When Hyakujõ Oshõ delivered a certain series of sermons, an old man always followed the monks to the main hall and listened to him.
When the monks left the hall, the old man would also leave.
One day, however, he remained behind, and Hyakujõ asked him, "Who are you, standing here before me?"
The old man replied.
"I am not a human being.
In the old days of Kashyapa Buddha, I was a head monk, living here on this mountain.
One day a student asked me, 'Does a man of enlightenment fall under the yoke of causation or not?'
I answered, 'No, he does not.'
Since then I have been doomed to undergo five hundred rebirths as a fox.
I beg you now to give the turning word to release me from my life as a fox.
Tell me, does a man of enlightenment fall under the yoke of causation or not?"
Hyakujõ answered, "He does not ignore causation."
No sooner had the old man heard these words than he was enlightened.
Making his bows, he said, "I am emancipated from my life as a fox. I shall remain on this mountain.
I have a favor to ask of you: would you please bury my body as that of a dead monk."
Hyakujõ had the director of the monks strike with the gavel and inform everyone that after the midday meal there would be a funeral service for a dead monk.
The monks wondered at this, saying, "Everyone is in good health; nobody is in the sick ward. What does this mean?"
After the meal Hyakujõ led the monks to the foot of a rock on the far side of the mountain and with his staff poked out the dead body of a fox and performed the ceremony of cremation.
That evening he ascended the rostrum and told the monks the whole story.
Õbaku thereupon asked him, "The old man gave the wrong answer and was doomed to be a fox for five hundred rebirths. Now, suppose he had given the right answer, what would have happened then?"
Hyakujõ said, "You come here to me, and I will tell you."
Õbaku went up to Hyakujõ and boxed his ears.
Hyakujõ clapped his hands with a laugh and exclaimed, "I was thinking that the barbarian had a red beard, but now I see before me the red-bearded barbarian himself."
The author has a point about dextromethorphan and phenylephrine. However, he does guaifenisin dirty:
>You’ll also find lots of cough medication with guaifenesin, which has similarly thin scientific backing.
He links ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24003241/ ) which shows that guaifenisin had no measurable effect on sputum volume or consistency (p = 0.12 for volume). But there are other studies with broader outcome measures which show positive effects:
>The pilot study was a randomized, double-blind study where patients were dosed with either 1200 mg extended-release guaifenesin (n = 188) or placebo (n = 190), every 12 hours for 7 days [...]
>Subjective measures of efficacy at Day 4 showed the most prominent difference between treatment groups, in favor of guaifenesin.
>The DCPD assessment of symptoms also indicated advantages for ER guaifenesin over placebo for the between-day changes from baseline in response to the questions “Over the last 24 hours how often did your phlegm prevent you from going to public places?” (Day 2; p = 0.0016) and “Over the last 24 hours, how difficult was it for you to bring up phlegm?” (Day 5; p = 0.0070).
G tends to do well in subjective (symptomatic) assessments, even when subjects are blinded, but poorly in objective assessments. However, this isn't enough to condemn it.
If you want to do a megaproject, just cover a significant amount of the lake in reflective material. This will reduce evaporation, increasing the lake level. It would be very bad for the ecosystem, though, since it depends on sunlight.
I think it's half this and half that Volvo is still a recognizable brand that Americans grew up with. My mother had a Volvo when I was seven. People would react if Volvo was banned. Polestar? What's that?
But Geely can throw down the gauntlet by building Polestars and relabeling them Volvos.
The scale bar on the far right "photo" (micrograph?) doesn't make sense. It is only slightly less than half the scale bar on the middle photo (10 nm), but the image is clearly scaled up by much more than 2x. Individual silicon atoms are circled in the right photo, but the covalent radius of silicon is about 0.11 nm, so they should be much smaller if the scale bar is accurate.
Tech companies like to rob the cradle, and academic departments hire far more grad students and postdocs than professors. Of course, this is also part of the problem with academic careers.
None of these strategies seem to address the other technological issue hiding beneath the surface, which is that EVs are fundamentally simpler (electric vs combustion motor) and hence should be cheaper than ICE cars when manufacturing pipelines are mature. This would result in lower profits across the car industry even in the absence of international competition. No US manufacturer so far has actually tried to build EVs cheaper than gas cars at scale (Tesla made a little noise and then got distracted), while Chinese manufacturers have no need to worry about cannibalizing the comparatively small domestic ICE market.
Letting the industry guide policymaking seems like it could lead to regulatory capture preventing EVs from reaching the (low!) price points that they should reach. Already the two-track emissions standards and chicken tax make cars too big and the "arms race" of having a bigger car than everyone else to stay safe (at the expense of others) prevents meaningful reform.
>Think of the body like a car, suggests Clemence Blouet, a neuroendocrinologist at the University of Cambridge in the UK. You can drive fast, using lots of fuel and putting wear and tear on the auto. Or you can stick to a gentle 15 miles per hour, and the car lasts longer. Living in a high-protein or high-calorie fast lane, she muses, could lead to the accumulation of those pro-aging oxygen radicals. Protein, in particular, also turns on systems that promote growth as well as aging. Restricting the diet could mean fewer of those damaging radicals and less pro-aging actions, keeping the body in smoothly working order for longer.
The implications here for quality of life are pessimistic. Also, the "extension" in the study is about 10%, but driving responsibly can make your car last many times longer.
I guess I don't understand why this study is suddenly getting attention when these kinds of trials have been going on for years. This one doesn't seem to have a particularly strong methodology or particularly unusual findings. It's just another page in a very, very long record of evidence about vitamin D, and by no means settles any major controversy.
>I always thought that if separating water and salt were easy, our bodies would have evolved to do it so that we'd be able to drink sea water and be fine.
Unfortunately for terrestrial animals, it's just not that simple. Seawater contains a lot of microbial life, some of which can be infectious or toxic. Going to the coastline to drink is potentially hazardous, because it usually means descending a hill on a predictable route which will be attractive to predators. And you need to get pretty far into the water, usually, because of nasty stagnant runoff, which can come from decaying matter that washes ashore, and sand in the surf. That means you risk drowning. Plus, you don't just need the energy for desalination, but the infrastructure (similar problem to real life!), which means more and larger juxtamedullary nephrons in the kidney, which is already a major weak point on the back due to the high blood flow in the kidney. Meanwhile, most of your food contains a lot of water, especially if you're one of the 99.99999% of animal species that doesn't cook it.
>Calcining Mg(OH)₂ -which is what you find in seawater
I'm not sure what to say, because it looks like you are copy-pasting from Wikipedia or something like that. Anyway, Mg(OH)2 is not found in seawater. Mg2+ is found as a dissociated ion. When you dry it, it mostly becomes MgCl2 with a little MgSO4. Mg(OH)2 is produced from seawater by the alkaline extraction process I mentioned before, and the process in TFA is interesting because it might be better.
Also, nobody would ever make magnesite ore. I referenced magnesium ore prices to estimate the value of the magnesium-as-ore in sea salt, because using finished magnesium prices would be misleading. Magnesium is mostly consumed either as the metal or as the oxide in cements and ceramics.
They are talking about lithium recovery, but there is a less exotic byproduct I'm interested in. One tonne (≈ 1 m^3) of seawater contains about 1.3 kilograms of magnesium, equivalent to about 4 kg of magnesite ore. Typical desal prices are on the order of $1 per tonne. Magnesite ore goes for about $100 per tonne, so the crude magnesium in a tonne of seawater is worth about $0.40, which could account for a substantial fraction of the desalination cost. (These numbers are very rough.)
Now you ask: why don't we just recover magnesium from brines if it's so great? Magnesium recovery from seawater isn't that easy: typically you have to treat it with some kind of alkali (often Ca(OH)2), so the cost is dominated by the extraction process (your alkali is consumed!), and you're competing with a pretty cheap ore. But if you have a solid byproduct, instead of a liquid, the options for magnesium recovery might be a lot more efficient, potentially offsetting the cost.
The fourth-most-prevalent ion, sulfate, might also be interesting, at least in a hypothetical post-petroleum future where sulfur as a byproduct of fossil fuel extraction is no longer "free". Sulfate is also annoying to extract from seawater, but again if we have a solid, the rules change.
As for the "table" salt itself, I think we'd quickly saturate (!) the market.
Electricity costs make the headlines, but I have also heard that the datacenters apparently make a loud perpetual buzzing noise that is audible from a large distance. That sounds like reason enough to oppose one being built near me.
Solar desalination looks pretty good in terms of efficiency. The problem is that the solar energy must now be collected at the shoreline. This means that a lot of coastal real estate gets turned into a desalination plant. Alternatively, you transport the water, but pumping seawater requires corrosion and fouling resistant materials throughout the system.
- land meats were all but banned in Japan for centuries prior to Perry's ultimatum, encouraging the development of alternatives in flavor and nutrition like natto and katsuobushi
- geographically, Japan had less access to land crops (even wheat was not common!) and more access to fish and seaweed than Korea
Sometimes I think people downvote me because they're frustrated that I didn't engage further. After twenty years of Internet discussions, I'm a little burned out and I tend to fire and forget.
Situs inversus ("dextrocardia") is a rare disorder. What I postulated is a (very) small selective advantage leading to a neurological mechanism evolving over generations, not a direct line from the heart to handedness during development. Anyway, the effect would be very slight, and even if it did exist, it could have gone away later, but dexterity would have been baked in at that point (see also the ocular blind spot).
Hyakujõ had the director of the monks strike with the gavel and inform everyone that after the midday meal there would be a funeral service for a dead monk. The monks wondered at this, saying, "Everyone is in good health; nobody is in the sick ward. What does this mean?" After the meal Hyakujõ led the monks to the foot of a rock on the far side of the mountain and with his staff poked out the dead body of a fox and performed the ceremony of cremation. That evening he ascended the rostrum and told the monks the whole story. Õbaku thereupon asked him, "The old man gave the wrong answer and was doomed to be a fox for five hundred rebirths. Now, suppose he had given the right answer, what would have happened then?" Hyakujõ said, "You come here to me, and I will tell you." Õbaku went up to Hyakujõ and boxed his ears. Hyakujõ clapped his hands with a laugh and exclaimed, "I was thinking that the barbarian had a red beard, but now I see before me the red-bearded barbarian himself."