Review of Richard Dawkins' new, very speculative book, The Genetic Book of the Dead.
List of the best posts from rationalist Robin Hanson's years of blogging.
The folks planning to build a new town called Esmerelda in wine country 90 minutes north of San Francisco; they say they are inspired by the nineteenth-century Chataqua movement. Summary on Twitter/X.
New nasal spray vaccines for flu and Covid are performing better than injections in current trials.
More development proposed along DC's Anacostia waterfront; I have had a small part in transforming this area from urban wasteland to thriving community.
Good NY Times article on why Roman concrete has proved so durable. One of the theories discussed is the same one I linked to last year, that the nodules of lime in the mix make the resulting concrete self-healing, and so the presence of those undissolved lumps was intentional. But there are other theories, including some that focus on chemical reactions involving volcanic ash.
Kevin Drum looks into Elon Musks' compaints about environmental regulators.
It is possible to die from being impaled by a swordfish.
Production of Shakespeare's plays is declining in America. But is that really news, or is it more remarkable that in an environment generally hostile to European history, and particularly hostile to some of Shakespeare's themes, there were still 40 professional productions of his plays over the past year?
Nobel Prize in chemistry awared to the people who designed AI systems for understanding protein folding and devising new proteins with a desired shape. (Press Release, New York Times, 12-minute video)
Ben Pentreath sells his old country house in Dorset, with the amazing garden I have featured here several times over the years, and moves to a historic house in Orkney with "so much potential." Farewell tea at his old house here.
Sabine Hossenfelder takes a look at computer scientist Stephen Wolfram's attempt to create a "theory of everything" using hypergraphs, finds it intriguing, 10-minute video.
Lidar mapping of two medieval cities in Uzbekistan. Both on mountaintops, because central Asia was a dangerous place back then.
A small but lavishly decorated house uncovered in Pompeii. To me one of the most important things we learn from Pompeii is how brightly colored the ancient world was, not just temples and villas but streetcorner restaurants and ordinary homes.
Paul Bloom says you should only believe findings in social science when they contradict the ideology of the people doing or publishing the study.
Investigating the fruit in Renaissance paintings, with an eye toward recovering lost or nearly lost varieties.
The essay as a work of architecture, which needs an impressive entrance to draw you in.
Scott Siskind at the Progress Studies Conference.
Kevin Drum is puzzled by the conflicting stories about shoplifting in the US. How bad a problem is it? and is it getting worse or better?
Michael Horowitz in Foreign Affairs: "One report suggests the [Iranian] strike [on Israel] cost about $80 million to launch but $1 billion to defend against. A wealthy country and its allies could afford that sort of expense a few times—but maybe not 20 times, 30 times, or 100 times." Twitter/X
3 comments:
The folks planning to build a new town called Esmerelda in wine country 90 minutes north of San Francisco; they say they are inspired by the nineteenth-century Chataqua movement.
Really? Because I would say they are inspired by money.
But I suppose that's splitting hairs - I suppose if we want to be exact, they're inspired by the the Chatauqua movement's historical capacity to operate as a way to make money.
And boy, did they historically make money! It turns out America's so-called Christians love nothing more than paying good money for the privilege of being preached to about the virtues of being / becoming rich. Nevermind that whole "camel through the eye of a needle thing" from the Bible - whatever idiot thought that up clearly didn't understand anything, eh?
To be cynically honest, I'm quite sure the same scam will work wonderfully in the modern day as well - especially in California wine country. I imagine a lot of the "educational" offerings will be modernized, but I could even see them trotting out "Acres of Diamonds" once again, wholly unaltered, and getting standing ovations from it.
What a disgusting state of affairs.
It is possible to die from being impaled by a swordfish.
This seems blatantly obvious to me, but then again, I lived a long time on the Florida coast and was familiar enough with swordfish, billfish, marlins, etc, to know.
Still, even without that, if you just look at a swordfish skeleton, it should become pretty clear to just about anyone how dangerous the bill is. They're huge fish, and their bills are tough bony spikes. They've historically been used to make spear heads in many societies. But even more to the point, swordfish themselves actively use their bills as weapons against larger prey.
Kevin Drum is puzzled by the conflicting stories about shoplifting in the US. How bad a problem is it? and is it getting worse or better?
Drum, in his usual fashion, dances around but fails to reach one important observation, and completely avoids another one entirely.
His opening anecdotal quote actually openly suggests the first observation: "If you live in one of those areas...", it opines.
But then Drum goes on to look at national statistics, and completely drops the ball on an obvious explanation - that shoplifting is up in some places, but steady or declining in others, and thus in aggregate it's not rising.
"Why would drugstores lock up toothpaste if shoplifting weren't a real problem?" he opines. To which my response was "Wait - they're locking up toothpaste in your local drugstores? I've literally never seen that in any of the places I've ever lived in my entire life. Heck, I've never even heard of it until now! Sounds like a case of local shoplifting being inordinately high to me!"
He then goes on to cite data on "shrink" as a percentage of sales, by year, and does at least note that "shrink" includes things other than actual shoplifting, and even considers that maybe numbers are being affected by the implementation of things like locked up toothpaste, helping prevent and offset things.
But what he doesn't consider at all is the fact that sales are not the same every year, and in fact are quite variable - so if you're measuring shoplifting as a percentage of sale, you're naturally going to have all sorts of variance built into that measure, as sales themselves fluctuate.
You could have an identical amount of shoplifting in two separate years, but if in the second years sales increased 25%, that would mean shoplifting would "decrease" by 20%, when in reality the exact same amount of theft, down to the penny, had occurred.
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