Links 20 December 2024

Not posting much because I have been busy with relocating cemeteries at Oak Hill in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, which you can read about here.

What to the people of Syria want, after emerging from the nightmare of Arab Socialism under Assad? Human rights, women's rights, tolerance of minorities, and free markets: neoliberalism.

Scott Siskind on a fascinating experiment Anthropic did on their Claude AI, seeing if it would resist attempts to turn it evil. It does.

Speaking of evil, captured documents reveal that one purpose of the Assad regime's torture program was to extort money from the families of the arrested.

Bunch of senior scientists issue a fat report arguing that research on "mirror cells" – forms of life built around mirror-image molecules, such as right-handed proteins – poses a dire threat to existing life and should be halted. (NY Times, Smithsonian, The Scientist)

"The Balkans are disappearing. . . . the region’s population is shrinking at a faster rate than almost anywhere else on earth due to a combination of emigration and low fertility rates." More people born in Bosnia live outside it than in, and a recent survey found that across the whole region, 44% are thinking of leaving. Interesting article at The Baffler with lots of detail.

America is getting less polarized. (Washington Post) But maybe the correct analysis is we're getting polarized along new lines.

Via Kevin Drum, an academic paper that calculated the European regicide rate over the past 1400 years, finding that it has declined a lot.

Scale armor found in a 1st century BC Chinese tomb.

Two separate studies find that the inbreeding between humans and Neanderthals occured in one period, c. 50,500 to 43,500 years ago.

Another claim that the earth contains huge amounts of hydrogen that we could drill for and use. Something about these claims makes me skeptical, perhaps because it is too much like what people want to be true.

China's North South Water Diversion Project, an enormous effort to supply water to the dry north. Two routes are already operating: the East Route, which is a modernized version of the old Grand Canal, and the Central Route, a gravity canal from a tributary of the Yangtze to Beijing. But enormous as these projects are, there is still not enough water in the north, so plans are underway for more canals. More details at wikipedia.

Controversial essay on how to promote gender equality without generating backlash.

Britain's Bronze Age cannibal massacre.

Eight Remarkable Scientific Firsts of 2024 is a pretty lame list.

Bah to this dumb article about archaeology at Çatalhöyük, all about Ian Hodder's "new" interpretation of the site, which Hodder first presented in 1992. He wrote a popular book about the site in 2006. Sigh. Some people just can't write about scholarship unless they can set up a dumb old orthodoxy and an exciting new idea.

Good piece about the current German malaise, by Anna Sauerbrey in the NY Times. One important piece is an energy shortage caused by the bizarre decision to close all their nuclear power plants while also phasing out coal and trying to quit Russian natural gas. Another is that Germany profited for decades selling machine tools etc. to China, but this helped Chinese manufacturers reach the point where they are outcompeting the Germans.

Squirrels hunting and eating smaller mammals. This is presented as surprising but they are from the rodent tribe, a very shifty and opportunistic bunch.

Too long but still interesting essay on Charles Fort and his Book of the Damned, which emerged from a weird intellectual madness.

First interviews with Assad regime soldiers are coming out in the western press. Keynote: "There was nothing coming through at all on the radio. There were no orders from senior officers. Just silence. It soon became apparent that it was every man for himself."

Collection of recent anti-Putin jokes, from Russia. Via Scott Siskind's December links post.