Random Thoughts XI: Listen to the Whispers

[Farm Boy]

Well, if God is the ant and the deer and the alpha and the omega, it's hardly worse than what he does to us. Best case scenario? Worms gonna eat you. So, why are we as we are? Are we being good stewards of our gifts? Seeing as ducks in totality are pretty clearly more important than every one of us in this thread put together. They'd almost certainly be more missed even by other great apes, as a measure.

 

[Ferocitus]

These are grim times, and the metaphors are getting darker...
View attachment 602264

And darker.

Thousand of flamingos die at Turkey's Lake Tuz amid drought

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-18/thousand-of-flamingos-dead-in-drought/100301628

 

[Ajidica]

On a happier note, I was trying to figure out how many tsp chopped mind "20 mint leaves" is, and I got a google ad for 20 lbs dried mint available for purchase on eBay.
Who buys cooking ingredients on ebay?

 

[Ferocitus]

This could impact the Republican Party and the Trump Cult negatively.

The Grauniad really needs to get a new spell-checker.

 

[amadeus]

On a happier note, I was trying to figure out how many tsp chopped mind "20 mint leaves" is, and I got a google ad for 20 lbs dried mint available for purchase on eBay.
Who buys cooking ingredients on ebay?

Why does it matter what condition the leaves are in?

Thought: Congress should have arguments more like the British parliament, complete with wigs. If elected, I will wear breeches, a wig, and a tricorner hat during the temperate months!

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I suppose I was basing my definition of genocide on themes I picked up in various sci-fi novels, such as Xenocide, one of the sequels to Ender's Game... and a story I was reading recently where there was a big debate in a futuristic society whether to attempt to exterminate a hive mind type alien civilization. The word genocide was used in that context even though this alien civilization was more like a bee/ant colony, with no real intelligence in the drones, and more like a collection of robot-like drones.

I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the future we look back to today and elevate the extinction events we've caused in terms of legal implication.. At this point I fully agree that genocide as we know it should not apply to ducks or tomatoes.

There's an old filksong I learned back in the '80s called "Beware of the Sentient Chili". The lyrics:


Beware of the Sentient Chili

by Chris Weber

Beware of the sentient Chili
that burbbles away on your stove
the peppers are silently plotting
with legumes, tomatos and cloves.
At night when you're comfortably sleeping
and lie unaware in your bed
the vegetables plan insurection
the lettice are seeking new heads.

It may start with slight indigestion
from underdone turnip cake crumbs.
Frustration in several world leaders
whose rice seems to stick to their gums.
In kitchens across every nation
the tinniest things will go wrong.
The plot of the sentient chili
strikes Moscow and Rome and Hong Kong.

The casserol, spinich and cheesecake
lend quite support to the scheme.
The nerves of a planet are streached then
while tempers start slowly to steam.
Still none see the grand machinations
now tilting world balance awry-
The stage set for final disaster.
The chili sits back with a sigh.

The one day the conflict is started
by generals whose lunches were odd.
The mushrooms rejoice as their brothers
stalk city to city like god.
When dust and all clamor are settled
there's not a soul left from the frey.
The sentient chili just chuckles
and happily simmers away.


Here's the YT version (I've heard much better renditions; this one is too slow and the flute is too loud, but at least you can get an idea of the melody):

Moral of the story: Don't be so sure you can trust your food. You never know what it's thinking.

 

[Takhisis]

Why does it matter what condition the leaves are in?

Thought: Congress should have arguments more like the British parliament, complete with wigs. If elected, I will wear breeches, a wig, and a tricorner hat during the temperate months!

You could do it the Sco'ish way and wear full Highland dress. Kilt (no underwear), tam-o-shanter, spats, sporran…

 

[amadeus]

Works for me! I’m part Scot!

 

[Takhisis]

The late deceased Duke of Edinburgh was Greek/German, but the actual difference in alleged traditional dress is only slight. So you could follow his example.

 

[amadeus]

Prince amadeus of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Hannover-Hesse-Bavaria-Moravia-CBE OBE GSCE DVD JPEG and conqueror of the British Empire in Africa and Uganda in Particular.

 

[Kyriakos]

Giannis wins the title. Happy for him

Congratulations to Milwaukee.

 

[H4run]

I meant to mock his Conor, but he ending up liking my post,, now I kind a feel bad for him, lol!

 

[amadeus]

I was reading about child psychology and cognitive development and one of the things was that little kids often aren’t aware that their thoughts/knowledge can be their own.

For example, if you fill a candy box with raisins in front of a small child, that child is going to assume the next person who comes in the room will also know there are raisins, not candy, inside the box.

Anyway, it just got me thinking about when I, as an adult, couldn’t put down in words what the heck I was trying to say and then would just end it with “ah, you know what I’m talking about.”

And the older I get, the more frequent this becomes; now as an adult, however, it becomes increasingly frustrating because I’m expecting people to know and understand things that I know. I’m not trying to toot my own horn—I barely understood a lot of my high school classes and got help in college in picking the courses that would fulfill the requirements while being the least taxing in the subjects I found the most difficult.

Getting back to my point, well, you know what I’m talking about!

 

[Farm Boy]

...and you seem relatively well understood!

 

[Arakhor]

Theory of mind is a pretty complicated topic, all told!

 

[amadeus]

Neighbor just came by and unlocked their door. This would not be unusual except for that they’d left their floor-to-ceiling window open.

It’s a secure-access building anyway so it’s not like a burglar’s going to come in, but still, what was the point of locking the door?

I lock my door any time I go out, and even when I’m in. Muscle memory!

 

[EgonSpengler]

Spotify put on an Au Pairs song - classic British post-punk if you're into that sort of thing - and while I was browsing articles about them, I stumbled into a website called, appropriately enough, Nostalgia Central, where they have a photo of the band and, oh Christ, one of them is wearing a tee-shirt from The Channel. *brain explodes*

I saw Ministry there, when they were touring for The Land of Rape and Honey. Fugazi. Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Sick of it All. Biohazard. Gang Green. I went there to see Sham 69, but their tour bus broke down on the way up from New York. I never did see Sham 69 play, so that was a bummer. According to Wikipedia, "The Channel had a legal capacity of 1,700, although management often oversold the venue for major acts." No kidding. I'm surprised there weren't fatalities at the Fugazi show, it was so packed.

I need one of those shirts. Probably $1,000 on eBay, or something.

 

[Kyriakos]

I was thinking a bit of the rather infamous (and usually dull) "monkeys with typewriters" case, where supposedly a vast number of monkeys could, given enough time, come up with an inferior to the actual classics work, with the common example used being a play by Shakespeare ( ). Most of the times the monkeys-with-typewriters argument is used to refer to AI or similar, but not always. The general argument is that if you produce an incredible number of sets, you may force a repetition of an existent set.
But that argument is only true if both the set and the tries to form the set have a specific number. For example (a very good example, with small numbers), if you have three people, and they all have to vote in an election, and there are only two parties, it is obvious that you will have two people who voted the same. For the analogous in the shakespeare-pithicines you would need to have a set upper bound of different books created by using English, as well as a bigger number of monkeys/attempts to produce them. If there were x such books as an upper bound, and no more than x could ever be written, then having x+1 monkeys/attempts would suffice to force a repeat of one of the books.
The problem is that the number of different books is not finite. While the number of words in each book can only be finite (otherwise it wouldn't have been finished), you could always have a "new" book formed out of the previous one by just adding a letter (or, at worst, a repeated phrase, as happens in Arabian Nights with the ant skirmish story). And while one could, realistically, expect that the number of such trick-works would be relatively small, there is then the issue of specific word sequence and sentence building in each book: Certainly, given enough (a vast number) of attempts, some monkeys or AI would end up producing the general idea of a specific barbaric work, and given vastly more attempts than that they'd move on to cover the general idea on a sentence-by-sentence basis as well. But by the time you'd get to reaching at letter-by-letter basis, you would need so incredible a number of monkeys/attempts that it cannot materialize.
This is unfortunate, because a first repetition spells out the collapse of the system's ability to come up with differences, and ultimately will signal a next phase. It is also why no machine will cut a lego bit in exactly the same (infinite) decimals of measure as with another bit; although even if it did, we would never know it.

 

[amadeus]

From Wikipedia:

In 2002, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes crested macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon, England for a month, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website.

Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages largely consisting of the letter 'S', the lead male began striking the keyboard with a stone, and other monkeys followed by soiling it.​

 

[Kyriakos]

Six monkeys isn't enough. For some first effects you'd need at least 6 trillion trillion monkeys. And consider forcing them to actually type ^_^