Viewing profile — Earw0rm

I'm too old and boring to go to cultural events that are likely to end in brawls. And yep, I get it on the booze thing, but they'd have to confiscate a ton of handbag booze for the…

Yep. Most "journalism" now is opinion columns. Local journalism is dead, with unfortunate consequences for local politics that bleeds into national and international stuff. Nationa…

They're doing this in the UK right now with security for cultural events. Since the Manchester Arena terror attack (awful, tragic, evil, and an isolated event), it has been mandato…

It's not that the machines were ugly or badly designed (albeit not as good as the 80s heyday), but they were unable to compete on price/performance and OS tech stack, and that in t…

That's because Microsoft understood taste as aesthetic - "we can put it in a pretty box", rather than ethic - fundamental to the process of making the product. Most of their endles…

Most people love to drive, but hate to be stuck in traffic. Or for the countryside to be all freeways and the city to be all parking lots. It's not the exact same asymmetry, but th…

Mostly in the past tense now, for better or worse.

The current El Niño hasn't really had time to affect NW Europe yet, there's quite some lag there AIUI.

Sheep and slow growing trees of course don't get along well, you have to choose one or the other at least while the trees establish, which for oaks is measured in decades. In Wales…

The timing is curious to me. Atmospheric CO2 didn't really start picking up bigtime until 1970, and trees, even fast growing pines, take decades to grow.

I'm thinking of flying over on the Spruce Goose to watch the first operational launch.

Yep, exactly the sort of thing I was alluding to. The "DNA is a Turing computer and everyone is born a blank slate" model is a bit too intellectually convenient for a 20th century …

A study has found that urban air pollution - ozone and nitrogen dioxide - causes changes in general expression in sperm, with potential impacts on foetal development. More evidence…

Nope, sorry. As someone who cares about music, there may be a superabundance of adequate, filler-level stuff which AI can adequately substitute for. But for any given mood, moment …

This is a recent phenomenon. The original reason for low population density was agricultural work, which - even in the early days of mechanisation - was plenty physical. Living in …

How old were you at the time? Mid 40s here and can comfortably sustain low 150s, but burn out quick past 160.

Absolutely, if you do strength/resistance work that'll counteract the tendency of long cardio to burn muscle. My point is just that if you /only/ do long cardio, it'll reduce the m…

Strength training has more of a positive effect on body composition. The problem with doing a lot of cardio is that you need muscle to burn calories (especially so without injury a…

This feels like a generalisable cognitive bug with our species. "Kill all the wolves, die as a result from invisible bacteria carried by tiny arthropods - or from Type 2 diabetic h…

By the time you're that sick, you've likely had years of compromised health. That's going to affect personality to some extent.

It's massive, hugely traumatic surgery, taking the patient past what was considered the point of death a century ago, bringing them back alive, and all with the aid of some of the …

IMV creativity that matters contains a third ingredient: intent, purpose, the will to make an artistic statement of some kind about how the world is or should be.

That's quite a leap. The idea that _semantic_ memories are encoded so as to be transmissible via blobs of neural tissue stretches plausibility.

AFAIK the gut in large terrestrial vertebrates has its own nervous system that rivals the complexity of the entire system in simpler creatures. The idea that all stateful/regulator…