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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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I don't think this necessarily conflicts with badger's claim; it may be that Computerese is a sufficiently obtuse language that the default language centers of the human brain can't cope with it the way they can with Spanish or Chinese, requiring considerable cognitive processing power to learn it anyway, but that this is ultimately just a quirk of what language architectures our brains are optimized for. Swimming isn't inherently a harder problem than walking, natural-selection-wise - but it's very difficult if you're an elephant.

Swimming isn't inherently a harder problem than walking, natural-selection-wise - but it's very difficult if you're an elephant.

Elephants are arguably better swimmers than humans -- I think they are positively buoyant even?

You might be thinking of hippos, which sink.

Actually, I was thinking of underwater swimming, the kind that fish evolved to do in the same way that humans evolve to speak natural language, and which elephants would struggle to match. But fair cop on the fact-check regardless, my fault for putting pithiness over precision.

I think they could probably be unusually good at that (as mammals!) too, if they weren't so damn floaty -- they have a built-in snorkel!

Ballasted elephant experimentation, anyone?