Only enable this feature if you understand the security implications.

They should put that disclaimer on their entire operating system.

Unfortunately “climate leader” is a pretty low bar these days.

Hmm… while I don’t see biodiversity as an end in itself, I do see it (or more specifically, the ability of ecosystems to produce new diversity going forward) as a critical part of maintaining the long-term viability of the biosphere in the face of mass extinctions and local ecosystem collapses. (And I don’t think that viability is a given—life has been lucky in the past, but that doesn’t mean our actions now have no effect on the odds going forward.)

Now, maybe (hopefully) there are other ways of maintaining the resiliency of the biosphere that are less cruel than predation (or disease, or resource exhaustion, etc.). But we need to understand the existing mechanisms before we can discover any potential better alternatives.

And maybe we humans can’t or won’t do that. But if nothing else, increasing future biodiversity increases the chance that some species or ecosystem will eventually hit on a better dynamic than what the world has had to work with so far.

Montreal is just a subspace of Montcomplex.

For the new study, she and 16 graduate and undergraduate students gathered nearly 20,000 photographs of raccoons across the contiguous U.S. from the community science platform iNaturalist. The team found that raccoons in urban environments had a snout that was 3.5 percent shorter than that of their rural cousins.

Or maybe people in cities take more photos of “cuter” animals?

Any idea of the date on this? He says he’d met Epstein “half a dozen” years prior, and mentions an incident in 2001 (which would put this letter somewhere between 2002 and 2007). AFAIK the first allegations about Epstein started to come out in 2005, so this letter could have been a few years before or after.

Edit: on re-reading, I guess Chomsky is saying that Epstein arranged a meeting with Ehud Barak to discuss an incident from 2001, not that the meeting itself occurred then.

Saag paneer.

Here’s a paper that tries to develop a method for measuring the difficulty of learning other languages for English-speakers (and potentially speakers of other languages).

This paper is concerned with the issue of “linguistic distance,” that is, the extent to which languages differ from each other. Although the concept is well known among linguists, the prevailing view is that it cannot be measured. That is, no scalar measure can be developed for linguistic distance.

Probably the same way Putin feels about Dobby.

How will we pay each other for our thoughts?

I ate the last one yesterday.

Did you really expect me to resist?

Sign language isn’t just another way of expressing English that can be picked up like learning a different alphabet or a secret code. It’s a full, independent language with its own complete vocabulary, syntax, inflectional system, etc. that takes as long to learn as any other natural language.

It would be great if more people knew it for the sake of communicating with the deaf, but as a means of foiling surveillance, there are many other approaches that would be more effective for less time investment. (Hell, you might as well learn a really obscure spoken language that would be less likely to be recognized or deciphered than ASL.)

Global Thermonuclear War.

We queried the TriNetX Global Research Network for adults ≥ 18 years with an insomnia diagnosis (ICD-10 F51.0). The exposed cohort required ≥ 1 melatonin prescription and ≥ 365 exposure-days; controls had no melatonin exposure.

I interpret that to mean that both the study and control cohorts had insomnia diagnoses, but the cohorts weren’t randomized and no other variables were controlled for.

I respect the ACLU in particular for that—for adhering to their organizing principle even when it means defending groups they’re otherwise ideologically opposed to.

Before trains, sea travel was the standard way to travel long distances even if a land route was available. Sea voyages came to represent any destination that was far enough away that communities wouldn’t be in regular contact.

I had a really good pizza topped with stinging nettle once. (It doesn’t sting after cooking.)

Assuming that

• human phenotypic traits that correlate more closely with mouse traits have more-predictable outcomes with mouse-tested medicine, and

• more-predictable medical outcomes correlate with higher survival and reproductive rates,

can’t you plug that straight into the Price equation?

So 58% of districts are at or above median income, but only 24% of districts have more drivers than riders?

Could it be that both variables are closely correlated, and the latter is just sampling closer to the tail end of the distribution?

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