Fascinating review of The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, a Japanese man who was one of the early leaders of the opening to the West in the nineteenth century, one of the finalists in Scott Siskind's annual book review contest.
The Smithsonian acquires the largest known collection of slave badges from Charleston, South Carolina, which slaves working away from their homes had to carry.
Right now LLM AIs can write political messages about as persuasive as those written by humans. This paper argues that it will be very hard for them to become much more persuasive, since order of magnitude increases in computing power seem to yield at most a tiny increase in persuasiveness. Right now there isn't any evidence that superhuman intelligence will be good for much. E.g., AI analysis of things like protein shapes is much faster than having humans do it, but the AI has not made any major discoveries or found any new approaches. Still waiting for the first radical new idea to come from AI.
Kiosks: photographs by David Navarro and Martyna Sobecka of Eastern Europe's disappearing tiny shops.
Auroville, a failed attempt to create a utopian community in southern India based on western political ideas and Indian spirituality; founded by anti-colonial activists, it nonetheless ended up recreating some of colonialism's sins.
Kevin Drum reviews the texts about Israel/Palentine issues that got three Columbia deans suspended, finds them unobjectionable. In a situation of complete mistrust, the banal can seem insulting or threatening. Speaking of which, really sad story in the NY Times about tensions at the UCSF medical school, doctors accusing each other of "harm" and "oppression," statements that minority patients feel "unsafe" with Jewish doctors, etc.
Major paper arguing that dingoes were domesticated animals before they went wild in Australia. I always thought this was so obvious that I never paid much attention to the debate, but apparently there are biologists who insist that dingoes are wild animals with none of the usual genetic markers of domestication. (NY Times, paper)
Dona Tartt (author of The Goldfinch) explains that there never was a golden age of art; artists have always been beset by the demands of money, politics, ideology, and so on. Art somehow endures because we value this "uncanny force bursting into the world, " with its glimpses of "the outlying lands beyond opinion and ideology."
Things I had never heard of before: Fat Beach Day.
Sabine Hossenfelder reviews some new evidence that creates big problems for most Dark Matter theories, 6-minute video.
In our world there is a constant rhetorical trope of distinguishing between "traditional" and "modern" parenting, usually with the idea that traditional is good. But, in fact, people have raised children in many different ways going back as far as we can see. Except for some really basic points – breastfeeding, lots of mother-baby contact – there is no consistency among traditional peoples. (I have some thoughts on human social diversity here.)
The University of Austin tries a new method for hiring faculty.
Kraut's 32-minute video at YouTube seems to be a decent introduction to the rise of Japanese militarism in the 1930s. But since I still haven't found a good book on this topic I won't claim to be able to judge. Sadly the rest of the series he projected on this topic seems not to exist.
Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) is one of the most widely assigned literary works in the US these days. But I never knew that her brother John S. Jacobs was also an escapee and an abolitionist. John Jacobs was a sailor who went, among other places, to Australia, and it was there, in 1855, that he published his own personal narrative. It rings with anger – the subtitle is, "The United States Governed by 600,000 Despots" – and it makes people wonder how much the other slave narratives were toned down by white editors so as not to alarm voters. It was rediscovered by an Australian researcher and has now been published. (U of Chicago Press, NY Times, wikipedia)
Mildly interesting essay on how Michael Foucault's analysis of power is being used in the contemporary discourse: "Foucault’s ingenious methods for analyzing power have now emerged as but one more strategy for the maintenance and expansion of existing institutional power." Also good on how bleak Foucault's vision of society was; to him, everything anybody says in any context is likely to be a play for power.
NY Times feature on the clothes worn by the top prospects in the NBA draft. Some pretty nice duds, when you consider that a lot of these guys are 19. Props to the guy who admitted his mother picked out his Yves Saint Laurent suit. Incidentally picks 1, 2, and 6 were all Afro-French; the first American taken was a white guy, which hasn't happened since 1977. After starting out white and then going mostly African American the NBA has become a world leader in multi-culturalism.
Germany's latest census revises the population down from 84.1 million to 82.7 million. The govenrment says the higher figure was just an error. The next time you are tempted to believe official figures with decimal points in them, consider that the German government can be 1.6% off in its count of people, who are much easier to count than most other things. How accurate are economic statistics in Myanmar or Nigeria?
Status of fusion report from Construction Physics. Conclusion: "there’s a good chance a working fusion reactor is near," but it won't be cheap, and with the price of solar and geothermal power falling so fast, by the time fusion power works we may not want it. On earth, anyway.
The men spend who spend long airplane flights doing absolutely nothing.
The pirate king of 10th-century Japan.
Nice photo sets from two recent contests: one for drone photography, and one in color photography.
Summary thread on Russia's recent offensive around Kharkiv (Twitter/X, Threadreader)
The rambling thoughts of a miserable, completely checked-out Russian soldier, who finds everything pointless. (Twitter/X)
4 comments:
Major paper arguing that dingoes were domesticated animals before they went wild in Australia. I always thought this was so obvious that I never paid much attention to the debate, but apparently there are biologists who insist that dingoes are wild animals with none of the usual genetic markers of domestication.
"The usual genetic markers of domestication"?
We're talking about animals on the other side of the Wallace and Weber lines - the boundaries demarcating a staggeringly profound shift in species diversity between Asia proper and Australasia.
From what I understand, dingos are part of an ancient genetic haplogroup that used to be widespread in East Asia, but which was supplanted over the millennia by other lineages. In short, in places like China, Japan, Nusantara, etc, other dogs from other places in the world came in over time and either introduced their own genetics through interbreeding, or killed off the local strains through outcompeting.
But that happened on the other side of the biodiversity lines - and DIDN'T happen in Australia.
Combine that with the fact that the Aboriginal peoples of Australia didn't practice animal husbandry or breeding, and you've got a lineage being preserved in Australia that went extinct elsewhere.
Now, one must note, that the original dogs of mainland Asia would have been domesticated animals - they lived alongside humans who were practicing agriculture, and studies of the oldest archaeological finds in China indicate they ate diets with lots of plant matter. With Australasian dogs sharing the same genetic lineage, that means that dingoes were domesticated animals at one point.
But once they reached Australia, where there was no agriculture, and started living in the Outback and other harsh landscapes, natural selection kicked in. Those individuals who had genes which favored the ability to hunt and live as carnivores survived and bred; whereas those which were more domesticated and more reliant on human agricultural product to survive, died off. In a few short generations the population would have been culled and completely reshaped, to say nothing of the subsequent thousands of years.
If you want to argue that dingoes are somehow fully "wild" rather than just extremely feral, you're going to have to find a convincing way to discount the potential effects described above.
Things I had never heard of before: Fat Beach Day.
Bad link - you accidentally duplicated the link about Fukuzawa.
"Kevin Drum reviews the texts about Israel/Palentine issues that got three Columbia deans suspended, finds them unobjectionable."
Of course he does. Has Kevin Drum ever looked at something that caused humans to feel strong emotion and thought, "This is very important! I totally share this emotion!"?
I'm not much concerned with the texts either way, though the way the behavior echoed that of my worst students was a little troubling. But I would love to hear Drum say something that didn't sound exactly like Kevin Drum. I'm reminded of Philip Glass's lament that, no matter how he tried, everything he wrote sounded like Philip Glass music.
@David
I'd never heard that about Glass.
I suppose it's true in a sense - I feel like it'd be pretty hard mistake his work for anyone else's, or vice versa. I can understand his frustration at not being able to get away from his own style, but maybe that's simply the price of being so instantly iconic and unique.
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