In some ways phone cameras are very impressive, since CCDs are now cheap and good enough that they’re no longer the bottleneck. All the computational photography stuff they do boosts their capabilities even more.

The thing that really limits them is the size and optical quality of their lenses.

Someone should post a Chinese cabbage or Jerusalem artichoke as well.

Reminds me a lot of this image:

I feel like we should be trying to engineer fusarium venenatum to express various animal proteins.

It already does a really good job as a meat substitute, and (unlike lab grown meat) the process for culturing it is very well understood and mature.

I don’t know if trying to genetically engineer a fungus would present any special challenges vs a plant or bacteria though.

I’m not trying to be mean when I say this, but to me your comment sounds a little bit like “I know you guys are starving but if you ever solve that issue make sure you don’t go too far in the other direction. I sometimes buy food that I don’t end up using, which is fairly pointless.”

I wish the biggest grievance I had with my country’s politics was that some of the parties are redundant. I think I’d be willing to give up a limb or two for that actually.

That’s a veritasium clickbait video.

While it’s true that no voting system is completely perfect that’s a little bit like saying that no one’s body is completely perfect, so trying to be healthy is pointless. The efficacy of voting systems can in fact be quantified and compared based on baysian regret, and some are better than others.

That’s for single winner elections. Almost any proportional system is going to be better than any single winner system, with the added benefit of eliminating gerrymandering. Presumably the best proportional system available is proportional score voting, but I don’t know if there’s been rigorous mathematical analysis of that yet.

The really interesting thing about costasiella kuroshimae is that its digestive system branches and goes up into all of those ‘leaves’, which is how the algae makes its way there to have its chloroplasts extracted.

I hope that after the bubble bursts the nuclear reactors can be used to put energy on the grid and maybe they’ll find something worthwhile to do with all those compute GPUs.

Most diagrams don’t include the mesentery, so people just think their intestines are sitting there like a pile of rope inside their torso.

Solar panels aren’t worth it for a normal EV, but supposedly the Aptera is so small, lightweight, and aerodynamic (with that teardrop shape) that they actually add a significant amount of range.

In a lot of situations I would rather cross mid block than at a corner crosswalk. The cars can’t be relied on to stop anyway, and mid-block there are a lot less directions you have to worry about.

Even if the intersection is signalized given the existence of right turns on red it’s still often safer to cross mid block.

Remember back when the progress bar on the nyancat video was a nyancat?

That sounds really interesting. I never thought about it that way before but I guess (dry) snow isn’t very conductive.

Are there any articles about or pictures of this project out there anywhere?

To my knowledge absolutely no one saying “Ban landlords” is also saying “Don’t build any more housing.”

There are plenty of people (EDIT: some of whom are in this very thread) who like to site that there are more vacant houses in the country than there are homeless people, as if to imply we already have all the housing we need.

But the fact of the matter is that US and Canadian cities have increased in population without a proportional increase in housing stock. The difference is mostly made up by more people living with their parents into adulthood, people living with more roommates to make rent, and multiple families living in “single family” houses.

We don’t do anything about it because home owners treat housing as an investment and expect its price to keep going up forever. Also because people hate multi-unit residential buildings for all sorts of nonsensical and racist reasons.

To be clear I am an advocate for the Vienna model of public housing and programs that temporarily repossess and rent out vacant properties, but I am first and foremost an advocate for housing abundance.

Farmers right now are fighting a legal battle for the ability to repair their own tractors.

It’s not good for farm equipment to be locked down and sealed off just like it’s not good for operating systems to be locked down and sealed off.

A little while back I ended up using YouTube for a few minutes without an ad-blocker. Every single video had a transphobic ad.

I didn’t think it was possible for me to hold any more contempt for advertising, but somehow they managed it.

So, I think the whole “well intentioned but hubristic scientist goes too far, tramples on the feet of god!” trope is pretty stupid in a lot of stories (although I still love a story about a character playing with forces they don’t understand if it’s executed well). But I also think you really have to consider where the “mad scientist” archetype comes from before you write it off as purely anti-intellectual:

1. To a large degree the mad scientist is an updated version of the evil wizard. Victor Frankenstein, the prototypical mad scientist, was trained in alchemy as well as chemistry and biology. Very often (such as in this very post) their laboratories are depicted as being in castles or even wizard towers.

2. Frankenstein was partly based on the sort of people who robbed graveyards. The more modern ‘howie lab coat, rubber gloves, and goggles’ mad scientist exploded in popularity after WWII, probably because of people like mengele and the invention of the atomic bomb.

There’s other themes present in the archetype of course (I already mentioned hubris and man’s vs god"s domain above, but there’s all the other stuff going on in Frankenstein too), but yeah. The ‘mad scientist’ archetype is a little bit like taking a normal scientist and removing their humanity and morals, leaving only their intellect and ambition/ego behind. A little bit like how a warewolf is a man stripped of all morals and self control, leaving only bestial impulses behind.

It’s intentionally stupid, which is why it’s not a permanent change.

They just want people to talk about, send pictures of it to their friends, etc, and be an avenue for reminding people that goldfish crackers exist.

Nah, the cost of labor + materials + distribution is the minimum price of an item. The actual price in practice will be that price + whatever the manufacturer can get away with charging.

What determines the premium they can get away with is whether or not alternative goods exist and whether or not the consumers are informed of them, motivated to seek them out, and capable of making the switch.

There’s little to be gained in trying to make current-day nations pay reparations for things that their ancestors did.

“We will not blame [King George] for the crimes of his ancestors if he relinquishes the royal rights of his ancestors; but as long as he claims their rights, by virtue of descent, then, by virtue of descent, he must shoulder the responsibility for their crimes.”.
-James Connolly

How about we look forwards, instead?

How about we look at the present? Because colonialism isn’t over. People are still suffering from it right now. The global south is still actively being colonized and exploited right now.

You can’t drive a knife into someone’s ribs then say “what’s in the past is in the past, we need to look forward instead” when your hand is still holding the blade. How can you hope to start the process of healing if you haven’t even taken the knife out all the way?

Now, I don’t have all the answers for how that healing process is going to work for the world, but I’m pretty sure a billionaire dancing around in a golden hat and velvet robes with a title that says “God made my bloodline special so I can stab whoever I want” isn’t a part of it.