My recollection is you need to “talk” to each animal once a day, every day.

It was so bad that it made me realize I could be a screenwriter.

I think what happens is Zach Snyder gets together some good ideas for characters and stories (and some pretty mockup pictures), then he uses those to sell the project. Unfortunately from there, he doesn’t or isn’t able to flush those ideas into a compelling narrative with engaging characters. Everything stays very 1 dimensional.

I suggest a hard pass to everyone.

Shogun season 1. It was really well made.

Heard they were green lit for 2 more seasons. Unfortunately, it seems the first season was based on a book and there’s no book to base the next 2 seasons on.

There is history, but I’ve become very hesitant about shows that outrun their books (ex. GoT). So, hopefully they are the same quality, but not betting on it.

Relevant text:

According to the research, lab-grown P. album was observed to break down a given piece of UV-treated plastic at a rate of roughly 0.05 percent per day for every nine-day period. Which isn’t nothing, but it’d take a very long time for the bacteria to get through the entirety of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, let alone the millions of metric tons of plastics that enter the ocean every year.

This report makes clear that the tripling target is ambitious but achievable – though only if governments quickly turn promises into plans of action. (emphesis mine)

Appreciate your view point.

My understanding is that the US is a net fossil fuel exporter with ~10% of exports going to China (source: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=727&t=6). So that aspect of your argument should probably be reworked.

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Interesting read. Found this particularly interesting:

Within a year of the rule’s adoption in 2021, Colorado’s Department of Transportation, or CDOT, had canceled two major highway expansions, including Interstate 25, and shifted $100 million to transit projects. In 2022, a regional planning body in Denver reallocated $900 million from highway expansions to so-called multimodal projects, including faster buses and better bike lanes.

Now, other states are following Colorado’s lead. Last year, Minnesota passed a $7.8 billion transportation spending package with provisions modeled on Colorado’s greenhouse gas rule. Any project that added road capacity would have to demonstrate how it contributed to statewide greenhouse gas reduction targets. Maryland is considering similar legislation, as is New York.

“We’re now hoping that there’s some kind of domino effect,” said Ben Holland, a manager at RMI, a national sustainability nonprofit. “We really regard the Colorado rule as the gold standard for how states should address transportation climate strategy.”

Pay walled, but they did have this snippet on the page:

Global CO2 emissions for 2023 increased by only 0.1% relative to 2022 (following increases of 5.4% and 1.9% in 2021 and 2022, respectively), reaching 35.8 Gt CO2. These 2023 emissions consumed 10–66.7% of the remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5°C, suggesting permissible emissions could be depleted within 0.5–6 years (67% likelihood).

So good that the increase was smaller, almost 0, but bad that we are likely to severely shoot past 1.5C.

Relevant text below:

District 19 represents 8,000 machinists who repair locomotives and heavy equipment for freight rail carriers including CSX, BNSF, and Union Pacific.

The Department of Labor and the Machinists entered into an agreement to rerun last year’s election—which Murtaugh lost by just six votes—after the challengers filed charges over irregularities with member addresses. It is extremely rare to have an election redone in this way. Fewer than 0.3 percent of union elections lead to a rerun supervised or ordered by the DOL.

Ballots were cast—or due in the mail—on May 3, but then had to be sealed and shipped to a central location to be counted under DOL direction.

Murtaugh and Rosato campaigned on a platform of increased transparency and a more militant posture toward the employers.

“The members have voted in a working member, because they’re tired of the ways things have been run,” says Murtagh. “I campaigned on having members engaged in the contract negotiations—no more closed doors.”

Negotiations for the next national rail contracts are expected to begin later this year. Contract negotiations under the Railway Labor Act, which covers railroad and airline workers, often take years.

Interesting read. I’m inclined to agree with the author that the UN 2086 population peak is BS and humanity will hit population peak sooner (potentially in the first half of the century).

United Nations’ expert “model” appears to have picked an arbitrary long-term fertility rate out of who-knows-where to which all regions asymptote, abruptly abandoning their current declines to head for theory-land! I’m honestly a bit aghast.

Just finished V Rising. I really liked it. For those who don’t know and are curious, it’s one of those games where, if you can’t beat a boss, you just have to get better. There’s some small things that make a fight easier, but it basically comes down to you understanding the enemy and learning to play better.

Fixed. Thank you.

Relevant Section on the genetics:

For the study, the researchers took blood from five of the cats, which had been adopted, and conducted a DNA test on four of the felines, which turned up no genetic mutations associated with white fur.

They then performed a whole genome sequencing for two of the cats, and this step turned up a deletion in what’s called the KIT gene, which can encode whether white will turn up in a feline’s coat (scientists have also connected variations in the KIT gene to piebald patterns in various animals like horses and mice.)

“In summary, comparative data from other species and genotype segregation analysis support the newly discovered KIT region deletion as potentially being a cause of salmiak coat color in cats,” the researchers conclude.

It’s strange to me they tested mice. My understanding is that Porcine (pigs) models are usually utilized to evaluate potential GI/intestinal effects on humans. As human and Porcine GI tracts are similar (why you really need to cook pork or you can get diseases or worms from the meat).

The article mentioned cats, so the current list of know susceptible species seems to be bird, cow, mice, and cats. Not a great sign.

Same with golfing, bowling, darts, etc. I think part of the enjoyment of these types of sports/games/competitions is to see how close to perfection you can get.

Relevant section of the article where it lays out what has been changing and what still needs to change:

… graft has been all but exterminated in some of the worst affected areas - for instance, government services such as issuing passports, permits and licences.

He also tells the BBC that significant progress had been made in reforming education and police.

Problem areas

Mr Kalmykov admits, however, that the government has been less successful in eradicating corruption in using natural resources (e.g. in mining and forestry), regulating monopolies and in large infrastructure projects.

“Progress has been slowest where big interests and big players meet,” he says.

According to him, “in the next five-ten years the government should focus on cleansing the judiciary, which will make the general system of public administration healthier”.

Relevant sections of the article:

The EU Council finalized the agreement earlier on May 21, which would provide Ukraine with between 2.5 billion and 3 billion euros ($2.7-3.26 billion) annually, with most of it allocated to Kyiv’s military needs.

The European Commission then announced later in the day that the “resources will be available to support Ukraine starting from July 2024, with bi-annual payments.”

The distribution will be reviewed on an annual basis.

My understanding is that some of the benefits China would get from invading Taiwan is the control of Taiwan’s world-leading semiconductor industry. So making it public knowledge that any invading force (i.e. China) would not be able to take over their production capabilities is a small deterrent.

Relevant section explaining the solution:

Let’s return to Hamlet, but this time your working memory — consisting of a whiteboard — has room for just 100 words. Once the play starts, you write down the first 100 words you hear, again skipping any repeats. When the space is full, press pause and flip a coin for each word. Heads, and the word stays on the list; tails, and you delete it. After this preliminary round, you’ll have about 50 distinct words left.

Now you move forward with what the team calls Round 1. Keep going through Hamlet, adding new words as you go. If you come to a word that’s already on your list, flip a coin again. If it’s tails, delete the word; heads, and the word stays on the list. Proceed in this fashion until you have 100 words on the whiteboard. Then randomly delete about half again, based on the outcome of 100 coin tosses. That concludes Round 1.

Next, move to Round 2. Continue as in Round 1, only now we’ll make it harder to keep a word. When you come to a repeated word, flip the coin again. Tails, and you delete it, as before. But if it comes up heads, you’ll flip the coin a second time. Only keep the word if you get a second heads. Once you fill up the board, the round ends with another purge of about half the words, based on 100 coin tosses.

In the third round, you’ll need three heads in a row to keep a word. In the fourth round you’ll need four heads in a row. And so on.

Eventually, in the kth round, you’ll reach the end of Hamlet. The point of the exercise has been to ensure that every word, by virtue of the random selections you’ve made, has the same probability of being there: 1/2^k. If, for instance, you have 61 words on your list at the conclusion of Hamlet, and the process took six rounds, you can divide 61 by the probability, 1/2^6, to estimate the number of distinct words — which comes out to 3,904 in this case. (It’s easy to see how this procedure works: Suppose you start with 100 coins and flip each one individually, keeping only those that come up heads. You’ll end up with close to 50 coins, and if someone divides that number by the probability, ½, they can guess that there were about 100 coins originally.)

Chakraborty, Variyam and Meel mathematically proved that the accuracy of this technique scales with the size of the memory. Hamlet has exactly 3,967 unique words. (They counted.) In experiments using a memory of 100 words, the average estimate after five runs was 3,955 words. With a memory of 1,000 words, the average improved to 3,964. “Of course,” Variyam said, “if the [memory] is so big that it fits all the words, then we can get 100% accuracy.”