Richard

The carbon tax is an abhorrent monster that is only going to grow, and grow much larger each year. This induces push-cost inflation on the entire economy, this increases costs without inducing monetary inflation. It is utterly myopic to claim a single increase is the cause for backlash when the call is for the entire scheme to cease. The image from canada.ca/en/environment… shows why. The rebate is incentive to ignore the deliberate destruction of our economy. Everyone, both personally and for the larger economy, would be better off without it.

@ArtemisConsort Being able to create and use a vacuum for experiments is a feat in and of itself.

I’m tired of the Aristotelian physics slander. Yes, heavier object fall faster than light ones, all else equal, *when immersed in a fluid* which is every environment Aristotle had access to. Do the experiment yourself. Drop a bowling ball and a same-sized ball of foam. There’s a great paper called “Aristotle’s Physics: a Physicist’s Look” that demonstrates how Aristotelian physics is a special case approximation of Newtonian physics in the same way Newtonian physics is a special case approximation of relativity and QM. Aristotle’s physics reigned for so long not because people were unthinkingly dogmatic, but because it was genuinely hard to come up with better models. Aristotle had to model celestial objects separately from terrestrial objects because his terrestrial model is describing *terminal* velocity and breaks down in the zero-friction limit. So he had two incompatible models. Newton unified them. Now we have two incompatible models - QM and GR - and are looking for unification. The more things change…

@JJ_McCullough It would drop the bills.

The one thing I don’t understand, however, is why Carney wants to cobble together a razor-thin majority government through a bunch of Conservative floor-crossings instead of just calling a snap election he’d surely win.

Canada doesn't have a Right to Recall. Once elected, politicians have no reason to adhere to the will of their constituents beyond the minimum necessary for reelection years later. The moment you have political parties, the color elected is more important than the person elected as far the legislature is concerned. Its the unfortunate reality of mixing individuals and associations in a single legislative body. One of the purposes of the office of Governor General, is that when an outlier of the democratic process occurs, the session can be dissolved. This would force democratic accountability of the process, even if a reelection yields the same results. The emergency lever would be extreme, but would be one of the clearest reasons to use the Reserve Powers. All of which would handled systemically if we had Recall Elections. But we don't live in a democratically robust nation, but a first past the post dogfight under the guise of politeness, who's threshold is organized around a mere 35% of the population.

Mark Carney is seizing a costly Liberal majority that voters denied him, and doing so through backroom deals. In January, MP Gladu said that floor crossers should face voters in a byelection to give voters the final say. I could not agree more. She should do so. The people in her community voted for our Conservative vision of a Canada that is affordable, safe, and strong at home, not for the costly Liberal government she has now joined. She should honour her word and let voters decide.

@markgadala Passive digital labour rights.

This is insane. $6.1 billion in unpaid wages. 819 million hours of labor. Every person who clicked a fire hydrant to log into their email was part of it. reCAPTCHA was never primarily a security tool. It was the largest unpaid AI training operation in history, running invisibly inside the infrastructure of the entire internet. Google launched reCAPTCHA in 2009 as a book digitization engine. Version 2 trained image recognition for Street View, extracting labeled data on house numbers, traffic lights, storefronts, and road infrastructure across the planet. Version 3 trained behavioral pattern recognition. Each iteration harvested a different dataset from hundreds of millions of users who were told the point was bot detection. The dataset was the point. The punchline is airtight: AI can now solve CAPTCHAs faster and more accurately than humans can. The tool built to filter out machines spent 15 years training them. You completed the loop without ever being told you were in it. Every system designed to keep machines out was simultaneously teaching them how to get in. The more interesting question is what today's equivalent looks like, and whether you'd recognize it if you saw it.

Physiological changes in brain structure produce circadian rhythm disruptions, its downstream. Circadian rhythm issues cannot produce structural abnormalities with the Cingulate gyrus nor reduced neural density around several areas of the DMN. Or just take the paper's contradiction, ~25% of ADHD cases do not have a disrupted rhythm, by definition it cannot be a circadian rhythm disorder, only have a probability of manifesting symptoms of sufficient magnitude. The probability of ADHD having a sleep disorder is categorically higher, but not diagnostic, this has been known for a long time. What's new is trying to label it by putting the cart before the horse.

ADHD is a circadian rhythm disorder. New review compiling the evidence - ~75% of people with ADHD have a disrupted rhythm. People with ADHD have: ◇ Higher daytime melatonin ◇ Impaired nighttime melatonin release ◇ Higher nighttime cortisol Contributing to altered genetic expression through circadian clock proteins BMAL1 & PER2, which effects all domains of cognition.

@EveKeneinan Earth is round, but our world is flat. Here's a technically true concept, that has zero bearing on understanding the world from the human scale point of reference. Its the "muddy the waters to appear deep" concept - its usage is limited.

This sort of anti-phenomenological subjective idealism under the guise of "science" is no less absurd because it is presented as "scientific." That only makes it doubly stupid, since it compounds the error of the false assertion with the error of deriving metaphysical truth from scientific theories.

@sleepdiplomat Physiology changes in ADHD brain structure producing downstream circadian rhythm issues is nothing new. What's new is how hard this is being pushed.

ADHD may be more than an attention disorder; new data suggests it's linked to mismatched circadian rhythms. A study found 78% of individuals with ADHD had delayed melatonin and cortisol release. #ADHD #CircadianRhythm

Default mode network (DMN, internal cognitive intentionality) and 'rich club' (interconnection clusters) areas are physiologically less regulated in ADHD. Task switching between internal thought types (deliberate, daydream etc)., and internal suppression for external focus, physiologically has a higher cost. (And why stimulants are so effective) Everything is just varying degrees of addressing the symptoms of those changes.

ADHD is literally a structural difference in the brain, not a personality trait. Large-scale MRI studies show that the amygdala and hippocampus are physically smaller in ADHD brains. You can’t "discipline" or "willpower" your way out of biology.

What is not accounted for is over diagnosis rate. The self report in the USA vs diagnostic assessment from other countries is a major flag. The changes in brain physiology which manifest ADHD are upstream from the circadian rhythms disorders. To frame ADHD in this manner is putting the cart before the horse and calling it insight.

The higher the solar intensity, the lower the ADHD prevalence. Across 49 states and 9 countries, sunlight exposure explained ~34-57% of geographic variation in ADHD rates.

@NTFabiano ADHD manifests circadian rhythm disorders. Which are downstream from the physiological changes in brain structure.

ADHD is a circadian rhythm disorder. We just published a new paper on the topic. frontiersin.org/journals/psych…

Attention is downstream from personal interest in the circumstance. I'd circumstance is perceived as more rewarding, attention follows. This is how I understood stimulants to work, when I was diagnosed years ago. It's not a new concept And while unethical, you could give stimulants to a lot of people, and those who calm/focus are more likely to have ADHD.

New brain imaging research is challenging long-held views on how ADHD medications function. A team from Washington University School of Medicine examined resting-state fMRI scans from nearly 5,800 children aged 8–11 and discovered that stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall mainly enhance connectivity in brain networks tied to wakefulness and reward anticipation, rather than the attention-control regions traditionally considered their primary targets. Children who had taken stimulants on the scan day exhibited heightened activity in areas linked to arousal and perceived task reward, while showing minimal changes in classic attention circuits. This pattern was replicated in a small controlled trial with five healthy adults, where a single dose of stimulant similarly boosted arousal and reward systems—effectively "pre-rewarding" the brain to make mundane or challenging activities feel more motivating and sustainable. The research also revealed a compelling connection to sleep: in the large dataset, ADHD children on stimulants generally achieved higher grades and better cognitive test scores than those not medicated. Remarkably, stimulants appeared to normalize the brain's functional connectivity disrupted by sleep deprivation, counteracting many of its cognitive and behavioral effects and mimicking the neural benefits of adequate rest. However, this restorative impact was absent in well-rested, neurotypical children taking stimulants, prompting concerns about overprescription. The researchers caution that symptoms of chronic fatigue in kids can closely resemble ADHD, potentially leading to misdiagnoses where medications merely conceal underlying sleep issues rather than addressing true neurodevelopmental differences. [Kay, B. P.(2025, December 24). "Stimulant medications affect arousal and reward, not attention networks", Cell]

Everyone has the right to their own opinion. No one is forced to listen to another's opinion. No one can deprive another of their opinion. What Brian does here is a slight of hand to give license for unnecessary cruelty via committee approval. Why do the necessary legwork to understand the faults in someone else's view, when it been 'pre bunked' for you? This is lazy intellectualism.

The problem with today’s world is that everyone believes they have the right to express their opinion and have others listen to it. The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but, crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense. ― Brian Cox

@ericweinstein When those of position of influenced and power are caught in a trap, it is in their interest to make the legal landscape of that trap a non-crime. This, more than anything to me, explains the direction trend of western society.

The position of most news organizations explaining their low interest in Epstein has been that this is mostly a non story. An Internet-meme spun out of control. I’ve maintained for ~20 yrs that this was about a lot more than sex. This was a major operation of some kind.

@elonmusk @Grummz BattleTech has been stuck in legal limbo as a franchise for awhile. Elon has the opportunity to do the funniest thing...

@TheNumbCanadian @Grummz x.com/i/grok/share/A…

I was joking when I called Grokipedia The Foundation. But now Elon is talking about making it permanent and in space. Does he just read every science fiction book and decide “yep, okay, that’s the business plan, we just do that!” 😂

@stats_feed I'd rather be first in a village in Gaul, than second in Rome.

Would you rather be the best player on the worst team or the worst player on the best team?

Whole virus exposure means the immune system builds a response for every antigen of the virus. A vaccine of only part of one antigen is categorically balanced on a knife's edge for efficacy. Immune pressure to for the virus to mutate is more diffuse in one and more specific in the other. There's also the difference of exposure pathway. Lung exposure is a different subset of the immune system than systemic. IgA antibodies dominate the mucosal membrane (with anti-inflamatory mode of action), IgG antibodies dominate the circulatory system (pro inflammatory mode of action). The long associated lymphoid tissue likes to stay antiinflammatory, and serves as a barrier between the lung and circulatory system - lung immune cell can cross into the blood, but blood immune cells find it difficult cross into the lungs. Or more simply, systemic immune system expose produces a weaker response for the lungs than lung exposure.

@mosuyanagi One level: don't expose yourself when you're not ready. On another level : you can't save everyone, you need to understand that.

"No, my superpowered son, do not save my life"

>crafted to be apocalypse proof >made to be suppressed >doesn’t even know what a switch is >still made in small batches each year >gun of choice for classy movie hitmen, villains, and occasionally protagonists in games

The issue is far more about systemic structural issues than party (different parties have their "types" of corruption which may have different amounts of "space" under the radar.) Ultimately, its a failure if Canada's separation of powers. The head of Legislative is also the head of Executive. This mixed seat appoints members who's role it is to check the lower house (senate) as well as members of judiciary. (Technically the GG does "on advise of the PM" but since the GG is bound by constitutional convention, it's a rubber stamp for what the PM wants). Other important functions also fall under PM appointment, head of RCMP, for example. Combine this with Canada's bend towards Legal Positivism and threads of Parliamentary Supremacy remaining (from before constitution) , and you have a political structure which treats elected officials as more important than rule of law or accountability. Simply stated; ethics and judicial oversight take second seat over voter will - if an issue is egregious enough, voters won't vote for them. Which only works if absolute clarity and freedom of speech are in place, which we don't. A party will be as corrupt as we allow it, if we want politicians to systemically be investigated and held to account, the laws need to change.

I agree with @PierrePoilievre when he criticized the leadership of the RCMP. So do millions of Canadians, and plenty of RCMP officers who are tired of pretending that the problems at the top don’t exist. This is nothing new, especially in Western Canada, where trust in federal institutions has been on life support for decades. Anyone can list Liberal scandals by the dozen. It’s practically a national pastime at this point. They’ve broken laws so openly and so often that it’s become part of their brand. When you control the RCMP and stack the judiciary with friendly appointments, accountability becomes more of a punchline than a process. And then there are the judges who get appointed to investigate them: Rouleau, Hogue, Johnston. Every one of them somehow manages to conclude that the government did absolutely nothing wrong. What are the odds? Every time Ottawa investigates itself, it comes out spotless. If this were a casino, the house would be under investigation by itself, of course. But the real comedy comes from the people clutching their pearls over Poilievre’s comments. These are the same people whose own ethics couldn’t survive a day of sunlight, lecturing everyone else about respect and apologies. They’re not offended because he’s wrong. They’re offended because he said out loud what everyone already knows. Poilievre doesn’t owe the RCMP leadership an apology. He owes Canadians honesty, and that’s exactly what they have been saying for years. @ElizabethMay is yet again speaking out both sides of her face.