Interesting visualization of the earth's ocean currents.
Noah Smith takes on the notion that MAGA will somehow help restore things like community and faith in America: "Trump's movement has been around for a decade now, and it has built absolutely nothing."
Jewish ritual bath of the Roman period found in Ostia.
Mind-expanding 33-minute video from Veritasium on some weird things that happen when you combine quantum mechanics with the principle of least action.
Scott Siskind ponders declining reading scores for American 4th graders: was it the pandemic?
Some violence in Syria, but nothing critical yet.
Larry Summers rips Trump's tarriff policies.
Memoirs of madness, quite interesting.
The Lapedo Child, a human fossil from Portugal, always bothered paleoanthropologists because of its mix of modern human and Neanderthal characteristics. DNA testing has confirmed that there were human/Neanderthal hybrids, which inspired new interest in this specimen. Now radiocarbon dating says this fossil is 28,000 years old, 10,000 years after most authorities think Neanderthals went extinct, which raises a lot of questions. (Scientific paper, news story)
Interesting NY Times piece on migration to Dubai, where only one in ten people is a citizen.
Fascinating thread (Twitter/X) explaining the difference between the total fertility rate and something called completed cohort fertility, which often yield different numbers. If the average age at which women are having children is changing, then CCF is a more accurate measure. Unfortunately you can't measure it until a cohort of women are too old to have many more babies. In the US the cohort aging out now had 2 children per woman.
The "cat meat men" of Victorian London.
Clothes and empire: "The Mughal emperors in India faced a sartorial quandary: continue wearing their traditional Central Asian attire, or adopt the lighter cotton clothing of this warmer clime?" Great pictures.
Filming Nanook of the North.
Why Doge will not meaningfully reform government or reduce spending, from a conservative thinker.
Weird discourse in Congress, where lawmakers and experts were discussing "how to beat China back to the Moon." Considering that two Americans walked on the Moon in 1969, it seems bizarre to me that anyone cares who gets there next.
Demographers worried about population collapse are focusing on very religious families, hoping that they can fill some of the future birth void: "The only sure way United States can get back to 1.8 TFR in my estimation is if 10% of women have 5+ children. This is because it is becoming increasingly likely that 30% of women in coming years will have zero & another 10% just 1. So lot falls on the 60% to have more children." To judge from their salience in the demographic discourse you would think that Finland's famously fertile Laestadians were an important group, but really there are only about 110,00 of them. But, hey, my wife and I raised five children without belonging to a cult.
Amazing images and new science from Juno at Jupiter, 20-minute video.
Review of a book subtitled A Cultural History of Hypochondria, interesting.
Good introduction to the philosophy of Martha Nussbaum. And an interesting essay by Nussbaum herself, "Beyond Anger."
Quantum computer boosters keep claiming their devices have performed feats non-quantum computers could not perform in a million years, but then somebody finds a way to do the same calculation on a regular supercomputer.
Plans for a big regulatory rollback at the EPA focused on CO2 rules. (NY Times, CNN, Guardian) As I said before on this subject, I don't think this matters much. Solar power is not replacing coal because of wokeness; it is simply less expensive. Geothermal power has been a fantasy of the eco-left for 50 years, but it is now taking off, not because of wokeness, but because deep drilling has gotten two orders of magnitude more efficient. My company works on every kind of energy project and I have not heard of a plan for a new coal-fired plant in 25 years. MAGA cannot save coal unless they outright force utilities to burn it.
Sea otters are pretty good at controlling invasive green crabs.
NPR has an update on the shortage of doctors in rural America, which they say has gotten worse since the pandemic.
A glimpse of the Roman baths in Baden Baden.
Pondering the vaginal microbiome.
Review of a biography of the Brothers Grimm, written as a refutation of the idea that folk tales "come from nowhere and belong to everyone," which nobody in folklore studies has believed in more than a century. The older I get, the less tolerance I have for these inane straw men.
This week's random past post is Tony Judt and the Anticommunist Left, from 2013.
1 comment:
But, hey, my wife and I raised five children without belonging to a cult.
The people who worry about birth rate don't care about raising children. If they did, they'd make it easier for people to adopt, provide more incentives and support systems to assist parents, and make it easier for immigrants to move here with their families and children.
No, what the alarmists are concerned about is strictly birth rates - and specifically births of "the right kind" of people.
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