The other day I went looking for information on Maya cosmology, and one of the first pages that came up was this old blog post that focuses on casting a Maya horoscope for Princess Diana.
American higher education is getting cheaper (Marginal Revolution).
US officials have pushed Qatar to expel the leaders of Hamas, with the argument that since they won't engage seriously with cease fire proposals, there doesn't seem to be much point in keeping them around. According to news reports, Qatar has agreed to toss them. This happened before the US election.
Raw exit poll data comparing how people voted to how much attention they pay to political news (Twitter/X):
-a great deal: harris +8
-a lot: harris +5
-a moderate amount: trump +1
-a little: trump +8
-none at all: trump +15
Tambalacoque (Sideroxylon grandiflorum) trees are not completely dependent on dodo birds and are in no danger of going extinct. Kicking myself for ever believing this when the truth was on wikipedia.
Summary of the career of anarchist anthropologist David Graeber: "David’s recurrent rallying cry as both a scholar and an activist was: It does not have to be this way." Unfortunately, I think that if you want a wealthy, technologically sophisticated civilization it really does have to be this way.
The NY Times reports on the 470,000 people who fled the Syrian civil war to Lebanon and are now fleeing Lebanon back to Syria. More Syrians would be returning if the Assad regime hadn't threatened to jail everyone who ever opposed them.
Neanderthal inbreeding; DNA of the 42,000-year-old Neanderthal skeleton known as Thorin shows evidence of severe inbreeding, as if his people had been living for thousands of years in a small, isolated group. This might be an important part of the the history of our genus; was the rise of Homo sapiens sapiens caused in part by wider marriage networks? David Reich discussed Neanderthal inbreeding in the interview I linked to here.
Tyler Cowen against tarriffs.
Kevin Drum on a new study that says tax cuts for the rich don't help economic growth but do make the rich richer.
Smog in Pakistan is so bad you can see it from space. This week schools and "unessential" businesses in Karachi and Lahore were closed to reduce the health risk.
Meanwhile, in America: Megan Fox Announces Fourth Pregnancy with Grungy Nude Photo Shoot.
Zvi, a rationalist figure who is in many matters a pretty strict libertarian, has turned against sports gambling: "ubiquitous sports gambling on mobile phones, and media aggressively pushing wagering, is mostly predation on people who suffer from addictive behaviors." As someone who lightly follows basketball and soccer I am regularly shocked by the ubiquity of gambling talk and gambling ads.
The quest to make glass ever stonger, 23-minute video from Veritasium.
Evidence that a supernova 2.6 million year ago may have caused the mass extinction at the Pliocene/Pleistocene boundary. (Scientific paper, news story) That's when the Megalodons died.
Manifesto for a future, moderate Democratic Party from Matt Yglesias on Twitter/X.
Speculation that cuneiform writing was influenced by design elements that appear on cylinder seals as far back as 4400 BC.
Police break up a cock-fighting "ring" in rural Virginia; names of the arrested are all Hispanic. You will be glad to learn that "All 80 chickens are currently being housed and cared for at the Stafford County Animal Shelter and are scheduled to be seen by a vet. The Stafford County Animal Shelter is currently exploring long-term solutions for their future."
Congress continues to hold hearings on UFO sitings and alleged government cover-ups.
Sam Harris election post-mortem, blames much of the Democratic defeat on identity politics. His main worry for the future is the culture of lies and the loss of faith in the media and other institutions.
I was just thinking that I hadn't heard much about Alaska lately. So when a video from Economics Explained popped up in my feed, I listened to it. I learned that oil production in Alaska has been declining since the 1980s and is now half of Oklahoma's. Payments from the state's wealth fund don't come close to covering the state's extra cost of living, so people are leaving and the population is falling.
Poaching and game laws in 19th-century England.
Kevin Drum has the data on how much drug use has declined among American teenagers
More on the fall in US drug overdose deaths.
The fake bear attacks on cars scam.
"Pearls of Wisdom" from Kevin Drum, 66 things he thinks are true and important.
East London in the 70s and 80s, cool photo collection.
The restoration of Bernini's Baldacchino in the Vatican.
Tyler Cowen interviews Neal Stephenson.
Kevin Drum on a new study that says tax cuts for the rich don't help economic growth but do make the rich richer.
ReplyDelete---
Zvi, a rationalist figure who is in many matters a pretty strict libertarian, has turned against sports gambling: "ubiquitous sports gambling on mobile phones, and media aggressively pushing wagering, is mostly predation on people who suffer from addictive behaviors."
Is this why people follow these commenters? Because they can occasionally observe that water is wet?
Next, we'll be hearing about how the military industrial complex is full of graft! Or how the police exist to protect property rather than people! Or how politicians exist to serve the top 1% rather than the bottom 99%!
Congress continues to hold hearings on UFO sitings and alleged government cover-ups.
ReplyDeleteThat's what happens when people vote for UFO conspiracy theorists to become members of Congress.
I learned that oil production in Alaska has been declining since the 1980s and is now half of Oklahoma's. Payments from the state's wealth fund don't come close to covering the state's extra cost of living, so people are leaving and the population is falling.
ReplyDeleteYou mean it's not terribly economically viable to live in the arctic wilderness, deeply isolated from civilization proper, with barely any infrastructure? Tell another!
@John
ReplyDelete"Unfortunately, I think that if you want a wealthy, technologically sophisticated civilization it really does have to be this way."
What, in your view, is "this way"? Genuinely curious, because I'm having my own difficulties figuring out what is the way things are.
I'm also curious as to John's view on things, because I doubt he's thinking of the same things Graeber meant (which are similarly murky to me).
DeleteFrom how the linked article paints his views, it sounds like Graeber was really just arguing that there's no single "correct" way for people to live, and his "doesn't have to be this way" comment was mainly just an appeal for people to question their complacent assumptions about the society they live in, and be open to other options.
John definitely seems to be taking away something far more specific than that, though.
The quest to make glass ever stonger, 23-minute video from Veritasium.
ReplyDeleteI was going to watch the video, but the comments saved me 23 minutes.
Apparently the video's creator makes zero mention of the East German development of "Superfest" glass, which for practical household purposes is essentially unbreakable - you can take a sledgehammer to a drinking glass made of superfest, and it won't even chip.
The East Germans invented the stuff, and then tried to shop it around to the rest of the world, and no one in the Capitalist parts of the world wanted to buy it, because if you sell people glasses that don't break, then you can't keep making money selling them replacements.
And there's a LOT of money to be made in selling replacements. Think about how much glass places like restaurants go through every year due to breakage. It's not at all uncommon for a busy restaurant to have to completely replace every single glass they own in as little as a single year.
Meanwhile, there are quite literally still restaurants in Germany today that have been using the same glasses for forty-plus years.
But modern society doesn't value improving the lives of the common people - it values filling the coffers of massive corporations. We intentionally choose to only supply people with inferior products, so that we can sell them replacements once those products needlessly break. Incredible waste, in the name of even more incredible greed.