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Showing content with the highest reputation on 03/09/24 in all areas

  1. https://www.rte.ie/news/2024/0308/1436684-trees-climate/ "The Tiny Forest concept was pioneered by a Japanese botanist, Akira Miyawaki. He pioneered a special method of planting and ground preparation that can be used to grow forests ten times faster than a typical forest (which usually takes 200 to 300 years" "Usually up to five saplings are planted for every square metre and as a result, the trees are forced to grow upwards for sunlight instead of spreading outwards"
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  2. Yes! Thanks for mentioning Tinbergen. His four questions, as they are sometimes called, are so useful that it may be worth posting - this is from Oxford's continuing education site.... The four questions are: Function (or adaption😞 Why is the animal performing the behaviour? In which way does the behaviour increase the animal’s fitness (i.e. its survival and reproduction)? Examples are plentiful and include, among many others, nurturing of young to increase their chance of survival, migration to warmer (and more food rich) habitats, escaping or avoiding attention from predators etc. Evolution (or phylogeny😞 How did the behaviour evolve? How has natural selection modified the behaviour over evolutionary time? This is typically addressed by the comparative approach, where the behaviour in question is compared among closely related species. Examples include how flight in birds may have evolved from gliding in dinosaurs or how the vertebrate and cephalopod eyes have evolved by convergent evolution, with the former having a blind spot, while the latter does not. Causation (or mechanism😞 What causes the behaviour to be performed? Which stimuli elicit or what physiological mechanisms cause the behaviour? Examples include the role of pheromones and hormones, such as increasing testosterone levels (caused by increasing day length) causing male display behaviour in many species of birds, moving shadows causing ragworms to withdraw into their burrows or contrast on beaks causing herring gull chicks to peck. Development (or ontogeny😞 How has the behaviour developed during the lifetime of the individual? In what way has it been influenced by experience and learning? Examples include how courtship behaviour improves with age in many birds and how predators learn to avoid toxic or dangerous prey with experience. I wonder if the development (or ontogeny) questions could be applied to our responses to the scent of flowers. We do come to associate certain positive experiences with nice smelling flowers. I am perplexed as to why the closing parentheses in my Oxford U quote are showing as sad faces. Are others seeing this, too? Is this a SFN glitch encountered before?
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  3. Not even that long, I suspect. Dense-packing the trees seems to stimulate growth for the few years observed, but what happens as the trees (literally) branch out? Will the proximity impede growth? What happens as their root systems start interfering with each other - will you run into issues if water is scarce?
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  4. I certainly hope you're not trying to imply that Mike Johnson isn't the second coming of Moses...subservient on Earth only to Trump himself... https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/house-speaker-mike-johnson-moses-speech-rcna128126 "Or so Johnson thought. According to Rolling Stone magazine, the speaker was “perhaps unaware that the event was being recorded for the NACL Facebook page.” The video is no longer available, but Rolling Stone reports that Johnson thanked the organization for not letting journalists in. “I’ll tell you a secret,” he said, “since media is not here.” God had spoken to him throughout Republicans’ weekslong effort to find a new Speaker, Johnson said. Eventually, God revealed to Johnson that he would be a Moses-like figure leading the GOP and the country through a “Red Sea moment.”"
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  5. Surprised nobody has mentioned scent as a possible reason. Why is it that most people like the scent of roses? I never wanted to eat one but the smell of cliff roses blooming in the high desert left a pretty strong impression on me.
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  6. I'm not sure we know how any typical forest planted now will be faring in 200 to 300 years; do we choose which species to grow based on what the climate is now or what we expect it to be? Sounds like a concept with benefits to farmed and gardened forests but not necessarily useful at very large scale. There are good reasons to have forests and natural ecosystems but emissions mitigation isn't one of them. I think it is more appropriate to think of the CO2 reforestation sequesters as counting towards reductions in land use emissions rather than to justify ongoing fossil fuel burning. The impacts on emissions of mass forest plantings are going to be complex but ultimately they'll be finite and won't exceed what was emitted from prior deforestation; this kind of forest cultivation might take down the Carbon faster but it will reach peak biomass faster and stop being a carbon sink sooner. I don't think we can depend on sustained, non-reversible increases in global biomass to make a significant difference to the climate problem. If it doesn't reduce fossil fuel burning it isn't fixing the climate problem. And in my view it is a travesty to plant forests in order to protect fossil fuels from global warming.
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  7. Christian nationalism in the US is not the same as Christianity. It’s more like an American version of how the Taliban and ISIS distort Islam. Jesus would be strung up in a gallows for being a woke liberal trying to destroy the country.
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  8. The hypotheses above may be complementary rather than contrasting because they seem to relate to different aspects of the "four why's of animal behavior" of Nikolaas (Niko) Tinbergen, i.e., causation, development, adaptation, and phylogeny.
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  9. Perhaps you can provide a more concise explanation of what you are trying to say, bc what I'm getting from you is that it's subjective, which I'm pretty sure was covered on page one, what I'm not seeing is the objective part of your position. As for an example of what I mean; I don't like celery, even though it's objectively edible and that many people say it's delicious.
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