As far as I understand it, they used 25 human and 12 squirrel samples. Comparison was done among medieval red squirrel strains, medieval human strains, and modern red squirrel strains.
Finding: medieval red squirrel strains were closer to medieval human strains than to modern red squirrel strains.
Inference: In medieval England, leprosy spread between red squirrels and people.
Problem with the inference: If they used modern human strains too and then compared them all, it would have been a complete study.
Are modern red squirrel strains closer to modern human strains than to medieval red squirrel strains? What kind of differences are there? Is it that they evolved independently from medieval times to modern times and thus appear different? Lots of questions are unanswered.
> If they used modern human strains too and then compared them all
Presumably the number of leprosy cases originating in modern England is near zero, so actually procuring relevant strains seems impossible, no? I can't imagine that comparing random strains from places around the would would yield interesting results.
When we are only talking about a few samples in each group, 4 cases every few years seems fine.. I would hypothesize that many of the symptomatic cases are people who are foreign but exposed to UK endemic leprosy. Of course to establish how true that is means there are more data points to collect for cases with foreign contact and the involved lands.
I looked it up before I posted, and it's actually the opposite: the overwhelming majority of cases are from visitors to the UK who contracted the illness outside the country. The last confirmed case of leprosy being contracted in the UK was in 1953.
It is very low indeed, and a large percentage of the cases are involving strains from other countries, but hopefully the number is not real zero[1], even after discounting the strains from other countries.
Not only that, but is it really the case that genetic material survives for 600 years? Can we really say, 'we know that these 12 samples are from red squirrels 600 years ago'?
> "With our genetic analysis we were able to identify red squirrels as the first ancient animal host of leprosy," says senior author Verena Schuenemann of the University of Basel in Switzerland.
> However, under favorable environmental conditions, for example when tissues are frozen or become desiccated quickly after death, these processes become inhibited before the complete destruction of all DNA endogenous to the organism.
Do you think there are 12 red squirrels in Winchester that were frozen or desiccated 600 years ago?
While Brexit has not improved food quality in Britain, I'm sure some well-preserved dead squirrels remain in the area. Also, Winchester is not that far from the Isle of Wight, one of the red squirrel strongholds
I'm out and about all the time, walking, I go to various places, and yet hardly ever find any signs of dead animals. Most recently I have saw a dead dear (roadkill), and it has now decomposed pretty completely after 2 months.
I don't see how 1 red squirrel dies 600 years ago, and we still have its remains today, nevermind 12 of them! All from Winchester!
Here's a list of medieval buildings in Winchester. There are 30-40 buildings old enough. Hard to imagine red squirrels choosing to die in these places, not being eaten by other critters, and then remaining undiscovered by cleaners all this time, only to finally become historical DNA samples.
"Ólafur appears to have developed a personal kinship with the whale, choosing not to try to kill her again. But he had no problem shooting the whale’s calf. One summer, when he raised his spear and took aim at the calf, his spear went askew, hitting the mother instead.
With that, he’d had enough. That was the last time Ólafur speared a whale."
A mother's love is unconditional like 99% of the time regardless of the species and humans are more or less the same across culture, time and space 99% of the time :(
does anyone ever think about a less vicious world? like I know evolution / survival of the fittest all that is a thing but did it have to be like this? Could we have evolved without killing?
Haha valid I could tell you stories but trauma comparison is not a healthy thing they tell me I don't even speak to mine but idk the pain of giving birth should get some credit?
I feel like when I was growing up this statement would have been accepted as a near tautology perhaps a cultural thing? or maybe a testament to the trauma-centric times we live in?
I don't think it's a "sign of the times" thing, I think it's an internet thing. If you made that claim outside IRL today it would be well received by nearly everybody, including people with bad personal experiences (if only because most people prefer to believe that good outcomes are the norm instead of wallowing in pessimism.)
But the internet? The internet is packed with people who focus on the negative, even people who resent their mothers (who may love them and treat them well) because they're so miserable they wish they had never been born.
Always remember that talking to people online doesn't give you a representative sample of what people at large are really like. There's a selection bias in play; people who have problems with "real life" have a tendency to spend more problem online.
Why is there credit due? It's hard for me to accept the fact that children owe their parents for giving birth to them. I would say credit is due how the parents treat their child afterwards is what matters.
It's rather common in rodents that they eat their offspring, as many parents that kept hamsters for their kids know.
In sheep it's somewhat common for first-time mothers to not want their offspring and refuse them the early ('raw'?) milk, which is pretty much a death sentence. A slow, painful death unless culled by a human.
The term mother isn't very clear in itself. Who is the mother in an anthill?
Right, so the queen lays the eggs, and there her care stops. Is she the mother since she made the eggs, or would the drones that care for them be the mothers?
That's an interesting question. In principle intelligence could evolve as a fitness indicator. That is, a species of herbivorous apes could select mates for ability in music, art, and story-telling, and then you get a gentle tribe of orangutan-like creatures with human-like culture. However, unless they specifically settle on non-killing as the fitness indicator, I don't see why they'd be consistent about it. Even an orangutan may eat a slow loris from time to time. It's more morality's business than evolution's.
Assuming a high dimensional multi-variate search space I guess that leads to the question what the role of killing is in calculating fitness is right?
In my head the more humans / beings have known about their world the better the have survived so it makes sense intelligence would be a fitness indicator that speeds up the search algorithm. But there's no intuitive answer to why killing as many people as possible would be a fitness indicator like population wasn't a factor until recently so it's not like resource scarcity was the issue
Resource scarcity has always been the issue. Even ignoring water (still an issue), foraging and agriculture are both incredibly hard ways to supply food.
even if resources were highly limited it seems intuitive that the evolution algorithm would prioritize acquiring knowledge for efficient resource gathering over killing long term wouldn't it?
Let's say cave person a figured out how to dig a well cave person b not so much. cave person b kills cave person a to get the well and uses it for x years then dies because they didn't acquire the knowledge to dig another one. so cave person c will be like "protec well digger hooman". same for foraging let's say cave person a killed cave person b who was extremely good at remembering where trees are in a given area sure cave person a got a meal for today but is gonna die out unless they develop the skills cave person a had
sorry I'm a homeless dropout maybe I'm missing something super obvious I'm still not seeing the how killing leads to an optimum solution. Maybe a local maxima for sure but not the most optimal solution in the search space and as civilized as humans have become killing still persists I've seen some brutal stuff by some insanely rich folk (at least to me) that had absolutely nothing to do with resources so maybe that's coloring my viewpoint but idk even for inter species stuff some species have been hunted to extinction which is like a dairy farmer killing everything instead of planning for multiple generations it doesn't make any sense
Sure, it's not optimal long-term planning. Evolution doesn't plan ahead at all, its only super power in that regard is being very slow and gradual. If species A gets better and better at eating the abundant species B, and this continues for a million years and species A specializes and evolves to be unable to eat anything else, and the population of A increases to a point where B's population suddenly plummets, they could both go extinct. But usually A doesn't get that effective at killing B (before the crisis), and what happens is a repeating population cycle, the old boom and bust.
>it seems intuitive that the evolution algorithm would prioritize acquiring knowledge for efficient resource gathering over killing long term wouldn't it?
By what mechanism do you suppose evolution would implement long-term planning?
I was thinking (but forgot to say) that hunting is usually said to be what drove the evolution of intelligence. Humans needed tools, plans, and at least the ability to yell words if not grammar, in order to kill large tasty animals, that's the usual idea for how it happened, more commonly mentioned than intelligence as a fitness indicator (aka pure showing off).
Beautiful idea, but of course people have thought about and wished for an alternative and less viscous world for thousands of years. The current paradigm is the worst possible, except all others.
I think about this a lot does that explain intra species killings? cave person A see sabertooth cave person A dead cave person B also see sabertooth cave person B dead cave person c gotta kill sabertooth before cave person c dead. cave person eat sabertooth like sabertooth eat cave person A & B I understand but not cave person A kill cave person B cause caveperson different / new its not like humans eat humans haha unless you're a wendigo ofc
Two possible reasons why humans don't eat humans (except when we do):
We're hardwired to have empathy for our own kind, e.g. the "selfish gene" theory, stronger for kin than for strangers but nonetheless strong enough to create an almost universal taboo against eating people. Note however that many other animals do seem to be wired to eat some of their own children: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_cannibalism
"The most dangerous game." People are very resourceful, and furthermore have friends and family who hold grudges. Eating people is a bad strategy because people who make a habit of it tend to get killed for it sooner or later. Hunting nearly anything else is safer than hunting other humans.
Eating one's own species is a fairly complex topic, and there are many local optimas. For a detailed read on this topic, see "The Red Queen" by Ridley.
>A mother's love is unconditional like 99% of the time regardless of the species
That's just BS. In many species, the mother never has any interaction at all with the young. In some species, it's not particularly uncommon for a mother to eat her young.
> "mammal mothers eating their young are relatively rare and usually occur under extreme stress or adverse conditions"
perhaps i meant to say just mammals? would be cool if neuroscience advanced enough to figure out what makes mammals specifically different but alas like Moses won't live long enough to see that day
Generally, a tendency for a type of animal to eat its young correlates to a strategy of producing a lot of them. Rabbits, for instance. I'm blanking on the name of it but this is one of a pair of strategies where the other is to be long-lived - like humans, or at the extreme end, the greenland shark, which has a very low metabolism. That's the alternate way of persisting as a species: do nothing, and especially don't die.
Just want to point out that this is a free book. Direct link: [1]. Also, the real content is only a little over 200 pages. The rest is notes, references, and other resources.
With the recent advancements in AI and space technology, space militarization may become the top existential threat we as human beings face, probably topping both climate change and the depletion of essential resources.
Aptiv is a ~$21B market cap company and Hyundai didn't buy any portion of Aptiv (as far as I know).
Hyundai and Aptiv were joint venture owners of Motional (50/50). Motional is privately held and worth around $4B or $5B. Hyundai bought out some of Aptiv's stake and also invested some more in Motional. Hyundai spent ~$1B.
I cannot edit this anymore. Yes, meant that the control Aptiv had over Motional will now be with Hyundai, practically.
The point I was trying to make was that this was titled in Aptiv's Q1 presentation [1] as "APTIV EQUITY INTEREST TO BE REDUCED FROM 50% TO 15%". That is, they will offload most of the control to Hyundai. Immediately, Aptiv shares rose. So for some reason, this is seen as a good thing by Aptiv shareholders.
My point was and is: Considering the above aspect, it will be interesting to see how Hyundai will make use of it.
The story starts with Genghis Khan's plunder of Merv and the mass murder that was ordered by him. It mentions the artisans who were kept alive. Then it swerves to the plunder of Merv by the Oghuz, continues in the next paragraph, and then returns to Genghis Khan by announcing his death.
Again, it returns to the artisans,but mid-paragraph (as is typical in that article), switches to battles again, and returns yet again to silk and artisans.
At last, it connects the battles and the silk together.
This is probably why it appears very hard to read. Especially, the mid-paragraph context switches continuing to the subsequent paragraph.
“Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road is a tense economic game charting the rise and fall of the greatest city in the world.
In Merv, players are vying to amass power and wealth in the prosperous heart of the Silk Road. Through careful court intrigue, timely donations to the grand mosque, and favorable trade deals, players attempt to redirect as much of that prosperity as possible into their own pockets.
Meanwhile, beyond the city walls Mongol hordes approach. If you help construct the city walls, you give up on precious opportunities to build up your own stature, but leave it unprotected and you will burn with the city. Every decision is weighty and the consequences of each misstep are dire. Will you rise to prominence or fade into oblivion?”
Its a sad story, they were at the global pinnacle of science and arts, opened their gates to mongols without any resistance, only to be still slaughtered like cattle. Imagine how much additional positive influence on current world, how differently middle east region would look like, and islam itself.
Lesson to be learned which is still very relevant today - don't trust primitive barbarians to uphold any moral expectations just because it would be logical or nice, rather 'Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum'.
7-10 days of siege doesn't sound like "without any resistance".
(I'd be willing to believe the mongols broke their word on a surrender parley, but it'd be very helpful to have non-persian sources corroborating that)
Anything which has clear paths to decision making, does not need AI.
Anything which requires only massive data processing, does not need AI.
Regarding the adoption: The crux is mentioned in the article well. You are building on top of faulty systems. However great the AI model is, you are given faulty data to process. It will not end well.
The way releases are done and security is handled, one can argue that it makes sense to stay one major version behind - as long as it is a version to which security patches are applied regularly.
I follow this rule, or the variant where you wait for the first point release of a new major version, wherever possible. My desktop ran Debian bullseye until maybe about a month ago, when I updated to bookworm on its 5th point release. My browser of choice on that machine is firefox-esr, which is still on the 115.x branch.
I'm updating to bookworm on my daily driver laptop today - testing the full system backup now.
I've had minimal issues recently with debian but decades of debacles (not just debian, everything from RSX-11 to windows server) have made me cautious. So exhausted with wasted time.
> It's going to take something significant to get me off Bookworm.
Do you have experience using "Debian LTS"? It might have gotten me to stick to Bullseye for a little while longer, but I don't know much about it, and EOL was coming along soon.
Excellent course. The only caveat I want to add is, the estimated hours to complete (23 hours) can vary extremely, depending on your 'pre-mastery' of the subject (or lack of it). Prepare and pace yourself considering that.
API Guide:
https://github.com/google-ai-edge/model-explorer/wiki/4.-API...
Custom Nodes - User Guide:
https://github.com/google-ai-edge/model-explorer/wiki/2.-Use...