almost as common as female heterosexuality here, as you would expect

I initially misparsed this as "the female bisexuality rate is as expected." I see that isn't what you meant, but had to re-read two or three times. Just FYI.

I feel like a 42.2% bisexuality rate among LW women is surprising enough to say something, but I'm not sure what.

SIA/anthropics strike again? "Fantastically Wrong: The Scientist Who Thought 22 Trillion Aliens Live in Our Solar System":

Here’s what [Thomas] Dick figured. At the time, there were an average of 280 people per square mile in England. And because he thought every surface of our universe bears life, it would naturally occur at roughly the same population density. So from comets and asteroids to the rings of Saturn, if you knew how big something was, you could guess how many beings live there. Thus, Jupiter would be the most populated object in the solar system, with 7 trillion beings. The least populated would be Vesta, the second largest asteroid in the asteroid belt, tallying just 64 million.

Dick, you see, was a very religious man, but also a voracious scientist, one of the last of the so-called natural theologists, who looked for signs of God’s influence in nature. For Dick, it simply did not make sense for God to have created the cosmos just to have it sit around unoccupied. There must be creatures out there capable of enjoying its beauty, because God wants all his work appreciated. In his book Celestial Scenery...

...You might think that living on other worlds might be difficult, but Dick assures us they’re arranged much like Earth, with mountains and valleys and such. The moon in particular has “an immense variety of elevations and depressions,” and while we can’t directly observe such features on Jupiter, Saturn, or Uranus, given their distance, when light hits them it reveals “the spots and differences of shade and color which are sometimes distinguishable on their disks,” thus betraying the uneven surfaces underneath. (We know today, of course, that these are all in fact gas giants.) God also provides atmospheres on other planetary bodies, “but we have no reason to conclude that they are exactly similar to ours.” Mars’ atmosphere, for example, is denser than our own, bestowing the planet that lovely red hue (it’s actually less dense). Others may be so thin that they allow their inhabitants to “penetrate much farther into space than we can do,” with the added bonus that such an atmosphere could “raise their spirits to the highest pitch of ecstasy, similar to some of the effects produced on our frame by inhaling that gaseous fluid called the nitrous oxyde.”...There is, though, the rather glaring problem of the crushing gravity of a planet the size of Saturn. But Dick posits that “the density of Jupiter is little more than that of water, and that of Saturn about the density of cork.” Jupiter, therefore, would have a gravity only twice as great as Earth’s—not so terrible in the grand scheme of things... And he wasn’t even the first scientist to argue that life existed elsewhere in our solar system. Far from it: It was none other than the famed astronomer William Herschel who argued that not only was there life on every planet, but on the sun as well. That blinding glow we see is simply a luminous atmosphere hiding a rocky surface that teemed with life.

(The Presumptuous Natural Philosopher notes: 'while it is true that we have no direct evidence of life on other planets, or indeed solid confirmation that the other bodies of the solar system are rocky and support life, all of this is at least consistent with our current knowledge, and consider the anthropic aspect: with a global population of ~1b in 1837, and a possible system-wide population of 22 trillion or 22,000 times the global population, would not the SIA provide crushing evidence that the other planets are likely inhabited?')

Ah yes, didn't think of that. Even while I'm concious my brain is doing things I'm/it's not aware of.

This is how Vetinari thinks, his soul exulted. Plans can break down. You cannot plan the future. Only presumptuous fools plan. The wise man steers.

—Terry Pratchett, Making Money

Although thought by a madman in the book, there seems to be truth in this quote. People often seem to think of the future as a coherent, specific story not unlike the one woven by the brain from the past events. Unpleasant surprises happen when the real events inevitably deviate from those imagined.

African praise songs were sung not only to kings, gods, and heroes, but to plants and animals, who obviously cannot grant anything to those who praise them.

I'm not denying the powerful psychological effect of praise in these cases, but the animistic religions of a large number of indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures do assert that plants and animals (or, more accurately, their respective spirits) have agency, and that good fortune on future h/g excursions may be ensured by respectful behaviour towards the spirits in question.

Unless you are familiar with the work of a German patent attorney named Gunter Wachtershauser, just about everything you have read about the origin of life on earth is wrong. More specifically, there was no "prebiotic soup" providing organic nutrient molecules to the first cells or proto-cells, there was no RNA world in which self-replicating molecules evolved into cells, the Miller experiment is a red herring and the chemical processes it deals with never happened on earth until Miller came along. Life didn't invent proteins for a long time after life first originated. 500 million years or so. About as long as the time from the "Cambrian explosion" to us.

I'm not saying Wachtershauser got it all right. But I am saying that everyone else except people inspired by Wachtershauser definitely got it all wrong. (70%)

To be fair to the aliens, the actions of Westerners probably seem equally weird to Sentinel Islanders. Coming every couple of years in giant ships or helicopters to watch them from afar, and then occasionally sneaking into abandoned houses and leaving gifts?

I'm a human and can easily imagine being attracted to Galadriel :) I can't speak for dwarves.

Thanks for the links. It all makes a lot more sense to me now (though at 2 trillion years, the timescales involved are much longer than I had considered). One last quibble: Relativity does not forbid the space between two objects (call them A and B) from expanding faster than c, it's true. But a photon emitted by object A would not be going fast enough to outrace the expansion of space, and would never reach B. So B would never obtain any information about A if they are flying apart faster than light.

I'm pretty sure Nature doesn't have one.