Free Market Environmentalists are building America's largest wildlife reserve [with video embeds]

First published on the Steem blockchain by @remlaps on October 02, 2022. View the original post.

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Building America's Serengeti for less than the price of a football stadium

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Introduction

Pixabay license from Stefan Weissenberger at source

Back in 2016, I wrote the Steemit article, Making Wildlife Conservation Fun and Profitable, which explored the idea of using market mechanisms to protect wildlife. In the article, I proposed the idea of a game that was inspired by things like Airbnb, Project Noah, and Pokémon Go where property owners, tourists, and app developers could all collaborate in a game where they get blockchain rewards for matching photographs of endangered wildlife.

In this concept, property owners of hotels and similar properties would post a photo of an animal that was seen on their property, and a tourist would be rewarded for taking a matching photograph of the same animal.

I was reminded of this post today, when I read the article ‘Free-Market Environmentalism’ Is Working in Montana. This article discusses the American Prairie Reserve, which is in the process of creating a so-called American Serengetti - the largest nature reserve in the contiguous United States.

In particular, the reason I was reminded of my 2016 post was the "Cameras for Conservation" concept from this excerpt:

Some of these benefits are felt most directly by American Prairie’s [Wild Sky](https://www.americanprairie.org/wild-sky) program participants, which financially incentivizes wildlife-friendly management practices on neighboring ranches. Interested neighbors can sign up for “Cameras for Conservation,” where American Prairie will pay to install game cameras on the rancher’s property and then pay them for each picture of an animal that that camera generates. If your game camera gets a picture of an elk or deer, that’s $50 in your pocket. A mountain lion? That’s $250. And if you document the presence of a grizzly bear or wolf, that will be $500 per animal, all while you are still running cattle on the property.

So I was curious to learn more about this project. I found some more about this project in the YouTube video, Imagine America's Serengeti: Building the Largest Wildlife Reserve in the Continental United States from the Aspen Institute. Here is the video:

How I used technology this summer to learn about the wild birds in my neighborhood

First published on the Steem blockchain by @remlaps on October 11, 2022. View the original post.

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BirdNet is a cell phone app that identifies birds from their songs. Here are my observations after using it for 3 months.

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American Robin: Pixabay license from Daniel Roberts at source

Introduction

Back in June, I posted a SteemLinks article, How I used a Raspberry Pi to automate birdwatching - ZDNet. The underlying source article suggested use of two applications, Merlin, and BirdNet. According to the article, Merlin helps with identification of birds by sight and by sound. BirdNet, on the other hand, only assists with identification by sound.

I immediately downloaded both applications with the intent of trying them out. It turned out that Merlin required email verification, so I terminated my relationship with that one, but kept experimenting with BirdNet for the next few months when I was out in the yard with the dog. Here's what I found.

First published on the Steem blockchain by @remlaps on September 04, 2023. View the original post.

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[Donald Hoffman](https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/) argues that all of spacetime is an abstraction for a deeper and unobserved reality. According to this line of reasoning, spacetime only exists when it's being perceived. What do you think?

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The Reality Illusion

Introduction

Whatever reality is, it's not what you see. What you see is just an adaptive fiction. -Donald Hoffman

In browsing through the available eBooks from my local library, I came across The Case Against Reality by UC Irvine Professor Emeritus, Donald Hoffman, and I read it over the weekend. The book presents a fascinating discussion on the nature of reality, a topic that has intrigued me for years.

In this book, Hoffman uses three major frameworks to argue that consciousness - not spacetime - is at the root of reality, and that our perceived reality is very different from the objective reality that actually exists.

The crux of Hoffman's argument relies on something of his own creation, called the Fitness Beats Truth Theorem (FBT), which he conjectured and claims that Chetan Prakash proved. According to this theorem, if perception agents that optimize for evolutionary fitness compete in evolution against perception agents that optimize for truth, natural selection favors the fitness-optimizers and the truth-optimizers go extinct.

In addition to the Fitness Beats Truth theorem, Hoffman also introduces us to the Interface Theory of Perception (ITP). According to this theory, the "reality" that we observe is something akin to an operating system interface. In this view, the things we see are nothing more than avatars and icons that provide useful shortcuts in order to allow us to survive for long enough to reproduce. A file icon on a computer desktop doesn't say anything about the underlying bits on the hard disk. Similarly, ITP argues that when we see an apple or a train or a snake, we're not seeing the reality of those objects, just abstractions that evolution has given us in order to guide our decisions. Provocatively, Hoffman argues that these representations don't even exist at all when nobody is perceiving them.

Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for March 28, 2020

As San Francisco's residents shelter in place, coyotes are emerging on the streets; A Harvard Working Paper gives best practices for business to use in preparation for novel risks; A training simulator aims to make autonomous safer before encountering real-world roads; An article suggests using wastewater sampling to identify drug usage trends; and a Steem post offers two web sites with learn-at-home resources for students

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Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for March 6, 2020

A TED talk by a security researcher gives a rundown on "stalkerware"; A Youtube video addresses Peto's Paradox - the surprising observation that larger animals are less likely to get cancer; Microsoft announces a free tier of its Cosmos DB NoSQL database; Twitter is testing fleets, transient tweets that expire after 24 hours; Brave Browser announces a state of the art privacy enhancement; and a Steem essay discusses the nature, causes, and treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder

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Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for February 5, 2020

A TED talk discusses the creation and potential of robots the size of a biological cell; Department of Interior grounds all non-emergency drones; Google releases an open-source application for two factor authentication; Google sends downloaded private photos to the wrong people; and a Steem post with photos of snow under the microscope

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