Ten thousand bamboo slips, many with preserved writing, found in wells in the Chinese city of Dutou; some are government paperwork, a few are "business cards" with someone's name, title, and place of origin. Roughly 1,700 years old. (Original Chinese article here, but Google translate is not great at archaeological Chinese.)
Weirdly fascinating Tyler Cowen interview with Patrick McKenzie, an expert on "business systems," basically about why things are the way they are. McKenzie covers topics like why people become debt collectors, gremlins in the credit card system, maple syrup theft, and much more. Also interesting on what it was like to live and work in Japan.
Desperate for attention, the science web sites all write about a new "terror beast" discovered in Cambrian rocks in Greenland, and you have to read some distance into the articles to learn that this monster was 30 cm long.
Interesting article on Confederate almanacs, with an introductory section on the history of almanacs and their particular importance in the early United States.
Scott Siskind reviews two articles on the honesty of LLMs.
Webb results confirm hints from Hubble that most early galaxies were not shaped like they are now, but were mainly oblong; astronomers use words like "banana" and "pickle" to describe their shapes. (NY Times, Wion) Incidentally the big Webb discovery from early last year, that some early galaxies seemed older than the universe, may have been resolved.
The first wind turbine at the long-fought-over offshore wind farm Vineyard Wind is now producing electricity; 61 more to come. (NY Times, corporate announcement)
The economic costs of an aging population.
Grim article on the global military situation in 2024, with Russia back on the offensive in Ukraine, the Gaza war roiling the Middle East, promised increases in NATO weapons production not materializing, and the increasing isolationism of the American public limiting US options: "Like an ailing mammoth, weakened by a succession of individual spear thrusts, the hegemon staggers bleeding across the global scene."
"We find that former East Germans have substantially more self-control than West Germans and provide evidence for government surveillance as a possible underlying mechanism."
Community First! Village is a neighborhood of tiny, one-room houses outside Austin, planned to grow to 2,000 homes and designed to house the city's chronically homeless population. (NY Times, project web site) Dozens of these villages are planned across the country.
Kevin Drum looks at a study on how much better and faster ChatGPT4 can make writers.
And Drum notes that while people are making a lot of noise about polls showing how much confidence in universities has declined, well, confidence in every single institution in America has declined, and universities are about average in how much confidence they have lost.
A claim that Leon Uris' 1958 novel Exodus had a major impact on US attitudes and policy toward Israel.
Excavating an early medieval cemetery in Wales, archaeologists find evidence that people were feasting by the graves.
Investigating a 15th-century shipwreck in the Baltic Sea off Sweden, probably a Hansa vessel from Lübeck.
Kevin Drum's Top Ten Years of the Past Few Centuries.
Crazy short video showing the destruction of a four-vehicle Russian armored assault near Kharkiv, one of several such failures on this stretch of the front over the past two months. (The field is littered with burned-out vehicles.) Hard to figure out the point of these doomed, ineffectual attacks.
The dismal mood in Ukraine.
2 comments:
Excavating an early medieval cemetery in Wales, archaeologists find evidence that people were feasting by the graves.
People don't change much. Most funerals today involve the ceremony and burial, and then afterwards everyone goes and eats and talks and socializes together for mutual comfort and remembrance.
Today, people usually secure some sort of separate venue for this - or maybe they hold it at someone's home nearby - but in the past, where travel was much less convenient, and many funeral attendees might be coming from far away, and no single home of anyone living nearby might be sufficient... it would make a lot of sense to just have everything take place at the graveyard. It simplifies the logistics considerably.
In just my lifetime I’ve seen funerals change. Earliest I remember was the men taking off their coats and filling in the pre-dug grave. (My husband said that they used to dig the grave, too) then the family taking a handful of dirt and sprinkling it in the grave. Then, the widow sprinkling dirt, now, I’ve seen boxes of dirt presented to use to sprinkle. When my father was buried the coffin was taken to a central pergola and the family was no allowed to see the burial. Now, with cremation more popular, often we don’t see and remains for weeks or months after the body has been removed by the mortuary workers. In Virginia, still, one can be buried without mortuary services within 3 days on one’s own land.
Post a Comment