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I live in an area where there are plentiful eagles and I never heard of anyone eating one. I kayak around some islands in a nearby river where eagles nest and frequently encounter people at boat landings inquiring about eagle feathers. The laws around that stuff are pretty harsh - I always figured them to be under-cover Feds.

I've shot tons of film over a great many years and I have a sizeable collection of cheap and expensive 35mm and 120mm film cameras covering the period from the late 1800's to the 1980's. I stuck to film well after digital cameras got cheap enough for my tastes and I still love to shoot film - I have about 25 rolls of exposed color film in my office waiting for me to develop, so I still shoot a fair amount on film. I also feel more of a connection to my film cameras since they have a personal history and are works of art.

One regret I have about the film era is that, starting out as a teenager, I scraped to afford film and, recently, it struck me how large the gap is between the memories I have now and the memories I captured on film back then. Once I had a job and could afford to take more photos, I seemed to have decided that photography was for travel and special occasions and I, sadly, took photos of little else.

Now I shoot a full-frame mirrorless digital (mostly so I can use my old lenses and also, I hate cell-phone photography ergonomics). I carry my camera everywhere and shoot quite a few photos on any given day. I am learning so much more about photography now that I can freely experiment and the equipment allows me to capture things that were only rarely possible before.

That being said, I encourage everyone to try film for whatever reasons strikes your fancy. The more people into film, the more options we'll have for film stock, chemicals, and cameras.

Maybe find a way to inspire in the rich the kind of philanthropy practiced by Andrew Carnegie. He wrote his views in, The Gospel of Wealth - not having read it, but having long heard Carnegie's name as an example of wealth turned to good, I'm planning to give it a read.

Unfortunately with a political system wholly owned by the wealthy (US), I fear that there may be more truth than I want in my father's admonition that things will never get better in this country until we have another revolution. I've been around a bit and so much of today seems to be a rinse and repeat of the issues I experienced when I was young - not the world I wanted to see for my daughter. Hopefully the next generation has a stronger backbone - mine and the couple after seem to have surrendered our dreams to greed and consumerism.

Indeed, as are concentrated forms of human habitation, and, your point is?

Once you let your kid name an animal, it is a pet.

I have a bit of experience with this since we have been running a chicken retirement community for the past four or five years as our chickens, now beloved pets of my teenage daughter are well into their senior years. We get eggs, but they are very expensive eggs given the feed cost/egg ratio is changing significantly as egg production wanes and feed prices are on a continuous trajectory upwards.

We do have limits - my daughter has accepted that I draw the line at vet visits. If a chicken is sick enough to need a vet, it will be allowed to die peacefully or be euthanized if there are severe injuries.

I still have great memories laying on the living room floor reading volume after volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica during family TV evenings. The set came with a language dictionary covering 5-10 languages; I spent endless hours "learning" Russian and Arabic from that book. I still have those books and the cabinet they were sold with.

Bye bye Fi.

You might like to explain how population life-expectancy figures correlate with covid fatality rates in a meaningful way.

I searched for two podcasts; one failed with an error ('Error: could not handle the request) [No Agenda]. I tested another one, [eggchasers], and that worked reasonably well. My main criticism is that, when a search returns something meaningful, there is not a lot there to compel me to create an account and drill in deeper. If I were designing this, I would seed the 'sign up' presentation to new users with some relevant bits from the conversations which are happening on your site. If there are no current conversations, then some message which would spark my desire to start one.

Also, what value does the acast privacy link for each episode provide that wouldn't alternatively be provided by some header element?

There are some issues, as have been pointed out, but one very real incentive to figuring those things out is the opportunity to reduce the number of problematic interactions with the police.

It does. The names of both concerns are (maybe were - been a few years since I passed by) on the sign in front of the building. I always wondered about the place, but looking it up slipped my mind.

Probably a reference only the British would get. Look up 'hedge porn'.

I met a guy who owned the Peekskill meteorite and the car which it hit it. He was/is a well known meteorite and Eurypterid dealer.

My wife had contact with a raccoon which tangled with our dog in the middle of the day about a decade ago. Since confirmation from the state lab takes weeks, she was off to the hospital for rabies shots straight away as a precaution. Total cost to us - pretty much nothing minus some trivial co-pays (< $100).

True to the US health care system, today, a decade later, we would likely pay a few thousand dollars or more - if it was covered. If incidental contact (no bite) was not covered, then it would be on my wife to either take the chance that the risk of rabies was insignificant or go ahead and pay thousands for the shots just in case.

About 5 years ago, I was bit by a stray cat we'd been feeding. I am a bit cheap, so going to the doctor is the last thing on my mind unless I'm gushing blood. I did give thought to the risk of rabies, so I did a little research. Seems you can be successfully treated for rabies within 10 days of exposure - depending a bit on the location of the bite (head/neck vs leg) - mine was on my hand. Cats typically die within a week after they become contagious and show clear signs several days prior to that. Lucky me, this cat continued to show up at our door for food every day through the week with no obvious behavioral changes.

So, having rolled the dice on my life for a few thousand dollars, I figured I was fine.

Mate, I wish, cheapskate that I am, that I was never faced with a moment where I pondered the economic worth of my life. I live in the US and my fellow citizens (from what I'm told) do not want the same kind of health care system that the rest of the prosperous nations enjoy. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

I wish I could find logic in it, but I can't.

If you live 1-2 years, as cuttlefish do, is it really that amazing that their memory does not fade between birth and death?

America solved a large part of air and water pollution issues as a side-effect of policies which shifted production largely off-shore. That solution won't work for the remainder.

The trash problem seems to have worsened - especially in the cities. Municipal governments have eliminated street cleaning from their service portfolio and now seem to mostly rely on things getting so bad that some civil group sign on to their adopt-a-highway program and make some effort to clean things up once or twice a year. Hard to take care of the home when you're busy sending trillions to destroying people's lives in other parts of the world.

The difficulty I have in looking optimistically toward the future comes from my lack of confidence in the leadership of this nation. An entrenched two-party system and a complicit media has led us to a place where we cannot adequately provide for basic human needs (education, health, and housing). Without caring for those things for all of the people living within our borders, the hard choices we will need to make are going to bring us through a period of turmoil as the pains of adjustment are felt unevenly throughout our society. Someone is going to lose and it probably won't be the rich and upper middle class. We will likely end up covering them for the loss of their beach-side property while the poor sod living in the countryside will be treated like we currently treat our homeless.

When I'm in DC for a conference at the convention center, part of my breakfast routine is a walk to the Sculpture Garden at the Hirshhorn with a take-out breakfast. I always make a point to listen to the Sunset Song exhibit through at least once.

This is from the FDA website.

"Under section 564 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act), when the Secretary of HHS declares that an emergency use authorization is appropriate, FDA may authorize unapproved medical products or unapproved uses of approved medical products to be used in an emergency to diagnose, treat, or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions caused by CBRN threat agents when certain criteria are met, including there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives."

You should probably drill into this if you are interested, but the phrasing most often referenced by people talking about effective therapeutics and the lack of approval by the FDA is, "there are adequate, approved, and available alternatives."

Interesting since this coincides with a different issue I am facing. I had an employee move to California (we are a single-site business on the east coast) and everything was fine during covid. Now I'm being told that there are concerns about California's employment laws since they are out of sync with the laws in our state and might require HR to do some additional work and the organization to incur added expenses. Currently, we are awaiting a decision from HR. Our mitigation plan centers around moving this person from employee to contractor. It might be the only option for us - the employee has plenty of other opportunities.

Sounds like Disney. Disney World (? - the one in Florida, USA) had a gift shop at the exit to every ride last time I was there. The bean counters probably consider it a great addition, and I'm sure it pays dividends, but that sort of unadulterated cashing in puts me off.

Who keeps a bottle of wine around long enough to bother worrying about oxidation? If I was opening a very expensive bottle, I would invite people over to share it. Most wine I buy to drink or cook with costs $10-$20/bottle. Hardly worth making any effort to preserve it if I forget to drink all of it in a few days time - worst case, I toss half a bottle or mix it into some salad dressing.

The average age of operating automobiles in use within the US is closer to 12 years. The registration fee (annual renewal, not initial registration) in the US is based on vehicle value in 8 states by my count.

On a personal note, me and most of the people I know think more in terms of miles than years. I figure every car I buy is good for 200,000 miles and most of the brands I favor have another 100,000 miles of life beyond that before repairs exceed some loosely calculated rate of return.

I spent half a day with Bruce Gordon and bought one of his bikes a decade or so ago. He's gone now, but he was an interesting character in his own right - seems the bike world is full of them.

There are only so many prime cuts, such as steaks, in a steer. Ground beef and sausages are what you make with the rest of that animal.

You might be thinking of the Joe Rogan podcast episode from late June with Bret Weinstein, formerly professor of biology at Evergreen State College, where the topic of gain-of-function research relative to Covid-19 is discussed in some depth.

Eric Weinstein, Bret's brother, as mentioned in a later comment, is the managing director of Thiel Capital. Eric was last on the podcast in April 2020 where there was some discussion of Covid - perhaps he also discussed gain-of-function coronavirus research which is not a new subject and has been the subject of controversy - even leading the NIH to suspend funding for this category of research in 2014 (that policy was reversed in 2017).

I've been going to OSCON on and off since the entire conference took place in the downtown Portland Marriott and it was a really good conference, until they moved it to Austin. From there, attendance seemed to decline yearly and the content was getting very watered down. At the 25th anniversary event back in Portland, it was startling clear that either O'Reilly was becoming disinterested in this event or there was a revenue problem. I guess a bit of both.

They return which is sometimes the source of their undoing - should someone set a trap at the scene of the original crime.

It is an interesting thought. I went to one of the early OSCON conferences in Portland and it was pretty cool to have the Ruby (Matts), Python (Guido), and Perl (Larry Wall) people all at the same conference. I was a budding Python programmer, but sat through sessions on the other languages to get a feel for what they offered.

That was a great conference - amazing attendees spending the evening hanging out around the conference center hacking code and an amazing diversity of presenters.

I go to OSCON often and that atmosphere has never been repeated as things have splintered off into language/application area specific conferences. Something's been lost - at least for the casual or beginner programmer.

Regarding speed cameras. I was driving around the Netherlands and saw speed cameras for the first time (I'm from the US) in Apeldoorn. There were signs that warned drivers about them. In the US, in several rural areas have electronic signs at the edge of town, just outside of the limit change, which warn you when you are exceeding the limit through town. I would have no problem at all with permanent enforcement systems provided they were accompanied by advance warnings. If I am so inattentive to my driving that I miss the warnings and get a ticket, so be it. It is much safer (and should be much cheaper) than randomly placed patrol cars performing radar/laser speed enforcement.

Pennsylvania is the same - there is a $0.58 tax on a gallon of gas ($0.75 on diesel) that is used to fund the majority of the costs related to road maintenance. Wikipedia tells me that is the highest fuel tax rate in the country - the roads must be incredibly expensive to maintain in this state because they are generally in significantly worse shape than the roads in neighboring states.