How is mistletoe herbaceous? (Edit—we were taught it’s a shrub.)
Mary Chernyshenko
Karma: 483
So this is hearsay, but a zoologist friend of mine has a zoologist friend of hers :) and that person has spent a while observing cows. She says cows are “smart” but kind of live in a different timescale than we do, a “longer” one. I have no idea what this means for any particular cow, yet what I find interesting is the notion of different timescales and how it affects ethology research.
OTOH, I have geese, and I do wonder about that Hans thing. Geese are 1) super fun, 2) variable in aggression, maternal instinct strength, shyness etc. Sure they can’t communicate many things, but.
They do expect me to behave predictably, to cooperate or to interfere. And I view this mutual expectation as a solid sign of smartness. For example, when I stand in their way, they would politely wait for me to pass, making it clear what they intend to do. They know they shouldn’t get into the vegetable garden, so they do not do it when they could be seen. One goose tugs open the little door to their house to get back on her eggs when she thinks she has us fooled. (Unfortunately, we have to shoo her away from them to get her to eat and drink. But it’s alright now, she became Mother Goose to this year’s crop and does go out to the pasture. We can mostly leave the little ones under her supervision.) My husband fixed some solar-powered streetlights on trees, to play football with the kid in the evening. The lights are triggered by movement. So now the birds take advantage of them. If we don’t lock them in their enclosure, they steal out to enjoy their nighttime swims and grazes (we call it “geese are clubbing again”.)
And yes, I am reading things into things, I do know that)
About the difference of “cars passing” and “birds chirping”, I think there are two axes to it: translatability and variability.
I expect translatability from children (lots, even as background sound), cars (less) and birds (some, depending on the bird). It’s something about ease of sorting the auditory information. (And in the context of a mini-map nim described, it would be cool to map out the physical limits of the heard area.)
But noise variability is another matter. When we talk about silence, what matters more—the intensity of sound or it’s spectral parameters? There’s at least one classification of noise (for example, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise ). I can’t hear the difference between, say, white and pink noise, and I’m like 90% sure they have indistinguishable effects on health and cognition, within “not loud doses”). But at least it’s some quantitative way to describe it.
(crap, I accidentally read “Stop acting like this isn’t a monster scandal b/c it is!” as”Stop acting like this is a monster scandal b/c it is!” and thought “this is like the best line ever”)
Seems like this would require very skilful maneuvering. [For me] it is a pleasure to try to build on the other’s thought, and deliberately “braking” is uncomfortable. I feel slow and sidelined, so I begin to ask questions which don’t aim at the core of the problem but glance off of it, so to speak. Then, hopefully, I stop talking.
And I don’t hate you!
(And—thanks.)
None articulated. Imagine my surprise :)
(A relative of mine is a psychologist, but not, in my opinion, a grown-up person. They discuss their clients at home. I found, and find this excruciating. To see how this had affected my expectations of a totally different person was eye-opening.)
...still, I think now that people should tell such things to people, if they mean them.
...but not always, unfortunately.
The best line here is “I don’t hate you”.
Seriously, it’s awesome and people should tell it to each other much more easily.
(My therapist said he doesn’t hate me. It was the single most liberating thing I’ve heard in a while.)
An example. When my kid was in his second year of primary school (that’s for 7-8 y.o. here in Ukraine), they played a game: kids were running in circles around chairs, and when they heard a whistle they had to sit down. But they were one chair short, and each time one kid and one chair were sent away. After three rounds my son started to get the general idea, and when they started running he went to the pile of discarded chairs and got himself one because whatever. (They disqualified him, and I stood there grinning like an idiot because heck yeah.)
But I also thought about how I would explain to him the game as a game, quite separate from everything else.
I feel like the easiest way to begin is by noticing someone’s faux pa. “We don’t do it here” means “we here” have collectively agreed on something else, but one can assume a role to develop some attitude to the agreed-upon thing. Be a lord and view it as yours to govern; be a word and build it through a multitude of connections; be a crook and parasitize on it; be a cook and enrich it; be a trader and “just deal with it” etc.
The trick is to remember what role it was, why you chose it, and what this says about your environment.
#1. It’s not the money, it’s the time which goes by and leaves the “you” forever alone on the roadside. #2. Having children is not aimed to support any ideology besides having children.
But what if A works with B and sees that B didn’t go all the way they could to solve a problem? It happens all the time. CIE doesn’t force A to peck B’s brains out for acting badly; A is under no obligation to hand out punishment—at least if they do work together.
That question “What three strategies for self-control could you use if you’d like to spend more of your work time doing “deep work”?” could perhaps be framed a bit differently. I personally am distracted not just but the things I want to do instead. I find myself distracted by so many loose ends, half-planned stuff, the current Apocalypse etc.
We Ukrainians have an anecdote which I think might be somewhat relevant here.
“Dad, they said on TV that vodka would cost more! Does that mean that you’re going to cut your drinking?” “No, honey, it means you’re going to cut your eating.”
(please provide a brief summary.)
...I just keep hearing “paa” even when I turn my phone away and not look at the video at all.
Sounds kinda utopian even in a not-the-least-convenient-world.
This is a thing I’ve heard unofficially from a guy in the industry, but I’m not sure how big of a problem it basically is. I mean, I think it’s a big deal, but I would not care to quantify it.
In Ukraine, we have a separate branch of research institutions dedicated to agriculture, forestry, fishery etc. I mean, we’ve got universities where there’s some science being done; the Academy, where most of it happens; and several “applied” branches like the above-mentioned Academy of Agrarian Sciences. The “applied” people are generally not well-integrated into the whole community, which is a problem in itself. One day I took part in an agrarian conference (I was looking for possible collaborations), and this guy showed me a sample of wheat they were working on. He said they have to keep producing new varieties, ever better varieties. Which means in practice that they don’t actually go all out to breed superwheat, they just keep making it incrementally super.
And I just hate this—local culture? Official requirements? I mean, if only they were actually acknowledged as researchers by the overall community (heck, if they were acknowledged as researchers by their own authorities). People would be working, ridiculous expectations would be laughed at, things would be moving along!
Because when they say Lysenko had left a legacy, this is what it looks like.
That common-ancestors-being-totally-different thing is wonderful. But really, wood is just wood, it’s not even “the” “interesting” feature compared to, say, the placement of the next-season(s) buds (which is an instrumental thing in itself, but at least a higher-order instrumental thing.)
I’d love to see an ELI5 explanation of high the MADS-box genes coordinate about making wood in an Arabidopsis plant, that has to be some serious challenge for them.