When Is the Next Leonid Meteor Shower?
The Leonid meteor shower in 2023 won’t reach storm levels, but it’s still worth checking out. Activity peaks on the night of Friday, November 17, and early in the morning of Saturday, November 18. The shower can produce up to 15 meteors per hour at its peak. The first quarter moon on November 20 won’t outshine the shooting stars, so viewing in 2023 should be good.
For your best shot at catching the spectacle, find a remote area with minimal light pollution and give your eyes plenty of time to adjust to the dark. The Leonids will be more visible in the Northern Hemisphere, and the best time to see them is in the hours before dawn.
Millennials are raising "bizarre and terribly behaved” children, glued to screens. Can Gen Z flip the script?
I once lived with someone who had a two-year-old god-daughter. Occasionally, this wee lass was allowed to play on an iPad. One day, my housemate saw her god-daughter spot a butterfly fluttering outside the window. Her tiny toddler hand reached out, and her thumb and forefinger made a sort of pincer movement. At first my housemate was baffled, but then she realised. Her god-daughter was trying to zoom in on the butterfly.
This story has stuck with me because, well, it’s completely nuts. This kid couldn’t feed herself for god’s sake, and yet had mastered a digital zooming motion? She thought the window, or reality itself, was a big screen? At the time, I remember a feeling of dread creeping over me – a sense that something terrifying was coming our way. I suddenly realised the human race was breeding and raising iPad kids.
... https://www.vice.com/en/article/93k8kv/ipad-kids-gen-alpha-childhood-development
@silvermouse said:
iPad Kids Are Getting Out of Hand
Millennials are raising "bizarre and terribly behaved” children, glued to screens. Can Gen Z flip the script?
I once lived with someone who had a two-year-old god-daughter. Occasionally, this wee lass was allowed to play on an iPad. One day, my housemate saw her god-daughter spot a butterfly fluttering outside the window. Her tiny toddler hand reached out, and her thumb and forefinger made a sort of pincer movement. At first my housemate was baffled, but then she realised. Her god-daughter was trying to zoom in on the butterfly.
This story has stuck with me because, well, it’s completely nuts. This kid couldn’t feed herself for god’s sake, and yet had mastered a digital zooming motion? She thought the window, or reality itself, was a big screen? At the time, I remember a feeling of dread creeping over me – a sense that something terrifying was coming our way. I suddenly realised the human race was breeding and raising iPad kids.
... https://www.vice.com/en/article/93k8kv/ipad-kids-gen-alpha-childhood-development
The entirety of personal devices and technology is out of hand. I was out to dinner on Saturday evening, and passed by a table with two younger couples, and one child under the age of two in a high chair (maybe even under 18 months), at it. The mother of the child was disinterestedly holding her phone with a cartoon video playing, inches from the child's face, with one hand, while eating with the other, and turned mostly away from the child. It made me very sad for the child.
Cashless sucks
It’s not in the interests of the ordinary person but it’s not a conspiracy either. A cashless society is a system run amok
"What we have here are a series of feedback loops, all serving the prevailing systemic logic of expansion and acceleration. Cashless society, then, is not just a privatisation process, but also an automation process. Automated giants like Amazon in fact lack any infrastructure to process physical cash, and street-level shops are being drawn into this systemic recalibration. Hipster cafés in London have signs saying ‘We’ve gone cashless’; what they are actually saying is ‘We’ve joined an automation alliance with Big Finance, Big Tech, Visa and Mastercard. To interact with us you must interact with them.’"
@ShawnOL said:
I don't like the idea at all. In a second someone could wipe away your money, including the government. Thay can't take your cash.
I agree. Cashless lends itself to being abused by someone. We all know there are people out there who would use it as a weapon against the populace (just look at Canada with those protesting truckers).
"Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another." - Proverbs 27:17
about the labor shortage of farm workers in Latin America. Average age on the coffee plantations is 54, young folk don't want to do that kind of work for low pay and lack of advancement, just like here.
Do you think curiosity can be cultivated? Or are some people just more curious than others?
I think you can develop a willingness to try new things, but curiosity is kind of self-motivated. I sense that for many people, they love the feeling of the familiar and the secure and a place where the answers are. Whether the answers are through religion or their political affiliation or family, there’s a security that comes with that, and that would imply maybe a lack of willingness to be curious and go outside that zone. I’ve been reading about the pre-Enlightenment.
Oh!
Which showed a similar kind of thing in some ways. Religion and other things provided all the answers. Then science comes along, and you maintain the how, but the why is now left behind. Max Weber talks about the great disenchantment. That’s when everything in the world seems enchanted, and it’s filled with a kind of spiritual power and then as science and everything starts to take over, things don’t have that magical aura anymore.
Do you feel enchantment about the world?
I feel that. I think a lot of people in the sciences feel that, too. They feel that the way things work in physics or biology or whatever it might be is still kind of marvelous. Even though they’re not just saying God or the gods made it this way, it’s still moving and amazing. And this idea of ecology, our awareness of the network or web of connections in physics and nature and biology, there’s a sense of wonder in that connection. It’s not quite religious, but it is amazing.
A citizen science model turns anecdotes into evidence by revealing similar characteristics among Gifted Word Learner dogs
"Interestingly, 74% of the owners participating in the study reported that they did not intentionally train their dogs to learn the names of toys. Rather, they noticed that their dog had learned toy names, probably during spontaneous playful interactions. Following this realisation, owners began intentionally introducing their dogs to more toys. During interviews, the majority of the owners noted that this spontaneous learning seemed to be effortless (e.g., they reported that the learning process did not seem difficult for the dogs, the dogs learned immediately and performed accurately). Therefore, the owners did not realize how uncommon this ability was until they learned about our research program."
Our blue heeler mix Jake knew every phrase or sentence, even if spelled out, that meant the truck would be rolling out of the driveway. He also knew how to convey the message that he meant to be in the back of that truck when it started rolling.
Shopping,
beer,
go,
groceries,
town,
I need,
go,
t-r-u-c-k
town
ride,
r-i-d-e,
drive,
I'm going,
Walmart,
Nashville,
get gas,
where's Jake?
take the dogs,
gonna go,
more others than I can think of
any of the above and he was all over it.
He also knew any phrasing that included the word "Vet". No matter how you snuck that one in, the next question was: where's Jake? I dunno, he was just here.
Once in the truck, he knew the exact location of every dog that might chase the truck within 10 miles in any direction, and issued his barking challenge in time to get them out and chasing.
It was a challenge. "Chase me! I'm the fastest thing you ever saw! Ha Ha! Next!"
WARNING: The above post may contain thoughts or ideas known to the State of Caliphornia to cause seething rage, confusion, distemper, nausea, perspiration, sphincter release, or cranial implosion to persons who implicitly trust only one news source, or find themselves at either the left or right political extreme. Proceed at your own risk.
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
@Amos_Umwhat said:
Our blue heeler mix Jake knew every phrase or sentence, even if spelled out, that meant the truck would be rolling out of the driveway. He also knew how to convey the message that he meant to be in the back of that truck when it started rolling.
Shopping,
beer,
go,
groceries,
town,
I need,
go,
t-r-u-c-k
town
ride,
r-i-d-e,
drive,
I'm going,
Walmart,
Nashville,
get gas,
where's Jake?
take the dogs,
gonna go,
more others than I can think of
any of the above and he was all over it.
He also knew any phrasing that included the word "Vet". No matter how you snuck that one in, the next question was: where's Jake? I dunno, he was just here.
Once in the truck, he knew the exact location of every dog that might chase the truck within 10 miles in any direction, and issued his barking challenge in time to get them out and chasing.
It was a challenge. "Chase me! I'm the fastest thing you ever saw! Ha Ha! Next!"
Music processing is a whole-brain activity that starts with the auditory cortex, a region of the cortex that sits approximately behind the ear and processes any kind of sound. Given the many factors that influence how a person perceives a single song—rhythm, pitch, lyrics, emotion, memory of the melody and any personal memories attached to the music—a wide variety of brain regions are soon roped in. For instance, according to a 2022 review paper in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, brain regions associated with movement (motor areas) activate in response to the beat, while the inferior frontal gyrus in the prefrontal cortex may process some aspects of harmony and the order of the notes and rhythms. Lyrics are processed in language areas, while the emotions stirred up by music show up in the brain’s reward networks, activating regions such as the nucleus accumbens, a very basic structure that sits deep in the forebrain.
This sort of thing really agitates me. Why could they just not observe and document? Why did they deem it necessary to collect the entire nest. Oh I see, because they had to be the first to do so. It amazes me how people that claim to respect nature and claim to hope to preserve it just can’t leave it the hell alone.
Comments
Warp speed, Mr. Sulu.
Trapped in the People's Communits Republic of Massachusetts.
When Is the Next Leonid Meteor Shower?
The Leonid meteor shower in 2023 won’t reach storm levels, but it’s still worth checking out. Activity peaks on the night of Friday, November 17, and early in the morning of Saturday, November 18. The shower can produce up to 15 meteors per hour at its peak. The first quarter moon on November 20 won’t outshine the shooting stars, so viewing in 2023 should be good.
For your best shot at catching the spectacle, find a remote area with minimal light pollution and give your eyes plenty of time to adjust to the dark. The Leonids will be more visible in the Northern Hemisphere, and the best time to see them is in the hours before dawn.
“Near Miss” by Stuart Woods and Brett Battles.
iPad Kids Are Getting Out of Hand
Millennials are raising "bizarre and terribly behaved” children, glued to screens. Can Gen Z flip the script?
I once lived with someone who had a two-year-old god-daughter. Occasionally, this wee lass was allowed to play on an iPad. One day, my housemate saw her god-daughter spot a butterfly fluttering outside the window. Her tiny toddler hand reached out, and her thumb and forefinger made a sort of pincer movement. At first my housemate was baffled, but then she realised. Her god-daughter was trying to zoom in on the butterfly.
This story has stuck with me because, well, it’s completely nuts. This kid couldn’t feed herself for god’s sake, and yet had mastered a digital zooming motion? She thought the window, or reality itself, was a big screen? At the time, I remember a feeling of dread creeping over me – a sense that something terrifying was coming our way. I suddenly realised the human race was breeding and raising iPad kids.
...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/93k8kv/ipad-kids-gen-alpha-childhood-development
The entirety of personal devices and technology is out of hand. I was out to dinner on Saturday evening, and passed by a table with two younger couples, and one child under the age of two in a high chair (maybe even under 18 months), at it. The mother of the child was disinterestedly holding her phone with a cartoon video playing, inches from the child's face, with one hand, while eating with the other, and turned mostly away from the child. It made me very sad for the child.
"Two For Texas" by James Lee Burke I've read most of Burke's work.
Cashless sucks
It’s not in the interests of the ordinary person but it’s not a conspiracy either. A cashless society is a system run amok
"What we have here are a series of feedback loops, all serving the prevailing systemic logic of expansion and acceleration. Cashless society, then, is not just a privatisation process, but also an automation process. Automated giants like Amazon in fact lack any infrastructure to process physical cash, and street-level shops are being drawn into this systemic recalibration. Hipster cafés in London have signs saying ‘We’ve gone cashless’; what they are actually saying is ‘We’ve joined an automation alliance with Big Finance, Big Tech, Visa and Mastercard. To interact with us you must interact with them.’"
https://aeon.co/essays/going-cashless-is-a-bad-idea-but-its-not-a-conspiracy
I don't like the idea at all. In a second someone could wipe away your money, including the government. Thay can't take your cash.
Trapped in the People's Communits Republic of Massachusetts.
I agree. Cashless lends itself to being abused by someone. We all know there are people out there who would use it as a weapon against the populace (just look at Canada with those protesting truckers).
"Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another." - Proverbs 27:17
interesting study if you have persistent lyme disease:
Superior efficacy of combination antibiotic therapy versus monotherapy in a mouse model of Lyme disease
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2023.1293300/full
“Havana Storm” by Clive and Dirk Cussler.
about the labor shortage of farm workers in Latin America. Average age on the coffee plantations is 54, young folk don't want to do that kind of work for low pay and lack of advancement, just like here.
https://dailycoffeenews.com/2022/12/20/labor-shortages-in-latin-america-present-a-growing-risk-for-the-coffee-industry/
"Buried Prey" John Sandford one that I missed at our library.
an interview with David Byrne
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/10/magazine/david-byrne-interview.html
here is an excerpt:
Do you think curiosity can be cultivated? Or are some people just more curious than others?
I think you can develop a willingness to try new things, but curiosity is kind of self-motivated. I sense that for many people, they love the feeling of the familiar and the secure and a place where the answers are. Whether the answers are through religion or their political affiliation or family, there’s a security that comes with that, and that would imply maybe a lack of willingness to be curious and go outside that zone. I’ve been reading about the pre-Enlightenment.
Oh!
Which showed a similar kind of thing in some ways. Religion and other things provided all the answers. Then science comes along, and you maintain the how, but the why is now left behind. Max Weber talks about the great disenchantment. That’s when everything in the world seems enchanted, and it’s filled with a kind of spiritual power and then as science and everything starts to take over, things don’t have that magical aura anymore.
Do you feel enchantment about the world?
I feel that. I think a lot of people in the sciences feel that, too. They feel that the way things work in physics or biology or whatever it might be is still kind of marvelous. Even though they’re not just saying God or the gods made it this way, it’s still moving and amazing. And this idea of ecology, our awareness of the network or web of connections in physics and nature and biology, there’s a sense of wonder in that connection. It’s not quite religious, but it is amazing.
https://greydynamics.com/special-collection-service-americas-mission-impossible-force/
A good cigar and whiskey solve most problems.
The Prince
--Niccolò Machiavelli
A citizen science model turns anecdotes into evidence by revealing similar characteristics among Gifted Word Learner dogs
"Interestingly, 74% of the owners participating in the study reported that they did not intentionally train their dogs to learn the names of toys. Rather, they noticed that their dog had learned toy names, probably during spontaneous playful interactions. Following this realisation, owners began intentionally introducing their dogs to more toys. During interviews, the majority of the owners noted that this spontaneous learning seemed to be effortless (e.g., they reported that the learning process did not seem difficult for the dogs, the dogs learned immediately and performed accurately). Therefore, the owners did not realize how uncommon this ability was until they learned about our research program."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-47864-5
My cat knows what "igottagetup" means.
Trapped in the People's Communits Republic of Massachusetts.
Our blue heeler mix Jake knew every phrase or sentence, even if spelled out, that meant the truck would be rolling out of the driveway. He also knew how to convey the message that he meant to be in the back of that truck when it started rolling.
Shopping,
beer,
go,
groceries,
town,
I need,
go,
t-r-u-c-k
town
ride,
r-i-d-e,
drive,
I'm going,
Walmart,
Nashville,
get gas,
where's Jake?
take the dogs,
gonna go,
more others than I can think of
any of the above and he was all over it.
He also knew any phrasing that included the word "Vet". No matter how you snuck that one in, the next question was: where's Jake? I dunno, he was just here.
Once in the truck, he knew the exact location of every dog that might chase the truck within 10 miles in any direction, and issued his barking challenge in time to get them out and chasing.
It was a challenge. "Chase me! I'm the fastest thing you ever saw! Ha Ha! Next!"
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
Inner core wobble
https://phys.org/news/2023-12-assumptions-year-rhythm-earth-core.html
" The Forsaken" by Ace Atkins last one in a series. Pretty good read.
smart dog
About earworms:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-christmas-songs-get-stuck-in-your-head-so-easily/
Music processing is a whole-brain activity that starts with the auditory cortex, a region of the cortex that sits approximately behind the ear and processes any kind of sound. Given the many factors that influence how a person perceives a single song—rhythm, pitch, lyrics, emotion, memory of the melody and any personal memories attached to the music—a wide variety of brain regions are soon roped in. For instance, according to a 2022 review paper in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, brain regions associated with movement (motor areas) activate in response to the beat, while the inferior frontal gyrus in the prefrontal cortex may process some aspects of harmony and the order of the notes and rhythms. Lyrics are processed in language areas, while the emotions stirred up by music show up in the brain’s reward networks, activating regions such as the nucleus accumbens, a very basic structure that sits deep in the forebrain.
I wish I hadn't seen that...
"Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another." - Proverbs 27:17
"Sanibel Flats " by Randy Wayne White an early Doc Ford novel 1990.
this could be a breakthrough in artificial intelligence:
Moiré synaptic transistor with room-temperature neuromorphic functionality
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06791-1
A little myrmacology to brighten your day
https://entomologytoday.org/2024/01/03/rare-ant-species-north-carolina-treetops-aphaenogaster-mariae/#
This sort of thing really agitates me. Why could they just not observe and document? Why did they deem it necessary to collect the entire nest. Oh I see, because they had to be the first to do so. It amazes me how people that claim to respect nature and claim to hope to preserve it just can’t leave it the hell alone.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/if-i-fits-i-sits-experiment-shows-felines-also-sit-illusory-boxes-180977681/
Why cats love to sit in boxes.
That means they're box trained.
Trapped in the People's Communits Republic of Massachusetts.