New theory about the origin of the wheel and axle points to copper mines in the Carpathian Mountains. (original paper, news story)
Every year NFL players eat around 80,000 Uncrustables (frozen crustless peanut butter & jelly sandwiches). (NY Times)
Where are the 7 million men "missing" from the work force? Many of them are disabled, or claim to be.
Sabine Hossenfelder on a new paper describing shapes that tile the plane or fill 3-dimensional space but have rounded corners and curved edges, 6-minute video.
Anti-tourism protests in Spain.
The rise and decline of the secretary. Via Marginal Revolution. I am old enough to have had bosses who had secretaries, but not to have ever had one myself. For about a year in the early 90s I had a boss whose only career goal seemed to be to get her own secretary, which she never achieved.
Renaissance books with pop-ups.
Remarkable hoard of coins dating to the Norman conquest of England – half showing Harold, half William the Conqueror, mostly dating to 1066-1068 – has been purchased via the Portable Antiquities Scheme and will go on display in the British Museum.
Heterodox Academy tracks ideological attacks on academics from both the left and the right, and they say right now attacks from the right greatly outnumber those from the left, a reversal of the situation in 2020.
And Heterodox Academy on Indiana's new "Open Inquiry" law, supposed to prevent indoctrination of students by their professors. They object to it for the same reason I objected to Florida's similar law, because there is no way for professors to know what statements might get them into trouble. Vague laws are bad laws. HA goes into this topic at greater depth in this piece on a proposed Federal bill, which they like much better than the Indiana and Florida laws. I am happy to have finally stumbled on some serious discussion of these issues.
On Twitter/X, Josh Marshall says that all the Trump operatives under 30 came out of 4chan and got their tone from online troll culture.
The planning and construction of Poundbury, (then) Prince Charles' dream of an old-fashioned English town, which now has 4,100 inhabitants. (20-minute video)
Interesting new Bronze Age hoard in Scotland.
Review of what sounds like an interesting book on medieval Christian mysticism.
Tweet compiling a bunch of articles complaining that Halloween isn't as fun as it used to be, stretching back to 1903.
Short history of the origins of civilization. Mentioning this mainly because it starts with an argument that agriculture appeared around the world in the Neolithic because changes in the earth's tilt and orbit led to greater seasonality, that is, bigger differences between summer and winter. I'm not convinced, but it is intriguing. Also notes that large-scale food storage, perhaps a response to seasonality, preceded agriculture. Then goes on to say stuff I think is wrong, like that farming made our health worse; it may have made disease worse, by raising our population density, but the other changes attributed here to poor diet could equally be caused by self-domestication.
From a new paper outlining the history of nepotism in European intellectual life, by tracing father-son pairs: "Most notably, nepotism sharply declined during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, when departures from meritocracy arguably became both increasingly inefficient and socially intolerable." Via Marginal Revolution.
British study finds that children born during British sugar rationing in the 1950s had lower rates of diabetes and hypertension as adults.
Turning AI loose on a large collection of Renaissance astronomy books. Interesting idea but I don't think they really learned much.
Global culture watch: Afro-French NBA star Victor Wembenyama dresses up for American Halloween in a costume based on a Miyazaki movie.
Detailed NY Times write-up of the battle in Mali in which the Wagner Group lost 46 mercenaries, including the man behind the popular Grey Zone Telegram channel. Basically, they got cocky and were lured into a trap by Taureg rebels.
They object to it for the same reason I objected to Florida's similar law, because there is no way for professors to know what statements might get them into trouble. Vague laws are bad laws.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, "vague laws" is the bedrock foundation of America's legal system, and it always has been. We're one of the oldest extant republics in the world, and we cling to a similarly old system of law that virtually everyone else has discarded because of its inadequacies in the modern world.
America employs "common law" - a system in which laws themselves are written to be vague, with the intent that their actual meaning will be "interpreted" by judges and courts through legal cases, and then enforced based upon those interpretations and precedents.
This is a system we inherited from England - as did every other nation on the planet which still uses it. But it's a small collection of places - America, Canada, Britain, Ireland, and a smattering of former and current British colonies.
Almost everybody else in the modern world now uses "civil law" - a fundamentally codified approach to legislation, where "interpretation" is of secondary importance, because the law as written serves as the primary foundation for how it is to be applied.
In practice, simple observation shows us that common law tends to result in vague laws, because there is an inherent expectation that such vagaries will be smoothed over through interpretation. This is obvious even in the Constitution - it grants vague powers to various bodies, but intentionally leaves the specifics vague, with the expectation that said bodies will "figure it out".
In contrast, civil law tends to result in exactingly written laws, because they are NOT open to interpretation. The law is the law, and it isn't up to judges or senators, et cetera, and the precedents they choose to set to determine if and how the law applies or not - the law itself tells you where and how it applies, and if you take issue with that, you have to change the law itself.
Consequently, in America, we tend to have a very hard time changing laws, because the preference is to instead change how we interpret the laws.
But in most of the rest of the world, laws are much more easily and frequently changed, because if a law is poorly written (or circumstances change and it no longer is fully adequate or relevant), then there is an overwhelming imperative to go in and adjust, remove, or replace the law in question, because -it is the law of the land- and it can't just be ignored on a whim as senators or judges please.