qubex

34 ms·

631.
by qubex 6y ago
Fair enough, good points, but you’ll find that habitually unshod people have surprisingly thick (and yet still perfectly sensitive!) soles that are very resilient to puncture and yet do not experience pain when walking over terrain that mak
632.
by qubex 6y ago
Thanks for the reference and the comment, I really do appreciate it (and I’m not being sarcastic), but evidence of foot structure mutating 40,000 years ago as a conseuqnce of wearing shoes only undermines my theory if floors can be definiti
633.
by qubex 6y ago
I’m pretty damned sure of it. Why would they do so otherwise when feet of the habitually-unshod are so perfectly adapted to walking on terrain? It’s not like (like in the case of clothes) they could see animals with warm furry coats and thi
634.
by qubex 6y ago
Of course they slept on grass to begin with (outdoors)... and of course, once they settled, they would reproduce the same arrangement in a proto-domestic setting. Also: people at some point discovered they could lay down floors, because it
635.
by qubex 6y ago
Numberphile and PBS Spacetime too.
636.
by qubex 6y ago
“Minds are what brains do, like beats are what hearts do” is my favourite summary of that.
637.
by qubex 6y ago
Can you believe that’s the most exciting news I’ve heard in the past six months?
638.
by qubex 6y ago
> That’s true, but only local and short lived and very local effect. And critically for my argument, photosynthesis works (less efficiently) even when this effect is absent. It’s not a mystery ingredient that makes the whole thing work
639.
by qubex 6y ago
Oh God, I can’t believe I made that mistake... and Oh God, you’re my bloody idol. You’re the reason I chose to study mathematics. You’re the reason I chose to delve into the rather esoteric field of symbolic computation. You’re the reason I
640.
by qubex 6y ago
I think you’ve missed my point entirely: the jumping of electrons that makes photosynthesis “so efficient” (which it isn’t—as a recent post here mentioned, it’s tuned for stability ) is not in defiance of the laws of physics, but entirely
641.
by qubex 6y ago
I’m glad you made this point, because it allows me to issue a cautionary word to those dualists who think that somehow the mind is something disjoint from the brain.
642.
by qubex 6y ago
There’s also the whole fringe topic of disequilibrium economics, which eschews most of what all economics assume by fiat (that economies are in equilibrium and get shocked out of it, and then resume some kind of trajectory back to the new e
643.
by qubex 6y ago
Let me drop in a plug for my favourite book, William Gary Flake’s The Computational Beauty of Nature (1997), by far the best exploration of these kinds of concepts I have ever encountered. It’s rich in discussion, beautiful diagrams, form
644.
by qubex 6y ago
What’s astonishing is not the ability to block radiation (after all, biology will always defer to chemistry first, and physics second—there’s no way biology can come up with something that exceeds the capabilities of its substrates) but rat
645.
by qubex 6y ago
The cargo ship whose cargo was sized and that was eventually impounded was registered in Moldavia, if what I have read is correct.
646.
by qubex 6y ago
The insanest thing is that it’s emerging that despite ammonium nitrate is predominantly used as a fertilizer, in this case it had been purchased and was being shipped for use as a mining explosive. If true, this is relevant because it the
647.
by qubex 6y ago
An “impolite no ” is not just a ‘no’, and it’s the latter that was required and not the former. He could have ‘recommended’ that the whole patch-set be re-architected to avoid depending on the proprietary module. There was really no need
648.
by qubex 6y ago
All half-dozen of us thank you for thinking of us. ;)
649.
by qubex 6y ago
I know precisely what you’re referring to. I used to call it the “Cocoa Smell” when I’d come across an application designed for OS X’s native APIs and not some port of something more or less haphazard. I suppose now they’re more varied (Swi
650.
by qubex 6y ago
I use Pages as my go-to word-processor and Numbers (on account of its table-in-sheet paradigm) is my favourite spreadsheet by far. I wish they’d beef the latter up a bit with ODBC access and support for iterated solution (very useful fo
651.
by qubex 6y ago
This is my reading of the situation: Firms are disposing of their trash and “official recyclers” are being preempted from collecting some (valuable) portion of that trash by gangs. Clearly the recycling firms are taking a hit, but they’ve a
652.
by qubex 6y ago
I was just giving a quick & dirty reply, and my knowledge of anthropology is quite limited. As I understand it we evolved out of the African savanna. If there are other niches we evolved in (rather than expanded to ), those would also
653.
by qubex 6y ago
A metaphor, if I may: think by analogy to the other famously exponential process, nuclear fission. When neutron flux gets too frisky, you have to throttle the reaction or face a catastrophe. You don’t need to disassemble the reactor to shut
654.
by qubex 6y ago
I’m from Italy and though I was abroad when the pandemic hit and the lockdown was declared, I’m pretty proud of the European response in general. The rolling crisis and half-measures that please nobody and solve nothing that we see going on
655.
by qubex 6y ago
I appreciate your nuanced reply, and I wholeheartedly agree with the spirit of your observations. I am not propounding the view that lockdowns are or would be beneficial, nor even dismissing claims that they might be mentally challenging. I
656.
by qubex 6y ago
Considering the attendant economic devastation and ongoing uncertainty about the health situation, would you expect it to? Nobody’s arguing that there’s no adverse consequences.
657.
by qubex 6y ago
Yeah, and it’s very mild compared to prison, and quite literally isn’t the same thing (which is why they have different names).
658.
by qubex 6y ago
The data may look like crap (to you) but it’s better than absolutist remarks and anecdotal allusions... and as this thread so aptly shows, there’s been a range of reactions, some even favourable.
659.
by qubex 6y ago
Isn’t deleting expired encryption keys how Snapchats are ‘disappeared’?
660.
by qubex 6y ago
> this begs the question: how were we meant to live? In the savanna in social groups of about fifty or less related individuals leading a hunger-gatherer lifestyle. I doubt the OP is going to argue that we all head back to that state,

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