buntsai

What you say is hilarious true for general anesthesia and was already deeply unsatisfying when I was a student decades ago. I think if GA was being introduced today, it would be have to jump through incredible hurdles to be used. In many ways, thank goodness these parts of medicine were discovered earlier when we had lower standards! :-)

I often used to tell my students that (plausible) mechanism is what distinguishes productive science. For example, population genetics was on very solid empirical and theoretical grounds but until we understood how DNA replication / transcription worked from 1953 onwards, genetics had a sort of unsatisfying magical, fairy-tale feel about it.

This is contrary to what some philosophers of science will tell you about measuring progress science purely in terms of its predictive power.

What I have to say applies really only to my fields of medicine and biology. I have no idea how physics or chemistry works as practical endeavours.

Not sure that is the historical timeline for Collectivisation in USSR and definitely no China. Collectivisation and Land Reform was a primary goal in itself in China from the 1950s. Communist Liberation was 1949 so right from the onset.

"state gradually withers away as a communist society is built" is 19th century Marx. I think 20thc Leninism, in practice, had a less sanguine view of the evolution of the state. The NEP was a tactical move. You could argue that Mao was always suspicious of state and party machinery which inherently had reactionary and counter revolutionary tendencies. However even when he was Mobilising the Masses, it was not restore to "autonomy" to the people but to clear the deck for further revolution. In Mao Zedong thought, "autonomy" is a very bourgeoisie.

Don't forget the encyclical with the German ("Mit brennender Sorge") rather than Latin (Ardens curarum?) title written by Pius XII and promulgated by Pius XI.

Is that really the position of the Catholic Church or what is a caricature of what people think it believes? The nice thing about the Catholic Church is that required beliefs have a formal spec. For something has important as this, there would be a clear and unambiguous references. Catholic Catechism / church council / papal encyclical. Do you have a quotable reference?

What I can find is only Aquinas that all living things have souls (anima). Humans have rational human souls. Animals have animal souls...

Descartes believed that only humans have souls. But that definitely represents a clear alternative to traditional Catholic beliefs. Many modern philosophers might argue that only humans have "consciousness" in a way that implies animals do not have souls.

In which case the "crimson carpet" appears to be the loose invention of the translator. The original just says "brocade" or I guess, "quilt", implying some sort of silk bed cover?

Agree 10,000 fold. English and Japanese are so different and have such different standards of aesthetics and literary form that good translations are like independent creations inspired by the original. I would like to know that the original form was. Even a word by word ungrammatical transliteration would be helpful. But not to have the Japanese available means I cannot even look it up...

The use of the "font" spelling variant rather than "fount" is any case a clearer indication of etymology. After all, a "fount" of types refers not to its role as a fountain of printing (fons fontis L -> fontaine OF -> fountain) but the pouring out, melting and casting of lead (fundo fundere fudu fusum [fused!] L -> fondre / fonte F).

I am not sure that Tolkien was a supporter of "Deontology" (ethical systems like Kant's). He was more probably a fan of virtue ethics of Aristotle and Aquinas. There is a large gulf between them. Wikipedia does a decent job of summarising the differences. We can not lump together into one category everyone who disagrees for many different reasons why we can sum up future consequences almost mathematically to come up with an "optimal" ethical choice. I am not sure that Tolkien is particularly interested in "greatness" either.

Some of your points are very curious. Biologists did not reject horizontal gene transfer. Or at any rate it has been part of the canon for pretty much the last 60 years which is essentially forever in biology. (The mechanisms for heredity, i.e. DNA were only discovered in the early 1950s). Besides, scientists are always "tweaking" theories as you put it. More precisely, a fruitful and productive scientific program leads to more and more discovers and elaborations that have to be accomodated. Look at the changes in the Standard Model in particle physics. The current controversy is whether and why the Standard Model is no longer being "tweaked". In other words, some physicist wonder whether current research is no longer yielding discoveries that allow advances and hences changes or elaborations to the Standard Model.

I find the efforts of the archeologists not to apply cultural norms particularly interesting:

In other circumstances, a caste system might be seen in a less favourable light:

> I like the egg myth because it suggests that the Chimú understood that social and political inequality is ‘baked in’ to humanity from the beginning,” says anthropologist Robyn Cutright of Centre College.

Similarly the discussion of preferring other people's children for child sacrifices. This is ascribed to their support desire for cultural diversity and laying new cultural roots. > “The Chimú had the ability to draw on a large terrain, and I think they were reaching out to diverse regions to find children for the sacrifices” > By sacrificing the children and burying them, they were, in a way, planting new ancestors.”

I hope the original archeologists have not been quoted out of context or that I have not misinterpreted them.

Either way it is quite amusing. I do not think I would regard child sacrifices in entirely the same positive light or even neutrally ...

Often the ribbons (alpha-helices and beta=sheets) form "protein domains". Canonically, these are stable, folded structures with conserved shapes and functions that serve as the building blocks of proteins, like lego pieces. These protein domains can be assembled in different ways to form proteins of different function. Different protein domains that have the same evolutionary origin have conserved structure even when the underlying amino acid sequence, or DNA sequence has changed beyond recognition over millions of years of evolution. In other words, molecular biologists use structure as a proxy for function. Looking at how the same protein domains works in different proteins in different species can give us clues as to how a protein might work in human biology or disease.

Numbers in the UK suggest higher death rates. There seem to have been something in the order of 150,000 excess deaths with fewer than 20 million positives (with a free and extensive testing programme). Both estimates come with caveats but this still suggest that pre Omicron strains had higher mortality rates. The key is using excess deaths statistics which seem much less subjective.

Have you actually looked up whether Gauss called this distribution "normal" because the other (parts?) of the distribution were "abnormal"?

Surely it is worth at least have a quick read of wikipedia or doing a Google search before saying something that may sound preposterous...

You don't really need to only break on punctuation. There is no convention to do so and so long as you so not break any logograms in half, the resulting text reads perfectly fine. In fact, the convention is to have left and right justified text with equal numbers of monospaced logograms, including punctuation, on each line (on the equivalent for vertical text). Classical Chinese before the 20 th century was seldom punctuated.