LesserAbe

In the US most students recite "the pledge of allegiance" every morning before school, which is kind of crazy. If you were in charge, what if anything would you replace it with?

I just saw a discussion among corporate event planners where one person was upset that event organizers don't give proper consideration to scheduling over top of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.

I can appreciate the annoyance, when I was still a practicing Christian I would never think to schedule a work thing over Easter or Christmas. We should treat others with consideration, and should be mindful of what others view as important days. But I also don't know what each religion considers to be major, non negotiable holidays. Do you?

Another question, does it matter where the event is? (for example, in the US should less consideration be given to holidays of religions that have fewer adherents?)

I know people can wear two video cameras to recreate a first person experience in virtual reality. I also know they make those mannequin head stereo mic sets that create interesting spacial audio, supposedly because they mimic the head's shape and position of our ears.

Instead of the dummy head, does anyone make a mic set that you can wear, with the mics in approximately the position of our ears / ear shaped?

I was thinking you could do some interesting things with that, like recording a band in their practice space from the perspective of the band members. Or tracking lead vocals where the singer is singing to a person wearing the mic set.

Some animals sing (birds, whales) and plenty of animals make sounds together at roughly the same time (wolves howling, prairie dogs yelling at threats). Are there animals that harmonize? Or animals that make sound that's rhythmically coordinated, like has a time signature?

Guess I'm asking about more finely coordinated sounds. It's something that's pretty neat about human music.

No, not talking about their own shit or vomit, har de har. I mean how dogs can't have chocolate, can't eat grapes. Are there things it's no big deal for them but would be toxic for us.

Just learned that Wikimedia has a project called Wikifunctions. I'm a big fan of Wikipedia and associated projects, and on its face sounds like a cool site. I do wonder how this would work in practical terms though, like how could it actually be used?

Prompted by another thread about conscription in Ukraine.

I saw a post on lemmy about how we could prevent 133 holocausts by promoting animal rights and veganism. The article opened by doing some math about how many dogs you could torture and kill in order to be equivalent to taking a human life, and then how many animals humans kill, and concluded that we're committing holocaust equivalents many times over.

I have respect for people who question the status quo and think seriously about morality. Thinking about slavery, it used to be argued "this is the natural order," "this is actually the moral thing to do" and so on. It wasn't easy then to stand up for what we now see as the obvious moral position. So I have some receptivity to this type of argument.

That said, I think back to when I was a Christian (atheist now), and was fully bought into the anti abortion movement. They argued that fetuses were human, that we were committing fetus holocausts all the time. Taking that view to its logical conclusion, one could justify things like killing a few (abortion doctors, judges) to save many (fetuses).

The author of the vegan piece was not advocating for such things. But one could ask why not. I think the fact the conclusion (133 holocausts) is so far outside accepted views should prompt some examination of the starting premises. (Is any killing of an animal for food the same as torturous factory farming, should we do something about animals that eat other animals etc)

I'm glad I read the piece because there's value in hearing other perspectives. We can't see ourselves and our own blind spots. I would have responded in-thread but that community description said "not a place for debate", so tossing out this thought here.

I wasn't aware just how good the news is on the green energy front until reading this. We still have a tough road in the short/medium term, but we are more or less irreversibly headed in the right direction.