Astronomy photo of the year contest winners.
Moving the Oseberg ship.
The journal of an ocean-going stewardess in 1892.
Is that really a primordial black hole?
I went looking for numbers on church attendance in the US and found that the most up-to-date statistics are published by companies that offer to help churches raise their memberships. Data from entites like Pew and Gallup seems to lag years behind, at least in so far at they publish it in time series. What I can find confirms that church attendance is rising among Millennials.
Late Neolithic tomb (dolmen) discovered in Spain, largely intact, lots of grave goods but not many pictures yet. (The History Blog, Spanish press release with more pictures)
One problem with studying Alzheimer's is that mice don't get dementia. But cats do, and some researchers are studying demented cats for clues.
What is the key military technology right now? Noah Smith opts for the Electric Tech Stack.
I was in Meridian Hill Park in Washington, DC this week. I discovered that the park was the end point of The Longest Walk, when 24 Indians walked from San Francisco to DC to issue a list of political demands, some of which they achieved. More than 2,000 people attended the Meridian Hill rally.
Freddie de Boer, "Things are Really Bad"
If you could stop MAGA, but only by turning back the arrow of progress, would you? Partially paywalled, but you don't need to read the whole thing to get the point: what issues would you (a Democrat) surrender to save democracy? For example, would you give up on trans rights, or fighting climate change?
Swedish study finds that while the number of children diagnosed with autism has increased, the average severity of their symptoms has declined. I consider this strong evidence that the recent increase is largely driven by changing diagnostic criteria.
Orange and grapefruit production in Florida has fallen 90% since the early 2000s, largely due to a bacterial disease called "Greening."
A claim: "From 1990 to 2010, rising numbers of H-1B holders caused 30–50 percent of all productivity growth in the US economy."
Printer Tracking Dots: does each laser printer have a unique signature that it prints on every page? Wikipedia, BBC, short video on Twitter/X.
Technical analysis of a Bronze Age hoard from Scotland has been published, interesting summary.
Russia and China both say they want a new gas pipeline from Siberia to China, but the Chinese are haggling hard over the price contract, knowing Russia has nowhere else to turn.
Using endophytes – smaller organisms that live on and within plants, like the nitrogen-fixing bacteria in legumes – to increase disease resistance and other crops.
Curtis Yarvin confirms his historical ignorance by tweeting that the Confederacy lost because "it had no theory of victory." In fact political entities like "the Confederacy" never have theories about anything, but Jefferson Davis absolutely did have a plan for winning the war: make the price of reconquest so high that northerners would opt not to pay it. Another theory of victory common in the South was foreign intervention. People who make arguments based on history ought to know something about it. (My thoughts on this topic are here.)
Reading Orwell in Moscow: After Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, readers in Moscow began to show much more interest in books focusing on the crimes of dictators, especially the Nazis. Via Marginal Revolution.
India finally retires its MIG-21 fighters.
The UN reports that more than one million Syrian refugees have returned to their homes since the fall of Assad.
Robin Hanson's TED Talk on "The Elephant in the Brain," aruging that your real motives are not what you think they are.
Thread explaining why the availability of AI systems that read x-rays better than humans has not yet led to a decline in the number of radiologists.
Why do cancer rates seem to be rising in the young? (Science News, National Cancer Institute, Yale Medicine) So far as I can tell, nobody knows, but many serious people are worried. On the other hand this seems to be largely colo-rectal cancer, one of the kinds we are best at treating.
More Denisovan (Homo longi) skulls found in China. Very cool, but the story of genus Homo in the Middle Pleistocene is a tangled mess and the ideas in the most recent Chinese publications are highly speculative.
Today's random observation:
Talked with a friend about what’s important to us in a man and the first thing she said was "he must have an appealing metaphysics"!?
Apparently she meant not a strict materialist. Anyway, single men out there, start working on a good way to describe your metaphysics.
3 comments:
Talked with a friend about what’s important to us in a man and the first thing she said was "he must have an appealing metaphysics"!?
Like half the stuff posted on twitter, this never happened.
I enjoy the juxtaposition between this recent move using a high tech scaffold suspended from a purpose built monorail...
...and the time in 1926 when it was first moved to the Viking Ship Museum, using only a rough wooden scaffold reinforced by a couple bars of steel, loaded by hand onto a railroad flatcar, and then pulled by teams of men with ropes along moveable sections of track laid out literally just ahead of the ship as it progressed, like roller logs, winding through the streets of Bygdøy.
Half seems conservative, even.
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