What if the snowflake nucleated around microbes in the air, as is common? [1] Would that be life-like enough, especially as the crystalline structure of the snowflake itself would reflect the microbe.
Or, what if the observer of the snowflake held the philosophical belief that we live in a single living universe, as did the ancient Stoics? [2]
It appears that we have at least two clear instances where preserved snowflakes can indeed be considered fossils.
Braindead to think salary is somehow attached to morality. I would say some of the most immoral people are people with a lot of money, and there are countless examples of that.
My logic is that, if you are trying to evaluate whether you'd want to be a politician, consideration of cost/benefit is rational. If you aren't ethical, the benefit of being a politician is a lot higher (because you can get unethical sources of funds). If we want to attract more sane, talented, ethical people, we need to pay more — and prevent blatant corruption like privledged trading.
"trying to evaluate...". Normal people aren't trying to evaluate becoming a politician. It's a lifelong career for most people and you think the lunch lady or librarian who constantly gives back to their community was evaluating on "becoming" a politician? The financial incentives should be lowered. Pay them like you pay a school teacher and ban insider trading. Then you wouldn't have all these worthless nepo babies who just want a lax job and power over people in these positions.
We want highly talented people to be in government — it’s a lot better than the alternative. Why should we treat comp so differently than other fields?
I think a better choice would be to simply remove the ability or to profit from the job. Perhaps politicians give up all their property and become wards of the state after serving their terms, or agree to aggressive post-service surveillance and corruption enforcement.
Do people really think that all of the most capable people are motivated by money? I've made several career moves in my life which have prioritized things other than my salary or financial security. I don't feel this is that rare.
Yes, of course they are. Not solely by money, but the most capable workers are not going to work for less than market rate because they don't have to. They can get meaning and power and everything else they want, and still make way more than Congressmen get.
The problem is, a corrupt capable person is far more dangerous. I rather have a honest but maybe less capable politician in charge, than a evil mastermind.
He separates conceptual understanding from notational understanding— pointing out that the interface of using math has a major impact on utility and understanding. For instance, Roman numerals inhibit understanding and utilization of multiplication.
Better notational systems can be designed, he claims.
> AI is itself a marketing term that has begun to lose its luster. It’s rapidly becoming an annoying or trendy label, not a cutting edge one.
Where have you been the last 15 years? However, I agree with your prediction. Coke making AI advertisements may have had cache a couple years ago, but now would be a doofus move.
Have you watched broadcast TV lately? Every single advert is AI generated. Pay attention and you’ll see the telltale signs: stitched together 3 second clips with continuity problems, every showdown from a fixed set of compositions, etc. it’s just less noticeable to the average viewer than that coke ad.
I don’t remember AI being used as a widespread marketing term until 2-3 years ago. Before that it was just more of a vague tech thing you’d sometimes see, but now every single app seems to have reframed their business to be about AI agents.
Early 2010s had a lot of neural networks AI stuff going on and it certainly became a minor hype cycle as well though that kind of resulted in the current LLM wave.
There was also a small chatbot bubble around 2014-2016 (Microsoft Tay kinda blew it out of the water, and it never recovered), though companies did seem a bit skittish about using the term 'AI' at that point.
Musical appreciation is almost shockingly absent from animals.
One possible reason is that allowing one’s nervous system to be entrained to external rhythms is potentially exploitable. So humans may have evolved the ability to “let the guard down.”
This is pretty fascinating, do you have anything else to say about it? Makes me think of mesmerism and snake-charmers, although IDK how real that is.
Another thing that comes to mind is recent pop-sci talking about how individual bees can measure time pretty accurately, which I personally found very surprising, even though I've heard that they "dance" for communication.
Rhythm appreciation is neurologically very interesting since it requires several basic abilities acting at once, including tracking time, but also a certain amount of memory and pattern recognition. Animal appreciation of melodic stuff and harmony is interesting too but seems much harder to study and more dependent on physical aspects of ears
I have a theory for this, but I don't know how I'd test for it (and I don't work in the field).
We have a time window within which audio stimulae are interpreted as being "the same sound". When you hear two impulses outside that window, they seem to be different sounds. You can play with this by looping two similar or copies of a sound and then varying their offset a few ms either way. They'll move in and out of seeming like the same and different sounds, and around the crossover point you get ringing effects (especially if there's more than two copies, such as with tight echoes).
To me, this seems like a fundamental part of music interpretation. Not the core, but very significant.
Also, different species have different time perceptions. (I mean, I'm kinda guessing, but they all have different heart rate ranges, attention spans, brain wave frequency ranges etc, all of which imply to me a varience in time perception). Our music makes sense against our time perception; we're quite sensitive to it... raise the bmp of a track by just 2 or 3 and it feels quite different. Change from 50% swing to 53% (or 52 if you're really sensitive) and your sense of the groove changes meaningfully. Pass all that through the "different perception of time" and it's easy to imagine our music means nothing to other species.
It also seems likely to me that:
a) most species have different sized windows
b) they perceive blends of frequencies quite differently depending on the window length
So, what seems like coherent, organised sound with a "story" or "meaning" or "structure" to us, probably becomes mush to most other species.
Then note that the different frequency ranges in which animals hear, the different ways their ears focus sound... etc. Us humans are creating organised sound around the biology of our auditory system; the perception of organisation is likely very different for most other species.
Just the difference between boom and bap, boom ... bap... boom... bap... tells us "something". but it's gonna tell you something different if you hear it as ttppssssss daaaaapppp ttpppssssss ddaaappppp.
Both statements are true. We have a strong tendency for integer ratios in harmony, and just intonation often sounds out of tune.
Integer ratios are the base upon which harmony is built. Temperament is a subtle modification that sounds very close to integer ratios, but allows more complex harmonic structures where dissonance is evenly spread out across all the relationships between tones.
Way off what? Complex ratios are likely to be heard as out-of-tune simple ratios, that's why they sound off. A concept sometimes called tolerance in music cognition. Note that by "complexity" and "simplicity" I'm referring to harmonic distance here.
7/4 ratio should be simple, but it'll sound out of tune (over 30 cents) in a normal context. Many BP intervals are just as simple and they'll sound very out of tune to people unused to them.
7/4 happens to be approximately 30 cents away from 16/9. It's hard to tell what's "simple" when looking at fractions, but 16/9 is indeed simple: divide by 3 twice and adjust the octave. If we assume octave equivalence, that means one step in the "7" direction is perceived as more complex than 2 steps in the "3" direction, so the second interpretation wins, but is perceived as out-of-tune.
That said, we're trying to isolate things that are typically not isolated. If you get to 7/4 by following the harmonic series, it will sound in-tune. If you get to 16/9 by playing and applying 4/3 twice, then that will sound in tune. Unsurprisingly the second option is more common in music.
Before 7th harmonic all you have is octaves, fifths and major thirds. If you want to stick to making other pitches out of stacked fifths and major thirds you'll end up with other compromises.
But the whole point of 12-TET is it is a close approximation of those just intervals while still allowing multiple keys to be played without retuning the instrument. If the close mathematical approximation didn't exist, there would be no reason to tune your instruments with a logarithmic recurrence relation.
> allowing multiple keys to be played without retuning the instrument
That's another simplification, real pianos are not tuned to 12TET, but use stretch tuning (which can be over 30cents off in the lower range).
I'd rather argue that people like what they're used to and so "people like pure ratios" is seemingly only true if "pure ratios" are not really pure. And that's ignoring a lot of the music that doesn't have roots in Europe.
What if the fungus accumulated radioactive particles in vesicles? Might they create chained reactions and thus deplete the radioactivity faster than spatially separated particles? Might that be plausible?
Theoretically yes, as long as the isotopes are themselves fissile and susceptible to chain reactions. E.g. U-235 is (obviously, since it's fission reactor fuel) but, say, Iodine-131 undergoes beta decay. That electron can't get into another I-131 atom and cause another decay there like neutrons do in U-325. So piling up I-131 won't get it going faster.
In principle if fungi could somehow concentrate enough fissionable material (say uranium), you could get something like the Oklo reactor going, but it would have to be a truly gigantic, probably unphysical amount of fungi to have access to that much environmental uranium in the first place and it would then have to be concentrated very strongly to get any measurable effect. You won't see anything at all if you just move a few atoms a few mm, so it would need to have very long range hyphae. You also need it to be basically one huge organism in order to collect the uranium to one place - billions of small fungi just doing a few square inches each won't work. It's unlikely the fungus could survive to become so huge on only the promise of fractionally higher future radiation, so it would need to eat something else too.
And then it would decay into daughter isotopes that don't further benefit from the concentration so it might not help a lot anyway if you're looking for cleanup. Plus you've covered your cleanup site in, presumably, millions of tonnes of fungus which might or might not be an improvement.
Not really. You're talking about a fungus creating essentially a nuclear reactor inside of its cells, and creating it out of fuel that's not good enough to make a nuclear reactor in the first place (it at one time was, but now it's a mess of decay products and nonsense).
Reactors also take a certain amount of mass. You can't just squish two tiny microgram particles together and hope to get anything going.
Technically I guess I can't prove it wouldn't work if you make it dense/hot/covered-in-reflectors enough, but I'm pretty sure it's _well_ beyond the limits of what a fungus could even conceivably do.
Note that the only numbers on that page have various critical masses in kg. That's a bigass fungus.
And that's still not getting into: the "fuel" here is real shit. It's gotta be beyond its useful life even if you ignore that the thing melted down and corroded and blew up.
Or, what if the observer of the snowflake held the philosophical belief that we live in a single living universe, as did the ancient Stoics? [2]
It appears that we have at least two clear instances where preserved snowflakes can indeed be considered fossils.
[1] https://asm.org/articles/2019/january/snow-is-coming-whats-t...
[2] https://modernstoicism.com/modern-stoicism-expert-panel-post...