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The Woman in black

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The Woman in Black: A Mysterious Figure in Roanoke’s History

Roanoke, Virginia is a city rich in history and ghost stories. One of the most well-known is that of the Woman in Black. In March 1902, she made several appearances in Roanoke after having been sighted on numerous occasions in Bristol. The apparition reportedly only made herself known to well-known married men as they walked home after hours.

According to legend, she appeared suddenly and unexpectedly to men who had stayed too long at their club, insisting they go home as quickly as possible. Sometimes she was said to hit, pummel, or knock a man down to the ground or slap him to the earth with a swish of her phantom garments as retribution for his sins. Her alleged appearances had the salutary effect of keeping married men home with their wives and families rather than going out each night.

There are many theories about her identity. Some think she was the wife of a man who was murdered on his way home. Others think her husband was unfaithful to her and she tries to keep the men honest. There are also those who believe she would flirt with the men to test their faithfulness. Either way, it has been thought that her intention is to keep other wives from having to go through the pain of losing their husbands like she did.

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Dumb Elon strikes again.

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According to a report by The Washington Post, Elon Musk overruled a significant number of Tesla engineers who warned him that switching to a visual-only system would be problematic and possibly unsafe due to its high risk². Despite their warnings, Musk was unconvinced and overruled his engineers. In May 2021, Tesla announced it was eliminating radar on new cars and soon after began disabling radar in cars already on the road³. This resulted in an uptick in crashes, near misses, and other embarrassing mistakes by Tesla vehicles suddenly deprived of a critical sensor².

Source: Conversation with Bing, 6/15/2023
(1) Elon Musk Overruled Tesla Engineers Who Said Removing Radar … – InsideEVs. https://insideevs.com/news/658439/elon-musk-overruled-tesla-autopilot-engineers-radar-removal/.
(2) How Elon Musk knocked Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ off course. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/03/19/elon-musk-tesla-driving/.
(3) Musk Overruled Tesla Engineers, And Now They Are In Serious … – Medium. https://medium.com/predict/musk-overruled-tesla-engineers-and-now-they-are-in-serious-trouble-2e37269e387a.
(4) Tesla CEO Elon Musk overruled engineers who were against removing …. https://auto.hindustantimes.com/auto/electric-vehicles/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-overruled-engineers-who-were-against-removing-radars-41679568912670.html.

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Umwelt

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In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll noted that every animal exists in its own unique perceptual world — a smorgasbord of sights, smells, sounds and textures that it can sense but that other species might not. These stimuli defined what von Uexküll called the Umwelt — an animal’s bespoke sliver of reality. A tick’s Umwelt is limited to the touch of hair, the odor that emanates from skin and the heat of warm blood. A human’s Umwelt is far wider but doesn’t include the electric fields that sharks and platypuses are privy to, the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes and vampire bats track or the ultraviolet light that most sighted animals can see.

The Umwelt concept is one of the most profound and beautiful in biology. It tells us that the all-encompassing nature of our subjective experience is an illusion, and that we sense just a small fraction of what there is to sense. It hints at flickers of the magnificent in the mundane, and the extraordinary in the ordinary. And it is almost antidramatic: It reveals that frogs, snakes, ticks and other animals can be doing extraordinary things even when they seem to be doing nothing at all.

~ Ed Yong, NY Times Opinion, 6-21-22