Faisal Aslam

I think @fullermingjr is a really nice guy and a gentleman.

Unseen wrote:
Don’t honeybees tell each other (reporting information) where to find newly-discovered nectar-hunting grounds, which then send other bees (behavior) to exploit them?

Apparently, when a bee goes to a flower, it leaves sweaty footprints on the petals.  Another bee can come along and smell the footprints and determine how long ago th…[Read more]

TheEncogitationer wrote:
1812 Governor Elbridge Gerry and a Boston district shaped like a mythological salamander

Whoa, nice factoid. I think I’ll remember this. I mean, I want to transmute enough brain cells to accomodate a more permanent memory. Salamandering, too? I always recall seeing districts with only a highway-wide corridor connecting…[Read more]

@strega – that’s a fantastic story.  The thing about pre-industrial people is their strong community ethos.  It shows how good it is for us.

Enco: the buzz is now snoring.

Y’all know that SCOTUS just defanged the Voting Rights Act, right? So incumbent legislators are already celebrating by ramping up gerrymandering.

Short:

According to my studies, one of the big differences between chimps (and the other great apes) and humans, is that we are “domesticated” (compared with them, our society is not structured around male-male dominance relations).  That means that we are able to cooperate and share.  Chimps can’t share, and therefore there’s no point cooperating.

We t…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Why humans are not clever chimps. (interesting site)

Theophilus Painter was not a very rigorous thinker, he kept making mistakes, of assuming things when he didn’t know, sometimes rooted in racial bias it is probably true.

New data from the National Institutes of Health show the human genome varies from the chimp…

[Read more]

But it has to be facilitated to some extent – someone has to be there to interpret and read out loud what someone is pointing to.

If somebody’s pushing somebody’s elbow as they type at a keyboard, or point to letters, then obviously that’s a pointless exercise.  But if they’re doing it themselves, it opens up communication to an otherwise non-verbal person.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
World of Woo: Facilitated communication.

Facilitated communication may possibly be woo sometimes, but it’s not always, and it provides a communication lifeline for people who can’t talk but can use their fingers.

I have a nephew who is severely autistic and non-verbal, and he now communicates on an i-pad.  He has…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
i did not notice anything about Islamic terorism.

Based on government and independent analyses, right-wing extremist violence has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of fatalities, amounting to approximately 75% to 80% of U.S. domestic terrorism deaths since 2001.

Illustrative cases include the 2015 Charleston church…

[Read more]

Jake,
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/right-wing-extremist-violence-is-more-frequent-and-deadly-than-left-wing-violence-data-shows