I’m Georgia. I crosspost some of my writings from eukaryotewritesblog.com.
eukaryote
Karma: 2,753
As opposed to other species of bear, which are safe for children to engage with?
Source?
I happened to get to play Optimal Weave today and really liked it. I don’t normally go for… well, board games at all, let alone strategy-type ones, but I had a lot of fun. The variable degree to which cooperation was a helpful strategy between goalsets (only sometimes) was neat. Good work!
I’m glad your symptoms went away! Sudden onset seizures sound terrifying.
What made you think in the first place that the problem might be worms? Do you have any risk / exposure factors like the paper mentions?
Ah! I forget about a compass, honestly. He definitely came in with maps (and once he was out there for, like, over eight hours, he would have had cues from the sun.) A lot of the mystery / thing to explain is indeed “why despite being a reasonably competent hiker and map user, Ewasko would have traveled so far in the opposite direction from his car”; defs recommend Adam’s videos because he lays out what seems like a very plausible story there.
(EDIT: was rewatching Adam’s video, yes Bill absolutely had a compass and had probably used it not long before passing, they found one with his backpack near the top. Forgot that.)
Helicopters were used as part of the initial S&R efforts! Also tracking dogs. They just also didn’t find him. There’s a little about it in Tom’s stuff. I don’t know if Tom got the flight path / was able to map where it searched, I think there’s some more info buried in this FOIA’d doc about the initial search that Tom Mahood got ahold of.
(One thing I saw—can’t remember who mentioned this, if it was Mahood or Adam Marsland—is that the FOIA’D doc mentions S&R requesting a helicopter with thermal imaging equipment to come search too, but that doesn’t seem to have actually ever happened. Which is a shame, because at that point Ewasko was alive and presumably closer to/within the main search areas, so that could have actually found him.)
Oh whoa, thanks for commenting! I really appreciate your videos and your work on the search.
Check out Marsland’s post-coroner’s-report video for all the details, but tentatively it looks like Ewasko:
Hiked alone
Didn’t tell someone the exact trailhead/route he’d be hiking (later costing time, while he was still alive, while rescuers searched other parts of the park)
Didn’t have a GPS unit / PLB, just a regular (non-smart) cellphone (I don’t actually know to what degree a regular smartphone works as a dedicated GPS unit—like, when you’re at the edges of regular coverage, is it doing location stuff from phone + data coverage, or does it have a GPS chip? - but either way, he didn’t have a smartphone)
Had an unclear number of the ten essentials—it seems like a fair number? But (as someone in the youtube comments pointed out) if he had lit a fire, rescuers could have found him from the smoke, so either he didn’t think of that or he just didn’t have a firestarter.
Though I want to point out that doing all of these things—well, it’s not an insane amount of preparation, but it’s above bare minimum common sense / “anyone going out into the woods who thinks at all about safety is already doing this.” I’ve had training in wilderness/outdoor safety type stuff and I’ve definitely done day hikes while less prepared than Ewasko was.
Yeah, if anyone reading this liked this, I also really recommend Mahood’s search for the Death Valley Germans. It’s another kind of brilliant investigation.
Thanks for the link, I hadn’t read that before! Hah, so that guy, KarmaFrog, is the same guy as Adam who posted the videos I recommended. He makes fun of himself in the video about the U-haul thing, which he has now, er, moved away from as a hypothesis.
Wait, just checking, when you say you got these examples from ChatGPT, do you know enough to verify that these are true?
Also, what’s the deal with the linked sources? They don’t mention browser differences. Does Firefox not run this 2023 version of Javascript or something? I’m not a webdev expert.
Huh, clicked on a few of these. I haven’t experienced this level of problems—like I said, I have a backup browser, but I don’t need to break it out often (once or twice a week?) I mean, I believe these people, but I don’t think I’m having some kind of consistently janky web experience that makes it not worth using, so as far as I’m concerned people should still give it a go.
(I also haven’t run into problems using Claude on Firefox. Goes fine for me.)
Killer exploration into new avenues of digital mysticism. I have no idea how to assess it but I really enjoyed reading it.
Oh, TIL, fascinating, thanks! Wild.
Thanks for the extra info—this is good stuff! I figured the moon difference might be, like, some extra rocketry on top of ICBMs, but not necessarily a lot—but this makes sense that it’s in fact a pretty substantial difference.
Yeah, I think people signing onto the OST really helped bury the idea. (It did not stop the USSR from at one point from violating it in 1974-75 by attaching a 23mm gun to a space station. (For “self defense”. It was never used.) This probably isn’t that related to the larger nukes question, I just learned that recently and thought it was a fun fact.)
I appreciate your excellent comment.
“I want to indicate an alien microbe,” I thought. “I’ll just draw something with a distinctly microbial feature but otherwise so weird there’s no way it could exist.” Archaea have shown me what for once again.
Thank you for introducing me to this odd fellow.
I’m to understand that trichinopoly chain is structurally the same as knitting. See for instance this post and the diagrams included, which look a lot like knitting and describe it as circular knitting. Is that incorrect?
I hadn’t seen this post at all until a couple weeks ago. I’d never heard “exfohazard” or similar used.
Insisting on using a different word seems unnecessary. I see how it can be confusing. I also ran into people confused by this a few years ago, and proposed “cognitohazard” for the “thing that harms the knower” subgenre. That also has not caught on. XD The point is, I’m pro-disambiguating the terms, since they have different implications. But I still believe what I did then, that the original broader meaning of the word “infohazard” is occasionally used in the wild in e.g. biodefense, whereas the “thing that harms the knower” meaning is IME quite uncommon, so I think it seems fair to let Bostrom and the people using it in their work keep “infohazard”. Maybe the usage in AI is different.
Yeah, great point! So to be fair to them, they were not doing tests that hinged on it having a specific codon scheme or amino acid. Like, they weren’t sequencing the samples—it was 1969, they couldn’t do that. They were putting it in nutrient-rich media or plants or animals or etc and seeing what happened. So maybe in such a case the coloration change would have been detected in, I don’t know, the water of the shrimp tank. But as you say it could well have been too late at that point, if an organism grew in seawater.
Sure, Wikipedia, NASA’s About Astrobiology page indicates this is pretty uncontroversial at NASA, Hawking, Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, this website from a NSF-funded exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science, Scientific American… I can’t immediately find a “how do most biologists think that life came to be” survey but I bet if there is a good one, it would support this. In high school and undergrad, I was taught that abiogenesis was all but consensus, and that other things (divine intervention, panspermia, ??) were considered unlikely.
I respect your oatmeal respect and expertise but I think parts of your post are close-minded about certain things. “True roots” is nothing—if you’re thinking really old tradition, why is a different new world fruit (blueberries) in there at all? Even if you’re not restricting yourself to that, why should coconut in oatmeal be fine but not guava? That makes me think it’s just about what tastes good and not really about tradition.
(I haven’t tried guava in oatmeal either, but guavas are great, a really unique flavor, I recommend trying it if you ever get the chance!)
I think it’s odd and overgeneralizing to assert that people don’t like oatmeal because of rationalizations about their diet. In my experience, people often innately dislike widely-popular sensations or experiences for no particular reason—sensory sensitivities or just unusual preferences or etc.
On that front I also dislike the texture of normally-cooked oatmeal—I think I never especially liked it but then I did long trail crews as a teenager where oatmeal was the only breakfast for weeks straight, and I really haven’t wanted to eat it since—but overnight oats (oats mixed with liquid and sat in the fridge overnight, not cooked—you could warm it up til it’s hot but not to the boiling point) or those packets of instant oats mixed with boiling water (but not otherwise cooked/microwaved after that) both have a soft but much-less-glorpy consistency, so I’ll happily eat them for breakfast sometimes. Recommend them to anyone looking for an oatmeal experience but wishing the texture were a little different.