NationStates

Aclion wrote:

Kowani wrote:I like the EU…

You have my condolences.

Don’t. Internationalism is the way of the future.

There is a town in Russia called Norilsk, in which you are not allowed to leave and you basically have no rights other than to work for the mining company that owns the town. All citizens in Norilsk work for that one company.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of women's suffrage in Wyoming, the equality state.

Metal, fur and glass were the main products that went west along the silk road. In fact, the ancient Chinese considered glass as an almost magical object and it was very, very prized.

MInecraft is over 10 years old.

Keith Moon of The Who once bought a £15k painting from the National Gallery just to smash it over a policeman's head.

Other such antics of the band's members (smashing instruments at every show, having Keith blow up toilets, throwing TVs out of all hotel rooms they had, etc.) made The Who accrue a £1.3 million debt between 1963 and 1969, which they needed three successful albums (Tommy, Who's Next, Quadrophenia) to pay off.

Honey bees implement a decentralized decision making mechanism for selecting new nesting sites. Scout bees returning from potential new nest sites will recruit advocates to their choice by use of a waggle dance, repeating the dance in proportion to the quality of the site. Thus, a higher quality site will produce a longer dance, thereby recruiting more bees. However, rival scouts are able to identify their competitors, and will try to inhibit their opponents dances by headbutting the dancer while emitting a short vibration. This process of dance-headbutting will continue until one group of scout bees recruits a critical threshold of bees, and the swarm departs to the new nest location.

This process appears to mirror the way the many competing neural networks composing your brain cross-inhibit each other, allowing the emergence of an effective and/or optimal decision.

Autonomous Cleaner Bot Cleaners wrote:Honey bees implement a decentralized decision making mechanism for selecting new nesting sites. Scout bees returning from potential new nest sites will recruit advocates to their choice by use of a waggle dance, repeating the dance in proportion to the quality of the site. Thus, a higher quality site will produce a longer dance, thereby recruiting more bees. However, rival scouts are able to identify their competitors, and will try to inhibit their opponents dances by headbutting the dancer while emitting a short vibration. This process of dance-headbutting will continue until one group of scout bees recruits a critical threshold of bees, and the swarm departs to the new nest location.

This process appears to mirror the way the many competing neural networks composing your brain cross-inhibit each other, allowing the emergence of an effective and/or optimal decision.

What I'm hearing is the human brain is made out of bees.

Valrifell wrote:

Autonomous Cleaner Bot Cleaners wrote:Honey bees implement a decentralized decision making mechanism for selecting new nesting sites. Scout bees returning from potential new nest sites will recruit advocates to their choice by use of a waggle dance, repeating the dance in proportion to the quality of the site. Thus, a higher quality site will produce a longer dance, thereby recruiting more bees. However, rival scouts are able to identify their competitors, and will try to inhibit their opponents dances by headbutting the dancer while emitting a short vibration. This process of dance-headbutting will continue until one group of scout bees recruits a critical threshold of bees, and the swarm departs to the new nest location.

This process appears to mirror the way the many competing neural networks composing your brain cross-inhibit each other, allowing the emergence of an effective and/or optimal decision.

What I'm hearing is the human brain is made out of bees.

I mean, hive minds seem somewhat less scary if you're basically already one anyway. I'm re-watching Star Trek: Voyager and every time Captain Janeway says "you're not a Borg, you're an individual now" I'm like, yeah, but... If the comparison holds, then the vast majority of menacing and scary hive minds do diabolical things like slog their way through a 9-to-5 job, then crash on the couch in their shorts with a bag of Doritos and a Netflix subscription. Some of them are named "Stan." They're pretty chill.

According to Wikipedia, the Quaker Oats company manufactured artillery ordinance during World War II. Oatmeal not only lowers the risk of heart disease when combined with a low-fat diet, but it also helped slay fascism.

Autonomous Cleaner Bot Cleaners wrote:According to Wikipedia, the Quaker Oats company manufactured artillery ordinance during World War II. Oatmeal not only lowers the risk of heart disease when combined with a low-fat diet, but it also helped slay fascism.

Though rather at odds with Quaker pacifism.

Several prominent Nazis after WW2 were invited into the post war administrations of both West and East Germany.

An Alan Smithee Nation wrote:

Autonomous Cleaner Bot Cleaners wrote:According to Wikipedia, the Quaker Oats company manufactured artillery ordinance during World War II. Oatmeal not only lowers the risk of heart disease when combined with a low-fat diet, but it also helped slay fascism.

Though rather at odds with Quaker pacifism.

Quaker Oats actually refers to the quaking of the earth underneath the firing guns!

Alpes a Septentrionali imperium wrote:The CIA did mind control experiments with lSD, hypnosis, and other chemicals called Project MKUltra

They dosed the subways, sadly i was off that day.

An Alan Smithee Nation wrote:

Autonomous Cleaner Bot Cleaners wrote:According to Wikipedia, the Quaker Oats company manufactured artillery ordinance during World War II. Oatmeal not only lowers the risk of heart disease when combined with a low-fat diet, but it also helped slay fascism.

Though rather at odds with Quaker pacifism.

Apparently the Religious Society of Friends have been protesting about this sort of thing since around 1877.

According to the folks at Quaker Oats, the Quaker Man was registered as a trademark on September 4, 1877 — the first U.S. trademark registered for a breakfast cereal. "The name was chosen when Quaker Mill partner Henry Seymour found an encyclopedia article on Quakers and decided that the qualities described — integrity, honesty, purity — provided an appropriate identity for his company's oat product." Today you don't come across a lot of impure, dishonest oats, but consumers in the late nineteenth century couldn't take such things for granted. To emphasize the purity angle, the original Quaker Man carried a scroll with the word "pure" on it.

https://www.straightdope.com/columns/re ... john-penn/

I don't think there is, strictly speaking, any reason why anti-Nazi ordinance cannot also possess integrity, honesty, and purity. Well, I suppose it depends on what we mean by "purity."

Autonomous Cleaner Bot Cleaners wrote:

An Alan Smithee Nation wrote:
Though rather at odds with Quaker pacifism.

Apparently the Religious Society of Friends have been protesting about this sort of thing since around 1877.

According to the folks at Quaker Oats, the Quaker Man was registered as a trademark on September 4, 1877 — the first U.S. trademark registered for a breakfast cereal. "The name was chosen when Quaker Mill partner Henry Seymour found an encyclopedia article on Quakers and decided that the qualities described — integrity, honesty, purity — provided an appropriate identity for his company's oat product." Today you don't come across a lot of impure, dishonest oats, but consumers in the late nineteenth century couldn't take such things for granted. To emphasize the purity angle, the original Quaker Man carried a scroll with the word "pure" on it.

https://www.straightdope.com/columns/re ... john-penn/

I don't think there is, strictly speaking, any reason why anti-Nazi ordinance cannot also possess integrity, honesty, and purity. Well, I suppose it depends on what we mean by "purity."

Cecil knows all.

Ethel mermania wrote:Cecil knows all.

Basically. If one wants "random factoids you can't help but remember," ...well --> https://www.straightdope.com/

I'm pretty such that's the first website I ever went to, and that was back in the day when it was an AOL thingy instead of a real website.

Autonomous Cleaner Bot Cleaners wrote:

Ethel mermania wrote:Cecil knows all.

Basically. If one wants "random factoids you can't help but remember," ...well --> https://www.straightdope.com/

I'm pretty such that's the first website I ever went to, and that was back in the day when it was an AOL thingy instead of a real website.

Fighting ignorance since 1973, it is taking a lot longer than we though.

First time i read the straight dope was in the Baltimore city paper when I was visiting a friend.

When a hornet enters their hive, Japanese honey bees will swarm it and begin to vibrate their wings quickly to heat up the hornet and cook it alive: https://curiosity.com/topics/japanese-h ... curiosity/

The Olympic flag's colors are always red, black, blue, green, and yellow rings on a field of white. This is because at least one of those colors appears on the flag of every nation on the planet.

I learned this when I was rather young and it has always seemed to stick in my mind.

The Incans(The people who occupied modern day Peru) believed that the first
Man came out of a hole in the ground and that a rich person is someone with a lot of followers.

Yansu wrote:The Incans(The people who occupied modern day Peru) believed that the first
Man came out of a hole in the ground and that a rich person is someone with a lot of followers.

It seems that this civilization was wise beyond their years. They already foresaw that followers equals wealth, just like we do now with social media.

Then again, they invented Incagram.

The blAAtschApen wrote:

Yansu wrote:The Incans(The people who occupied modern day Peru) believed that the first
Man came out of a hole in the ground and that a rich person is someone with a lot of followers.

It seems that this civilization was wise beyond their years. They already foresaw that followers equals wealth, just like we do now with social media.

I fear they meant dependants, not followers. How rich someone was was measured by the amount of people they supported and provided for. A philosophy western capitalism had to destroy asap of course,

The Alma Mater wrote:

The blAAtschApen wrote:
It seems that this civilization was wise beyond their years. They already foresaw that followers equals wealth, just like we do now with social media.

I fear they meant dependants, not followers. How rich someone was was measured by the amount of people they supported and provided for. A philosophy western capitalism had to destroy asap of course,

Don't ruin my puns with facts

The blAAtschApen wrote:

The Alma Mater wrote:
I fear they meant dependants, not followers. How rich someone was was measured by the amount of people they supported and provided for. A philosophy western capitalism had to destroy asap of course,

Don't ruin my puns with facts

BUt it is such a lovely fact. For one, it shows how "foreign aid' programs in fact did wonders to destabilise societies that were not capitalist - which ofc was the intention all along.

Alpes a Septentrionali imperium wrote:The CIA did mind control experiments with lSD, hypnosis, and other chemicals called Project MKUltra

Mortal Kombat Ultra?