ryanblakeley

People who have so much in assets that they can live (and support their family) with the interest they earn on those assets, and by a huge margin, not just comfortably retired people. Those are the people who get richer, at the expense of your kids. Inflationary housing expenses are a drop in the bucket when someone's assets are in the billions.

Creative expression is also about relationships with other people and connecting with an audience. Treating it like product optimization seems hollow and lonely. There's friction to asking another person to read and give feedback on something you wrote, but it's the kind of friction that helps you grow.

There were a number of anomalous characteristics including its shape, acceleration, rotation, origin, and reflectivity.

Super-intelligent game-playing AIs, for decades, were trained on human data.

I once took a group of young people foraging for mushrooms in the Willamette valley on a farm that had loads of these newts. I warned every body not to touch them.

After preparing dinner, one girl got very ill, as did I, while other people who ate the dinner were fine. I was so worried I'd mis-identified some mushrooms.

But turns out she had handled one of these newts and the bacteria had transferred to the mushrooms she picked. I contacted it from washing the mushrooms. I threw up several times that night.

In hindsight, had we not washed the mushrooms as thoroughly as we did, things could have gone much worse.

Sperm bank

Silicon lids on glass containers are a great combo. I use Weck jars, wide-mouth for easier cleaning, in sizes 1L, 500mL, and 200mL, in my commercial kitchen. And stainless steel hotel pans and lids for everything else.

Consumer-grade stuff is a waste of time for several reasons, but in-particular the lack of standardized sizes. When I do catering and people ask about food storage I recommend those wide-mouth glass jars and 4-inch 1/9th and 6-inch 1/6th pans, and standardized baking sheets (1/2 and 1/4 sizes mostly) with re-usable lids.

> something belonging to a sick person is fastened to the end of a throwing stick smeared in human or kangaroo fat. The stick is then stuck in the ground and a fire lit beneath it. Mulla-mullung chant the name of the sick person. Once the stick falls, the ritual is complete.

Just to be clear, these models can answer questions about relationships between people if you mean family relationships.

Answering questions about what you're describing sounds really interesting. What would a training set be like that describes a bunch of complex human relationships and then asks questions about them with objective answers?

"Dry stack" is another term for that, a stone wall without mortar.

In my opinion, thinking of this as a grid is misguided. It's barely different than flex columns. I would want to be able to have some objects take up more width than one column, or not have clean columns at all. Like "space filling" and "mosaic".

Is sexual cannibalism off the table?

Adrian Tchaikovsky's sci-fi book Children of Time has a pretty cool take on the future of ant wars. I'm interviewing him in a couple weeks to talk about ecology in science fiction. If anyone has a suggestion for a question I'd love to hear it.

> generated 68x more power than needed to operate its sensors

> all components...can be purchased at a local hardware store

I can't help but think this would be used for surveillance. All you need is dirt to run a sensor and transmitter. But it's cool science.

It would be interesting to figure out how much does it take away from the soil biome's energy budget. If you did a whole acre of these, would the insects, worms, and millipedes take a hit, and then birds and reptiles etc.?

Thanks for the recommendation. I write about animal intelligence and will be keen to pick that one up.

The molecular basis of circadian rhythm has been studied in fruit flies. Every cell has a chemical clock which adjusts for a range of temperatures. They found that calorie restriction and cold temperature extends the life span of fruit flies. But if you alter the DNA of their circadian clock those lifespan increases do not happen.

Can I get a version that lets me stare at a dog's face instead?

I value privacy above the marginal usefulness of targeted ads. You should be free to opt-in to tracking and personalization if that's what you want. But we shouldn't all be caught in a surveillance dragnet by default.

I appreciate your perspective. Perhaps I should have said "few" instead of "many" and "parts" instead of "systems". But it does sound like your overall impression of backup and restorative capacity differs from what I gathered in that interview.

He did say damaged HV transformers would be a big deal and repairs would take weeks, but maybe that was an optimistic take. Talking about solar storms and grid damage, the range of possibilities is very large, depending on the storm's intensity and where it hits.

I interviewed a guy from the NOAA to ask about that. The gist is 1) the military has hardened satellites 2) they have a phone-tree system for alerting grid operators and 3) many high voltage transformers have back-up systems in hardened storage.

[1] https://ryanblakeley.net/p/solar-flare

One of our serious cultural flaws is powerful individuals don't divest their power, and the system doesn't force them too. A prerequisite to becoming rich or attaining political power is a desire to have it. And those people never in their life reduce their scope.

That is an incredibly cool discovery. Another weird body hack in Northern Australia Hymenoptera is the honey pot ant. Their replete caste are passive food storage containers.

> Ophidascaris robertsi is a roundworm usually found in pythons...the world-first case of the parasite being found in humans.

The title of the article says "Insect", the first few paragraphs are about lacewings, but the study being cited only looked at fruit flies. The study didn't test memory. It looked at neuron location and activation, which could indicate something about memory, but that's a journalistic leap.

That's a nice reference. It's good to know a dental x-ray is only 1.5 mrem, compared to a full body CT scan coming in at 1000 mrem.

A group of hunters and anthropologists recently butchered a bison using only these kinds of tools https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmsrkFjPiKM

I would have been more surprised to learn that they do a truly random walk search.

They lay down pheromones to create trails, isn't that part of the answer to how they avoid crossing paths?

https://ryanblakeley.net is about animal intelligence

A software labor union with licensing would save a lot of trouble.

Four siblings, ages 13, 9, 4 and 11 months. Found in thick jungle by a rescue dog.

You can give a working dog affection. It doesn't erode their ability to do a job. It's only an issue if you do it at the wrong time.

From the Science section, there is a headline "Metallic Object Falls Through New Jersey Home's Roof", which is the desensationalized version of "Possible meteorite crashes through the roof of a New Jersey home, lands in bedroom still warm".

The ambiguity of "metal object" kind of makes it more sensational than "possible meteorite".