I'm in no way asserting that Colville restored the human form to art either, just observing that Hockney was far for alone in using the human form to convey aspects of his meaning.

Just musing....

In a nutshell, the paper basically says that the lateralization that led to the predominance of right-handedness occurred around the time humans became bipedal and around the time of neuroanatomical expansion, possibly related to bipedalism.

In other words, before these two changes, we used all four limbs for locomotion and had no preference for either forelimb for grasping. Then one or two things happened and right-handedness predominated. It seems that that neuroanatomical expansion took over the areas of the brain that previously allowed our left hands to be as capable as our right hands.

I write "one or two things happened" because it wasn't clear to me from the paper whether the neuroanatomical expansion that led to lateralization was necessary to and part of bipedalism, i.e., caused by our locomotion bits taking over other parts of the brain to manage our balance, or whether it was merely coincident with it.

Interesting questions asked and answered, more research needed.

My understanding of positivism is, in a nutshell, that its goal is to reduce everything to physics, including social, inter-personal interactions. My read of the article is that Rovelli is focused on the intra-personal, so to that extent it isn't positivism, or is at least a limited, focused positivism. Extending Rovelli's thinking to the inter-personal would be, IMHO, a categorical error: While we may one day be able to fully describe the physics (and electrochemistry, etc.) of everything inside the person, physics is insufficient to describe what happens between people, at least to the extent that what is happening is a result of each person's actions, choices, etc.

I think this where bringing qualia in as a level of abstraction is useful: Everything about us is ultimately operating on our physical hardware, but not everything about us is "just physics", since our "us" (our OS, if you will), makes observations and chooses actions that are determined at least to some extent by the "us", and not just by the physical operations.

At this point, one could bring in Skinner and make everything operational conditioning, or Kahneman for a slightly different take where much of what we observe or consider consciously (the energy-hungry slow system) has been pre-filtered by physical processes that are not available to us (the energy-efficient fast system).

If those lines of thought are correct - and that remains an open question - then we could potentially arrive at a complete positivism wherein everything is determined primarily by our internal physics, though we wouldn't get predictability for the same reason that we cannot solve the three-body-problem analytically or predict the weather accurately for all time or predict with certainty the motions of the planets, etc.: There are too many inter-dependent variables, and modelling will always lag actual behaviour.

I think we are on safe ground saying that intra-body behaviour is all physics, and on safe ground describing some of the physics responsible for what we call thought, e.g., neuropsychological processes, but at some point we need to model things differently to continue to make sense, make progress. We get away from just-physics at higher levels of abstraction, with the challenge being to describe the transitions from one model level to another (corporeal electro-chemistry to reflective thought and action to inter-personal relations to sociology and economy).

Sort of like how we know that everything is quantum mechanics at the appropriate scale, but that QM isn't terribly useful for modelling weather, planetary motion, etc.

Rovelli is a reductionist, the only logically and physically defensible intellectual position, while dualism is inherently supernatural, invoking phantoms, phenomenology that is purely fictitious.

It's a bit like pain: to create better analgesics, we need to work at the lower levels closer to the biology, but a patient describing pain to a doctor works at a higher, descriptive level, as does the doctor. Where is the pain, what are its qualities (dull, sharp, shallow, deep, burning, etc.).

Anyway. I live closer to James Bay than DC. Let that sink in a moment (and sink is what you will do if you attempt the drive).

Very, very few of these organizations have ever known, and fewer still have ever cared, about their Sarahs.

This isn't the end of Sarahs. Sarahs have never had their time or place beyond immediate teams, many of which have used Fight Club rules when it came to their Sarah: Never talk about Sarah, especially not to the boss. Other, non Fight Club rules: When Sarah is away, cover as best you can. Change jobs before Sarah retires. It is not the end, because the time of Sarahs never began.

So I agree with ";dr" comment, but it would apply had this been written by a human, by AI, by a super-intelligent shade of blue, or a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

I have no idea what these projects would be, but based on personalities, Roxy would chew through CPU and memory like a beaver (she loved turning large branches into small chunks), Bubba would inspire calm and peacefulness but walk into things (he was one-eyed and a little clumsy), Terry would stick like glue (an eBPF program, maybe?), Tizzie would work well most of the time then destroy your stuff (an AI agent?), and Topé would always be there, but never quite willing to participate (a bad Windows driver?).

I don't the area well enough at all to suggest an alternate name, but maybe Wiley, which is an indirect reference to Dag from Barnyard via Wile E. Coyote?

The Internet was just another network, albeit one that worked more reliably (most of the time) and with less configuration effort (most of the time) than UUCP. I didn't "go to the Internet", it was just another path to the computer on my desk, the most convenient way to get USENET. If I "went anywhere", it was deliberate, using Gopher or WAIS to find things then "visiting" a place with ftp. Or telnet.

The only "other place" I had then was the VT220 (? It's been a while) in the basement with the Gandalf (? ditto) modem, eventually replaced with a PC and a Hayes (? ditto bis). I had to physically go somewhere to access work, but then again, I had to physically go somewhere to access work even without remote/home access.

My then-me would say that the author confuses the Internet with "the world wide web as accessed from a personal device".

Perhaps if one was just the right age at just the right time, the Internet Was a Place, but for anyone before and anyone after it was just was and just is.

To ensure that RLs would always be manageable in size, we used distribution points (cRL and issuing) and decided at certificate issuance which RL would contain this certificate's serial number if ever it were revoked.

This approach scaled really well and kept RLs manageable.

There were applications that didn’t understand distribution points and needed the One RL to Revoke Them All, so we supported that as well (as an option, IIRC).

I'm struggling with how to articulate the idea that seems to be in so many Canadian heads, regardless of their military experience.

Assume the worst case, that the US invades Canada and that no allies come to assist, for whatever reason.

The best the US can hope for is a pyrrhic victory: while it may well be true that the Canadian military and population cannot hope to resist the US military, anyone thinking there would be anything other than a pyrrhic victory does not understand how, uh, what words to choose, hmm, bloody mindedly petty and vindictive Canadians can be.

There is that old trope about mistaking "polite" for "nice". Canadians are mostly are the former, and are mostly the latter most of the time, and can even be the former while not at all being the latter. But remember too the trope as to why so many of the specific rules of the Geneva Convention, etm., exist.

Canadians don't pick fights, generally, but see fights to the end, always, and almost always no matter what. And it's not a red mist thing: That comes and clears. What is left is cold. Sober. Focused. Are you still here? Are you not retreating fast enough? Do I still have functional limbs/weapons/comms? Carrying on....

We don't stop until it is safe to stop, and by safe I mean we can stand down and not have to stand to again, or until there is no we left.

Now, more tropes:

Longest sniper kill: Canada has the top spot and at least two more of the top five. Those are all recent.

Only force to meet its D-Day objectives: Canada, with fighting as fierce on Juno as elsewhere.

Only western soldier to fire on a Soviet: A Canadian with the group sent to protect Denmark from Soviets who were rolling fast and hard over northern Germany. The RoE were sort of vague on that point, but they were explicit about not withdrawing, about not giving up an inch. Words didn't work, triggers were pulled, a standoff occurred until sufficient forces arrived to convince the Soviets to withdraw to their agreed lines.

Before becoming PM, Lester B. Pearson won the Noble Peace Prize for the idea of UN Peacekeepers, of putting Canadians in harm's way to separate combatants in hot zones. The idea was taken seriously because memories of Canadian performance in WWII and Korea were fresh in mind. "Oh, those guys? Yeah, OK, ceasefire and separation sounds good."

Again, I am not in anyway suggesting that the US would not win in an invasion of Canada, if Canada stood alone. What I am suggesting is that what would be left (of the US, let alone Canada) would make the victory hollow and bitter.

(You do know that the Canadian boycotts that are so impacting tourism and distillers, among others, are not economically motivated, right? So many US talking heads cite tit-for-tat tariff nonsense, and very few miss the point entirely: Canadians mostly didn't give a damn about tariffs, but when "51st state" was mooted, even if as a joke, Canadians stopped buying US stuff. The tariffs could disappear today and many would still push for closer ties with the EU, possibly even membership, for distancing Canada from the US even more, all because we are fiercely independent, and willing to sacrifice a great deal to retain that independence. Canadians are mostly quiet about it, but never mistake silence for acquiescence or consent.)

Now, if you don't find gcc and neither of vi (and later vim) or emacs usable, well, let's not go there.

And the tools, they just keep getting better. Now I have both clang and gcc, and so many wayy-cool vim plugins to choose from.

I still pay for good hardware, but thanks to Linus and his ilk, I barely need to do that anymore.

:->

Yeah, I know, karma hit coming, but the other comments are so counter to my experience (I quite like the page and content) that I could not not comment.