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An easy solution to reduce carbon emissions and make concrete that lasts for a really long time.
“The ancient Roman Empire still makes its presence felt throughout Europe. Bathhouses, aqueducts, and seawalls built more than 2000 years ago are still standing—thanks to a special type of concrete that has proved far more durable than its modern counterpart. Now, researchers say they have figured out why Roman concrete remains so resilient: Quicklime used in the mix may have given the material self-healing properties.
The work could help engineers improve the performance of modern concrete, says Marie Jackson, a geologist who studies ancient Roman concrete at the University of Utah, but who was not involved with the research.
The Romans were not the first to invent concrete, but they were the first to employ it on a mass scale. By 200 B.C.E., concrete was used in the majority of their construction projects. Roman concrete consisted of a mixture of a white powder known as slaked lime, small particles and rock fragments called tephra ejected by volcanic eruptions, and water.”
“When the team created small cracks in the concrete—as would happen as the material aged—and then added water (as would happen with rainwater in the real world), the lime lumps dissolved and recrystallized, effectively filling in the cracks and keeping the concrete strong, the researchers report today in Science Advances. “This has an incredible impact,” Masic says.
Modern concrete typically doesn’t heal cracks larger than 0.2 or 0.3 millimeters across. The team’s Roman-inspired concrete, in contrast, healed cracks up to 0.6 millimeters across.
Masic hopes the work will inspire today’s engineers to improve their own concrete, perhaps with quicklime or a related compound.”
The transcript from his speech –
My name is Colin Wright, and I am an evolutionary biologist perhaps best known for arguing the (now controversial) position that biological sex is real, there are only two sexes, the differences between males and females matter, and that women are adult human females.
You might be wondering why this is relevant here at a rally about ending child mutilation. Well, it’s actually extremely relevant, because the justifications given for performing these horrific surgeries on children are rooted in absurd, reality-denying pseudoscience about basic biology.
It’s a pseudoscience that denies the existence of males and females.
It’s a pseudoscience that says biological sex is just an arbitrary social construct.
It’s a pseudoscience that says a person’s identity determines their biology.
And it’s a pseudoscience that says that a person can be born in the wrong body, which is demonstrated by having preferences or behaviors that are typically associated with the opposite sex.
Most people don’t realize how much our major scientific and medical institutions have been captured by this pseudoscience literally claiming that girls who are tomboys, and boys who are effeminate, are transgender.
But the American Psychological Association, the Endocrine Society, the American Psychiatric Association, and even the CDC, to name only a few, all literally define “transgender” as “persons whose expression or behavior does not conform to that which is typically associated with their sex.”
That’s their definition. Go look it up for yourself if you don’t believe me.
It doesn’t get much clearer than that. If your daughter is not a feminine girl, she’s actually a boy. And if your son is not a masculine boy, according to them, he’s actually a girl. Or even something else entirely different altogether.
This is absurd in the extreme.
We know that if left alone, many of these extremely “nonconforming” children will grow up to be normal, healthy, gay adults.
But now, because of gender ideology, these children are being told they have a mismatch between their gender identity and their biological sex, which can then be “fixed” with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery.
In addition to these beliefs defying all we know to be scientifically true about basic biology, they are also grotesque and evil.
What is occurring at Vanderbilt Medical, and hospitals and clinics all over the country in the name of gender pseudoscience, is a medical scandal of horrifying proportions.
And it has to end right now.
Justdad7 has a great article on how the misuse of statistics and bad studies are being used by the gender religious to support their arguments. I highly recommend going to his substack and reading the entire article.
The Appeal to Authority
The people who write gender flap-doodle are not stupid. You need to learn a lot of facts in order to twist them and to get your stuff published you need fairly impressive credentials. Any particularly pointed challenge to a piece of gender woo woo from a lay person is likely to be met with the indignant response along the lines of, “How dare you challenge someone who holds a Doctorate from an Ivy League University and publishes in Peer Reviewed Journals.”
This line of argument is a fallacy which has a fancy Latin name, the argument um ad verecundiam or the appeal to authority.
People with doctoral degrees from prestigious universities have to be very bright and hardworking at least at some points in their careers. However, they can still make mistakes and if someone points out a specific mistake, you need to answer the specific point.
A weak or fallacious argument from an expert does not get any better if it is endorsed by lots of other experts. This is the fallacy of argumentum ad numeram or the appeal to popularity. When someone points out that gender affirming care has been endorsed y the American Psychological Association, the American Pediatric Association, the Endocrine Society and many other medical organizations, it is still legitimate to ask whether any of these groups based their endorsement on a systematic evidence review.
The appeal to authority persists because it serves a social purpose. Questioning everything is good advice in the classroom but in day to day life there simply is not time. We need to be able to rely on expert advice without scrutinizing every detail.
Liberal society has developed a matrix of safeguards to ensure that expert advice is reliable, most of the time. Professionals are licensed and regulated by governing bodies. Scientific papers are subject to peer review. Academic tenure protects researchers from undue government and corporate pressure. The press watches for cases of abuse.
The rise of gender ideology has seen all of these safeguards fail simultaneously. It will take time to rebuild them and the loss of public trust will take even longer to undo.
The Brain Eating Amoeba
A war has been going on for billions of years that breeds well armed monsters who struggle with other monsters for survival. Having no particular interest in us, most of them are relatively harmless, as our immune systems deal with their weapons handily. But there are exceptions.
Naegleria fowleri is an amoeba that not only has developed a deadly taste for human brains but is also a match for our defenses and a guest in dramatic headlines. What happens when this monster enters your body?
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…