Saturday, November 19, 2022

George Lake George of 1874 fame /- Does walking help you generate ideas?

Indeed, in ACT Canberra weather is also nuts …


From accounts of missing bodies to ghostly hitch-hikers, enigmatic Lake George, located on the busy Federal Highway between Sydney and Canberra, has earned a reputation of Australia's very own Bermuda Triangle of mystery.
When full, Lake George is one of the largest inland freshwater lakes in Australia. However, the lake is rarely full and its constantly changing ...

Those from shady neighbourhood of Howell Avenue suggest that the most colourful legend surrounding Lake George Orwell is that of a Loch Ness-type monster that has occasionally been reported lurking in the murky depths of the lake (and allegedly retreats to subterranean mud caves when the lake is dry). In fact, an 1866 NSW Road Guide warned travellers "to be careful of a large water monster that occasionally surfaces for air".


Not so long ago in 1874 the lake was 7.4 meters deep …
The lesson learnt that George Orwell’s Lake, that is not a lake but a depression, was not as deep in 1984 as it was in 1874 


Does walking help you generate ideas?


Secret behind spectacular blooms in world’s driest desert is invisible to human eyes Frontiers Science News


Artemis 1’s Orion capsule sends Earth 1st image of home on the way to the moon Space.com


Early Humans May Have Cooked Fish 780,000 Years Ago Smithsonian


Beauty after COVID

Why Birds Are Anti-Aging Superstars

Audubon: “Wisdom the Laysan Albatross celebrated a big birthday last year, turning a whopping 70 years old. Flying for months at a time over the open sea, albatrosses’ bodies are built to last, and as far as we know, she is the oldest wild bird in the world. However, the reason for Wisdom’s extraordinarily long life—even living longer than the biologist who first banded her—remains a mystery. While most birds don’t reach their eighth decade like Wisdom, they have earned a reputation for longevity that has puzzled scientists for centuries. In 1623, English philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon observed that birds outlive small mammals. Now we know that birds, on average, live two-to-three times longer than mammals of the same size. Steven Austad, who studies the biology of aging at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, likes to compare mice that rarely survive more than a year outside of a lab with wild House Sparrows that can, at the highest end, live until 20…The best theories to explain birds’ longevity point to the power of flight as the major driver of avian biology. Annual migrations, sometimes for thousands of miles, require biological tricks for remembering geographic locationsmaintaining strong muscles, and keeping their eyes and ears working well. Flight also allows birds to more easily evade predators and find shelter. “They’ve had to be so highly engineered to succeed at flight,” Austad says. “That kind of physiological integrity has allowed them to stay healthy much longer than another animal.”


“My bet is that I think there’s less than six key insights that need to be made. Each one of them can probably be written on the back of an envelope. We don’t know what they are, but when they’re put together in concert with GPUs at scale and the data that we all have access to, that we can make something that behaves like a human being.”

From Carmack’s Lex Fridman. Well said.


Dungeon Masters quiet quitting


Cats are listening more than you think (NYT)


Boys who are valid


Are male central bankers more trusted?


The plans of Elon, for Twitter.  Recommended.  May or may not work, but way ahead of the whiny debate you see on Twitter itself.


How octopuses build their big nervous systems.


Extreme lake effect snow around the Great LakesThe Watchers