Talmudic sandwhich Jews wasn't on my bingo card for today.
To get us back on track, here's something from /x/
"I certainly see the randomness in my work, and I also see how this fast shuffle of possibility after possibility might eventually, given enough time, juxtapose and disclose something important automatically overlooked in more orderly thinking. [...] Since nothing, absolutely nothing, is excluded (as not worth being included) I proffer a vast mixed bag — out of it I shake coin-operated doors and God. It’s a fucking circus. I’m like a sharp eyed crow, spying anything that twinkles and grabbing it up to add to my heap. Anyone with my attitude might just stumble onto by sheer chance and luck — in his actual life, which is to say the life of his mind — the authentic camouflaged God, the deus absconditus, by trying odd combinations of things and places, like a high speed computer processing everything, he might outdazzle even a wary God, might catch him by surprise by poking somewhere unexpectedly."
— PKD
Talmudic sandwhich Jews wasn't on my bingo card for today.
To get us back on track, here's something from /x/ View attachment 7191633
"I certainly see the randomness in my work, and I also see how this fast shuffle of possibility after possibility might eventually, given enough time, juxtapose and disclose something important automatically overlooked in more orderly thinking. [...] Since nothing, absolutely nothing, is excluded (as not worth being included) I proffer a vast mixed bag — out of it I shake coin-operated doors and God. It’s a fucking circus. I’m like a sharp eyed crow, spying anything that twinkles and grabbing it up to add to my heap. Anyone with my attitude might just stumble onto by sheer chance and luck — in his actual life, which is to say the life of his mind — the authentic camouflaged God, the deus absconditus, by trying odd combinations of things and places, like a high speed computer processing everything, he might outdazzle even a wary God, might catch him by surprise by poking somewhere unexpectedly."
Me thinks they might be able to survive cause of the tropical climate cause most animals do better in tropical climates (dinosaurs are also cold blooded). Nessie in loch ness sounds unlikely cause scotland is very cold and reptiles don't do well in the cold, generally.
As an aside, many dinosaurs were warm blooded. An animal such as a sauropod would've been warm blooded just by virtue of its sheer size, while theropods gave rise to birds which are warm blooded as well. However, there is some evidence that stegosaurs could've been cold blooded, so it's not something that can be generalized. Plesiosaurs weren't dinosaurs themselves, but they were also warm-blooded, so they could probably survive in moderately cold regions.
I believe dinosaurs existed in isolation till the second generation of mammals came around. A bit similar to how cave lions and mammoths survived till the times of Egyptian civilization. I don't quite believe dragons existed since the European model of a dragon is very different to the asian model, one is a winged dinosaur like thing while the other is serpentine. China and Japan in fact use snake and dragon interchangeably since both are supposed to be spiritually the same in most cases.
The thing is, European dragons being depicted as winged dinosaurs is a relatively recent thing. The stereotypical European dragon (like the one on the Welsh flag) only appeared in the late Medieval period and it only became commonplace in the last couple of centuries (not to mention the anatomy on its torso is mammalian, not reptilian, but that's besides the point). For most of European history dragons were depicted with very varied bodies, from giant snakes to chimeric mishmashes of common animals like lizards, birds and dogs.
Here's an 18th century illustration of a dragon as a mishmash of different animals.
The Draco constellation as a giant serpent.
Saint George and the winged snake.
Saint George and the crocodile thing.
Saint George and the fish-lizard.
The word "dragon" itself comes from the Ancient Greek word for serpent, so even though European dragons are no longer depicted as snakelike, they may have started out as snake monsters. As @NoReturn said, it's likely that dragon myths started out as tales of serpents before developing into their own thing.
If you want to go even deeper look into the Eagle vs. Snake cults. In short, Indo-European eagle worshippers wiped out the previous people's snake worshipping religion.
If anyone wants to learn about judaism, they just need to read up on Sabbatai Zevi. To understand the Ashkenzim specifically, just add Ariel Toaff's book and read up on Jacob Frank.
The word "dragon" itself comes from the Ancient Greek word for serpent, so even though European dragons are no longer depicted as snakelike, they may have started out as snake monsters. As @NoReturn said, it's likely that dragon myths started out as tales of serpents before developing into their own thing.
If you want to go even deeper look into the Eagle vs. Snake cults. In short, Indo-European eagle worshippers wiped out the previous people's snake worshipping religion.
Yeah, the original myth seems to be about Trito, the first hero, slaying a three-headed snake that blocked the waters and/or stole the cattle and/or the dawn goddess. He lost the first battle but won the rematch, maybe with the help of the thunder god.
TL;DR: There's a question around Philip K. Dick of "What did he figure out?"
In 1974 PKD had a spiritual experience (see below) that changed how he saw the world. He apparently worked his visions into the VALIS trilogy, a collection he called the Exegesis, and some of his other works. Some people say the dental surgery that set it all off just fucked him up, but it's also possible that the surgery was just the trigger for things he'd been pondering his whole life to start fitting together.
To quote Lovecraft:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
TL;DR: There's a question around Philip K. Dick of "What did he figure out?"
In 1974 PKD had a spiritual experience (see below) that changed how he saw the world. He apparently worked his visions into the VALIS trilogy, a collection he called the Exegesis, and some of his other works. Some people say the dental surgery that set it all off just fucked him up, but it's also possible that the surgery was just the trigger for things he'd been pondering his whole life to start fitting together.
To quote Lovecraft:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
The deep philosophical question "When is a bread a bread?". Are the breadcrumbs around a Schnitzel still bread? Did their substance change when being turned into crumbs and breading? As the name suggests, no. But did the flour change substance when being baked into bread? Did the wheat or rye change when being ground into flour? As such, wouldn't the breadcrumbs change from being bread into something new, something closer to being flour? You don't use breadcrumbs the same way you'd use regular bread. You can't just spread butter on a pile of breadcrumbs and put a slice of cheese on it. So when going from bread to breadcrumbs, the bread stops being bread and becomes something new, something made from bread, but not being bread proper anymore. Like wheat kernels becoming flour or grits or whatever. They become descendants of the original, they're made from something, but stop being that something.
My personal view is that a sandwich consists of one or few continuous pieces of bread (which can be fried or double-baked, but not ground) that is topped or filled with ingredients in such a manner that the bread and the ingredients are eaten simultaneously. As such, a burrito is a sandwich as it is made with a flat bread and filling rolled up. So is a shawarma, and so on.
So what is a KFC Double-Down? It does not involve continuous pieces of bread, and instead replaces the bread with (breaded) chicken? It is called a sandwich by KFC, but is it one?
No, it is an abomination and a mockery of a sandwich, it is gluttony manifest and we can only hope that Christ died for this sin as well.
Jokes aside, it's not really a sandwich despite the name. If you get some Five Guys burgers without the buns it's also not a sandwich anymore, and the breading around the chicken doesn't change that.
one mandatory factor of a sandwich, in my opinion, is that it must be possible to consume it without using utensils
it must be possible, and reasonably feasible, comfortable and intended, to hold*
*sandwiches that fell apart do not leave this category because they are merely failed attempts at sandwiches, outliers, the intent is still a sandwich
Some people say the dental surgery that set it all off just fucked him up, but it's also possible that the surgery was just the trigger for things he'd been pondering his whole life to start fitting together.
There was a site, which I can no longer find, by a man I believe was a former dentist, in which he outlined an interesting belief about the movement of electrical fields through the body. The site was mostly advocating against root canals as dental treatment (dentists and teeth, go figure) after finding out he had a hidden infection in at least one of his teeth that had been causing chronic disruption to his health (it was caused by the fact that teeth are naturally porous; a live tooth maintains a positive pressure that keeps crap out, while a dead one tends to have a negative pressure, drawing things to its interior where they can fester, and also that no root canal can truly remove every last bit of tissue from within the tooth), but one of the things he discussed in particular was the interconnection of electrical fields within the body and how infection can disrupt those fields in unexpected ways. They don't just traverse through nerves, but also along the surface membranes of muscle bundles in the body and other such things. He found his entire personality changed from having his infected teeth removed.
Sounds like Dick might have experienced something similar, but perhaps more profound.
I really, really wish I could find it now, because the whole thing was fascinating, regardless of how true it might have been. He definitely seemed to know his stuff I originally stumbled across it while reading up on research into the use of low level electrical stimulation to trick newt and frog tadpoles into growing fully-functional body structures in the wrong place, based on the observation of the emergence of electrical currents at different voltages during embryonic development, the flow of which mapped out precisely where structures would then form.
Of course, the next step is to then question how these fields interact beyond the confines of the body. They won't just stop at the skin. We're intimately connected to the world in ways we don't yet understand, but science still views a body as an isolate sack of chemical reactions and a strict boundary between inside and outside. The possibility that we can sense, at some innate and poorly understood level, the electrical field of those around us could go some way to explaining a whole bunch of things that are normally dismissed as crackpottery. Things like being able to see internal injuries. It is possible to induce a profound religious experience in someone by manipulating an electromagnetic field around them. If we can do it, then it can happen naturally.
There's a lot of potentially schizo stuff to get into when you look at things like this. Things like "is time actually real", or are we just seeing "now" for some other reason? Did he peek outside of time and perceive a huge chunk from the "side"? Did he somehow connect to some sort of electromagnetic "imprint" that stretched through time from the past to the present? Or maybe he was just a very imaginative and perceptive man, experiencing a personal crisis as a reaction to his body recovering from chronic illness.
"When is a bread a bread?". Are the breadcrumbs around a Schnitzel still bread? Did their substance change when being turned into crumbs and breading? As the name suggests, no. But did the flour change substance when being baked into bread? Did the wheat or rye change when being ground into flour? As such, wouldn't the breadcrumbs change from being bread into something new, something closer to being flour?
The usual, anyone gets too close to "the truth" and TPBP/The Illuminati/CIA/Lizards kill them.
In this specific case, they're saying PKD got too close to something "real" and his stroke was caused by external forces.
There was a site, which I can no longer find, by a man I believe was a former dentist, in which he outlined an interesting belief about the movement of electrical fields through the body. The site was mostly advocating against root canals as dental treatment (dentists and teeth, go figure) after finding out he had a hidden infection in at least one of his teeth that had been causing chronic disruption to his health (it was caused by the fact that teeth are naturally porous; a live tooth maintains a positive pressure that keeps crap out, while a dead one tends to have a negative pressure, drawing things to its interior where they can fester, and also that no root canal can truly remove every last bit of tissue from within the tooth), but one of the things he discussed in particular was the interconnection of electrical fields within the body and how infection can disrupt those fields in unexpected ways. They don't just traverse through nerves, but also along the surface membranes of muscle bundles in the body and other such things. He found his entire personality changed from having his infected teeth removed.
I know the one you're talking about. I personally believe he was fixated on the teeth because that's what he knew best, but I think this is a body-wide thing, he just noticed it in his area of expertise.
I'd love to hear more about people's experiences with their personalities changing after surgery. I've seen it multiple times IRL. It's not a switch, but as an example I've mentioned before I can speak to at least two people who changed after having bits cut or taken out.
There's a lot of potentially schizo stuff to get into when you look at things like this. Things like "is time actually real", or are we just seeing "now" for some other reason? Did he peek outside of time and perceive a huge chunk from the "side"? Did he somehow connect to some sort of electromagnetic "imprint" that stretched through time from the past to the present? Or maybe he was just a very imaginative and perceptive man, experiencing a personal crisis as a reaction to his body recovering from chronic illness.
If we take him at his word, in PKD's case, he was experiencing "now" and several thousand years ago simultaneously. He says explicitly that he wasn't insane, and was able to basically maintain a normal life while it was happening, but from reading some of what he wrote, it sounds to me like living with a very "real" dream overlaid on his normal experiences.
Like on an old TV when you're halfway-tuned to two tv channels at the same time.
Nuclear bombs are not real. It's the nations of the world playing pretend like kids.
"I've got a super duper mega bomb! It's WAY better than your tiny little baby bomb!"
"Oh yeah! Well I've got a ultra powerful bomb too!! In fact, I've got like, a hundred billion more of them than you do! And if you do ANYTHING to my pillow fort, I'm gonna shoot all of them at you!"
You're telling me bombs that could destroy the entire world exist and somehow they haven't yet? They were "invented" 80 years ago and there's thousands of them and somehow they've only been used twice? Yeah right.
I have vague, direct reason to believe a few things.
In case I am correct, I do not have clearance nor did I explicitly hear this from anyone with clearance and this is based solely on inference.
-The National Ignition Facility's energy positive inertial confinement fusion is an example of "trickle down" tech from classified projects, namely one which was a replacement for project Orion
Project Orion was an initiative to construct a space vehicle which would be able to travel to Mars in weeks instead of months, and beyond. It would have been propelled by nuclear charges. In space, nuclear detonations are actually fairly impotent for anything other than melting metal. So, "nuclear shaped charges" charges with tungsten added to create a jet of heavy plasma reaction mass, would be fired and detonated behind a massive pusher plate, which would use ablative oil to absorb the heat, and propel the spacecraft. It would not have been a massive issue in Low Earth Orbit as starfish prime was, as Prime was a 1.4Mt strategic warhead (think wrecking an entire metro area), and the warheads to be used on Orion were to be anywhere from 4-40Kt, or between the yield of a nuclear artillery shell and a little more than the yield of the Hiroshima bomb (extremely weak by even cold war standards). This may sound insane, but it was prototyped successfully with conventional explosives and the program would have gone forward. An enhanced-fusion-bomb version of the drive could have sent humans to Alpha Centauri within anywhere from one to three lifetimes (a generation ship or crude stasis chamber could have been feasible in that case). The problem is that the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed. The United States asked the Soviets to allow an exception for space travel/project orion in specific, which they refused, as they assumed the US was planning to use these ships for military endeavors, as they would have essentially no weight restrictions and functionally infinite delta v for cislunar operations. The US was totally planning on building nuclear space battleships/shuttle carriers, to be used as fractional orbital bombardment systems (now also banned by treaty) and presumably to combat soviet space vehicles when necessary, probably by firing their nuclear bomb/fuel out of a specialized cannon or coilgun at the side or front aspect of a target.
So, you're the US in the early 70s and want a gigantic nuclear space battleship, and have the means to build one, but it's banned by treaty! What do you do? Look for alternatives. Introducing the pulsed fusion drive. Much more expensive than an orion drive, and not as easily scalable, but if you want a little bastard vehicle trundling around cislunar space without meaningful limits on DV, fucking with enemy satellites and potentially acting as an unpredictable fractional orbital bombardment system, this is the way to do it. Small, and much more difficult to detect. Probably took several decades to develop. How does it work? It's a miniaturized inertial confinement fusion device. Doesn't necessarily need to be energy positive, but miniaturization yields a ton of application advancement when scaled. So, the tech was probably... revolving-door-ed? Or given? To Lawrence Livermore. Unless they helped make it in the first place. That part's not important. The important part is that the groundwork for grid scale fusion power gen has already been laid in the skunk-sector.
•3D printing is another "trickle-down-tech", but only in terms of extra demand and innovation/being driven to what it is today. Not as big a deal.
-The Federal Government quietly/privately executes a fucking lot of (American) people for reasons related to "national security."
•Don't worry about this one. Unless you do something you shouldn't with something that belongs to the government, or are recruited as a spy, this does not affect you.
-The "Epstain thing" has been going on for about 20 years longer than disclosed, and large internal organizations not already privy to it/monitoring that area for other reasons "ran into" it and people ended up being threatened/silenced/shut up from the highest levels of government.
-Pretty much every modern device is solidly hardware backdoored (more than MgmtEngine) and there is no level of linux-ing or airgapping that will save you, in addition your device can likely either use circuit traces as crude antennas or your power supply as a crude powerline adapter to send telemetry.
•Note that information gathered illegally cannot be used in open court, and information gathered legally but with classified methods "probably won't" be used in open court.
So, "nuclear shaped charges" charges with tungsten added to create a jet of heavy plasma reaction mass, would be fired and detonated behind a massive pusher plate, which would use ablative oil to absorb the heat, and propel the spacecraft
You're telling me bombs that could destroy the entire world exist and somehow they haven't yet? They were "invented" 80 years ago and there's thousands of them and somehow they've only been used twice? Yeah right.
No one wants to be at the giving end of a nuclear bomb because no one wants to be at the receiving end. During WW2 America was the only country with nukes, which is why it got to use them unimpeded, but now that all major players have them you can no longer nuke a country without risking getting nuked in retaliation.
Not too sure about that.
LLNL does a lot of defense stuff for sure, and the NIF facility was directly dual use, but inertial fusion had been going on a lot longer than NIF. There had been previous experiments for ICF, and while maybe one motivation for nuclear fusion is also space drives, the main motivator for the LLNL experiments was always power generation (and as an added bonus, nuclear weapons research).
Granted, the idea for laser based inertial confinement fusion came just a few years after Project Orion was scrapped, in 1972, but given the immense size of the lasers required, I doubt they had been thinking about space drives first. Even now with decades of making lasers better and more efficient and compact, the required laser drivers are still huge.
I don't think much technology was "given" to LLNL since they rather publicly developed a lot of the tech they use. Like the glass slab melting processes, the optical coatings, the machinery for that... has been going on since the Cyclops laser.
No one wants to be at the giving end of a nuclear bomb because no one wants to be at the receiving end. During WW2 America was the only country with nukes, which is why it got to use them unimpeded, but now that all major players have them you can no longer nuke a country without risking getting nuked in retaliation.
I understand the concept of M.A.D., I just think the fact it HASN'T happened is more proof nukes don't exist than they do.
If they did exist, there's no way we wouldn't have made annihilation happen by now. In 80 entire years of thousands and thousands of nukes existing, you really mean to tell me not one prideful world leader said "throw em"? People are cruel and our structures don't work, there's just no way we would have the soundness of mind to ever wield a weapon like that an not instantly destroy ourselves with it. What's more likely, we lied to end a war, or we built a mega ultra super death weapon?
Not too sure about that.
LLNL does a lot of defense stuff for sure, and the NIF facility was directly dual use, but inertial fusion had been going on a lot longer than NIF. There had been previous experiments for ICF, and while maybe one motivation for nuclear fusion is also space drives, the main motivator for the LLNL experiments was always power generation (and as an added bonus, nuclear weapons research).
Granted, the idea for laser based inertial confinement fusion came just a few years after Project Orion was scrapped, in 1972, but given the immense size of the lasers required, I doubt they had been thinking about space drives first. Even now with decades of making lasers better and more efficient and compact, the required laser drivers are still huge.
I don't think much technology was "given" to LLNL since they rather publicly developed a lot of the tech they use. Like the glass slab melting processes, the optical coatings, the machinery for that... has been going on since the Cyclops laser.
You know more than I would, I'm only making loose inferences based on vague tidbits. I really only know the pop sci retelling of things in regards to the history of fusion projects, I just strongly suspect that by one means or another this tech or some other non-bomb-based nuclear pulse drive may be actively used, and the miniaturization of such tech would probably provide valuable data and resource to contribute to the energy-positive-fusion project.
