Strange trapezoidal stone tomb found in Kazakhstan, dates to the Bronze Age.
Tyler Cowen on Bronze Age Pervert and how badly evolution explains most of what humans do these days: "People spend so much time not having sex."
Using ChatGPT to write a viral essay on grief.
Mistrust leads to more regulation, even when what people mistrust most is the government.
"Having more money leads to less loneliness."
The Greek economy, hammered by a near default on its debts in 2009 and then harsh austerity imposed by the EU, is finally coming back, with a tourism-driven building boom (NY Times). This is a semi-triumph for the tough-love financial policies pioneered by the IMF, since corruption and government profligacy in Greece really had gotten out of control. Amusing that one of the photos they use in this piece to illustrate the boom was previously used in a different story to illustrate the threat posed by new construction to important archaeological sites.
Microsoft is moving ahead with building small nuclear reactors to power its data centers.
Law student cheats by carving answers onto ball-point pens in tiny letters (Fox News, X)
Global culture watch: Russian soldier refers to their counter-attacks near Bakhmut as "Zerg rushes." The Zerg are an alien race in Starcraft 2 that can raise a lot of weak units very quickly, and players typically use them like suicide bombers.
A claim that crows use statistical reasoning.
"Scientists have created a new type of vaccine that instead of activating the immune system, selectively suppresses it. The so-called inverse vaccine, which has only been tested in mice so far, could one day be used to treat autoimmune diseases, in which the immune system attacks the body, the researchers say."
Large Language Models have some issues with basic logic: "For instance, if a model is trained on 'Olaf Scholz was the ninth Chancellor of Germany', it will not automatically be able to answer the question, 'Who was the ninth Chancellor of Germany?'" Of course which logical propositions can be reversed in this way is one of the oldest topics in western logic (Aristotle is mortal, but not all mortals are Aristotle), so I don't find it surprising that it is hard for AI to extract such rules from ordinary prose.
Liberal feminist rant against the "marriage plot," seeing calls to get married as an excuse not to reform the economy in fundamental ways so single parents aren't so poor.
Orcas that have learned to feed on fish already collected for them by fishing nets are now dying in record numbers from net entanglement. I would say that whether they eventually sort this out will be a good measure of their actual intelligence and ability to communicate.
This week's Sign of the Apocalypse: throwing slices of cheese at your baby's face, and then uploading the video. Shame on all you buffoons. (NY Times, Youtube compilation) There are a few babies whose response is, "Mmmmm, cheese" but many more find it upsetting; I wonder if in 20 years we will have a study like the famous marshmallow test arguing that how babies responded to cheese in the face predicted their future lives.
According to data collected by the College Board, while the posted tuition costs at American Universities have soared, the actual tuition paid by the average student has remained essentially unchanged for 30 years.
The NY Times reports, of the swift Azerbaijani conquest of Karabakh, that "amost no one saw it coming," even though all the observers whose stuff shows up in my OSINT feed on X predicted it; on September 10 this guy wrote, "Azeri forces almost blatantly ticking through indicators and warnings for immediate military action." Incidentally, all the OSINT guys also say that the leadership of the self proclaimed Armenian Republic of Karabakh brought this on themselves by radical intransigence, rejecting multiple compromise peace plans proposed by the US and the EU; even the government of Armenia said publicly that they were washing their hands of Karabakh and would do nothing to help them. And they didn't.
Vis Scott Siskind, a piece on an unusual French anti-anxiety medication called Etifoxine.
Bronze Age arrow with a stone tip melts from the ice in Norway. Note that in the "Bronze Age" bronze was expensive and people still used stone and bone for many tools; not until much cheaper iron came along did we really enter a metal age.
Experiments at CERN confirm that antimatter reacts to gravity in exactly the same way as normal matter, sadly obliterating two generations of sci-fi antigravity schemes. (NY Times, Nature)
The hoopla surrounding the launch of Taiwan's first domestically-produced submarine includes liquor sold in submarine-shaped bottles. In case you wondered, yes Taiwin is massively increasing its defense spending in response to Chinese threats, as are Japan and the Phillipines. The cost of this new Age of War continues to rise.
Ukraine Links
Interview with Ukraine's spy boss, Budanov, in Washington, DC. Budanov is extremely careful about everything he says so he gave this inverview for a reason, to send some message to somebody. One thing he says is that winter weather won't stop the fighting, since it is being waged without vehicles anyway.
Kyiv Independent story on what some military experts say is a long-term Ukrainian campaign to degrade Crimea's air defenses and attack its military infrastructure.
Many Armenians in Karabakh expected that Russia would come to their defense against Azerbaijan, which didn't happen. And then Tuesday night Russian television presenter Solovyov called on the Armenians of Karabakh to come fight for Russia against Ukraine.
The Majority Never Had It So Good: why support for Russia's war is strong is rural areas.
Satellite tracking of fires in Ukraine suggests that September 27-28 saw the most intensive shelling of the war so far.
On the subject of estimating Russian equipment losses, a note that Russia had 180 T-80U tanks at the start of the war, and Oryx data confirms the loss of 89, but no more have been reported lost in weeks nor are any showing up in video from the front; so where did the other 91 go? Most are probably undocumented losses of one sort or another. OSINT guys are also reporting that Russians are getting better at not posting videos of their own equipment losses, which on the one hand means they are getting better at OPSEC but on the other means the ratio of actual to documented losses is getting even higher than it used to be.
This week's Sign of the Apocalypse: throwing slices of cheese at your baby, and then uploading the video. Shame on all you buffoons. (NY Times, Youtube compilation) There are a few babies whose response is, "Ummmm, cheese" but many more find it upsetting; I wonder if in 20 years we will have a study like the famous marshmallow test arguing that how babies responded to cheese in the face predicted their future lives.
ReplyDeleteLike most of your Apocalypse-watch posts, almost no part of what is being described is actually new in any meaningful way.
There must be many millions of VHS tapes still floating around containing "Home Movies" in which parents of the late 70s through to the mid 90s amuse themselves or their friends / guests by subjecting their own babies to potentially upsetting stupid hijinks - the only difference is those recordings were never digitized and put online.
And of course, well before the means to make recordings of such tomfoolery were cheap and universal, people have been mildly tormenting their own offspring for laughs for centuries at least - presumably millennia, if anything can ever be said of human nature with any accuracy.
Is this sort of thing gross when you actually contemplate it sensibly? Absolutely. But are we all ultimately a bunch of cruel, selfish apes deep down? Undeniably. This is just who we are - who we have always been - as a species.
According to data collected by the College Board, while the posted tuition costs at American Universities have soared, the actual tuition paid by the average student has remained essentially unchanged for 30 years.
ReplyDeleteUtter nonsense, and Drum himself all but admits it.
Tuitions have gone up drastically, full stop.
Yes, most students don't pay the full tuition out of pocket, because they get scholarships or grants which cover some percentage of that, but that doesn't mean the full tuition doesn't get PAID - it just means the total price is being split up between multiple parties.
Drum frames scholarships and grants as "routine discounts from the list price", which is staggeringly wrongheaded. It's not like a grocery store where they have a shelf price of $4.99, but then a more or less permanent "sale" tag underneath that which brings it down to $3.99 instead. You have to QUALIFY for a grant or scholarship! It's not some universal discount that anyone can claim! And more importantly, there are A FINITE NUMBER of grants and scholarships available, in numbers woefully insufficient to benefit everyone who would want to use them!
Grants and scholarships overwhelmingly go to people who otherwise could not attend college or university AT ALL. It's not really a "discount" if you're still paying the upper limit of what you could ever possibly hope to afford - or potentially even more than you can actually afford.
If your family is wealthy enough for you to afford full tuition, you are more or less automatically rendered ineligible for most grants and scholarships of any meaningful size. It's certainly still possible to get small contributions here and there, or even for the highest achievers to receive considerable funding or even full rides through various sources, but overall, if you can afford to pay full price, most of the time you are expected to pay full price (or near to it). Only a very small minority get reductions that matter.
And if your family is NOT wealthy enough for you to afford full tuition, a major grant or scholarship is effectively the only way for you to attend - which introduces a form of survivor bias. Only a minority of poor students who apply for grants or scholarships win them, and those who get rejected don't get to attend - and therefor aren't reflected in the relevant statistics.
Rising tuition prices aren't just a problem for the people who pay tuition, either in full or in part. They're a problem for all the people who CAN'T pay tuition, either in full or in part, BECAUSE they have risen.
"Average tuition cost" actually paid doesn't tell you anything about how many more students are unable to even CONSIDER attending college today compared to 30 years ago. We could have ten times as many prospective students today automatically being excluded from college, and you'd never know that simply from "average tuition cost".
It also doesn't tell you anything about how many more or less scholarships are available.
It also doesn't tell you anything about how much bigger or smaller those scholarships might be.
It also doesn't tell you anything about how much more or less people borrow in student loans.
It also doesn't tell you anything about how much more or less interest is paid on those loans.
It also doesn't tell you anything about how much more or less valuable a degree is once obtained.
It also doesn't tell you anything about "non-tuition" costs (housing, meal plans, books, labs, etc.)
It also doesn't tell you anything about number of years spent in school, multiplying the annual costs.
It also doesn't tell you anything about changes in cost of living beyond "inflation".
Etc.
On the subject of estimating Russian equipment losses, a note that Russia had 180 T-80U tanks at the start of the war, and Oryx data confirms the loss of 89, but no more have been reported lost in weeks nor are any showing up in video from the front; so where did the other 91 go? Most are probably undocumented losses of one sort or another.
ReplyDeleteWeird question - the losses were visually confirmed, but what about the very existence of the tanks in the first place?
From whence comes this number of 180 tanks? Official Russian inventory lists of equipment? Such documents haven't been accurate at any point in the past 300 years or more. Great numbers of Russian vehicles and other forms of materiel have only ever existed on paper.
Equally great numbers of other items likely did exist at some point in some fashion, but when called into service were not fit for use. Perhaps a depot had 20 tanks put into it in 1983, and over the next four decades unscrupulous quartermasters "borrowed" "spare parts" out of them for any number of reasons ranging from helping others fraudulently pass inspections to enriching themselves via the black market.
Or perhaps the depot was scheduled to receive two separate shipments of 10 tanks each, the first arriving in late 1991, and the second scheduled for 1992, but in the chaos of Soviet dissolution, the latter never arrived, yet this was never properly noted in records and paperwork, for any number of reasons ranging from incompetence to corruption to simple clerical error or loss of files.
These sorts of things are not only "not unheard of" in Russia, they are in fact the deeply rooted stereotypical norm.
And that's all before we even get to the "undocumented losses". The two things compound.