’re both sure we had mentioned this to our friend in the past so we didn’t think to remind her. She obviously just forgot. Any way, we wound up discussing on the way home how to tactfully mention our “no pork” preference again. I find it hard to be polite and tactful with someone who I know would feel horrible about preparing a meal that contained something we don’t eat.
Then there’s my father’s wife who asked for information on our and my sister’s dietary needs and managed to neatly craft a dinner that violated all of them. My sister said, “I think she hates us.” That’s hard to argue with.
@OzarkHillbilly:
@dazedandconfused:
@Kari Q:
On odd radio transmissions…
One experiment the Voyagers did was to shoot radio waves through planetary atmospheres. The atmospheres distort the waves, which provide some info on its characteristics. The waves beamed by the Voyagers were received on Earth by NASA’s deep space network.
The team that designed New Horizons wanted to take the same measurements of Pluto’s atmosphere. But they couldn’t because 1) the probe was much farther away, and 2) New Horizons lacked the power necessary (it carried only one radioisotope generator where each Voyager had two).
So they did the measurement in reverse. NASA’s deep space network sent the radio waves through Pluto’s atmosphere and New Horizons received them.
I don’t know the relative strength of these signals compared with radar and broadcast signals. But they are the kind of radio transmissions that happen now and then and people seldom know about.