As I've been saying about the intense negativity of our time: "Why Life on Mars Will DOOM Humanity."
A takedown: "This article isn't just wrong, it is fractally wrong, embarassingly flawed at every level of analysis."
In praise of the Faroe Islands, with pictures.
Excellent article of the early days of Rockefeller's Standard Oil. Via Marginal Revolution.
Somebody asked a bunch of English economists what the government could do to promote economic growth. Unsurprisingly, their top answers were 1) regulatory reform (it is really hard to build in much of England) and 2) invest in energy and other infrastructure. They go together because it is regulations and local opposition that prevents the building of more power lines.
Richard Hanania wants to Bring Back the Internet Gatekeepers: "One could argue that a company should have the right to build an information-sharing platform that is not taken over by antisemites and conspiracy theorists, even if that is the kind of content that the market demands."
Is gravity a fundamental force, or could it be the outcome of other interactions? Sabine Hossenfelder considers a recent paper that derives gravity from entropy, 6-minute video.
Dan Williams, Is Social Media Subverting Democracy, or Giving it to us Good and Hard? "My new essay argues that social media isn't manipulating people into holding bad ideas. It's revealing the popular ideas that elites used to filter out."
DNA study of the lone specimen of the Toronto Subway Deer, Torontoceros hypogaeus, finds that it was more closely related to white-tailed deer than to Caribou. (NY Times, BioRxiv) The sole fossil of this species was found during excavation for a new subway line back in 1977.
Paper claiming that LLMs can get gambling addiction.
Roman sailor's gravestone found in New Orleans. Some stuff here I did not know about Roman sailors.
Europe's largest bat, the greater noctule, catches and eats songbirds.
Construction Physics delves into why more Americans pedestrians are getting killed by cars. You might think it is drivers and their phones, but the data doesn't really say so.
American refrigerators have gotten 26% bigger since 1990, but one survey found that 72% of Americans still think their fridges are too small. (NY Times)
America has hit peak 18-year-old. From here on out, the number of people reaching college age begins to decline rapidly. Twitter/X, Medium, The Hechinger Report.
Noah Smith asks whether anything can keep China from becoming the pre-eminent global power. His answer is, only internal factional fighting.
Studying dogs and their favorite toys to understand addictive behavior.
Paleolithic rock art that used blue pigment.
3 comments:
"Richard Hanania wants to Bring Back the Internet Gatekeepers: "One could argue that a company should have the right to build an information-sharing platform that is not taken over by antisemites and conspiracy theorists, even if that is the kind of content that the market demands."
One line within the linked article particularly got me thinking...
'People used to say that “the answer to bad speech is good speech,” but it’s clear that at this point we have too much access to (mis)information.'
We've had to carve out quite a large number of kinds of speech which we do NOT grant protection under the First Amendment, precisely because good speech is not always the answer to bad speech.
For example, if someone falsely shouts "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, there's no amount of "good speech" that could counteract the harmful effect of such speech panicking a crowd of people into fleeing the building - you are not realistically going to calm the masses with reasonable discourse at that point. Certain kinds of harmful speech simply have no reasonable "answer", and must instead be prevented in the first place.
It's high time we reevaluate what kinds of speech we are willing to legally allow - in large part because Hanania is right, and the modern media landscape is so very different than it used to be. As he points out, there used to be a great deal of filtering in "the marketplace of ideas" in the form of speakers seeking large audiences having to convince major media outlets to give a platform to their message. With that filtering effect largely diminished today, so much more harmful speech which previously would have fizzled out is instead reaching massive audiences and causing serious problems.
Our laws must be shaped to fit our needs. When our needs change, so too must our laws. When the media landscape is less able to filter out harmful speech, then we the legal landscape must shift to balance things out.
Paleolithic rock art that used blue pigment.
"The previously available evidence showed that artists from this period typically used red and black pigments almost exclusively. Because blue pigments are absent from cave paintings, scholars long assumed that early Europeans either lacked access to them or deliberately chose not to use them."
I... what?
Black pigments are ubiquitous because soot, charcoal, and other products of combustion are geographically ubiquitous. Red pigments are (fairly) ubiquitous because iron ochre and such is (fairly) geographically ubiquitous. Meanwhile, blue pigments are NOT ubiquitous, because copper derivatives are NOT geographically ubiquitous.
How is this surprising to anyone? You don't grind up rocks containing copper compounds to make pigment if you don't have ready access to said rocks. You likewise don't grind them up if they're too much trouble to harvest and process.
Soot and charcoal can be created on demand by burning plant matter, and can be used as pigments even without refinement, or you can very easily pulverize them. Red ochre can be pulled out of surface soil by hand, broken apart by hand, and ground to a fine powder with even just wooden implements. Azurite and other cupric minerals are more commonly found deeper in the earth, are often embedded in rock and ores that need to be mined with specialized tools, and are much harder to pulverize into a powder suitable for use as a pigment.
"The presence of azurite shows that Palaeolithic people had a deep knowledge of mineral pigments and could access a much broader colour palette than we previously thought – and they may have been selective in the way they used certain colours”, Dr Wisher says.
No, Dr. Wisher - they did not have a "deep knowledge" of mineral pigments. They just knew that if you found a colorful rock and ground it into powder, you could then mix that powder with oils or similar and make a paint. If you understand that you can grind up ochre to make paint, then you understand that you can grind up other differently colored bits of earth to make paint as well.
If you found a particularly blue copper-heavy rock somewhere, you could grind that up and paint with it. But given the relative scarcity of such rocks in easily accessed surface areas, you'd probably view it as valuable due to its rarity. And that rarity would disincentivize destroying it for something as mundane as making paint, which you can just make out of common (and non-valuable) things like combustion products or ochre.
People in later eras didn't frequently paint with gold, for example - not because they somehow lacked "deep knowledge of mineral pigments", but because when people had access to it, they vastly preferred to use gold in other ways, for other purposes, due to its rarity and value.
Construction Physics delves into why more Americans pedestrians are getting killed by cars. You might think it is drivers and their phones, but the data doesn't really say so.
They consider just about every angle you could think of... except road design. Ironic, given the source is "Construction Physics".
They even point out how the bulk of the increase is in urban areas, and yet they still don't think to ask the question, "Could this be a problem with how streets are being built / modified / etc in urban areas over the past few decades?".
The fact that it is a uniquely American problem ALSO lends credence to the idea that it could be something to do with infrastructure design - we have some fairly unique trends in how we choose to design and build roads, and the ways in which they interact with surrounding areas.
I also find it odd that they bring up the matter of jaywalking and pedestrians not being in intersections... but they don't bring up the topic of sidewalks, or the topic of cars turning off of roads in ways that cause them to cross the paths of pedestrians (such as entering a shopping center's parking lot), as opposed to pedestrians crossing the paths of cars moving in a straight line.
Naturally, you're going to see the most collisions between pedestrians and vehicles in places where those two things are the closest together. Naturally, in urban areas there is less space to devote to separating pedestrians and vehicles from each other. And the trend in America has long been for design and planning to favor vehicles, to the point that people in other countries frequently view our infrastructure as actively hostile to pedestrians. It would not remotely surprise me to learn that this spike in deaths is caused primarily by some recent trend in urban planning, which has amplified that historic trend.
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