Lioness Devouring a Man, Phoenician
ivory found in the Palace of Ashurbanipal
at Nimrud, c 800 BC.
Orcas not only have fads, they have retro fads.
Google's new AI, GenCast, is the best weather forecaster on the planet (NY Times, summary from Kevin Drum)
Huge hoard of Roman coins from the reign of Nero found in England.
Amidst the "shadow depression" and all the other supposed woes of the US economy, online sales this Cyber Monday smashed the previous record for online commerce in a day.
The scale of Russian online manipulation efforts: Tiktok recently removed 66,000 bot accounts with 10 million bot followers, all involved in attempting to sway the recent election in Romania.
India strikes a deal with 30 scientific publishers to give all Indian students and academics access to most of the top journals, for $715 million over three years.
Seven-minute video with views of the interior of Notre Dame after its 700 million Euro restoration, much lighter and more colorful than before the fire. Photos here. Longer video on the restoration here. The restoration relied heavily on the very detailed plans made during the restoration of 1844.
Kevin Drum asks why Veterans' Administration disability payments have gone up so much.
Claims from Chinese researchers of a new type of human living in Asia around 200,000 years ago. (News piece, original article)
Major sacrifice of Iron Age weapons found in Denmark.
Noah Smith worries that China will dominate global manufacturing and thus the world: "manufacturing is war now."
Solo polyamory. It sounds like a right-wing joke but apparently it is something people have actually said about themselves, like the self-proclaimed Asexuals who have sex and the Queer people who only have regular heterosexual relationships. Sometimes you just shake your head and move on.
According to this study, giving people $1,000 a month for three years has little impact on their political views, except that they become more supportive of work requirements for welfare.
Peace and a real estate boom in Kabul, Afghanistan.
A claim that "green corridors" have cooled the city of Medellin, Colombia reversing urban heat island effect.
Scott Siskind on modern architecture, which he hates.
Stone tablet carved in an unknown language found in (European) Georgia. The symbols do resemble those used in Middle Eastern scripts, but they seem to be unique.
The use and misuse of Aristotle in political debate from the Renaissance onward.
Chemical analysis of the Anzick baby suggests that the Clovis people of North America ate a lot of mammoth, but drawing conclusions from the skeleton of one 18-month-old seems shaky to me.
The rebellion spreads to Syria's south, with the first southern town in open rebellion. And the first rebel drone attacks on Russia's main airbase in Syria. As to where they get their drones, Iran's FM just called on Ukraine to "cease its support for terrorism in Syria."
The Han emperors and "blood-sweating" horses.
Thoughts on that "last universal common ancestor."
Putin enjoys making nuclear threats but meanwhile there are reports that Russia has formed a Motor Rifle Regiment from troops who had been assigned to nuclear duties.
One thing Elon Musk and the US Air Force brass are going to agree on is comparatively cheap, air-launched cruise missiles like the Barracuda from AI company Anduril. Companies are competing savagely for an order they expect to be as many as 100,000 missiles. Such a stockpile does strike me as a pretty effective deterrent against some enemies.
Update on Ukrainian drone production:
- They have purchased 1.6 million drones in 2024.
- They are "working on drones to intercept the Shahed-type long-range attack drones that Russia uses for its nightly attacks on Ukrainian cities."
- Next year they expect to produce "tens of thousands" of ground drones for ferrying ammunition to frontline positions and evacuating wounded.
- Next year they also expect to produce 30,000 long-range attack drones.
- They have ten companies working on AI drones with self targeting, and they hope to field their first AI drone swarm soon.
4 comments:
Amidst the "shadow depression" and all the other supposed woes of the US economy, online sales this Cyber Monday smashed the previous record for online commerce in a day.
How can you link to something which at the very top of the page states people are buying out of fear that prices will go once Trump gets a chance to impose his proposed tariffs, and spin it to dismissive of "supposed woes of the US economy"?
Even ignoring the tariffs angle, you do understand that this is measuring...
...A) total dollars spent, which BY DEFINITION is a larger total when inflation and cost of living keep increasing...
...and B) online sales specifically and exclusively, which is much more an indicator of changes in how people choose to shop, not additional shopping being conducted over and on top of existing shopping?
Orcas not only have fads, they have retro fads.
Given that no one can come up with a plausible reason why the orcas are balancing dead salmon on their heads (either now or back in the 80s), I vote that we take a lesson from archaeology and just presume the act must have some mysterious "ceremonial" significance.
#attemptsathumor
Solo polyamory. It sounds like a right-wing joke but apparently it is something people have actually said about themselves, like the self-proclaimed Asexuals who have sex and the Queer people who only have regular heterosexual relationships. Sometimes you just shake your head and move on.
I think the specific choice of name is a bit unfortunate, but the underlying concept itself as described is perfectly sensible. I myself don't see much utility in the label for my own life, but if it helps someone, somewhere, then who am I to care or complain?
The point of communication is to express ideas. For the people to whom this term is relevant, it achieves that goal - it helps them easily communicate their experience and feelings, even if only to similar individuals who are "in the know". Not every turn of phrase or term of art needs to appeal to society at large. Lots of labels of all kinds exist which the majority of people scoff at, but that doesn't make them stupid or pointless.
Stone tablet carved in an unknown language found in (European) Georgia. The symbols do resemble those used in Middle Eastern scripts, but they seem to be unique.
“Generally, the Bashplemi inscription does not repeat any script known to us; however, most of the symbols used therein resemble ones found in the scripts of the Middle East, as well as those of geographically remote countries such as India, Egypt and West Iberia.”
...
"Some similarities have been found with the Proto-Kartvelian script24 that appeared in the 4th millennium BC, as well as symbols found on seals from the territory of pre-Christian Georgia. Similarities were mostly identified while comparing the tablet symbols with Caucasian scripts (Georgian Mrgvlovani, Albanian, proto-Georgian)."
Odd idea, but... what if this is a "Pseudo-Kufic" type situation?
European artists in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance would not infrequently imitate Kufic Arabic script, without actually having a real understanding of the writing they were imitating. Consequently, they frequently got symbols wrong, creating "new" ones which vaguely resembled some originals, but do not parse properly. And even when they got symbols right, mere imitation of individual elements without actual context for meaning and grammar can only ever produce gibberish.
This tablet could be exhibiting much the same thing - crude imitations of symbols from other languages that the writer could not actually read.
Perhaps it has some ties to magical / esoteric practices - invoking mysterious foreign language elements to tap into mystical power. (See "Hocus Pocus", "Allakazam", "Open Sesame", etc.)
Or perhaps it was done simply for aesthetics, like much "Pseudo-Arabic" art was done in the West - perhaps there was a local fashion for foreign goods from exotic, far-off locales, and some enterprising individual started roughly copying actual exotic items to make their own knock-offs locally. (See Viking-era swords with misspelled or gibberish Latin inscriptions; see also modern Chinese "warlord" pistols, with misspelled or gibberish English stamping / proof marks; see also knockoff designer handbags, and fake Tiffany lamps, and imitation Faberge eggs, and a million other things throughout all of human history.)
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