161–170 of 191 posts
When I read "tensegrity" I thought of these strange tables/scupltures you can buy: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=tensegrity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkzeE6BVNIk [Super Ball Bot, NASA]
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Also worth pointing out that billions of years already sounds like a long time to humans, but once you grasp how quickly everything is moving at the cellular or molecular level then it becomes a really reallllllly long time.
Random factoid I picked up from The Machinery of Life : how do various proteins inside a cell know to find and bind to a specific chemical or protein they need? They don't - everything inside a cell just constantly bumps into everything else, and because of how fast things move at this scale, it doesn't take long for any single thing to touch approximately every other thing inside the cell. I.e. turns out random walk…
This article doesn't even try to address what I feel is the deeper and more interesting question (but probably one that can't be answered): Why is it that horses, cows, giraffes and birds have all had to come up with a purely passive solution of "locking" themselves in place, either via their joints (for the four-legged), or via the tendon mechanism described here for birds? I.e. why wasn't in simpler in evolutionary…
Evolution is like DFS depth first search, it isnt looking for an optimal way optimally its just going down a branch until it finds a satisfactory solution. Sleep according to sleep scientist matthew walker, isnt what it seems. If i remember correctly theres even more brain activity and it serves certain goals like behavior refinement, among other things not just refreshing yourself. There might not be more benefit by…
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Evolution is like DFS depth first search, it isnt looking for an optimal way optimally its just going down a branch until it finds a satisfactory solution. Sleep according to sleep scientist matthew walker, isnt what it seems. If i remember correctly theres even more brain activity and it serves certain goals like behavior refinement, among other things not just refreshing yourself. There might not be more benefit by…
My simple conception is that evolution loves local maxima.
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The fascination with “intelligent design” is cherry-picking. The is no shortage of “unintelligent design” in the natural world. Take humans, for example. You can block your trachea and die through the simple act of eating. An intelligent (and omniscient) designer could have avoided that by better designing our overall our overall structure. Or take the fact or ear bones are modified jaw bones. Or if you believe in in…
When you notice these flaws you are seeing it in very very short term. What we are today is what eventually worked for a million years. The design you see today is the way it is because it had to be robust enough (including those problems) to survive to this day. The examples you quote do look like a problem today, but I think they must have worked to some benefit to bring us here.
There are parts that might be a million years old, but everything is in a state of flux at all times. Things are changing all the time. Evolution is a process with no end goal.
And just because that got us here today doesn't mean it's the best design. If that's the case, cats are equally the best design. As are dogs, and elephants, and mosquitos, and platypuses. Evolution is the ultimate form of the adage, "You don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than your friend". Good enough works well enough.
We are effectively held together with duct tape and string. Our eyes are wrong, our backs are wrong, our throats, nerves, circulatory, etc. are all wrong in some manner. And some of the fixes are simple. There is no reason for our ocular nerve to start from the inside of the eye. It just happened that way. And it worked well enough.
You can use a lead pipe to hammer nails, that didn't make it a good choice.
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Yeah but what role? 24h always at least a bit running brain has also crucial role in survival. I get some form of maintenance is needed, but 8h every day seems like an overkill for very significant disadvantages. Many other mammals require significantly less sleep.
Could it be that 8h is a "modern" sleep pattern? You can also take several shorter naps throughout the day (polyphasic sleep pattern). But to be honest, without light there isn't much humans can do at night.
The forgotten medieval habit of 'two sleeps'
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My simple conception is that evolution loves local maxima.
Therefore mutations ensure you don't get stuck there.
Little chitin matchbox racecaroaches everywhere ..
An interesting and somewhat related fact is that flying birds also sometimes sleep: https://www.audubon.org/news/scientists-finally-have-evidenc...
The short story (at least in the case of the frigatebirds they studied) is that they do hemispherical sleeping, where only one half of their brain is asleep. And also it seems they only sleep while climbing in a thermal updraft. The theory being that "gliding up" is the safest portion of their flight.
Relatadely there is a famous videoclip of a paraglider colliding with an eagle mid-flight. https://youtu.be/g8_hyqlQXpk?si=alAvnt4Xva4RGYw3 (The clip is quite scary, but both the pilot and the eagle seems to be fine at the end.)
It is speculated that the incident happened because the bird was "dozing off" mid-flight in the updraft too. Of course this is difficult to verify.
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I can do more than that. I used to wake up sweaty half the time from sleeping as child. Now that never happens as an adult, i instead wake up with my sweater mysteriously taken off. I wish sleep self would learn to put a sweater on if it turns cold though.
I swear I used to be able to switch off my alarm clock while still fully asleep