USA, too—Spanish and French.

If we’d had a third language it probably would have been Chinese instead of German—the cultural influence of German was minimal in the part of California where I grew up.

I thought Homo sapiens and Denisovans were both descended from Homo erectus as well.

Are they talking about some late-surviving Homo erectus lineage that was contemporary with Denisovans and Homo sapiens?

Good point.

Is the publishing journal a better indication of low-quality research than the research institution that conducted the study (the Tokyo University of Science, in this case)?

Also, the specific combinations that had the strongest effect were capsaicin (chili peppers) plus either cineole (eucalyptus) or especially menthol (mint). (The latter two have similar pathways, while the capsaicin is distinct; the benefit comes from using both pathways together.)

Are there any culinary sources of eucalyptus (or cineole)?

Confusion is a notification of prediction failure.

RSS feeds seem like the obvious replacement—how is your vibe-coded solution better?

Your self is the private reservoir of knowledge and experience you draw on to interact with the world in a way that’s distinct from anyone else (and that couldn’t be predicted without access to that internal knowledge).

Did he try offering them FIFA Peace Prizes?

Nah, they’ll just add a “for entertainment purposes only” disclaimer to the government itself.

I can’t see how Lamarck’s theories can be seen as aligned with more “dynamic” theories like the extended evolutionary synthesis. The idea that an organism’s evolutionary potential is completely embodied by its current traits (even including epigenetically-transmitted traits like niche construction) renders it purely reactive: inert clay whose every change is dictated by the external pressures of natural selection.

A separately-transmitted genome with some components hidden from selection is the only way for organisms to evolve dynamic strategies for reacting to selection in ways not completely determined by their expressed traits.

All cardinalities equal to or greater than that of the natural numbers.

I think machines have replaced the role of the chorus in classical Greek tragedies. Everyone knows they’re not supposed to represent individual people—they’re just the personification of social expectations and unconscious norms.

Or 5/9 of the Supreme Court.

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The lion-and-sun flag is the flag of the old Safavid Empire.

If you want to use a historical flag, a more appropriate one might be the pre-Islamic Sassanid Standard of Kaveh—the flag of the legendary blacksmith who overthrew the tyrant Zahhak. (But that flag has also been used by Iranians protesting the current regime, which may not be the overtone you’re intending.)

I will avoid saying why I’m planning on doing it now only because it will color people’s interpretation of why I’m doing it.

Flags are symbolic—they exist to communicate, and the only criterion to judge their appropriateness is whether they communicate the intended message to the intended audience.

Without knowing your intended message, it’s impossible to say whether or not you should use one in a given context.

Institutions aren’t the sum of their parts—their behavior is dependent on human participation, but is largely independent of the values or goals of the participating humans.

Unless you’ve identified a specific weakness and have a plan to exploit it before going in, your participation will probably benefit it more than any opportunistic harms you can do to it while participating.

Nationalism—the idea that there ought to be (or ever was) a 1:1 correspondence between countries, cultures, and ancestry—is a 19th-century invention unsupported by history, anthropology, or genetics. Ancestry tests that categorize results by country are obfuscating real data to meet a demand for pop pseudoscience.

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