English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

CowperKettle

00:42

AI hype of the day

Criggie

00:53

@CowperKettle I guess if your product is indiscernable from AI schock then it wasn't very good in the first place ?

The Wombles

The Wombles are fictional pointy-nosed, furry creatures created by Elisabeth Beresford and originally appearing in a series of children's novels from 1968. They live in burrows, where they aim to help the environment by collecting and recycling rubbish in creative ways. Although Wombles supposedly live in every country in the world, Beresford's stories are primarily concerned with the lives of the inhabitants of the burrow on Wimbledon Common in London, England. The characters gained a higher national profile in the UK in the mid-1970s as a result of the popularity of a BBC-commissioned children...

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jlliagre

01:11

@Criggie Thanks, different beasts. It seems the definition I found better apply to cockwombles.

Robusto

@CowperKettle Over-hype, most likely.

Cerberus

01:27

@CowperKettle It will be the end of writing that was already pretty useless, magazine stuff, I bet.

@jlliagre True; it is not a pretty term.

Perhaps convey, transport, send are better.

alphabet

@CowperKettle Isn't it pretty much already the end for professional novelists? It's an incredibly low-paying job; unless you're uniquely talented (or famous or popular) you're not reaching a widespread audience.

Cerberus

True.

A tiny percentage of novellists get anywhere close to making a living out of it.

@CowperKettle I assume GPT wrote that post?

Mitch

01:58

@Cerberus yeah that makes sense. But they didn't mention any evidence of such large areas. The archeological evidence of that may exist and the popularizations of the articles may have mentioned it.

A relevant tidbit of trivia: I have a friend who is an agronomist (a crop/soil scientist) and he did a lot of research and consulting in the Amazon.

And he told me that the soil in the Amazon is remarkably ... infertile (counter to expectations from the existence of lush vegetation there)

That is, when they cut down jungle for wood there, the soil does not support crops very well there...most of the fertility is above ground... the humidity and sun.

This isn't his narrowly focussed research but is well known from decades of experience in the Amazon.

Cerberus

02:21

@Mitch Which means they would have required even larger areas of farmland?

Gathering food from the jungle will have an extremely low yield, I don't believe that is possible for a real city.

Mitch

02:31

@Cerberus yes, that's what I would figure if they had to clear existing forest there.

@Cerberus I'd want someone to do the numbers to be sure....what you say matches my intuition but maybe original forest could support crops that would feed more than just the farmers, and without clearing the forest.

I remember reading how some groups of amazonians (the yanamamo in southern Venezuela) would plant tobacco in patches, leave them in attended for a year and come back (possibly by chance) while wandering around the forest and harvest it.

Cerberus

@Mitch Nooo.

Mitch

@Cerberus I just don't know for sure.

Cerberus

Crops convert electromagnetic energy into nutrients that we can get energy out of. Under a canopy of trees, you will have 90% less electromagnetic energy.

You can't eat the plants that take most of the solar energy there, the trees.

There is no energy to generate edible biomass under the trees.

Mitch

Ok

Cerberus

In my parents' garden, the grass even dies where it is in the shadow between the house and a tall taxus tree, which doesn't even branch out over the grass.

Granted, there are some tall oaks farther away, but not so close to the grass.

Mitch

02:42

I wouldn't be surprised if our questions about what these amazonians cultures had as good source to support a large population.

Cerberus

Hmm I can't parse that sentence.

Mitch

Pre-Columbian agriculture in the Amazon Basin

Pre-Columbian agriculture in the Amazon basin refers to the farming practices developed by the indigenous communities of the Amazon rainforest before the European conquest. Contrary to the common misconception of the pre-Columbian rainforest as a pristine wilderness untouched by human influence, agricultural communities in the Amazon Basin actively shaped and managed their environment prior to the arrival of European colonists. Eyewitness accounts by early Spanish and Portuguese explorers describe populous cities and flourishing agriculture. Population estimates for the pre-Columbian Amazon Basin...

@Cerberus it was unfinished

Cerberus

Ah you found a Wiki!

> As elsewhere in the Americas, the European conquest brought the collapse of indigenous populations and their advanced agricultural systems were largely forgotten.

We actually have not forgotten about the agriculture of the Aztecs and some other civilisations.

Perhaps because they has more writing?

No, I think the civilisations in the Amazon must have collapsed a longer time before Europeans arrived there, and more disastrously.

Mitch

The article doesn't answer our questions...it just says there was agriculture in the Amazon precolumbus

Cerberus

> the Basin is no longer thought to have been a primeval forest at the time of European contact

Mitch

02:55

@Cerberus yeah the article does not mention dates well

@Cerberus the wiki article just says the arrival of Europeans brought about the population collapse.

I'm not particularly confident in the wiki article but it would be a lot of work to look in the source article.

Cerberus

@Mitch Quite possibly, but then why didn't the same thing happen to the Incas or the Aztecs?

Mitch

@Cerberus I don't k no w that it did not happen to the Aztecs or Incas

Population collapse happened to the Eastern North American Indians during the 1500s, before active colonization started at the beginning of the 1600s

Cerberus

Complete collapse of their civilisation and cities and population.

That did not happen to the Aztecs or the Incas.

The Spaniards had to exert themselves to conquer them to the last city.

Mitch

@Cerberus not complete but 90% decrease in population.

CowperKettle

Cerberus

03:06

@Mitch That is still quite different from what happened in the Amazon.

Mitch

They say that many East coast English settlements were founded in abandoned Indian villages (from European disease)

Cerberus

Still not comparable.

Mitch

(from European fishermen spreading the diseases during the 1500s who landed temporarily on the East Coast)

Cerberus

And had sex with a few women there.

Mitch

Possibly

I think diseases like TB and smallpox given to the Indians by the Europeans was the main culprit. But Indians gave Europeans syphilis. Not exactly a great trade for either side but you know

Cerberus

03:12

Umm we had syphilis here before that?

6 mins ago, by Cerberus

That did not happen to the Aztecs or the Incas.

7 mins ago, by Cerberus

Complete collapse of their civilisation and cities and population.

So I wonder why this happened in the Amazon but not in the Andes or Mexico.

Cerberus

03:27

> The spatial pattern of this forest transformation radiated outward from human activity (which was concentrated on rivers)

So perhaps agriculture was concentrated in fertile flood plains somewhat similar to Egypt?

alphabet

03:59

@Cerberus And the ones that do (e.g. Colleen Hoover) do not tend to be regarded highly by the literary ~~snobs~~ connoisseurs.

@Cerberus I think it's been debated.

Cerberus

04:36

@alphabet Yes, of course the mass-commercial ones aren't good.

> According to the Columbian theory, syphilis was brought to Spain by the men who sailed with Christopher Columbus in 1492 and spread from there, with a serious epidemic in Naples beginning as early as 1495. Contemporaries believed the disease sprang from American roots, and in the 16th century physicians wrote extensively about the new disease inflicted on them by the returning explorers.[89]

Most evidence supports the Columbian origin hypothesis.[90] However, beginning in the 1960s, examples of probable treponematosis—the parent disease of syphilis, bejel, and yaws—in skeletal remains sh…

Interesting.

An epidemic in Naples in 1495 already, really?

The Wikipaedia article is pretty gruesome.

M.A.R.

06:15

JD Vance sounds like the newest offroad Jeep model.

Exercising more can lead to weight loss. What people neglect to notice is that once you start exercising, you get way hungrier and eat more too, at least at first. So the best strategy always involves monitoring how much you eat, and a lot of people that just wanna exercise more don't wanna do that.

People who exercise and lose weight feel much healthier than people who just eat less. And their lipid biomarkers are usually much better too, though I don't know if it's been studied that said favorable lipid profile translates to better clinical outcomes in the long run.

For example, one potential problem with just eating less is you lose more skeletal muscle mass that way too. Again, I dunno if this loss of muscle mass is acceptable, since clinically we have both benign and pretty dangerous ways of losing muscle.

Cerberus

06:43

That all makes sense.

CowperKettle