Take the horseshoecrab, or the tardigrate or even the cockroach.

None of those are species—they’re a family, a phylum, and a (partial) order, respectively. While those clades have been relatively stable morphologically, species within each clade still come and go.

English makes perfect sense—it’s all the other languages we keep stealing words from who can’t agree on a common spelling system.

It’s contextual: government can be used for right-wing or left-wing purposes, and people opposed to those uses can use libertarianism as a justification whether the actual policies they’re opposing are right- or left-wing. But that means people with right- or left-wing sympathies can selectively target policies they disagree with on purely sectarian grounds, while disingenuously claiming libertarianism as a motivation.

No species lasts forever—and the faster their environment changes, the sooner their expiration date.

“The initial spark of the idea for this research arose when someone asked me if I believed in horoscopes. It got me wondering if there could potentially be a biological basis for them, in terms of how a person’s birthday could be associated with physiological or mental features.”

Hmm… the seasonal differences in diet and environment are probably greatly reduced in modern times, compared to when astrology developed. So maybe trends like this used to be even more pronounced.

I suspect it’s a difference between the sell-by date (AKA shelf life) and the expiration date—most contraceptives would be expected to be good for at least a few years after purchase.

How about Monaco and Morocco?

Give the dollar to someone who looks hungry, then go to the park and read a book.

• The outcome of past events in the MWI is indistinguishable from other interpretations.

• The prediction of future events in the MWI is an open question—there are different versions that make different predictions.

“Researchers in the field sometimes describe our goal as to pass the ‘Visual Turing Test,’” said Suyeon Choi […] “A visual Turing Test then means, ideally, one cannot distinguish between a physical, real thing as seen through the glasses and a digitally created image being projected on the display surface,” Choi said.

So they just came up with a needlessly opaque synonym of “verisimilitude”.

I donate to the Patreon account of a local independent journalist who covers the city council.

In the literal sense of the time it takes neuronal spikes to travel from your retina to your visual cortex, no.

What makes it feel that way, I think, is a reduction in the amount of resources your brain is devoting to the real-time modeling of your environment that those visual signals feed into, and that has to be processed before you become conscious of any changes.

Doom Quixote.

I kind of see the relationship between computer science and programming as parallel to the relationship between linguistics and speaking foreign languages. You don’t need to learn linguistics to speak another language—so AI translation isn’t taking the linguistics out of translating because it wasn’t a necessary element to begin with.

As a 50-something, I can see the case for putting the “golden age” of the internet between the birth of Wikipedia in 2001 and Facebook in 2006.

Last finished: The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind by Dan Davies.

Currently reading: Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism by Leif Weatherby.

They’re about how two mid-20th century intellectual movements (cybernetics and structuralism, respectively) that would have provided valuable tools for managing contemporary issues (institutional collapse and artificial intelligence) were sidetracked in the 70s and 80s by other movements (neoliberalism and poststructuralism), and proposals for updating them for our present needs.

Interesting that two of the few countries that prefer the US to China are China’s fellow BRICS members Brazil and India.

Right. It’s estimated that there’s about an asteroid’s worth of dark matter passing through the solar system at any given moment, so it’s possible that that has already happened.

A jaundiced eye?

If someone else posts a better comment that renders mine superfluous, I’ll often delete mine. But if someone else has already replied to mine, I’ll leave it for the sake of context but downvote it so the better one gets more visibility.