Amuse yourself with the Medieval Murder Map, which shows the locations of killings documented in Coroner's Rolls from London, York, and Oxford, with a link to the Coroner's Inquest for each. Lots of good details, mainly about violent fights over insults and the like.
Orca goes for the seal-toss world record.
Dark, post-apocalyptic art by Yuri Shwedoff.
Scott Siskind donates a kidney.
Drilling is getting better fast; according to this article, the productivity of drilling rigs has increased 50-fold in 20 years and is still rising fast: "drilling is far from physical limits." If that's true it has major implications for the future of geothermal power, which might fall greatly in price.
More aerial photographs of ancient earthworks in the Amazon.
Impressive black and white photographs by Drew Doggett of the Mundari people and their cattle.
New study finds nearly 400 Roman forts in the Middle East using old Corona spy satellite photos.
People are traveling to the hotel that inspired "The Shining" to stage spooky weddings, complete with flower girls dressed as the Grady twins (NY Times)
For the Commonplace Book, Maria Abramovic: "I don't see any good art made out of happiness."
Speaking of art by unhappy people, how about Michelangelo: are the drawings on the walls of the "secret room" in the Medici Chapel in his hand? (NY Times, NPR)
Strange photo-story by Karolina Jonderko titled Bebok, more or less Polish for Bogeyman, about a group of teenagers and their fears.
Another study finds little to no evidence that YouTube's algorithms radicalize anyone. I don't want to say that the Internet has had no impact on people's political beliefs, but it seems to me that it acts mainly by helping people find support for what they already believe rather than turning people into fantatics. I think there is just a lot of evil out there and always has been.
Kevin Drum on The strange case of professor Ivonne del Valle.
And Kevin Drum on the miniscule number of degrees awarded in gender and ethnic studies (0.36%)
Opening a lovely Etruscan tomb that dates to around 600 BC.
Nobody meets our standards: in order to avoid naming birds after "people with racist pasts," the American Ornithological Association has committed to replacing all bird names derived from people. (NY Times; statement)
Ben Pentreath at home in Dorset, wonderful garden photos.
Offshore wind power faltering: major projects off New York and New Jersey are cancelled due to high costs. The companies say the already large subsidies they were granted are not enough to make the projects profitable. (NY Times)
Fertility falling rapidly in Argentina, down to TFR of 1.36; that's a decline of 40% in a decade. From this same X account (Birth Gauge) I learn that fertility is very low in Puerto Rico, down to a TFR of 0.91 and still falling. Quite a change from the rhetoric of West Side Story. And the fertility of US Mormons has just fallen below replacement. (Note that people make the Mormons seem unusual by comparing them to the US as a whole, but if you instead compare them to other white suburban churchgoers they aren't very different.)
Ukraine Links
Ukrainian blogger says both Bakhmut and Avdiivka, and in fact the whole eastern front, are complete sideshows with no strategic implications, and the war has to be won either in the north or the south, that is, by Russia conquering Kyiv or Ukraine conquering Crimea.
Good example of a "FrankenSAM," an old Soviet Buk SAM system modified to fire NATO RIM-7 shipborn anti-air missiles. Allegedly the US is making five of these conversions a month. Again, the ability to change how missiles are used throws off all the counts of how many of what kind of missile each nation has.
In Ukraine, return of WW II "floating island" camouflage.
Geoconfirmed, a very reliable outfit, counts more than 200 Russian vehicle losses in the Avdiivka offensive.
In a paywalled interview with The Economist, Ukrainian commander in chief Zaluzhnyi, says the war has entered a phase of static, "positional" battles, and the only way to escape this is via massive application of missiles and drones, which he hopes Ukraine will manufacture for itself. (Yahoo, TCH)
Nobody meets our standards: in order to avoid naming birds after "people with racist pasts," the American Ornithological Association has committed to replacing all bird names derived from people.
ReplyDelete"Nobody who has already had a bird named after them meets our standards", perhaps.(Particularly given how many birds named after people were so named in the 1800s, by wealthy and influential British men, excluding basically everyone else.)
And realistically, it's probably only some of said people who don't "meet the standards" - but the AOS has chosen to replace all the names for the stated reason of focusing "attention on the unique features and beauty of the birds themselves. (And probably also for the unstated reason of not wanting to have to argue about which names get to stay and which don't - removing them all is less controversial and more "fair" in the eyes of the public.)
Lots of people could be chosen today who would "meet the standards" of not being chosen via "exclusionary naming conventions developed in the 1800s, clouded by racism and misogyny".