As far as I have seen the US system is one of the most expensive but doesn’t , overall, have better results than countries with universal health care. I’d say it’s perhaps better for the rich but then they can still go private in other countries anyway.

V Interesting.

The link with interpersonal trust (because of the effect on vaccination rates?) seems kind of sad.

I think you have found out that social media does not attract the sort of demographic that can handle nuanced views. Just remember in the future - J K Rowling wants to personally murder all trans people - and you’ll be more poplar. lol

And I suddenly realise that after about a day of stories when mainland China dropped all its covid restrictions the media totally lost interest ... Did nothing much happen as a result , or are we just not hearing about it?

With some of these questions you could say we have working assumptions rather than absolute knowledge. To have an edge there would , I think, have to something that wasn't universe but the universe seems like all the space/time there is.

Though we don't know for sure , there is some reason for thinking it might also be infinite in size. There is in edge in the sense of the limit of our ability to observe. The observable universe has for us increased in size as telescopes get better though you could say that its also a sort of illusion since the further we look , the further back in the universe's history we are seeing. We are seeing it as was. We can only see as far as light has had time to travel. The limit is called the cosmic horizon.

And we also have some reason to think its pretty much the same everywhere in general. Though some bits are clumping together the space between is increasing everwhere. At one point in the past it infected very fast , slowed down and is now accelerating again. But as far as we know whereever you were in the universe you would look out and observe something similar to another observer. If the universe continue expanding its possible that we could imagine one day an observer looks out and sees nothing because all the stars would be too far away for light to reach them.

I know nothing - in no way an expert but i would hazard that there is a definite gradient in intelligence/consciousness/self-awareness etc beginning with very simple immediate input-response with no significant ‘processing’ to neural networks that take inputs and build models of external reality mediating possible responses to those that build more complex models allowing greater flexibility and even models of the models/modeller. I wonder if self-consciousness is a sort of internal experience of a model of the models or model of the modeller. But no doubt rather like the concept of life itself these are difficult concepts to be entirely precise or draw definitive lines about. And obviously we should be careful about considering potential variety in something like intelligence because there are perhaps arguably creatures with complex but niche limited intelligence and those with more flexible wide-ranging, I think. It’s easy to see ourselves at the top of every gradient but that may be in the sense of plasticity (?) and range rather than in specific niches. If that makes any sense at all!

Monty Python clip seems necessary…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17SJeBpWpMs

If of interest…

>Overall, vaccination was associated with reduced risks or odds of long-COVID,

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(22)00354-6/fulltext

> A new study, published today in The BMJ, suggests that COVID-19 vaccines may significantly reduce the impact of pre-existing long COVID symptoms.

https://www.ndph.ox.ac.uk/news/covid-vaccine-long-covid

I was listening to a podcast a while ago where they were laughing with a guy who (I think) had basically got a Nobel prize or some such for as they put it expanding our ignorance by working out that we actually only really know what 5% of the universe is - because dark matter/ dark energy makes around 95%.

Could already be happening? I could be totally misremembering but doesn’t it still progress at the speed of causality??? Though if so that would mean it might never catch up to some of the expansion? On the other hand … some theorise that we are already in a process of false vacuum decay - that’s what cosmic inflation is?

If you didn’t know about digital books being freely available from the library ( depending on country of course) then have heard the good word about their large selection of free ‘audio books’ too!

Reminds me of Some like it Hot!

It’s also interesting to consider the very mainstream annual pantomimes which are generally shows for children (and a regular Christmas school trip) in the U.K. in which the ‘dame’ is always a man in drag and the principle boy a girl. Of course it’s well known that in Shakespeare’s day women weren’t even allowed on the stage ( so plays that had men pretending to be women who in the play are pretending to be men and so on?) so I’m guessing plenty of actors that specialised in dressing up as women.

I thought it was at least looked down upon in (edit- pre-Christian) Roman society depending on your role in the relationship. In as much as being seen acting as a woman or subservient was a bad thing , being seen as the ‘dominant’ participant not so much!

Edit: I wonder why the downvote for what as far as I know is entirely factual.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_ancient_Rome

Also I think one has to be careful about perhaps using modern concepts of pansexuality/polyamory on ancient cultures especially when it’s based on another culture’s views ( propaganda?) about them and the Romans weren’t exactly unbiased or always worried about being too accurate when writing about other groups. From what I can see ( being no expert) Roman writers seem to have described Celtic women being shared by lots of men , being able to choose their men , and yet also the Celtic men preferring other me? But how reliable those comments are and whether it corresponds precisely to our idea of ‘pansexuality’ etc can we really say?

Wasnt that still in 70s (?) comedy something like Morecambe and Wise or The Goodies - or am I misremembering.

If it had been Shakespeare would definitely be deliberate.

It would certainly have been more convincing.

‘Allegedly’

>The explanation favored by Sagan is that the Dogon were visited by a technological civilization, but not an extraterrestrial one. The nature of the knowledge imparted is consistent with a visit by a science attentive person in the 1930s or 1940s when the discovery of the nature of Sirius B was being widely discussed in popular science books. This information could then have been woven into the Dogon's existing mythology in time to give Griaule and Dieterlen something very interesting to write home about.

>A variation on this theme is that the knowledgeable visitor and the source of the information might have been Griaule himself. Though an anthropologist, Griaule had studied astronomy in Paris. He was aware of the discovery of Sirius B and may have over interpreted the Dogon responses to his questions.

>In 1991 Walter van Beek, a Belgian anthropologist, led a team of anthropologists to study the Dogon tribe. Although he hoped to find evidence for their astounding astronomical knowledge, the team found no trace of the detailed Sirius lore reported by Griaule.

https://chandra.harvard.edu/chronicle/0400/sirius_part2.html

>It’s not very intuitive that the world is flat.

I guess history isn’t a strong point either.

>Some physics I don’t know enough about to have intuition on it.

Seems like you dint know enough about physics fullstop if you think evidence is unimportant and gut instinct is enough.

>I know what I know.

You believe what you believe. Knowledge entails a quality of justification. ‘Feels’ is neither evidence nor justification.

It can indeed.

I keep trying to find something on any limits to the worlds of the many world interpretation but it’s difficult.

>This implies that all possible outcomes of quantum measurements are physically realized in some "world" or universe. (Wiki)

I’m curious as to under these circumstances what determines whether something is possible or not. And are there potential universes that don’t exist because they are not the possible outcomes of any quantum ‘measurement’? Does that make sense?

I did find this .. though obviously I have no idea as to the validity ..

> In the Many World’s interpretation of quantum mechanics the universe we live in seems to split into separate universes. You’re in a not-special one of them and evidently they’ve got normal space. Same π.

https://www.askamathematician.com/2020/12/q-is-%cf%80-the-same-in-every-universe/

Like I said

>He’s making it up he goes along.

So it’s just your gut that works as a physics detector then? The fact that peoples ‘guts’ evidently contradict eachother or have proposed things that later turned out to be false …. doesn’t undermine your gut. How lucky. You should market it.

Believing that your gut can inform you of the truth or not of the physics of complex cosmological phenomena is pretty much the definition of absurd.

Intuitively it’s obvious that the world is flat and the sun travels around it …… that must be true then. lol

Anyway enough of Camelot your gut … ‘tis a very silly place.’

All possible universes if I remember correctly even in MWI? I claim no expertise but there are different kinds of multiverse theories. The cosmological inflationary and the MWI and branes (?) though some would like to link them? I’m not sure to what extent MWI is meant to be multiple versions of ‘this’ universe - the cat being alive in one and dead in another but the laws of physics still being the same? Or does it also produce universes with varied basic conditions? I don’t know - but i think the cosmological inflationary multiverse does include the possibility of universes with very different conditions and some parameters are unsustainable - the bubble pops , deflates etc.

>I don’t need evidence to know something is true when my gut already knows from faith and facts provided.

lol. So everything and anything anyone has ‘in their gut’ must be true? I always knew Santa was real…

Or you just have a special git detection device no one else does.

I mean frankly this is just silly. There’s overwhelming evidence that people believe contradictory , absurd , and provably wrong things.

Believe what you like but don’t pretend it has anything to do with reality or science. Don’t expect anyone to take it seriously.

>Black holes have a singularity and the Big Bang had a singularity.

These are based on mathematical modelling and extrapolation. Whether or not there was an actual singularity in the Big Bang is very much debated as is whether it would be the same kind of thing as what might be in black holes. It’s difficult to say since our mathematical modelling break down by that point.

>Put it together

And make something entirely imaginary and unjustified? Provide evidence that a singularity discharges energy into other universes….. Or this has any thing to do with infinite energy ( especially since some argue that the overall level of energy in this universe is zero).

Oh but I forgot. Your evidence is - ‘I feel it in my gut’ . lol. I guess that saves doing the science or the maths at least.

In the words of the prophets of Monty Python…

>He’s making it up as he goes along.

Whilst it's trie but entirely trivial that what is ... is. Claims do need evidence to be taken seriously and we can't know what is without evidence.

I have read similar ideas and they are interesting ( if well above my brain grade) but I think I am right in saying that in quantum physics ‘observer’ is really a term for kinds of interaction , it doesn’t actual have to be a consciousness? There is a certain elegance to the idea that there is some kind of natural selection process for universes that means while there may be infinite potential ones only some can be real?

One thing that you might find interesting is the idea that our universe is actually one with zero total energy. I couldn’t comment on its validity but presumably it could apply to multiverses too?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe