Virtual reality bus tour of ancient Rome.
Interesting little Tyler Cowen post comparing the Enlightenment in Scotland and Ireland.
Long-lost 1898 film of Mardi Gras in New Orleans is rediscovered in a Dutch museum. Not just the oldest known film of Mardi Gras, but the oldest known film of New Orleans.
Long Scott Siskind review of a book about homelessness in San Francisco, summarizes lots of data on these questions.
Liberace performs "Feelin' Groovy." Sometimes you have to wonder.
There are still plenty of credentialed biologists who think natural selection can't really account for evolution as we know it, and want to consider alternatives.
Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic covers one of the real crises of modern life: Google Search is clogged with ads and getting less and less useful. Likely much of the problem lies not with them, but with the ever increasing SEO war being waged by web sites. But some of it is Google themselves. For example, they are trying to fight fraud etc. by directing people to safe sites, even when those sites are useless. (Like Web MD on drug side effects; scared of lawsuits, they just repeat the warning labels without any context, which is not helpful.) Warzel complains that Google is burying "interesting" results, and I am finding the same.
Sculptor Daniel Popper at the Morton Arboretum, figures that are part human, part plant.
I just discovered that in 2016 a painting judged by experts to be a "sublime" Mark Rothko and purchased by a top collector was exposed as a recent fraud, causing it to lose all its value.
Twenty years ago many internet experts said online shopping would make it easier to find and enjoy offbeat art, leading to a Renaissance in fringe music, film, and books. But it didn't happen; so far as anyone can tell, blockbusters and best sellers get a bigger market share than ever. Ted Gioia asks, "Where did the long tail go?" As I have reason to know, the self-publishing of niche books has been a particular falure.
US tech sources are reporting that the Chinese government used fake social media accounts to stir up environmental opposition to a new rare earth mining project in Texas, an operation dubbed Dragonbridge. Didn't have any more luck than real environmentalists do in Texas. (Since I posted that, the news has gone mainstream: here is the Washington Post.)
NY Times feature on Montana's oldest general store, opened in 1900. I've read a lot of oral history focusing on the early 20th century, and one of the themes is the huge part those stores played in in rural life. They often acted as brokers for local produce (from apples on Catoctin Mountain to hand-hewn railroad ties is eastern Virginia), allowing people to trade for outside goods they needed. They served as banks, extending credit in lean seasons. Plus they were the center of social life for many men.
Interesting research aid from the 18th century.
Two orcas with a taste for shark liver transform an ecosystem.
Easy-read chart summarizing the crisis in Sri Lanka.
New study, based on surveys asking people about their mental situation over the past 30 days: "The prevalence of psychological distress increased from 16.1% in 1999–2000 to 22.6% in 2017–2018 . . . Statistically significant increases in the prevalence of distress were observed across all age, gender, race/ethnicity, and educational attainment subgroups examined. Rates of serious psychological distress increased from 2.7% in 1999–2000 to 4% in 2017–2018."Ukraine Links
Short video of a Russian surface-to-air missile that "boomeranged" back toward its launcher immediately after launch.
More US military men saying that Russia will eventually run out of men and other resources and start to lose the war in Ukraine. This gave me a sudden vision of German military men saying the same thing in 1944.
Igor Girkin's summary of the front-line situation on June 27: "Time is working both against the so-called 'Ukraine' and the RF. But against the RF, time is working harder."
Institute for the Study of War assessment for June 29, with a note on how Russia plans to annex captured areas of southern Ukraine.
Russia abandoned Snake Island (again) on June 29, after finding it indefensible. Twitter thread on what this means. I keep thinking that since the Russian Navy has contributed so little to this war, their inability to defend one small island must be humiliating. And with Putin sacking generals right and left, the admirals must be nervous.
And the Institute for the Study of War for June 30, with notes on the withdrawal from Snake Island and the fighting in Lysychansk.
Dmitri, who translates intercepted Russian phone calls and other sources, says the recent Russian successess in the Donbas have raised the morale of Russian soldiers in a way that is immediately obvious in their calls home.
16 comments:
On those surveys about the prevalence of mental health distress, I'm astonished at how low those percentages are.
From the artical on evolution:
"“We’re not here to explain the elephant’s trunk, or the camel’s hump. If such explanations could even be possible,” Brian Charlesworth told me. Instead, he said, evolutionary theory should be universal, focusing on the small number of factors that apply to how every living thing develops. “It’s easy to get hung up on ‘you haven’t explained why a particular system works the way it does’. But we don’t need to know,” Deborah told me. It’s not that the exceptions are uninteresting; it’s just that they aren’t all that important."
This is from two very respected biologists (evolutionary biology, I think). Anyone know of any other field of science (not social science) where such a (dismissive) explanation is accepted? Physics? Chemistry?
Has there ever been an artist whose work was easier to forge than Rothko's? You don't even have to have any artistic talent. You could use the same paint brush you used to paint your house. :-)
How to forge a 17th century Dutch painting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C54slmaqM48
There are still plenty of credentialed biologists who think natural selection can't really account for evolution as we know it, and want to consider alternatives.
Alternatives like what? "Intelligent Design"?
If you think the fundamental theory of natural selection combined with the random factors of mutations and simple survival chances, what else makes even a lick of sense?
If you aren't satisfied that we don't have a clear explanation for the evolution of eyes, is that a problem with the basic principles which explain how they could have arisen, or is that actually just a problem of a lack of data, because we're talking about something that happened billions of years ago and we simply lack much in the way of surviving samples from which to derive data? Are you really against evolution, or are you just annoyed we don't have time machines so you can go and fill in the huge gaps in our knowledge base via 1st hand observance?
typo:
If you think the fundamental theory of natural selection combined with the random factors of mutations and simple survival chances is insufficient, what else makes even a lick of sense?
Interesting research aid from the 18th century.
Huh. I was surprised that it wasn't something more... surprising to me - I've known about such devices since I was a child, pre-internet, despite still not knowing a proper name for one or ever having been in the same room as wonder. Now I wonder where, how, why I learned about them.
Perhaps it's something like the kinds of odd words that people who play D&D learn, and then fail to realize the average person is not nearly as familiar with - somewhere along the way I encountered these in a niche setting, without realizing how niche they are, and just assuming other people knew about them as well.
On those surveys about the prevalence of mental health distress, I'm astonished at how low those percentages are.
They're based on people self-reporting, though, and therefor I would assume they're low. People in general aren't very good at recognizing a lot of things about themselves, and there's also a strong societal conditioning to downplay our problems - what one might refer to as the "I'm fine" problem.
And all of that isn't even considering definitional differences - what qualifies as "psychological distress"? What elevates it to "serious psychological distress"? Are these terms the researchers are using themselves to interpret and describe what respondents reported? Or were they actually prompting the people they surveyed by outright asking 'have you experienced psychological distress in the past 30 days', and just assuming everyone would know how to properly qualify things and whether their experiences fit within the definition the researchers held?
Given what I know of most surveys, I'm guessing it was the later - just a series of questions / statements on a piece of paper with zero explanation or qualification, expecting people to magically correctly understand what is actually being asked of them.
"I have you suffered from psychological distress in the past 30 days"
Strongly Agree
Agree
Neither Agree Nor Disagree
Disagree
Strongly Disagree
/eyeroll
Short video of a Russian surface-to-air missile that "boomeranged" back toward its launcher immediately after launch.
Watching the video, I'm not quite convinced it actually went backwards.
I think the missile is traveling toward the camera the entire time, it just banks sharply left and down from its original trajectory, not somehow magically performing a full 180 in such a short period of time. The missile appears to be originating from behind the illuminated ridge in the background, and it impacts in front of / on that ridge.
Additionally, there doesn't appear to be any kind of secondary explosion - if the missile returned and struck a vehicle launching it, you'd expect a gasoline explosion at the very least; and unless this was literally the last missile being carried by such a vehicle, you'd expect the other missiles on the launcher to go up in a rather spectacular (and large) explosion. This doesn't match other footage I've seen of missile trucks being hit - they blow BIG.
"If you think the fundamental theory of natural selection combined with the random factors of mutations and simple survival chances is insufficient, what else makes even a lick of sense?"
Oh, I don't know, like maybe an environmental trigger that turns on an already existing but turned off trait within the genetic material, and therefore, change, even major change, might take a lot less time than the current thinking allows for. You know, like how relatively quickly dogs changed into so many different types? Or how foxes physically changed in a generation or two when domesticated. In other words, the genetic code may contains many capabilities, of which only a small portion are displayed at any one time.
No one in the article is talking about intelligent design, but intelligent design has become a crutch for those who don't hage answers to serious questions. Kind of like screaming racist! I stuff questioning the current theory all the time. Some of it is disguised intelligent design. Some of it deserves further investigation. Questioning things is the scientific way, so coming across stuff like this shouldn't upset anyone.
"I READ stuff questioning the current theory . . ."
@Shadow
That doesn't overturn the fundamental theory of natural selection and mutations, though - it just suggests a greater level of complexity within it.
Genes are chemicals, like any other. Of course they are going to have certain environmental triggers - all chemicals behave in different pre-determined ways depending on what they come into contact with via environmental factors. That's just an inescapable fact of reality.
To hear that people are arguing that "natural selection can't really account for evolution as we know it" sounds insane to me, because it seems wild to me that anyone would fail to account for the sheer chemical complexity of the universe in considering the full scope of evolutionary pressure.
It's like if someone said evolution was broken because it doesn't account for the fact that life has evolved in a gravity well - it's kind of bizarre to think that anyone would approach the matter from a point of view that doesn't automatically assume that gravity is a given and therefor take it into account. It's the sort of thing that's so staggeringly obvious it ought to wholly unthinkingly be taken for granted.
Hence my confusion - of course evolution needs to consider the complexities of biological chemistry, that seemed beyond any sort of question, and thus I couldn't imagine what else a person might be getting at in saying evolution "can't account" for everything. It absolutely can, and the only reason you might think it doesn't is if you don't recognize that the added complexities you're noticing are NOT, in fact, in any way distinct from evolution as a whole.
@G- The mid 20th-century synthesis of evolutionary biology is being questioned in a lot of ways. For one, it did not allow any role for hybridization, which some now think has a big role in evolution. It did not allow that genes might pass between species, which bacteria do every day; some think large species do it frequently as well. It did not allow that species might split and then merge back together, which has been observed in Galapagos finches.
I consider those fairly minor tweaks within a generally Darwining picture, but others (e.g. Lynn Margulis) have considered them fundamental. I don't understand the math but I have been told that introducing hybridization and gene sharing wreaks havoc with the equations.
And, of course, the neo-Darwinian synthesis assumed all the functioning systems that life now has (genes, for example) and so cannot almost by definition account for how life got to this point. Some biologists think the first few hundred million years of evolution must have proceeded very differently.
Good to hear because that's what the article is about, imo.
"To hear that people are arguing that "natural selection can't really account for evolution as we know it?"
I think they are saying it can't account for it alone, or that there are parallel ways of achieving it, although molecular biologists, according to the article, come pretty close to saying NS doesn't matter. I find it hard to believe molecular biologists would say something that drastic.
"It's like if someone said evolution was broken because it doesn't account for the fact that life has evolved in a gravity well."
Not being able to explain something is always a problem for current theory. But it will remain current theory until someone comes up with an alternative explanation supported with evidence. Then the real fight begins. (I think that's Kuhn in a nutshell.)
The article has its limitations. Still, it's good to see scientists questioning the standard theory. Any time current thinking becomes gospel-like we have dogmatism. Questioning the status quo (with evidence) is still the best way to keep dogmatism from getting out of hand. One of the hallmarks of science is it is self-correcting. To the extent dogmatism creeps into the process, it isn't.
This is from two very respected biologists (evolutionary biology, I think). Anyone know of any other field of science (not social science) where such a (dismissive) explanation is accepted? Physics? Chemistry?
Who said it was accepted?
On those surveys about the prevalence of mental health distress, I'm astonished at how low those percentages are.
I'm astonished how seriously people take self reported surveys on mental health.
"It did not allow that species might split and then merge back together, which has been observed in Galapagos finches."
There's not actually any such thing as a "species", though. The concept of a species is just a useful categorization tool for us humans, not actually some kind of metaphysical barrier or threshold.
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