The stupidest ideas of all time include thermostats and alarm systems that require WAN access and cell phone apps on the LAN, during extended power outages. Arguably anything essential in your house (or your car, or life in general) that requires an internet connection is broken by design.
This is false actually. The article OP linked is wrong or incomplete. The Romans brought and bred huge numbers of rabbits to Britain, for eating.
We know people are them because when the Romans left ("dark ages") they were eaten to extinction:
"Butchered hare and chicken bones appear in the archaeological record hundreds of years later, among Roman-period food waste. At this time, Sykes said, hares were farmed for food, and the Romans introduced rabbits to the island, although hares and chickens continued to hold religious associations for Britons. After the Romans withdrew from Britain in A.D. 410, the populations of hares and chickens crashed, Sykes said, and rabbits went extinct."
So what is going on in medieval times, centuries later, is they are being re introduced and horded by the Anglonorman aristocracy. This could simply be because, of course, half of England then is in today's France. The Plantagenet dynasty is even more French than the earlier Normans, who are of course mostly ex-Vikings. Later, at peak, the "English" Angevin dynasty territories stretch south from say Calais all the way thru Occ country to the Basques; and are intermarried with Spain and France. There's rabbits everywhere, trivial to bring back to Britain.
But they were apparently difficult and expensive to farm (which seems crazy as they breed like... rabbits) but this is perhaps explained by climate change-- the medieval warm period was about 950-1250 and then it began to get much colder. For example by 1315-1317 there was horrific famine caused by crop failures and abnormal cold summers. In this context the rich people are laboriously farming rabbits in artificial warrens inside of managed game preserves and poor hungry people get executed all the time for eating.
A good book for this era is Tuchman's 'Distant Mirror' which is like Game Of Thrones meets zombie apocalypse. Don't read it if you're French. It may be the reputational nadir of French civilization?
Shakespeare played with this intentionally, and repeatedly. He uses conies and cony in multiple plays. One example, Henry VI, Part III, act 1 (beginning of play) he stages a battle and the capture of one noble in the civil war in the scene where famously later he calls the queen dowager "she-wolf of France"... widow of his hero Henry V of Agincourt fame. Reading the play today it seems just a dry history and bunch of pompous nobles prattling on an on with allusions to ancient Greece and Rome etc. But on stage with raunchy actors, the word cony (meaning: coney, rabbit) is surrounded in this scene by about ten different sex and genitalia words. And in the middle of the scene -- where somebody is about to die -- they stop the historical military action and have a sex-word raunchy poetry slam:
"Lord Clifford. I will not bandy with thee word for word,
But buckle with thee blows, twice two for one"
Here it may be helpful to imagine peak Tupac vs Biggie, throwing shade.
On the one hand, Shakespeare has to get the play text as written approved by humorless puritanical, literally Puritan censors and the actual Archbishop. So he can't say the c-word or make jokes about giant dongs. But, on the other hand, he does. By leaving it to the innate intelligence of the audience to grok the double entendres even in the middle of a civil war. (There are many other examples in other plays that are less subtle, but this particular one is clearly written for the actors to ham it up on stage).
In one scene we get:
"And full as oft came Edward to my side,
With purple falchion painted to the hilt"
"I am your butt, and I abide your shot"
(Note here Shakespear is actually mocking queen Elizabeth's minister IRL, Robert Cecil, who was hunchbacked, by making this hunchbacked character Richard of Gloucester ie the later super-ugly evil king Richard III... who is so ugly women cross the street and dogs bark at him... ahem, prefer the company of men and abide their shot as the literal butt of the butt joke. Simultaneously, Cecil's IRL first cousin Sir Francis Bacon also preferred the company of his male servants and is perhaps the actual crown prosecutor responsible for everything from slander or libel to state executions. Another writer, the perfectly-named John Stubbs, recently had his right hand amputated for slut shaming the queen herself ("a gaping gulf"). So this is not dull. It's high stakes!
[Footnote: Separately, plays and allusions to Edward II or Richard II are always about male favourites getting special access to the king. This becomes scandalous during the reign of James, who was notorious for err granting root access privileges; this led to fair questions later about who was the biological father of Queen Anne's son Charles, then duke of York-- for whom New York is named ever since. James himself was the "butt" of the same jokes, as it was not clear who his father was either, and Henry IV of France mocked him as "Solomon" ie the son of David, his mother's Italian lover, David Rizzio, whose root-access was suddenly terminated in 1566.]
"made an evening at the noontide prick"
"My ashes, as the phoenix, may bring forth
A bird that will revenge"
(this is played straight these days but in Elizabethan times and in her actual presence, this is a triple double entendre where ashes is enunciated as 'asses' ; Phoenix is one of the queen's personal metaphors for herself, sewn into her clothes, printed in her designs, worn as a jewel etc ; and bringing forth the revenge bird is yes vanilla the mythical phoenix coming back from the dead... but bird in this era allows the actors/company to play this scene with bird=cock or bird=woman, which still exists in slang today. Here noted in passing when the bird is a Quail, that's always a prostitute joke, which then you want to look for dunks nearby about somebody Burning with crotch-Pox which is STD jokes again about Robert Cecil among others who have sexually transmitted diseases which are serious in era of no antibiotics... in the public theater with randos in the audience this is played for laughs, but in a private court performance with the queen or later king James present this is mocking specific courtiers whom everybody at court already knows have one or more super gross STDs)
"I will not bandy with thee word for word,
But buckle with thee blows, twice two for one."
Bandy from the French bander, 'to stretch/erect/thrust' & buckle, colloquially to couple and mate. This works because it's plausibly deniable for the censors and conservative audiences, but the actors can play it for raunchy laughs when they want. Like the entire scene. Note also this begs the question if the "two for one" is a threesome joke, and invites contemplation who was known for the best parties back in the day when two-on-one happened twice, or more exotically, whatever a fivesome is called (twice two 'for' one).
In case the subtext isn't clear enough or you don't want to believe Elizabethan Catholic poets liked to mock humorless Puritan censors, in rapid fire the scene continues with:
#prick
#finger
#wound (contemporary slang for vag.)
#thrust
#"spurn" which Shakespear also uses in some weird ways in other plays eg "spurn me like (your) spaniel" so could be a other raunchy slang word we have lost since
#so strives the woodcock"
#"so struggles the cony"
And the glorious: "triumph thieves upon their conquer'd booty"
This is not a good analogy, because both kidneys do the same thing and we don't need both of them to live.
Whereas the left and right brain hemispheres do different things that enable our species to be what it now is; which is more similar to what the article calls hind and fore/front brains, which again do different things that we wouldn't be us without. We would still be human if we had only one kidney the way we have only one bladder or one pancreas.
Kidneys are more like say lungs, gonads, breasts, or nostrils in that we have +1 extra; but the benefit created by multiplicity is ~doubling or capacity and resilience to local disease and random injury-- not a profound functionality. (Like is created by the second eye or second leg.) Of these, the second breast is radically more useful than the second kidney, and is probably a special case as it changes how we live so evolved.
I see the point, and understood it when I wrote my comment. However, as far as I know (and I could be wrong), there is no characteristic of either cerebral hemisphere determined at the embryonic stage that differentiates one from the other. As such the two hemispheres become functionally distinct but are not functionally distinct in principle or by virtue of being left or right.
Also, as others point out, hemispherotomies and -ectomies and to a lesser extent corpus callosotomies show that neither hemisphere nor their intercommunicative ability are strictly necessary for brain function. Yes, for ideal function, but that can be said of kidneys too.
The right and left hemispheres do different things… unless you had a hemispherectomy as an infant and then one half is able to mostly perform the duties of both.
I wonder if we would have been capable of endurance hunting without both lungs. I suspect that changing that would have very drastically changed human development.
Professional nerds in silicon valley and beyond might consider whether they can help, and how.
My understanding from long conversations with a beekeeper who has lost millions of bees, including entire colonies remote from agricultural and residential pesticides and artificial colony technology (which are some of the hypothesized causes blamed) is there is a mix of a) pathogens, and b) global supply chain homogeny distributing the pathogens mixed into various agricultural products eg mulch and soil, and c) environmental factors to include possibly RF which have been observed to destroy previously healthy colonies very quickly and then also scramble or interfere with the colony division/expansion process where a queen starts over. To include in some cases the queens apparently getting lost and/or leading astray their entire swarm of minion bees during the fragile process of relocating. This getting lost is apparently a new puzzling phenomenon.
Anyway, it would be bad if large fragile ecosystems upon which many species including ours depend, were deprived of key pollinators. There is probably some very smart insightful person or team here on HN who could help and profit from helping on a global scale.
I was in such a meeting yesterday where multiple participants were required by law to be each in same meeting from different computers in same room and with their mics and speakers on, and same law prevents use of conference room camera speakers and mic. There was a constant and annoying audio echo for everyone.
From governments, of course. There were times when criticism of anything and everything was a common and safe practice online. There are very few places where it is possible to keep practicing this now.
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