driggs

Ignoring the false equivalence of wasted candle light to stolen WiFi bandwidth, as has already been pointed out...

It’s an unspoken(?) assumption that one can’t apply for a remote job unless one has access to internet. Doesn’t matter whether it’s yours, stolen from a neighbor, or sipped from a coffee shop, so long as it’s reliable and of sufficient bandwidth. That’s the remote work deal.

Having the privilege to work remotely for a non-remote job requires the same deal, an your employer seems even less responsible for providing bandwidth in the latter case.

Is my point nonsense, or are you unable to see past your own pedantry?

Sure, if you insist on invoking Pliny The Elder, I'll grant you that magnetite was originally a bad name. And then humans discovered electromagnetism. Now geology students all over the world invoke a word that didn't even exist - which has the same root name as the mineral, owing to the fact that the mineral has that property. It's now a good name. And every modern geology student is thankful, because they think of "magnetism", not the thousand-year-old root of the word "magnetism" which predated our discovery of the physical phenomenon.

I wrote "presumably" in my reply to you above because I don't know or care what seussite is, and was typing on a cell phone at 2AM. The point was the point. If I flipped a boolean bit because you were trying to trick me, then all you've done is prove that those examples are also bad names rather than good names.

Names ought to have meaning, when possible, rather than being arbitrary.

If you still think that point is nonsense, and are unable to understand that argument beyond the details of an example, then you're going to have a long successful career as the guy people regret inviting to their party.

PS: Disagreeing with an argument doesn't make it nonsense.

You’ve completely missed the point.

“Seuss” presumably tells you something meaningful about suessite.

“Greig” presumably tells you something meaningful about greigite.

“Dave Mao” doesn’t tell you anything about davemaoite.

The name serves as a mnemonic, not a diagnostic criteria! My brain is overloaded with emacs keybindings, I can’t memorize any more arbitrary lists!

What can you tell me about Fe₃O₄? _blank stare_

What can you tell me about Magnetite? A ha!

(I already edited my response since what was intended as a joke sounded unintentionally confrontational.)

The fact that there are already bad names doesn't justify creating more bad names. If nothing else, I suppose the terrible names are memorable.

Names are NOT just names, unless you believe that all of science should involve rote memorization of arbitrary labels.

Calcite is made of calcium. Magnetite is magnetic. Andesite's type locality is The Andes. Azurite is blue (azure).

Sure, there's lots of minerals, and the damage is already done in that there's a long list of minerals honoring people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minerals_named_after_p...

But this mineral is very special (which is why you're reading an article about it). Couldn't they have thought of some name, even Latin, having to do with the fact that it's the first known mineral from the lower mantle? From the fact that it was trapped in a diamond? That it lasted one brief second? A prefix added to "perovskite" since it's simply another form of that mineral? Or at least if naming it after a person, how about the guy who discovered it given what a cool discovery story this is.

Maybe Ho-Kwang "Dave" Mao deserves honor; give the guy an award. But as far as I can tell from the article, he has nothing to do with this mineral.

It makes me sad every time a mineral, chemical, or species is named after some arbitrary human (or worse) because the name is arbitrary, telling you nothing about the thing itself or diagnostic differences from similar things.

It’s even worse when the name sounds stupid. “Dave”?! After somebody’s nickname, who wasn’t even a “David”?!

Thanks for making science even harder!

As a professional software engineer of ~20 years who's dabbled in music for as long as you've dabbled in software, I'm humbled and impressed. Just wanted to say "great job!", and wish you a long, fulfilling career combining your passions and talents.

Given the scope of the universe, and aided by the perspective of photos like these, many would certainly describe this idea - that life has only ever existed and will only ever exist on Earth - as "unbelievable".

Wow, Tam Hunt touches on this exact idea in this podcast at ~21:00:

https://mattasher.com/2020/07/19/episode-11-tam-hunt-on-cons...

He pitches the idea (which I'm poorly paraphrasing) that there's a relationship between the complexity of matter and the complexity of its aspect as consciousness. Smaller fields of consciousness merge with a common resonance to form larger more complex consciousness. Anesthesia or coma being states where those smaller fields fall out of resonance and the more complex consciousness breaks down.

I didn't "experience nothingness"; I did not experience, full stop.

My consciousness did not exist. I had no awareness of the passage of time. There was no observer. No dreams. From my perspective, I teleported from a chair to another room, with an existential discontinuity in between. The only "experiencing" was after my consciousness was brought back online.

I cannot describe it to you sufficiently with words, and you likely cannot understand it sufficiently without ceasing to exist for yourself. Are the dead aware that they are dead? It seems, from my perspective, that for those 45 minutes, my consciousness was extinguished, not unlike that of someone fully dead.

(Not that I have first-hand experience being fully dead, of course! And, in a conversation about panpsychism, I suppose the experience of being a dead body isn't something to discredit as "nothing"!)

Pardon my inability to express accurately with words, but I most certainly did not experience oblivion. I am using the word "oblivion" to describe the state of absolutely no experience whatsoever. It was practically religious/mystical/psychedelic in that it truly felt that I had not existed at all during that time.

(And, no offense, I get the George Harrison reference, but saying that consciousness "is everything" begs the very question of evaluating panpsychism critically. I'm posting this because it is counter to my own longheld beliefs that consciousness is inherent to being.)

I've long pondered the idea that consciousness is inherent to all "things" - animal, vegetable, mineral; atom, planet, solar system - in that things experience _being_, whatever that means for a given thing.

A recent oral surgery gave this hypothesis pause. I was given Propofol as an anesthetic, and upon awakening had an extremely impactful existential experience. My very consciousness had been extinguished, instantly, as if by a lightswitch, and for 45 minutes there was nothing but oblivion.

If consciousness is inherent to being, then how could it so easily be nullified to the point of oblivion, and then brought back online?

Always install an upstream Python in parallel to the OS X provided version if you're doing Python development. Apple custom compiles theirs, and it's always out of date. In fact, there are Mavericks specific bugs in both latest upstream and in the version included with Mavericks; look for a new Python release in the next few days.

See: http://code.activestate.com/lists/python-dev/125760/

And don't forget to `brew install python`!