cmpb

Counterargument to 2: the air is largely nitrogen, but humans do not utilize it during respiration. Thus, this reliable feature of the environment has not been selected as a dependency.

I'm not necessarily arguing it's untrue, just not quite the hard-and-fast rule that 1 is.

Ah the old "entire digitized Library of Congress" per second metric

In the past, I have found it very difficult to get through books, but I’ve never had a problem with just putting it down when I’m not interested. I think that’s a big part of my situation: I have had trouble finding things that really hold my interest. And even for some books that I did find interesting, my low reading speed made the process drag on for too long for my interest to hold up. But no, I’m not tortured. I do appreciate your concern, however.

It definitely doesn't fit the bill of this thread (no images, not original links), but it's an interesting site nonetheless. I'm amazed at the number of books you've read over the years. I'm shooting for 3 books this year, and that's a 200% increase over last year!

Do you have good memory for the content of the books you've read? Or do some specific books stand out even over several years?

Good point. That seems like a "soft-shutdown" compared to the "hard-shutdown" that I interpreted from the parent post: dying due to being unfit in the environment.

>An unusually high number of reports of late breeding and captive rearing near the coast—primarily on tropical milkweed (Asclepias curassavica)—may also suggest there are higher numbers of non-migrating monarchs than usual which can negatively impact the population.

Just a friendly reminder to milkweed enthusiasts to always use your local native milkweed instead of the exotics. They might attract more butterflies, but they're bad for the population because they spend more time later in the year on the exotics instead of migrating back for overwintering.

  SuperExpressive()
    .anythingButString('aeiou')
    .toRegex();
  // ->
  /(?:[^a][^e][^i][^o][^u])/

There's got to be a better way to express that in Regex, right?

I'm curious about this. Is there any easy way to determine how much wealth Putin or Xi actually has? Or is any discussion about their wealth just anecdotal?

It could also be that he had the "privilege" to earn it (as not everyone has that privilege).

I'm sure that, as with most mental illnesses, susceptibility to conspiracy theory would be a scale (say, not-very-susceptible to highly-susceptible). And in that case, we're all on the scale somewhere.

As you mention such weaknesses being "actively exploited", it makes me think of advertisements / advertising agencies attempting to manipulate people (to buy stuff, etc.). Perhaps our location on the conspiracy-theory-susceptibility scale would correspond with our susceptibility to advertising tactics, such that those who are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories correlates with those who are more likely to buy something based on seeing an advertisement. Or perhaps there's even some element of training in there, whereby some people might be "trained" by advertisements into being more likely to believe in conspiracy theories.

Or maybe I'm just trying to pin negative behavioral consequences to the advertisement industry, a facet of our society that I find loathsome.

I'm just saying, it took me until halfway down page two to realize it.

Please, rant away! I'm interested in your opinion and the context of the decommissioned machine

That sounds like a pretty easy/fun daily routine!

I do this too, but my window of I-can-still-take-my-meds is shorter because it’s only one dose for the day, and if I take it too late, I’ll be up all night. I’m usually halfway to dropping off the kiddos at daycare when it dawns on me, and I have to race home before going to work.

That's an interesting concept. Normally fire is a healthy part of the ecosystem, but as humans we've changed the context in which fires occur (e.g. by reducing naturally occurring fire and by making droughts more common) such that when they do occur they are more destructive than many species are able to handle. If that is the case, I wonder if there is a way we could reintroduce fires to the system (i.e. controlled burns) in such a way that it doesn't completely destroy the ecosystem.

Special training would be my guess at the suit defense tactic here. Police are trained to toss the item in such a way that it’s not considered assault, etc. Same reason police are allowed to use the giant screens in their cars while they’re driving.

I would appreciate a response to this as well, from the author or someone knowledgeable on this subject

I think the normality of it isn’t the issue. The issue is that many residents of Hong Kong have been explicitly demonstrating that they are not comfortable with China having any control in Hong Kong

Thanks for reminding me to catch up on the last few months of XKCD! Ended up sending a bunch of coronavirus-related comics to my biologist wife.

What about https://www.revk.uk/2018/10/unicode-dicks.html?m=1

>Lacking guns and even bows, they could hunt only by digging traps or pursuing prey across the mountains until the animals collapsed from exhaustion.

This reminds me of a show I watched on the Science channel when I was young about how humans have evolved. They showed various African civilizations and detailed how they hunt in parties by simply keeping pace with the animal until the animal just collapses. It goes on to say that that is one characteristic of human evolution that has made us drastically more successful at surviving than other species

Oh goodness, now I can't unsee it.

I think in this case, the picture of the blanket actually says a lot more than the title. Not much substance outside of those two things, however. Either way, HN often brings a lot of substance to the table in the comments for these type of articles.

I’m trying to imagine a world where this technology is ubiquitous, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’ll be easily exploitable from the perspective of a nefarious actor (e.g. a jamming device of some sort). I just can’t see safety-critical systems coming to rely on it

I think it’s more likely that it was in their calculations to not bring them back.

As a citizen of the United States (who came of age well after this event took place), I've only ever been told that this was an act of heroic success, something to be proud of, something that America should be proud of. I'm curious what the reception to this was outside of the U.S. Especially, e.g., to someone living in the USSR, what was it like hear that someone else had put a man on the moon?

Science did know it. It just didn’t realize that the angular momentum could change with time.

No, it seems that I’m this case, the angular momentum of the light beam itself changes over time, a process that is typically referred to as (or driven by?) torque in classical mechanics, and so they used that term here as well. They call it “self-torque” (I believe) because it’s the light changing it’s own angular momentum. But I’ve not been involved with physics academia in several years, so take it with a grain of salt.

Thanks for that adding perspective to the conversation. If you don't mind my asking, what specific school system(s) was it that you were a part of?

As a kid in the Louisiana public school system of the 90s, I can attest that I was not exposed to the language itself, and opportunities to learn the language in the school setting were not provided, despite having grown up in an area that I know has a high number of Cajun descendants (I'm from a family of Fontenots in Allen Parish). But my wife (who grew up in the basin/Teche area) had a wealth of opportunity at her school, even taking French immersion classes for several years. I'm curious as to how consistent and spread-out the effect that you're referring to was.

The article mentions the fact that the dialect and culture are diminishing. In Louisiana, we have the same problem happening with the Cajun and Creole cultures, and it’s very sad to see. My wife’s grandmother spoke only Cajun French for all of her youth and still doesn’t speak English very comfortably, but that generation is dying off. Unfortunately, the more thoroughly Cajun areas of Louisiana are also the poorest, and so many of the new generations are leaving to bigger cities and more opportunities, myself and my wife included.

There are attempts to keep the language alive, but I’m betting it won’t be nearly enough, and it will likely only live on in an academic sense. The culture has of course also started to dissolve, but that’s no different from what’s experienced in areas all over the US what with ever increasing exposure to the ‘common identity’ via the internet/etc.

At the very least, however, our food culture has been so well-infused into our lives that I really doubt that aspect will die off anytime soon.