Friday, April 9, 2021

LInks 9 April 2021

The clipper ship Cutty Sark under sail

The medieval penitential "is sex sin" flowchart.

Excerpt from John Boehner's memoir describing the Republicans' turn toward craziness in 2010.

The History Blog: "The wooden lifeboat that carried the crew to safety after their ship wrecked off the western coast of Australia in 1891 has been found intact in the rafters of a hay shed."

The meter-wide, featureless, gelatinous blobs occasionally seen floating in the sea off Norway have been the subject of scrutiny and conspiracy theories for 35 years. They have now finally been identified as the egg sacs of a common squid, Illex coindetii

Many deep sea bacteria are completely invisible to the human immune system.

Interview with Pete Buttigieg about his new job as Secretary of Transportation (Washington Post)

Anger on the right: “Most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.”

Reaching the deepest known shipwreck.

Trying to redeem social psychology after the replication crisis.

Denver Riggelman is a former Republican Congressman who lost a primary in 2020 to a far-right character and now devotes himself to fighting QAnon and other disinformation. (New York Times)

I complained a while back that nobody knows how to move artifacts between museums with style any more. I was wrong.

Mysterious medieval seal depicting an elephant. 

The booming business of selling longleaf pine needles for mulch. (Washington Post)

The toxic mess in Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal is finally being cleaned up. In a New York desperate for more housing the de Blasio administration plans to rezone the surrounding area for 8,000 apartments and condos. Residents, of course, are suing to block the plan. (New York Times)

4 comments:

G. Verloren said...

The medieval penitential "is sex sin" flowchart.

The flowchart I've seen before elsewhere, so my major takeaway from the linked post is that the medieval church was fine with people masturbating in moderation as long as they were vegetarians.

G. Verloren said...

Many deep sea bacteria are completely invisible to the human immune system.

Why would our immune system have the capacity to recognize and respond to bacteria it has never, ever encountered, that has evolved in a totally foreign environment?

The deep sea is just a few degrees shy of being outer space. I'd be far more surprised if our immune systems COULD detect such bacteria, as that would imply strange things.

G. Verloren said...

Anger on the right: “Most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term,”

Anger, yes; but more troublingly, delusion at best, but very likely also projection, and almost certainly Fascism.

szopen said...

Via marginalrevolution: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/georgia-election-law-backlash-exposes-outrageous-double-standard/

I find the comments especially interesting (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/04/wednesday-assorted-links-292.html#comments)