patrick.net

NDrLoR says

HeadSet says

the fossil of a dragonfly with a 4 foot wing span

Can you imagine that hitting your windshield of getting stuck in your radiator or AC condenser?

Today's dragonflies feast on mosquitos. I would be more worried about the mosquitos a 4 foot wingspan dragonfly would eat.

A conspiracy theory:

Plants can not use CO2 if its concentration falls below ca. 100 ppm in atmosphere, and they suffer even at somewhat higher levels. These lower levels were approached in recent geologic times (minimum of ca. 180 ppm). If plants die, all multi-cellular life will likely die.

May be plants and/or aliens farm us so we would increase CO2 levels in atmosphere???

Remember quote from Kurt Vonnegut:

“Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.”

Bd6r says

Plants can not use CO2 if its concentration falls below ca. 100 ppm in atmosphere,

Yes. Now notice how Venus and Mars have atmospheres that are nearly totally CO2. The young Earth was likely that way as well. Photosynthesis over the millions of years has pulled all that CO2 out and gave us the 20% Oxygen atmosphere. All that oil/coal/gas in the ground is composed of carbon that was once CO2 in the atmosphere.

HeadSet says

And if the atmosphere was 40% oxygen, imagine the epic forest fires,

I've seen 25% oxygen declared the level of fires till there's no damp fuel left to reach or the oxygen is burned back down. Not to mention, such concentrations of oxygen are harmful to life long term. It's past a point of diminishing returns for air breathing life and well into biologically overwhelming free radical territory.

Tenpoundbass says

My predictions that water would come from land and not from the sea has been far more correct than any Global Warming, Climate Change, Sea rise bullshit.
The ocean is peaked out at 30K feet deep. It just can't give any more. The pressure pumps the water back into the crust,

You are not even wrong.

HeadSet says

es, in the same way that a Creation Science type sees plenty of evidence that Noah's arc existed

Except, NOT in the same way at freaking ALL. There is no "because God/Al Gore/Greta Asperg says" in my worldview. I'm nothing if not an iconoclast, willing to attack even "my side's" own sacred cows toward the goal of removing BS. People who are actual allies always seem to mistake this as "being totally bought in to the other side's rhetoric" and double down on weak claims that work against our important common goals. The post concluding the girl who died of an aneurysm was 100% certainly caused by the covid vax is a fine example of this.

Automan Empire says

The post concluding the girl who died of an aneurysm was 100% certainly caused by the covid vax is a fine example of this.

With what percentage of certainty do you think the healthy young woman who died shortly after the jab was caused by the jab?

Not expecting a cogent answer.

Onvacation says

Automan Empire says

The post concluding the girl who died of an aneurysm was 100% certainly caused by the covid vax is a fine example of this.

With what percentage of certainty do you think the healthy young woman who died shortly after the jab was caused by the jab?

Not expecting a cogent answer.

I laid it out pretty plainly upthread that there is no info to go on, other than what has been copypasted to 3 websites. Researching the woman herself doesn't yield any new covid-related information, and doesn't show anyone who knew her personally hanging on the question of whether the VAX caused it. It COULD have been ruptured by sequelae of the vax, it could have been completely independent. THERE IS NO FURTHER INFORMATION TO WORK TOWARD A DIFFERENTIAL ON THIS QUESTION. Therefore, I don't assign ANY percentage to it. Like many complex and uncertain issues, I imagine constellations of probabilities. Arbitrarily assigning a 0-100 precentage of certainty introduces bias to the consideration of the matter internally, and communicates a nonexistent level of certainty, and a suite of presuppositions freight on board, to anyone who hears such a number expressed.

Some people can't seem to live with any level of uncertainty. They'll settle on uncertain answers because the cognitive dissonance of feeling uncertain is to THEIR VALUES somehow less bad than the cognitive dissonance of realizing one has incorporated a falsehood as true, which has far reaching epistemic implications toward everything else one believes as "true."

SIDE NOTE TO PATRICK about the site. The quote function here is better than many websites. If possible, can you someday add bold, italic, and underline buttons, even just to drop HTML tags at the cursor, to make all modalities of emphasis as expedient as all caps in the heat of typing? Thanks.

Automan Empire says

If possible, can you someday add bold, italic, and underline buttons, even just to drop HTML tags at the cursor, to make all modalities of emphasis as expedient as all caps in the heat of typing? Thanks.

you know there is the ability to do this. Just XML.

<i>italics</i>
<u>underline</u>
<b>bold</b>

I also fucking hate XML if you regard this as a poor solution. XML is the stupidest, most cumbersome markup there is. When you close a tag, you MUST close the last tag you opened, so there's needless redundancy, and for some fucking stupid reason, 60 years ago (about when SGML was created) this was thought it's less likely to create errors, instead of more.

Automan Empire says

SIDE NOTE TO PATRICK about the site. The quote function here is better than many websites. If possible, can you someday add bold, italic, and underline buttons, even just to drop HTML tags at the cursor, to make all modalities of emphasis as expedient as all caps in the heat of typing? Thanks.

Thanks, I've had this on my list for a long time. I'll bump up its priority.

Of course CO2 is a greenhouse gas. People pump it into their green houses all-the-time!

Automan Empire says

I've seen 25% oxygen declared the level of fires till there's no damp fuel left to reach or the oxygen is burned back down. Not to mention, such concentrations of oxygen are harmful to life long term. It's past a point of diminishing returns for air breathing life and well into biologically overwhelming free radical territory.

35% Oxygen Atmosphere in the Carboniferous, largest flora ever recorded. Trees were often 100+ feet tall, some approaching 150 feet.

Thanks for the lignite, Stigmaria!

Fire played an extensive role in Carboniferous era ecosystems:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0031018294900051

... and the high prevalence of oxygen made large creatures (reptiles with inefficient lung systems) metabolism more viable. The decline in oxygen, which was rather sudden, is often suspected as one of the main reasons for the reduction for the mass extinction event following the end of the Pennsylvanian Epoch and the beginning of the Permian

The South Pole has just recorded the coldest season ever recorded.