jabretti

I saw a good documentary on grizzly bears catching salmon. While the younger, less successful bears will eat any salmon they can catch, the older and more experienced bears can catch so many salmon that they'll just slit them open, eat the roe, and throw the rest of the salmon away, so that they're getting maximum calories per unit of volume in their stomach.

Orcas seem to have fairly specialised diets -- there's different subspecies, each of which eats something different.

https://seaworld.org/animal-info/animal-infobooks/killer-wha...

>Type A whales eat mostly Antarctic minke whales and have also been observed hunting southern elephant seals.

>Large type B whales eat mainly seals, especially Weddell seals, and also hunt minke whales.

>Small type B killer whales have been observed hunting penguins and are believed to mainly eat fishes.

>Type C killer whales mostly eat Antarctic toothfish (Dissostichus mawsoni).

>Little is known about the diet of type D killer whales, however, they have been observed preying on Patagonian toothfish (Dissostichus eleginoides) caught on longlines.

So if type C whales don't eat seals and type B whales don't eat fish, it's not surprising that no whale type likes to eat humans -- they're apparently just picky eaters.

That'd have roughly as many characters as a 338,000 word book... longer than The Brothers Karamazov (365,000) but shorter than Gone With The Wind (418,000).

Just over half the length of A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, and probably just as entertaining. Heyooo!

Didn't we have automats in the 1930s?

Motley Fool seems to be the leaders in this -- if you search google news for any stock you're interested in then you'll find that Motley Fool seems to be cranking out largely-boilerplate articles about it; sometimes they seem to have had some human intervention, other times they seem to be fully computer-generated.

Yes, but step back and consider the immense intellect and creativity being devoted to getting laid, or speculating about what's going to happen on Game of Thrones, or thinking up clever things you should have said half an hour ago, or complaining about what's wrong with Star Wars these days.

Or arguing on the internet.

Just a teeny portion of our species' intellectual output winds up creating or discovering anything of real value, but that's fine, we muddle through nonetheless. The finance industry has its role to play in ensuring the lights stay on and there's food in the supermarket.

>The idea that "telling people what to believe" is a phenomenon unique to one side of the political spectrum is absurd. What's been the most watched cable news network in recent years?

This is true, but there's an asymmetry here, and it's best summed up by Conquest's Second Law: any organisation not explicitly right-wing will become left-wing. So in the US nowadays we have right-wing media outlets, which are right-wing, and we have everything else, which is left-wing.

Breitbart is right-wing, and Salon is left-wing, and that's fine -- people go to those sites explicitly because they want news from that perspective. It's what the readers want, and it's what they provide. But GQ is a magazine, dating back to the 1930s, ostensibly about men's fashion and suits and watches and cars and things... so why is it filled with left-wing political content and Trump bashing? It doesn't seem to be a sensible business decision, it just seems to be driven by the personal opinions of the editors.

That, I think, is what the OP means about people not being told what to believe. They don't mind it when explicitly political outlets push a political point of view, but when neutral territory (like GQ or football or Entertainment Weekly) gets politicised then that really turns off at least half the population.

It's a feature, not of capitalism, but of human interactions in general. (It should not have escaped our attention that any time an "alternative to capitalism" is tried it inevitably winds up with wealth and power even more heavily concentrated, this time in the hands of the people whose job it was to ensure that wealth and power were shared fairly.)

And, to a large extent, of animals. I suppose there are some animal species where all members are more or less equal, but they're probably mostly solitary animals which rarely interact with each other. In social species, massive inequalities, particularly between males, are the norm.

It would be equally interesting if you could find one who disagrees with the statement, so they can tell us about other languages that are more irregular and in what ways.

Cranking out one buzzfeed-grade article a day doesn't seem like much work.

I'm pretty sure I've already put more thought into this comment than they put into most of their articles.

> We are all born with the same brain (see the ted talk on the "After 83,000 brain scans"). Some of us just aren't born in the right environment to curate it and never learn the best ways to use it

That's blatantly untrue, and we have shitloads of twin and adoption studies to prove it.

The question is: who are the ones abusing their power? The alleged perps, or those who are claiming to be victims?

Here's what I found from googling:

https://www.forensicsciencedegree.org/wp-content/uploads/201...

I really can't escape the thought that it's just pumping out a generic face of a particular race, though. I'd like to see the faces that it produces for a number of different-looking people of the same race. (The two faces in the linked article certainly look very much like "generic black man" and "generic black woman").

Honestly, that "diversity drives innovation" is a total goddamn lie. Hiring the best people available drives innovation. Diversity itself has never been shown to be of any value.

If you look at some of the most innovative places in history, they weren't particularly diverse. It doesn't seem to have held them back. Renaissance Florence wasn't especially diverse, it was a bunch of Florentines sitting around doing Florentine things. Victorian London wasn't all that diverse, either, but they were innovating at an astounding rate.

Bell Labs in the 1960s was mostly nerdy white dudes with pocket protectors, and they were massively innovative -- because what drives innovation is thoughts like "What if we laid down amorphous silicon dioxide directly onto the wafer and annealed it to reduce electron traps?" rather than thoughts like "omg, I just saw a person with a different colour skin, my mind is totally blown".

I assume by 2050 it will all spell out some obscene message which Elon Musk will read to us as he departs for Mars.

I've been back and forth from Australia to the US enough times that it takes about five minutes for my brain to adjust to driving on the other side of the road each time.

That said, my brain takes the cue from looking at what side the wheel is on (I just keep the side with myself on it close to the centre line). If I got off the plane and into a McLaren F1 then I'd probably have real problems (thankfully Avis doesn't carry twenty-year-old supercars).

Spelling difficulties are are artefact of what makes English so powerful, though -- its ability to simply adopt foreign words any time it feels the need to do so.

The base language was formed by crashing two major European language families into each other a thousand years ago, and we've been happily borrowing words from every other language on Earth ever since as we've needed them. If we want to make up a brand new word, as we so often do in science, we'll probably reach for a handful of Greek and Latin prefixes and suffices and stick them together any way we like.

After a thousand years of this, English is probably the language with the biggest and most expressive vocabulary of any language in the world.

>Too many people have dismissed SL foolishly. Glad it survived and proved them mostly wrong.

I dunno, ten years ago a lot of people were predicting that Second Life would be the Next Big Thing, and assuring me that I should really be buying up Second Life real estate with my hard-earned real-world money because soon it'd be worth a lot more.

Second Life has survived, but it certainly hasn't gone mainstream. It's just another weird corner of the internet with its own community, and good luck to 'em.

> Seriously, no one is concerned that Tesla is announcing, not one, but two new products, while they are failing to deliver on all three they are currently producing (in terms of production ramp-up)?

I dunno man, every time before I've said "Tesla/SpaceX can't possibly do that", they've succeeded in doing it (albeit usually a year or so behind schedule) so I've given up trying to tell them what they can't do.

Let's see if that makes it from prototype to production, though; if you could meet the legal requirements with cameras and displays I think someone else would have done it by now.

Concept cars often lack mirrors, or have ridiculously small mirrors that wouldn't be legal. Apparently car designers really just don't like adding them.

Serviced apartments typically aren't "permanent", though, they're rented by the night like a hotel rather than on a longer-term basis, so they cost a lot more, to compensate for the high vacancy rate.

Yep, my car has a lower drag coefficient than a Veyron, and yours probably does too.

A Chevy Tahoe has a lower drag coefficient than a Veyron. One of those super-boxy 80s Volvos has a lower drag coefficient than a Veyron.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile_drag_coefficient

You'd think that the ability for the wheels to deliver power to the ground has to be the limiting factor at some point.

Also I'd really want to be able to buy one for less than $200K. Cost is still the real problem.

That's still only 1.5g. That's a lot for a straight-line acceleration, but it's not that crazy for a turning acceleration.

Fighter pilots and race car drivers pull much greater gs all the time. So do rollercoaster passengers, though.

For the most part, as in this case, it seems like idolatry tends to emerge from the bottom up rather than being decreed from the top down.

The Pope and Cardinals would really prefer it if people would pray to a nice abstract God in a nice abstract sort of way, but superstitious common people really want to be able to have a nice neat physical object that they can entreat for the safe return of car keys and the like, and these two streams reach an uneasy compromise at the local priest's level.

"Hauling stuff in rough terrain" seems like the PR-friendly version of what they want this technology for, but I don't think it takes too much imagination to think up other uses.

Headline contradicted by actual article.

From the first few paragraphs you'd swear that Walmart was busy supplementing its stocks of cheap crap with Maseratis and superyachts.

Instead it seems that they're actually supplementing their core business with a few brands like Bonobos and Lord and Taylor, which are in fact solidly of the middle class, and certainly not the upper.

No, but a butler could.

I can't afford a butler, but if I could, then I'd get one. He'd live in my house and know all about me and my personal life; knowing about my personal life would help him do his job better. I wouldn't worry that my butler knew I was in a relationship, or pregnant, and that he changed his behaviour accordingly.

On the other hand, I suppose I wouldn't want a butler who sold information about me to third parties, or used the information to advertise to me for kickbacks. "You have been down recently, sir... perhaps a new Bentley would cheer you up?"

Indeed, which is why it was a terrible idea to go ahead with this doomed compromise.