Shout out to my friends named Bob who probably never thought there would be a Pope with the ultimate regular guy name.
And the brouhaha over the statue of an anonymous black woman in Times Square. (Daily Mail, Time Out, Black Enterprise, short video from CBS news, amusing discussion on Reddit: "she looks like she's about to beat me for not cleaning my room.")
The Trump administration finds out what everyone else already discovered, that there is no formula for peace in Ukraine because Russia continues to make demands with which Ukraine cannot possibly comply. Off the record, administration officials say the main issue is Putin continuing to demand sovereignty over big areas of Ukraine that he has never been able to conquer.
I noted here a few months ago that no model could account for the abundance of gold in the galaxy. Now a team of astronomers say gold and other heavy metals may be made by magnetars, magnetized neutron stars. (News article, original paper)
Alex Tabarrok notes that clothing has decined dramatically in price and investigates whether it has also declined in quality.
NBA star Tyrese Haliburton had a bad start to the season but is playing great now. He says that he ruined his game by following what everyone said about him on social media and fretting over the criticism. Then he gave up all social media and got his confidence back. (NY Times) I have lately heard several basketball types say they have gotten sick of NBA social media because it is so intensely, bitterly negative. An acquaintance sent me a video this week of a basketball podcaster who devoted a whole episode to pleading with fans not to be so awful. Whatever our problem is, it extends way beyond politics.
For military nerds, summary of a major report on reforming US naval shipbuilding.
"Unparalleled Misalignments," pairs of words where the words are synonyms but the phrases are not. Many are lame but a few are very clever.
According to this study, Americans in their 50s are getting less healthy. I assume this is a correlate of those "deaths of despair."
Recent econometric data on US wages show stagnation beginning in the early 1970s, extending down to right around the time NAFTA was signed, when they started going back up again. Whatever is goin on with working class wages in the US, NAFTA is not the problem. (Twitter/X 1, Twitter/X 2)
Until I watched this 15-minute video, I did not understand how closely improvements to 19th-century telegraphy were dependent on cutting edge physics and mathematics, in particular Maxwell's equations and their application by Oliver Heaviside. Early telegraphs were very slow, and the longer the line, the slower the transmission, and it took fundamental advances in physics to speed things up.
John Thomas Smith's wonderful etchings of London in the 1790s.
The biological mechanism behind those flowers that smell like rotting meat.
New surgeon general nominee Casey Means once posted a list of the things she did to find love at age 35, including working with spirit guides, making wishes on heads up pennies, praying to photos of her ancestors, full moon ceremonies, talking to trees, and tripping on mushrooms.
Scott Siskind trashes Mencius Moldbug's MAGA turn, says he "sold out." There's a good phrase I haven't heard much lately.
Noah Smith: globalization did not hollow out the middle class.
Interesting NY Times piece on those MAGA women influencers who wear a lot of makeup and get in lots of fights. One of many weirdnesses of the moment is the prevalence of Mormon-looking mean girls.
Toolkit of a Dacian stonemason found in Romania.
Maya ritual offering found in Yucatan cave.
Six hoards from the late Bronze Age and Iron Age found on one Hungarian hill; I think it's safe to say this was a place of ritual importance.
2 comments:
Shout out to my friends named Bob who probably never thought there would be a Pope with the ultimate regular guy name.
I would have thought in all the centuries of chiefly Italian Popes, we'd have had at least one "Roberto", but apparently not?
There was, however, Robert de Genève, who was elected Pope in Avignon at the start of the Western Schism - now considered an "Antipope".
Whatever our problem is, it extends way beyond politics.
Our problem is that we've actively promoted all the worst qualities in our citizenry, because it makes for better customers.
Stupid, angry, insecure people are easier to manipulate and swindle. The capitalists figured that out much more than a century ago, and they've been steadily cultivating a society in which the ordinary person is an impulsive, unhappy moron because then you can easily sell them palliatives of all kinds.
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