So the next captcha will be a list of AI-generated statements and you have to decide which are bat shit crazy?

Fair, though I guess my interpretation was that void* is kind of like a black hole in that anything can fall into it in an unsettling way that loses information about what it was?

We need to watermark insert something into our watermark posts that watermark can be traced back to its origin watermark if the AI starts training watermark on it.

Several years ago, I went under the knife and the whole day from the point they put me under is a total blank. It’s unsettling because I am told I carried on conversations with the doctor, family members, etc. after initially coming to from anaesthesia, but it’s only starting the following morning when I woke up in a regular hospital bed that I could start remembering again.

I totally get where people are going with eliminating dictators and what not, but knowing myself as well as I do… yeah, you’d probably find me down at the Chinese buffet.

I remember ads claiming it was cutting edge nanotechnology! And I thought oh cool, you mean like there are tiny robots running around in the shampoo? But no, it was microplastics.

This happens naturally in the form of meteors streaking through the sky. Each one of those is adding a tiny amount of mass to the planet.

But you’ve got me wondering about something now. When a large asteroid hits the planet, it obviously adds its own mass, but it also kicks up a lot of debris into space. Some percentage of that will reach orbital escape velocity and never come back. But I honestly don’t know if there is a net mass increase or decrease after such an event? We’re generally concerned about other more pressing matters in such a scenario!

From what other posters are saying, it may be the other way around? That is, most mammals cannot see green, so it doesn’t matter from a camouflage perspective among mammals. Humans (and primates in general) are an outlier in this repect.

Bird of prey can, though, so there’s that.

Wow, that is fascinating!

Makes me wonder about the other direction, going into the near infrared as opposed to UV. I remember from a class in remote sensing that many plants are actually most reflective in that band (more so than in green, even). NIR air photos are often used by biologists to get an indication of the health of a forest. But I have no idea whether animals also reflect NIR? It may be that most animals cannot see in that band in the first place, so it would not offer any camouflage advantage.

Great read! That explains a lot.

I’ve been deep diving a bit myself and found this article that explains another thing that’s puzzled me over the years. Some birds have crazy vibrant coloration that almost glistens, like peacock feathers. Outside of the zoo, I’ve noticed it a bit in common grackles. They look black on first glance, but when you study them closely, they have this kind of purple sheen around their heads. Apparently, it’s still melanin at work here, but it’s structured in a very special way.

Right? I guess that’s what puzzles me the most about it. It must be really hard for mammals to become green since you would think it would confer an advantage in many environments you find them in.

I guess there are a lot of mammal species that kind of make themselves scarce during the broad daylight hours, so maybe green camouflage is less relevant if you’re only out between dusk and dawn?

Yeah fair. I had painted glass fish in my aquarium at one point and discovered the “paint” came from feeding them dyed food and eventually faded away when I gave them normal food back at home. They are naturally transparent for the most part which, frankly, I thought was cooler. I did have a gourami that was legit green though, as far as I could tell.

Ha!! You really had to go down the “rabbit hole” for that one I bet! Awesome.

Yeah, I’m a big believer in shade trees! The one in our front yard has grown tall enough to provide blessed relief from a blazing afternoon sun. The only problem is the dude next door, who’s heavy into solar, is worried it’ll block his panels. And I’m a believer in solar too, so I don’t know what to say. Maybe we can come to some sort of compromise…

The Internet needs to be capitalized.

That’s why we need passive daytime radiative cooling. In theory, it could completely eliminate the urban heat island, but it still seems to be mostly at the pilot project stage so far. I did read somewhere that you can DIY with some packaging tape (which somehow has the right properties?) over a reflective backing. Maybe I’ll experiment a bit this summer.

I don’t live in Scotland, but I can’t even imagine what it must’ve been like to have that close referendum followed by Brexit only a couple of years later.

What I’m wondering about right now though is Irish unification? That seems to be building up some serious momentum from everything I’ve been reading.

Compiler/interpreter: Can’t find variable farfignewton.

Earlier:

Me: Declare variables near, far

IDE: Oh! You mean farfignewton right? I found that in some completely unrelated library you didn’t write. Allow me complete that for you while you’re not paying attention.

The article seems focused on Arizona Mormons, and that’s a swing state.

You have to understand that religion was banned by the communist regime of the day. Admitting to it could get you locked up.

But my dad, as a tourist making this casual observation about flagrant rule-breaking going on in plain sight even as he spoke, broke the tension completely and made the locals admit there is a lot of rule-breaking going on everywhere.