Hans Rosling at TED, an ode to economic growth via the magic washing machine, extraordinary 9-minute video.
The super complainers.
Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.
Carnyx (Celtic battle horn) and boar's head standard found in England, c. 50 BC to 50 AD.
Austin Peay State University in Tennessee has to reinstate a professor they fired over a social media post about Charlie Kirk, and pay him $500,000. I think we sue each other way too much but the system sometimes allows people to fight injustice.
Richard Feynman, "What is Time?", 23-minute video. Takes the view that the arrow of time derives from entropy.
Humanists against new technology.
Magnus Carlson on winning his sixth World Blitz Chess Championship: while other players may be there to do the best they can, or to earn money, "a serious advantage I have is that I am playing for first place."
Sabine Hossenfelder, "The End of an Era in Physics," 7-minute video. With string theory, supersymmetry, and other recently hot ideas played out, what comes next? And Hossenfelder on wave energy, which has huge potential.
Richard Hanania, How I Outgrew Nietzsche. Personally I outgrew Thus Spake Zarathustra but am still a big fan of Beyond Good and Evil. All the superman prophecy stuff wears thin, but Nietzsche was right that most philosophy was (and is) assumptions all the way down.
Archaeologists working at the Maya site of Ucanal find evidence of an important political event: the founder of a new dynasty seems to have dug up the graves of his predecessors and burned their remains. (news story, academic article) It's hard to document events archaeologically and cool when we can.
Medieval seal that incorporates a Roman carved gem found in England. I love this because I often wonder about the attitude of medieval people toward the Roman past. I had the more educated characters in The Raven and the Crown think regularly about the Romans, for example when crossing Hadrian's Wall, but I was just making that up because I have no idea what knights, ladies or priests knew or thought about Rome in the early 1300s.
China seems to have abandoned its plan for a super particle accelerator. Presumably this is at least in part because few physicists think there are any new particles to be discovered at the energies it could reach.
Perun, strategic winners and losers in 2025, one-hour video. He gives the top prize to the new regime in Syria and annoints Iran as the biggest loser (because of the multiplying military, political, economic, and ecological crises).
I personally recommend against learning about the beliefs of authors you love, but if you want an introduction to W.B. Yeats and the occult, here is a serviceable one. I think Auden said it best, writing of Yates and his magical experiments "your gift survived it all."
It is now possible to do some paleogenomics work in the field, without moving the bones being studied. The hope is that this will persuade some guardians of ancient burial grounds to allow DNA studies.
The Nike track suit Maduro wore after his arrest became an overnight best-seller.
Did Biden's policies cause a surge in immigration? This piece says no.
Economists argue that if you take account of Social Security – a kind of wealth Americans accrue while working – then wealth inequality has gone up a lot less than usually projected: "Its importance has grown dramatically over the past three decades. In 1989, Social Security represented only 26.0% of the wealth of the bottom 90%. In 2019, this percentage rose to 49.8%. We cannot understand household balance sheets without paying attention to Social Security." (Twitter/X)
In the US, married people are healthier then single people of the same age, possibly because spouses nag each other to do healthy things. (Twitter/X)
The National Portrait Gallery in London acquires the only two known photographs of mathematician Ada Lovelace.
Kraut on how Italian fascists desensitized the nation to brutality, and how sinister actors in the world are still trying to do this to us, powerful 12-minute video.
The remarkable case of a Texas A&M professor who was banned from teaching Plato's Symposium, "particularly passages on Aristophanes’ myth of split humans and Diotima’s ladder of love," because of new rules that ban teaching "gender ideology." The new conservatives are trying to give the old leftists a run for their money in ideologuing the university.
An excellent reading of "The Door in the Wall" by H.G. Wells, a short story about the tragedy of finding a door to better worlds, 42-minute video. Text here. Much like the others on which I based my own version, Dreamland. Until I read E.T.A. Hoffman last year I did not know this was a common literary form.
The Kafka industry.
Something I did not know: until the 1965 Immigration Act, the US had no limits at all on immigration from Latin America. (Twitter/X; interesting history of US immigration policy)
Serious look at the relationship between Bukele and El Salvador's gangs.
Russia has dispersed its front-line troops so thin that Ukraine is using expensive HIMARS rockets to strike groups of a dozen men. This strike led to ten deaths.
Andrew Perpetua's team counted 48,869 Russians killed in the Ukraine war this year, using video evidence; December was the bloodiest month, with 5724. All for nothing.
Old meets new: Russian cavalrymen with horse-mounted Starlink terminals.
2 comments:
All the superman prophecy stuff wears thin, but Nietzsche was right that most philosophy was (and is) assumptions all the way down.
Isn't this just the literal definition of philosophy?
Science is the application of logic in circumstances where empirical observation are possible.
Philosophy is the same thing, just when confirmation via observation is NOT possible.
The less observable evidence you have, the more you have to rely on assumptions in your application of logic. That's just self evident. If you want to ask how tall a tree is, or how far away a star is, you can measure that. If you instead want to ask more nebulous things like whether or not God exists and in what form, and what is the meaning of life... then... yeah. There are no measurements one can take concerning such abstract concepts. So it's assumptions all the way day.
I'm not sure you need a cynical German eugenicist from the Victorian era to tell you that.
I love this because I often wonder about the attitude of medieval people toward the Roman past. I had the more educated characters in The Raven and the Crown think regularly about the Romans, for example when crossing Hadrian's Wall, but I was just making that up because I have no idea what knights, ladies or priests knew or thought about Rome in the early 1300s.
I'm reminded of how in the French Revolution, angry mobs destroyed 28 statues of Biblical kings at the cathedral of Notre Dame, because they mistook them for statues of French kings.
I think most medieval views of Rome would be rooted in ignorance. Warped distortions at best. In the same way that you got all those paintings of Biblical battle scenes where everyone is clad in 15th century plate armor, the conventions of the present would be projected backward onto a poor understood, deeply mythologized past.
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