Insect-worn microcamera streams video to phone 120 meters away

But I'm not so sure it's that much better than dogs for search and rescue. Much more promising for surveillance.

Other companies like e2v do have sampling packs available for most of their standard sensors, and they're pretty friendly. Not quite so small though!

The rectenna would have to be much too large to produce anywhere near 25mW even at a 10% duty cycle.

I suppose if you didn’t mind ramping the RF output power way up you could shrink the antenna size, but not much smaller than 1cm^2 I think.

If you're totally fine with it, why not just say "kill" instead of the soothing euphemism?

And that's the kind of mindset that got us into the mess we find ourselves in today.

I didn't advocate a black and white approach of, using animals=evil.

I agree with most of what you say, I just think we should always ask ourselves these questions instead of blindly admiring the technical achievement, comfort, etc.

It's a matter of respect for the universe, part of the respect is aknoweldging that killing is part of this universe, but we should be thoughtful about it. And understand necessities vs excessiveness. It seems you do purposely think about these things, so I've got no qualms with you :)

I hope I'v made myself clearer.

First of all, let us clarify what anti-speciesism means so that we are on the same page here and don‘t fight with windmills that don‘t exist.

Anti-speciesisim is the position that one should not discriminate on the basis of species as it is not a morally relevant criterion for making destinctions between living beings. The argument is that similar to the color of skin, there is nothing that we inherently value in being a member of a specific species. What we generally care about are other more fundamental criteria such as ability to feel pleasure and pain or some other criteria that could be a plausible source of value (e.g., potential to create value in the world which could be proxied by intelligence). Thus, it is totally possible to be anti-speciesist and still value human beings more than other animals based on the understanding that we are different in our ability to feel pleasure and pain or create value in the world. Moreover, in your post you have not made any argument which would put anti-speciesim per se into question.

Of course, you could argue that there is an inherent difference between non-human and human animals but you still need to define what that criterion is. If you believe in an evolutionary world view species doesn‘t seem like a good candidate since we basically randomly evolved from other animals and it would be totally unclear from which point on we were worthy of moral consideration. It seems much more likely that you care about something else then species but I am open to hear your side on the argument.

Now, where you probably see a difference to most anti-speciesists is the degree to which you want to give recognition to the moral value of non-human animals. For anti-speciesists, how much moral concern we should have for an animal is generally an empirical question that is based on some definition of cognitive function. Going down this route has the nice property of making things emendable to a grounded discussion about facts rather than just moral intuitions.

To sum up, I think you should really reconsider your position on anti-speciesism as it is a pretty defensible and logical position to take if you are inclined toward a scientific world view that recognizes evolutionary theory.

Regarding the moral question of using animals for food production if we don‘t have to (and trust me, we don‘t need to rely on almost all of the billions of animals we are slaughtering every year for reasons of tradition or taste), I can also recommend the following short video (2 min) on a thought experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSUz6Rj5oo4

> When you say "livestock enslavement is problematic" you're stating an opinion as if it were a fact.

No but it IS a fact, if you agree you wouldn't hit your dog, I suppose that when you "put it down", you would also prefer to do it painlessly instead of giving it to a slaughterhouse that operates on such a scale that it can't quite 100% guarantee your dog might not dangle half-alive on a meat hook for a minute (or other types of accidents that definitely do happen).

If you agree that treating a dog like that IS problematic, we're doing this to animals that are literally just as intelligent and loving as dogs (namely, pigs), on a massive industrial scale.

Sure, I also consider myself sufficiently superior to animals to justify eating them.

But the way they are treated in the bio industry is absolutely problematic, for a various number of reasons actually.

Due to the suffering of wild animals, eating beef is probably net negative for total animal suffering because a cow only has 1 brain for a ton of biomass.

I read a book suggesting that programme was discontinued as the cats kept getting involved in road traffic accidents.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Dunn,_Invisible_Boy

[2] It's not invisibility ala The Invisible Man, but instead a dragonfly sized drone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-resolution_imaging#Multi...

https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.03277

Spinning a web is a metabolically very expensive process, requiring as it does a great deal of protein - protein which can only be recovered by either eating the spun silk again, or eating prey trapped by it. Spiders consequently have to be pretty smart about where and how they do it, because the ones who aren't tend not to reproduce. So it's usually a very safe bet that, wherever you see a spider web, it's there because that's where the prey tends to be. It can be interesting to see what sort of prey that is - for example, right now in the basement of my ~130-year-old house there are a couple of very happy cellar spiders enjoying a steady diet of pill bugs, and another by the kitchen radiator who all on her own solved most of an ant problem for me before I ever realized I had it.

They're actually very desirable animals to have around, in my thoroughly considered opinion, despite getting about as bad a name as wasps - and with just as little reason.