Viewing profile — anvandare

I think we are well past the point where belief in a rules-based world order turns from optimism to delusion. Entrench yourself behind entire libraries of law books if you wish, it…

All you have to do is train an LLM on the collected works and letters of John Searle; you could then pass your arguments along to the machine and out would come John Searle's thoug…

The shrine is not the shrine. The shrine is the previous generation teaching the next to build the shrine. So if the shrine were to fall, then the shrine would eventually fall. Tha…

Forest fires would definitely get a lot more exciting.

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A cancerous cell does not care that it is (indirectly) killing the lifeform that it is a part of. It just does what it does without a thought. And if it could think, it would proba…

I don't know. Let's start by cutting up any "social"* company/platform with more than 10 million users and work our way down from there. Who knows, it might even have the side-effe…

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The gender of a noun is just a noun class. But because Germanic languages lie more toward the analytic end of the morphological typology continuum (whereas Romance languages lie mo…

Pregnancy is, it seems, just another (evolutionary) war. https://aeon.co/essays/why-pregnancy-is-a-biological-war-bet... Red in tooth and claw at every layer, from the smallest cel…

"The limits of my keyboard mean the limits of my programming language." If only they had had ⊥ and ⊤ somewhere on their keys to work with Booleans directly while designing the lang…

I take it this means it has moved to the obituaries?

Well, if she weighs the same as a duck... It seems to be a variation of §1 - because witchcraft is a serious crime and the god of rivers (Idlurugu) would obviously drown anyone who…

I think you're thinking of the Lightspeed Leapfrog trope[1]. (In a more general sense, it's the inverse of the first-mover advantage: the law of the handicap of a head start[32]) O…

As the laws of physics do not seem to stop at the borders of a skull, there is no sovereignty of the Self. But no one minds a thought thinking itself its own thinker, as there is n…

I agree. Evolutionary speaking, animals that develop different behaviors based on 'clean' versus 'unclean' would have a leg-up against the competition. Ants, to give a quick exampl…

"Accepting the limitations of birthform betrays a lack of imagination." - Civilization: Beyond Earth

The summer solstice ("the longest day of the year") is always the same date regardless of your latitude: June 20th/21st (in the northern hemisphere). And assuming Syene is on the s…

Earth is a spaceship, unfortunately somehow a bunch of monkeys went rampant and now they're busy tearing up the life support system. If we can satisfy their (limitless and still gr…

For reference: this book is obviously a (praiseworthy) ambition to have a Greek counterpart to the Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata[1] by Hans Ørberg. Ørberg's way of teaching Latin…

Once dates get too complex it is easier to just have an external script figure out whether today is the day and have it run every day: 0 9 * * * anvandare is-today-the-day.py && ce…

>SPECULOOS (Search for habitable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars) I like silly backronyms like that[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculoos

Mankind is to Nature as a cancer cell is to the rest of the organism. Very much part of it, also very much going to kill it because it can't stop growing and consuming resources. B…

"Tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chambre." "All the unhappiness of men arises from a single fact, which is f…

History is either seen as a circle or as a line. If as a circle, then history repeats itself endlessly. The world is reborn and dies, over and over. It is seen as the lives of gene…