Noah Smith thinks the horrible mood of Americans is finally improving, hopes the decade to come will be more optimistic, lauds the Harris campaign for latching onto this "good vibe."
Scott Siskind, Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases? (Not really, but it seems to be effective against a bizarre variety of conditions.)
Crazy enormous drawing of one artist's cruise ship adventures.
Thread on Grok AI, which seems to have been released without any safety protocols and will happily make an image of Mickey Mouse slaughtering children or tell you how to stage a school shooting.
Tyler Cowen interviews Paul Bloom, psychologist and expert on child development, very interesting. Says young children don't care much about skin color but they are very sensitive to who speaks their own language in a familiar accent.
The people who were labeled "gifted" as kids and think this ruined their lives.
Discovery of two more victims at Pompeii; modern archaeology has provided an exact description of their last hours.
Matthew Perry's death amidst serious ketamine addiction reminds us that ALL psycho-active drugs are dangerous. (CBS, NY Times, BBC)
New Neanderthal site discovered in Spain, c. 70,000 years old, shows the residents were eating small animals like rabbits and turtles as well as the larger game found on most Neanderthal sites. This is presented as surprising but I don't know of any predator that won't eat smaller animals if that's all they can find. My dog happily chases anything from deer to houseflies, and its mainly the insects that he actually eats.
Sabine Hossenfelder on why science and scientists can't be trusted, 10-minute video. The problem of academics engaging with each other in insider games, rather than with the world, is deep, widespread and, I think, very damaging.
Delightful collection of mysterious personal ads from the 1860s and 1870s.
On Twitter/X, Shashank Joshi of The Economist has some passages from a recent book on antisemitism in Britain. The book says only about 5% of Brits are "hard core" antisemites, but that means there are about 11 hard core antisemites for each British Jew. The proportion of antisemites rises to 15% among British Muslims, but since British Muslims are a small minority, the large majority of British antisemites are natives of Christian background.
In Belgrade, Serbia, big protests against a proposed lithium mine. Decarbonization will not be easy.
And here is Matt Yglesias on the hard problem that sometimes decarbonizing means paying costs locally to have a very small impact on a global problem: paywalled article you could read with a trial subscription, summary on Twitter/X.
Big primary battle in Florida between Trump acolyte Matt Gaetz and a Republican challenger backed by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Any hope for breaking Trump's hold on the party? Probably not in Florida's first district, but worth watching.
New street art from Bansky.
Sabine Hossenfelder on a another experiment that found no sign of dark matter, 5-minute video.
Steph Curry in slow motion, eight 3-pointers in the Olympic basketball final.
Claims that Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were innocent victims of US anti-communist hysteria, or antisemitism, or both, are still all over the internet, even though Soviet records obtained in the 1990s confirmed that Julius was a spy and Ethel helped him. Some people can't let go of their grievances.
Tweet claiming that one of the most striking things about the recent Olympics was the "unprecedented unity of fans" from the former Soviet nations in central Asia. Something of a regional identity seems to be developing. This might seem obvious to you but the post-Soviet governments have actively opposed this and tried to develop their own nationalisms.
Many painters have been obsessed with color. But what did their colors look like when new? Does it matter that what we see is nothing like what they intended? What should we do about it?
Review of a new biography of Oliver Cromwell, interesting on the politics of the 1650s, when dissenting Protestants wielded a power all out of proportion to their numbers. The radicalism of the Civil War period faded very quickly because there were never very many radicals. As a naive undergraduate I thought the Diggers, Levellers, and so on represented "the people," but now we know they represented only themselves.
Ukraine using dog-shaped robots for scouting and delivering supplies to front-line positions. Said to have enough battery capacity for two hours of operation.
Poland's arms-buying spree continues with a reported deal to purchase 48 Patriot missile launchers and 644 PAC-3 missiles (the ones used for shooting down incoming missiles). The launchers will be assembled in Poland. Also more than 300 AMRAAM air-to-air missiles, exact number unclear.
And German buys 600 Patriot PAC-3s for around $2.5 billion. Some Ukrainians have suggested that if Europeans are worried about Russia they should give these weapons to Ukraine instead of building their own stockpiles, and indeed finding this balance is an interesting problem for European nations.
Russian troops in Ukraine keep getting older: "The average age of Russians killed in Ukraine is nearing 38 and rising." Soldiers in their 70s have been captured. Opinions differ as to how bad a sign this is militarily; I am mainly impressed that tens of thousands of Russian men aged 40 to 70 have so few prospects that they choose to sign up for a bloody war to get a bonus that translates to around $25,000. Especially considering that many Russian businesses are desperate for workers and unemployment is very low.
Interesting interview with a former Russian officer about the Kursk incursion. Notes that Ukraine has staged several raids across the border using the "Freedom of Russia Legion." This was done, he says, to observe the Russian response and scout for the future offensive. Border guards tried to warn about this, but they were ignored and nothing was done to shore up defenses.
Ukraine captures 102 Russian soldiers at once. Ukrainian sources say Russia has lately been more eager to set up a prisoner exchange than ever before, presumably because many of the prisoners from Kursk are conscripts.
Because of the chaos of the Kursk front there have been multiple reports of Russian aviation attacking their own men. One poor group of Russians in two trucks were attacked by their own helicopter, and then Ukrainian dones swooped in to finish them off.
Thread on Twitter/X summarizing a Wall Street Journal story about Ukraine's destruction of the Nordstream Pipeline. Nobody seems very worried about hiding the details of this operation; does that make it real, or fake?
Reports that Ukrainian forces have surrounded the village of Korenovo with hundreds of Russian inside.
Pretty good article at Vox about how Columbia University President Minouche Shafik managed to make everyone mad over her handling of pro-Gaza protests, leading to her resignation this week.
Crazy little video of a Russian soldier who appears to head butt a drone, which explodes, but he then trots away as if unhurt. This reminds me of a weird article I read decades ago about all the crazy stuff that happened in explosions in WW II: people who had their clothes blown off but were completely unhurt, people who were thrown 30 feet through the air but landed unharmed, etc. The conclusion was that if you set off a few million explosions the really unlikely stuff starts to appear in the sample.
Review of a book about World War II by Philips O'Brien, a military historian who thinks battles are unimportant and wars are really about production and what the US calls "command and control." (Or, these days, "C2".) Among the claims is that US and British bombing of Germany was decisive in its defeat. Interesting, although I don't see how it refutes Richard Overy's argument that the bombing campaign used up more US and British resources than it destroyed German resources. Does make it clear that the US and Britain had a bigger part in defeating Germany than some accounts allow, since most of the Luftwaffe was devoted to fighting the bombers. I follow O'Brien on Twitter/X and so far his record on the Ukraine war has been lousy; he was claiming more than a year ago that Russian losses were "unsustainable" and they would "soon" have to give up.
5 comments:
Alas, on the Kursk offensive, one should probably mention indications that, to the extent that the goal was to draw off Russian forces from their offensive in eastern Ukraine, this appears so far to have failed, at least according to the NYT (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/16/world/europe/russia-ukraine-pokrovsk-kursk.html). Other sources may have a different, perhaps more sophisticated, take, but if this is right, then Ukraine's bold gamble appears to have been answered by a bold Russian gamble, to ignore Kursk and keep going. That said, Kursk has clearly accomplished other, more political goals, including showing Ukraine wasn't just going to sit while waiting on Western internal politics.
That Noah Smith essay is very interesting; thanks for the link. It's not so much about American vibes in general--it says nothing about Americans' general feeling about the economy, for example--as about the good vibes surrounding the Harris-Walz ticket and the apparent way they have seized the initiative, and the vibe, from Trump-Vance. Smith does argue that Harris-Walz may indicate an emerging normie majority that rejects both progressivism and right-wing asshole-ism. Personally, I'm thrilled with Harris-Walz, though I'm trying to take it one day at a time.
Sabine Hossenfelder on a another experiment that found no sign of dark matter, 5-minute video.
Scientist 1: Huh. Based on our current understanding of the universe, there ought to be a lot more matter out there.
Scientist 2: That would seem to imply that our current understanding of the universe is flawed somehow, then.
Scientist 1: NO! Clearly we just can't detect all the matter that MUST be out there!
Scientist 2: ...well, I suppose we ~do~ have an extremely limited vantage point, cosmically speaking... maybe we're missing something that will become clear once we've developed the means to observe the universe from multiple discrete pl...
Scientist 1: Stop babbling! CLEARLY the answer is that there's a special kind of SECRET matter which is simultaneously unable to be observed using literally all known forms of detection, AND exists is insanely staggering quantities that dwarf the amount of normal matter in the universe! It's the only explanation for the discrepancies in our FLAWLESS CALCULATIONS!
Scientist 2: ...I'll go file the grant applications to start trying to detect it, I guess?
Review of a book about World War II by Philips O'Brien, a military historian who thinks battles are unimportant and wars are really about production and what the US calls "command and control." (Or, these days, "C2".) Among the claims is that US and British bombing of Germany was decisive in its defeat. Interesting, although I don't see how it refutes Richard Overy's argument that the bombing campaign used up more US and British resources than it destroyed German resources.
Does it ~need~ to refute that particular argument?
It may indeed have used up more US and British resource that it destroyed German resources - but all that matters is that in so doing, it depleted German resources enough to cripple their warfighting capability, while still leaving plenty of US and British resources ever after paying a heavier cost.
It's like an ugly court case, where one party seeks to prolong the conflict long enough for their opponent to run out of money of their own, forcing them to forfeit. If you're rich enough, you can just keep throwing money at the problem, and even if you're losing far more than what you're costing your opponent, so long as they run out of money first, you win.
Crazy little video of a Russian soldier who appears to head butt a drone, which explodes, but he then trots away as if unhurt.
Your link doesn't work for me, but I found the footage elsewhere.
Personally, I think people are misunderstanding the footage, likely due to the extreme angle. It looks to me like the soldier begins diving to the ground, hope for the drone to continue on its course and impact behind him; and it also looks like the drone detonates prematurely, exploding in the air slightly above the soldier.
Why it explodes early I'm unsure - it might have been remotely triggered by the operator, but was mistimed; or perhaps another soldier nearby (but off-camera) shot it from the air (both sides have been fielding shotguns for precisely this purpose).
Whatever the reason, it seems he didn't take the full brunt of the explosion - which is probably why he didn't die outright. (He may have died after the fact due to concussive trauma and internal hemorrhaging; or he may have gotten lucky and actually escaped unscathed - no way to tell from the footage available.)
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