NASA releases 25 x-ray and composite images to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Chandra X-Ray telescope.
How bad is the historical record? And is anything about history "objective"? Should we just throw it all over and admit we're telling stories that reinforce our own politics?
Mike Pence posts a completely unremarkable message praising Biden for stepping down, gets savagely attacked by the MAGA crowd for the treason of praising Biden for anything.
Interesting post by Alex Tabarrok about the Japanese effort to translate western technical books in the 19th century.
Scientists claim to see signs of ancient life in Mars rocks.
Thread on Twitter/X about anthropologist James C. Scott's (Weapons of the Weak, Seeing Like a State) unfinished book on rivers. Seems like a fascinating project.
Spitalfields Life visits London's Highgate Cemetery.
Tyler Cowen interviews historian Alan Taylor, much about the American Revolution and the evolution of Canada.
Strange claim that much oxygen in the ocean is being generated by chemical reactions on the sea floor. I am skeptical.
New gene editing technique discovered, claimed to be better for some purposes than CRISPR. (Technical article, news piece, thread on Twitter/X.
Scott Siskind links to some reviews of a book called Bad Therapy and says, "I think both ignoring/repressing trauma and exaggerating/spotlighting trauma are potentially dangerous, and that someone needs to invent the art of successfully navigating the space between them (I don’t think mainstream psychiatry has this art, though it does have pieces of it)." I wrote about this here.
Alex Tabarrok has some updates on the crisis in Cuba, including a claim that 10% of the country's population has fled in recent years.
Delightful post on Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park in East London.
The amount of coal shipped to US power plants fell by 8% in 2024, is down more than 55% since 2010.
Deep Mind at the Math Olympiad (NY Times, Google, MIT Technology Review)
Shipwreck full of champagne found in the Baltic.
Biden's programs have indeed set off a factory-building boom in the US.
Move in the US Congress to ban octopus farming.
From Scott Siskind's book review contest, a description of a bonkers web site called Real Raw News that tells the story of how Donald Trump has continued to rule America from behind the scenes. The main focus is on the secret trials of Trump opponents at Guantanamo Bay. Seems like a sick revenge fantasy for Trumpists, not recommended for liberals with blood pressure issues. On the other hand, the author says that RRN is the most passive conspiracy theory in history, since it tells its readers they don't have to do anything because Donald Trump is already in charge behind the scenes, killing their enemies; "Real Raw News is the exact sort of conspiracy theory that the Deep State, if it exists, should want to exist and be popular. It’s the sort of conspiracy that the Deep State, if it exists, might deliberately invent." But the real meat of the review is to ask, if some people believe this already with no evidence, how many will believe it when AI can make convincing videos of everything it claims to be happening?
Strange claim that much oxygen in the ocean is being generated by chemical reactions on the sea floor. I am skeptical.
ReplyDeleteWhy the skepticism? We've known about these massive fields of minerals for a long time - people have been proposing undersea mining of them since the 70s at least. We know that the depths have no photosynthesis going on, because there's no sunlight. And we know that the proposed reaction checks out according to physics.
The only other source of oxygen known is oxygen-rich surface water sinking due to mixing and currents - but that wouldn't produce bubbles on the deep sea floors, as happens. The formation of bubbles indicates that fresh oxygen is being generated, and that the water is already saturated with dissolved oxygen and the excess is having to bubble off.