mellavora

Well, given the overwhelming emerging evidence of social attention and behavior in plants, and given that it makes evolutionary sense that "social attention" would provide a fitness advantage in any environment where there are other actors,

the only reason to doubt it would be an assumption that "attention to social information" can only happen in creatures with an complex central nervous systems. Which requires rather constrained definitions of "attention", "social", and "information"

ok, there is another reason to doubt it. inertia. We've been taught/told that a complex CNS is what makes intelligence, and it is hard to get away from that idea.

Yes, you just aren't as good at it as the octopus. Maybe if you practiced more?

It is hard to extend morality between species. The idea of parents sacrificing themselves for their children seems to resonate as highly moral, and is also a common pattern in biology.

But how it plays out, from humans where the male can provide more by continuing to live and "hunt/protect/teach"-- but at the risk that the "hunt/protect" might end his life, to spiders where (some species) the male gives his body to provide nutrition for the child,

well, who am I to say which is more moral?

except the mother has to care for her eggs until they hatch. So I guess we'd be fine only eating the males...

Octopuses seem to have quite a bit of independent cognition in each of their arms, which are wrangled by the central brain.

Yes, that's inherent in the design. All grey matter (optimized for local intercommunication), no white matter (optimized for sending signals between regions).

Each arm has its own ganglion ("CPU") and the central unit struggles to keep up with these and keep them coordinated.

Yes, but always remember the plural of applepus is apple pie

But not as cool as "Whales on Stilts"

with the exceptions that an intern is (hopefully) going to learn from their mistakes and improve

The promise of capitalism is to improve people's circumstances and thus make them happy.

The promise of buddhism is to make people happy regardless of circumstances.

As someone who has lived both primarily outside and primarily inside, my preference for categories, for putting things in boxes, has a direct connection with my willingness to put myself in a box (i.e. a "room" in a "building", box in a box).

Likewise, most software/computer interfaces I know are pretty focused on putting things in boxes. For one thing, the screen is a small rectangle, and everything has to fit into a smaller rectangle in that rectangle.

Even the title "how we sort the world" implies that categories are the central element and that they can be sorted.

Nouns are the "real" thing, and verbs are transitory.

However, when you live outside, spend both days and nights without walls to encase you, my perspective flipped. Verbs became the important thing. It doesn't matter what the weather is, there is always weather, what matters is how it is changing.

A verb-centric world, where the nouns are always in transition.

Look, I like central heating and indoor plumbing. I live in a box these days. But I also remember how it was to live outside walls.

So there is some interesting research about brainwave syncing during effective communication, which certainly includes personalized instruction (tutoring) or small-class learning.

I wonder how that works with computers, when we are only sync'ing with the ghosts and statistical patterns of other humans, and those patterns are generated by electronic brains.

Checksums! Bah, I used to have to code uphill both ways in the snow, and I liked it!

You mean "win the lottery" "twice"

What I hate about Airbnb is all the hidden fees and ridiculous homework you have to do when leaving. Regulation could have gone to fix that but yeah here are some flying pigs!

Airbnb could have gone to fix that. Why leave it to regulation?

there are people who own apartments in NY that couldn’t afford to live there if they weren’t able to earn some money from renting out their space on AirBnB.

Yes, but also turning every apartment into a potential revenue source puts upward pressure on rents.

So there are also people who cannot afford apartments in NYC because of short-term rentals.

Don't know about NYC, but in the midwest there are hotels that specialized in providing construction workers a home away from home for 1-2 weeks. You get a bedroom and minimal kitchen for 125-150/night. It isn't luxury, but most certain is: > Hotel rooms like that ... at least for normal people.

As a married guy, I see my wife's ring every day.

And I have a friend of a friend whose entire business is helping people sell wine for 20K a bottle and up. Emphasis on "and up"

I also have a friendly relationship with a local wine shop, where I usually buy bottles for 10-15 bucks. They also carry (and sell) many bottles at 5K a pop and up.

And if you want to get all mathematical about it, assuming the right kind of power law distribution, it is more likely to see one person who would pay 2000 for a bottle than to find 2 people who would pay 200.

power law stats is weird. Once you are outside of the bell, the bell area has NO constraint on the observation. Unlike Gaussian and similar distributions, where probability falls off very rapidly as you move out of the bell.

Cleansing the Doors of Perception by Hudson Smith.

Yes.

I assume you mean the thoughtful person whose probing questions unlock and unblock everyone else.

Lunchtime conversation is only one enabler of this.

I suspect the person is Hamming, as he makes reference to this in his book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering.

This aspect of what it takes to be a Hamming is curiosity about what other people are doing; you can track this by reading shipped emails or lurking in slack channels, then reaching out individually to the people/teams involved when you wonder about something.

Hamming was intentional about doing this at lunch. The magic isn't lunch, it is in intentionally seeking the information and then acting on it.

New users wonder how to call functions. They form an intuition ("use parenthesis"), but it's unreliable. "Oh, parenthesis are optional--oh, parenthesis are only optional sometimes".

print f"are you {sure} you need parenthesis to call a function in python"

Python is much more boring in this respect, users are more likely to form accurate intuitions.

is defining a class the same as defining a function? What about functions implicitly defined when you define a class?

__what__ is __with__ __some_words__?

why do you need an empty file called init.py in the same directory as your actual code?

So no matter how similar homeschooling will look to government-controlled schooling, people with power will never stop attacking it because of that crucial nuisance.

Just like in Florida, where teachers now face felony charges for having the wrong book in the classroom (not as required reading, just having it in the classroom). Yup, that's people with power attacking home-schooling for sure.

Nothing gets past your professor.

There, fixed it for ya

Nearly 3 Billion Birds Gone Since 1970

The first-ever comprehensive assessment of net population changes in the U.S. and Canada reveals across-the-board declines that scientists call “staggering.” All told, the North American bird population is down by 2.9 billion breeding adults, with devastating losses among birds in every biome. Forests alone have lost 1 billion birds. Grassland bird populations collectively have declined by 53%, or another 720 million birds.

https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/bring-birds-back/

I see how that works once your neighbors have your phone number, but what about that first introduction?

I've had neighbors come over to introduce themselves, some even with welcoming gifts when we bought the house and moved in.

Yes, the thing with Tolkien, is he was telling stories which are meant to be TOLD, as in oral, spoken out loud.

To an audience which might be falling asleep, or minds drifting as they stare at the fire.

That's part of his magic, and few other authors match it.

Contrast to Harry Potter, which is a stream of visual images.

Look, I'm at work and don't have time to dive deep into economic theory. If you read the source articles you'll see it has a 100 year plus history and is well grounded in basics of economics, in fact has more accurate base terms than most theories-- it is the first one to recognize that land and capital are separate concepts.

You also seem to be surprised that your ownership of land is a right granted by the government. Go ask your favorite law school professor about this, they will confirm that I am right.

Historically all land belonged to the sovereign. The US didn't like the idea of kings, so under our common law all land belongs to the US government.

And you get your rights to your piece of it because the law recognizes that you should have and deserve to have monopoly rights.

But if it wasn't fundamentally the property of the US federal government, where would the government get the legal jurisdiction to enforce the monopoly rights it has granted you? The US government will not enforce any property rights you may think you have in Mexico.

See, I'm not questioning private property, I want you to be able to own land. I'm looking at it in its proper full legal context.

Now you want to restrict voting rights to land owners, probably thinking some variant of "no taxation without representation", right? But recall that the fundamental owner is "we the people", not "we the individual to whom the people have granted a monopolistic usage of what we the people own".

So yes, since every citizen is in fact the land owner, then the single tax principle by default meets your criteria of restricting voting rights to land owners.

And since I've met your criteria, welcome to the movement. We are glad you are here.

This is one more reason why we need to move to a single-tax system. No tax on labor, because we want more labor and you should keep what you make. No tax on capital, because we want more investment so that labor is more effective.

Tax land. Land is not capital nor is it labor. Land ownership only allows rent-seeking behavoir. Land ownership is an artificial right granted by the government.

Google "single tax movement" to learn more. Or try this:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

Old schoolers lift metric.

The bar is 20kg.

The weights (pairs of each):

1.25

2.5

5

10

20

you might want some 25kg bumpers for deadlifts

The problem with immortality is how does society create room for the next generation?