The Silurian Hypothesis: It was the Cephalopods

Klaus M. Stiefel at his own website:

A hypothesis called “The Silurian hypothesis” wins the title of “most interesting hypothesis most likely to be false” for all of science. In brief, the hypothesis postulates that previously a species different from ours had achieved high intelligence and technological civilization on this planet. The Silurian hypothesis (named after “Silurian” aliens in the brainy British TV series “Doctor Who”) was initially proposed by two astronomers, Gavin A. Schmidt and Adam Frank, as a thought experiment, to see if it would even be feasible to detect the traces of such a hypothetical civilization which had existed many millions of years ago. Would there still be detectable changes in the sedimentation patterns if someone (not human) had built cities and military bases a hundred million years ago? Would ancient trash dumps be conserved somewhere, somehow? Would there be changes in the patterns of radioisotopes in the rocks as a result of an ancient nuclear war?

So, in their original paper, Schmidt & Frank didn’t actually voice belief in an ancient civilization, but pondered the question if and how it would be detectable. They conclude that no ruins of ancient football stadiums, highways or housing projects would survive geological time. In contrast, unusual episodes of global warming and the presence of certain artificial radioisotopes (Plutonium-244 and Curium-247) would give an ancient civilization away. Mass extinctions could be a sign of an ancient smart, technological, fast-expanding species.

More here.

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Large drones have been spotted flying over the US for weeks, and state and federal officials say they still have no idea who is behind the flights

Jeremy Hsu in New Scientist:

Mysterious drones have been swarming the night skies above New Jersey and other nearby states for a month. They have been spotted over several US military sites. They have been videoed over houses and apartment buildings. A swarm was seen following a US Coast Guard rescue boat at the same time that New Jersey police reported 50 drones arriving on land from the ocean. But no one seems to know who is piloting them, or whether it is a coordinated effort.

The incidents have drawn the attention of state governors and legislators, as well as members of the US Congress, and the FBI has launched an investigation, asking for the public to report sightings.

Witnesses describe the drones as being as loud as lawnmowers, with some approaching the size of a small car – significantly larger than a typical quadcopter or multirotor drone that anyone can purchase.

More here.

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Liberalism and the Non-European: Isaiah Berlin and Edward Said

Beatriz Silva in the Journal of the History of Ideas blog:

“November is a mournful month in the history of Palestine,” Edward Said began his eulogy in memory of Sir Isaiah Berlin in 1997. With the news of Berlin’s passing came an outpour of newspaper articles written by the philosopher’s admirers, friends, and scholars, honoring the man who remains one of the major liberal thinkers of the Cold War. Said’s text, published in the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat, went relatively unnoticed. In the first few paragraphs, the Columbia University professor remembers a man with whom he shared intellectual roots: a skilled orator and a philosopher with an astonishing breadth of knowledge that extended well beyond philosophy. The second part of the text takes an introspective turn, as Said confesses to the reader: “None of us [Palestinians]—and I do not excuse myself at all were able to engage with Berlin on the question of Palestine.” With this reflection, Said hints at an aspect of Berlinian scholarship that persists inadequately addressed: the British philosopher’s unwavering commitment to the state of Israel and, most importantly, his dismissal of the experiences of Palestinians since 1948. In highlighting what has tended to be written off as a mere footnote in Berlin’s life, Said suggests a re-evaluation of the Oxford don’s liberal theory by asking: who was Isaiah Berlin’s liberalism for?

The two intellectuals met for the last time at a London restaurant in 1996. “Unfailingly cordial,” as Said described Berlin’s treatment of himself, “he called out to me and insisted on chatting briefly with me about the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Vico.” Berlin and Said’s shared interest in Giambattista Vico indicates that the two academics shared more in common than one might expect.

More here.

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Brady Corbet’s Outsider American Epic

Alexandra Schwartz at The New Yorker:

“Cinema is frequently associated with glamour, but the reality is that it’s labor,” Corbet told me. In the case of “The Brutalist,” his work seemed to be paying off. Initial reactions had been ecstatic. At Venice, where the film premièred, in early September, viewers had applauded for somewhere between twelve minutes (according to Variety) and thirteen minutes and five seconds (according to Deadline), longer than for any other festival entry but Pedro Almodóvar’s, and Corbet won the Silver Lion for Best Director. The film, which will be released in late December, was already being discussed as a Best Picture contender, and Brody as a Best Actor front-runner. (This week, it was nominated for both awards, plus five more, by the Golden Globes.)

Corbet found the swell of advance enthusiasm gratifying, if bewildering. “Historically, if something is really radical, people initially don’t like it,” he said. “What’s very unusual about ‘The Brutalist’ is that people are connecting with it much faster than I expected them to. I’m very touched, but I’m also completely confused.”

more here.

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Friday Poem

Shoulders Are For Emergencies Only

Talk to me, Poem . . . I’m all alone . . . Nobody understands what
I’m saying . . .

Have you been in jail, Poem . . . A lot of poems go to jail . . . like
a lot of women who get tired of no-good men . . . Do-no-good-
poems beat up on people . . . Do-no-good-poems say I’m sorry the
next day . . .

I know poems get lost . . . because they’re always being found . . .
There are Wanted posters . . . milk bottles . . . and lonesome
guitars in the night . . . looking for a poem to take home . . .

I know poems get neglected . . . just like doo-wop singing on the
back porch and the deacons opening church with Leaning on the
Everlasting Arms . . . people forget what got them over . . . what
saved them

What are your plans, Poem . . . Give it up . . . I hear you’re a rap
star now . . . going for the Grammy and the gold . . . everybody
singing your praises . . .Do you ever miss your home . . .

The sign on I-81 says: Shoulders Are For Emergencies Only . . .
Ride me, Poem . . . I think I’ve got the blues . . .

by Nikki Giovanni
from
Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea
Harper Perennial, 2002

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Funny Compliments That’ll Win Everyone Over

Charlotte Andersen in Reader’s Digest:

    • The chance of meeting a person like you is the only reason I talk to strangers.
    • Being friends with you is like peeing my pants: warm, a relief and something the whole world will eventually see.
    • You inspire me! Not enough to cure cancer but enough to load the dishwasher. And the dishwasher is definitely my most pressing problem.
    • You’re the only one I let control the music when I drive.
    • No one understands me like you do—not even me.
    • You’re so efficient, you can cook Minute rice in 30 seconds.
    • I saved a sample of your DNA … just in case cloning ever becomes legal.
    • I brag to all my friends about you.
    • I love your weird so much, it has become my normal.
    • Thanks for inviting me over. You’ve got a real nice joint here—your elbow, specifically.
    • You’re my rock when I hit rock bottom. Thanks for softening the fall.
    • One of my favorite hobbies is hanging out with smart people. I got into it after I met you.
    • Whenever I’m upset, you’re the first person I want to talk to … which probably sucks for you, but you handle it like a champ!
    • You’re the only person who understands my sign language when I’m crying.
    • Confession: You make me laugh so hard I pee a little.
    • Are we bad at being good or just really good at being bad? Not that it matters.
    • I love you like waffles love Nutella.

More here.

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Are you a morning person? You may be a Neanderthal descendant

Adela Suliman in The Washington Post:

Do you find it easy to wake up early? You may have Neanderthals in your ancestry.

A study published this week in Genome Biology and Evolution has found that Neanderthal DNA remains in some present-day humans and may determine whether someone is naturally an early riser.

Neanderthals are our closest extinct human relative, according to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and had defining physical features such as larger noses, angled cheek bones and stockier bodies. They were known to use sophisticated tools, control fire, be skilled in hunting, wear clothing and live in shelters. “We found that Neanderthal DNA that remains in modern humans due to interbreeding has a significant and directional effect on modern humans,” study co-author Tony Capra, an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California at San Francisco, wrote in an email. “In particular, the Neanderthal DNA that associates with chronotype consistently increases propensity to be a morning person.”

More here.

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The Past And Future Of Hot-Rodding in America

Rachel Kushner at Harper’s Magazine:

Now it was June, and we were at the National Hot Rod Association’s Nostalgia Nationals at Beech Bend Raceway in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The weather was brutal, and it was forecast to remain so: sunny, low to mid-nineties, wiltingly humid. In the distance, an antique roller coaster creaked along wooden tracks, and I wondered who would choose to ride it when there were so many cars to ogle and races to watch and people to meet.

It was day two of the three-day NHRA event. We had just left Paul’s pit area with cold bottles of water that he’d given us, and this is what we looked like: a sixteen-year-old boy and a middle-aged woman, each some variety of redhead and likely related, sporting baseball hats and sunglasses and carrying protective earmuffs, coated in sweat but undefeated by the climate. The boy almost a man: thin, broad-shouldered, and at six feet, taller than the woman by several inches, the two of them moving along with purpose like they were some kind of team, conferring and comparing notes in matching purple-mesh media vests that said nhra in big white letters.

more here.

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Thursday, December 12, 2024

Writers On Other Writers’ Writing

Marco Roth at The Feckless Bellelettrist:

Like the writing of book reviews, the live author interview has been placed under the sign of “marketing and publicity,” and treated less as a distinct skill than part of an ethos of service—something that “professional” writers do for other writers and for their publishers—as well as signaling everyone’s support for the perennially endangered small bookstores and event spaces that host them. The assumption is that the interviewer, like the interviewee, has something to sell. Since everyone is engaged in promotion, no one has to be paid. The sense that the interview is a devalued form, anyone can do it, especially if they published a book a year before the book under discussion, makes it a kind of professional corvée for writers whose value accrues elsewhere. This can often have a corrosive effect on the quality of the events. I have been to evenings where it appears the interviewer hasn’t even read the author’s book. More recently they have become another opportunity to indulge in guilty feelings and remind everyone in attendance that something more important and painful is happening elsewhere. In general, people come to these things to look rather than to listen and they do them to be seen rather than heard. The author will be signing books afterwards; there will be free drinks before you go out to pay for drinks; you can take a selfie if you want.

These are cynical, world-weary objections, albeit sometimes true. But my discomfort with the form has a thicker root.

More here.

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Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Podcast: Jeff Lichtman on the Wiring Diagram of the Brain

Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

The number of neurons in the human brain is comparable to the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Unlike the stars, however, in the case of neurons the real action is in how they are directly connected to each other: receiving signals over synapses via their dendrites, and when appropriately triggered, sending signals down the axon to other neurons (glossing over some complications). So a major step in understanding the brain is to map its wiring diagram, or connectome: the complete map of those connections. For a human brain that’s an intimidatingly complex challenge, but important advances have been made on tinier brains. We talk with Jeff Lichtman, a leader in brain mapping, to gauge the current state of progress and what it implies.

More here.

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On The Medallic Art Of The Gilded Age.

James Panero at The New Criterion:

How did America’s Gilded Age leave its most enduring mark? Through its architecture? Its institutions? By the numbers, the age’s most lasting currency has been its coins and medals. Consider the penny. The sculptor Victor David Brenner designed the Lincoln cent in 1909. Since then, the U.S. Mint has produced nearly five hundred billion pennies featuring Brenner’s obverse design. On August 6, 2012, one such coin minted in 1909, a rare variety featuring Brenner’s initials, touched down on the planet Mars as a passenger on the Curiosity mission. Since the lander used the penny as a calibration target, what is surely mankind’s most remote work of bas-relief sculpture became covered in Martian dust. Closer to home, but equally remote and dust-covered, there is probably a Lincoln cent in the pocket or couch cushion of every American. The New York Times Magazine recently saw fit to publish a cover story slamming the penny’s obsolescence, but no consideration was given to the astonishing success of its design. In the history of the world, no other work of sculpture has been as ubiquitous.

more here.

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The Scandal of America’s Prisons

Leann Davis Alspaugh and John J. Lennon in The Hedgehog Review:

In 2016, an essay arrived in our offices from John J. Lennon, then incarcerated at Attica Correctional Facility in New York. “The Murderer’s Mother” was a personal essay in the best sense: compelling and honest without being self-aggrandizing. John did not rationalize taking the life of a fellow drug dealer on a street in Brooklyn. Nor did he sidestep the psychological toll that his incarceration has taken on his aging mother. After his essay appeared, John and I began corresponding and soon became editorial colleagues and friends. In the summer of 2019, I traveled to Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Westchester County, New York, where I spent the day with John and his family, celebrating his graduation from Mercy College with a bachelor’s degree in behavioral science. John has gone on to become an award-winning journalist writing from prison. This year, his New York Review of Books essay “Peddling Darkness” was a National Magazine Award finalist in reviews and criticism. He is also in the final stages of preparing his book, The Tragedy of True Crime, which will be published by Celadon Books in the fall of 2025. John agreed to talk with me from Sullivan Correctional on how American prisons fail inmates, as well as some ways in which they are improving.

More here.

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Relevance! Relevance! Relevance! Microsoft at 50 Is an AI Giant—and Still Hellbent on Domination

Steven Levy in Wired:

Jaime Teevan joined Microsoft before it was cool again. In 2006, she was completing her doctorate in artificial intelligence at MIT. She had many options but was drawn to the company’s respected, somewhat ivory-tower-ish research division. Teevan remained at Microsoft while the mother ship blundered its way through the mobile era.

Then, as the calendar flipped into the 2010s, an earth-shattering tech advance emerged. A method of artificial intelligence called deep learning was proving to be a powerful enhancement to software products. Google, Facebook, and others went on a tear to hire machine-learning researchers. Not so much Microsoft. “I don’t remember it like a frenzy,” Teevan says. “I don’t remember drama.” That was a problem. Microsoft’s focus remained largely on milking its cash cows, Windows and Office.

More here.

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What Was The Twentieth-Century Novel?

Bruce Robbins at The Baffler:

Did the novels of the twentieth century accomplish anything? Edwin Frank, who is known for his love of the genre, is convinced they did. In his stylish, selective survey Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, he focuses on the genre’s formal innovations, which take readers’ minds off their somewhat vulgar appetite for suspenseful plot and relatable character and teach them to be satisfied, instead, with something like a diet of single sentences, exquisitely prepared. The genre’s masterworks urge us to set a slower pace, savoring what each novelist puts on the table and realizing, as we push back our chairs, how much more substantial the meal was than what we thought we wanted.

There is both instruction and pleasure to be had from Frank’s commentaries on modernist sentence-making. In German, as he notes, the run-on sentence doesn’t violate any rules, but Kafka takes the run-on and runs away with it, adding “slight nervous shifts of tone and implication, abrupt introductions of unforeseen elements that are then absorbed without comment, as if expected.” This procedure makes these sentences “an endless surprise, entertaining disconcerting, effortless, tortured, suddenly funny, and wonderfully sad.”

more here.

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Donald Trump 2024 TIME Person of the Year

Eric Cortelessa in Time Magazine:

Trump’s political rebirth is unparalleled in American history. His first term ended in disgrace, with his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results culminating in the attack on the U.S. Capitol. He was shunned by most party officials when he announced his candidacy in late 2022 amid multiple criminal investigations. Little more than a year later, Trump cleared the Republican field, clinching one of the fastest contested presidential primaries in history. He spent six weeks during the general election in a New York City courtroom, the first former President to be convicted of a crime—a fact that did little to dampen his support. An assassin’s bullet missed his skull by less than an inch at a rally in Butler, Pa., in July. Over the next four months, he beat not one but two Democratic opponents, swept all seven swing states, and became the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years. He has realigned American politics, remaking the GOP and leaving Democrats reckoning with what went awry.

More here.

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Wednesday, December 11, 2024

The Depths of Wikipedians

Annie Rauwerda at Asterisk:

Asterisk: You’re famous for the Depths of Wikipedia account, where you share factoids from some of the most arcane, interesting, and surprising pages on Wikipedia. But you’re also now a part of the broader Wikipedia community. How did you first get interested in the site, and how has your involvement changed over time? 

Annie Rauwerda: I started back in high school editing typos and adding things that I noticed were missing — like items to lists. But I had never done anything more than that because I was afraid of it because there are so many rules. Like, I’d seen the talk pages. And many of Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines and essays are very wordy.

Then I started the account — even though I felt a little like a phony. But I remember the first time I felt really excited about the Wikipedia community was when I got on a call with the president of Wikimedia, New York City, back in 2020. And she had told me about a guy named Jim who retired from working at the phone company. He worked in that big AT&T building that doesn’t have windows. I don’t know exactly what he did in there — but cables and stuff. Anyway, he’s retired now, and he spends all day biking around New York City and taking photos of infrastructure for Wikipedia, because Google Maps photos — and so many other photos — aren’t freely licensed. And I was like, that’s amazing.

More here.

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