dguest

hace 10 horasdiscuss

Indeed.

This isn't a particularly bad case. I think both are often useful, and this headline isn't wrong, I just assumed the bubbles had some direct use and found the scientific title more clear there.

dguest

hace 14 horasdiscuss

Oof, sorry if that was misleading.

Maybe I'm overly fixated on the "to" in "to achieve": the whale doesn't care about the bubbles, they serve no important purpose in helping them sleep, it's just what happens when you vent air under water.

It's also kind of a nitpick, but the scientists refer to resting whales, but specifically state that they don't know if they are sleeping. I guess getting a proper EEG on a sperm whale is another scientific frontier.

Edit: An awesome scientific frontier: honestly if anyone deserves my tax money it's the grad student trying to figure out how to measure brain waves in a submerged oceanic whale.

dguest

hace 15 horasdiscuss

> Jack Dorsey is now using his clout to share about this app and bring some light on the situation

Failed attempts at censorship are the best thing that could ever happen to Bitchat: free advertising for a vibcoded and questionably secure entry in a space with plenty of competitors. As others have commented it's basically impossible to shut down an open source app by blocking the source distributor, but press is priceless.

I played around with Briar [1] for a while: it worked well, and had an option to install peer-to-peer without going through any app store, was sad to see that the authors put it in maintenance mode. It also had a security audit.

[1]: https://briarproject.org/

dguest

hace 16 horasdiscuss

The title of the original article [1] is a lot more clear:

    Buoyancy regulation through modulation of onboard gas volume by resting sperm whales

They don't "blow bubbles" to sleep vertically, they vent gas to regulate their specific gravity. This allows them to sleep vertically below the surface. The scientists measured the gas release by listening for bubbles, but they did a lot more: they actually modeled the buoyancy of whales and compared it with data.

If you've done any scuba diving (or swimming) you're familiar with this method of buoyancy control. And most fish accomplish on actively transporting gas between an internal bladder and their blood.

The difference is that whales have no way to refill their lungs while submerged, which is why their dives start deep and slowly drift up: as long as they are drifting upward the volume in their lungs is expanding in response to decreasing pressure. So the bubbles are essentially a way of pumping the breaks, which is apparently something they can do in their sleep (if they are in fact sleeping).

Is anyone else slightly annoyed by the cutesy title? Of course I recognize that the meme economy runs on this stuff, so maybe it's just nerds like me.

[1]: https://dmscdn.vuelio.co.uk/publicitem/61eae467-9527-4922-b9...

dguest

hace 25 díasdiscuss

Is there any evidence that individualization of responsibility works better than government policy?

Personally I see no contradiction in using a product despite wanting policies that prevent it: it just implies that you understand the tragedy of the commons.

dguest

hace 26 díasdiscuss

50m shells seems pretty optimistic. I thought some alarms would fire when things are within 1 km.

dguest

hace 26 díasdiscuss

I feel like LEO is a convenient speed to know if you are someone who often asks "how fast is that". At Mach 23 it's a lot faster than sound, and on the slow side of "how fast space stuff moves".

Of course it's still 3 orders of magnitude slower than galaxy collisions, which themselves are colliding at roughly 1% of the speed of light.

dguest

hace 27 díasdiscuss

Yes! I meant local issues that don't concern 100M people. Local issues that concern a few thousand people can be (and often are) resolved by direct democracy.

I guess I could argue that putting a stop sign at a particular intersection in rural Kansas could concern me, even though I don't live in Kansas, but I think very few people would make that argument in good faith.

dguest

hace 27 díasdiscuss

Personally I've always appreciated talking to nurses I know.

The respectable ones know they aren't doctors, but they've seen a lot more recoveries and cases where minimal intervention was required. As some people have said some surgeons like to cut people up.

dguest

hace 27 díasdiscuss

I think everyone can agree that having O(100M) people vote on every local initiative is absurd.

But a lot of countries are somewhere on the "direct" vs "representative" spectrum. The US actually abnormally lacking in direct mechanisms, for example. See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_by_country

dguest

hace 29 díasdiscuss

If you have a photocopier and a few currencies you can have a lot of fun with EURion:

- look up your local laws! usually you can photocopy money as long as it's shrunken / enlarged by a specific amount

- you can cover up everything but the EURion and see what it does to the rest of the copy

- you can cover up the EURion part of the bill and print out the rest

Again, particularly in the last point, be sure to look up local laws and set the printer scaling accordingly

dguest

hace 29 díasdiscuss

Also his profile on Stack Exchange [1]

    This account is temporarily suspended network-wide. The suspension period ends on Mar 18, 2292 at 16:28.

Note the "temporary" suspension end date, 250 years in the future.

[1]: https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/4864/ron-maimon

dguest

el mes pasadodiscuss

Citation:

- https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_Criminalize_Hunting,_Fishing,...

- https://www.yesonip28.org/

dguest

el mes pasadodiscuss

Also so that it can make the retailer money. The studio might not want to piss off the retailer, which they would do by pulling the physical copy (or selling it at the OEM price directly). There are cases where retailers will de-list some products in retaliation.

What's interesting to me is that game studios have less to loose here than other OEMs. With equipment like shoes, outdoor gear, or cars, having the physical product out in stores does a lot to sell it: you have to try on shoes, driving a car builds attachment, it's also nice to check the build quality of your tent or whatever.

With games, you generally just have to play it / read the reviews, and you can trial it directly at home in a lot of cases.

dguest

el mes pasadodiscuss

In the opening scene a scientist argues once the ambient temperature of some region is 37°C we'll all get eaten by fungus. It will evolve to live at body temperature.

There are some precedents for this: hibernating bats lower their body temperature to that of a moldy environment, and are getting infected with a fungus which kills 90% of them in some cases [2]. Logic goes that raising the ambient temperature could be the same (with some evolution thrown in) as lowering our body temperature.

Is it credible? No idea, not that kind of scientist.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLNagvJHl3g

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-nose_syndrome

dguest

hace 2 mesesdiscuss

Isolationist is an interesting way to describe Switzerland: economically they're probably one of the most internationally integrated, and thus dependent, countries in the world.

dguest

hace 2 mesesdiscuss

I'm probably missing something. This would seem a bit problematic for some organizations that put Switzerland on the world stage, e.g.

- The UN

- CERN

- The Red Cross

- The WHO

- The World Economic Forum

- ETH Zurich

There are probably a lot of others I'm missing.

I'd imagine international banks also benefit from recruiting foreign nationals to do business with their home countries, and not just because there's a shortage of domestic labor. The whole point of these organizations is to be the headquarters of a much larger international project.

I guess maybe there will be a lot of weird exceptions if this were to go though. Otherwise, good luck sourcing your diplomats from entirely Swiss people.

dguest

hace 2 mesesdiscuss

I'm the same.

When people who maintain this separation travel for work, do they just bring both along? My laptop is often the heaviest thing in my bag, I'd hate to bring two.

[late edit: I meant work travel]

dguest

hace 2 mesesdiscuss

I'm not a lawyer, I program.

My understanding is that Civil Law (most of the world excluding UK, US, AU) is like a program: you feed it a situation, it outputs a decision, every once in a while you edit it.

Common Law (UK, US) isn't really a program, but you could stretch and say it's a state machine that has been running since the country started. Every interaction sets a new precedent and changes the state. But the programming analogy falls apart because no one in the right mind would design such a program.

LLMs might actually be the best example of such a program though: Common Law is basically one long chat with an LLM, hundreds of years long.

Before LLMs came along, a Common Law system seemed to have a finite time limit before it's co-opted by wealthy people with the resources to read the whole history. Now I think maybe can push it a bit further.

But it's still a terrible program.

dguest

hace 2 mesesdiscuss

Imagine the headlines though! (says your will boss, or bosses boss)

It's still stupid, but they are imagining the news:

> This guy said "it's probably fine" right before Flight 1337 explodes over the Atlantic.

Now personally I'd actually be willing to take that risk: the odds are so overwhelmingly in favor of it being a dumb prank; you might as well refuse to take a shower for fear of slipping on the soap.

But all it takes is one person up the chain of command to say "this would be bad PR" and you've lost your job.

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