Month: November 2015

Stoned suburbs

“Should we smoke before we pray?” Cynthia Joye asked, tapping the Bible resting on her lap. Joye had just arrived at her friend’s home in Centennial, Colorado, a suburb south of Denver, for the 5th or 6th meeting — it was hard to keep track — of Stoner Jesus Bible Study. “I think the plant is sacred. It puts people in a frame of mind where you think of God.”

the new xanax to try to overcome the existential ennui of suburbia.

Gmail Writing Emails

Here are a few of the responses that come pre-programmed in the updated Gmail Inbox app:

Mom, you’ve already sent me this article about bacon causing cancer, like, 5 times.

Mom, yes, I listened to your voice message. Thank you for also e-mailing me everything you said in that message. But it’s July. Do we really need to start discussing Thanksgiving plans already?

I’m not entirely sure how you managed to sign the whole family up for these automated USA Today updates on the bacon cancer story. Kudos, I guess.

And now you’re using that thread to plan Thanksgiving. Great.

Touchable holograms

Ultrahaptics had recently announced a working tractor beam that uses high-amplitude soundwaves to generate an acoustic hologram that can pick up and move small objects. The team is now designing different variations of this system. A bigger version with a different working principle that aims at levitating a soccer ball from 10 meters away; and a smaller version, targeted at manipulating particles inside the human body.

On Apple Picking

“I have never met or heard of someone coming to our Eastern Washington apple-growing region to pick apples for leisure. It must be an East Coast or urban thing.” Pheasant Orchards found the idea of picking for fun “hilarious and sad,” a reflection of just how estranged from nature modern Americans must feel. “We don’t try to build our own furniture, or cars. We don’t feel the need to go to the forest ourselves to cut a tree down when we need lumber. Our economy has raised people’s quality of life by becoming more efficient and productive. I don’t understand why we want to go backwards when it comes to agriculture.”

Coywolf evolution

The coywolf has evolved in the last ~100 years.

It is rare for a new animal species to emerge in front of scientists’ eyes. But this seems to be happening in eastern North America

2022-06-02: Evolution seems to be faster, perhaps in general, than expected.

The study is the first time the speed of evolution has been systematically evaluated on a large scale, rather than on an ad hoc basis. The team used studies of 19 populations of wild animals from around the world. These included superb fairy-wrens in Australia, spotted hyenas in Tanzania, song sparrows in Canada and red deer in Scotland.
“The method gives us a way to measure the potential speed of current evolution in response to natural selection across all traits in a population. This is something we have not been able to do with previous methods, so being able to see so much potential change came as a surprise to the team. Whether species are adapting faster than before, we don’t know, because we don’t have a baseline. We just know that the recent potential, the amount of ‘fuel’, has been higher than expected, but not necessarily higher than before. Evolution cannot be discounted as a process which allows species to persist in response to environmental change.”