> Why should I take the moral high ground and listen to an argument I dislike if I'm not offered the same courtesy.
I mean not using the Dutch translation of the n-word as part of your username and thinking you're clever for hiding it in a plausibly deniable way would certainly help with me believing you're arguing in good faith.
UK police have had various types of Jaguar over the years; there was a period where the original Mark 2 Jag could outrun the police, so they had to buy some as well. The Mark 2 became ubiquitous in police procedural TV shows, usually driven by criminals, but also Inspector Morse.
In Italy the Carabinieri[0] used to have a Ferrari 250 GTE 2+2 in the '60s. The car is still around[1] and is legally allowed to go around with the original "police colors" even tho it's now owned by a private collector.
There's plenty more modern sport cars these days, in various countries.
the state of Austria usually buys its police cars from Porsche (the dealer not the carmaker) guess, that doesn't count. but Austria had Porsches (some of them 911) in the 60s
David Hockney has indirectly been incredibly important to me during a very difficult period of my life. Thanks to him I'm probably the only art student to ever win "Best Talk" at a conference for physics students.
Over half a lifetime ago now I tried studying physics. I failed miserably at it, and after a few years had to make the difficult decision of dropping out (it would take another 15 years before I would get the ADHD diagnosis that explained my struggles). This was nothing short of an identity crisis for me, on top of already struggling with my mental health for years, since becoming a scientist (or what childhood me thought a scientist was) had been a lifelong dream of mine.
Younger me decided to go all in on that identity crisis, I guess, since I switched to studying art. I was absolutely miserable during the first year, not knowing what I was going to do with my life and feeling like a complete loser. Oh, and my first serious relationship also ended on a very bad note around the same period. Those probably were the most depressing months of my life.
Around that time, friends from my former studies asked if I was going to join the International Congress of Physics Students again the next year. At first I declined, thinking it would just be a confrontation with my personal failures. I never even managed to get to the point of having a basic student project of my own to present a poster or talk about!
Then our art history teacher showed us a documentary about the Hockney-Falco thesis[0]. Which argued that the jump in realism shown by Renaissance painters was due to them secretly having access to optical aids like the camera obscura long before they officially were considered to be known to European cultures. A topic that bridged art and science.
And then, maybe as a response to being sick and tired of how I was feeling sorry for myself, I "decided" I that was going to hitchhike to ICPS 2008 in Krakow[1], meet another cute hitchhiker on the way to have a brief summer romance with, give the best talk of the conference using the HF thesis to illustrate differences between art and science, and then live happily ever after.
Absolutely ridiculous of course, but I needed a goal to keep me going. I'm actually quite introverted and used to be terribly scared of giving presentations, or anything that would draw attention to me really. Realistically I just hoped a few people would show up and enjoy the talk. But as a weird kind of self-help occupational therapy (and probably also out of fear) I went all-in on preparing the talk when not at school.
I tried to cram every sprawling thought on the topic into the talk, ending up with about 120 slides. I had 20 minutes for the presentation. Instead of doing the sensible thing of cutting down on content (did I mention I would get an ADHD diagnosis a 15 years later?) I ended up doing dry runs multiple times in the mirror with a clock, figuring out where it needed rewriting and reorganization slides to make the story flow better, and so on. Oh, and of course each slide had to have at least one joke too.
Hitchhiking from the Netherlands to ICSP 2008 ended up being a lot of fun, but no romance sadly. Then I ended up being really grateful to past me for obsessively preparing, because instead of a handful of friends showing moral support for the art weirdo like I expected, the auditorium was completely full. To my own surprise I wasn't scared because I had prepared my material so much. And the audience loved it, to the point of my talk being picked as best talk of the conference afterwards.
And as a cherry on top I met a cute Polish hitchhiker on the way home who also felt like having a brief summer fling :).
As for the "lived happily ever after" bit, obviously life still has its hardships, but yes, I'm generally happy with my life now. Because that personal success was the first time I started actually believing my life could get better, and it on average has had an upward trajectory ever since as a result.
So thanks, Hockney, you never knew me but in a way you probably saved my life, and it wasn't even with your art (love your collages though!)
Yeah, ages ago I read in a book about evolution that mammalian genes are actually simplified (or optimized, if you will) compared to amphibians because we don't have to accomodate as wide of a temperature range due to being warm-blooded and giving live birth.
I also recall seeing in a documentary that the temperature of crocodile eggs will determine if it's a male or female. Wikipedia seems to back that up:
I'm sure it does and you have my sympathies, but your situation would not be a reason to let Texas freakin' Instruments off the hook. They're not exactly "a small company", and I wouldn't be surprised if the $5k would have been cheaper than dealing with the response to this, so this just comes across as incompetence on their end.
Well, as far as I understand it's pretty much a given that it happened underwater or underground, to protect against cosmic radiation and other harsh conditions averse to lifeg so that's not really a "what if" unless you meant something else than I think you did.
Mind you, "soil" as we know it did not exist before life was there to create it. Geology as it exists on Earth does not exist on lifeless planets.
Water is also averse to emergence of life chemistry, despite the mature life depending on it, it hydrolyzes and damages the fragile structures. It is the same situation as with oxygen in principle.
There's a hypothesis that sign language evolved before vocal languages, and that the latter "took over" as the default because it's energetically much more efficient. There's lots of circumstantial evidence but of course it's impossible to ever conclusively prove. This feels like another data point in favor of it.
As stated, this is too vague to be much of a hypothesis. Animals, including humans, communicate multimodally, so gesture and vocalisation are not mutually exclusive evolutionary stages. To claim that one evolved before the other, you'd need to define some relevant markers, such as grammar, cultural transmission or some anatomical adaptation.
Well I wasn't about to spend hours looking up sources and details specifying this hypothesis. All I remember now is that it's one that's taken seriously.
Yeah, one of the cool things about sign languages that most people don't realize is that it's spatial, and that allows it to be more "parallel" compared to vocal languages because its "information channels" (e.g. two hands, facial expressions and "whole body language") can be placed side by side inside that space.
Of course spoken language also has multiple channels (e.g. tone and sound) but they still lack the spatial aspect.
Apparently, people who pick up sign language later in life commonly typically make what is known as a "split verb error", where they structure their signs sequentially like vocal languages when they should do those things simultaneously.
Now I wonder if mixed Italian-Dutch children have two different forms of communication by gestures. Would be interesting, especially since neither are true sign languages.
Well, this is probably a thing where humans are very diverse in their subjective experience.
I'd say this is definitely a noticeable thing with small children at family gatherings, birthday parties and the like. But I grew up in a household where both of my parents came from families where big family gatherings with even extended family was common, and I know not everyone has that kind of experience, so who knows how much of that is nature or nurture as well.
In my case however this has persisted well into adulthood: despite being a chronic insomniac who has a really hard time falling a sleep normally, at these types of social gatherings I often have to fight off falling asleep precisely because I feel comfortable and safe among friends and/or family (I wonder if that is in any way related to my ADHD).
I also get sleepy at gatherings. It's something really subtle and hard to defend against, but brutally simple.
It's the food and air quality. There's a lot of people in an enclosed environment eating too many carbs (or too much in general).
Timing is critical and I'm on a mission. Before the heavy food comes out, I grab a seltzer and a small salad. I convince some people to join me on the patio for a drink. It's important to arrive late enough that people are eager to break away, but well before any food ceremony.
Nah, food comas are noticeably different, at least for me. Plus I also had this drowsiness at student parties where I whs the only sober guy (because tee-totaller) while everyone got tipsy, and no food was involved either.
I mean not using the Dutch translation of the n-word as part of your username and thinking you're clever for hiding it in a plausibly deniable way would certainly help with me believing you're arguing in good faith.
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