People who have so much in assets that they can live (and support their family) with the interest they earn on those assets, and by a huge margin, not just comfortably retired people. Those are the people who get richer, at the expense of your kids. Inflationary housing expenses are a drop in the bucket when someone's assets are in the billions.
Creative expression is also about relationships with other people and connecting with an audience. Treating it like product optimization seems hollow and lonely. There's friction to asking another person to read and give feedback on something you wrote, but it's the kind of friction that helps you grow.
How do we know they're anomalous characteristics if it's literally the first one we've ever spotted? What is the normal shape of an interstellar comet core?
Stellar comets haven't been ejected from another solar system. We have vanishingly few examples of those, and we've not directly observed any up close.
"Flat as a pancake" is one of several theoretical possibilities from its light curve, not a known fact about the object.
"Highly unusual" in space tends to mean "there are a bunch, but we haven't seen them until now". In 1992, exoplanets were "highly unusual". Now they're everywhere.
Yes, and the exoplanets we found first were highly unusual and not at all what we expected to find, which triggered tons of new research to amend our models of planetary system formation and dynamics. I’m not even sure what you’re trying to argue here – we found an object that did not fit our model of what things should look like, which is very curious and calls for an explanation. That’s how science works. Doesn’t mean it’s aliens. But “oh well maybe it’s just how things are back where it’s from” does not satisfy anyone.
I’m very onboard with “it was an interesting object and we should learn more”.
I object to UFO cranks jumping to “it was a starship” conclusions like Avi Loeb wants to. Just as I would have when those weird first exoplanets showed up.
Did he conclude it was a starship or argue we shouldn't dismiss out of hand that an object like this has a non-zero chance of being an artifact of another civilization?
Why would we assume non-interstellar comets are always the same as interstellar comets? Conditions obviously are a little different when something is ejected from a system and then spends millions of years in interstellar space.
> Borisov had the same characteristics.
We have a sample size of three thus far. Making conclusions right now is like saying all extrasolar planets are large gas giants because the first three were.
We'd assume most interstellar objects are comets because that's which objects you find on the outskirts of a solar system and are the easiest to get kicked out. We'd assume they're mostly like our comets due to the Copernican principle. We shouldn't assume we're special.
> We'd assume they're mostly like our comets due to the Copernican principle.
We're still figuring out what our comets are like, let alone unusual ones spending a few million years in interstellar space. New types of comets(ish) bodies discovered in the 2000s:
We've spotted ~5k out of an estimated trillion. Each one we've sent a probe to has brought surprises. The Oort cloud remains theoretical at this time, and the first Kuiper belt object other than Pluto/Charon was found in 1992. It would be deeply silly to think we know everything about our local comets, let alone unusual ones from elsewhere.
I once took a group of young people foraging for mushrooms in the Willamette valley on a farm that had loads of these newts. I warned every body not to touch them.
After preparing dinner, one girl got very ill, as did I, while other people who ate the dinner were fine. I was so worried I'd mis-identified some mushrooms.
But turns out she had handled one of these newts and the bacteria had transferred to the mushrooms she picked. I contacted it from washing the mushrooms. I threw up several times that night.
In hindsight, had we not washed the mushrooms as thoroughly as we did, things could have gone much worse.
Eating wild mushrooms has got to have the worst cost/benefit ratio outside of wingsuiting or recreational bear wrestling. In exchange for hours of study and a significant risk of death you get fifty to a hundred calories of food. Probably made sense in the tenth century when the average person was one bad harvest away from starvation, but it seems harder to justify today.
Where I live mushrooms are by far the most abundant wild food. It's good exercise, very enjoyable "work", and they taste really really good with a huge variety of flavors.
Leafy greens also have very low calories per pound. We eat them for the nutrients not for the calories. Because of mushrooms and wild greens, I buy very little vegetables, all I need is relatively cheap (per calorie) foods to go with the wild stuff.
There is also risk of food poisoning with food from restaurants or the store.. not to mention the chronic poisoning of eating food grown with excessive pesticides etc.
For the most part the abundant edible mushrooms look very different from the dangerous ones. But yes you do need to know ID thoroughly if you go for certain species.
That said not everyone lives where edible mushrooms are abundant, I'm not trying to suggest everyone should do it.
Not even that much. A couple of cups of mushrooms -- a generous helping as a side dish -- has around 30 calories.
All the significant calories comes from the oil or butter they're cooked in.
I'm not sure it was ever about avoiding starvation, but rather just a different flavor to eat sometimes. When you're always eating the same local ingredients, food can get boring pretty quick. It's the same appeal of spices -- you got a new flavor!
Salt is more fundamental for the body than just flavoring. I'd hesitate even to call it a spice. That said, umami ingredients like mushrooms and seaweed are certainly used together with salt.
There's a long history of glutamate containing food and food products being used in place of salt across the world, before it was first chemically isolated.
Well you were replying to a comment about why we foraged for them before salt broski. Doesn't really make sense to bring up the price of something that wasn't isolated then.
I'm skeptical of any food that humans only started eating since the industrial revolution, including those that are derivatives of or isolated compounds of real food. Mostly the effects on our bodies are not well studied. I haven't specifically read studies on msg though.
I mean, foods like soy sauce and yogurt and sauerkraut predate industrialization, but are very processed. I wouldn't worry too much about MSG in particular, since it is also mostly made by fermentation:
> It's the same appeal of spices -- you got a new flavor!
That's not the appeal of spices. People don't stop using the spices they like in quest of newer, worse-tasting ones. By far the most common case when a person is eating spices is that there's nothing new about the flavor.
Could also be used to mask stale or spoiled foods that if cooked enough, wont kil you and still contains nutrition. Nothing goes to waste. Another could be preservation as is the case for salt.
Salt is much simpler than that. It's a vital nutrient and if you don't eat enough of it, you'll die. It's useful for preservation, sure, but you're not eating it because you couldn't find fresh food. You're eating it because it's salt.
Many spices, as well as actual oil extracted from actual snakes by actual healers, and mushrooms as well, gained reputations in antiquity as medicinal and/or beneficial to health in some way.
And this often fueled increased trade and increased cultivation volumes and increased prices and tariffs and wars and cruel laws. In antiquity.
And often, the actual medicinal benefits became overhyped, and crept from their scope, and each nation's crown jewel of a spice became a miracle cure-all, and cue the trade wars and sword-wielding knights defending their spice.
Basically the "Snake Oil Salesmen" of the Wild West were white hucksters who diluted the actual snake oil down so much, or didn't bother adding any in the first place, then sold the elixirs on Main Street between the saloon and the whorehouse. So the Native Americans were nonplussed that their shamanistic remedies had been subverted as a trope of quacks and hoaxers.
Most of all, these spices and mushrooms have been gradually enshittified, perhaps literally, and many of them are a shadow of their former selves, bred for mass-production. And Americans sit there and dust our burger and fries with gray sand that doesn't even taste like black pepper anymore. Not to mention the salt that's been refined until there's nothing but sodium in it.
Perhaps mushrooms are the least likely food to be enshittified or deliberately commercialized, except for about 4 types in the grocery stores. From what I've learned about mushroom foraging, it's never worth it; just go buy mushrooms in the store, I mean for crying out loud. The risk is too great, and aficionados can claim "easy identification" all they want, but "easy" is relative and not for you to judge, because there's a fine line between tasty and fatal.
Oh come on - Making cost benefit analysis of foraging and eating wild mushrooms into a matter of calories is wild.
The calorific value of a meal is one of the least important aspects - you might as well complain that the mushrooms don’t come in sufficiently varied colours to make it worthwhile.
It’s not about the calories. It’s about the experience - the taste, the texture, the satisfaction of knowing you did it yourself.
Yeah, when I read the comment about calories I thought "This is a prime example when engineers only think about numbers and completely miss the forest for the trees (err, mushrooms)"
Also, for many mushrooms, the risk of consuming a toxic variety is extremely low if you know what you're doing. People love to bring up examples of "But the head of the Mycological Society of XYZ died of misidentified mushrooms!!", but a while back I dug into those examples and found 0 evidence for any of them - they're just popular Internet old wives' tales that people love to regurgitate.
A high percentage of fatal poisonings in the US have been Southeast Asian immigrants because, in the button stage, the North American death cap looks nearly identical to the paddy straw mushroom they know from home.
Acccording to America's poisen center these are the numbers:
Calls to poisen control concerning mushrooms: 8,294
Of those calls, 4862 were of unknown origin, only like 3-400 are confirmed dangerous wild grown mushrooms, 2k+ are psylocibin. 3-400 is probably <1% of the amount of people who forage, so its a lot safer than driving a car I'm guessing.
To be honest, I will probably still pass. Mushrooms kinda freak me out on a biological level anyways. What is crazy to me is how people find certain things scary or risky but they'll literally strap themselves inside a metal box on wheels that has uses a controlled explosion produced with highly carcinogenic toxic chemicals, that has hundreds of parts that can fail, it can slam into the other contraption next you tear you in half, all so they don't have to ride a bike or walk for an extra twenty minutes..
I can't remember who said it originally, but it amuses me to no end that the only reason our society works as well as it does is a mutual agreement to follow some lines and not play bumper cars
Honestly it's not hours of study.
You identify the one mushroom that you're going foraging for, and then you need to know the ones that look like it so that you don't get those by mistake. It's pretty simple if you know what you're doing.
Ie: Chantrelles have a symbiotic relationship with Douglas Fir trees, so you're only going to find them around Douglas firs.
> Chantrelles have a symbiotic relationship with Douglas Fir trees, so you're only going to find them around Douglas firs
I'm not sure that's true, I know that we had Cantharellus cibarius ("golden chanterelle") growing up everywhere in the woods, but I don't think the Douglas fir even exists there, never heard that name before. The forest was mostly oak I think.
How many people in the US do you think actually forage wild plants and fungi?
The number of hospitalizations is somewhere around 10k a year. For ~1500 of those it's at least life threatening. ~100ish end up with organ failure or permanent neurological problems. ~10 of them die. That's every year.
That might be mildly dangerous compared to other hobbies, but if you isolate for actual practitioners of the hobby, suddenly those numbers look extremely dangerous.
Where are you getting your data? Is this a specific country/worldwide/what? If you're just talking about the US, a quick Google search shows your numbers are off by a few orders of magnitude. This article from the CDC estimated 100 hospitalizations for mushrooms in the US in 2016: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010a1.htm
Foraging for mushrooms is not dangerous if you know what you're doing and stick to easily identified mushrooms that aren't easily confused with poisonous varieties.
AAPCC annual reports, linked to from an actual mushroom foraging guide.
Also I said plants and mushrooms. Not specifically mushrooms. AAPCC doesn't track mushrooms separately and I would consider the CDC to not be the authority on poisoning -- their specialty is diseases.
Eating plants at random must be more dangerous than eating mushrooms. I have heard that there are far more poisonous plants than fungi, and greens have almost no calories.
Risk of death is a huge cost/downside. I've known several people poor enough to optimize all of their eating around cost per calorie. 30-50 calories is basically only worth your consideration if it's free at that point. If that came with a high risk of illness/death it's not even worth considering.
A lot of the cost per calorie is in preparation; if you can cook your own meals, you can reduce your cost per calorie signficantly. The problem is a lot of people don't have the time (or maybe will-power) to cook every meal; a few of my previous jobs made it very difficult to cook my own meals, so I ate fast-food alot, and gained a lot of weight.
When your boss starts pushing Return To Office, ask if the company has a worthwhile kitchen in the office; at least a burner and plenty of room in the refrigerator for ingredients; it should be feasible to cook breakfast and lunch, but also dinner, in case you need to work late.
"Starve now"? If you're talking about the US, get real.
Essentially nobody is starving in the US for lack of calories (unless it's a case of mental illness or something similar). In fact, in the US, usually the opposite is true. From the Wikipedia page on food insecurity in the US:
> Reliance on food banks has led to a rise in obesity and diabetes within the food insecure community. Many foods in food banks are highly processed and low in nutritional value leading to further health effects. One study showed 33% of American households visiting food pantries had diabetes.
Meh, there are a couple of mushrooms that are super easy to identify with no risk of confusing them with anaything dangerous (at least where I live). Stick to those and you're fine.
Also, they are super tasty ;)
I'm honestly amazed I didn't get tetrodotoxin poisoning when I was a kid. We used to play with these rough skinned newts all the time, they were everywhere, and nobody was especially diligent about washing their hands.
Same! I even kept a couple of them in a terrarium. And, my dad was a PhD in zoology, so it wasn't like I lacked access to expert advice. It was a "they have toxins on their skin, so... Eh, maybe wash your hands a bit", not "wash your hands or the whole family dies" level of concern.
Makes me wonder if a) these toxicity stories are exaggerated, b) it's really regionally specific, c) toxicity has radically increased in the past ~40 years since I was playing with newts, or d) we got dumb lucky.
I loved this article. I didn't know anything about the newt / snake interaction; I wonder if my dad did.
Silicon lids on glass containers are a great combo. I use Weck jars, wide-mouth for easier cleaning, in sizes 1L, 500mL, and 200mL, in my commercial kitchen. And stainless steel hotel pans and lids for everything else.
Consumer-grade stuff is a waste of time for several reasons, but in-particular the lack of standardized sizes. When I do catering and people ask about food storage I recommend those wide-mouth glass jars and 4-inch 1/9th and 6-inch 1/6th pans, and standardized baking sheets (1/2 and 1/4 sizes mostly) with re-usable lids.
I use wide-mouth canning jars for lots of things besides canning. They're tough, easy to clean, can handle hot and cold, and there's no plastic touching the food or beverage.
About the only negative is that they sweat a lot in hot weather if you keep cold drinks in them, but it'd probably be easy to make some kind of insulated caddy for them.
> something belonging to a sick person is fastened to the end of a throwing stick smeared in human or kangaroo fat. The stick is then stuck in the ground and a fire lit beneath it. Mulla-mullung chant the name of the sick person. Once the stick falls, the ritual is complete.
Just to be clear, these models can answer questions about relationships between people if you mean family relationships.
Answering questions about what you're describing sounds really interesting. What would a training set be like that describes a bunch of complex human relationships and then asks questions about them with objective answers?
Of course, it would be easy to put such questions together, and I'm sure the LLM would do fine with them - there's a massive amount of human text about human relationships.
One difference, as in all ml training, is interactivity. Looking at ape studies, knowing the relationships is partly diagnostic, but it's also about planning and competition. And that competitive/adaptive aspect is what is what looks like a real evolutionary driver. If you can understand, navigate, and manipulate relationships successfully, you get more mating opportunities. Doing /that/ well involves both reasoning and long term planning, both of which are apparent in chimps.
A good book on this topic is 'are we smart enough to understand how smart animals are' by Frans de Waal.
"Dry stack" is another term for that, a stone wall without mortar.
In my opinion, thinking of this as a grid is misguided. It's barely different than flex columns. I would want to be able to have some objects take up more width than one column, or not have clean columns at all. Like "space filling" and "mosaic".
