Ever talk to someone who hasn't had their morning coffee?

Dehydration, emotional or physical stress, and poor sleep hygiene can all result in reduced blood flow to the broca region of the brain, which is crucial for speech and audio processing. This is most frequently identified due to speech issues like gibberish or slurring (i.e., some of the more extreme/exotic symptoms of ptsd), but it also can manifest as hearing issues. Google up Broca's Aphasia for more information on that. Due to the fleeting and temporary nature in which most experiences of altered hearing occur in otherwise healthy people, this connection usually only registers with people who have another persistent issue which is the underlying cause. You, a little bit outside of the norm with a trained ear and all, seem to have cued in on this. Right idea, right observation.

Try to relax, drink water, maybe try resting the day before a show. Avoid the salty foods, maybe do some pushups to keep your heart-rate going between shows. The best solution is all going to depend on how you're built.

>I have clearly demonstrated that they are viable.

While simultaneously glossing right over the fact that all of it is attributable to a sense of vestigial practices.

Fair, but not really. I used a wrong word. While I agree that your response is correct in pretty much every respect, it highlights the consequence of rudimentary practices in a de-centralized field.

To the first point, "the term hybrid is used for this very reason, as juxtaposed with species." Obviously, I wasn't clear enough in my meaning that you felt the need to point that out, so I'll just own that mistake.

As to the rest, I'm sure you know "species" denotes "a population capable of producing viable offspring." So why would we ever use a different word? Outdated understandings lead to outdated naming conventions which persist after the science has surpassed the action. A hybrid, by definition in the context of biological evolution, is "offspring produced by more than one species." That's an explicit indication regarding the presence of distinct populations or a statement about the capacity to produce viable offspring. One of these criteria is affected, otherwise they should just be called the same species, sub-species or maybe even same ring-species from the very get-go.

Like taxonomy as you mentioned above, asserting primacy to the factor of a population is more on the arbitrary side of things. It's a blurred line in many respects. Viability, however, is not.

Most people tend to think of species as a label. A is this, B is that, etc etc. Consequently, they gloss right over the correlating feature that A is NOT B, B is NOT C, and so on. The underlying question is "Are A and B the same species, or of different species?" Well, it's science, and we can test that, or at least keep our eyes peeled for a test performed by nature. Are they able to diffuse alleles into a receiving population without impediment? That's a closed-ended question. While the answers to that tend to be found somewhere along a spectrum, it's a tighter constraint on subjective opinion, and is consequently the preferred approach. Veering the other way by calling mixed-plant offspring "hybrids" is, for lack of a better description, kind of missing the point in so many ways. That's a practice rooted in history, but not so much in the core of science, which is testability/falsifiability. Since the discovery of DNA and the commercial availability of DNA tests or other advances in tech/science, there's hardly an impetus to use that more-arbitrary decision making process as a place-holding crutch until such a time as a verifiable answer becomes possible anymore. We can police that up, we just typically don't.

We tend not to go back and re-label things accordingly chiefly because it conflicts with naming rights, plus the fact that it's a rather large undertaking that would require updating an entire field. That's pretty much it.

With respect to the viability of f2 generation hybrids, eh... re-classifying the parent generations in the manner described above erases the issue you present, which is essentially what a debate surrounding the relationship between humans and Neanderthal is all about. That all boils down to motivation or a sense of importance to "get it right" rather than a question of if hybrids are viable or not, or if our definitions need to change at all.

So yeah, "hybrid" absolutely does imply that the offspring are not viable. We just incur some leftovers because the history of taxonomy is loaded with examples that represented the best effort possible at the time, which in turn leads to a lot of people still doing it now.

The term "hybrid" exists for this very reason. It's to specify the product of two species, which is imbued by nature with DNA compatibility issues that either partially or entirely prohibit the free diffusion of genes into a receiving population. In short, that example of offspring (mules, in this case) is not "viable" by definition. In this case, because mules are infertile, there's not a reproductive vector for a horse population to have donkey dna in it, or vice versa... with extremely rare exceptions. In other words, "close enough to an absolute that we consider them distinct."

Ligers, Zonkeys, Jaglions, pumapards, coydogs, wholphins... there's plenty of examples of hybrids in nature. Chimpanzees have 48 chromosomes, humans have 46, so yes there is a similar problem, not to mention a world of ethical constraints on ever testing that in a labratory setting.

Interestingly, human chromosome #2 appears to be the product of chromosome fusion in our genetic history, which apears to be the explanation for how we "lost" a pair of chromosomes with respect to our closest cousins.

Recombination and uneven numbers of chromosomes as an impediment to viable offspring mostly makes sense in light of preventing chromosomal matching during the fertilization process. So yeah, fertilization occurs, but the resulting zygote is essentially informational garbage that fails to develop appropriately to thrive.

In meiosis, there's "crossing over" in which chromosomes of the same type exchange information. The jist of it is that donkeys and horses are similar enough that their chromosomes can produce functional offspring in mixed pairs, but the exchange of information between those pairs during meiosis renders the sex cells of that offspring incompatible. It's a state of fragility. Additionally, horses have 64 chromosomes and donkeys have 62. With rare exception, mules have 63. 32 come from the mother, 31 come from the father. What's left is typically described as an "incomplete" set of genetic directions, which further impacts their ability to produce viable offspring.

a long time ago....

"element" was just a word, nothing like how we use it today. Earth, wind, water, fire... then in the 1600s some clever guy thought about what we know today as chemical elements. That was the advent of "the atom." This meant the irreducible composition of a substance. By that point, you had early chemistry/alchemy actively TRYING to decompose substances into their basic elements and experimenting with different combinations. Like your question of gold... well, could it be reduced further? No? Okay, then it's an element.

It wasn't until the early 1900s that the modern definition of the element rooted in numbers of electrons and protons and such took hold. A few centuries worth of experimentation turned out to have some useful merit. Within a few decades of this, we built the bomb and haven't had a world war ever since.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.

Yep.

Dog breeds, for example are often the product of intentional selection for behavioral qualities. Some breeds are typically more territorial, more gentle, more "independent minded," and so forth. Right along with that, some dogs have very little in the way of "speaking dog" to other dogs. No interest in sniffing butts, playing or seeing who lays down in a vulnerable position so others can check them out. In the great debate of nature vs nurture, there are many examples of dogs not being socialized with other dogs very well, so they end up with distinctly higher error rate when interpreting another dog's nip or bark or standoffish posture. They might take that as an attempt to initiate play when no such thing was meant. Likewise, their own communication through behavior and body language is often enough met with confusion by other dogs. And of course, sometimes they appear to be just plain born that way.

I'll put it to you this way by stealing an example straight from stack exchange.

Place a cocktail stick through an ice cube and lay it on top of a glass filled right to the top with (room temperature) water. The submerged half will melt quicker than that on top.

So what if we dial "room temp" down to 33 degrees? Same answer. What if we dial it up to 200 degrees? Same answer.

Air is an AWFUL medium for temperature to transfer. It'll take an hour to cool down a warm beer in the fridge. But it's like maybe 12 minutes submerged in water at the same temp as your fridge.

In a cooler you want the maximum of cold thermal mass but the minimum of heat transfer. THATS why draining a cooler makes the ice melt faster. You're literally allowing the ingress of warm air while actively displacing the cold thermal mass. It's got very little to do with wet vs dry like OP is getting at.

>However, the water and air may not be at the same temperature, no?

That's exactly what I am getting at.

Thermal-conductivity is like a speed-limit, so to speak.

Degree for degree, you'd need roughly 11,000 times as much air exposure as you'd need water to melt both cubes in the same amount of time.

Double the temp of the air, you still need 5,500 times as much air... and so on.

At that point, it's not about what melts ice faster, it's about how much assistance you need to give the air to compensate for the fact that water is better at it.

Think about it this way...

Scenario #1: You jump into water that is 33 degrees

Scenario #2: You walk around outside when it's 33 degrees.

You're wearing nothing but a bathing suit in both scenarios. In which environment are you going to induce hypothermia faster?

Thermal conductivity of water is 0.598 W/m·K

Thermal conductivity of air is ~ 4.5 × 10^−2 W m^−1 K^−1

The disparity here is like... not even a contest.

Air and water of equal temp in the described scenario with controlled conditions leaves essentially no room whatsoever for the draining ice-cube to melt faster than the non-draining one.

Holy crud... Her body double is still alive at 103 yrs old.

I don't know if it's written in stone anywhere, but a quick review of the scene looks like it's the inverse of what you're saying.

To me, it looks as follows:

Shot 1: Judy was in Sepia. Part of her face was showing in that shot (albeit with a creative use of bad lighting), her double in color stepped out, but as a view from behind, obscuring her face.

Shot 2: A head-shot of Judy as Dorothy from the reverse angle was spliced in to show that it was her. But... oh look, her hands moved. Clearly, this was a distinct shot. I would expect a multiple-camera setup for a shot like this to preserve continuity, which begs the question of why a whole separate take with continuity errors was leaned on in order to accomplish the effect if that was actually Judy who stepped out in color.

Shot 3: A continuation of shot 1 (the hand placement and camera position are exactly where you'd project them to be with approx 1/2 second of missing film in between) but the face of the "color" version of Dorothy is again obscured. There is a creative use of foreground and a long-drawn out take (misdirection) until Judy's double is sufficiently far from the lens so as to be obscured via good old-fashioned limitations of focal length.

Shot 4: As before, definitely not from a continuous take, begging the same question as before.

>The choice of where we’ve decided (0,0) to be is somewhat arbitrary, but if you’re curious, it’s defined as the position of the Sun on the sky at the vernal equinox (around March 21st).

Makes sense for it to be at the equinox... do you know, historically speaking, why this was settled upon? I mean... while it's "good enough" for long stretches of time, even this changes subtly from year to year. Is there further guidance on an annual adjustment?