TheVat

I, for one, love a good yarn about wolves and sea snakes!

While I mostly agree on this, I would note that a mild exception often needs to be made with musical instruments. It does sometimes take a nudge from a parent to get across the concept that regular practice is vital in mastering an instrument and playing in an ensemble. Usually if the child has some affinity for the instrument, not much "force" is needed, but there is a small element of coercion - if you want to keep having lessons, then we need to have a regular practice time each day. My wife, a professional musician and music teacher, tries to have this learning be more carrots and less stick - e.g. mastering a piece of music they like, and having recitals. The child wants to do well in the recital, then they are motivated to practice. If that does not motivate them, then it is likely they wouldn't have the personality for longterm study of an instrument or ensemble playing. The only students she has recommended ending lessons to the parents were those who just didn't want to bother with practice. My point is that I've met people who told me, "I took piano for a few months, and I didn't practice much. Now I wish my parents had made me stick with it and enforced a regular practice." There are masses of studies showing that the disciplined approach music requires results in children who do better generally in school and later careers and overall life satisfaction.

Those kinds of facultative mutualism are fascinating - they often seem to have an improvised quality. I think some famous ecologist (Odum?) dubbed it "protocooperation," as in they're trying out various arrangements that are far from being obligatory. I've seen hunting cats try this sort of thing around here with mule deer - they try following them around to see if the deer activity will stir up potential small prey. Not mutualistic of course - the deer get nothing out of it.

Many of the WaPo refugees are landing on their feet and enriching the pages of other outlets. Marcus quit when her column critical of Bezos got spiked, then turned around and published it in The New Yorker. Sargent went to The New Republic. Petri joined The Atlantic where she continues to skewer all things MAGA. Marc Fisher (who helped WaPo win two Pulitzer Prizes) is doing magazine projects. It's heartening to see the good journalists finding work, though today's step in the Senate towards reducing funding of NPR/PBS is going to be scary for some of the buyout folk who landed over there. I plan to bolster my donations to both, with the money I'm saving cancelling my Post sub (plus a little extra and not just because Laura Barron-Lopez is cute).

More sad news about the Washington Post, once a great news organization which diligently exposed the truth without bias or fear of the powerful. After several of its finest writers have jumped ship in the past few months - Greg Sargent, Ruth Marcus, Alexandra Petri, et al - I see that its premier national columnist and political analyst has just announced he is leaving the Post. This is the last straw for me, and I will be cancelling my subscription shortly. And, NTS, I can no longer include The Post in any listing here of low bias outlets.

Yes it's hard to imagine an issue of avionics more critical than unwanted fuel cutoff. Boeing is not having a great decade. I wonder if jet design might have to go back to a mechanical linkage for control of fuel lines. That would take some doing! (I am relieved to learn that investigators are looking elsewhere than pilots turning off the fuel to both engines, flipping two separate switches, due to a misfire of "muscle memory." )

Question. Answered. Thoroughly. Ok, the difference between a RLR and GLR is that the latter is conditional, and this is a challenge to AI. And that does challenge the adequacy of the neurosymbolic system where If/Then rules are provided or extracted. The light is green, but the AI must be able to determine all relevant criteria for the "way being clear.". If there are no animals or people in crosswalks, then you may obey green and go. If the vehicle in front of you moves forward, then you may also do so. If the green light is solely for pedestrians, you cannot go. If a vehicle on the cross street is drifting into the intersection, you cannot obey the green until it corrects itself or is otherwise removed. If a sinkhole or large gap has appeared in the street, you cannot obey the green, and must await redirection by a traffic control officer. Etc. So it's a good point to make, that while humans can intuitively grasp a wide range of novel situations (I hear an approaching siren, I'd better wait) which all fall under "If the way is clear," the AI will struggle with novelty if it doesn't have that more general understanding of a compromised path.

Sorry, I wasn't quite clear what you meant by... ...and I don't know if this is an American not understanding what is meant by the green light rule as you use Brits use it, or what. It was my understanding that green simply means you can go, either as car or pedestrian, so I'm not sure in what sense the permission is disobeyed. I must sound quite obtuse but I am surely missing something about this example. In my experience, pretty much everyone resumes their forward progress when the light turns green. I mean, how does one "disobey" a green light? Just stand there for a bit, or just sit in your vehicle while everyone honks at you? OK, this must all be some subtle metaphor or something.

Yes, I have doubts that combining deep neural nets with symbolic IF-THEN rules is going to solve continuous learning and on-the-fly generalization in the RW. It still won't be able to spontaneously "see" RW relationships and extract rules by building an understanding. We conscious folk develop an understanding of why we should stop at a red light by means of seeing a larger order to things, e.g. what happens to the traffic situation, and us, when even one driver ignores the rule. (Or what happens when certain other minds observe us violate such a rule) We even learn the rule can be ignored when, say, the cross street is empty and our passenger has a dire medical emergency, or when it's three a.m. in rural Nebraska. AGI needs the heuristic path to what rules MEAN. While neurosymbolic AI could learn to deduce certain rules, it will not have a path to why the rules are out there AFAICT. But perhaps I'm underestimating its potential.

That's my impression, too. They understand the vectors of the paste better than what it does in the gut. It sounds a bit analogous to the impairment of intestinal villi in humans in conditions like Coeliac, Crohn's or Giardia, but far more rapidly devastating of course.

I saw a good article on neurosymbolic AI recently in The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/neurosymbolic-ai-is-the-answer-to-large-language-models-inability-to-stop-hallucinating-257752 (Excerpt) Neurosymbolic AI combines the predictive learning of neural networks with teaching the AI a series of formal rules that humans learn to be able to deliberate more reliably. These include logic rules, like “if a then b”, such as “if it’s raining then everything outside is normally wet”; mathematical rules, like “if a = b and b = c then a = c”; and the agreed upon meanings of things like words, diagrams and symbols. Some of these will be inputted directly into the AI system, while it will deduce others itself by analysing its training data and doing “knowledge extraction”. This should create an AI that will never hallucinate and will learn faster and smarter by organising its knowledge into clear, reusable parts. For example if the AI has a rule about things being wet outside when it rains, there’s no need for it to retain every example of the things that might be wet outside – the rule can be applied to any new object, even one it has never seen before. During model development, neurosymbolic AI also integrates learning and formal reasoning using a process known as the “neurosymbolic cycle”. This involves a partially trained AI extracting rules from its training data then instilling this consolidated knowledge back into the network before further training with data...

Borax probably blocks nutrient absorption. We had ants for a while in Oregon and we mixed borax with corn syrup, making a paste. It is solid enough that workers will take bits back to the colony. Larvae can eat solid or semisolid pastes and they turn some of it into a liquid which is then what the Queen eats. That's where the effectiveness really lies.

Mr President, I just saw this in the Atlantic... https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/07/usaid-emergency-food-incinerate-trump/683532/?gift=43H6YzEv1tnFbOn4MRsWYjThj3QsobGGgnD0vt4bXdk&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share Drop dead, you worthless scumbag. The way this sort of travesty keeps happening on your watch is evidence that my defecations are better qualified for public office than you. Sincerely, The Vat

Based on some prior work experience, I tried to point him towards some answers, because they are possibly in a country where police assistance may be of variable availability and quality. There are parts of the States, where I live, where one may find corruption and incompetence in some law enforcement districts, and matters of fraud may not be pursued by the police with the required diligence. You, John, are quite fortunate to live in the UK.

I got "Saskatoon taskbar with shreds immersive, native as a minstrel lozenge," but not sure my translator is accurate.

Still mystifying. If muscle memory kicks in, it usually (from my experience and others I've talked with) repeats an action done at the start of a routine. A common example is a motorist with the hand operated parking brake. Before driving, you release the PB. If muscle memory kicks in, you tend to repeat the releasing motion (as if you hadn't remembered already doing that). You don't reengage the brake. I would think turning on fuel lines would be similar - you would absently repeat the "run" motion and realize from kinesthetic feedback you'd already done so and administer a forehead slap. Not saying the muscle memory theory is wrong, just that it is a truly bizarre anomaly if that's what happened. Toggling up and down are distinct moves. Plus, these are two separate switches so one would have to make this bizarre error twice, wouldn't one? To use my earlier example, it's a bit like driving down the street in a car with two parking brakes and reëngaging them both.

Or how to tell a balloonist from a baseball pitcher - ask them to read the phrase "wind up."

IIRC, she went off the Craigslist relay system (which anonymizes addresses) and I then checked her email address at a website that monitored and located scams. Been a while, so I don't recall the details. Just that she wasn't too bright, and didn't use some sort of cloaked server like Proton Mail.

I really pity the people that are driven to take such wretched boiler room jobs, many must know how noxious their presence is on the web. We had a pet go missing a few years back and the Craigslist ad was answered by some woman claiming to be a neighbor. It became clear she was a scammer (e.g. asking for us to send money to pay for her outlay on food and cat toys, before she brought the cat over), and I was able to track her actual location to someplace in Africa and flag her CList relay. I closed our exchange of emails by asking her how she lived with herself, preying on the hopes of people who had lost beloved pets. I didn't want her to starve, but I wanted to make her conscience twinge. A bit OT, but I recently received an email titled Your Prostate is the size of a Lemon. Spammers seem to be able to garner some personal information (age, in this case) and then direct a torrent of scare ads (failing organs, in my demographic) your way. It's interesting that science fora OTOH seem to get a lot of spam tilted more towards a younger demog. Possibly many keywords on-site suggesting students and areas of study.

Paul Neil Milne Johnstone (1952–2004) was a real poet who lived in Redbridge, Essex. Johnstone had attended Brentwood School with Douglas Adams. There Johnstone edited a broadsheet, "the Artsphere Magazine," that included mock reviews by Adams as well as Johnstone's own poetry. His name was used by Adams as the author of the worst poetry in the universe in the original radio broadcast, and first edition of HGttG, though this was changed to Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings for all subsequent versions. Johnstone went on to achieve moderate prominence in the poetry world as an editor and festival organiser, including the 1977 Cambridge Poetry Festival. So here's a thread for bad poetry. Whether it's a lump of green putty in your armpit or dead swans in a stagnant pool rotting away, let your Muse take you someplace truly awful, repellent, rancid, festering, or even confectious. Or feel free to post quotes from the worst poetry you've encountered (with all due respect to copyright laws and the health and safety of SFN members and guests). To get the ball rolling, here's the peerless Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings to provide a little inspiration. ( her poetry is still considered to be the worst in the Galaxy, closely followed by that of the Azgoths of Kria and the Vogons, in that order.) The dead swans lay in the stagnant pool. They lay. They rotted. They turned Around occasionally. Bits of flesh dropped off them from Time to time...And sank into the pool's mire. They also smelt a great deal. I will also offer, from beyond the Hitchhiker universe, i.e. the so-called real world, a snippet of what is considered one of literature's worst poems, The Tay Bridge Disaster, by the infamous William McGonagall: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Tay_Bridge_Disaster Oh! Ill-fated bridge of the silv'ry Tay, I now must conclude my lay By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay, That your central girders would not have given way, At least many sensible men do say, Had they been supported on each side with buttresses At least many sensible men confesses, For the stronger we our houses do build, The less chance we have of being killed." Now, have at it, gruntbugglies!

I have generally found Axios to be fairly low-bias, though I see that media bias analytic groups like All Sides have generally rated them as left-leaning. https://www.allsides.com/news-source/axios

And now Turnip is backpedaling on agri and lodging laborers... https://www.axios.com/2025/07/11/trump-immigration-farmworkers-visas Under pressure from worried farmers and hotel owners, the Trump administration is launching a program to streamline issuing visas for temporary, migrant workers to try to make sure fruits get picked, meat is packed and lodgings are cleaned. Why it matters: President Trump's immigration crackdown has put his administration between a MAGA rock and a special-interest hard place. Farmers who rely on noncitizen workers — who make up as much as 40% of the agricultural labor market — are howling that Trump's mass deportation program is damaging the labor market, and could therefore threaten the food supply. But Trump's MAGA base wants to ratchet up deportations, saying the administration shouldn't allow employers to incentivize illegal immigration by granting "amnesty" to certain noncitizen workers. Zoom in: Trying to balance those competing interests, the Department of Labor has created the Office of Immigration Policy. It's designed to be a red-tape-cutting, one-stop shop to help employers get faster approval for temporary worker visas...

I didn't encounter a paywall (or realize the Times was Murdochian - yikes!). I also wondered about the school name. Sounds highly specialized. 😁

You're most welcome. As I was reading your exchange I began to hear small whimpering sounds and after some looking around realized they were coming from me. Though the Science Direct article provided some amelioration, there were periodic resumptions of the pitiful sounds when my eyes passed over phrases like "low damping and high nadir." Overall, I welcome any opportunity to expand my understanding of how grids deliver power to a home. (Once it's delivered to my 200 A load center I become more expert, having wired four houses so far, with no electrocutions to date)

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/how-the-cat-got-its-miaow-to-mimic-babies-and-manipulate-their-owners-6tmwgq36n Cats miaow only to humans and mimic newborn babies to grab our attention, according to one of Scotland’s foremost vets who says that we should listen to our pets better. Danielle Gunn-Moore, professor of feline medicine at the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies at Edinburgh University said that cats had learnt to manipulate human emotions. She said: “In the wild kittens will mew to their mum to get them to come back and rescue them. But they are not miaows. Cats have learnt over the millennia that if they make a noise not unlike a newborn baby it is a good way of getting attention whether we like it or not.”