Long ago I saw an episode on Ira Flatow's Newton's Apple where he asked how a helium balloon in a bus would behave when the vehicle began to move. One...
The upper midwest of the US doesn't harbor many red squirrels, so I'm not familiar with their behavior. Grey squirrels are everywhere around here. The...
An impressive example is a dog tearing after a Frisbee, then leaping to catch it in its jaws. But other animals do this too. An eagle dives to catch a...
Quite some time ago I read that infants have a limited built in knowledge about the world. This was demonstrated by showing the baby a helium-filled b...
The worms that early birds get are something of an ecological problem. The native earthworms of North America were scraped off by the last glacial per...
It seems to me that insects (using it as a general term) are scarcer than they used to be. Mayflies (order Ephemeroptera) used to be extremely plentif...
So, what were you sick with? Norovirus? Covid19? Salmonella? Rhinovirus? Strep throat? Hope you are well, now. Malaise is one thing, but being really ...
I don't think either one of us is right, or wrong. I don't know enough about how the brain works to be right or wrong. I'm just guessing and passing o...
If it is the case that neither of us knows more than just "a bit about the brain' than your claims about your self, and my claims about my self, and w...
Which is how Lars Chittka figured out so much about The Mind of A Bee, his 2023 book about bee perception, cognition, and success. One of his observat...
It isn't that 'I' or 'you' don't exist; rather, the identity that I have doesn't occupy a specific region of the brain called "the self" -- at least t...
And who are you? Where did you come from? Who do you think you are? So, some neurological researchers and thinkers propose that the 'self' -- you, I -...
OK, so another good theory down the drain. On the other hand, nothing was stopping the child's custodian from loading a syringe with some arsenic and ...
When it comes to our power of thought, it's still hidden. We don't know at this point how the brain thinks BECAUSE we do not have access to enough of ...
That is probably true, but I didn't have tetanus treated or not, so... How did it happen? I did read (in the same tabloid you read) that tetanus vacci...
Tetanus (caused by Clostridium tetani) is just as likely, which is pretty bad. But having one's leg rot off is not good, either. I stepped on a lot of...
I too, and I strongly prefer premium brands with high-quality ingredients (no guar gum, locust bean gum, carrageenan, artificial flavoring, invert sug...
Why would you even want to do that? Ice cream is not a low calorie food. Julia Child's was making a butter-and-sugar-rich dessert with another chef, w...
Google said 'guiri' means "uncouth foreign tourists, usually those with Northern European looks". Well, of course thrifty Northern Europeans would hav...
The availability of fruit emoji's might be sufficient reason to move the whole TPF site to Discord! One could use the pineapple emoji to efficiently w...
Brain worms, mostly. Robotic devils, viruses up the ying yang, subversives of every variety -- nothing too unusual. Dark mode is very dark, indeed -- ...
Hey, Shawn; I don't think it's going to happen either--not because the population is so satisfied, but because the capitalists are so entrenched and w...
Why the hell not? Isn't one of the consequences of capitalism that the proletariat (working class) become increasingly proficient in the complex workp...
Emma Goldman, the famous early 20th Century anarchist allegedly said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution," As is often the case ...
Are there no oppressed masses yearning to be free? No exploited-to-exhaustion workers? No lumpen proles? Where's the alienation, the anomie, the despa...
Did Captain Kirk make William Shatner, or did William Shatner make Captain Kirk? Or, on a different level, did the Presidency corrupt Trump, or did Tr...
According to a report in Worm City News, stinging worms have washed up on the shores of Texas. The little bastards have tubules containing venom betwe...
The Guardian, 8/29/24 As if reasons were needed, this demonstrates why one should avoid terminally boring work in soulless offices where dropping dead...
What should the EU do when Trump wins the next election? Have you no highly skilled assassins? Have you no advanced voting machine hackers? Have you n...
At the risk of foot-in-mouth-disease... a) the world is understandable. b) our sensory information is reasonably reliable c) BUT we are perfectly capa...
My knowledge of Kant is from snippets I've read elsewhere. His work IS, however, on my list of things I would have read had I been born in an alternat...
We all lose a certain number of brain cells every day, about 1 cell every second. Tick, tick tick. Since yesterday at this time you have lost 86,400 b...
Probably the worst sermon topic for any preacher, priest, or pastor is what they have to deal with on Trinity Sunday. Explaining the Trinity, and why/...
Been there, done that. Except that I don't consider Christianity "false". There are no "true" religions so there can't be any "false" ones. Religions ...
One way to avoid Covid is to shun other people, who are nothing but hell, according to J. P. Sartre. Fuck Sartre. Kant asked, "What can I know? What o...
Very interesting. I first heard about the EUB when I was a freshman at Winona State. The 'house parents' of the Wesley Foundation house were an EUB co...
Per my favorite New York Jew, Woody Allen: "I'm not afraid of dying; I just don't want to be there when it happens." I'm 78; I scheduled hip replaceme...
The genre of "gospel" music is quite large and a lot of it is very singable for otherwise unskilled congregations. "Power in the Blood" is a good exam...
Proof of the difficulty of talking about the happiness of the masses. Certainly the USSR had a properly functioning social fabric. They wouldn't have ...
I don't know how to think about "The Happiness of All Mankind", all 8 billion individuals -- one by one or collectively. Only individuals can experien...
What I make of it is that eventually the dogma becomes crushingly heavy and squeezes the life out of whatever liberation a religious movement might ha...
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