Drone Captures Dolphins Guiding Lost Humpback Whale to Deeper Water

Killer Whales Groom Each Other Using Tools Made From Kelp

Primates, birds, and elephants are all known to make tools, but examples of tool use among marine animals are much more limited. Reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on June 23, a team of whale experts has found widespread tool manufacture and usage in an endangered population of resident killer whales living in the Salish Sea—part of the Pacific Ocean between British Columbia and Washington. The whales fashion tools from kelp and use them for grooming purposes. 

“We found that southern resident killer whales regularly use lengths of bull kelp during social interactions, apparently as a tool to groom one another,” says Michael Weiss (@CetaceanMike) of the Center for Whale Research in Friday Harbor, WA. “To find that the whales were not just using but also manufacturing tools, and that these objects were being used in a way never before reported in marine mammals, was incredibly exciting.” 

Weiss and his team discovered this unexpected whale activity while conducting aerial observations of southern resident killer whales, which are a critically endangered whale population with fewer than 80 individuals left found in the Pacific Northwest. The team has been monitoring the whales since 2018 to learn more about their foraging and social behavior. 

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Small Pox - Defeating a Virus That Killed Half a Billion People

Immense gratitude. Well, immense is not enough. 

Well, I am a moron. Why do I expect people to have any gratitude for anything?

Thanks for eradicating small pox and making my life healthier (and my face better). 

Thank you.

Man, what a life it's been. With Max for 13 years, running water, electricity, health and so many things I take for granted.

Associative Theory Of Creativity

This research goes back to the 1960s, when psychologist Sarnoff Mednick was studying patterns of thought in people diagnosed with schizophrenia. He was exploring the idea that highly creative individuals might share certain associative patterns with those diagnosed with schizophrenia, namely, the tendency to make connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. In a classic 1962 experiment, Mednick asked participants to say the first word that came to mind when they heard a prompt like table. Less creative participants tended to respond with obvious associations like chair or leg. The more creative participants gave those answers, too, but they also came up with more surprising ones, like food or even mouse.

Mednick’s observations led him to propose that highly creative people have a different kind of memory structure—one that holds a wider range of ideas and forges more unexpected connections between them. He called his theory the associative theory of creativity. His research showed that creative ideas are more likely to emerge from combinations of concepts that are further apart in the mind’s conceptual network. The greater the distance between two ideas, the more original and surprising their combination tends to be. More recent research, by Kenett and others, confirms these observations.

Some of the best-known stories of invention come from unexpected associations. Velcro, for example, was invented when George de Mestral was walking his hairy sheepdog through a field of burr-covered plants. It’s notoriously difficult to remove burrs from an animal’s hair, which means the animal is going to carry seeds a far distance, allowing the plant to spread more successfully. De Mestral took out a magnifying glass and saw very tiny hooks that clung to the dog’s hair. Then he made the distant connection: The burr’s mechanism, designed by nature to spread seeds, could be used to make a clothing fastener. There’s no shortage of other surprising inventions that began with distant connections: Post-It notes, the X-ray, shatterproof glass, the microwave oven, silly putty, heart stents.

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Crazy Ants Lead the Way for Swarm Intelligence, Helping Colonies Plan Complex Tasks

Anticipating future events is often considered a hallmark of higher cognition, seen in mammals, birds, and even in some insects. Ants have long demonstrated intelligent group behaviors, like farming, architecture, even social distancing, but whether they can engage in preplanning wasn’t known.

That changed when researchers spotted something unusual near their lab. Longhorn crazy ants (Paratrechina longicornis) were carrying food back to their nest, but a few were also picking up and removing gravel from the path ahead.

“When we first saw ants clearing small obstacles ahead of the moving load we were in awe,” said study co-author Ofer Feinerman in the news release. “It appeared as if these tiny creatures understand the difficulties that lie ahead and try to help their friends in advance.”

This stood out because most known trail-clearing happens over days and it wasn’t clear what triggered it.

[--]

Crazy ants are known for their erratic movement and constant scent-marking. As they walk, they touch their abdomens to the ground every few steps, leaving pheromones that guide others.

In this case, those same trails turned out to be the cue for clearing behavior. Ants didn’t need to see the food or be part of the transport team to start moving beads — just one scent mark near an obstacle triggered the behavior and could put them into “clearing mode.” From there, they continued without further cues. As co-author Danielle Mersch explained, this behavior isn’t driven by individual understanding but emerges from simple interactions — showing how complex outcomes can arise from collective action.

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New York Court Recognizes Dogs As Family Members

Today, Justice Aaron D. Maslow of the Kings County Supreme Court issued a decision affirming that dogs can be recognized as immediate family members under New York law.

Specifically, Justice Maslow ruled that Nan Deblase may recover emotional distress damages for having witnessed the death of her son’s dog Duke who was hit by a car while they were walking through a crosswalk. In 2024, the NhRP filed two amicus briefs in support of the plaintiffs in the case, arguing that justice and the flexible nature of the common law require allowing the plaintiffs to recover emotional damages for having witnessed Duke’s death. Justice Maslow relied extensively on the NhRP’s briefs in his decision.

NhRP Executive Director Christopher Berry on this legal win for animals: “Too often, courts reflexively apply outdated precedents that treat animals as mere property, even when those precedents no longer reflect common sense. Today’s decision shows the justice system at its best: fulfilling its fundamental duty to deliver justice based on facts and reason, not outdated legal fictions. The Nonhuman Rights Project is proud to have contributed to this important outcome. It serves the interest of justice to recognize that Duke was not a legal ‘thing.’ He was a member of the family.” 

The defendant had moved to dismiss the case on the ground that dogs can’t be considered immediate family. Justice Maslow disagreed. “Adhering to unyielding general precedent no longer aligns the law with current societal norms concerning family pets,” Justice Maslow wrote.

A trial on damages will follow Justice Maslow’s decision.

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Shadow-Boxing with AI Safety

Notice the moral ambiguity in this problem, and how much more difficult that makes it to work with. Some people, including many who gravitate to technical fields like AI research, would prefer to stick to engineering problems, where there’s a clear right answer. To some extent, that’s ok, but they have to then admit that they don’t have any say in how their work will affect the world. They’re essentially a pawn in the hands of whoever decides what topic they work on, and that’s normally whoever supplies the money.

AI safety, as it currently stands, allows the AI world to feel that they do have control over what they’re creating. Of course, they say AI safety is a hard problem and requires more work, but they feel they have basically pinned down what they need to do to avoid things turning out badly and it is at this point an engineering problem. 

For those AI researchers that are not comfortable with being a pawn in the game, the right place to begin is with the high-level questions of what we want AI to be, and what we don’t want it to be, and clearly, the ethics of building killing machines is a big part of these questions. This means spending the time to understand parts of the world outside your familiar culture, broaching topics that make people uncomfortable, and tackling morally ambiguous questions that can’t be solved as cleanly as technical ones can. 

AI safety blocks people from doing these things, because it gives the illusion that the matter is already being dealt with. That’s the whole purpose of this sort of shadow-boxing: to allow people the comforting but false belief that they’re wrestling with the big issues. Oh, you’re concerned about how AI is shaping the world? Great, join the AI safety team, we’ve already identified the key areas for you to work on. We even have metrics and benchmarks and datasets, so just engineer a way to make one of these scores higher and you’re doing your bit to make AI safe.

[---]

AI is a subject that I came to out of a quasi-spiritual impulse to understand the nature of the mind and the self, and it’s now getting roped into the most powerful and destructive systems on the planet, including the military-industrial complex, and, potentially, the outbreak of the next major global conflicts. Trying to navigate this central and rapidly changing position brings a host of new questions–questions that are unfamiliar, controversial and ambiguous–and so far the AI world has barely found the courage even to ask them.

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How Nostalgia Ruins Economies

For years, I have been stating nostalgia is evil. I mean, pure evil. When everything changes, and everything is a child to impermanence, nostalgia puts shackles on motion of life in vain. 

Now people are talking about the implications of this evil in economies: 

Nostalgia is a killer. The term, originally coined in the late seventeenth century, described an illness that came in response to change and dislocation. Symptoms included fever, appetite loss, and heart palpitations. The prognosis, if left untreated, was death.

Today, society no longer sees nostalgia as a disease. Instead, it is thought of as a fuzzy, seemingly benign feeling about an idealized past. But the profound economic disruptions of the last few months might push analysts to revisit the idea that nostalgia is a grave, even life-threatening condition. American policies based on the premise of restoring past greatness—the mythical and opaque “again” of Make America Great Again—have worsened lives both within and outside the United States.

Read the whole thing. 

The parasite of nostalgia starts from each individual head and the diseases envelops him or her and rapidly spreads, 

Every cell in my body is not the same as it was when Max took his last breath. My cells are different but my love for Max hasn't changed. It doesn't mean, I eschew my responsibilities for Neo, Fluffy, Garph, Saroo and Blue and brood and kill myself over the past time over Max. That is not the lesson Max taught me. Max taught me to live in the present, and I try to do that every moment. 

Delicate Balance To Understand & Pass On That Wisdom That It May Not Be Wisdom

To make my point still clearer, I shall pick out a certain science book to criticize unfavorably, which is unfair, because I am sure that with little ingenuity, I can find equally unfavorable things to say about others. There is a first grade science book which, in the first lesson of the first grade, begins in an unfortunate manner to teach science, because it starts off an the wrong idea of what science is. There is a picture of a dog–a windable toy dog–and a hand comes to the winder, and then the dog is able to move. Under the last picture, it says “What makes it move?” Later on, there is a picture of a real dog and the question, “What makes it move?” Then there is a picture of a motorbike and the question, “What makes it move?” and so on.

I thought at first they were getting ready to tell what science was going to be about–physics, biology, chemistry–but that wasn’t it. The answer was in the teacher’s edition of the book: the answer I was trying to learn is that “energy makes it move.”

Now, energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right. What I meant is that it is not easy to understand energy well enough to use it right, so that you can deduce something correctly using the energy idea–it is beyond the first grade. It would be equally well to say that “God makes it move,” or “spirit makes it move,” or “movability makes it move.” (In fact, one could equally well say “energy makes it stop.”)

Look at it this way: that’s only the definition of energy; it should be reversed. We might say when something can move that it has energy in it, but not what makes it move is energy. This is a very subtle difference.  It’s the same with this inertia proposition.

Perhaps I can make the difference a little clearer this way: If you ask a child what makes the toy dog move, you should think about what an ordinary human being would answer. The answer is that you wound up the spring; it tries to unwind and pushes the gear around.

What a good way to begin a science course! Take apart the toy; see how it works. See the cleverness of the gears; see the ratchets. Learn something about the toy, the way the toy is put together, the ingenuity of people devising the ratchets and other things. That’s good. The question is fine. The answer is a little unfortunate, because what they were trying to do is teach a definition of what is energy. But nothing whatever is learned.

[---]

What science is, I think, may be something like this: There was on this planet an evolution of life to a stage that there were evolved animals, which are intelligent. I don’t mean just human beings, but animals which play and which can learn something from experience–like cats. But at this stage each animal would have to learn from its own experience. They gradually develop, until some animal [primates?] could learn from experience more rapidly and could even learn from another’s experience by watching, or one could show the other, or he saw what the other one did.  So there came a possibility that all might learn it, but the transmission was inefficient and they would die, and maybe the one who learned it died, too, before he could pass it on to others.

The question is: is it possible to learn more rapidly what somebody learned from some accident than the rate at which the thing is being forgotten, either because of bad memory or because of the death of the learner or inventors?

So there came a time, perhaps, when for some species [humans?] the rate at which learning was increased, reached such a pitch that suddenly a completely new thing happened: things could be learned by one individual animal, passed on to another, and another fast enough that it was not lost to the race. Thus became possible an accumulation of knowledge of the race.

This has been called time-binding. I don’t know who first called it this.  At any rate, we have here [in this hall] some samples of those animals, sitting here trying to bind one experience to another, each one trying to learn from the other.

[---]

Finally, with regard to this time-binding, a man cannot live beyond the grave. Each generation that discovers something from its experience must pass that on, but it must pass that on with a delicate balance of respect and disrespect, so that the [human] race–now that it is aware of the disease to which it is liable–does not inflict its errors too rigidly on its youth, but it does pass on the accumulated wisdom, plus the wisdom that it may not be wisdom.

It is necessary to teach both to accept and to reject the past with a kind of balance that takes considerable skill. Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation.

- Richard Feynman, What Is Science?

The Law Of Entanglement - How the World Works When No One’s Looking

You are not meant to climb endlessly upward. You are meant to root down, open slowly, and turn again toward the light — in whatever form it finds you.

[---]

In the wild, survival is not awarded to the strongest, nor the smartest, nor the most beautiful. It belongs to those who can change.

[---]

Adaptation is wisdom in motion. It’s the art of listening with your whole being — and answering, not with resistance, but with a new shape. 

Take a deep breath. Read this piece. Meditate on what you read. Re-read it. 

Your nonsensical individuality should dissolve immediately or maybe, like most sapiens it might dissolve only in your death bed. 

You should prefer the former because later is like getting an erection for the first time in death bed. 

Good luck. 

After I finished reading this, I looked at Max's photo and tears rolled into my rugged beard. 

Thank you Gonzalo Kern for capturing the essence of "everything" eloquently. 

The law of entanglement

Step into a forest, and nothing is alone.

The tree depends on the fungus. The fungus feeds on the root. The root drinks from the soil, which is made by worms and time and death. The deer eats the leaf, the coyote eats the deer, and both carry seeds in their fur to feed the next season. Even the wind is shaped by the trees that receive it.

This is not metaphor. This is ecology. This is fact. And it is also philosophy.

If nature has a first principle, it is this: All things arise in relationship. Nothing exists in isolation.

Modern thought, especially in the West, often begins with separation — subject and object, self and other, mind and body, human and world. But nature begins with entanglement. With reciprocity. With systems within systems, all nested and interdependent. And the closer we look — through microscopes or through stillness — the more we see that boundaries are not borders, but places of exchange.

A tree is not just a tree. It is a colony. It is a network. It is an intersection of sun and soil and lineage. It breathes out what we breathe in. The carbon in its trunk may once have been part of a volcanic sky or the bones of an ancient animal. The minerals in its bark were once part of a mountain, slowly weathered down by rain.

To live by the philosophy of nature means to begin here — with this deep recognition that you are never alone, and never not affecting.

The heartbeat you feel right now depends on the oxygen made by algae in the sea. The food you eat depends on pollinators you may never see. Even your body is not entirely yours — it’s an ecosystem of bacteria, water, inherited genes, and borrowed air. The self, when seen clearly, is not a fortress. It is a confluence.

And yet, we are trained to forget this.

We speak of independence as a virtue. Of success as something achieved alone. But no being in nature thrives alone. A lion without a savannah is not a lion. A human without a living world is not a human — at least not in any whole sense.

You belong to a web you cannot see.

Your life is an unfolding of countless unseen contributions.

And everything you do — every word, every action, every silence — ripples back into that web.

Nature doesn’t judge. But it does respond. It shows us, again and again, that harmony is not found in isolation but in relationship — and the health of a system depends on the quality of its connections.

[---]

Because true beauty in nature doesn’t ask to be remembered. It asks to be met.

And it does not flatter us. Nature’s beauty is not designed for human pleasure. It has its own logic, its own form of coherence. The lichen’s subtle architecture, the elegance of decay, the eerie bioluminescence of deep-sea creatures — these exist for reasons far older and deeper than our gaze.

To recognize beauty without trying to own it is to step out of the consumer’s posture and into the witness’s. It is to say: I do not need to hold this to be moved by it. It is to participate in the sacred economy of nature, where value is not measured by permanence or control, but by presence and attention. 

[---]

We have wandered far. Through empires and engines, ideologies and algorithms, we have built a world so loud it drowns the quieter truths. In our pursuit of control, we mistook nature for a backdrop — a setting to shape, rather than a wisdom to follow. But the forest remembers. The river remembers. The body remembers.

To return to the philosophy of nature is not to retreat into some primitive past — it is to recover something foundational. A way of being that honors complexity, interdependence, and the deep intelligence that moves through all things. Nature does not argue. It does not demand belief. It simply shows — and invites us to notice.

There is no dogma in this philosophy, no commandments chiseled in stone. Only patterns, relationships, rhythms. The spiral of a fern, the give-and-take of wind and branch, the tension that holds a spider’s web. These are its scriptures. These are its teachings.

 

 

News I waited for 20 plus Years

One of the biggest killers of animals for no freaking reason and just because they can. In the process they have caused a cancer epidemic all over the world to the people who use their household products are now facing the music.

Procter & Gamble PG -1.90%decrease; red down pointing triangle said it would cut 7,000 jobs, or roughly 15% of its nonmanufacturing workforce around the world, over the next two years.

The maker of Tide detergent, Pampers diapers and Bounty paper towels had about 108,000 total employees as of June last year.

P&G executives, speaking at a conference in Paris, also said they plan to trim the company’s product portfolio, exiting some categories and divesting it of some smaller brands in certain markets. The company didn’t offer specifics on those plans. 

 

The Logic Of Buddhist Philosophy Goes Beyond Simple Truth

Let’s start by turning back the clock. It is India in the fifth century BCE, the age of the historical Buddha, and a rather peculiar principle of reasoning appears to be in general use. This principle is called the catuskoti, meaning ‘four corners’. It insists that there are four possibilities regarding any statement: it might be true (and true only), false (and false only), both true and false, or neither true nor false.

We know that the catuskoti was in the air because of certain questions that people asked the Buddha, in exchanges that come down to us in the sutras. Questions such as: what happens to enlightened people after they die? It was commonly assumed that an unenlightened person would keep being reborn, but the whole point of enlightenment was to get out of this vicious circle. And then what? Did you exist, not, both or neither? The Buddha’s disciples clearly expected him to endorse one and only one of these possibilities. This, it appears, was just how people thought.

At around the same time, 5,000km to the west in Ancient Athens, Aristotle was laying the foundations of Western logic along very different lines. Among his innovations were two singularly important rules. One of them was the Principle of Excluded Middle (PEM), which says that every claim must be either true or false with no other options (the Latin name for this rule, tertium non datur, means literally ‘a third is not given’). The other rule was the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC): nothing can be both true and false at the same time.

Writing in his Metaphysics, Aristotle defended both of these principles against transgressors such as Heraklitus (nicknamed ‘the Obscure’). Unfortunately, Aristotle’s own arguments are somewhat tortured – to put it mildly – and modern scholars find it difficult even to say what they are supposed to be. Yet Aristotle succeeded in locking the PEM and the PNC into Western orthodoxy, where they have remained ever since. Only a few intrepid spirits, most notably G W F Hegel in the 19th century, ever thought to challenge them. And now many of Aristotle’s intellectual descendants find it very difficult to imagine life without them.

That is why Western thinkers – even those sympathetic to Buddhist thought – have struggled to grasp how something such as the catuskoti might be possible. Never mind a third not being given, here was a fourth – and that fourth was itself a contradiction. How to make sense of that?

Well, contemporary developments in mathematical logic show exactly how to do it. In fact, it’s not hard at all.

At the core of the explanation, one has to grasp a very basic mathematical distinction. I speak of the difference between a relation and a function. A relation is something that relates a certain kind of object to some number of others (zero, one, two, etc). A function, on the other hand, is a special kind of relation that links each such object to exactly one thing. Suppose we are talking about people. Mother of and father of are functions, because every person has exactly one (biological) mother and exactly one father. But son of and daughter of are relations, because parents might have any number of sons and daughters. Functions give a unique output; relations can give any number of outputs. Keep that distinction in mind; we’ll come back to it a lot.

Now, in logic, one is generally interested in whether a given claim is true or false. Logicians call true and false truth values. Normally, and following Aristotle, it is assumed that ‘value of’ is a function: the value of any given assertion is exactly one of true (or T), and false (or F). In this way, the principles of excluded middle (PEM) and non-contradiction (PNC) are built into the mathematics from the start. But they needn’t be.

To get back to something that the Buddha might recognise, all we need to do is make value of into a relation instead of a function. Thus T might be a value of a sentence, as can F, both, or neither. We now have four possibilities: {T}, {F}, {T,F} and { }. The curly brackets, by the way, indicate that we are dealing with sets of truth values rather than individual ones, as befits a relation rather than a function. The last pair of brackets denotes what mathematicians call the empty set: it is a collection with no members, like the set of humans with 17 legs.

Thus the four kotis (corners) of the catuskoti appear before us.

In case this all sounds rather convenient for the purposes of Buddhist apologism, I should mention that the logic I have just described is called First Degree Entailment (FDE). It was originally constructed in the 1960s in an area called relevant logic. Exactly what this is need not concern us, but the US logician Nuel Belnap argued that FDE was a sensible system for databases that might have been fed inconsistent or incomplete information. All of which is to say, it had nothing to do with Buddhism whatsoever.

Even so, you might be wondering how on earth something could be both true and false, or neither true nor false. In fact, the idea that some claims are neither true nor false is a very old one in Western philosophy. None other than Aristotle himself argued for one kind of example. In the somewhat infamous Chapter 9 of De Interpretatione, he claims that contingent statements about the future, such as ‘the first pope in the 22nd century will be African’, are neither true nor false. The future is, as yet, indeterminate. So much for his arguments in the Metaphysics.

The notion that some things might be both true and false is much more unorthodox. But here, too, we can find some plausible examples. Take the notorious ‘paradoxes of self-reference’, the oldest of which, reputedly discovered by Eubulides in the fourth century BCE, is called the Liar Paradox. Here’s its commonest expression:

This statement is false.

Where’s the paradox? If the statement is true, then it is indeed false. But if it is false, well, then it is true. So it seems to be both true and false.

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