Are the legal battles in our courts a kind of ritual conflict resolution?
Like the giant forest ants when they stand on four stiff legs to look as big as possible and hit each other with their front legs and antennae? They don't bite, but the mandibles are wide to show how well they could bite...
Instead we hit each other with paper, like subpoenas...
@futurebird it seems the courts are dictated by money and ability to pay lawyers rather than justice. The poor are disproportionately represented in prisons while those responsible for the wars, inequality and moral decline don't appear to be held accountable.
Homo naledi is the most interesting new human like primate. They are from South Africa, little people. walked upright, but primates walking upright goes way back.
They had hands just like modern humans but longish arms and powerful shoulders ... so they could probably zip up a tree.
They have small brains half modern size. This has made people astonished that they may have had fire.
I'm glad I'll never meet one, a smart little firebug with powerful arms sounds terrifying. 1/
It's the weekend and I get to catch up with my colonies and see what they've been up to all week. It's spring so they are very busy and VERY hungry. I need to order more feeders... why can't we have cicadas in NYC? That would be so helpful... I have thousands of hungry mandibles to feed a little gasters to fill and they are not patient.
I don't know why everyone doesn't have an ant colony. There's always something new going on in there.
"I should start writing my year end student reports." I think to myself... and so braced and alarmed by the earliness of this thought I decide to take the weekend off in celebration of daring to even think about planning so early.
@futurebird
there was a time in my life when I made todo lists on odd days. On even days, I would do the things on the todo list I'd made on the previous day, because doiing anything on the same day as a todo list was too exhausting.
@futurebird there's only one book anywhere close to your quest which I've read this year. It's about the problems which have been plaguing us for decades in astrophysics, and how anomalies actually help in finding solutions.
It's called SPACE ODDITIES: THE MYSTERIOUS ANOMALIES CHALLENGING OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE UNIVERSE, by Harry Cliff.
I found it to be well-written, engaging, and smoothly presented.
I love the fedi only more for being the only place I know full of exasperated FORTRAN defenders. How can we insult the original word? Yea, when it was first written we were not yet even born! 🥰
@futurebird ha, BLAS and LAPACK are written in fortran and almost all linear algebra libraries use them for array operations, e.g. numpy. so there’s a chance several of the programs you use are running fortran, especially anything ML/AI related
Its always remarkable to me to think about Descartes and Galileo being contemporaries: so we know how the former reacted when the latter was imprisoned:
“I inquired in Leiden and Amsterdam whether Galileo’s World System was available, … I was told that it had indeed been published but that all the copies had immediately been burnt at Rome, and that Galileo had been convicted and fined. I was so astonished at this that I almost decided to burn all my papers … .”
I think Descartes’ impact on math education and math communication is much more significant and interesting than his philosophy which always felt a little shallow to me— I think of him as a math teacher first and everything else second.
All the power walking grannies at the res have such big guns as of late Jesus. they remind me of Pheodlie majors
— or maybe *my *arms are getting kinda wimpy
I keep this on the tutoring table in the math office so the kids know I’m not playing around. (it’s actually very useful when doing geometric constructions)
@futurebird off topic, but that pen takes me back 20 years!
I used to have one that looked like that, it's that an old one? Or are they still made?
(It's a plastic version of a technical drawing pencil, don't know how they are called in English. Right?)
Everyone running around excited a non-human primate "used medicine to treat wounds"
I'm just over here looking at ants who have been doing this since before you were an inkling on the evolutionary tree and wondering what the big deal is.
@futurebird
I've decided the next step in human evolution should be to just give up and trick ants into taking care of us, like that large blue butterfly or that snail I just posted about. Who needs x-men type powers when you can sit back and have ants bring you food and protect you?