It’s true that Marionberry is one of the most delicious as well as aggressively thorny, but there are many excellent thornless cultivars pioneered by the University of Arkansas, including Triple Crown and Prime Ark, as well as the series named after Native tribes, Apache, Navajo, Arapaho, which are among the sweetest.
Not to shit on other people's work, but I can't help to think that all this effort breeding cultivars of (very invasive) European blackberries could've been better spent further domesticating native species that indigenous peoples have often already partially domesticated. In fact some already exist.
Shouldn't we be focusing on plants that aren't a constant threat to native ecosystems?
Usually I'm the one making this argument to naysayers. But we're talking about plants of the same genus so there's definitely competition for market space, policy, funding, agricultural land, etc
You are wrong in so many ways its hard to know where to start but no we 100% are not better off, "further domesticating native species that indigenous peoples have often already partially domesticated" a phrase that barely even makes sense in the context of the need for modern agriculture to feed 8 billion people.
Technically wouldn't any newly bred cultivar pretty much be an invasive species, should it be capable of surviving, competing with, and cross-breeding with its natural kin?
Blackberries can choke out entire hillsides and meadows. They're highly invasive in certain environments. There are other delicious invasives you be more familiar with like prickly pears (Mediterranean climates), ice plants (coastal scrublands), amaranth (everywhere), and dandelions (everywhere).
The Himalayan Blackberry (rubus armeniacus, native to Armenia and Iran) is definitely a damaging invasive species. Even if I have picked and eaten at least a quart of its yummy fruits in the last week, I’ve also spent untold hours pulling out its damn roots. It competes with English Ivy for the most murderous in crowding out other plant life around here.
Blackberry is wildly invasive in the Pacific Northwest. It forms dense thickets that choke hillsides and watercourses, and interfere with the movement of wildlife.
It's a small perk that you can head out with a few bowls and fill them up with delicious berries in record time to make pies with. Besides that, they really do suck.
Is temporary. On their native areas they allow trees to grow, then the trees eventually grow over the bramble, take the place and blackberries leave. lots of animals big and small find refuge on those places. Is more a cure than a choke [on their native areas I repeat]. I hate to be attacked by the plant, but their utility for birds, insects and mammals can't be denied.
But If you want 'blackberries' on East USA the correct way is to use the totally equivalent black raspberry Rubus occidentalis that is an USA native, not so tall and has several good selections available. Look for Munger, Jewel or Blackhawk for example in your plant nursery. Easy fix and easier to harvest clean as it detaches from the peduncle.
They can be an absolute menace when overgrown in a garden. And there's no way you're going to be able to pick the fruit from most of them when they're bunched up and taking dozens of square meters of land, only the ones on the outside layer.
That's not really how that works. Certain crops are edible but we don't want them to spread too much because they easily overtake other, more fragile species. This applies to blackberries.
Blackberries are definitely an invasive species, at least in Australia - you shouldn't eat wild ones because they're commonly sprayed with herbicides to try and control them.
Health is only temporary, and everyone in your family is going to die, until someone makes a trillion dollar startup to cure aging. So it is fundamentally wrong to put health, family, and work as things opposing each other, ultimately they are all needed on a way to get all of the galaxy filled with life. And as Susan have shown one can both do great work, and have a big family with 5 children.
Isn't that person and stress source dependent. Also working until late in life actually improves mental acuity and fights off dementia.
So maybe work but not in excessively high stress loads is your point?
Though i think your implied underlying assumption that because she was a leader in tech and under a high workload somehow caused this is unfounded and unnecessary.
Yeah, but magnitude wise it doesn't seem like a huge difference of 56 vs 90. 56 to me now looks way early, but I assume when I get 70 then I start to think that 90 looks way too early. When I was 10 years old, 56 seemed miles away though. So there's always going to be this problem. Especially since supposedly the older you get the faster time seems to go. So the fact that I and we are all going to die at some point not too far away is still something that is constantly in the back of the mind and frequently on the front.
E.g. compared to being able to live more than 1,000 years or forever and with body in its prime condition recovery etc wise. E.g. having a 25 year old body for 1,000+ years.
Why it's a good idea to fill galaxy with life? Why should we care about it? Also, seeing that our current civilization-system is already at the brink of catastrophe, we should focus on less ambitious goals, such as preserving life on Earth.
1. I don't want my children to die. And i don't want all the life on earth to be eliminated by a random asteroid.
2. Imagine two planets, people on one of them believe that expanding is the moral imperative, and the other want stay where they are. Eventually the people from the first planet will be technologically as far away from the people on first planet, as we are from people on Sentinel island. And therefore will be completely reliant on goodwill first people.
3. The only way to preserve life on earth is to develop space technology, once we have sufficient industry in space, controlling whether on earth will be a simple task, trivially solving climate change issue.
Absolutely worth it. We wont fill the galaxy filled with life because the galaxy is huge and we are but one tiny tiny portion of it. For us to survive and do anything impressive takes all of human ingenuity.
Also those two items aren't mutually exclusive. Both can and should happen in tandem. Anyone arguing otherwise is just a mentally lazy person.
Whenever you have two goals competing for the same resources, you need to prioritize. I'm for preserving life on Earth first, and spreading it to other places as a distant second.
Again you aren't competing for the same resources. Our global resources are plenty. You are unnecessarily making a dichotomy.
Of course preservation of life on our planet should be paramount. We can also pursue space travel. Space travel research isn't whats killing our planet.
If such thin perovskites ever become cheap and stable enough, they will allow creating autonomous, hydrogen filled, cargo transporter dirigibles, which could be faster and cheaper replacement for trucks.
Well, if people live for really long time like 10000, it would become much easier to travel to other stars with technology that we already have, so there will be plenty of "ecological niche to live in".
Would it really be much easier? It's already possible, we just would have new generations on the ship when we arrive. We don't care enough about those future generations to take off for a new world today. Will we care more about our own 10000 year futures?
Passing down skills and ideas needed for the mission to survive and succeed over multiple generations is a very hard task.
A group of skilled and motivated people who spend a small percentage of their lives on a ship, is going to be very different from a group that is trapped in a small town for generations.
My estimate would be that the mission to succeed is going to need 10-100x more people on generational ship compared to a transport ship. (million vs tens of thousands.)
But this time it is a testable mathematical theory. If it turns out that it is possible to find a Turing machines that behave like humans, we will be in position of a god to them, outside of their time and space, able to control everything that happens to them. But then maybe Penrose is right, and such a machine is impossible.
In any case we have managed to find that the right question to ask is not idealism vs materialism, but computationalism vs non-computationalism.
Depending on complexity of the pattern Hashlife may be unable to speed up the computation and even may turn out to be slower than the simple implementation.
The most annoying thing about Permutation City is that it intentionally disregards complexity. Generally in simulation it will be possible to speed up many types of computation, but there will be many computations that will be impossible to speed up, even some of simplest cellular automata are like that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_irreducibility
That's a valid wish, but there is already a large number of people in America who oppose American values. So in principle there is no difference whether their number will grow by immigration, high birthrate, indoctrination of other peoples children, or adults changing their views.
So simply opposing immigration won't accomplish what you want, it will only be used as a weapon against you.
If you really want to keep your values, you need to find ways to
attract more people who have the same values.
E.g. Cubans who run away have a good immunity against communism, that's why people who make it so easy to cross the border by foot, made it hard to enter by boats.
He was certainly not predestined, but his inclinations and temperaments did distinguish him. True some luck is involved; it is a necessary part, but individuals are often what induces the procuring of wealth.
> The fact that 3 years in we are still collaborating with Russia on the ISS and in other scientific programs is deeply disturbing.
Do you think Putin cares about scientific programs enough to stop killing people?
All the "we won't talk to Putin, but will buy Russian gas reexported by another murderer Aliyev" is very nice and emotional, but it did not have any positive effect.
If instead of all of this theater with sanctions, EU and US gave more weapons from the start, and removed regulations to drop oil prices, Ukraine would have won at the end of 2022, and at a much smaller cost than damage to the EU economy already caused by sanctions.
The problem with p-zombie argument is that it is completely inconsequential.
It is like if i say there is some property let's call it phi-factor, i am certain i have it, some people have it too, and some do not, but there is absolutely no way for others to tell who has this phi-factor thing and who does not, because it doesn't cause any difference in behavior of people.
This kind of hypothesis doesn't explain anything and does not predict anything, and therefore it is not possible to build any logical chain based on it.
There are good versions of p-zombie argument, e.g. you could say that it is very hard to find difference in behavior of people and p-zombies, but if you create planet like simulation inhabited with p-zombies they will have large differences, e.g. they will never develop art, or science, or religion, or will die out because will not want to have children.
In any case there needs to be some measurable difference in behavior, for argument to be valid. But since this is a normal testable theory, it does not lead to the same kind of self-contradictory statements as p-zombie version, and therefore is not popular with philosophers who want to talk about things they have nothing to say about.
The argument is not inconsequential, you just need to understand the work the argument is trying to do. If you are only interested in testable hypotheses, then the argument isn't relevant. But that's not the only thing that matters in Science. Science doesn't operate free of assumptions or conceptual frameworks. An experiment is situated within a set of background assumptions that determine what the experiment outcome says about the world.
Our conceptual framework for understanding consciousness also matters, and the p-zombie argument is directly relevant to what conceptual framework is a plausible basis for doing a science of consciousness. The zombie argument puts limits on what the brain sciences can say about consciousness as such, i.e. the qualitative feel of subjective experience. The very point of the argument is to elucidate the limits of scientific explanation regarding consciousness. For that it is very consequential.
Could you bring any example where non-testable hypothesis have mattered in science, or even have been proposed?
As far as i can tell the p-zombie argument is a variant 2=3 "proofs" with hidden division by 0. People claim as truth a proposition with no consequence,then claim that a proposition they want to prove follows from it. It does not elucidate anything.
The limited variant of the argument which predicts something does help in understanding the limits, but p-zombie supporters do not like that argument because it also shows the boundaries of what brain sciences can't say, and that is not much.
>Could you bring any example where non-testable hypothesis have mattered in science, or even have been proposed?
If you think of science as just a collection of empirical data, then you won't find any value in untestable hypotheses. If you think of science as an enterprise that's aimed towards explanations about the world, then conceptual data matters. Interpretations of quantum mechanics are a fruitful ground for non-testable conceptual work to be relevant to science. Here is one example[1] of the Many Worlds interpretation providing conceptual and intuitive support that helped advance quantum computing.
But beyond that, what an experiment tells us depends on our conceptual framework. When we hear a click in a Geiger counter, are we merely detecting clicks in this particular device, or are we detecting electrons out in the world? This isn't something that an experiment will decide for us. The conceptual framework we are operating with allows us to say the click isn't just the detector going off, and our model of these clicks isn't just predicting when this device will click in the future, but rather that our experiments are detecting the existence of actual electrons too small to interact with without special devices.
Interpretations of quantum mechanics are testable, they have to produce quantum mechanics, which puts a very narrow constraint on possible theories.
The equivalent of p-zombie hypothesis with quantum mechanics would be if one said that particles in addition to coordinates have to be described by one more variable, which does not affect any of other equations of motion. These type of theories do not have to obey any constraint, and you can trivially produce an infinite amount of them.
You can say that this kind of variable has different value for particles in human brain, therefore study of this additional variable is more important than the study of the rest of physics. But this won't improve your understanding of either the brain or physics, just like p-zombie hypothesis does not.
>Interpretations of quantum mechanics are testable, they have to produce quantum mechanics, which puts a very narrow constraint on possible theories.
No, this is not what anyone means by a theory being testable. An interpretation of QM by assumption reproduces all the same results of QM. That's why its an interpretation. In the same way, the p-zombie thought experiment by assumption reproduces all of physics without any deviation. QM interpretations and the p-zombie argument are on the same footing here.
>These type of theories do not have to obey any constraint, and you can trivially produce an infinite amount of them.
This just shows a lack of understanding of what the p-zombie argument is claiming. Perhaps revisit your initial misconceptions rather than piling on the mistakes?
Interpretation of QM does not "reproduce results by assumption", it provides a computational scheme for obtaining equations of QM. P-zombie argument on the other hand does not produce anything.
Hopefully this will allow to develop new thornless varieties that will duffer only in presence of thorns and not taste.