Perseid Meteor Shower over Stonehenge by Josh Dury.
Lots more cool stuff at his web site.
Italian researchers claim to have found a description of the exact location of Plato's tomb in one of the charred papyri from Herculaneum. The text is a history of the Academy, which might turn out to be a valuable source on ancient philosophy if enough can be read.
The world's biggest renewable/storage electrical project has just been approved for northern Australia. The plan is that much of the power will be transmitted to Singapore along an undersea cable 4300 km (2700 miles) long.
Interesting carved stone found in Poland, in a Viking style but seems to depict a Christian priest or bishop.
New regulations promulgated by the Department of Interior under the Native American Graves Protection Act are so confusing that nobody seems to know what they require, and some museums are removing their Native American exhibits and cutting off access to their collections until the dust settles and they know what's what. Some archaeologists are afraid this will mean the loss of collections for decades, if not forever.
Scientists can buy citations on the black market to up the citation count of their publications.
Sabine Hossenfelder on recycling nuclear waste, and getting more energy from it, 5-minute video.
Kevin Drum reports that California's big tech companies are giving up on DEI initiatives. Not only do they irritate people, they have had no impact on the number of female employees, which continues to decline.
Photos and video from the annual Bosch parade in the Netherlands.
Rock layers found on uninhabited Scottish islands seem to preserve a geological record spanning the beginning of the massive ice age known as Snowball Earth, c. 720 million years ago.
Wreck of the HMS Hawke, a cruiser sunk by a German torpedo in 1914, has been found off the coast of Scotland in "remarkable" condition.
Alex Tabarrok on the intellectual roots of modern YIMBYism.
Russians using video games – in this case Hearts of Iron mods – to spread the message that Russia is helping Africans fight western imperialists.
Bonkers profile of Palmer Luckey, who invented the Oculus Rift, got fired from Meta for hanging out in right-wing chat rooms and supporting Trump, and then founded defense AI company Anduril. I'm irritated that Google won't find me a photograph of his Henry VIII costume.
Video of Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov driving a Cybertruck with mounted machine gun. Interesting times.
I hear from a friend who teaches at a local community college that of the 3257 students who tried to sign up this spring and summer, 2124 were spam bots. They had to implement a new, much slower, manual sign-up process to fight the plague.
Beavers have been reintroduced to northern England and seem to be thriving. Mark my words, in a decade they're going to have so many beavers they're going to be fighting about killing them.
Speaking of which, a fatal brown bear attack in Romania led the country to dramatically raise its hunting quota. It's been a long time since European countries had problems with wildlife running amok, but now there are tense debates about the killing of boar, deer, bears, wolves, and soon (I'm sure) beavers.
From this little story about a dead oarfish washing up in California I discover that dead oarfish are considered a terrible omen in Japan, possibly predicting earthquakes. For some reason I am seeing a lot of chatter about big earthquakes in the near future. Are there oarfish washing up, or is there some more serious evidence?
Weirdly fascinating NY Times piece by Rowena Chiu, who was Harvey Weinstein's personal assistant, about the quandary faced by Matthew Perry's personal assistant. Celebrities expect their assistants to do whatever they are told, including lie for them or procure drugs for them. How much blame should fall on these assistants? Should we expect them to resign rather than buy ketamine?
The organism that made the mysterious fossilized burrows known as bifungites has been identified: a small, segmented worm. (NY Times, original paper)
Via Tyler Cowen, a list of what are said to be the most widely read books in Silicon Valley.
Interesting comment from Belarusian dictator Lukashenko on why Belarus won't join the war: "They [the Ukrainians] have constantly told us, and the Westerners, that they don't need a war with Belarus. We understand this and say that we are not going to fight with you. And not because you are good. But because we are not ready to increase the front by 1200 kilometers. Here is the entire border - 1200 km. Now the "SMO" front is 1000 km. Are we ready to close 1200 kilometers? No. And Kursk has shown this."
In the midst of Ukraine's offensive into Kursk there's a fight over bridges over the Seym River. Ukraine has blown up all the old bridges, so the Russians have been setting up pontoon bridges. Turns out, though, that pontoon bridges are highly vulnerable to drone attacks, and so are engineers trying to build them.
Statistics on how many of the various kinds of Russian missiles Ukraine has been shooting down.
People counting Russian prisoners from Kursk in Ukrainian videos are up to 507 as of August 20. Some have no doubt been missed, but experience shows that we see imagery of most Russian group surrenders. Rumors of thousands of prisoners taken during Ukraine's 2022 offensive turned out to be false, and the people who said "If there were that many prisoners, we would have seen pictures" turned out to be right.
Hilarious bid for the F-bomb world record by a Russian watching a drone attack on an airbase.
Chatter that the US is moving away from its very ambitious NGAD program toward a plane that would be smaller, cheaper, and built for easy upgrades.
Thread arguing that Ukraine's Kursk offensive is slowing down because they don't have enough trucks to supply the 30 or so battalions already deployed.
Dmitri of War Translated: "Every morning in Russia now is a Groundhog Day: drones are flying, an oil depot is burning somewhere, another military convoy was destroyed, Putin visited places that have nothing to do with the war. Every single morning. The special operation is going according to plan."
6 comments:
Hilarious bid for the F-bomb world record by a Russian watching a drone attack on an airbase.
Poor translation, or at least, uninspired. The speaker's actually using much more varied language than the translation suggests.
It translates "blyat" as f***, which is generally close enough as these things go. But the speaker also employs "nahui" and "pizdets" liberally, and while you can translate those as f***, they're actually equivalent to d*** and c*** respectively.
And those are just the ones I picked up on - I'm really not great at all with Russian, so it's possible he employed even more varied swears. I'm surprised I didn't hear a single "cyka" in all that, though.
Celebrities expect their assistants to do whatever they are told, including lie for them or procure drugs for them. How much blame should fall on these assistants? Should we expect them to resign rather than buy ketamine?
Yes. Yes, we should.
If my boss told me to do something illegal, I would document it and refuse to do it. If they fired me, I'd explore my options to take them to court for wrongful termination, and take my story to the media.
If those options were closed for some reason (say, I feared reprisals from someone rich enough to be above the law), I would at the very least resign my position.
Good people do not willingly allow themselves to be complicit in wrongdoing, period dot. There are always exceptions, of course - serious coercion would introduce some uncertainty into things, for example. But if the only reason you're breaking the law is to keep your job? I'm sorry, that's not nearly good enough.
Find a new job, and do whatever you can safely do to expose your former employer's attempted criminality to the authorities and the public at large. The rich in particular need to be held accountable in this wretched country, and that will only ever happen if we refuse to collude with them.
New regulations promulgated by the Department of Interior under the Native American Graves Protection Act are so confusing that nobody seems to know what they require, and some museums are removing their Native American exhibits and cutting off access to their collections until the dust settles and they know what's what. Some archaeologists are afraid this will mean the loss of collections for decades, if not forever.
I read the complaints in the link, and I'm convinced the poster is just not used to parsing legal or technical language. I could find no logical contradictions whatsoever in the citations presented.
I suspect that part of the poster's confusion may be a misunderstanding of the usage of "defer". While it can often be used to mean to submit to someone or something else as superior and superseding to your own position, it can also simply mean to acknowledge the merit of someone or something else's position.
This second definition fits perfectly with the DOI's statement that "our intent in defining this type of information is to ensure that Native American traditional knowledge is considered alongside scientific and historical information."
All that they are in effect stating is that decisions cannot be made without deferring to - that is, making an acknowledgement of - Native American traditional knowledge.
(For example, if scientists / historians / whoever insist that something isn't a "funerary object" and wasn't "intentionally placed with or near human remains", but Native representatives insist that such an object does in fact fit within the context of their own knowledge of Native American traditions, then the non-native experts can't just dismiss that claim, and MUST take it into consideration, even if they disagree with it or think it lacks hard evidence.)
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This is consistent with another of the DOI's statements: "We have not added a requirement for deference to the determinations of lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, or NHOs as it would be be inconsistent with the Act."
In this case, the critical context is "deference to the determinations of lineal descendants", etc.
The choice of wording seems to be extremely unfortunate, in that they appear to now be using "deference" in the other sense (of submitting to someone or something else, rather than acknowledging it). Nevertheless, that does not change the fact that the statement is entirely logically consistent.
In effect, what they are saying is the determinations of natives are not being "deferred to" in the sense of overruling the determinations of scientists and historians - but that the traditional knowledge of natives must be acknowledged and considered in the course of scientists and historians making their own determinations.
This notion is directly reinforced by their VERY NEXT SENTENCE:
"Museums and Federal agencies are responsible for making determinations under the Act and these regulations..."
(...meaning ONLY museums and Federal agencies make such determinations, and natives do NOT make determinations...)
"...but must do so after consulting with lineal descendants."
(Meaning that when making their determination, museums and Federal agencies can't just dismiss or ignore what natives have to say!)
The only other complaint made is the following:
the DOI says within a single paragraph that entire collections are required for reporting under NAGPRA and only portions of a collection are required
This is simply not correct, and misunderstands what the DOI actually wrote:
"These regulations require the summary to include the entire holding or collection which may include cultural items. We note that only holdings or collections, or portions of holdings or collections, that may contain cultural items are required to be identified in a summary."
We can break this down and simplify it as follows:
"If a holding or a collection might contain certain items, it must be identified in a summary."
"If a portion of a holding or a collection might contain certain items, then the entire contents of the collection must be identified in a summary, not just the portion."
~~~
Basically they're saying that if there's no possibility of a holding / collection containing cultural items in ANY portion of it, then you don't need to provide a summary for that collection / holding...
...but if you DO need to provide a summary, then the summary must include ALL items in the entire holding / collection, not the the items in a particular portion (or portions) of it.
Bonkers profile of Palmer Luckey, who invented the Oculus Rift, got fired from Meta for hanging out in right-wing chat rooms and supporting Trump, and then founded defense AI company Anduril. I'm irritated that Google won't find me a photograph of his Henry VIII costume.
What is WITH all these far-right nutjobs and their weird Lord of The Rings themed self-aggrandizing, totally devoid of all self awareness?
This piece of shit literally builds robots that kill people. And he cheerfully addresses the world and say, "Look at me! I'm a great and noble hero!"
He fashioned for himself the equivalent of the Pits of Isengard, a nightmarish factory churning out unnatural mockeries of life, which exist solely to serve as tools of mass murder. And yet, without so much as blinking, he will proudly compare himself to Aragorn, when in reality he is plainly Saruman?
And all without even the remotest realization that the sword of Andúril itself never was used to kill anyone in the Lord of The Rings, but only ever served a symbolic role? (And even that was of limited value - Sauron was destroyed by a hobbit commoner and his gardener carrying a ring on a hopeless quest, not an heir of ancient Kings of Men wielding a legendary blade of old on a grand battlefield.)
There are no words to describe the utter disgust and loathing this feculent, brainless maggot inspires in me. I hope he chokes. On an autocannon shell fired from one of his own slaughter machines suffering a targeting malfunction.
I really need to do better at double checking my posts keep my name attached - if I take too long to compose them, they seem to reset to anonymous, and I never remember to double check when I'm about to post.
Anywho...
From this little story about a dead oarfish washing up in California I discover that dead oarfish are considered a terrible omen in Japan, possibly predicting earthquakes. For some reason I am seeing a lot of chatter about big earthquakes in the near future. Are there oarfish washing up, or is there some more serious evidence?
Looking at a wikipedia list of notable earthquakes (apparently 5.0 and up) in California, there's definitely a rough pattern of earthquakes above a certain magnitude happening in batches over the course of a few years, then you get several years without any, and then you get another batch of ones clustered fairly close together again.
In the past 50 years, we've had:
One in 1975
One in 1978
Two in 1979
Four in 1980
One in 1981
One in 1983
One in 1984
One in 1986
Three in 1987
Two in 1989
One in 1990
One in 1991
Six in 1992
One in 1994
One in 1999
One in 2000
One in 2003
One in 2007
One in 2008
Two in 2010
Two in 2014
Two in 2019
One in 2022
I don't know about you, but that spread definitely suggests to me that California is about due (or even somewhat overdue) for another cluster of large earthquakes.
As for the Japanese cultural connection to oarfish, I wonder if it's more than just superstition. People used to dismiss or discount a lot of Japanese lore surrounding tsunamis, which has since been able to be proven as actually accurate. So if their traditional observations about tsunamis themselves ended up being quite on point, why not their observations about the earthquakes that CAUSE tsunamis?
Oarfish live in very deep waters, and despite their size they are apparently terrible swimmers - reportedly because they don't develop much muscle mass, because they inhabit very still waters with little in the way of currents to have to swim against.
The deep sea is also a common place to find offshore vulcanism, along with all sorts of associated phenomenon like volcanic gases venting from underground, sudden shifts in water pressure, the creation of current-like seafloor "waves", and the stirring up of sediment and seafloor debris.
Since earthquakes almost never occur in total isolation, but are usually an interconnected chain of events, with different seismic shifts of different intensities occurring in different places near each other, it would make pretty good sense that if there's an undersea "foreshock" which adversely affects and kills oarfish which then float to the surface, that would be a reliable way to predict a subsequent earthquake that might strike the nearby land (perhaps with "aftershocks" to follow).
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