Ben Pentreath's summer in England and Tangier, wonderful garden photos.
Three women injured in river otter attack, one seriously.
The religious and erotic meanings of the threshing floor, 10-page article.
Marc Bourier's sculptures, with many tiny wooden faces.
The destruction of the Kakhovka Dam was a catastrophe for Ukraine, but exploring the exposed reservoir bottom, Ukrainian archaeologists are finding hundreds of ancient artifacts (NY Times)
Using mathematical techniques to reconstruct a Neolithic bead necklace even though the site had been seriously disturbed.
From the mad folklorist at Old European Culture, The Dragon Who Stole the Rain.
Sexual harassment and hockey romance novels.
Using multi-deminsional topology ("4D") to design new materials not imaginable in regular 3-dimensional math. Not useful yet, but might prove to be.
Using lidar to map Roman roads in southwestern Britain.
Sulfate particles cool the planet by reflecting sunlight, so pollution regulations that limit sulfur emissions may be contributing to global warming. But as Kevin Drum argues, the effect is almost certainly very small.
Newly discovered 39-million-year-old whale may have been the largest animal ever, but without a skull paleontologists don't know what it ate to get that big.
Ron DeSantis says "of course" Trump lost the election; later said that Trump's claims of electoral fraud "did not prove to be true."
Chinese archaeologists excavating the tomb complex of Emperor Wen of Han (ruled 180-157 BC) have found a complete giant panda skeleton.
On-the-job deaths in America are 92.5% men, 7.5% women. That's probably because 1) the really dangerous jobs (logging, fishing) are nearly 100% male, and 2) the biggest cause of workplace death is vehicular accidents, and men do most of the driving and have more accidents per mile than women. Men also get shot much more often even when doing the same work as women (bartenders, security guards, police).
Study finds that Covid vaccines saved 750,000 lives in the US, and that "behavioral efforts" also saved many lives, mainly by keeping people from getting sick until vaccines became available. (Marginal Revolutions, original paper)
Public schools in Cambridge, Massachusetts say they won't offer algebra in middle school because "many students continue to reel from pandemic-related learning losses and are not ready to take Algebra I before high school, and offering it only for those who are prepared would only widen the persistent disparities of educational performance among subgroups." Story comes from the Boston Globe, which is paywalled, so I can't find out if there is more going on.
New estimate says there are 20 times more rogue planets in the Milky Way than stars, most of them rather small. The current theory is that they formed around stars but were ejected from their systems by collisions or other violent events. (NY Times, EarthSky)
Update on water policy in Israel, where "almost 100 percent" of sewage water is reused and 60 to 80 percent of drinking water is desalinated seawater. Water is a solvable problem.
There are about 2,400 squirrels in New York's Central Park, 2.75 per acre. Yes, they counted. Don't ask why. And what about the Great Squirrel Migration of 1968? Which was investigated by, among others, the Center for Short-Lived Phenomena, a real institute that didn't last very long.
Ukraine Links
Ukraine needs more surface-to-air missiles.
Russian news anchor Olga Skabeeva reports finding 284,000 obituaries of Russian soldiers on social media. That raw number probably includes many duplicates, but this might be a sign that some Russians are getting concerned about casualities.
Institute for the Study of War update for August 7, with observations on the peace negotiations in Saudi Arabia: "China is not fully aligned with Russia on the issue of Ukraine."
On August 8, Russian worries about Ukraine's foothold across the Dnipro near Kherson.
And in more cross-Dnipro news, a Ukrainian probe across the river in the area of the former reservoir led to the death or capture of the entire 25-man Russian patrol sent to look for them. Part of Ukraine's strategy seems to be wearing the Russians down by forcing them to fight along the entire front.
Good account of the fighting at Hostomel Airport, the first important action of the war. I notice again that the Ukrainian government began to take defensive actions the day before Russia's invasion, so I wonder what they knew and whether the Americans told them.
How do Ukrainian soldiers learn to operate their new western weapons? How-to videos on YouTube.
Revisiting a wargame staged by the Modern War Institute in April 2022: "After applying expected geostrategic and operational developments over the remainder of this year and into the start of 2023, we determined the Russians reached an operational culmination well-short of their maximal objectives. Given the combination of Ukraine’s proven will and its capabilities in a defensive fight, the prospects for Russian forces in heavy urban combat proved daunting. By the end of the summer, Russia no longer possessed the forces to pursue major simultaneous objectives nor the combat power to conquer a major city. All was not rosy for the Ukrainians, who lacked the combat power to go on the offensive and eject Russia from the occupied territories. With neither side able to achieve decisive military effects in the offense, without exception, the combined teams predicted that without a negotiated settlement the war is headed toward an indefinite stalemate." This misses Ukraine's successes last Fall in retaking Kharkiv and Kherson but otherwise looks pretty good.
2 comments:
Newly discovered 39-million-year-old whale may have been the largest animal ever, but without a skull paleontologists don't know what it ate to get that big.
Given that the smallest whales extant today are traditional carnivores, and the biggest are filter feeders... it seems intuitive that it ate plankton and krill.
That said, I don't know much about extinct species - if it turns out the same pattern holds in the fossil record as well, as I would imagine it would, I'd be shocked if it ended up being anything but a filter feeder.
Update on water policy in Israel, where "almost 100 percent" of sewage water is reused and 60 to 80 percent of drinking water is desalinated seawater. Water is a solvable problem.
That's great, but how solvable is the problem of the Israeli government? Particularly with regard to the (largely-ignored-by-the-media) ongoing crisis of Netanyahu's totalitarian grab for power and the undermining of Israel's (admittedly Apartheid-limited) democracy?
Getting back to the topic of water, though... Israel is a tiny country with a tiny amount of cropland, and they import massive amounts of food. Desalination and water treatment is fine for human hydration, but it can't produce anywhere near enough water to irrigate crops on the scales we need globally.
Desalination is also limited to coastal regions - you can desalinate all the sea water you want at sea level, but unless you're going to somehow pump entire rivers worth of water UPHILL into interior regions - often over mountain ranges - to reach agricultural heartlands all around the world, it can't possibly address our actual water needs.
SEVENTY PERCENT of all freshwater used by humans goes to agriculture.
Really let that sink in.
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