Sunday, April 16, 2023

Bees are sentient: Five pillars of wisdom

 It is said that a news story should be like a mini skirt on a pretty woman. Long enough to cover the subject but short enough to be interesting.


Puma’s Secret Garden: Study Reveals Sly Strategy of Nurturing Nature To Lure Prey SciTech Daily


Liberal Party members' homes raided by anti-corruption watchdog, according to report


Video: Drunken “Idiots” Decide to Touch a Moose. See What Happens FIeld and Stream


Has T. rex lost its bite? Menacingi snarl may be wrong AP


The Gambler Who Beat Roulette Bloomberg


 Bees are sentient The Guardian: inside the stunning brains of nature’s hardest workers…This March, Stephen Buchmann [a pollination ecologist]released a book that unpacks just how varied and powerful a bee’s mind really is. The book, What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories and Personalities of Bees, draws from his own research and dozens of other studies to paint a remarkable picture of bee behavior and psychology.



 It argues that bees can demonstrate sophisticated emotions resembling optimism, frustration, playfulness and fear, traits more commonly associated with mammals. Experiments have shown bees can experience PTSD-like symptoms, recognize different human faces, process long-term memories while sleeping, and maybe even dream. 

Buchmann is part of a small but growing group of scientists doing what he calls “fringe” research seeking to understand the full emotional capacity of bees. His research has radically changed the way he relates to the insects – not only does he now avoid killing them in his house, he has also significantly reduced lethal and insensitive treatment of specimens for his research


Five pillars of wisdom

Art / Proposal for Fourth Plinth, 2021, Goshka MacugaOn the Street, a new book by Edwin Heathcote / the world’s worst arts job listing?. See also the world of Jerry Gogosian / also related, First Sackler, now Bet365… / art by Packard Jennings / November Fine Art, prints for sale for charity / transform any drawing into an animation with Sketch

Architecture / do buzzwords kill the buzz around buildings? / touring the Svalbard Seed Vault / ‘exploring Gordon Cullen’s role in the development of the British architectural theory of the 20th century / Lego Modulex, the forgotten brick / Barbie’s dreamhouse(s) / My London DiaryBuildings of London, both projects by Peter Marshall / see also London then and now.

Music / Black Country, New Road’s ‘Live at Bush Hall’ concert film / it’s the 50th anniversary of The Dark Side Of The Moon / box sets all ready to go at SuperDeluxeEdition / all hail to the telescopes, plus an interview delving into their instrumental roster / remembering indie of the 00s / ‘why do modern pop songs have so many credited writers?‘ / rock biog, Jinxed, how not to rock’n’roll looks fun / a database of claims of music copyright infringement

Thoughts / a list of mass hysteria cases (or mass psychogenic experiences, in modern parlance) / picturebooks analysed by Slap Happy Larry / ‘inside the Swiss clinics where the super-rich go for rehab‘ / Rule of Three, a podcast about comedy / ‘When did cleverness become such a nuisance?‘ / the new Misalignment Museum in San Francisco is a memorial to an imagined future in which artificial general intelligence kills most of humanity‘ / perhaps pertinent, ‘list of inventors killed by their own invention‘.

Things, things, things, things, things. Alan Biet’s ‘KottkeGrand Canons‘ (via Kottke and elsewhere) / wonderful alternate reality Apple hardware devised and created by Dana Sibera / all about the (real) Apple Lisa/ find out the dimensions / what were the Ghost Rockets? / Hieronymous Bosch miniatures / surgery using Play-doh / Arkeonews, what’s happening in archaeology.