alejohausner

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

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?

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 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.

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"

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.

Rumble is indeed a free for all, with lots of angry kooks. But it’s also a place where reasonable dissenting voices have found a way to get their ideas heard. It’s a mixed bag.

He criticizes the military-industrial complex. Don’t you think that’s an institution worth dismantling?