Today I Learned #4: Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

[Comrade Ceasefire]

Why not. After all (to quote Borges), the fundamental property of the world is its complexity. Writing isn't even the world, since there everything has to be a symbol already so as to exist ^^

I see (sorry, couldn't resist) your Borges, and raise you Wittgenstein's Language Game.

The symbol might exist in the author's world, but they cannot know that it's the same symbol the reader will receive or how they will interpret it.

It's difficult enough in speech. When the author and reader are separated by culture, as well as time, the possibility of misalignment can be immense.

At least in speech we have the (going out on a limb here) 'universal' utterance "Uh?", meaning I didn't quite get that, could you repeat it, possibly in another way. No such possibility exists in written communication, particularly poetry and literature.

Barthes and Foucault are out of the game. Chomsky passes.
Kyriakos?

 

[Kyriakos]

I see (sorry, couldn't resist) your Borges, and raise you Wittgenstein's Language Game.

The symbol might exist in the author's world, but they cannot know that it's the same symbol the reader will receive or how they will interpret it.

It's difficult enough in speech. When the author and reader are separated by culture, as well as time, the possibility of misalignment can be immense.

At least in speech we have the (going out on a limb here) 'universal' utterance "Uh?", meaning I didn't quite get that, could you repeat it, possibly in another way. No such possibility exists in written communication, particularly poetry and literature.

Barthes and Foucault are out of the game. Chomsky passes.
Kyriakos?

You can't know that, certainly - which would produce (even honestly meant, not in jest) interpretations like your nice one about deciphering king Alexander the monkey-bitten ^^
Of course as you know it happens literally every time. For example, here, although I have a general sense of the type/way in which we carry this discussion (an elegant joke), it doesn't mean I have information about how its elements or the type itself is experienced in your mind. The references to other groups of symbols (including authors named) suffer from that too. Imagine that re Wittgenstein (other than having read his TLP book and being vaguely aware of Bertrand Russel's view of it, and also a quip by Godel), my personal most invested memory is that someone pretending to be him was on the cover of a 1999 british computer game magazine, where they were making a very poor joke about "Return to Castle Wolfenstein Wittgenstein".
Such tints and taints build up to larger things, particularly allowed to when the discussion has no real focus

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

You can't know that, certainly - which would produce (even honestly meant, not in jest) interpretations like your nice one about deciphering king Alexander the monkey-bitten ^^
Of course as you know it happens literally every time. For example, here, although I have a general sense of the type/way in which we carry this discussion (an elegant joke), it doesn't mean I have information about how its elements or the type itself is experienced in your mind. The references to other groups of symbols (including authors named) suffer from that too. Imagine that re Wittgenstein (other than having read his TLP book and being vaguely aware of Bertrand Russel's view of it, and also a quip by Godel), my personal most invested memory is that someone pretending to be him was on the cover of a 1999 british computer game magazine, where they were making a very poor joke about "Return to Castle Wolfenstein Wittgenstein".
Such tints and taints build up to larger things, particularly allowed to when the discussion has no real focus

I found his Blue and Brown books completely unreadable. (Bertie's comment seemed quite reasonable about his later work.)
He was important when Kit was studying linguistics back around 1985 and we've found his notion of the "Language Game" useful in explaining some concepts to others. I'm sure there are many far better expositions now, 40 years later, but some things you learn stick in memory like small compact vignettes.

The same with Barthes, Foucault and Levi-Strauss. They were important way back then and I still like some of their ideas - Einstein's Brain is a very short chapter by Barthes I enjoyed a lot from Mythologies.
Foucault's "archeology of ideas" in Madness and Civilisation and Discipline and Punish were fascinating, but more for the historical content than their philosophical ideas and importance.
I'm not saying that I agree or disagree with the entire opus of each of them, or that they are even relevant now but they were, not surprisingly, useful structures on which to hang your own ideas.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

About the Marsh Arabs of Iraq

https://twitter.com/x/status/1770187069047865588

 

[Birdjaguar]

^^^ IIRC they are mostly gone as are the marshes.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

Sperm whales drop 'bubble of poo' off WA to prevent orca attack in rarely recorded encounter
Sperm whales off Western Australia's southern coast have successfully defended themselves from an attack by a pod of orca by defecating at will, creating a "cloud of diarrhoea".

The rare defence mechanism thwarted the likely fatal attack at the Bremer Canyon — a marine life hotspot about 50 kilometres off the coast between Albany and Hopetoun — on Tuesday.

Sperm whales drop 'bubble of poo' off WA to prevent orca attack in rarely recorded encounter

Sperm whales off Western Australia's southern coast have successfully defended themselves to an attack from a pod of orca by defecating at will, creating a "cloud of diarrhoea".

www.abc.net.au

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

More poo news from Australia, Rupert Murdoch's birthplace.

Newly discovered Australian beetle almost mistaken for bird poo​

What's red, black, and hairy all over? Yo mo... A new species of bug discovered in Australia, dubbed by some as a "punk beetle" for its shaggy white locks.
A Queensland researcher spotted the fluffy specimen by chance while camping and initially mistook it for bird poo.

"It's very unique. There are not many insects out there that have that trait," James Tweed told the BBC.

The national science agency CSIRO has since confirmed it's an entirely new family of longhorn beetle.

When Mr Tweed first spotted a tiny white object on a leaf in the Gold Coast hinterland in December 2021, he didn't think much of it.

But after the entomologist did a double take, he realised it was in fact an insect unlike any he'd seen before.

"It's about one centimetre long... and covered in long, fluffy white hairs," he said.

"A lot of the hairs stand basically straight upright, and so it gives it a bit of a mohawk type look."

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

^^^ IIRC they are mostly gone as are the marshes.

Yes, Saddam drained the marshes. The marshes have come back, but the Marsh Arabs not so much.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

Danger Noodle News from Down Under (TL;DR edition)
Don't try to emulate professionals on social media for the sake of "likes".
"If you don't know what it is, you've got a 50-50 chance. You might get bitten, or you might not."

"The obvious cost of having venomous snakes like brown snakes around is that they can bite you and you can die."

"We did some field work where we had 100 snakes per square kilometre in farmland. That's a hell of a lot of brown snakes."

"If you're just killing mice on the surface, you're probably getting the adult males that are wandering around looking for girlfriends and so on."
"But a brown snake can go almost anywhere a mouse can go, and so they're getting rid of the females and the young ones and so on as well."

"The old farmers, in particular, were always taught to kill snakes and they taught their kids to kill a snake if they saw one.
"A lot of people get bitten when they are trying to kill snakes."

"Any product that you buy — a snake repeller spray or those vibrating, solar snake repellers — none of that sort of stuff works."

"I'm not a snake hater... but I don't like not knowing where the venomous ones are."

"As long as you keep your eyes out they're not a great problem."

Why farmers are being urged to make friends with venomous visitors

Usually snakes are unwelcome visitors on farms, but research suggests the benefits of their presence on agricultural land far outweighs the potential costs to farmers and graziers.

www.abc.net.au

and some other ABC pages.

 

[Kyriakos]

Danger Noodle News from Down Under (TL;DR edition)
Don't try to emulate professionals on social media for the sake of "likes".
"If you don't know what it is, you've got a 50-50 chance. You might get bitten, or you might not."

"The obvious cost of having venomous snakes like brown snakes around is that they can bite you and you can die.

"We did some field work where we had 100 snakes per square kilometre in farmland. That's a hell of a lot of brown snakes."

"If you're just killing mice on the surface, you're probably getting the adult males that are wandering around looking for girlfriends and so on."
"But a brown snake can go almost anywhere a mouse can go, and so they're getting rid of the females and the young ones and so on as well."

"The old farmers, in particular, were always taught to kill snakes and they taught their kids to kill a snake if they saw one.
"A lot of people get bitten when they are trying to kill snakes."

"Any product that you buy — a snake repeller spray or those vibrating, solar snake repellers — none of that sort of stuff works."

"I'm not a snake hater... but I don't like not knowing where the venomous ones are."

"As long as you keep your eyes out they're not a great problem."

Why farmers are being urged to make friends with venomous visitors

Usually snakes are unwelcome visitors on farms, but research suggests the benefits of their presence on agricultural land far outweighs the potential costs to farmers and graziers.

www.abc.net.au

and some other ABC pages.

Maybe they could have asked Aesop, about the Farmer and the Snake never being able to be friends

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

Maybe they could have asked Aesop, about the Farmer and the Snake never being able to be friends

Stop saying that sort of thing!
You just made me start singing "Ooooohhhh klahoma!"

 

[Kyriakos]

Hey, the snake remembers the time the farmer tried to kill it, much like the farmer remembers his son being bitten and killed.
The rest is politics

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

Hey, the snake remembers the time the farmer tried to kill it, much like the farmer remembers his son being bitten and killed.
The rest is politics

Here's something for you to "remember".

 

[Kyriakos]

Sneks aren't fun. I still remember my only encounter with one, when I was 10

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

That there are +1000 varieties of banana

There are more than 1,000 varieties of banana, and we eat one of them. Here’s why that’s absurd | Dan Saladino

The lack of diversity could mean the fruit’s extinction. It offers a stark warning of what could happen to other key foods, says food journalist Dan Saladino

www.theguardian.com

Most people don’t question why every banana they’ve ever eaten looks and tastes pretty much the same. Most of us will never try a blue java from Indonesia with its soft, unctuous texture and flavour of vanilla ice-cream, or the Chinese banana that is so aromatic it’s been given the name go san heong, meaning “you can smell it from the next mountain”. The demand for low-cost, high-yielding varieties has resulted in vast monocultures of just one type of globally traded banana, and this is true of many other crops as well. Homogeneity in the food system is a risky strategy, because it reduces our ability to adapt in a rapidly changing world.

Unlike wild bananas, which grow from seed, every single Cavendish is a clone, the offspring of a slice of the plant’s suckers growing below ground. This means it has no way of evolving, so it can’t adapt to new threats that arise in the environment. Panama disease, also known as fusarium wilt, is whipping through monocultures of Cavendish bananas in Asia, Australia, Africa and, most recently, in Latin America and the Caribbean, the source of 80% of the world’s traded bananas. Just a few spores carried on a spade or even on clothing is all it takes to contaminate a plantation, and growing the Cavendish on that land is no longer an option.

 

[EgonSpengler]

That there are +1000 varieties of banana

There are more than 1,000 varieties of banana, and we eat one of them. Here’s why that’s absurd | Dan Saladino

The lack of diversity could mean the fruit’s extinction. It offers a stark warning of what could happen to other key foods, says food journalist Dan Saladino

www.theguardian.com

And, in an example of "time is a flat circle", "all of this has happened before, and it will happen again", the modern Cavendish banana has been the staple banana for only 70-80 years. Before that, the Gros Michel banana was popular. It was nearly wiped out by a fungal infection called "Panama disease", from which we get the jaunty tune, "Yes, We Have No Bananas"(1923). Well, no Gros Michel bananas, anyway.

 

[Takhisis]

That there are +1000 varieties of banana

There's over 3000 varieties of potato, too.

And, in an example of "time is a flat circle", "all of this has happened before, and it will happen again", the modern Cavendish banana has been the staple banana for only 70-80 years. Before that, the Gros Michel banana was popular. It was nearly wiped out by a fungal infection called "Panama disease", from which we get the jaunty tune, "Yes, We Have No Bananas"(1923). Well, no Gros Michel bananas, anyway.

In the 2000s-2010s there was a fungus spreading that threatened to destroy Cavendish banana plantations simply because banana varieties are kept by making cuttings off existing plants, thus having no variation and essentially cloning one original plant. Since the fungus is proven to be capable of infecting one Cavendish tree then it can infect any tree descended from that same variety.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

As one moves through the stages of Boomerhood on the way to Enlightenment, TILs start to fit together into a single, Buddhist-like jigsaw puzzle of the world and all its complexity.

The only advice my grandfather ever gave me that made sense was: "You can't drink it all. They just keep making more."
And so, after doing some back of the envelope calculations, I gave up alcohol about 40 years ago.

My other life-changing lesson at university came from experiment and experience, viz. Oreos are not only the world's worst biscuit (US: "cookie"), but they are useless.

If you bite the ends off a Tim Tam (the Emperor and Swiss army knife of biscuits), you can use them like a chocolate straw to suck vodka or Benedictine (my old friend, bless its pointed little head) out of a bowl.
Can you do that with Oreos? Elegantly?

After seeking advice from my wife, a lawyer at the time, I surmised that the difference in popularity between Oreos and Tim Tams must be connected to the statute of limitations on fraud in our respective bastions of democracy. In Australia there is no limitation. But with no internet to enlighten me I was lost; I needed one more piece of information to finish my puzzle.

Hallelujah!

TIL that the basic statute of limitations for fraud in California is three years, and four for felony fraud! The clock doesn't start clicking until the victim realizes that fraud has been perpetrated on them.

I thought I'd found the final piece of the jigsaw I was missing. But I forgot one important fact.
The USA is not a Oneness.

I hope that there is somebody here who can enlighten me regarding the variations in limitations across the other 49 states of that fractured, seemingly deluded, and allegedly fraud-prone republic.

Om, nom, nom.

 

[Gori the Grey]

If you bite the ends off a Tim Tam (the Emperor and Swiss army knife of biscuits), you can use them like a chocolate straw to suck vodka or Benedictine (my old friend, bless its pointed little head) out of a bowl.
Can you do that with Oreos? Elegantly?

That Oreos prevent one from performing (or even attempting) such a thing might in some circles be counted as a mark in their favor.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

That Oreos prevent one from performing (or even attempting) such a thing might in some circles be counted as a mark in their favor.

I'm indebted to my learned colleague.
It was remiss of me not to include that I was born after Prohibition ended in the US.