Buying a cheap 2nd hand E-bike (right now) means the same as buying any other broken bike: You need to know how to switch a chain and adjust brakes. The electronics themselves however are surprisingly resilient.

Despite the name and status as a pest (they are literally European scarabs), I feel nostalgic whenever I see one. Farmers ruthlessly fought them, so there hasn’t been a swarming event here in at least 20 years.

No fireflies where I live, but that doesn’t mean my childhood was free of a beautiful insect swarm.

My area had a bad outbreak of cockchafers I got to enjoy.

After reading the comments here, I see the problem: You judge past things by what they have become, and new things by what they are. Nothing will ever be “truly innovative” by those standards.

The automobile was for a long time just a more expensive carriage. The airplane was a pass time for the ultra rich, while anyone else got by with hot air balloons if they wanted to fly. The soviets got to space first by pointing a ballistic missile upwards.

We have CRISPR and can alter the Genes of any living organism to match our needs, but oh well, it’s only used by labs right now and anyone else got by perfectly fine by selective breeding, can’t call that innovative, can we?

Well, I disagree with the premise.

But perhaps one of the more obvious physical examples are Blue and White LEDs (1992). Small gadgets used to always have red LEDs, maybe green ones, or an unlit 7 segment display, everything else was too expensive or too energy consuming for battery powered devices. And not only that, RGB Diodes also saw the end of pretty much all cathode-ray tubes.

You see kids, back in the olden days before white LEDs, the only way to get blue light was to throw high energy electron ray on a phosphor coating. So anything blue or white before the 90s was made with that technology, from car radios to TV screens.

I’d personally also keep an eye out what the cheap electric motor will do next. From “hoverboards”, civilian drones, e-scooters and the modern e-bike, it’s only a matter of time before the new use case will emerge.

The human of the future:

Before you fantasize how this could be used in humans in the future, producing that single thought cost more energy than leaf sheep produce via photosynthesis in their lifetime - feeding of it requires energy efficiency any warm-blooded animal just isn’t suited for.

Still cute though.

I like the Rock of Ages 2&3 soundtracks myself. Classic music transformed into video game ost is fun.

“Sheen, this is the 7th week in a row you’ve shown CRISPR modifications to the mosquito genome to curb malaria in class”

Comments are all the same as when they made mosquitos infertile, unable to spread malaria or wingless too.

Rice Burritos

• Set up pot for loose Rice
• Put the vegetables in the same pot and a bit extra water
• Add Curry Paste
• Cook like it says on the Rice
• Maybe add Coconut milk
• Put in Tortilla, maybe add some salad

3 minutes of vegetable peeling while the water starts to boil, 10 minutes of unsupervised boiling, maybe 5 minutes stirring. You only need to clean 1 pot, and it’s cheap.

Me and my 4 tribesmen making meters of twine by funnelling fibers through a mamoth femur: “Isn’t technology amazing?”

1500 years later in Mesopotamia: “Your feedback is highly appreciated, please listen to our lyremen as you wait in line”

“Who here plans on driving their car today? Show of hands!” … “I recommend getting to know these people, because you are far more likely to die in an car accident caused by a stranger than by someone you know. But also don’t upset them, as you are far more likely to be murdered by someone you know rather than a stranger.”

“Mr Tourguide, aren’t you supposed to talk about sharks?”

Buddy, if they won’t talk to you after you mentioned your toxic tulips, fear is not the reason.

Even if you added “for it’s meat” at the end there, I have killed and eaten fish.

But the way you said it, who hasn’t swatted a fly or mosquito? Not to mention the skin mites and fruit flies you consume daily.

99% of humans have the complete opposite reaction when the animal in question is a mosquito.

If you want to open a padlock and don’t have the key, you can almost certainly break it open with 2 big wrenches.

I only had 1 opportunity to try that yet, when removing a 20 year old lock some stupid kid left on my stuff and then forgot where I put the key, but man did it feel empowering.

You can practice this trick at any romantic bridge. Do you really think whoever etched their initials on the lock is still together and would notice? Please

I never said that. What I meant is that a behaviour, which benefits a species as a whole but reduces one individual’s fitness, is not evolutionary competitive. It’s evolutionary game theory, like the prisoners dilemma from normal game theory.

And to determine if some behaviour is such a dilemma, you have to consider costs and benefits of it, which is not at all clear in natural situations. That’s why I said it needs to be studied.

But I must concede, I sort of assumed what exactly you called an evolutionary advantage. Common homosexuality in penguins or not discriminating against homosexual individuals in penguins have very different analysis here.

I’d be cautious with saying evolutionary advantage here.

I don’t believe the “Gay Uncle hypothesis” any more than the somewhat debunked “Grandmother Hypothesis”, which aimed to explain menopause with biological altruism. Just because we could think of a way in that it might be advantageous for a species doesn’t mean it’s advantageous for an individuals fitness.

Of course, it can be still an advantage, but we’d only know with more free, uncensored research.

From the penguin documentaries I watched as a kid, I feel like the “leaving eggs behind” might involve relentless bullying.

The news say Eastern Ukraine, though take that with a grain of salt as I haven’t been there personally.