For people who fly more often this probably occurs often enough to not be noticeable, but when you take the same exact flight, from the same exact gate, twice in less than one week, wearing the same exact clothes, carrying the same exact luggage, there is a weird sense of Groundhog Day.
I even brought the same exact kind of apple to eat as airport snack. And yes, I have exactly the same seat on the plane.
I wonder if it’s going to be the same airplane crew this time.
Questioning again, always, why I live where I live
Here, this is what I get to do after a day at work.
New model predicts that we’re probably the only advanced civilization in the observable universe. Via Universe Today.
Well, playing with the Drake equation and the Fermi paradox is always fun and educative, as long as you assume that you are on a purely speculative ground. We actually don’t know, and the “probably” adverb in the title is central.
[…] The expectation that the universe should be teeming with intelligent life is linked to models like the Drake equation, which suggest that even if the probability of intelligent life developing at a given site is small, the sheer multitude of possible sites should nonetheless yield a large number of potentially observable civilizations. We show that this conflict arises from the use of Drake-like equations, which implicitly assume certainty regarding highly uncertain parameters. We examine these parameters, incorporating models of chemical and genetic transitions on paths to the origin of life, and show that extant scientific knowledge corresponds to uncertainties that span multiple orders of magnitude. This makes a stark difference.
This would be controversial, but I don’t understand those who are against all zoos and sanctuaries where humans get to come in contact with animals.
My friend who works at WWF would make a better argument, but I would try. Without doubt, natural habitat preservation is always the best and preferred option, but it is not always possible, especially in poor countries (and incidentally “humans first” folks usually fight efforts to limit human expansion by government and conservation nonprofits claiming social justice grounds).
Also, education is important – our local wolf sanctuary picks a single “wolf ambassador” each year who gets accustomed to humans and attracts the visitors who come and see the wolves (behind fences) – this creates funding for their breeding and release program that saved and repopulated hundreds of wolves in the West – and those other wolves are only heard, but not seen, by the visitors.
Finally, most people don’t have the ability or means to travel, and letting children experience the wonder that the nature is super important for their appreciation for nature as adults.
Now, endangered exotic-pets trade and circus animals – that’s fair game and there is no humane reason they should exist.
“At first it was absolutely shocking. He’s up every two hours. If all he does is grumble, there’s a good chance that he’ll fall back asleep. But if he starts gobbling out vowels and consonants, that means he’s up for good and nobody’s going back to sleep for a while. We’ve been getting some longer chunks of sleep lately. But whenever we think it’s conquered, there’s a curveball. So we’ve just had to embrace being absolutely knackered all the time. The first thing to go was our vocabularies. You know when you can’t quite think of a word, but then you suddenly get it? Well that doesn’t happen anymore. The word never comes. So now we consider it a win if we’re able to communicate a rough idea of what we mean.”
tinfoilparachute 