The Aztecs once sacrificed 42 children in an attempt to appease the rain god and end a drought.
Wonderful Etruscan sarcophagi seized from looters.
More exit polls, showing the shift of various groups of men vs. 2020:
Non-white non-college men: Trump +21
White non-college men: Trump +9
Non-white college men: Trump +9
White college men: Harris +2
Some largely Asian precincts in major cities shifted 15-30% toward Trump; "The injustice of being labeled as privileged, selfish, cheaters, overrepresented, white adjacent, and resource hoarders hurt very deeply."
Trump beat Harris among pre-trail detainees at the Cook County Jail.
Interview with author John Green about his crusade to make the world "suck less."
Saber-tooth kitten mummy found in Siberia, 35,000 years old.
SpaceX has has recently launched 17 rockets in 31 days, bringing their total to 114 so far in 2024. They are dominating the launch industry.
The history and modern business of olive oil, with a focus on the bogus organic cachet of "extra virgin," actually a product of modern industrial methods.
Possible explanation for the "Wow signal" of 1977, no aliens involved. Original paper here.
Cass Sunstein on what is exactly involved in making the government more efficient.
More work on estimating the number of deaths in the US Civil War, with a best guess of 698,000. (NY Times, original paper)
If all the big art shows only display works by supposedly marginalized artists, who is marginalized? "There was a new answer to the question of what art should do: it should amplify the voices of the historically marginalized. What it shouldn’t do, it seemed, is be inventive or interesting."
Medieval mass grave found in Leicester, England. One minute video here.
Interesting review of Jordan Peterson's new book on the Bible, mainly asking the question of whether Peterson's faith in a therapeutic, symbolicized God can really protect us from nihilism.
Scott Siskind reveals which art works in his quiz are human vs. AI.
Codes and secret secretaries in Renaissance Venice.
The Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) figures out that one of its most famous UFOs, known as GOFAST because it appeared to be skimming the sea surface at fantastic speed, was not actually going very fast. Using the advanced technology known as trigonometry they worked out that it was at an altitude of 13,000 feet and traveling at a perfectly normal speed.
Former Republican Senator Ben Sasse was hired to be President of the University of Florida on a 5-year, $10 million contract, but left after 17 months. According to the NY Times, the biggest issue was that the Board of Trustees is obsessed with raising the school's US News & World Report rankings, and Sasse didn't care. When the school slipped from 5 to 6 among public universities, the board demanded to know what he was going to do about it, he said, "nothing," and out he went. This local Florida story agrees that the rankings issue was important but also cites financial scandals and personality conflicts with the head of the board. It strikes me that many conservatives are feeling like they left higher education to liberals for too long and now want to increase their involvement, but that can mean very different things, from withdrawing into "classical education" to a business-style, "results oriented" push like we have seen at Texas A&M, Florida, and (for a while) Virginia.
The Leonidas microwave weapon is intended to nullify the threat of small, cheap drones; basically it uses a precise EMP to disable electronics, so it would in theory work on autonomous drones. It is designed to be modular and easily updated to keep up with any countermeasures. Now being tested by US forces in Syria. Ad from the manufacturer, 18-minute video, article from Army Technology.
First video of a western tank (Leopard 2A4) knocking out a Russian tank in combat.
Video of Russia's IRBM strike on Ukraine: Twitter/X, YouTube.
2 comments:
SpaceX has has recently launched 17 rockets in 31 days, bringing their total to 114 so far in 2024. They are dominating the launch industry.
They are also dominating the failure-to-launch industry.
I wish I could find the exact quote, but to paraphrase, a former NASA chief once remarked that if NASA ever lost rockets at anywhere near the rate that SpaceX does, they would have been shut down instantly.
Trump beat Harris among pre-trial detainees at the Cook County Jail.
Amazing. The whole "he's just like me" mentality finally ends up being true.
...except that when rich people break the law, they don't go to jail, so I guess it's not ENTIRELY accurate...
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