I tried feeding frozen peas to ducks in a pond near me. The peas mostly sank below the water immediately, and the ducks didn't seem to care for them anyways. A few of them came over to investigate and weren't interested after checking them out. I might've been doing it wrong, or maybe the ducks just were just too used to getting fed bread.
Zaphod Beeblebrox's earlier years
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Boy, have I heard that song before. / (musical notes)
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“Incredible you say? But true, ladies and gentlemen! … He has only one head!”
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“Yes, with the amazing new ‘knife,’ you only have to wear the skin of those dead animals.”
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“Well, it just sort of wriggled its way up the beach, grabbed Jonathan, and dragged him back again. I mean, the poor thing must have been half-starved!”
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WARNING SHARKS IN AREA
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“Yo! Everyone down there! This is the jackal! I’m tired of slinking around the perimeter! … I’m coming down to the kill! … Is that gonna be cool with everyone? … I don’t want trouble!”
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“It’s okay! Dart not poisonous. … Just showin’ my kid the ropes!”
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Eventually, the chickens were able to drive a wedge between Farmer Bob and Lulu.
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"MOOOOOO FARMUR BOB Mooo"
Yeah, even accounting for perspective, the ratio seems off
Interestingly, he redrew this for The Far Side, it previously appeared in his earlier strip, Nature's Way:
Some background on this comic:
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The flak over the "Tethercat" cartoon is of a sort I always find interesting. I could understand the problem if these were kids batting an animal around a pole, but that natural animosity between dogs and cats has always provided fodder for humor in various forms. In animated children's cartoons, for example, dogs and cats are constantly getting smashed into oblivion by a variety of violent means. (I'd like to know if the creators of "Tom and Jerry" got these letters. Probably, so that doesn't help me.)
What I think I've figured out is, in animation, a cat might be flattened by a steamroller or get blown up by dynamite, but a few seconds later we see him back in business―chasing something or being chased until he's "killed" again. There's never a suggestion that the cat's suffering is anything but transitory. In a single-panel cartoon, however, no resolution is possible. The dogs play "tethercat" forever. You put the cartoon down, come back to it a few hours later, and, yep―those dogs are still playing "tethercat." I suppose some people may have appreciated a disclaimer at the bottom of the cartoon saying, "Note: A few minutes later, the cat escaped, returned with a bazooka and blew the dogs away." (Of course, now I'm on the dogs' case.)
IMO free will is commonly misunderstood. It's not an absolute property, it's a relative statement. In other words, something doesn't "have" free will, the term is merely shorthand for "behavior that can't be predicted". To me, a rock doesn't have free will because I can use relatively simple physics to predict its behavior perfectly. Other humans have much more free will because it's much harder to predict their behavior. A bug is somewhere in the middle. To a superhuman intelligence (supercomputer, aliens, deity, take your pick), humans don't have free will, because our behavior can be perfectly predicted.
That squares with my opinion on QM in that even if deterministic interpretations of QM are eventually rigorously ruled out, I would still be of the opinion that if we could poke through the underlying substrate and query an intelligence there, our behavior would be perfectly predictable. Much like a video game character discovering the math behind the RNG that controls their universe. So they're kind of orthogonal concepts, but somewhat related.
100%, I avoid using plastics as much as possible around anything that I ingest that involved heat somewhere in the production process. Not entirely possible, but I do what I can.
The universe is deterministic. Quantum Mechanics doesn't really disagree with this, it's just not as popular an interpretation as the other ones. Even if deterministic QM interpretations eventually end up being ruled out rigorously, maybe we could someday "poke through" to the underlying substrate, like a video game character figuring out the seed for the RNG that determines their universe.
Sounds like a bubble, which isn't a bad thing but not very common in the US IME. I haven't looked at housing prices in that area, but I'm guessing they would be obscenely expensive for most people. Even where real estate is much cheaper than that, I've only really known a few people that have done that sort of thing and they're all well-off.
I'm also going to plug the community we've got over at !AskUSA@discuss.online, it's great for casual US-focused questions like this.
If you rotate him around the vertical axis by 180°, his head will be oriented the same way as the pictures.
The big news will be that John Titor is being sent back in time to save us from the Epochalypse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor