Thirty-four years of Strandbeests, 22-minute video.
Jeremy Horpedahl, "Four charts to overcome your pessimism about how recent generations are doing economically."
Reuters says 600 Americans were fired for comments posted after Charlie Kirk's assassination.
The sea wolves of western Canada (see here) have been videotaped raiding traps set for invasive green crabs. (YouTube, CBC, NY Times) Lots of blaph about whether this means wolves "use tools," but I would put it under the category of general cleverness.
A pretentious intellectual visits Las Vegas, has a good time.
Tyler Cowen interviews Blake Scholl of Boom Supersonic, lots of wild transportation talk.
People going against the status quo are more likely to be confidently wrong.
Moss spores that spent nine months in space germinated when they were brought back to earth.
Max Stirner's radical individualism, 53-minute lecture from Wes Cecil. You can think that Stirner was a narcissist but he was dead right about Marx and Engels and their worship of abstractions.
Piers Taylor celebrates "deeper and messier architecture," some interesting buildings.
A claim that the English may have gotten more intelligent, genetically, in modern times and that this explains the Industrial Revolution. Maybe people are getting smarter – there is other evidence of this – but any association with the Industrial Revolution is suspect because the authors present no comparative data from China, where a rich civilization full of smart people did not industrialize.
A strange Viking burial with scallop shells on her face.
Study finds that Brexit reduced the GDP of the UK by 6-8%.
Sculpted reliefs of theatrical masks found at Roman site in Turkey.
New experiment shows that under one particular set of conditions, readers, including MFA students, prefer the literary output of ChatGPT over that of human authors.
Catalan artist Jaume Plensa's humanist scuptures.
Tyler Cowen on AI poetry. I find most contemporary poetry unreadable, so I would be happy to have more good stuff from any source.
Richard Hanania shreds Patrick Deneen's "post-liberal" philosophy.
New study: "Evidence that learned avoidance of a pathogenic bacterium can be transmitted to future generations in C. elegans is growing."
Somehow they have persuaded some Brits to run across the landscape while being hunted by baying hounds.
Nuts on the woke right copy nuts on the woke left, now with fake hate crimes (New Jersey Globe, Twitter/X)
A long past post that has gotten a bunch of views lately: Free Love, which used the catastrophic romantic experience of the Shelly/Byron circle to show that the traditional wisdom about marriage is correct.
Europe is not ready for war with Russia (Twitter/X). All this tweeter says is true, but I think he vastly overrates the threat. A force that can't take Pokrovsk is not storming into Warsaw. Yes, drones are awesome and Russia has a ton of them, but Israel just showed they're not much use against F-35s.
There are so many fiber optic lines lying across fields along the front line in Ukraine that Russian soldiers get tangled in them, in this case making the soldier unable to avoid an oncoming drone.
Lots of economists and foreign policy types are saying that the Russian economy is in terrible shape. Most do not think that it is likely to collapse, but Russia's ability to fund the war keeps decreasing and the long-term cost to the nation keeps mounting. On YouTube: Professor Gerdes, Jason Jay Smart, Nigel-Gould Davies, Perun. Text articles: Atlantic Council, Meduza. Summary from one of these speakers: "Time is no longer on Russia's side." And here is a claim from Russian media that half the nation's clothing shops have closed.
Short video showing 100 interceptions of Shahed-type drones by Wild Hornets interceptor drones.
1 comment:
Jeremy Horpedahl, "Four charts to overcome your pessimism about how recent generations are doing economically."
So if I show these to all the Millennials and Zoomers I know, they'll suddenly be rid of their decades old student debts, be able to ever afford to own a home in their entire lifetimes, be able to stop living in fear of getting seriously ill because medical bills would bankrupt them, and they won't have to live paycheck to paycheck in desperation and despair anymore?
Wow! If only someone had made and shared these magical pictures sooner!
Although I'm confused about why they seem to disagree with each other? And why they seem to be measuring very different things? And why they admit that they are using "weighted" values, but in no way explain how that weighting works, or what possible biases and misrepresentations those weights might have? And why one of them uses non-linear axis scaling, which is usually a sign of deceptive graphic design? And...
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Reuters says 600 Americans were fired for comments posted after Charlie Kirk's assassination.
To quote XKCD:
"The Right to Free Speech means the government can't arrest you for what you say. It doesn't mean that anyone else has to listen to your bullshit, or host you while you share it. The 1st Amendment doesn't shield you from criticism or consequences. If you're yelled at, boycotted, have your show cancelled, or get banned from an internet community, you free speech rights aren't being violated. It's just that the people listening think you're an asshole, and they're showing you the door."
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Lots of blaph about whether this means wolves "use tools," but I would put it under the category of general cleverness.
A pre-historic human or human ancestor picks up a flint and bangs it around and makes a spark? Tool use, clearly! Behold, the glory of we humans!
A wolf picks up a rope set by humans and uses it to reel in a submerged trap containing crabs which the wolf cannot normally see or smell, and only knows about because it has observed human interaction and made several logical leaps to puzzle out cause and effect and solve a problem? Not tool use! Only we glorious superior humans use tools! This is just "general cleverness"!
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Tyler Cowen on AI poetry. I find most contemporary poetry unreadable, so I would be happy to have more good stuff from any source.
If you find most contemporary poetry unreadable, why would you think an "AI" that collates that vast bulk of poetry and attempts to imitate it would be any more readable? Surely it's going to be drawing from databases largely full of the very poetry you don't like?
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