Announce protest actions, general chit chat or give your opinion on issues we haven’t covered for the day.
The Editor doesn’t moderate this blog, 3 volunteers do, they are very lenient to provide you a free speech space but if it’s just deranged abuse or putting words in bloggers mouths to have a pointless argument, we don’t bother publishing.
All in all, TDB gives punters a very, very, very wide space to comment in but we won’t bother with out right lies or gleeful malice. We leave that to the Herald comment section.
EDITORS NOTE: – By the way, here’s a list of shit that will get your comment dumped. Sexist abuse, homophobic abuse, racist abuse, anti-muslim abuse, transphobic abuse, Chemtrails, 9/11 truthers, Qanon lunacy, climate deniers, anti-fluoride fanatics, anti-vaxxer lunatics, 5G conspiracy theories, the virus is a bioweapon, some weird bullshit about the UN taking over the world and ANYONE that links to fucking infowar.
Could a Chlöe Swarbrick leadership see the Green party out preform Labour?
You are so right. NZ Labour has been imported preformed from the UK with so many of our apparatchiks having done intern there. Greens, if they stick to their kaupapa and do things the NZ/AO way with enlightenment from the guidance of wise, past Maori leadership brought to the present, could be our ‘doing and being’ not our undoing as in the recent past.
Can analysis of human society for simple divisions lead to being classified as a sea slug or an octupus?
https://www.wired.com/2013/10/how-the-freaky-octopus-can-help-us-understand-the-human-brain/
…Scientists think one reason we humans can do those things is that we have an unusually well-developed capacity to learn and remember. Our short- and long-term memories are lodged in multiple parts of the brain—an arrangement underscored by people who have suffered, say, a prefrontal lobe injury. These people might have difficulty with short-term memory, but their long-term memories remain intact. Simpler organisms like sea slugs, however, use a single spot—and even the same synapses—for both forms of recall. And human long-term memories are made by a process known as long-term potentiation, which strengthens nerve synapse activity, allowing more data to be stored. Most vertebrate lab animals have brains that work the same way, so we’ve only been able to guess whether ours is the optimal—or the only—solution for achieving as much as we have, cognitively speaking.
The octopus may hold the answer to this question. Despite our last common ancestor being that worm, the octopus has evolved a similar setup for recording and storing memories. This is striking, because “not that many brains are organized to acquire a lot of memories,” says Binyamin Hochner, also of the Hebrew University. Hochner and his colleagues have discovered that the octopus depends on long-term potentiation to learn and create long-term memories. The presence of these familiar structures and dynamics in the animal, which has quite a different set of genes than vertebrates, suggests that LTP might be one of those rare, crucial elements of intelligence that Godfrey-Smith alluded to. With that tantalizing suggestion, researchers can now focus more intently on the workings of octopus learning and memory as an alien but useful foil for our own.
The octopus might even present new kinds of intelligence. Most of what we do all day—scratch an itch or sing along to Miley—is controlled by our outsize noggins. Our brains are big and powerful and have a highly developed frontal lobe, which handles the executive functions that make possible amazing things, such as studying octopuses. But it turns out that this sort of centralized encephalization is not the only evolutionary solution for developing substantial intelligence. The octopus’s unusual neuronal layout allows its eight individual, flexible arms to act and carry out instructions on their own—and in coordination with one another. That means the central brain doesn’t have to be bothered with small, continuous signals from and directions to each of the suckers. They’re operating on their own volition, a fascinating alternative to our own jointed, head-directed limbs. And it’s not just brain researchers who are learning from octopuses; one scientist has advised the military about ways of replicating this capability for troop and command structures, and roboticists are trying to figure out how to instill this sort of “embodied intelligence” into their bots. As one researcher puts it, the octopus is like the Internet, whereas we are stuck with individual CPUs….
Wellington – can we buy a little vial of that reality dust for other Councils? Before they in charge, have to be carried kicking aned screaming from the building and thrown in the duck pond.*
Council gets out the axe to fund the pipes – The Post, Wellington.
Another fiery council meeting is in the works as staff recommend further budget cuts to fund more than $1 billion of investment in Wellington’s pipes.
The proposal comes as the Wellington City Council is under pressure to show its dedication to funding failing water infrastructure, which has led to water restrictions across the region this summer.
It could also lead to a big rates rise. The council was on Wednesday considering a 15.4% rates increase, which is yet to be finalised but comes after three big increases for the city in the past three years…
The citizens are revolting:
Bad Sir Brian Botany – AA Milne
Sir Brian woke one morning, and he couldn’t find his battleaxe;
He walked into the village in his second pair of boots.
He had gone a hundred paces, when the street was full of faces,
And the villagers were round him with ironical salutes.
”You are Sir Brian? Indeed!
You are Sir Brian? Dear, dear!
You are Sir Brian, as bold as a lion?
Delighted to meet you here!”
Sir Brian went a journey, and he found a lot of duckweed;
They pulled him out and dried him, and they blipped him on the head.
They took him by the breeches, and they hurled him into ditches,
And they pushed him under waterfalls, and this is what they said:
”You are Sir Brian—don’t laugh,
You are Sir Brian—don’t cry;
You are Sir Brian, as bold as a lion—
Sir Brian, the lion, good-bye!”…
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/When_We_Were_Very_Young/Bad_Sir_Brian_Botany
https://community.scoop.co.nz/2024/02/wellness-van-doing-the-miles-for-rural-health/
A free wellness van will be touring the country from February to December 2024, offering free health checks for those in agricultural communities. Often in rural areas, time is scarce, and doctors can be hard to access, so general checkups can be missed. This can have devastating consequences for families…
If Dr Reti takes the accolade for this then it is a good start for health.