A shallow comment can contain a profound question. "What is the meaning of life?" would be an even shallower comment.
Were a comment to contain new and interesting information about a profound, i.e. generic, question, that would be fine. But this is precisely what internet comments bringing up generic questions don't usually do. It's not a good fit for the genre. Someone who really has something original to say about a profound question would be better off writing an essay, or a book. Certainly not a one-liner to an internet forum.
This is so much the case, in fact, that changing the subject from a concrete topic to a more generic one is a frequent form of trolling.
In this case, the question is informative and stimulating because it challenges the assumption that human interaction has a different dynamic to animal interaction.
Bringing this question to conscious awareness is a different category of social discourse to “What is the meaning of life”, which is not really a social question at all.
I'm sorry, but I don't agree. The topic is the social behavior of octopuses. It's not always bad for HN threads to go off topic—for example if there's an unpredictable direction which is more interesting than the original topic—but it's pretty much always bad for them to go in generic, pseudo-profound directions like this. It makes discussions more predictable, and therefore more (yes) shallow.
p.s. Please don't use multiple accounts to comment in the same thread. That's abusive, and will eventually get your main account banned as well.
It's not pseudo-profound. It goes to the heart of what social behaviour is and provides another angle for interpreting the personal experiences shared by the researchers. There's nothing shallow about it.
The reason it's shallow is this is directly addressed by the content of the article. The author starts out the essay by giving all of the reasons we have to believe that our relationships with pets and other humans are mutual, i.e. closeness in evolutionary distance, the fact that we're all social creatures that form bonds within our own species that are clearly advantageous to us and friendship makes sense from that standpoint. It then contrasts that with a traditional naive view of octopuses as loners that either mate or kill each other when they meet in the wild, giving reason to doubt that they would form friendships with humans.
It then goes on to complicate that narrative, claiming that more recent discoveries indicate many species of octopus are, in fact, social creatures, and older understanding of them was likely due to insufficient observation and the fact they hide themselves so well.
It's quite an in-depth essay with a lot of information in it that addresses this exact question with nuance, research, anecdotes, from every side of every possible answer. It deserves better than a pithy response implying the author never thought to just ask the reverse question. He definitely already thought of this.
There are countless variations on that. I've always been partial to this one:
Y es que en el mundo traidor
nada hay verdad ni mentira;
todo es según el color
del cristal con que se mira
which roughly translates to: "and it's that in this treacherous world, there is truth nor lie; everything has the color of the glass(es) through which we look", from Ramón de Campoamor, a 19th century Spanish poet.
The reason I’m posting that here is because for many years I don’t drink it. I was so used to hydrating from soda and other beverages advertised on TV I completely lost touch with plain old H2O.
Then one day I rediscovered its pure refreshing goodness. What a surprise! I savoured it and marvelled at the pureness of the way it quenched my thirst.
Water! Quenching thirst since before the dinosaurs.
Affordable. Convenient if you have a tap. Amazing on a hot day if you have a fridge and a pitcher.
Someone recently was exclaiming how good water was. We had been drinking heavily and I insisted they drank water while we were drinking alcohol since they were complaining about hangovers. They woke up with no hang over.
It turns out they just don't really drink water. It's always something in a can - flavored seltzers or soft drinks.
It kinda blew my mind that there are people out there who don't drink water. It feels as natural as breathing to me.
My kids had friends (round 10 yo) who claimed they did not like the taste of water. That blew their minds since they'd been drinking water their whole life.
It is still the main beverage we drink, and there are still those who never drink it. Incredible.
To be fair, tap water in different places tastes different. If you're in a rural area of the US with well-water, what comes out of the faucet can have a strong rusty taste.
Exactly. As a kid, I thought I hated the taste of water. Our municipal tap water was terrible -- it was safe, but no one drank it because it was so unpleasant.
On the other hand, NYC and SF both have excellent tap water. And other cities are somewhere in between, or at the extreme end can even be dangerous (Flint MI).
The same is true of well water. Some of the best-tasting and perfectly safe water I've ever had has been well water. And as you mention, it can also come in all sorts of off-putting flavors. And it can be contaminated and dangerous (biologically or chemically).
People talk a lot about the variations of coffee or wine or beer, but I think the variations in water are even more interesting (and sometimes contributive to the others).
There's something very wrong with the first world when people discover drinking water. I'm not singling you out, I've heard the same story from other people, usually from the US, and it's mind boggling to me. I know it's the parents fault.
It's like discovering that clean air is pretty good for you and feels nice when inhaled.
That is not true of most areas in the US where tap water is fine to drink. Some localities do have high concentrations of iron or sulfates in the water that taint the flavor.
Isn't the availability of bottled water a relatively recent thing? It certainly wasn't available for most of the time that I lived in the UK (1955 to 1985), but sweetened carbonated drinks have been a thing for well over a hundred years.
I used to drink soda for every meal and I went down like 2 inches on my waist size when I stopped. I mean I did eventually gain that back, I guess, but it took years.
I have heard folk wisdom to the effect that a can of Coke a day results a pound of weight gain per month. According to this (somewhat dubious) article, 20oz of soda per day results a pound of weight gain per week!
Nobody is forcing us to use browsers from google or Mozilla.
We are all free to implement our own UA. The specs are all open standards.
What stops us from writing browsers is the sheer volume of time and effort required - hundreds of thousands of hours of highly skilled work. That is all.
In the absence of such an effort, we would be left high and dry, with no way to experience the web.
Fortunately, that isn’t the case, because some others have done the work and allow us to use their browsers.
For that, we might feel grateful.
We might also be wary, and try to be aware of any adverse consequences of using someone else’s thing. That’s common sense, but it is still not a case of being at someone’s mercy. That situation loomed when one company sought to control the standards for the web as well as the implementation, but what we have today is different to that.
The specs are open standards, but do the specs specific enough to actually do something that would work in practice?
By "work in practice" I mean handle most sites that people actually visit and display them almost identically to the way Chrome and Firefox do. If your new browser doesn't do the same thing as Chrome and Firefox on those sites, the users are going to perceive it as your browser sucking.
If Chrome and Firefox deviate from the spec in some way, you will have to match that deviation.
If there is something not covered in the spec but that browser have to deal with (such as handling malformed HTML, which a lot of sites have), you will have to match what Chrome and Firefox do there.
This feels like saying that you're not forced to be subject to the laws of your country, because you could always go find an unclaimed island and create your own country. At some point the practical impediments are such that yes, we are at their mercy. And no, Google at least does not deserve any gratitude for creating a more efficient ad delivery machine (what, you think they provide a browser out of the goodness of their hearts?).
You're not stuck in some evil country. You have Mozilla. If you want to improve it, you can submit code to it. Or start a new browser project by rounding up a dozen friends who feel the same way you do and going for it. If you're not a software engineer, you can be an evangelist who inspires software engineers. What is stopping you from working towards your own ideals?
And even if you could do it, it's not a given that you can make a good one.
In fact, I believe making a good browser is impossible because the web is fundamentally broken. The standards require your browser to be crap. The browser is no longer a user agent, it's a server agent, and trying to block & work around antifeatures is akin to writing an antivirus program that somehow detects and blocks malicious code without breaking the rest of the program. You can try, but it's a ridiculous never-ending cat and mouse game and if you don't keep up, you just end up "breaking the web" without actually making any part of it good.
A corporation is a shield behind which humans plot and practice their most deliberate, libidinous schemes of avarice, moderated not by morality or community, but only by laws and markets. And for that, corporations have lawyers, resumes and advertising.
It is a rare corporation that retains a soul for longer than its founders presence, because lawyers, resumes and advertising cannot sense what founders could: a creative future.
Thanks. Looks like the royal society link is the original work, but the nature editorial also mentions the same - it’s still possible we might have higher stability in other conditions (they only loooked at dna in bone samples). Not saying we will hold hope for dinosaur cloning, just that 521 years sounds too small.
Amber is heterogeneous in composition, but consists of several resinous bodies more or less soluble in alcohol, ether and chloroform, associated with an insoluble bituminous substance. Amber is a macromolecule by free radical polymerization of several precursors in the labdane family, e.g. communic acid, cummunol, and biformene. These labdanes are diterpenes (C20H32) and trienes, equipping the organic skeleton with three alkene groups for polymerization. As amber matures over the years, more polymerization takes place as well as isomerization reactions, crosslinking and cyclization.
The questions still seems reasonable? Maybe there exists some geological processes minerals deposits that absorbed moisture? Some kind of geothermal heating (although maybe that would just make steam permeate the surrounding area), an asteroid fragment from the Chicxulub impact that carried DNA into space??
This is great! I would add one more important item to that list:
- Find a common problem of these different stakeholders that will actually get solved by your new standard.
Often, the standards talk is just a solution in search of a problem. It is easy to build a standard. It is not so easy to build a standard which really solves some stakeholder pain and gets adopted by multiple organizations.
