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First piece of 2024! Here's some music I was listening to, a cover of Depeche Mode's Somebody by hante: youtu.be/l84NU2ZWo9I

Did you know the W3C published Ethical Principles for how the web should work?

w3.org/TR/ethical-web-principl

I find them so inspiring. And they guide what developers should be doing, too.

“The web should empower an equitable, informed and interconnected society. It has been, and should continue to be, designed to enable communication and knowledge-sharing for everyone… we need to consider the ethical implications of our work when we build web technologies, applications, and sites.”

I like the hobby of mushroom hunting. In particular, I like mushroom identification forums because their members stay down to earth. You won't find people patting each other on the back for being inexcusably terrible, due to the consequences of making mistakes.

On vouvoie les gens qui font des choses importantes mais on tutoie les gens importants.

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Le livre de la sociologue Joanna Kempner est désormais en précommande ! Elle y étudiera comment des personnes atteintes de douleurs résistantes sont parvenues, grâce à leur union et à internet, à mettre au point des traitements à base de champignons psychédéliques et à faire connaître leurs découvertes à la communauté scientifique.

« La poursuite de leur combat en dit long sur un système si défectueux que nos thérapies antidouleur les plus innovantes

Remember The Dress, a viral sensation back in 2015? I was wondering if I was still perceiving it like I used to, that is white and gold. I now see it "as it is", i.e. a terrible photo that could be interpreted either as a completely backlit white and gold dress or a blue and black dress with strong lighting coming from inside the store. I also see the colors that I would have to use to turn the photo into a painting. This is probably as a result of spending a lot of time looking at paintings and painting.

Do you see it differently than you used to 8 years ago?

Do you use an ad blocker while browsing the internet?

#Mastodon #Fediverse #AdBlocker #InternetBrowsing #UserPreferences #Ads #Internet

Of course, it could also be that flying birds evolved into walking giants thanks to their lightweight bones...

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I'm reading about giant dinosaurs and now I'm convinced that their large size required lightweight bones which became later key to evolving into flying birds.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentin

This paper describes the predatory bacterium Vampirococcus lugosii, which preys on members of the bacterial species of the genus Halochromatium [1].

This thing is incredible. For example: Vampirococcus lugosii has a severely reduced genome, something like 1.3 Mbp, and lacks the genes which code for many of the standard biosynthetic metabolic pathways (e.g. phospholipid synthesis, amino acid synthesis, and nucleotide synthesis). Yet it is somehow still alive.

How does this work?

One mechanism that Vampirococcus uses is to get these raw materials from its prey. An example of this are the nucleotides that Vampirococcus lugosii gets by chopping up the DNA that it sucks out of its prey. And amazingly, Vampirococcus lugosii uses a CRISPR-Cas system and various restriction enzymes to accomplish this. See the image for a cartoon of this system.

Predatory microbes.

Crazy.

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Description of “Candidatus Vampirococcus lugosii”]

Lugosii after Bela Lugosi (1882–1956), who played the role of the vampire in the iconic 1931’s film “Dracula”. Epibiotic bacterium that preys on anoxygenic photosynthetic gammaproteobacterial species of the genus Halochromatium. Non-flagellated, small flat rounded cells (500–600 nm diameter and 200–250 nm height) that form piles of up to 10 cells attached to the surface of the host. Gram-positive cell wall structure. Complete genome sequence, GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ accession number PRJNA678638.
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#biology #vampirococcuslugosii

References
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[1] "Reductive evolution and unique infection and feeding mode in the CPR predatory bacterium Vampirococcus lugosii", nature.com/articles/s41467-021

Amanita pachycolea (Western grisette), Pacific coast of northern California. One of the low-risk edible amanitas.

Principle of self-reinforcing ignorance: those who would benefit the most from new advice are those who are most likely to reject it.

A natural mind is an emerging system that shares the following properties with a cyclone:
- has a lifetime
- has a center that's defined in space with good accuracy with respect to the center of any other cyclone i.e. they are easy to distinguish from one another
- their spatial boundaries are fuzzy
- their start date is fuzzy
- their end date is also fuzzy but perhaps less so than their start date

Much of this model goes out the window when considering artificial minds implemented and clonable with modern computers.

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