Emphasis should be placed on "everything we call culture and civilization". There is a thought experiment that might help. Imagine we had a time machine, and no scruples, and we could go back and pluck babies from the past to experimentally raise them in modern American families. I'm pretty sure Gould would have argued that babies from 40k years ago would grow up to be behaviourally indistinguishable from modern humans.
Thought experiment: if you had a time machine and could kidnap a baby from 50,000 years ago and raise them in an American family today, would they grow up being behaviourally indistinguishable from modern Americans? Gould would have argued yes.
> How long does a ship have to sit still before organisms attach to it?
It's inherent with exposure to seawater. It's a question of how much, not if. Location matters. Shallow waters off the coast are generally much much richer in marine life than in the middle of the ocean.
It can be a matter of days before a visible film is building up.
> How does this anti-attach coating get applied and can it be reapplied?
It's usually part of the paint, and generally ocean-going ships are repainted every year or so.
The biocides used in marine paint is probably underappreciated in their ecological impact. Many of them are based on copper and copper levels are elevated near marinas or ports.
Historically some really awful compounds were used, like organic tin compounds which slowly released over many years which was convenient for repainting schedules but unfortunately they turned out to be bioaccumulative toxins and were banned by global treaty in the early 2000s.
Much of the Old Testament seems to have a relation to Babylonian literature and religion.
I'm reminded of how the rediscovery of the Gilgamesh and Atra-Hasis epics caused a crisis for Christian Biblical literalists in the late 19th century. The works have passages strikingly similar to Noah and the ark in the Bible, but date about a thousand years older with some differences. Many of the early Assyriologists were motivated by their Christian faith. I sometimes wonder if the apparent decline (I think so anyway) of interest in Mesopotamian history comes from the decline of Christianity, and so people do not see it as relevant history.
But the Mesopotamians defined 12 hours in a day, 360 degrees in a circle, and the constellations. We do not fully appreciate how much of a foundational layer they were to our own civilization; I recently learned that some Latin and Arabic star names are calques from Akkadian star catalogs: Antares has the Latin name cor scorpii, "heart of the scorpion", a direct translation from the Arabic, which is a translation of the Akkadian, which is a translation of the Sumerian name for the star going back many thousands of years.
> Surely if the machine you go to for answers regularly makes things up you would just stop using it?
But are they going for answers, or for something else?
A large % of the language used by humans in conversation, is not about conveying information. It has cognitive and social and emotional uses.
Consider rhetoric. Trying to persuade someone. Very little information is usually conveyed. Probably most often, the audience already knows everything the persuader is saying. But they construct a series of thoughts, experiences, images that hopefully drag them along to the desired conclusion.
That shared experience is what we often seek from other people through language, not plain answers. That language is a neutral conduit for conveying information is typical conception of the man of letters and engineer alike, an illusion I suffer from myself about language, but it's false and misleading.
LLMs provide an addictive simulacrum of the non-information aspects to conversation.
The Fourier transform turns a frequency constant carrier into a beautiful straight line on the plot. The more stable the frequency of the transmitter and receiver, and the larger the sample, the more distinct that line will be on the plot. Human visual pattern recognition can spot a carrier well below the auditory noise floor using this method. If it's transmitting Morse code you can just read the ... --- pattern of the line.
You'll notice something else too: the faster it keys the blurrier the line gets. Time eats up frequency-space. This is as close as one can get to touching the Shannon-Hartley theorem intuitively. With a baud rate of 1 symbol per minute and GPS-stabilized clocks on both ends (is that cheating?) shortwave has near-global reach on a watt of power with a minimal antenna.
> use terms like "musicality" (at least in my language, not sure if that translates to English) to refer to the quality of one's transmission
I think the most common metaphor I've encountered is to penmanship. Like handwriting Morse code can be: sloppy or precise, utilitarian or calligraphic, disjointed or well-joined, beautiful or ugly, legible or illegible, rough or smooth, languid or rushed, cramped or too spread out.
Quebec has a larger grid and lower rates due to its abundant hydroelectricity.
Ontario's relatively high costs are from the supply mix which is about 50% nuclear, 30% hydro, 10% wind, 10% gas.
Residential kWh as delivered is currently (no pun intended) about 12 US cents which is a bit high if you're used to Midwestern or Alberta coal but those in California are probably envious.
We're in a prolonged guerilla conflict in Canada. We are winning but the end is not in sight yet.
In Ontario every year the Ministry of Forestry distributes several million doses of rabies vaccine for wildlife. The goal is to immunize the majority of skunks, foxes, raccoons and the like, particularly in populated areas.
They air drop edible pellets with the live rabies vaccine; they are labeled "do not touch do not eat" because it can vaccinate most susceptible mammals, including humans.
In Canada we give money directly to the poor. A woeful pittance - $340 for a single adult in Ontario - but no conditions attached to it. Other than that one is supposed to look for a job, but they don't press on that point hard these days. I'm sure some do go spend it directly on drugs. There's a known spike in overdoses after the social assistance deposits at the end of the month. I've seen it suggested payments should be weekly or even daily to prevent that.
I think a reasonable definition of "novel" is a long-form work in prose, that tells narrative stories, often looking at individual families and characters and their development over time. In that sense, novels are not that novel and there are novels preserved from classical antiquity, India's golden age, and medieval China.
The US ambassador to Iceland made an inappropriate comment about Iceland being the 52nd state and was summoned by Icelandic President to explain. A poor joke, apparently.
One almost wonders if the US admin is actively trying to get one of its ambassadors declared persona non grata.
It's not a history book or even all that much a book about Lisp, despite its name, but Lisp in Small Pieces incidentally covers a lot of Lisp history. The book at its core is about implementing compilers and interpreters. It starts with something close to the McCarthy meta-evaluator, and the rest of the book iteratively elaborates on why the naive meval is not a practical programming language, somewhat mirroring the evolution of historical Lisp implementations in the process.
It dates to the early 90s so it doesn't touch on Clojure or anything recent. The bibliography and citation is excellent.
> Literature about Lisp rarely resists that narcissistic pleasure of describing Lisp
in Lisp. This habit began with the first reference manual for Lisp 1.5 [MAE+62] and
has been widely imitated ever since. We'll mention only the following examples
of that practice: (There are many others.) [Rib69], [Gre77], [Que82], [Cay83],
[Cha80], [SJ93], [Rey72], [Gor75], [SS75], [A1178], [McC78b], [Lak80], [Hen80],
[BM82], [CH84], [FW84], [dRS84], [AS85], [R3R86], [Mas86], [Dyb87], [WH88],
[Kes88], [LF88], [Dil88], [Kam90].
Speech is not the same as writing. It is not interchangeable. It's not easy to compose writing aloud. Speech is a poor interface for manipulating words like that. Have you ever seen something like an ex tempore speech or panel discussion or radio interview transcribed in writing? It can be almost incomprehensible.
They are different processes. You do want to see the words laid out. And you want to point at them. Drag them around. Drag and drop.
> The 3 generations that spent their entire life behind a PC in the 20/21st century will be seen as crazy as the soldiers who spend all day underground to click a button inside a missile silo.
our hunched backs and strained eyes are noble signs of the craft which go back thousands of years
the remains of Ancient Egyptian scribes show neck vetebrae wear and repetitive strain type injury to the wrist and thumb
I have had some truly spectacular results that still kind of stagger me in the last few months using Claude in my hobby projects -- but even though Claude insists on trying to slip its name into the git history as credit it's not Claude -- it's me. Someone who has studied CS and software engineering for decades will craft different prompts from someone without that background. A suggested axiom: there is nothing I can build with Claude that I could not build myself with my current level of CS knowledge, assuming I had infinite focus and time. In my hands it can go as far I could anyway, and no further. (But it is faster!) My experience bears that out so far.
I have hearing aids with a deep-learning based noise reduction and speaker isolation/clarity features. So about 14 hours a day. Or have we moved the goal posts again?
I think it is an open question: can an unknown language be cracked -- without any dictionary or grammar or understanding of the language? Just lots and lots of texts, maybe some of it bilingual.
It's a common misconception that is what happened with Ancient Egyptian with the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone was just one of the big pieces of the puzzle. The decoding came when people realized that Coptic (a language written alphabetically and still in use in the Coptic Church today) is actually descended from Ancient Egyptian; as Spanish is to Latin, Coptic is to Ancient Egyptian.
Similarly the attempts to decode classical Maya were all dead ends. Until Yuri Knorozov realized that it encoded the ancestor of the Maya languages which are still spoken to this day. (Knorozov's Wikipedia article is worth checking out just for his photo with his cat. [0] IMHO.)
I have written before about the La Mojarra 1 stele in Mexico [1]. It looks a lot like Maya. [2] But it isn't Maya. Maybe the difference like between Russian and Latin writing?
No one can read it. It's undecipherable. There are some attempts to identify it with a proposed ancient language that would have been related to the modern Mixe-Zoque languages: some of the glyphs that are shared with Maya, when read phonetically, start sounding like a Mixe-Zoque language. But no one has proposed a confident decipherment. There probably isn't enough text. La Mojarra 1 is the only long example of the Isthmian script.
Deciphering Akkadian was very difficult, at first. The process started with Persian; old Persian was written in a simplified adapted form of the Mesopotamian cuneiform (wedges on clay). It was a kind of alphabet. And Old Persian was already understood. And there was a bilingual text on a monument carved by Darius I. But even then -- decoding relies so heavily on the fact that Akkadian is a Semitic language distantly related to Hebrew, more distantly, also Ancient Egyptian. So again, we sort of knew what we were looking for.
That is all to say: even if the Voynich manuscript (for example) contains real text in an otherwise completely lost language, I'm not sure it is possible even theoretically to translate it.
I find significance in the shuffling and enjoy it. Always overhand. And very thorough; I have a perhaps overmechanistic view but I suspect effective divination requires true randomness in the information theory sense.
