RyanMcGreal

The only fresh strawberries I ever eat are local and in season. Everything else is just too disappointing.

It's clear that there also needs to be a change in culture and training among police services to discourage the intuition-based practice of deciding someone is guilty and then pressuring (borderline torturing) them to say something that can be taken as a confession.

For many human movements, the relation between intensity and injury is a u-curve with high risk at extremely low intensity (atrophy) and extremely high intensity (overuse/repetitive strain), and low risk at moderate intensity.

Sidenote: I recently finished reading The Story of the Human Body by Daniel Lieberman, in which he addresses this issue (among many others). The book is absolutely fantastic, an engaging, highly-readable page-turner packed with insights and epiphanies about how we can think about contemporary challenges from an evolutionary perspective.

I highly recommend Deirdre Barrett's book Supernormal Stimuli for a fascinating and detailed review of this phenomenon in its various manifestations in human societies.

Seriously, America: how is ANYONE still arguing against universal, single-payer health care?

I used to work in a building with a family of peregrine falcons living on the roof. It was never a dull moment outside our window!

Humans are domesticated primates, and like all domesticated animals we demonstrate the canonical properties of neoteny, or the adult retention of childlike traits: physical traits like rounder heads, flatter faces, shorter noses, bigger eyes and shorter jaws, of course; but also and more importantly the cognitive traits of playfulness, curiosity, creativity and innovation.

Indeed, it is in many ways the explosion of cultural innovation and exchange approximately 50 thousand years ago that marks the distinction between archaic humans and modern homo sapiens sapiens, who spread to every habitable continent on earth and developed a wide variety of inventions to facilitate living in diverse climates. Archaic humans also had culture, of course, but nothing like the innovation curve that has characterized the period since then.

America has some of the worst worker protection laws and regulations in the developed world: occupational health and safety; minimum wage; paid time off (vacation, illness, parental leave); lunch and other breaks; consecutive hours worked in a day; 'at-will' termination; and so on. It really is an extreme outlier.

In that case, is my clothes dryer a robot? In addition to its timed dry setting, it also has a feedback setting in which it runs until the clothes inside have reached a (configurable) specified level of dryness, at which point it turns off.