🌸🌹2ck 🌱🐇 @2ck@qoto.org

I think part of the reason I favor integrative models in biology is that the way I've learned to understand complex things is through syntactically complex linked structures like program code that, in a (somewhat loose) sense, recapitulate the structure of what they describe. The way I've learned biology up to this point is by linking together, in my head, a variety of narrative descriptions and figures that I have to integrate in a loosely structured manner. An integrated, multi-level model (a schema, perhaps) seems like an effective alternative, though it may ultimately only be legible to the person who creates it.

this is now my #Windows hate-thread. welcome in.

I *hate* how #Microsoft actively coddles its users. They even redirect away from features explicitly asked for. It's so stupide.

12 Sept Date announced for Blender Studio's short film:
https://studio.blender.org/blog/wing-it-premiere-date/?utm_medium=homepage

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_pig
War history is wild

I'm not sure if olfactory perception is weird or just the whole rest of the senses are weird

minor update. probably last for the year. I think the main family has moved. I did see another chick briefly, but stopped seeing it sooner than I think it could have developed to a fledgling. (Can adults fly their chicks elsewhere?) I saw a couple swallows just now leave, but couldn't tell if they were using the nest or just the shade

Just needed a place to put this:
On Free Will and QM
14 July 2018
The question of free will in the face of deterministic laws of physics sometimes brings up quantum mechanics and the so-called uncertainty principle as a away to escape the strictures of a mechanistic theory. I think such an appeal is not necessary though. In fact, an effective free will can be achieved through information hiding and the limits of computation. First, to say a system, A, has free will means that, at any point in time, there is no observer which can simulate A faster than A can evolve in real time. Note that A can be a classically deterministic system: if the evolution of A's subset of the universe is as fast as possible or if all the observers must lack sufficient information about A to simulate it faster than A can evolve, then A can still have free will.
[a couple edits for readability]

brains is complicated