Do you get bigger by absorbing air (thereby increasing your buoyancy) or by absorbing water (with the opposite effect)?

In the sense that the original organic material has been replaced by minerals? I guess that’s a version of the old Ship of Theseus question.

We could use one, and assume we’re operating in the field of complex numbers:

1 N = North
i N = West
i² N = South
i³ N = East.

And we could use the complex modulus to indicate distance or speed… or we could map the Riemann sphere onto the surface of the earth and use a single complex number to indicate location.

I think the framing of questions like this assumes that there are certain “physical” things that follow one intrinsic set of laws, and certain other things that follow a fundamentally different, incommensurate set of laws.

But we don’t actually have direct knowledge of any intrinsic laws, physical or otherwise—the best we have are a set of purely provisional laws we’ve made up and regularly revise on the basis of cumulative evidence. And our method for revising these provisional laws requires that any new evidence that contradicts a law, invalidates it—provisional laws must apply to everything without exception. If we give ourselves the out that contradictory evidence can be attributed to “non-physical” causes, we can never invalidate anything nor update our models. So dualistic models are inherently unscientific—not because they’re wrong, but because starting with such assumptions is incompatible with the scientific method.

The study authors believe an eruption occurred around 1345, about two years before the start of the pandemic, from either a single volcano or a cluster of volcanoes of unknown location, likely in the tropics. The resulting haze from volcanic ash would have partially blocked sunlight across the Mediterranean region over multiple years, causing temperatures to drop and crops to fail.

Wow, that’s exactly what happened just before the Plague of Justinian (i.e., the volcanic winter of 536). I’m surprised they don’t mention that in the article.

Many of the people electing the pope have hopes of becoming pope one day themselves, so they elect someone they expect to outlive.

The original usage was to carry out (a command). In that original sense it was the sentence, rather than the prisoner, who was executed; but the meaning got transferred over time.

Unionized mitochondria.

Once we get good, universal real-time translation, we might start to see a new proliferation of local languages. And of small groups inventing their own cryptolects for privacy, trying to evolve them faster than AI can keep up.

Agnosia or asemia?

Secretary of Health.

Not a movie yet (AFAIK), but Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower is downright uncanny.

Wikipedia’s current events portal covers current events and conflicts with links to plenty of background info.

That article reports that a drug targeted at clearing amyloid proteins didn’t suffice to restore the brain’s waste-clearing functionality; this article reports that a drug targeted at repairing the blood-brain barrier does restore waste-clearing functionality (including amyloid proteins). So they’re not completely contradictory.

It looks like the research was done by academic and government-sponsored institutions in Spain and China, so hopefully it won’t just become a profit-making tool for the biotech industry.

Only enable this feature if you understand the security implications.

They should put that disclaimer on their entire operating system.

Montreal is just a subspace of Montcomplex.

Here’s a paper that tries to develop a method for measuring the difficulty of learning other languages for English-speakers (and potentially speakers of other languages).

This paper is concerned with the issue of “linguistic distance,” that is, the extent to which languages differ from each other. Although the concept is well known among linguists, the prevailing view is that it cannot be measured. That is, no scalar measure can be developed for linguistic distance.

Probably the same way Putin feels about Dobby.

Sign language isn’t just another way of expressing English that can be picked up like learning a different alphabet or a secret code. It’s a full, independent language with its own complete vocabulary, syntax, inflectional system, etc. that takes as long to learn as any other natural language.

It would be great if more people knew it for the sake of communicating with the deaf, but as a means of foiling surveillance, there are many other approaches that would be more effective for less time investment. (Hell, you might as well learn a really obscure spoken language that would be less likely to be recognized or deciphered than ASL.)