TheVat

Illustrates the way accidents are more common on home turf or comfortable situations. When you hike, you expect a certain hazard and the caution reflexes are activated and you choose where you place your feet. Those reflexes are dampened (so to speak) at home. Nastiest tumble I had was off a stepstool in the garage. Here comes the topic relevance officer, slapping his baton in his hand....

Am starting to wonder if Roy Cooper might migrate to top of the list. All other criteria aside, it's good to have a friend at your side - Cooper and Harris are friends going back to when they were both AGs of their states (NC and CA). And Cooper is a master of bipartisanship and reaching moderates. And he worked on his parent's farm in the summers when he was growing up which can be helpful in relating to rural America generally. Any foothold in rural culture is going to be helpful.

Yes I've done that on very steep pitches, too. The delicate art of not not tripping up on a root or rock as you try to maintain a clear backwards view of the path. Walking sticks (or trekking poles, as they call them here, these days) also help to get some of the load off the knee joint, but I don't much like them. Not for the looking like a fool aspect, but just having to carry one more thing.

Indeed. Something about your title line just said opening line of a limerick. (though I guess the proper meter of a limerick, anapest, would call for an extra syllable, e.g. the indolent apes of old Punt...) I had not heard about using mitochondrial DNA this way, or the precision it might bring. Fascinating stuff.

Probably not Mt Athabasca, which is off limits to tourists. Maybe Pyramid Peak. DKF is nearly universal in those with trick knees, AFAICT. The biomechanics of descent are hard on even fairly healthy knees, I've heard (and experienced myself). As a hiker, I've found the best way to mitigate DKF is taking short steps and stopping to "bicycle" your legs every few hundred feet.

The indolent apes of Punt Were much too lazy to hunt Their penchant for sloth Was protected by Thoth So their life skills tended to stunt.

Jasper is located in Alberta, not BC. My sympathies as well. We live on the edge of wildfire country. (an area where nights are cool enough that many don't have AC - more smoke drifting in the past few years has led some to rethink the cooling system of just opening windows 9pm-9am.) Climatologists have some models that show the North American West getting drier in the coming decades. Could mean that some woodlands will give way to scrubland or savannah or even just grasslands. It won't be fun getting through such a transition.

I don't care what an unsentient LLM generates about ethics. What do YOU, in your own words please, see as the guiding ethical principles in developing AI? You, as a human, had feelings about the current state of things that motivated you to start this project. Have you studied ethics and formed a core philosophy that informs your ideas? And what are your credentials, as they would relate to this highly challenging and sophisticated field? Are you an autodidact? When you assert: What do you think constitutes the greater good? That's a vague phrase that covers a lot of territory.

Truth (or falsity) isn't a thing. It's an attribute of a statement about some aspect of the world. If a statement is true, then it corresponds accurately to some state of affairs in the world. So it does not contradict itself. The statement simply remains true so long as it corresponds to reality. If I say Dubai has a hot climate, it will be true so long as that is the reality of Dubai. If the Earth changes in some drastic way and becomes coated with ice, then the statement will become false. So truth value of a statement can change when a statement no longer accurately describes reality, but that is not an inherent contradiction in the statement: it has simply shifted from true to false. (due to fuzzy word meanings, sometimes with gray areas between T and F)

I think Lon Chaney would be great for capturing the werewolf vote! Or, wait, perhaps you meant Liz Cheney. I don't think progressives who are essential to a Harris win will warm up to Liz Cheney, however much she is a woman of character and courage. I think Harris needs someone who can talk with conservatives without being themselves a conservative, e.g. Beshear or Kelly or Cooper.

I think I lean this way, too. It's less the melanin shortage or dangly bits, more the bubble of wealth that obscures seeing the big picture and how ordinary folk occupy most of the pixels.

Ok, glad we're not oafs with tunnel vision (unless we're JD Vance), but this hunter gatherer dichotomy still seems wobbly and stereotypey to me. I realize you are making a proper disclaimer of having no evidence, and that this is your speculative take. Guess I've just known too many women, my spouse included, who are notably single task focused people and make me look a scattered flibbertigibbet by comparison. Have I mentioned how much I like radishes?

While I agree that consciousness may not be a thing, perhaps rather it is a collective term for dynamic processes, I don't see how it can be a phenomenological illusion, a phrase that contains a fatal contradiction. We can certainly be conscious of something that is not real and an illusion, but the mere fact that we are conscious of the illusion points to a subjective experience that is undeniable. The semantic content of "illusion" is that it is something that is presented to a conscious mind. Without consciousness, without that particular experience that we have of our thoughts being about something, there would also be no illusion. Zombies, e.g., would not have illusions. (philosophical zombies, btw, are an extremely useful philosophic concept in exporing this topic - I recommend the writings of David Chalmers on the concept) If a zombie said, I am seeing an illusion, it would be just as false as the zombie saying, I am a conscious being. I know what it is like to see the color red! Free will is not a necessary condition for awareness. A thermostat has no choice on what it does, and is also a simple circuit that is generally presumed not to be conscious and lacks the features of a mind. (I won't drag panpsychism into this) A prisoner might have no choice on where he is going to spend his evening, but that does not mean that he is not conscious of his lack of choice. A tiger might not have a choice on attacking a slow-moving zebra, but that doesn't mean it will not experience a subjective state of enjoying having it for dinner, and may be highly aware of how tasty and satisfying the zebra is.

That, too, is fair. I just bristled a little at the male stereotype, "most men have a better grasp of the big picture than most men do." Calling us men relatively oafish is not really better than calling women ditzy or moody. It's a trendy thing to do, I hear it a lot, but it is not contributing to the mental health of young people to hear these kinds of stereotypes. If we simply go by the criterion of fresh perspective, then inevitably more women and POC will pour into our political chambers. Why does the software now take away the text window I'm writing in when I open another folder? This has been going on for a few months and it's annoying AF. I open a new window and recover my text, but why should that be necessary when it wasn't before?

While I agree a woman's perspective offers a lot to running this country, I have to say that all perspectives are limited in some way, so there are no guarantees of anyone pulling in the best big picture. Black voters, as a bloc, were very supportive of Biden as someone who understood the big picture, so maybe lack of melanin doesn't have to be an impediment to perspective. Justice Jackson, for example, was an excellent choice for SCOTUS not because she was Black or a woman, but because she had a different educational track and upbringing and life experience than anyone else on the Court. That, plus a lively and sharp intellect, made her a good pick. I don't see Kelly as POTUS because he is still light on experience. Even the fairly green Obama had seven more years political experience than Kelly. Maybe in four years (er, eight years) we can ask if looking at Earth from orbit helps with a big picture. If he were then the most qualified person for the job, then I don't think his ethnicity or gender should be a factor at all. Just as Kamala would make a great Reproductive Rights/Women's Rights president, so would Mark Kelly make a great Gun Control President.

OTTO Apes don't read philosophy. WANDA Yes they do, Otto. They just don't understand it.

It does not help the story that the thymus is located in the chest, not the throat. Given the cold places I have lived, I would have died about a thousand times if -2 F caused such an effect. One time I was out in -25 F for about an hour and did get a patch of gray skin on my face, a touch of frostbite, but that was unusual. Usually you can handle that temp with wicking layers and a good winter coat and boots. I had just gotten tired of my glasses fogging when the scarf was over my face and so had yanked it down. The main danger, as anyone who's spent time in Arctic or subarctic conditions will tell you, is with the feet freezing. A lot more lost toes out there than lost noses. A relative of mine served as a geologist and ornithologist on the Crocker Land Expedition, and joined a couple of other Arctic expeditions as well. Our extended family has always had a touch of stoicism about cold weather, with males especially tending to experiment with various levels of underdressing in winter. A fair amount of this insanity seemed to derive from the polar explorer in the family tree. Often framed as "Cousin Elmer went to the North Pole." In my entire life I never saw my father wear a coat with a hood, or much of any headcovering. He never seemed too uncomfortable.

It is funny, though it's my impression that it is not farting but rather the failure to fart that is painful and debilitating. Perhaps their thymus glands had attacked them, constricting the normal avenues of release.

Kelly, Beshear, Shapiro. My guess is it's dwn to those three. All three give her daylight between her and Biden and know how to talk to moderates without inflaming Progressives. (though Shapiro has been so pro-Israel that he could put off the progs in the No More Bombs for You, Bibi cohort) What's really encouraging is Biden waited until the RNC was over to step down, so the GOP is stuck with Vance now. Any of my trio will eat Vance for breakfast. As name drops go, that's about as good as it gets. Astronauts have that special shine.

Kelly is looking better to me now, for several reasons 1. Immigration hawk, which would allow Kamala to get a little separation from Biden and his unpopular immigration record 2. No threat of lost Senate seat to GOP, since AZ has the governor (D.) appoint replacement. As @swansont noted also. 3. Proven ability to work in hard vacuum. (who else can claim that?) 4. Proven ability to work in a red state (purpling, now) and perhaps a conduit to Kamala for bipartisan efforts. 5. The whole grace under pressure thing, from dealing with wife Gabby's severe injuries to helming space missions. (see 3) 6. Has a Masters degree in a scientific field. (a great thing to have, in my completely unbiased opinion...)

As someone who is a zombie at certain hours of the day, I was also quite triggered by that thoughtless slur. So much that I had to stress-eat some brains.

But there is also an adaptive advantage, in social species, to codifying actions which promote tribal cohesion and trust between all members of the group. So taking care of a weak member could strengthen group dynamics and increase overall survival chances - caring could prove adaptive in this way and its effects would be net positive, the transmission of "kind" genes promoting group survival outweighing the possible transmission of an infirmity (assuming it is even genetic in the first place)(and that someone would accept a weakened person for mating).

Yes, not the year for an open convention. Primary voters did check a box next to Kamala Harris, so the Dems should proceed on the basis that that, and now Joe's endorsement, make her the most solid choice and they should fast track an early pre-convention nominating vote (as had been planned for Joe). If primary voters were willing to have Harris be the backup to a man who would turn 86 in his last year of office, I'd say they were okay with her as President.

The DEI Hire crap gets regular workouts. Justice Jackson weathered this a couple years ago. Should be challenging to try and smear that on someone whose been Attorney General, US Senator and VP, but I'm sure they will try. Cogitating wildly on her possible VP choices, I wonder if there might be serious consideration of someone like Gen. James Mattis, who radiates probity, instead of the usual calculus of finding a strong swing state governor. They can't really pick Newsom (unless causing Middle America to cringe from an All California ticket is a goal). I like Buttigieg but he's not ready (for reasons already mentioned) and Transport Secretary to VP would be some anomalous form of political quantum tunneling. Also, I wonder if the swing state governor gambit could backfire in some way. Twill be fascinating to watch all the gears turning.