driggs

This article is full of fluff, like too many long-form articles on the Internet, but contains some interesting questions for those of us who study bats...

- Bats evolved for a night-flying niche to avoid predation by birds like hawks and owls. In such a high latitude there is little true night, so how do they adapt?

- White-Nose Syndrome is so deadly (90% to 99% mortality for Myotis species) because it thrives in the cold, humid temperatures that bats rely on for hibernating overwinter, and its high mortality rate is related to the fact that these bats cluster together shoulder-to-shoulder in great numbers (tens, hundreds, thousands, tens-of-thousands of individuals) allowing the fungus to spread rapidly when introduced by an individual. These populations of Little Brown Bat in Alaska don't roost in traditional cave/mine roosts in high numbers. How does this affect WNS spread, mortality, and these populations' ability to survive?

- Hibernating bats do so to wait out the winter, where there is unfriendly weather and no night-flying insects for food. The Alaskan "winter" is incredibly long and severe, meaning that these Little Brown populations must have an extra reliance on hibernation for survival. How does this affect their susceptibility to WNS?

Also, the photo of ~7 clustered bats roosting in an attic has an incorrect caption; these are Big Brown Bats (Eptesicus fuscus), not Little Brown Bats (Myotis lucifugus).

Exactly.

The fantastic song "Plug Me In" was a double entendre with a very NSFW video. A quick search shows that it's sadly lost to the modern internet.

Great band!

Because Apple switched the default macOS shell from the GNU-licensed `bash` to the BSD-licensed `zsh`?

The concern isn't about the trivial difference in Nyquist frequency, it's about aliasing and dithering when importing/exporting/synchronizing digitally.

1 sample from the EP-133 is 1.0629251700680271 samples at 44.1kHz, or 0.9765625 samples at 48kHz.

(But, again, it doesn't export/synchronize audio digitally, so it probably only matters if directly importing samples.)

The ADC and DAC operate at 46.875 kHz, its samplerate. That's the entire point of my original comment about it being nonstandard.

OK, you've pasted from the #1 Google result after searching for "46.875 kHz samplerate".

What does this have to do with the Teenage Engineering EP-133? It doesn't have USB audio or SPDIF, so no standard samplerate clock to conflict with.

It looks like the interesting feature of their tool Fixit 2 is that its lint rules know how to auto-apply themselves. I'm fine with an auto code formatter, an auto import organizer, but not sure how much I trust a linter to auto-apply "fixes".

Curious that its got a nonstandard 46.875 kHz samplerate rather than 44.1 or 48.0 kHz.

Not that it matters since its only output appears to be on the analog side of the DAC.

This is a surprisingly well-featured sampler/sequencer for the price!

Why is it that FM synthesis was so well-suited to relatively simple early digital hardware (eg. Yamaha's DX/TX line)?

Does that also make for relatively simple software FM synthesis?

A team at West Virginia University is trying to scale a process which extracts rare earth elements from coal mine "acid mine drainage". The hope is that the process helps to clean up AMD - itself an environmental hazard remaining after coal mining - and produce rare earth elements from what would otherwise be waste.

https://wvutoday.wvu.edu/stories/2023/04/05/wvu-researchers-...

https://wvwri.wvu.edu/divisions/critical-materials

Global shutter might be the most impressive feature, but also notable is that the a9 includes C2PA authentication metadata. This is a cryptographic chain of provenance on digital media, starting at the hardware camera itself.

In addition to provenance itself, C2PA allows for asserting that an image should not be used for AI training / ML mining.

https://c2pa.org/specifications/specifications/1.3/explainer...

Great that it lets you attach the debugger if it's running as interactive process.

Does that get you a full Swift REPL like Python's debugger does?

This clickbait title does not follow from the references cited.

It's based on 2019 Pew Research polls on what Americans think the country will look like in 2050 and on their perception of Social Security.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/03/21/public-...

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/03/21/retirem...

Small single-file Python application is impressive:

https://github.com/widgetti/wanderlust/blob/master/wanderlus...

...though I still can't figure out what "the OpenAPI Wanderlust app" does after reading every line!

> The intravenous PDD treatment Zulresso, also made by Sage, costs $34,000 a year.

So, by some definition, this $16k pill course is a bargain.

`g` is short for "global", but it is global to that request only. This makes data available to hooks which can wrap request handlers before/after they execute

It's inspired by Flask's same functionality, though it's a part of the greater Application Context and Request Context in Flask, which Microdot apparently doesn't have:

https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/2.3.x/appcontext/#stori...

BVO was one of the weirder ingredients in Mountain Dew for many many years, until it was finally reformulated around ~2020.

Then they released Mountain Dew Throwback, which was subsequently rebranded Mountain Dew Real Sugar, and that variant still contained BVO. It sounds like they might retire it this year, perhaps because of the proposed ban on BVO?

It looks like all 7 of their C14 dated samples were simply "organic soil", no artifacts or charcoal. If you're going to build a pyramid by piling soil and rocks, then the soil will be older than the pyramid.

The authors don't mention having done any core samples away from the pyramid as a control group.

It seems like they have, at best, proved that Gunung Padang contains old soil, without proving anything about the age of the pyramid itself.

Of serious consideration, eh?

  Flask:     64,900 GitHub stars
  Starlette:  8,800 GitHub stars
  MicroDot:     847 GitHub stars
  Tremolo:        6 GitHub stars

https://github.com/pallets/flask

https://github.com/encode/starlette

https://github.com/miguelgrinberg/microdot

https://github.com/nggit/tremolo

This website lets you choose various translates and compare them verse by verse:

https://ttc.tasuki.org/display:Code:gff,sm,jc,rh

(Select different translations to add/remove from the hamburger menu)

The original was published by Random House in 1972; mine is a 25th anniversary copy published by Vintage in 1997.

The one you link to, published by Penguin - Random House in 2011, says "Jane English and her long-time editor, Toinette Lippe, have refreshed and revised the translation" and that it "features over a hundred new photographs by Jane English", so seems like it might be a 2.0 version. I'm sure it's beautiful and inspiring as well, but I've only personally read the original version.

If you can find the oversized print copy of this Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English translation, originally published by Random House, it is one of the most visually inspiring books to read:

https://eheart.com/TAO/TTC/TTCchapters-small.pdf

Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English were married (by Alan Watts!), and each chapter of the book includes inspiring black-and-white photography by English, with artful Chinese calligraphy from Gia-Fu.

They also published a translation of Chuang Tzu in the same beautiful format.

I formerly worked for a small RealEstate aggregation/publication software company with large market adoption, and a well-known competitor started deep linking to the images within our custom-written resizing image cache server, and continued to do so after several polite requests to stop. Image traffic is the bulk of network traffic for RealEstate data, and their stollen traffic was very significant, cutting into our own available bandwidth and costs.

We slyly added referrer-based logic which would, with 1/20 probability, serve the Goatse.cx image instead.

Needless to say, within 48hrs we never received another deep link request from that competitor.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was recorded despite the limitation of 4-track recorders, most certainly not because of it!

They used as many as three individual Studer J37 4-track recorders with 1" tape, bouncing tracks across machines, and preserving the original generation tapes so they could bounce down again without cumulative noise. And, for "A Day in the Life", they synchronized two 4-track machines together with a 50Hz control signal so they could record all of the orchestral parts.

But sure, for bedroom musicians who aren't The Beatles, forced limitations can be freeing!

The obvious second book to read after Laozi is Zhuangzi (Chuang-Tzu). His book is a joy to read, full of humor and anecdotes, where Laozi's reads like cryptic poetry. Both books describe a common worldview of harmonious living with the natural world, from complementary perspectives.

I personally recommend Burton Watson's translation of Zhuangzi.

See: "The pupillary light response as a physiological index of aphantasia, sensory and phenomenological imagery strength."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9018072/

This study had participants imagine a bright scene, which triggers a physiological pupil response similar to the response of actually walking out into the bright sun. Those who self-reported aphantasia had no physiological pupil response.

Aphantasia is not a "false belief", and I assure you that those with aphantasia find it just as hard to understand mental visual imagery as you find it hard to understand a lack of mental visual imagery.

This is an especially interesting read given that Huxley described his own apparent aphantasia - lack of mental visual imagery - in "The Doors of Perception":

    I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen event or object. By an effort of the will, I can evoke a not very vivid image of what happened yesterday afternoon, of how the Lungarno used to look before the bridges were destroyed, or the Bayswater Road when the only buses were green and tiny and drawn by aged horses at three and a half miles an hour. But such images have little substance and absolutely no autonomous life of their own. They stand to real, perceived objects in the same relation as Homer's ghosts stood to the men of flesh and blood, who came to visit them in the shades. Only when I have a high temperature do my mental images come to independent life. To those in whom the faculty of visualization is strong my inner world must seem curiously drab, limited, and uninteresting.

Bats are small, and mammals, but are very different from "small mammals". They live for 10 to 30+ years, typically have just one or two pups per year, and spend the whole summer raising their young.

In a roost full of one million bats(!), a mamma bat can recognize and return to her own waiting pup. We record such a diversity of "social calls" with full-spectrum bat detectors that they almost certainly have individual names for each other.

Bats have culture in the sense that they pass on knowledge from individual to individual, over generations, for decades or centuries. Migratory Mexican Free-Tailed Bats will travel many hundreds of miles to return to a specific cave roost, which they learned from their family and friends, and will teach to their offspring. Different populations of the same species of bat will have learned to return to a different cave roost.

They have an intelligence that we cannot fully understand, living in a world where one of their primary senses is echolocation. Contrary to that old saying "blind as a bat", they've also got the 5 senses that we have as well, including good sight. When a Big-Eared Corynorhinus looks you in the eyes, you can see intelligence staring back at you.

(I am speaking exclusively about echolocating microbats, not "flying fox" megabats. I have ~15 years experience recording and analyzing bat echolocation and managing bat hibernacula and maternity roost caves.)

There is a significant difference between "interests" and "best interests".

Unhealthiest. Unhappiest. These are literally studies where WV comes in at the bottom of the list. You just seem to be arguing for the sake of arguing.

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/rankings-and-ratings/1...

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/most-unheal...

Then go ahead and explain why West Virginia is consistently and historically among the poorest, least educated, unhealthiest, and unhappiest states in the US.

It is a fact that West Virginians vote to perpetuate these circumstances. Our governor is the richest coal baron in the state, and we're going to overwhelmingly vote out centrist Joe Manchin to put that coal baron into the US Senate.

I've lived here for four decades, the son of a coal miner who was the son of a coal miner, the first person in my extended family to ever earn a college degree. Do you actually know what you're talking about, or are you just angrily shouting into the wind?