I'll give a half-baked counter to this: we know gravity impacts the flow of time through relativity. There is currently no evidence that time travel wouldn't be impacted by gravity in some way. Maybe the way time in time travel interacts with gravity protects you from this problem? Probably not, but it has just as much evidence to support it as your claim of time travel will dump you in empty space.
You’re positing some unknown influence will cause everything to work out well in the ends without any evidentiary basis. Occam’s Razor suggests that you’re more likely to be wrong than parent.
Of course the idea that your point of origin must be fixed from time A to time Z if you’re willing to allow for time travel is itself flawed. If you could somehow move an object to an arbitrary time you could move them to an arbitrary point in space, and your ability to calculate may be significantly greater on the grounds that you’d have more advanced technology than us. It’s all scifi woo though until someone actually time travels.
I disagree with this interpretation of what I said. We HAVE evidence that time and gravity interact. It's actually more of a violation of Occam's Razor to suggest that time travel is somehow exempt from that interaction than to claim that yes, time travel should in someway be subject to the influence of gravity.
This paper cites 10 other papers, two of which are essentially the same paper. The author also has additional papers claiming that Vitamin D helps prevent COVID mortality using a "ecological integrative approach." His papers also all seem to be lacking concrete meta-analysis and discussion of other approaches and clinical data.
Since the pandemic, there was certainly noise about Vitamin D deficiency and COVID-19 death correlation that the NIH decried as unsubstantiated. Fair enough. Since then, quite a bit of data has been collected.
There are a few hundred PHDs^1 that agree that Vitamin D deficiency increases COVID 19 mortality (nowhere is prevention mentioned) in the US, with no EU overlap that I could see from casual review.
Maybe I'm taking sides here, but I think the data is supported, even if the NIH papers are flawed. Funding what many people assume to be a null hypothesis, is not popular so there may never be research that is convincing, for most.
Having more Vitamin D probably means that you are getting more outside activity and/or have a better diet.
Both things have a protective effect against things like Covid in the way of better cardio and immune system.
So, I would say that the link is very weak at best and probably not related to vitamin D directly.
"The Big Vitamin D Mistake is a concise advocacy editorial, not a definitive study. Its central thesis—that we all need ~10× more vitamin D than current RDAs—is not supported by subsequent large randomized trials or by regulatory reviews. Use it, if at all, as a conversation starter about DRI methodology, not as a basis for clinical dosing."
Edit: You can also click on his name in the original post (or the link above) and see all the papers in pubmed authored by him.
Edit 2: These two papers:
Veugelers PJ, Ekwaru JP. A statistical error in the estimation of the recommended dietary allowance for vitamin D. Nutrients. 2014;6(10):4472–4475. - PMC - PubMed Veugelers PJ, Ekwaru JP. A statistical error in the estimation of the recommended dietary allowance for vitamin D. Nutrients. 2014;6(10):4472–4475. - PMC - PubMed
and
Heaney R, Garland C, Baggerly C, French C, Gorham E. Letter to Veugelers, P.J. and Ekwaru, J.P., A statistical error in the estimation of the recommended dietary allowance for vitamin D. Nutrients 2014, 6, 4472-4475; doi:10.3390/nu6104472. Nutrients. 2015;7(3):1688–1690. - PMC - PubMed
From what I can tell, the "ecological integrative approach" is referring to the approach used in the research of that paper, not on how Vitamin D acts in relation to COVID
> Following an ecological integrative approach, we examined the associations between published representative and standardized European population vitamin D data and the Worldometer COVID-19 data at two completely different time points of the first wave of this pandemic.
and
> Thus, a major limitation of our ecological approach is that we had to rely on published - but perhaps not always completely representative - data on the vitamin D status of the populations in Europe.
Right, I was criticizing the approach. Edit: specifically the fact that the paper has no discussion of how the meta-analysis data was prepared, processed, or how they made sure it was complete.
I would agree with you if this paper was citing... more papers. Since there are so few and one of the citations is a concurrence with the paper with actual data work, then it harms this paper.
Either the author didn't do a literature review before publishing, isn't well versed in the field, or chose not to cite works which may not agree with their results. Neither of which reflects well on the author.
I disagree here. Blood tests done at birth are done specifically for the benefit of the child (and with minimal risk to the child). A paternity test has no benefit for the child (it doesn't tell you who the father is, simply who the father isn't) and a ~1% risk of harm to the child.
The period immediately after birth is one of the most dangerous times for children, and we (should) specifically take action to protect them in a moment where they are at risk and have no agency. A paternity test would increase the risk of harm to the child (either through violence, deprivation, or neglect). We didn't even get to the subject of possible violence against the mother either, which is likely.
Wouldn't the marginal risk from the blood test be zero, since they do a little blood prick on their foot anyway?
Also, there's a second order effect you're ignoring: a mandated paternity test would change expectant mothers' behavior leading up to the birth. You wouldn't try to dupe someone if you knew you'd be found out. Or, if you weren't sure, you'd more likely be transparent.
I did some looking, and it's so rare that there aren't any go-to statistics to cite. There are some reports of men committing murder after a paternity test, but it's unclear to me how what you're saying is anything more the speculation.
It might actually be that mandatory paternity tests reduces the background rate of familicide. All of the reports that I could find were only after the father had invested considerable time into raising the child as their own. The stakes of the deception are much higher. But if they know the day the baby is born (or earlier), then it's much easier to walk away. It also makes it pointless for the deception to happen in the first place.
The internet is truly a wild place. You can say something like "We shouldn't do mandatory paternity tests at birth because they bring no benefit to the child" and someone responds with "So you're saying we shouldn't stop wife beaters?"
No bitch, that's a whole different sentence. What the fuck are you talking about.
The essence of your comment is that paternity testing should be avoided because there is no benefit to children and there is potential harm to women. Your focus was not on the mandatory nature of any such testing.
And I believe you understand my analogy in spite of your faux confusion and outrage.
That’s not even my argument though? I was very clear that specifically immediately post birth is a high risk time and that mandatory paternity tests at birth increase those risks with little to no benefit to anyone. I did not say anything about forcing a man to raise a child. You’re deliberately misreading my point to argue against a straw man.
Are you gaslighting? Your comment is just above, you can reread it as many times as I have trying to extract any other argument with as little success.
The benefit is to the "father", obviously, in confirming paternity or alerting him of infidelity and fraud. It's either peace of mind or potentially life-changing. The benefit is incalculable.
Your only arguments for why immediately post-birth is a poor time are that it would be convenient for everyone else (including the perpetrator of the fraud) if the victim was unaware and continued to be exploited for some time (how long? when would be a convenient time for the reveal?). That is outrageous.
A stronger argument in line with the "benefit of the child" thinking would be that slight domestic violence should no longer be grounds for divorce since divorce rarely benefits the child.
Which is obviously a crazy line of thinking, but so is "let's force a man to (financially) raise a child that isn't his".
That’s not even my argument though? I was very clear that specifically immediately post birth is a high risk time and that mandatory paternity tests at birth increase those risks with little to no benefit to anyone. I did not say anything about forcing a man to raise a child.
.. you do realize a paternity test can happen with just a cotton swab? And aside from that, they already get a heel prick / blood spot test to check for a bunch of things. Drawing a tiny bit of extra blood from that in no way presents any extra danger to the baby.
Sorry, the conclusion in the paper really underlies how poorly the results fit the evidence: "The resulting almost doubling in the age of the Universe and increasing the formation times by 1 order of magnitude has been a subject of concern and requires that the new model also explain some critical cosmological and astrophysical observations" [0]
It's a double edged sword. On the one hand the model helps to explain the "impossible early galaxy" problem (since the universe is older than we thought).
On the other hand, if the universe is older there are other things that will need more research to figure out.
You should be sceptical, but there is not as yet a reason to entirely reject it. I'm not really a fan of the tired light theories myself, but glad to see different ideas being explored.
A good point. I have heard of primordial black holes as a candidate for (at least some) dark matter. Not heard that dust was ever a candidate (if you have a reference it would be appreciated).
Baryonic (tangible) dark matter exists in the form of MACHOs, which includes small cold planetary-mass dwarf stars. But there's a limited number of these, and the Big Bang hydrogen helium ratio puts limits on the amount of baryonic matter there can be.
I think there are too many unknowns and we are nowhere near close to fully understanding our universe that we should be open minded to new ideas and see if they fit into our understanding. Dark matter is one explanation to the bullet cluster but perhaps there is another we just don't understand. Yes if someone has a perpetual motion machine to the spam folder but I am always open to hear new ideas to our universe.
Hedging risk. This is often a hard concept for people to grasp: there is value to hedging risk. It (generally) cannot be turned into money. There is extrinsic value to reducing risk.
But you are only able to hedge the money part of the risk. Life insurance does not bring anyone back, and health insurance only repairs your health as much as can be done with money. You can't insure against incurable diseases, as in the risk remains. You will just get some money to hopefully feel better, or for your children.
Same with insuring some painting let's say. You can get enough money to buy a different painting, but the risk of losing that particular painting is still there. If it is a unique painting and it gets lost, how are they going to repair the non-monetary value of it? They can't.
Hedging the risk of being shot by wearing armour sounds like actual hedging. Buying insurance against being shot sounds like just betting. The non-money part is exactly the difference, and it is missing in insurance.
Yes, you are hedging against financial loss. Most of the other stuff you describe, e.g. sentimental value of one painting vs another, are irrelevant to insurance. You pay a (relatively) small amount to eliminate the risk or mitigate the effect of getting a massive (specifically financial) loss.
I'm of the opinion that there's a reason why a subset (myself included) of people who when initially exposed to infinitesimals, and specifically the part where you start just disregarding terms, reject them (it's one of the oldest arguments related to calculus! [0]). Those geometric arguments are essentially less rigorous versions of limits! And that lack of rigor hurts those arguments until you have a rigorous justification for them (that didn't appear until the 1960's if my memory is right).
I've come around to infinitesimals, but mostly through exposure to the large hyper-reals. (for context for someone who doesn't know, the idea is to define a number, k which is greater than all real numbers. If you take 1/k, you have a very small number and you can fit an infinite number of 1/k's between 0 and the "next" real number. This concept is what sold me on infinitesimals.)
> Those geometric arguments are essentially less rigorous versions of limits! And that lack of rigor (...)
Yes it's equivalent to limits, but limits are a very cumbersome machinery, specially if you use the epsilon delta definition (there exists .. such that all ..).
But note that I just linked you a PDF that does fully 100% rigorous calculus using only infinitesimals with no limits. Yhey aren't disregarding small terms willy nilly (like it was done in the early history of calculus)
The only catch about SIA is that it requires you to use intuitionistic logic rather than classical logic in your mathematical arguments (which I admit is a barrier, but it also buys you some things). And what it offers is much simpler proofs that support intuitive reasoning.
There is also this book, "A Primer of Infinitesimal Analysis" [0], which develops a big chunk of calculus and classical mechanics using only infinitesimals, and is fully rigorous.
I wonder if it's working with floating point numbers that made me less uncomfortable when first discovering infinitesimals. The idea that something just falls out of our current representable scope under certain operations seemed fine to me. I've always had a soft spot for infinitesimals and a slight dislike for epsilon-delta limits.
