I agree that cats kill a lot of birds and something needs to be done about this.
However, when you also have articles stating that migratory fish and insect populations have declined by 75% over the last 50 years [1,2] (which clearly isn't caused by outdoor cats) it would seem to me there are larger forces at work.
A period (full point) is a dot within the sentence, while a full stop is a dot at the end of a sentence. In the 19th-century [1], this terminology was used on both sides of the pond.
I read a book about lucid dreaming a while back, and it said something like: the easiest way to tell you are in a dream is to look at something mechanical or complicated.
The idea seemed to be: if you could get your dreaming mind to look at your hand and then turn it over to the other side, you didn't have the mental 'bandwidth' to imagine the opposite side correctly, and you'd realize you were dreaming.
Equally, if you were around a bicycle in a dream, and tried to look at the gearing mechanisms etc., it just wasn't possible for your brain to generate that level of detail; it would just change the bicycle into an elephant or what-have-you.
I never got to lucid dreaming, but did notice a similar thing happening. So, I always found it interesting how the mind might switch from internal 'concepts' to external 'reality' in a way that isn't readily available to 'conscious' thought.
Not really going anywhere with this, but if 'AI' can generate better bicycles than our dreaming minds, then…
I too was at school in the UK during the 80s and 90s and don't have any fond memories. Maybe because it wasn't a school with Latin in the curriculum. I had two science teachers: a young one and one nearing retirement.
The young science teacher spent the whole lesson writing from his notes onto the blackboard, while the whole class just copied it verbatim. His only interaction was asking whether everyone had finished, before wiping one-half of the board clean to continue.
The other science teacher had us read from our textbooks all lesson, and his only interaction was to get annoyed when we made so much racket he couldn't read the newspaper. He always seemed the smarter of the two teachers to me.
Isn't the reason because the lingua franca of HN is English? If people were posting articles in other languages, there'd be a more representative set of criticism.
I even had a MiniDisc car stereo. So much better than CDs, you could just let them rattle around in the glove box and they didn't get scratched.