Via Scott Siskind, an obituary for Chuck Feeney, who made billions as a pioneer of duty-free shopping and gave away nearly every penny, living his last years in modest obscurity. If you have heard of him it was probably as a major funder of the Irish peace process, throwing millions around to compensate anyone in Ireland who felt threatened by the pending deal.
Interesting renderings of historical figures in modern garb. I think it is a bit literal, not taking sufficient account of past techniques of portraiture, but some are a lot of fun.
The DeepMind team says they have discovered 2.2 million possible new possible inorganic crystals, 380,000 of which should be stable enough for synthesis. Now if only the AI can tell us what they will be good for. . . .
Chinese archaeologists explore a Ming Dynasty porcelain kiln.
A star system has been identified with six planets, all orbiting in resonance with each other. (NY Times, CBS News)
One of Bologna's last remaining medieval towers is in danger of collapsing.
Some seriously wacked-out biology involving cellular "nanobots" that fuse into "superbots" that heal damaged nerve tissue.
The Carmelite Monks of Wyoming are building themselves a new gothic monastery using computer aided design and computer-controlled stone-cutting machinery, which they operate themselves. (Carmelite web site, online article, Youtube)
How Nonconsumption Can Turn Ordinary Items into Perceived Treasures
The northernmost population of scorpions in the world lives on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, England, where there are more than 10,000. These yellow-tailed scorpions, native to southern Europe, probably arrived in the 1700s aboard Royal Navy ships coming to the Sheerness Dockyard. As a bonus, wikipedia has a great article on the dockyard.
Finalists for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year people's choice award.
Excavations near Carlisle, England have uncovered a Roman bath house.
More evidence that immigration boosts Republicans: "An inflow of migrants equal to 0.4 percent of the county population boosts the Republican party vote share in midterm House elections by 3.9 percentage points." Via Marginal Revolution.
During the pandemic, test scores declined for students in all US states, regardless of whether they closed their schools and for how long; now Kevin Drum reports on international data that shows the responses of different countries also had no effect and how far behind students fell. So, strangely enough, pandemic learning loss seems not to be related to whether or how long schools were closed. What was the cause?
This 24-minute video will bring you up to date on the US military's staggering array of new drone programs; the goal is to field so many aerial vehicles that they completely overwhelm enemy defenses, "blocking out the sun like Persian arrows."
Hoard of Bronze Age axes found in Poland; these axes seem to have been used as a sort of money, or perhaps for high-status gifts, since more than half of those that have been found were never used.
The residents of Christiana, an old hippie sort-of commune in Copenhagen, have agreed by consensus to invite the state in to solve their problem with violent drug gangs. (NY Times)
Something else to worry about: the American Great Plains are being invaded by Eastern Redcedar trees, turning more than a million acres of grassland to forest monoculture. The main reason is the decline of fire. (NY Times, Eastern Redcedar Science Literacy Project)
And now anti-immigrant riots in Ireland (NY Times). Around the world it becomes increasingly clear that what drives right-wing extremism is immigration, and especially accepting refugees. How pro-immigration, pro-democracy people should react to that is unclear to me.
German museum asks Italy to return a classical sculpture to them, on the grounds that Mussolini sold it to Hitler in a completely public way, for a lot of money, which should make it entirely different from stuff the Nazis stole or forced people to sell.
5 comments:
I wonder if the forces driving migration might not be so great as to render irrelevant in the grand scheme both the hostility of the rightists and the benevolence of the liberals.
During the pandemic, test scores declined for students in all US states, regardless of whether they closed their schools and for how long; now Kevin Drum reports on international data that shows the responses of different countries also had no effect and how far behind students fell. So, strangely enough, pandemic learning loss seems not to be related to whether or how long schools were closed. What was the cause?
...living under a life-threatening, unending crisis? One that disrupted daily life, and made both students and their families stressed out and afraid for months and months and months?
Whether you kept going into school, or whether you did remote learning, I would still expect students to perform poorly given how upended the entire world was for them. When live is hard for students, they perform worse - this has been shown time and time again.
And now anti-immigrant riots in Ireland (NY Times). Around the world it becomes increasingly clear that what drives right-wing extremism is immigration, and especially accepting refugees. How pro-immigration, pro-democracy people should react to that is unclear to me.
There's an old argument from the wake of World War II that holding an anti-immigration stance is fundamentally "Un-American" - and it's one of the few cases where I think one can actually use that term and mean something real and coherent, rather than just employ it as cheap slander.
America is a country of immigrants. It has always BEEN a country of immigrants. Anyone who seeks to oppress any given minority in this country needs to be reminded that THEY are themselves a minority of one sort of another; there IS no actual majority in this country - whatever group you want to claim might be "the majority" is in actuality not a single group; e.g. "Christians" aren't the religious majority in this country, because some of those Christians are White, some are Black, some are Protestant, some are Catholic, some are Liberal, some are Conservative, and so on.
Being anti-immigrant is about the most Un-American thing you can do. And despite the triteness of the thought, it quite literally puts you in same camp as the Nazis.
As distasteful as I tend to find Patriotism in general to be, perhaps what we need to do is remind the American populace who like to think of themselves as Patriotic what it actually means to support America - and that if you don't love America as a country of immigrants, than you've never really understood or loved America to begin with.
German museum asks Italy to return a classical sculpture to them, on the grounds that Mussolini sold it to Hitler in a completely public way, for a lot of money, which should make it entirely different from stuff the Nazis stole or forced people to sell.
Utterly absurd. The sale was illegal under Italian law. It was objected to at the time as illegal.
Mussolini flagrantly broke the law to conduct the sale - he didn't amend the law to make it possible, he didn't try to find any loopholes or technicalities to exploit, etc, - he simply didn't give a damn.
It is, by definition, stolen art - regardless of how publicly it was stolen, or how much of a bribe the Nazis offered to make it happen.
Drones, drones, drones.
When will we have drones that look like insects that are the size of insects and are used for espionage? Like a fly on the Kremlin wall or the Great Hall of the People or the Ministry of Security wall? We have them, don't we? Next time you use your flyswatter check to see if it's blood and guts or electronics splattered all over.
I like the video of animals swatting drones. They don't seem to like them at all.
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