I haven't read deepness in the sky but it's interesting how wrong alot of scifi got this. Cameras are always considerably bigger than grains of sand
Well, Deepness is set a few thousand years in the future, so we've got some time to work on it.
Readit Newscmpb commented on A “meta-optics” camera that is the size of a grain of salt cacm.acm.org/news/a-camer... · Posted by u/rbanffy
cmpb commented on Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance phys.org/news/2024-10-sci... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
>Probably not quickly enough. Ecosystems can adapt if given enough time, but the recent rise in ocean temperatures has happened very quickly by evolutionary standards.
Exactly, which I think is always the key point at issue that needs to be raised any time someone says "well earth has been this hot before." Never at this velocity, at least not without extinction events.
Yes, and in fact the extinction event associated with this high-velocity change is termed the "Holocene Extinction" [1]
cmpb commented on Show HN: PRQL in PostgreSQL github.com/kaspermarstal/... · Posted by u/kaspermarstal
> How long would it take you to write the SQL for that?
I don't want to appear rude, but unless I'm missing something, this is a pretty simple SQL query, of the kind anyone with mimimal SQL experience could write off the top of their head in seconds.
I like the idea of PRQL, but I think a better example is needed to sell it.
This "find the latest row for each <column>" query is kind of a poster-child for seemingly-simple but actually difficult to get right/performant sql.
E.g. see: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1313120/retrieving-the-l...
I'm confused to why there is also a french name. I get that it was french at one point but it was 200 years ago, and afaik very little people in the area still speak french
I'm from the area, so I feel I might be qualified to give you an answer. The short story is that some people here do still speak dialects of French [1]. The number of native speakers is rapidly declining (and will soon diminish completely), but many residents of Louisiana have grandparents or other family members who did grow up speaking it exclusively (or more commonly now, grew up speaking it with their exclusively-French-speaking parents/grandparents).
There are probably several reasons that it has held on for so long here, but predominantly it's because of multiple waves of influx of French-speakers (from when Louisiana was owned by the French, then from people of the Acadia region of Canada who were forced out of their region and migrated here in the mid-18th century) combined with persistent poverty resulting in poor education and low travel into and out of Louisiana (so not a lot of mixing with the rest of the US).
Strange seeing not just my state, but my hometown, rising on HN. Sad, too.
Related: For those interested in point-and-click / text-based games, check out the game NORCO, which is about the city Norco (named for the refinery that graces its skyline), a suburb of New Orleans. It's actually an extremely accurate representation of the socioeconomics of the area (which is painful to admit), and has some truly gorgeous pixel art.
Obviously, we should try to figure it out and learn from our mistakes, increase security, etc., but what accountability can we really expect from knowing that the pandemic started due to a lab leak? Accountability is almost meaningless compared to the scale of the total global loss.
I'm reminded of a line from an episode of Star Trek TNG where a very powerful alien destroys an entire race by thinking them out of existence in a momentary lapse of judgement, and Picard simply says "We're not qualified to be your judges -- we have no law to fit your crime."
cmpb commented on A weed is swallowing the Sonoran Desert hcn.org/articles/south-no... · Posted by u/bikenaga
>We removed 1.5 million plants at 21 events in seven state parks this year.
I have been involved in Ardisia and Tallow removal efforts here in the US south. When the infestation is this bad, you're not going to solve it with mechanical methods, no matter how hard you try and how many people you have doing it. Chemicals can definitely help, but they often have unexpected detrimental side effects to other native plants and animals (though sometimes they have unexpected beneficial effects on other native plants - I've seen rare prairie natives pop up in Louisiana after Triclopyr killed off overcrowded baccaris under power lines).
I wonder, could we develop a "gene drive" for plants?
> just stop mowing
... and add a tick check every couple of days to your routine :-(
And be prepared to interact with many other animals. This includes the ones we all seem to love, like birds and bees and fireflies, but also those that are typically considered vermin, like spiders, snakes, mice, wasps, roaches.
Not that there's anything really bad about that. It just requires a change to how you approach your outdoor spaces.
cmpb commented on Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans ourworldindata.org/mammal... · Posted by u/astroalex
The sad thing is that 100 years ago humans and livestock accounted for around 5% of the biomass (all zoomass, not land mammals only), 95% being the wildlife. Now the numbers are reversed.
We've stolen the land from the wildlife and dedicated it to a few species we consider edible (agriland is more than forests now, and 75% of it for animal agriculture).
Is anybody surprised that we're living in the anthropocene, defined by massive die off of wild species?
We have to (as a species) return the land to wildlife and let it repopulate the earth, otherwise we'll lose them. We don't even know what gems we're losing. I'm not talking about some bugs, but about dna - those are millions of years of (computer) code generated by nature, code so precious we don't even have an idea how to simulate it, let alone understand it (at this point in our evolution).
If we lose it, goodbye new medicines, new regenerative dna techniques, new technologies, and who knows what. We simply cannot know what we're stealing from future humans (this point was made for the selfish humans we are, better arguments could be made).
The article indicates that the bulk of the extinction of large mammals happened during the Quaternary Extinction[1], between 52kya and 9kya, so 100 years ago the damage was already done. It also makes the argument that the extinction events in each region coincided with the arrival of humans to that region, which would imply that these extinctions were not due to climatic changes.
I don't mean to imply that we're doing enough right now to keep our planet healthy. I agree with your sentiment and just wanted to provide a little context and clarification.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/mammals#quaternary-megafauna-exti...
PS It's "Vernor"