British Wildlife Photography Awards.
Bipartisan momentum for nuclear energy in the US government.
AI says Biden is cognitively fine.
Since 2007, the cost of a megawatt of solar photovoltaic equipment has been falling at a rate of 44% per year. Which is amazing, although the essay this comes from errs in thinking that we can keep taking more land for solar farms indefinitely, when there is already opposition to every suggested plan.
Remarkable Ming Dynasty Tomb excavated.
The Callahans and the Murphys was a 1927 silent film that the studio pulled because it was so offensively stereotypical about the Irish, and it was thought lost, but a couple of clips survive. (NY Times, IFI)
Kevin Drum has the list of senior Trump appointees who do not now support him, starting with Mike Pence.
Sabine Hossenfelder, short video arguing that "our existence actually transcends the passage of time."
Alex Taborrok argues that it is unconstitutional for state universities to charge higher tuition to out-oif-state students, since Article IV says “The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.”
About 74,000 years ago the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted, perhaps the most powerful volcanic eruption seen by Homo sapiens sapiens. People have theorized that this nearly wiped out humanity, but evidence from Ethiopia joins evidence from two other regions in showing that humans coped just fine.
More biologists who think life began at undersea hydrothermal vents. Too bad their theory has a "then a miracle occurs" bit in the middle.
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Alex Taborrok argues that it is unconstitutional for state universities to charge higher tuition to out-of-state students, since Article IV says “The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.”
As is noted in the comments on that linked page, this is already settled law - multiple courts have ruled in favor of the state's right to charge out of state students more, including appeals.
Taborrok wants to draw a parallel between a separate ruling regarding commercial fishing licenses, but fails to recognize the inherent differences between the two things. A state college only has so much space and infrastructure, and every out of state student they allow in means one less in-state student that can accept.
In contrast, an out-of-state fishing company buying a fishing license does not in any way deprive any in-state fishing company of their own chance to buy their own license - there is no practical limit to the number of licenses that can be sold by the state (fish population and take restrictions not withstanding).
Moreover, the nature of the two resources is totally different. A state college or university is the product of spending taxpayer money - whereas a fishing license is mostly a form of bookkeeping and a minor monetization of a natural resource which is NOT the product of spending taxpayer money.
Beyond that, fish (and the commercial enterprises that catch and sell them) are more or less interchangeable entities, aside from where they reside and to whom they pay taxes. But human beings and their educations are not. States have a vested interest in providing education and training for their own residents, because their own residents are vastly more likely to remain in state and to put their training to use within the state. Someone who is willing to get a degree in one state might not be (and usually isn't) willing to live and work there afterwards.
If, say, your local medical schools give all their spots to out-of-state students, those students are virtually guaranteed to return to their own states of residence and open a practice there, rather than in your state. And any who ARE interested in practicing medicine in your own state can simply become permanent residents (which they would want to do anyway to open a practice), and thus become eligible for in-state tuition.
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More biologists who think life began at undersea hydrothermal vents. Too bad their theory has a "then a miracle occurs" bit in the middle.
What theory for the genesis of life on earth DOESN'T have that "then a miracle occurs" bit in the middle?
As best as science can tell, life is an extreme anomaly.
You can put all of the necessary elements and compounds together in the right ratios, at the right temperature, with the right levels of exposure to light and radiation and all the rest, and leave it for a human lifetime, and the odds of it actually spawning life are so insanely small as to be non-existent.
In fact, it's worse than that. As far as the evidence suggests, the earth formed 4.6 billion years ago, but the oldest known proof of life anywhere on the planet dates only to 3.5 billion years ago. The conditions necessary for biogenesis didn't exist everywhere, but they would have been extremely widespread across the planet and in the early oceans.
And it STILL took about a billion years before life got going.
That's a thousand years, repeated one million times. That's the entirety of the human species - 300,000 years - repeated 3,333 times.
And that just gets you the most basic single-celled organisms.
Then you need to spend ANOTHER TWO BILLION YEARS to get to the earliest known proven multi-cellular organisms. And those would have been the most basic multi-cellular organisms.
The mechanisms by which life both arises and becomes more complex are, as far as we can tell, UNIMAGINABLY unlikely to succeed. If the genesis of basic life is "a miracle" (and by all accounts, it truly is, given how bad the odds were) then the progression to multi-cellular life is twice as miraculous.
And yet you aren't complaining about that larger miracle, curiously. You comfortably take it in stride; heck, you arguably even take it for granted. Of course single-cellular life would become multi-cellular eventually! Nothing miraculous about that! Or so we all subconsciously imagine.
Life is an utter absurdity.
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(Warning: Math Ahead - I Can't Guarantee I Didn't Make A Mistake Somewhere)
Imagine flipping a coin over and over and needing to get 100 heads in a row.
That's going to take an average of (very roughly and generously calculated, for purposes of simplification) about 10^31 coin flips.
Let's toss something obscene, like a billion coins a second - 10^9.
That's going to take 10^22 seconds for us to reach our target number, aka, 10 sextillion seconds.
There are 31,536,000 seconds in a year. Meaning you'd have to flip a billion coins each second for 317,097,919,837,645 years (on average) to get even close to getting 100 heads in a row. (In reality, it's more, due to my simplifications.)
That's ~317 trillion years.
The earth is 4.5 billion years old.
That's 70,000 earth lifetimes.
The universe itself is (seemingly) 13.7 billion years old.
That's 22,000 universe lifetimes (in length so far).
It's possible the universe is very young, and could last a trillion years.
That's 317 universe lifetimes (in full).
Flipping a billion coins a second.
To get "just" 100 heads in a row.
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Obviously, life is far more likely than getting 100 heads in a row.
Maybe it's closer to the odds of getting "only" 80 heads in a row, which is much, much, much better.
One again, rounding it off very roughly for simplicity, - if you flip a billion coins a second, it'll "only" take you 317ish million years. That's pretty close! We're within an order of magnitude!
How about "only" 79 heads in a row? That gets us to just about 3.17ish billion years (flipping a billion coins every second). Now we're in the ballpark, at least!
If the collective "primordial soup" of ancient earth was able to undergo THREE billion opportunities every second to progress along the chain to biogenesis, but it required about 79 sequential successes in the chain of necessary events or the entire thing failed, then it would have taken life just about a billion years to emerge, which fits our expectations.
We can adjust as necessary - maybe the "number of heads in a row" was much smaller, but the number of "coin flips per second" was also much smaller. Those sorts of fine details are beyond my ability to guess at without a lot more information and context.
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