The Bamberg Casket, Viking art from the 10th century
The first Vancouver street given a new, unpronounceable Native name. More name changes are planned, but people are already protesting the first one. Serious question: after people, as they will, shorten this to some kind of easy to say nickname, or turn it into a joke, possibly an offensive joke, will anything have been gained in the way of restoration to Native peoples?
At a conference for OCD sufferers. (Harpers)
Asking whether Doomsters believe what they say.
List of remarkably successful undergraduate theses, on Twitter/X. Via Marginal Revolution. One led to a Noble Prize. This list doesn't include one of the most famous, Maya Lin's design for the Vietnam Memorial in DC.
The amazing classical portrait busts of the Torlonia Collection.
New theory proposes that space time "remembers" everything that happens. Not sure if this is interesting and radical, or more evidence that physicists are floundering without a clue. (Summary on Reddit, another on LinkedIn, paywalled article at New Scientist.)
New residue studies suggest that tobacco smoking goes back 2,500 years on the Columbian Plateau. Incidentally tobacco varieties from South America seem to have spread across all of North America well before European contact.
This video begins, I kid you not, "One math equation could cause reality itself to break down, and no one knows how to stop it." And this is a snippet of an interview with Terrence Tao; shouldn't the kind of people who watch interviews with famous mathematicians understand the absurdity of that claim? Incidentally the Terrence Tao interview with Lex Fridman is interesting; Tao comes across as someone whose mind works so fast that he has trouble slowing down enough to communicate his ideas to the rest of us.
Colossal marble head found in Rome.
Where do African economic statistics come from? "In 2010, I returned to Zambia and found that the national accounts now were prepared by one man alone."
Tyler Cowen summarizes what sounds like an interesting essay by Ted Gioia about why songs and movies are getting longer in the smartphone age.
Amazing medical news: "A single infusion of a stem cell-based treatment may have cured 10 out of 12 people with the most severe form of type 1 diabetes. One year later, these 10 patients no longer need insulin. The other two patients need much lower doses." (NY Times)
Short biography of Chen Jingrun, a Chinese mathematician who did important work in number theory but was then targeted, beaten unconscious, and imprisoned by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. He continued doing mathematical work in secret during his enforced labor service. It is hard to overestimate the impact of the Cultural Revolution on Chinese intellectuals.
Excellent NY Times feature on water use in Los Angeles; despite the growing population, total water use in the city has fallen 32% since 1990. "How did this happen?
The answer speaks to a general truth about progress, which, in big, messy democracies, tends to occur not all at once but in incremental, often unsexy ways, mostly out of the news cycle."
Moving 25-minute video on the elimination of smallpox as a triumph of two revolutions, one scientific and one humanitarian. Via Marginal Revolution.
Conservative Twitter/X is a swamp. And Elon is one of the worst offenders.
Pondering all those very early galaxies observed by the Webb Telescope, a group of physicists have argued that their light, passing through the dust-dense early universe, generated heat, and they say this invalidates all conclusions that have been drawn from the Cosmic Microwave Backgroud. (Original paper, news article, short video from Sabine Hossenfelder)
Are technology and capitalism making life too smooth and easy, so that we no longer have "experiences?" Seems to me that there is plenty of "experience" out there for people who want it, so if some folks prefer Carnival cruises, I don't see how that's a problem.
Old school gay activist Andrew Sullivan against the radicalism of the LGTBQ+ movement. (NY Times) Noting that public opinion is moving against the trans activists, he writes "Americans are broadly fine with transgender people. They are fine with gay people. They just reject replacing the fact of biological sex with the phantasms of gender ideology."
Scott Siskind delves into the question of why twin studies find that many traits are highly inheritable while genetic studies can't find much evidence that genes are behind it. Kind of long and confusing, which was my main takeaway. We know that heredity occurs but have only the most meager understanding of how it works.
America's prisons are emptying. (Twitter/X) With many more prisoners leaving the system than entering, our incarceration rate is set to fall in a few years from 5th highest in the world to 200th.
Magnificent rant against Hezbollah from a Lebanese television host, with the refrain Leave us. "When we look at you all we hear is war, and all we smell is death." (Twitter/X)
Detailed thread on the status of Iran's nuclear program from Dmitri Alperovitch. (Twitter/X)
Alex Tabarrok summarizes an amusing but paywalled Matt Levine piece on the bizarre economics of used cooking oil.
One of Scott Siskind's readers tells you more than you want to know about Alpha School, an online speed-learning academy. I haven't read it because it is 17,600 words long (plus charts), which I find absurd.
Bronze Roman "wrist purse" found in Czech Republic.
New, anti-immigrant party rising in Japan: "Voters afraid of ‘scary foreigners’ propel Sanseito before election."
But I guess things aren't so bad in Japan, since the death of Princess Aiko's dog made the front page.
Geologists report finding rocks in Canada that are 4.16 billion years old, which would make them the oldest known.
Summary of Iran's missile attacks on Israel: "Iran fired 525 missiles at Israel over the past 12 days according to the
@haaretzcom tracker. 30 got through and hit built-up areas causing a total of 28 deaths. The rest (94%) were either intercepted, mis-fired or fell in uninhabited areas."
Study of Israeli missile defense during the latest conflict, based on videos shot in Jordan, says the US used a minimum of 39 THAAD interceptors, which would cost around $495 million, and Israel used a minimum 43 Arrow interceptors. Some awesome video at the link.
Very negative take on what Israel achieved from Michael Young on Twitter/X.
Putin explains his goal one more time for the thick-headed: "I consider the Russian and Ukrainian people to be one people. In that sense all Ukraine is ours."
Amazing short video of Israeli missiles intercepting an Iranian IRBM.
4 comments:
"Iran fired 525 missiles at Israel over the past 12 days according to the @haaretzcom tracker. 30 got through and hit built-up areas causing a total of 28 deaths."
I take that to mean more than 30 got through but didn't hit "built up" areas. The Tel-Aviv based institute for National Security Studies says 50 made a direct hit. 50 is a lot for a small country to absorb, but so is 30. I just don't see how any country can afford a long-term war anymore. Not only are these weapons ridiculously expensive, they take forever to manufacture. My understanding is the U.S. currently has the capacity to produce only 500 Patriot missiles a year. [There are plans to increase that to 650.]. Do the math, you have to fire two to four for every incoming missile. How long will 650 last?
Google AI say this about the Patriot:
A Patriot missile battery (including the system and missiles) costs around $1 billion to build. Individual Patriot missiles, specifically the PAC-3 MSE interceptors, cost approximately $4 million each, according to multiple sources. The launcher itself costs about $10 million."
Cheap drones look like the most useful weapon.
The first Vancouver street given a new, unpronounceable Native name. More name changes are planned, but people are already protesting the first one.
I clicked on the link fully expecting it to be an issue of Anglophones being notoriously bad about pronouncing foreign words or names, even when Anglicized, and was perfectly prepared to scoff.
I was not REMOTELY prepared for them to have chosen to spell it entirely in IPA pronunciation guide glyphs, which in my experience are only decipherable by actual professional linguists. That left me a little gobsmacked.
I actually honestly wonder how many native speakers of the Halkomelelem language even know hot to read or pronounce "šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmasəm".
HOWEVER...
Despite the linked article wringing its hands over the idea of "real-world implications of making šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmasəm the street’s sole legal name"...
...the road was ALSO given an official Anglicization - "Musqueamview Street" - which appears on EVERY SINGLE STREET SIGN FOR THE ROAD
(in addition to the non-Anglicized version) and which is 100% accepted for official usages such as mail delivery, government forms and records, etc.
Yes, the article quotes random "man on the street" individuals who express fears about not getting their mail, or having legal documents like wills be rendered invalid... but the unsubstantiated fears of ignorant lay people do not affect reality!
The simple fact is that streets ROUTINELY have multiple distinct legally acceptable names, all over the world. If you send a letter in your country's mail system, and it gets lost in the stacks, and the city changes the name of the destination street before it gets delivered... IT WILL STILL GET DELIVERED! Post offices take these things into account! They aren't going to see "Musqueamview Street" and say, "Oh! That's not the precise legal name! We shall REFUSE to deliver this parcel!" That would be absurd!
Likewise for private parcel companies! And ditto for legal documents! If you sign a lease which lists your address as "Musqueamview", the document isn't magically invalidated because that's technically not the legal name! If your will lists your address "Musqueamview", no judge on the face of the planet is going to accept that as some kind of valid nullifying factor! It's a complete non-issue, born from modern "journalistic" fear mongering and controversy manufacturing.
And to top it off, "Musqueamview" is an eminently pronounceable Anglicization, and not even that hard to spell; certainly not meaningfully harder to pronounce or spell than comparable French or even English street names. If you can handle "Carnarvon Street", "Alamein Avenue", "Brackenridge Street", or "Camosun Street" (all located nearby), then you can handle "Musqueamview", methinks.
Serious question: after people, as they will, shorten this to some kind of easy to say nickname, or turn it into a joke, possibly an offensive joke, will anything have been gained in the way of restoration to Native peoples?
I don't understand, John, how you can link to the article in question, and then blatantly ignore its contents and, in so doing, misrepresent the issue.
You have chosen to frame the story as "this name is absurd and unworkable", when that's not remotely true - most people are going to use the official Anglicization of "Musqueamview", and that's the end of the story.
I have to say, my gut reaction is that I don't buy for a second that you ACTUALLY believe there is any real risk of "Musqueamview" being somehow shortened, or given a mocking or offensive nickname. I hate to admit it, but this prompted a negative emotional response in me - it feels like you are engaged in blatant bad faith arguing, and grasping at straws to find something to complain about.
...but! ...benefit of the doubt, and all that...
Maybe you're merely arguing from a place of confusion - perhaps you merely skimmed the article, and gleaned an incorrect sense of the situation. Or maybe you genuinely DO think "Musqueamview" will somehow be altered in a problematic way, and the problem is my own incredulity - maybe I'm drawing irrational connections between my perception of you as an intelligent, educated man... and your arriving at what seems to me like a conclusion that is silly at best. It's possible that -I- am being irrational...
But that said... I'm deeply disappointed that:
[A] What you chose to focus on was that the name is "unpronounceable", because that's simply not true, even for the average Anglophone, and...
[B] You focused on that factor to the COMPLETE EXCLUSION of what I would deem the more important aspects of the situation raised by the article.
You completely fail to address the matter of the massive, widespread public support for the city removing the road's previous name of "Trutch Street", because namesake Joseph Trutch was a notorious racist and bigot...
And you likewise make zero mention over the fact that the city did not consult with any other First Nations besides the Musqueam who have their own ancestral claims and relationships to the general area - which is to my mind the only truly problematic aspect of the situation, as the Squamish Nation has since complained about their exclusion from the process.
It just feels intellectually dishonest, John. "Weird name bad" is just such a bizarre takeaway from the article you link to.
Re the doomster article: I'm somewhat bemused by the author's apparent idea that beliefs should lead to action. I wonder what taking action is like. Maybe I should try it once before I die.
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