veddox

I reference this paper in almost every science-communication talk I give as an ecologist.

It was not a new result by any means, we've had a whole range of other studies showing the same over the last three decades [1]. But it was still a very important study, simply for the sheer amount of data they collated: analysing 170 species trends across four decades across Europe is quite a feat!

Taken together, it really drives home the message that modern agricultural practices are shredding the environment, but also that there is a lot of nuance behind biodiversity declines that we need to look into further, and that offer hope for improvement.

[1] e.g. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959270919000480, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-45854-0, https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12585,https://doi.org/10.1111/c..., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2011.05.006, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1474-919X.2004.00375.x

To allow different circles of friends to sit together.

At the weddings I've been at (usually 100-150 guests), there would be families and relatives of the groom and bride, then their school friends, church friends, university friends, etc. - anything up to a dozen different groups of people who know each other but not the other guests. So a seating plan allows these friends to enjoy the party together. It doesn't prohibit them from getting to know the other guests, but offers a bit of a safe space with people the hosts know they will get along with.

(Additionally, in many cases, these groups of friends may not have seen each other for several years, e.g. since their school days, and appreciate the opportunity to catch up.)

The „bus factor“ is a pars-pro-toto idiom. The „bus“ refers to any event that suddenly removes an important team member. This could be literally being hit by a bus (or SUV…), but could also be an illness, a move to another city, or simply a new position.

> contrary to other things, like fusion, this is possible.

Of course it's possible, I'm just saying it's not (and can never be) free. "Free for consumers" simply means somebody else paid for the costs - or more likely, the consumer paid the costs through taxes rather than at the store. You will always have input costs to produce an output, and these will not be negligible.

Just a few points on what you said, and these are not "accounting details": (1) Solar energy is not free - you need to build, install, and maintain panels and a power grid. (2) Of course you can reduce fertiliser, organic farming does so and takes ~20% yield decrease (depending on the crop). But then you have higher labour and machine costs to control weeds, and an overall higher per-hectare price. (3) Food processing matters because you probably don't want to spend most of your day milling your grain ration to make flour that you can then bake into bread. Ditto for other types of staple foods (you want to make your own sausages?). (On a historical side-note, here's a write-up of how ancient food systems worked: https://acoup.blog/2020/08/06/collections-bread-how-did-they...).

Bottom line: Food systems are incredibly complex!

All the problems you address are absolutely there.

But I have to say I have become pretty allergic whenever I hear anybody talk about "disrupting" an existing industry, for two reasons: (1) Existing industries are usually that way for a reason; often outsiders don't understand this until they have tried (and failed) to change things. (2) In those cases where industries were "successfully disrupted", I have the impression the result often just ended up exploiting people in different ways (looking at you, Uber and AirBnB.)

On reducing land area: as an agroecologist, I do think that this is a very important goal.

First, because in many modern agricultural landscapes (such as intensive farming regions in western Europe or the US Midwest), there is simply no space for nature. Agriculture is the leading cause of biodiversity loss in large parts of the world, and much of it has to do with lack of natural habitats.

And secondly, because we have such a lot of pressure on land in the more densely populated regions of the world - now only exacerbated by area demands for renewable energies.

However, I agree that vertical farming is unlikely to be a workable solution. Much more promising (though also more boring and irritating to some people) is to (a) reduce food waste and (b) reduce meat consumption. We could easily triple our food output without any further technical advances if we "just" did those two things.

There‘s no such thing as a free meal. Of course you could distribute free food to all your citizens (the Ancient Romans famously did), but somebody still needs to pay for it.

It‘s not just about on-farm labour, you need big machines (and lots of diesel!), fertiliser, pesticides… And that‘s before you look at all the rest of the food system, because to put a meal on the table you need the whole supply chain (ag-tech, fertiliser production, food processing, wholesale suppliers, etc.)

In modern agriculture, the farmer only gets a fraction of the money you pay for your loaf of bread, because there are so many other people involved.

The tubes are called xylem and phloem. Lignin is one biopolymer that is used in their construction, but it's not the only one (cellulose is even more important) - and you shouldn't confuse the building material with the structure.

Also, the article specifically says that these processes will usually remove the lignin to make the result transparent.

> who was really writing a Late Antique world

I agree with all the rest of your comment, but I think this point is only partly correct. Gondor can be interpreted as Byzantinian (late Antiquity), but Rohan is rather Anglo-Saxon (early Middle Ages), and the Shire actually quite modern (18th-19th century England). Numenor of course is Atlantean (romanticised classical Antiquity), the Druadain are Stone/Bronze Age, and the Elves - are the Elves.

Yes, but it comes from Norse mythology, not Latin: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Midgard

As a scholar of early medieval literature, Tolkien borrows tons of ideas from the Edda and other mythological sources. (To give him his due, he masterfully reinterprets and combines what he „borrows“.)

> Though I’ll admit Tolkien could be an outlier here.

To quote a military historian‘s analysis: „ Tolkien’s first-person experience of war and his deep grounding in medieval and Anglo-Saxon literature means that – while Tolkien does not stop to discuss Aragorn’s tax policy – Middle Earth tends to fit within the ‘zone of the possible’ much more neatly than Westeros. Armies in Middle Earth move at normal speeds, the economic and population systems (and the human terrain with them) make sense, characters behave within the confines of religious belief and social custom, and so on.“ (https://acoup.blog/2019/10/06/new-acquisitions-how-fast-do-a...)

Well, some of them did. There were a surprising number of doctors and other health-care workers among the Covid/vaccine-sceptics.

> It's unlikely that miracles happened as described in biblical texts due to the length of time between the events and the recording of them. I'd also expect people to exaggerate or even fabricate stories to boost other narratives, so there's a whole bunch of uncertainty surrounding them.

I don't think that does justice to the historical weight of the New Testament accounts. We have multiple eye witness accounts of the events surrounding Jesus' life, recorded within a few decades of the events themselves and emerging from an oral tradition that placed a premium on verifiable accuracy. The early Church writings we have (for example Eusebius) make it clear how concerned the first Christians were to ensure the historical reliability of their teaching, and how strongly they opposed the spreading of stories that were of doubtful veracity. In fact, the New Testament itself repeatedly tells its original readers to verify its accounts by asking other eye witnesses (e.g. Luke 1, 1 Corinthians 15).

> Either Jesus performed actual miracles, but then the Judas story doesn't make sense; or Jesus was an ordinary mortal, but then Christianity doesn't make sense.

The assumption here is that people will unconditionally believe and follow a person who performs miracles. But human beliefs and actions are more complex than that. People regularly refuse the evidence of their own senses, or that of knowledgeable authorities, if it contradicts their prior world view. They also regularly act contrary to better knowledge if they think it's in their interest.

So I think it's perfectly plausible that Judas experienced all of Jesus' miracles, but out of a mix of personal disappointment (Jesus not living up to Judas' expectations) and greed decided to betray him nevertheless.

The New Testament is pretty open about the fact that what Jesus claimed can be pretty hard to believe. The other disciples doubted Jesus too for a very long time. Yet eventually, what they heard and experienced convinced them enough that they preferred to be put to death rather than deny its truth. What makes you think Judas is more trustworthy than them?

(In fact, the Bible's willingness to talk about the weaknesses of its protagonists makes it all the more believable to me. If the early church leaders had "censored" the story to fit their own interests, why did they leave in all that embarrassing stuff about themselves?)

> Because HN users tend to be interested in niche but powerful languages, they are not to be trusted to know programming in general?

No, the parent comment meant that HN users are not a representative cross-section of programmers in general. This manifests itself, for example, in relatively niche languages being mentioned and discussed disproportionately often.

In other words: just because HN loves it doesn't mean everybody else knows it.

You need to scroll down (and presumably have JS enabled).

Can you elaborate on this, or link to a more detailed description of what you mean?

Both of those are good (I love my Viper), but neither of them is <250$. In that price range, I‘d recommend the Nikon ProStaff.

8x42 is the „default“ size for birding, but I also like the easier portability of a 8x30.

Interesting! Although I found the original paper much more illuminating than the write-up: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ancient-mesoamerica/...

Also, the use of the word „civilisation“ here feels wrong. What they discovered was an early, large-scale polity of a known civilisation.

Because it is a family of languages that are perceived by many as being aesthetically pleasing, and offer a lot of features that give you a very different perspective on programming from the typical C-derived languages. Lisp is just fun to work with.

Also the sense of tradition can be appealing - it is the second-oldest language still in use, after FORTRAN, and has been incredibly formative in many respects. It‘s similar to how learning Latin doesn’t only allow you to read a lot of great works of the past, but also helps you understand modern languages.

From my own impression and what other people here are saying, it seems to boil down to ease-of-use:

1) high admin costs of forums due to security issues and spam,

2) usability issues from clunky interfaces and separate accounts for each forum.

On Reddit/FB/etc., the admins don't have to take care of security, and users only need one login to access any community on the site. So yes, the demise of the forums is in some ways quite regrettable, but nonetheless understandable.

I always found that xkcd rather amusing, I never thought it really happened!

FWIW, I had a successful arbitration process this year via the German Insurance Ombudsman after my bike was stolen and the insurance didn't want to pay. The process took a few months, but was pretty easy overall and I got my money back :-) (In the end, the insurance paid just to avoid further hassle.)

Regarding PayPal: I've always avoided getting an account with them, because I generally don't like online services having access to my bank account. Two weeks ago, though, I was forced to create an account with them to pay a conference fee - just to have the PayPal account locked literally the minute it was created. I have no idea why, I didn't get any further information, and no useful response from customer service. So I guess I will remain a non-PayPal customer...

Loved playing this for several years, an absolutely mindblowing game with a great (if rather small) community! Eventually had to stop because I just didn’t have the time to play regularly anymore, but I still miss this world…

While I heartily agree with most of your comment, I must strongly disagree with the third paragraph (this is exactly what I'm doing my PhD on):

> many scientists won't go to bat against this kind of land use change. A self-respecting scientist won't say that converting croplands to monocultures ready for insecticide use lead to biodiversity die-off because it's hard to actually track the fluctuations between species

Although you are correct that the details are complicated and different species respond in different ways, the overall picture is abundantly clear. Intensive agriculture with large monocultures, simplified landscapes, and heavy fertiliser/pesticide input is wreaking havoc on biodiversity around the world. The scientific literature has been very explicit about this for over twenty years [e.g. 1-5], and lots of scientists (including my colleagues and I) are actively engaging with farmers, NGOs, and policy-makers to find workable solutions to ameliorate the problem.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2005.00782.x [2] https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1253425 [3] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.03.002 [4] https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.14606 [5] https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abg6995

This is an absolutely fantastic experiment and probably part of the reason I'm a biologist today. Keeping a single experiment going for so long is quite a feat, and it has payed off handsomely. Lots of great science came out of the Lenski lab in the last 30 years, not least because of the consistency and thoroughness of their work. Glad to see the LTEE moving on to a new chapter - many happy landings!

> We can, with computers.

Lenski and his colleagues have been working on that too, with the Avida platform (https://doi.org/10.1038/nature01568). Although that was 20 years ago and I haven't heard much from it lately, so I don't know how active this still is.

> I wonder if we could add something to the medium that increases the chance of deletions

The bacteria beat you to it: Several strains developed elevated mutation rates, already back in the 90s (https://doi.org/10.1038/42701).

That's a good point. The wider issue is of course that some people are smart, but not good at writing, and they might be sidelined in an organisation that leans heavily on writing. However, the corollary of that is smart people who are not good at talking get sidelined in an organisation that does a lot of talking. So that's an issue you will always have: the form of communication you focus on will always put some people at a disadvantage. It just means you have to be aware of that, and try and keep an eye open for people who have important things to say, but are struggling to get them across.