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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: World Politics and Elections 2024

« on: May 04, 2024, 05:30:29 PM »

Pretty good long-form essay on why the Trudeau government in Canada is so unpopular https://thewalrus.ca/justin-trudeaus-last-stand/ Skips pipelines, the Tories' threats to end the carbon tax and defund the CBC, and the full scale of Canada's foreign policy problems in India, China, the USA (they have an election coming up and their own populists), and the Arab world (Canadian troops are in Syria and Iraq and the Canadian government has a position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict)

Three Indian citizens have been arrested in Canada and charged with the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar; police are investigating whether three other murders by gunfire were related https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/nijjar-killing-arrests-made-1.7192807

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History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: The Great Plate Debate

« on: May 01, 2024, 05:20:17 PM »

The difference in boiling points is why things are fried in hot oil (and why deep friers are so dangerous).

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: UK Politics 2024

« on: April 28, 2024, 05:23:06 PM »

I can't make sense of the contrast between the UK as chronically depressed (low on energy, fixated on the past, self-destructive, and unable to see actions which might lead to a better future - the way Labour refuses to state clearly which disastrous Tory policies they would reject is symptomatic) and that people on the continent are still risking their lives to get there.

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Cultures are Weird

« on: April 25, 2024, 07:36:49 PM »

Stormy Daniels' life after suing Donald Trump included a ghost-hunting vlog https://www.patheos.com/blogs/fivefoldlaw/2021/06/21/stormy-justice-and-justice-for-stormy/  Ghost hunting and the paranormal appeal to rural older men with less formal education in the USA, so I guess this fits her tours of rural strip clubs?  All forms of video rely on putting cute people with melodious voices in front, although you can succeed in any of them without being cute and pleasant-sounding.  The trouble with doing so online is that many of the SoCal tech firms keep blacklists of uppity women to suppress (15 years ago it was literal text files which they traded, today its probably a little bit more complex).

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History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: The Great Plate Debate

« on: April 18, 2024, 06:27:54 AM »

People often demonstrate quenching a blade in oil, pulling it out, watching it catch on fire, quenching it in oil again, and repeating until it stops igniting.  https://yewtu.be/iQ4_mWnGn6E?t=411

Quenching plate armour is difficult because its large thin pieces with complex three-dimensional shapes which can easily distort.  Armourers today usually fasten the parts temporarily together with wire.  I remember that the PBS Nova on reproducing a Greenwich armour had some good clips https://www.pbs.org/video/secrets-shining-knight-preview-em5biq/

Europeans wrote basically nothing about iron production and ironworking before the 16th century.  It was just another dirty manual trade like pottery or pig farming.  Theophilius only touches on ironworking because he decided he wanted to write about how to make tools for working glass, ivory, and precious metals.  And iron is unstable and often has villainous things done to it by conservators collectors and metal detectorists, whether that is assigning conscripts to scrub the palace armoury clean, or baking the sword they just dug up to stabilize it, or applying modern browning and bluing solutions.  So its hard to be sure of lots of the details, especially because arms & armour studies never became institutionalized.  Its a few curators, a few archaeologists, and a lot of people without academic jobs.

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Questions and Suggestions - The High Court / Re: Styling Blockquotes

« on: April 14, 2024, 07:20:18 PM »

Thanks for taking the time to fix this!  I did not know that there was a shortcut to refresh the stylesheet for a page.

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History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: The Great Plate Debate

« on: April 14, 2024, 03:16:35 AM »

I don't have any hot metalworking experience and Physics 12 was too long ago but I think boiling points have something to do with why water cools hot iron quicker than plant oils or rock oil.  Water boils at 100°C, linseed oil (just to pick one plant oil) at 340°C.  https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Linseed-Oil

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History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: The Great Plate Debate

« on: April 09, 2024, 01:35:49 AM »

GreenLeaf Workshop in the UK has a video on oil blackening steel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1APNUh5GTKA  It is good to know that from the Iliad into the 16th century, Europeans talk about quenching ferrous metals in water.  Today metalworkers often use various oils because they don't cool the metal as quickly so the metal is less likely to crack, but I don't know a source for that up to the 16th century.  Around 1130 Theophilius describes techniques such as burning a cow's horn onto spurs to blacken them if the customer can't afford gilding or does not want to spend, but dipping hot metal in oil was not something ironworkers did on every project.

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Cultures are Weird

« on: April 05, 2024, 06:54:59 AM »

A local paper in Ontario has a long-form piece on a serial swindler who got caught when he appeared on a livestream with a series of hard-right figures and someone matched his face to an earlier alias https://lfpress.com/feature/the-piano-player-the-rise-and-fall-of-a-con-man-with-many-names

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General Chatter - The Boozer / Re: Exilian Pub Out Of Context

« on: April 05, 2024, 05:05:38 AM »

Whilst not in a pub context, some people usually attendant at pub were having a discussion this evening in which the phrase "She's not Nietzschian! She just has breasts!" was uttered and it was decided that it was sufficiently spiritually a Pub Out Of Context thing to say that it should be added here as an honorary mention.

Nietzschian Nietzschian or the Kevin Sorbo series Nietzschian with bone blades and a bodacious femme-bodied AI avatar?

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Weird Internet Communities

« on: March 21, 2024, 04:31:51 PM »

Cathy O'Neil interviewed someone who dropped out of the Effective Altruism movement while still practicing some of the belief system.  Interviewee reports that a philosophy professor thinks EA is getting major influence in philosophy departments in the UK through donations. Contrast the LessWrongers whose preferred way to interact with academe is to read pop science books and computer science and psychology papers and who tend to be dismissive of philosophy, history, philology, etc. https://mathbabe.org/2024/03/16/an-interview-with-someone-who-left-effective-altruism/ (And Sam Bankman "if you wrote a book you made a mistake" Fried the son of two professors)

Interviewee, like the people above, noticed that many of the movement leaders are thinky talky people not doers ... except that some EA people now control big money!

Edit: American on how he spent a year working for a crypto company trying to decide whether it was as scammy and fly-by-night as it seemed then left when he decided the answer was "yes" https://johnsundman.substack.com/p/100-bafflegab

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: World Politics and Elections 2024

« on: March 21, 2024, 02:32:29 AM »

When the party-of-capital BC Liberals rebranded as BC United to avoid associations with centrist party-of-power federal Liberals in April 2023, something predictable happened: their support in the polls collapsed in favour of the BC Conservatives.  This put the leader of BC United in the situation of having to say on the record that voters are confusing the provincial and federal conservatives, which is plausible but not very respectful to low-information voters. Canadian parties have very small advertising and PR budgets so a rebranded party does not have many chances to communicate the new name between elections.

https://thetyee.ca/News/2023/12/27/Kevin-Falcon-BC-United-Not-Doomed/

Unfortunately BC United has gone full 'how can we reduce our emissions when China exists?' One factor which the Tyee interview leaves out is that most of the CO2 added to the atmosphere from the year 1 to 2000 was added by Europe and the North Atlantic plus Japan.  So we got the benefits, and telling India and China that they have to stay poor because we used up the global carbon budget is not likely to be convincing.

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History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: Space yays

« on: March 13, 2024, 04:41:35 PM »

NASA's safety culture after Apollo 11 is a weird mix of safety-conscious (carefully calculating incremental increases in cancer risk to International Space Station crew) and reckless (all those deaths in the Shuttle program)

Is this something that's actually traceable as a single block change, or is it more that it's gone through several phases since? We're quite a few careers down the line from Apollo 11 now!

Simultaneous in different parts of the organization!  They lost the Columbia while teams were carefully trying to calculate obscure long-term health risks to highly-paid idealistic volunteers.

Maybe because of its origins, NASA is always centred around a prestige project (Apollo, Space Shuttle, ISS, Artemis) and when that project gets into trouble management makes choices which are bad for science and space capabilities but good for covering their butts.  Currently they are cancelling a $20m science project (Chandra X-ray telescope) to have MAWR BUDGET for the Moon/Mars plan.

More budget would probably help, but giant prestige projects are prone to delays, budget shortfalls, and deadly engineering failures.

Edit: fediverse thread on moon dust and its effects on breathing and equipment https://mastodon.green/@AnarchoCatgirlism@transfem.social/112057068231111010

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Belief in NHI

« on: March 13, 2024, 06:15:23 AM »

The Walrus wants you to be scared of TikTok misinformation https://thewalrus.ca/social-media-is-warping-history/ which seems to draw on a trade book from a Big Five publisher: Jason Steinhauer, History, Disrupted: How Social Media and the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

Basically though, corporate social media are not places for establishing evidence-based consensus.  They never were, any more than bar-room chats, cable TV, or magazines for thinky talky people were.  If you wanted them to be, you would build them differently, and they would be much smaller.  Knowing verifiable true things is an uncommon taste.  There was no time in the 20th century when most people in the North Atlantic world were good scientific materialists, most people have at least one belief or practice which is hard to square with natural science.  But when you are one-on-one or one-on-few with people, you can listen with attention, ask some gentle questions, and offer some extra information and often they can take that and step away from the woo.

If you want a mass-media-sized audience, you have to create mass-media-shaped things like big speculative claims or moralistic gossip about famous people.

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History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: Space yays

« on: March 12, 2024, 08:51:02 PM »

One of the hard problems in human spacetravel is shielding crew from radiation outside the Earth's magnetic field whenever there is a solar storm (although a lot depends on the level of safety you expect).  One proposal is electromagnetic shielding but implementation is the problem.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/03/shields-up-new-ideas-might-make-active-shielding-viable/

NASA's safety culture after Apollo 11 is a weird mix of safety-conscious (carefully calculating incremental increases in cancer risk to International Space Station crew) and reckless (all those deaths in the Shuttle program)