Who knows? It doesn't freeze here, so they do some foraging all winter, here. Colder places they only fly to collect water occaisionally in winter, and spend a lot more energy (honey) generating heat with physical activity.

And there's this as well : The Dr. Seuss version

Just hubski plus whatever is usually enough.

I can't recommend "Dark Tower", frankly. "The Stand" was great, as I remember it, except for the deus-ex-machina ending, which seemed bolted on - but the story up to the ending made the game worth the candle. However, a much younger 'me' read that, so take it as you will. I have not read the extended version.

Your description of "It" reads a lot like how I'd describe his "Dark Tower" series - an enjoyable read (if you like King), but not very deep, and a little unsatisfying. I'm interested to see what the film looks like, though - I think it could translate well. I've heard they have lined up Idris Elba as the gunslinger.

e.g. First result for 'hubski briandmyers search' is this :

I know nothing about automatic transmissions, but I'm pretty sure in this case, it's nothing to do with Boolean algebra - he's saying it's Boolean in the sense of 1/0, on/off, yes/no - i.e. in contrast to fuzzy logic. Boolean logic yields ON or OFF only, whereas fuzzy logic can supply a range of values, which might be interpreted as "cold", or "near".

I like Nirvana ...

Those books look awesome.

'Cenotaph' is one of the words I'd never come across before moving to NZ; there's a prominent one at Auckland's war memorial museum.

Thanks for taking the time to share this, it made my day. Have a badge.

Consumption of ethanol lowers blood sugar though - does not increase it.

Liqueurs often have a lot of sugar in them (schnapps etc), but spirits, wine and beer have nearly none. Maybe you're thinking of carbs?

Programming can be a great career, you just want to master an application domain

This meshes with my experience. My niche is embedded programming. It's not glamourous, and you don't get to use cool new languages -99% of what I've done in my career has been in plain old 'C'; but if you have the knack, there's always work to be found, and it's always different. It's been good to me.

In 1971, an accidental release of weaponized smallpox from the island infected ten people, of whom 3 died.

So yeah, it doesn't even need to escape a lab. Feral campers could do the job.

You do realise that they don't vaccinate for it any more, right? And they have not, for many many years (because the vaccine itself is not risk-free).

All it has to do is escape the lab (not likely UNLESS some lab tech does something stupid) and remain undetected long enough to spread. Low, but definitely not nil, odds.

$30 a month for a phone plan with no data? Seems high (but maybe that includes a free phone, or something?)

I pay $16 per month - NZ dollars, about $11 US; I get 500 MB data (which rolls over if unused, good for up to 12 months), plus I get 100 rollover minutes to NZ and AU per month; unlimited texts to NZ and AU; unlimited minutes to calls to the same provider; and most international calls are 6 cents per minute. But I pay about twice what you do for monthly internet + VOIP landline (fiber with a 500G data limit, with a small extra charge for going over).

Local band The Beths have this very catchy tune which is getting some airplay locally :

It's possible (maybe) but since no one has done it, or even come close, then it's pretty unlikely. If we could make machines that think like we do, we'd sure as hell do it, because that shit would open up frontiers like you can't imagine.

Free anti-gravity, or eternal life, are kinda similar - no reason they couldn't be discovered (maybe) but it's looking pretty unlikely since no one's done it.

We're in agreement - you saw how I said "It's possible (maybe)", right? Someone 100 or 200 years ago would have been 100% CORRECT to say "it's pretty unlikely" that they could go to the moon!

I think it's also quite possible that we WILL develop a way to have immortality - and I think that possibility is on a par with creating human-level intelligence artificially. For either, there's no clear path for how to get there, so barring some unforeseen breakthrough - it's gonna be a while, at best. I try not to engage in wishful thinking.

Tap and hold over text (like a URL in your browser) and you should get an option to 'copy' it. Tap and hold on a text-input window (like a hubski post) and you should get an option to 'paste' that text.

Handguns and tequila

Most self driving systems today are using neural networks

No offense intended, but colour me skeptical - can you support this? I believe there's a lot of research into neural networks for pedstrian identification etc, but I've never seen any indication that (for example) Google Chauffeur uses neural networks at all. Again, they appear to be throwing brute-force at the problem.

[edit] Details about self-driving software are hard to find; however, I did find this little hint (from this article http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/autonomous-driverless-car-brain/ )

Yet as smart as today's cars may seem, they are cognitive toddlers. In a car brain, software, processors and an operating system need to run algorithms that determine what the car should do, and these decisions must be made quickly.

Why not allow these machines and algorithms to learn the best courses of actions

Two reasons - machine intelligence is still a long way from being capable of human-level reasoning. Most of what we have now (that works well) is very simple-minded, brute-force approaches to reasoning (i.e. expert systems). Second reason - we don't NEED human-level reasoning to make good progress in self-driving. As an example, a huge first step in this process happened long ago, and has hardly any innate intelligence at all - the automatic transmission.

Cuba used to be your average poor island country, and now it has a literacy rate of 76% and some of the best healthcare in the world. Seems to me it's the only way to go.

76% seems way too low, and nothing to brag about. Wikipedia says it's 99.7%

Edit: I just noticed this post is almost 2 months old. It just showed up on my feed, which is interesting and different.

This is one of the cooler features of hubski, IMO - a new comment on an old post can resurrect a discussion, by putting it back in people's feed.

Aaaand now, they seem to have repaired themselves. Edited, I assume.

You are truly a fount of knowledge, my friend. That's the one.

I noticed a couple of your image links didn't embed - and those links start with "https://" - I thought that #bugski was fixed? mk ?