Ah well, no advice that I offer* to obstinate politcos, pundits or AI-inventors ever gets past the Cliché Protection Barrier that's established to firmly keep out any ideas (and I got a million of em) that are Not-Invented-Here. Should I take a hint and stay in my lane?
Naw. But one way to keep defending this incredible, miraculously creative, anomalous Enlightenment Civilization is to keep pointing out how wonderful science truly is! And hence...
== The Wonderful World of Nature and Biology! ==
First... some great sites:
Anton Petrov's science podcast is a favorite. (Though in every episode I catch some small error; it's half the fun!) This time: using micro black holes for energy purposes on Earth.
Izat familiar?
Tis, if you read my eponymous novel Earth. And this happens almost exactly on the timeline I projected, for that story's dramatic arc.
My friend - and 25-year host of the Closer to Truth sci-philosophy TV series - Robert Lawrence Kuhn - just published a comprehensive survey of theories of consciousness — A Landscape of Consciousness: Toward a Taxonomy of Explanations and Implications. A balanced survey of the core philosophical issue of our time.
Drinking water directly from the air? A concept predicted in one of the Out of Time novels… Boondoggle by Tom Easton and Torion Oey, which will soon be published by Amazing Stories. Now a real life product!
== Tracing the hidden history of life ==
Moreover – "But what is really interesting is that it's clear it possessed an early immune system, showing that even by 4.2 billion years ago, our ancestor was engaging in an arms race with viruses."
How much of the evolution of biochemistry is lost to time? "We might never know exactly, but our research yielded an important piece of evidence: only eight new reactions, all reminiscent of common biochemical reactions, are needed to bridge geochemistry and biochemistry.”
And yes, I expect the Drake factor f(L) to prove trivially large, as did f(P). Planets and life, everywhere... but f(i) very small and f(c) - true civilizations that escape the male reproductive strategy called feudalism, in order to become creative and civilized enough to reach the stars? Vanishingly small.
== But let's cheer up! ==
Much later… a stress event in the early Jurassic may have driven many bird-hipped and two-legged dinosaurs to higher latitudes where they had to develop feathers and warm-bloodedness to survive, while the poor lizard-hipper giants had to make do in more arid lands. Yay bird-hippers! (And the furry little mammals who followed them into the hills.)
A hilarious and insightfully informative video - How Cats Broke the Game - that explores the biology and anthropology of humanity's partnership with cats... told entirely in GAMER PLAY terms, e.g. build-points and skill-sets and power-ups, terminology that winds up making surprisingly solid sense. In fact, it's new-gen speak that actually rather impressed me.
(Though humans bred terriers and other dog types who are also great ratters. And much more loyal.)
And in news from deeper time… This particular posting by Anton Petrov is especially interesting, re the impudent proposal that complex (multicellular) life forms had a brief start during an oxygenization event around 2.1 billion years ago, only to die off, leaving only single celled life till at least a billion years later, when it got rolling again. Naturally, it seems slim... though without any killer refutations, so far. And... well... interesting!
== Peering at human bottlenecks ==
New evidence indicates that humans left Africa earlier than thought.... "The Neanderthal Y chromosome, for example, is more similar to the Y chromosome found in living humans than it is to the rest of the Neanderthal genome. In 2020, researchers offered an explanation: Neanderthal males inherited a new Y chromosome from humans between 370,000 and 100,000 years ago. But that would have made sense only if a wave of Africans had expanded out of the continent much earlier than scientists had thought."
"But why do the early migrations out of Africa seem to have fizzled away? Was there something different about the people in the last wave?"
Well, yeah, I talk about it in Existence.
A more recent bio mystery that’s been discussed a lot right here, in this blog’s lively comment community (below) has been the Great Big Y-Chromosome Bottleneck, from about 7000 to 5000 years ago, which appears to have started – and ended – rather suddenly, especially From Europe to South Asia. This article describes it pretty well.
But how do you get a situation in which nearly all healthy females got to breed, but only one male in 17? And why would it happen (and stop) all across Eurasia with such brutal suddenness?
My own theory. It began with the arrival of larger farming villages, in which old tribal democracy could no longer function. No longer hold local 'lordly' bullies in check. Not when those top bullies could gather an 'army' of 20+ pals, call themselves demigods and simply take the widows of any men they killed. (That era also coincides with the arrival of large scale beer brewing; ponder that.)
And the Y-Chromosome Bottleneck ended just as quickly! Pretty much as soon as some of those large villages gathered into even larger town- and city-based kingdoms. Those bigger-scale kings -- from Ur to the Indus to the Nile -- needed law and order! They also needed men for their armies, in struggles against other big kings. And hence they would have commanded local lords to stop wholesale slaughter of other local men!
Those events would fit the order and sequence of the chromosomal evidence perfectly! Though... yes... that is a long way from proof.
And further DNA sleuthing opens such a window into a Scandinavian village 5000 years ago, tracing seven generations of 100 related individuals, 17% of whom had… the Plague. Which may have accounted for population declines. Which leads us to…
== Preparing for the next pandemic? ==
I have yet to see a single person, even one, point out the real, topmost effect of the Covid-19 epidemic. That it was a spectacularly effective and relatively mild wakeup call and training exercise, for when we must deal with the real thing. A real ‘pandemic.’
All of what I just said may offend those of you who lost one or more people to that nasty disease… or if you claim that both government and society bungled the response. True enough. Still, I am not deterred from calling em as I see em.
For example, while millions died, when you factor in remaining lifespan (most fatalities were elderly), the number of lost human years doesn’t rank anywhere in the top rank of plagues.
(Well… worst in total deaths, sure. Though not as a fraction of the population or in seismic effects upon civilization. But sure. way-way worse than anything we the living have seen.)
This is small comfort to those who lost loved ones, or who still suffer from Long Covid. (I know several and it’s a nasty syndrome that must be fought with science!) And I am well aware how consensus is shifting, re: the disease’s origins -- toward a verdict that this was no ‘accident.’ At least not completely.
Still, I expect future generations will deem the whole episode to have been ‘innoculatory’… leaving us much better prepared for something truly worse.
Like (perhaps) the H5N1 Bird Flu that’s now spreading among mammals, killing (for example) thousands of elephant seals and spreading through dairy and beef cattle*. With signs of seeping into pigs and thence maybe human-to-human… though let's emphasize that experts still rank it as ‘low risk.’
== More blessings from Covid-19? ==
A few – very few – have openly marveled over the incredible speed with which RNA-based vaccines arrived, saving millions and leading to even better/quicker skills. Stockpiles of medical supplies and apparatus are far improved and bureaucracies finer tuned. Even the mistakes that were made in the initial covid-panic led to better understanding.
For example, next time we’ll likely know within mere days whether a pathogen can be transmitted by ‘fomites’, by non-living surfaces. So, no bleaching your store packages or produce, or microwaving your mail. Though hand washing proved-out as a very, very good thing.** And fer gosh sakes stay home with your sniffles and coughs!
Surveillance and detection, while at 1% of what experts say we should be funding, are at least a hundred-fold better than before, e.g. sampling viral loads in city waste water ‘sewersheds.’
Of course, none of this is helped by anti-science manias like the new U.S. Defense Secretary appointee, who proudly declared: "I don't believe in germs and I haven't washed my hands in a decade!"
... or vaccine denialism by loons, who romanticize the 1950s as some whitebread paradise era, while ignoring the myriad ways that things were far more wretched then – and reasons why – during that decade, as I well recall – the most-adored person in America was named Jonas Salk.
If science-haters truly carry out their open plans, we could be in big trouble (as described chillingly in these few paragraphs by Robert Heinlein). Or even if they remain the raving impediments that they currently are.
None of this is meant to minimize. In fact, my job is to look ahead at possibilities, both bright and dark. And both future-view and history suggest 'pandemics' can get far, far worse than Covid-19. And while we are certainly unprepared, we are definitely less unprepared than we were.
(* Thorough cooking does kill the virus, so maybe rare steaks should be off the menu, for a while. Pasteurized milk seems to be fine.)
Then there’s this on the history of vaccines.
== Final tidbits ==
‘Researchers have uncovered what might be the world’s oldest solar calendar at Göbekli Tepe, a 12,000-year-old archaeological site in southern Turkey.’ The implications of very pre-literate sophistication are so interesting.
Does putting Neosporin in your nose help fend off covid? Surprisingly, there’s preliminary evidence that it does.
And finally this bit of genuine wisdom to cancel your incel rage junkie....
"He's just mad because he was abandoned by wolves and raised by his parents."
-- Robin Williams
========================================================
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* Though again, Joe Biden has two weeks to do one thing.
One thing easily within his power, that might shatter the worst madness, infection and treason among the US political and aristocratic castes.
He could do this. He could... though his factotums will ensure that he won't.
43 comments:
TASAT:
In Connie Willis' works she often references a pandemic that hit the 2050's (?) United States especially hard - 30% dead, iirc, because...well, because at least 27% of this country won't adjust their lives for any peril they can't shoot. This isn't supposition any more. It happened and we just got lucky. This time.
Pappenheimer
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2024/12/27/bird-flu-mutation-united-states-louisiana/77265627007/
First severe human case of bird flu in US shows 'concerning' mutation, CDC says
The CDC has confirmed 66 human cases of bird flu in the U.S., but no human-to-human transmission has been detected.
The outbreak has severely impacted the American egg industry, leading to near-record high egg prices.
A cat food recall was issued due to bird flu contamination concerns after a cat death was linked to a contaminated batch.
The first severe case of bird flu in the U.S. is showing signs of mutation, stoking fears that the virus could become more transmissible among humans, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has announced.
The sample taken from the patient in Louisiana showed mutations in the gene responsible with attaching to a host's cells, the CDC said Thursday.
The CDC has confirmed a total of 66 human cases of bird flu across the United States as of Friday, although the number is believed to be higher. While the human cases have been mostly mild, the H5N1 bird flu outbreak has wreaked havoc in the American egg industry and heightened concerns about a new pandemic.
Although the CDC said the Louisiana case is "concerning," the agency reiterated that no person-to-person spread of bird flu has been detected so far.
https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-024-11152-x
Evidence of an emerging triple-reassortant H3N3 avian influenza virus in China
https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1hoxcfq/last_week_in_collapse_december_2228_2024/
Bird flu killed 20 large cats at a sanctuary in the U.S. state of Washington. Experts say that H5N1 and its variants pose a greater threat than many realize, because animal-to-human transmissions are undercounted and growing more frequent. Mutations continue, but the virus has not yet gone human-to-human.
A study on Long COVID found “high rates of depressive disorders (45.6%), generalized anxiety disorders (21%), sleep disturbances (76.3%), and…cognitive changes (94.7%)” among afflicted test subjects. Another study claims that about 30% of Americans have Long COVID now—a figure that varies wildly among different studies and groups—and that women experience this condition more than men. Meanwhile, about 300 health workers are suing the NHS because they weren’t provided PPE in 2020-2021, which led to serious COVID-related health complications & disabilities.
Researchers concluded that there is a link between prisons and tuberculosis in Latin America. “About a third of all tuberculosis cases since 1990 were associated with incarceration,” said one scientist working on a study00192-0/fulltext) published last month. Following recent Nile flooding which displaced 28,000+, cholera cases are rising in Sudan.
RIP Jimmy Carter.
Carter is a vastly underrated president. Yes, he came across as weak. Yes, he was President when Iranian students took the US embassy as hostages. Yes, he was President over rough economic times.
But, Jimmy Carter was, hands down, the most ethically sound President of my lifetime. He became President in the aftermath of Vietnam and during the second OPEC embargo. Carter's big achievement is he killed hyper-inflation to the point that we didn't see it again for 40 years. He cut off runaway inflation before it could trigger another depression.
Ronald Reagan gets credit for this, but it was Carter appointing tight-money FED chairman Paul Volker one year before an election that killed inflation.
Carter did this knowing that a tight money policy could trigger a recession that would cost him the election. Carter did it bc the country needed it. Inflation had zoomed to 18% if I recall correctly and the prime mortgage rate was insane. The acid test of Presidential greatness is doing what the country needs regardless of its impact on their political future.
Jimmy Carter is the ONLY President of the last 50 years to truly pass this test.
Carter also secretly funded stealth in the black budget when military appropriation were hugely unpopular. Discovering stealth tech in the late 80s was a huge factor in the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and the fall of the Soviet State.
Carter also attempted to gain control over the security agencies. Surrendering control over the Panama canal created an opportunity to reshape our relationship with Central and South America after a century of imperialism (an opportunity subsequent administrations did not follow up).
The MadLibrarian, previous comments:
...Luigi Mangione, who is currently being treated as something of a folk hero, despite pulling off an assassination?
Not "despite", but "for pulling off an assassination."
His story reminds me of a fictionalized version of the Bonnie and Clyde story I just saw recently. But even they were admired (by their adoring fans) more for their tenacity than for their death toll. Mangione has fans who don't simply excuse the killing, but who are fans because of the killing.
When I followed that case, I got the impression that both legacy media and law enforcement both were both frantically and in an amateurish way trying to control the narrative, making the situation worse, making it more likely that CEOs will be taken out in the street. Having Eric Adams parading him around did probably not help, either.
And with the killing applauded to by a large number of people from both camps and Musk and Ramaswamy enraging MAGA plus all those electoral selling points being walked back on or doing a 180° turn even before the inauguration - I have the distinct feeling that a lot of people might discover their class consciousness in the next months and years.
I consider it a sign of the times that polio was recently detected in Melbourne's waste water.
This was a disease that was set to follow smallpox* into oblivion a few years ago.
*Although monkeypox is making a bid for the crown.
Larry,
Jesse James, ex-Confederate bushwhacker and bank robber, fits this mold. Despite callous executions of civilians, he got his own cult following by 'getting back at the man' and seems to have been quite magnanimous to the folks in his own neighborhood*. He also inspired some really bad ballads and poetry.
*Mostly. he didn't shoot or rob them.
Pappenheimer
Wow, we all live in our own little bubbles. I didn't realize long COVID was so prevalent. One in three people is huge.
I have yet to catch COVID. While I had a bad lung cold last spring, I hadn't been sick for 4.5 years after taking supplements to boost the immune system during the pandemic, plus immediately taking a shower EVERY time I came home after leaving the house. Testing said that cold wasn't Covid (from what I understand false positives are the big problem with the pcr test, not false negatives).
Strangely enough, I have A LOT of energy for a 60yo. In part, its bc I'm a bit of a workout nut, and part of it is I take anti-aging supplements that boost mitochondria function (mitochondria are the "energy factories" of the cell).
Jimmy Carter would have had two terms and be considered a success - but for the TREASON committed by Reagan who conspired with the Iranian Mullahs (when just a citizen) to have them keep the US hostages
The origin of life - the first fossil banks appear very early - within a few hundred million years of the planet cooling - the difficult step would appear to be "Complex Life" - cells with a nucleus - which appears to have required a whole planet of simple life evolving away for a couple of billion years
Pappenheimer:
Despite callous executions of civilians, he [Jesse James] got his own cult following by 'getting back at the man' and seems to have been quite magnanimous to the folks in his own neighborhood
According to Indiana native Kurt Vonnegut, the same was the case for John Dillinger.
I suspect 'complex life' isn't as hard to kickstart as it sounds using Earth as the measure. Our early Sun wasn't as luminous as now, so the energy gradient available was weaker. With a good sized round of photosynthesis sucking up the CO2, the planet mostly froze over... until the gradient got steeper above AND below the ice.
I think what Reagan did is better describes as betrayal. Not unique, though, since Nixon was guilty of his own version with an enemy in which we WERE engaged in a hot war.
Not just most ethically sound President. Most ethically sound person... that I know of.
He did what we needed him to do when it needed to be done.
Myth vs. Man:
"Why'd you rob banks, John?"
"That was where the money was."
Pappenheimer
Duncan, I doubt Carter would have won even if Reagan gave the middle finger to the Iranians.
The reason why is that taking down the American President vastly increased the power and reputation of the Islamic Republic in Iran, especially in the Middle East. The Iranian students HATED Carter because he backed the Shah. If Reagan told them to pound sand, they still would have held the hostages until after the election, hoping Carter would lose the Presidency.
It's basic human behavior. Removing the most powerful man in the world from office would make them feel important.
Also, the failed rescue attempt made people think Carter was incompetent. What's funny is Carter made the gutsy call. It's not as if the President can plan the op. In 1979, the US had PLENTY of experienced special forces guys to carry out such a mission (from Vietnam). BUT, I totally buy that their equipment wasn't made to operate in the Middle East. The mission failed, but it wasn't Carter;s fault.
However, when stuff goes wrong like that, the guy at the top ends up taking the blame. People wanted Carter out because too many bad things happened during his presidency and they aren't going to think too much about the causes.
During the early stage of the pandemic a friend of mine pointed out that Covid-19 was a training run for something worse. She made the same points that our host did about how it was bad but could have been much worse. I pointed out that what was very unusual about it was its sneakiness, its great ability to spread undetected. Its mutation into a more contagious but less virulent form has removed much of this ability.
I've discussed this with a few of the microbiologists I've encountered. They agree that complex life is not really that big of a trick, certainly not 2B years difficult. The most plausible solutions to the Fermi Paradox are along the lines of the Dark Forest or even the more recent Hermit hypothesis as recently described by Isaac Arthur.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-Vb9adhjds
National Day of Mourning is January 20th.
The GOP has been associated with abhorrent betrayal of American ideals and written law since at least the early 1950s. Joseph McCartney, Ronald Reagan, Dick Nixon, et al, are all just symptoms of the rot at the heart of American conservatism.
It is no surprise that SCOTUS, the DoJ and the FBI chose to embrace Trump and hide their own complacency in his betrayal of America rather that allow his crimes to be investigated and punished.
It is no surprise that the conservative voices here minimize the severity of the crimes and their own acquiescence to them.
It is the number one unspoken tenet of conservatism that there must be groups that the law binds but does not protect, and groups that the law protects and does not bind.
Carter was a victim of that tenet. He was a good man and a decent POTUS, but like other middle-way liberal POTUS' after him, he did not push to root out the rot in the DoJ. Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden all have a stain on their legacies - they allowed conservatism to hold *all* the power at the DoJ and never got rid of those that put the tenet above our laws.
Carter was a good man, but he failed his nation.
duncan cairncross said...
"The origin of life - the first fossil banks appear very early - within a few hundred million years of the planet cooling - the difficult step would appear to be "Complex Life" - cells with a nucleus - which appears to have required a whole planet of simple life evolving away for a couple of billion years"
That was the consensus speculation for many years, though not because there was any clear evidence pointing that way. Evidence was sparse, at best, and so pessimism, or maybe skepticism, seemed to be the more reasonable way to bet.
But more recently evidence has accumulated that doesn't support that view. The study OGH linked to is one of the latest that refutes it. That's why the study is considered to be so interesting. It doesn't just push the date of the origin of life on Earth further back, it pushes the date of complex life way back. If reasonably accurate, say within a few hundred thousand years, it pretty thoroughly refutes the idea that complex life on Earth took billions of years to evolve after the origin of life.
One more thing, this isn't the only study to suggest that complex life started much earlier. There have been many studies pointing in that direction. Different studies, different lines of investigation.
(Folks, please proof your comments for closing tags.)
I spent a lot of time reading, discussing and debating about consciousness for many years. I always enjoyed watching Closer to Truth on that topic (and others). My view of consciousness is quite opposed to Kuhn's*, but I really appreciate how he is willing to talk and argue with a wide variety of views, even those that he does not agree with. He seems to do a good job of honestly trying to get closer to the truth.
*Kuhn's view (which is very common) as best I understand it is that consciousness is something that is fundamentally different from any other natural phenomena and that it can not arise solely from the physical workings of human nervous systems obeying the laws of physics as we currently understand them.
One of my favourite Kuhn interviews was with Stephen Wolfram about mathematics: discovered or invented?
Wolfram stuns Kuhn by describing math as an artifact of history, and further argues that math seems to model nature so well only because we have historically used math to model only those parts of nature that work well with our mathematics. Wolfram calls that simply a circular argument, not the revealed language of the Universe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUCwtLTUPQ4
I (too) often quote an early psychohistorian (one of the Hungarian Martians).
“The only reason psychology students don’t have to do more and harder mathematics than physics students is because the mathematicians haven’t yet discovered ways of dealing with problems as hard as those in psychology.”
- John Kemeny
Part way through Kuhn's paper. It seems like a pretty good job of collecting, explaining and organizing the current landscape of ideas about consciousness, just as he said was his goal with the paper.
One of the first he described includes something that has become an ever increasing pet peeve of mine as time goes on. Philosophical Zombie. I'm really disappointed whenever someone takes PZ's seriously.
scidata,
I gotta say, from my seat over here in the middle of the amateur bleachers, I completely agree with Wolfram & Kemeny
Darrell E:
Kuhn's view (which is very common) as best I understand it is that consciousness is something that is fundamentally different from any other natural phenomena and that it can not arise solely from the physical workings of human nervous systems obeying the laws of physics as we currently understand them.
It seems to me that we often conflate and confuse the terms "consciousness", "sentience", and "self", not even mentioning the "undefined except I know what I mean by it" term "soul". All of those things overlap, but with different connotations if not actual differences.
What we perceive as our own thinking may somehow transcend the physical body which houses it. I don't know enough to explain further. But our sense of ourselves as sentient beings is more complicated than simply "I think, therefore I am." So much of who we feel ourselves to be is tied up in wanting and the emotions associated with frustration or satisfaction of those wants. And so much of that is driven by the physical body--hunger, pain, pleasure, and any number of hormonal influences. Even seemingly-abstract notions such as striving for justice or revenge come out of observations and reactions to self and others as physical beings.
I'm not at all clear that a disembodied spirit version of my consciousness would be something I'd recognize as the same thing as "me".
mathematics: discovered or invented?
The fact that an object falling from a certain height hits the ground after a certain time with a certain velocity is a discovered thing. It was happening long before human beings existed and happens whether or not we understand it.
The numerals and symbols and rules by which we communicate such facts are an invented language. There's nothing in nature which says that "2" or "+" or "4" have meanings other than what we give them. And the fact that one can write "2 + 2 = 5" is no different than the fact that one can write "Llamas are smaller than frogs." Truth and falsehood are discovered, but the languages used to express them are invented.
God has no need for math because He already knows the answer to any problem. It is we students of reality who need to use math and logic to work through the intervening steps from problem to solution.
Larry Hart,
Yeah, many people feel very strongly that their personal experience of consciousness is so amazing, so mysterious, so unique that it absolutely must require something extra special (Compared to the mundane unfolding of nature abiding by the already known laws that all other known phenomena comply with.), because it's all so amazing that they can't imagine otherwise.
I don't discount that consciousness does indeed feel amazing and mysterious. But I don't think that these feelings should be given any significant weight in judging what ideas about consciousness might be closer to truth. History clearly demonstrates that feelings are poor evidence for figuring out how things work. That's why so many of the methods of science came about as ways to avoid emotion based biases.
Darrell E:
I don't discount that consciousness does indeed feel amazing and mysterious. But I don't think that these feelings should be given any significant weight ...
Religious people especially want to believe that there is something innate in a "soul" that is not of the material world. I put "soul" in quotes because no one has yet been able to articulate to me what meaning that word has which is different from "self" or "consciousness" or maybe "identity". It's as if the word itself imparts mystery to the thing which is then (circularly) implied by the forceful insistence that human beings have souls.
As you point out, science is much about determining facts that might be different from what we fervently wish they were.
Earlier on, I forgot to mention memory as part of what makes us perceive ourselves as having a true identity. Without memory of past experiences, I have a hard time even understanding how conscious thought would work.
And one thing I still don't understand about entropy is why--assuming as many here insist, that physical laws don't care about the direction of time--why memories accumulate as we move forward in the direction of increasing entropy. Intuitively, I'd expect the opposite--that thoughts would get more muddled and random as entropy increases. Yet we remember the past and don't remember the future. To me as a layman, the obvious reason is causality in the direction of time's arrow. But physicists insist there is no such thing, so...
Tony… polio can be detected in waste water because the most popular vaccine is now a version of the Sabin live virus vax, which actually gives recipients a very mild – usually never-felt – case of polio-lite, which they then transmit to others, immunizing them, too. It works, though one in 100,000 affected persons get actual polio. It’s a harshly practical method where Salk shots simply would not get to enough kids in still-endemic areas.
Hence, polio in your wastewater doesn’t mean much unless it is a virulent, natural strain.
John Viril gets post-of-the-day, for citing half a dozen unsung greatnesses of Carter. I’ll quote him… and add more.
Likewise Duncan.
Matthew funny thing. Now it’s Republicans howling at the DOJ and FBI and CIA… you are not agile.
Oh, I know Stephen Wolfram. Brilliant fellow! Maybe even right about the ‘computome.” Still, as LH says, things were falling before Galileo came up with the concept of acceleration.
Not having received any good/bad recommendations for Netflix's PANTHEON, I've gone ahead and started watching it. Rather mind-bending. It's based on short stories by Ken Liu, the translator who brought Cixin Liu’s “Three Body Problem” and associated books to the English world.
John Viril:
The Iranian students HATED Carter because he backed the Shah. If Reagan told them to pound sand, they still would have held the hostages until after the election, hoping Carter would lose the Presidency.
Sounds a lot like the abandon-Biden students here this time around. No matter that Trump will be worse for Palestinians in Gaza. Biden backed Netanyahu, so Biden must go. And even when Biden wasn't the candidate any more, still.
People wanted Carter out because too many bad things happened during his presidency and they aren't going to think too much about the causes.
That also happened to President Biden. In his case, it wasn't even so much that too many bad things happened, but that too many bad things were asserted over and over by news and social media. Voters wanted "change", even though the change they wanted was pretty much what Biden already did.
Republicans howling at the DoJ and intelligence community is like the conservatives howling at the media - in both cases they are strengthening already dominant positions in order to crush *any* resistance.
You cannot seriously claim that the DoJ, the intelligence community, and the media have the slightest liberal bias. Not with a straight face, you cannot.
Thanks for the info dump, David. The source I drew from was the Vic. Dept of Health, who thought it newsworthy enough to mention on their social media feed.* With RFK Jr's brand of lunacy waiting in the wings, I thought it topical.
*They also said the case detected posed no risk to the public.
----
The math 'innate v invented' discussion reminds me of Gleick's book on Chaos Theory, where he points out that, prior to cheap computing power, it was assumed a lot of perturbations in physical systems smoothed out over time because the calculations were easier. Now we know that the future behaviour of even classical systems can blur into a haze of fractal probablities.
I agree with Alfred that the step to complex life has served to date as the biggest filter in the Drake equation: a billion years is a significant fraction of the age of the Universe. If the mean time for such a step to occur were, say 10 billion years, it's conceivable that it occurring here after only one billion is a plausible lead case. A confirmed discovery of complex life from much earlier than previously found would put that notion away.
Since this post is about biological findings, I'll drop another interesting snippet that's just crossed my radar. Aliens within?
DoJ, Intell, and some of the media lack a progressive bias.
A liberal bias is a bit more common at DoJ, but still kinda rare in the media.
I'm not trying to nitpick definitions. It's just that mixed usages of these terms will lead to unnecessary confusion and disagreements.
------
As for the GOP's history, I think the Dems of old were actually guilty of more corruption, but that's because the progressives tended to be with the GOP back in the day. After the Dixiecrats and Progressives swapped parties, it feels like the modern GOP is trying to corner corruption.*
* Not quite successfully (see a recent Illinois governor), but the MAGA folks don't appear to give a damn so corrective forces aren't being applied in the GOP.
Milky Way as THE cosmos. Dethroned 100 years ago today.
On my last visit to LACMA, I got to see a cosmology exhibit where they addressed various cosmologies humans have believed over the ages. Artifacts were on display for all of them.
When I got over to the modern one they showed a bit of the progression as our scientific theories changed with evidence. In one display case I recognized what looked like a glass plate negative of a portion of M31. It was an eerie experience because some deep memory was pulled to the surface. It dawned on me that I knew the image from my college textbooks. Cepheid variables discovered in the Andromeda Nebula.
Normally when I walk through a museum, I don't have that reaction. Even for tech museums when I see things like what I used to use. I did for Hubble's plate, though, possibly because I'd been primed by all the centuries and millennia old art. I felt like something I knew* was being displayed as if it was ancient. Then... I realized it was... and felt kinda old. I wound up just staring at the plate for a while.**
* Obviously I wasn't around in 1924 when the plate was created. I did spend some time on a big telescope with a college professor (Flagstaff AZ in winter) and learned the setup and development process. Having hands on experience with those glass plates made seeing one in a museum make contact with that college memory.
** I've no idea if the plate was the original. Didn't really matter to me. I didn't need the caption to recognize M31 or the inked arrow pointing to a dot.
I am reminded of an old SciFi story -
Men Martians and Machines - Erik Frank Russel
Somebody coming onto the spaceship was asked what he was bringing - he said "Plates"
The reply was - Armour, Dinner or Dental?
No - Photographic
I recall that novel with some fondness.
... actually, all that I recall is being fond of it (plus the Martians making jokes about the density of the ship's Earth standard pressure.)
"...felt like something I knew* was being displayed as if it was ancient. Then... I realized it was... and felt kinda old."
When will we admit that we're all just spontaneously generated Boltzmann brains looking for love in the only place that appears to have evolved it?
BTW, to our easternmost correspondents, Happy New Year from back here in the year 2024.
It is 2025 in Germany.... Happy new year!
"...the change they wanted was pretty much what Biden already did."
Was on the phone last week with a customer who was happy TCFG, who he'd voted for, had won, because interest rates were dropping and inflation had stopped. By his tone of voice he suddenly wasn't sure how TCFG going to be in office had lowered inflation over the last year, and I forebore asking him if he thought Biden had had anything to do with that. Not starting political arguments at work with customers. Maybe, just maybe, after a few leopards do some rhinoplasty to him, he'll wake up with a clue....
Pappenheimer
It's 2025 everywhere on earth by now.
May God have mercy on us all.
There are hundreds of millions or even billions of years between major biological developments such as photosynthesis, eucaryotic cells and multicellularity. Yet life, especially simple life forms, evolves much more quickly than that.
That suggests that some of these developments depend on environmental changes which happened much more slowly than biological evolution. Which suggests dependency on geological changes. But which changes and when?
One of seems very likely. Every life form appears to be descended from extremophiles. These are just the organisms that could survive the Late Heavy Bombardment by living deep underground.
Welp, 2025 is off to a great start - a cybertruck exploding into flames outside a Trump hotel. Doubt it's going to get much better.
Pappenheimer
P.S. read somewhere that there's more biomass under the earth's crust than on top - mostly unicellular life
P.P.S. early cosmologies are obviously tied to the theology of the envisioner. The ordered Ptolemaic structure is obviously an artifact. Of course, those pesky comets were a wrench in the gears...Giordano Bruno imagined other planets around other stars, but I don't know if he was the first one to potentially displace us as the center of the universe.
New Orleans. Trump hotel and Tesla.
Reichstag fire?
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