Best headline ever for a nature article?
Enemy anemones wage all-out war
When tide rolls back in, it's polyp vs. polyp
Say "enemy anemones" three times fast....
As the tide starts to cover the colonies, "scouts" move to the border and look for empty space to claim. The "warrior" anemones — which are larger and well-armed with stinging cells – provide backup by inflating their arms and slapping at enemies, sometimes from four rows back off the front lines.
Meanwhile, in the center of the colony, poorly armed anemones concentrate on reproduction, making sure there are enough "troops" to maintain the colony.
And they coordinate all these complex behaviors without a single brain among them.
And they coordinate all these complex behaviors without a single brain among them.
We are Anemone of Borg...
And they coordinate all these complex behaviors without a single brain among them.
They have no brain. And they don't even know it!
Poor warrior anemones. I wonder if other anemones offer them support... like, say, enemy anemone amenities.
eta: Of course, other sea creatures might steal them, resulting in enemy anemone amenities for manatees.
Or if the manetees provide them: enemy anemone manatees amenities.
And, if there was only the one type of amenity, it would be enemy anemone manatee amenity monotony.
Unless you weren't sure. Then it'd be enemy anemone manatee amenity monotony, apparantly.
The Bayesian approach is very powerful if you can put in some prior probabilities, collect some data, and then revise the probability estimates based on the fit of your model to the data. After several iterations you can arrive at an efficient and accurate answer. But if there are no data-based iterations? If you start and end the process with your own assumptions, which are of unknown quality? I just don’t understand what has been accomplished.
That's a great point to make about Swinburne, although I think he has a lot more going for him than "assumptions ... of unknown quality". He gives all sorts of philosophical arguments for the quality of his assumptions. They're assumptions that don't exactly have empirical data going for them or against them. Still, his project--trying to prove the existence of God using all of the universe as the data to be explained (e.g., what is the probability of there being a universe given an all-loving, all-powerful God)--must look quite weird from a scientist's point of view.
A friend of mine's slogan used to be "No brain, no pain," which covers quite a lot of Massachusetts drivers.
I go away for a few hours, and philosophy breaks out!
