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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.

@Vinz pizza sure, but burgers? There's a possibility that the presence of a fork and knife indicates that the place is a proper restaurant, in which case certain expectations exist that do not exist in fast-food places - which are not considered "restaurants". For example, drinking from a bottle in a restaurant is bad manners but Americans do it all the time. I find that eating a burger with knife and fork is a matter of convenience. I tend to do this in restaurants that provide silverware because their burgers are usually too large. I suppose Americans try harder to eat them with their bare hands, but it seems like more effort for them. I'm not sure about real restaurants that serve burgers in France because I haven't had much experience with those (I'm French but live in California). Also note that traditional French table manners forbid eating anything with hands except for bread, meat with bones, and certain raw or dry things that are more like appetizers or desserts. Burgers are widely understood to be a foreign thing that is super weird to serve on a plate like all sandwiches, so French people would generally not know what to do with it and improvise. Fast-food chain burgers are always eaten with hands with no hesitation.

@freemo I can assure from my 25 years of living in Paris that hearing a french dude yell "Bouge ta caisse de merde, connard" to the car in front of him is far from being sexy.

@georgetakei how do you stop hate or rather, how do you prevent hate from developing in children? (and especially other people's children?)

Semi-wild Psilocybe cyanescens (wavy caps) and Psilocybe allenii have started to pop in large numbers in the Bay Area. This is the first week of the season with more than one rainy day. Harsh weather, I know.

1.

Un peu en retard mais encore dans les clous, aujourd’hui nous fêtons les 85 ans de la découverte du LSD par le chimiste Suisse Albert Hofmann !
Le 16 novembre 1938, Hofmann, qui étudiait l’ergot de seigle pour en tirer des principes actifs intéressants pour leurs propriétés thérapeutiques, synthétise le 25e dérivé de cet ergot (d’où le nom LSD-25). Mais cette nouvelle substance, testée comme stimulant cardiaque, est moins puissante que d’autres molécules déjà sur le marché.

It's useful to notice that shallow imitation in art or "kitsch" will also borrow the terms used to describe what it imitates. This includes "fine art" - as a non-native English speaker and US resident, I had to look up the definition of "fine art" because it seemed to be applied only to a certain style of paintings in a commercial context. None of what I consider interesting art would be labeled as "fine art". It was my surprise to find out it was defined as an equivalent of the French term "beaux-arts" which is rarely used in French and refers to art for the sake of it as opposed to decorating functional objects (decorative arts, "arts décoratifs"). I've grown allergic to the term "fine art" just like I've always been allergic to the brand of art it refers to today. I won't use the term "kitsch" to label the work of others because it's pretentious and mean but I will also not use the term "fine art" to describe what I do.

The attractive force that causes floating Cheerios to clump together increases in strength when objects are withdrawn from a liquid. #physics physics.aps.org/articles/v16/s

Google Translate is being confused. It thinks "calaveras" is more likely to be an English word than a Spanish one, and of course, fails to translate it into anything.

It means "skulls".

OCaml friends: How many characters does this print? (It's valid UTF-8 and valid Unicode)

print_endline "\xF0\x9F\x90\x95\xE2\x80\x8D\xF0\x9F\xA6\xBA";;

It's a trick question for Unicode awareness. It should show a service dog emoji but in my console, I see a dog followed by an orange vest. Here it is: 🐕‍🦺

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