Our upstairs is a converted attic and all wood, except the carpeted floor. There are several spots where cats have tried to destroy the house, I have no idea how we can fix that kind of thing. The only thing that has worked is to stack up objects in front of the tempting surface.
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Obviously doesn’t work in every case, but we used some combination cat hammock/scratching post things to give them a place to hang out, and a bit of catnip sprinkled on help reinforce that those were good places to be.
Also, they often have a routine… ours like to scratch shortly after doing their business, so having the scratching surface in the area they’ll travel through afterwards gives a redirect.
If all else fails, there are the little rubber covers you can use on the claws to blunt them? They are a bit of a hassle to upkeep, though.
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That one bedpost I mentioned isn’t quite that bad, but not too far behind. 
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Relatedly:
Legal experts said the Oregon case is one of the first focused on public health costs related to high temperatures during a specific occurrence of the “heat dome effect.” Most of the other lawsuits seek damages more generally from such ongoing climate-related impacts as sea level rise, increased precipitation, intensifying extreme weather events, and flooding.
Pat Parenteau, professor of law emeritus at Vermont Law and Graduate School, said that zeroing in on the heat and the heat dome effect are elements that might make the Multnomah case easier to prove.
“When it comes to the extreme heat events that affected Portland, the scientists concluded, in looking at that event and then looking at historical records of heat waves in the Pacific Northwest, it would not have happened, but for human-caused climate change,” Parenteau said.
“That’s actually the first time I’ve ever seen climate scientists state a conclusion like that in such absolute terms,” he added.
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… the full video is not available anymore, but in it Patrick Dykstra describes how he’d slap bits of his equipment together to make clicking noises and the whales would respond — unfortunately Dykstra only knew how to click “hello”
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While officials have previously noted instances where it appeared that H5N1 on dairy farms had moved to nearby poultry farms, this appears to be the first time such spread has led to documented human infections.
The link between the poultry farm cases and neighboring dairy farms is still just a hypothesis, however, Nirav Shah, the principal deputy director at the CDC, emphasized to reporters Tuesday. “It is a hypothesis that needs and requires a full investigation. But that is a hypothesis at this point,” he said of the link between the dairy farms and the poultry farm. So far, there is no direct evidence of a specific source of the poultry farm’s infection, and the route of infection is also unclear.
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If you can open these images in a new tab you might see them bigger. I can do that in Firefox; not sure about other browsers.
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So weird to think when I was a kid, we didn’t even know for sure if there were any planets in other solar systems, didn’t have any way to know, just sci-fi speculation. And here a few years later, they’ve catalogued 6700 of them.
At some point I picked up an old used Astronomy textbook at a library sale for 50¢ or so. All the pictures in it were super blurry, grainy black and white. Even then, some of the hypotheses and such that it mentioned about our own solar system had already been disproven or proven. Just amazing how much it has developed in my own lifetime, as well as the generation or two before. Pluto hadn’t even been discovered yet 100 years ago.
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It has been amazing what’s been discovered in just the last few years. I had an astronomy book as a kid that showed a dramatic drawing of an early theory, of a star swinging by the sun and pulling all the planets out by gravity.
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If you see this brand of cookie, stay away. They come in 3 or 4 varieties.
I discovered these during the pandemic, and have bought them on-and-off over the past few years, when I find them. They are very tasty. I have had a suspicion about them for a while, but I have now officially determined these are the cause of why I feel sick some weekends. They cause, in the words of Olestra, fecal urgency. Remember that term?
There is nothing in the ingredients that seem suspicious. Or at least, no more suspicious than other mass-produced foodstuffs.
Wheat Flour; Semi-Sweet Chocolate (Sugar, Unsweetened Chocolate, Cocoa Butter, Soy Lecithin [an emulsifier], Natural Vanilla Extract, Salt); Margarine (Vegetable Oil [Canola, Cottonseed and/or Soybean Oil], Palm Oil, Water, Salt, Mono- and Diglycerides [Mono- and Diglycerides, Tocopherols, Ascorbic Acid, Citric Acid (Antioxidants)], Soy Lecithin [an emulsifier], Natural Flavor, Annatto Extract [Color], Turmeric Oleoresin [Color], Vitamin A Palmitate); Brown Sugar (Beet Sugar, Cane Syrups); Sugar; Egg Whites; Fructose; Invert Syrup; Water; Baking Soda; Natural Vanilla Flavor; Salt;
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Google researchers claim that, in an experiment simulating what happens when you leave a bunch of code strings alone for millions of generations, they’ve observed the emergence of “self-replicators” from what began as non self-replicating code chunks.
The raw material for the experiments is tens of thousands of pieces of code, written in a programming language called—I’m not making this up—Brainfuck. The researchers call this an “esoteric language chosen for its simplicity” in only allowing two mathematical functions: +1 or -1. These chunks of code were randomly mixed, combined, and “left to execute code and overwrite themselves and neighbors based on their own instructions” over millions of generations.
The expected result was no result, that the code would all remain random with no particular trends. Instead, self-replicating programs emerged, which self-replicated themselves over multiple generations to swiftly hit the experiment’s population cap.
That’s not all: in the above scenario, new types of replicators often emerged, and in some cases out-performed and replaced the previous self-replicator.
The paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.19108
The setup of this sounds very close to an idea I’ve been kicking around for a few years now. Haven’t had the focus to finish coding it, but my (pretty obvious) expectations were a) that self-replicators would eventually form if the “chemistry” (the “code” of the programs) was able to support it, and b) that once a replicator formed, it would in short time take over, and only be unseated if a more capable replicator arose.
Edit: That paper’s very interesting… apparently they were even able to reproduce the same kind of results using emulation of the z80 CPU instruction set.
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A small study in Texas suggests that human bird flu cases are being missed on dairy farms where the H5N1 virus has taken off in cows, sparking an unprecedented nationwide outbreak.
In slightly better news:
Known infections in humans have all been mild so far.
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