Month: May 2017

Insect extinction

This won’t be good for the food chain

The Krefeld Entomological Society has seen the yearly insect catches fluctuate, as expected. But in 2013 they spotted something alarming. When they returned to one of their earliest trapping sites from 1989, the total mass of their catch had fallen by 80%. Through more direct comparisons, the group—which had preserved 1000s of samples over 3 decades—found dramatic declines across 10 other sites.

2019-02-11: Insects are going extinct 8x faster than other animals

“If insect species losses cannot be halted, this will have catastrophic consequences for both the planet’s ecosystems and for the survival of mankind”. The 2.5% rate of annual loss over the last 25-30 years is shocking: “It is very rapid. In 10 years you will 25% less, in 50 years 50% left and in 100 years you will have 0.” A rethinking of current agricultural practices, in particular a serious reduction in pesticide usage and its substitution with more sustainable, ecologically-based practices, is urgently needed to slow or reverse current trends, allow the recovery of declining insect populations and safeguard the vital ecosystem services they provide. In addition, effective remediation technologies should be applied to clean polluted waters in both agricultural and urban environments.

FBI skills

Ryan should have trusted his instincts. Johnson and his colleagues were not documentarians. They were undercover FBI agents posing as filmmakers. By the time they sat down with Ryan, Johnson and his team had spent 8 months traveling to at least 5 states to film interviews with 24 people about the Bundy standoff, all part of an FBI effort to build criminal cases against the Bundys and their supporters.

the fbi is more incompetent than a bunch of inbred farmers

Nodosaur

A dinosaur fossil that was discovered in a bitumen pit in Alberta, Canada, in 2011 is the best-preserved specimen of a nodosaur ever discovered, and it is truly a spectacle to behold. The herbivore died 110 ma BP in a riverbed and was swept to sea where it was swiftly buried in the mud and sediment of the seabed. Resting on its back, the nodosaur’s soft tissues, armor plating and thorny ridges became mineralized, preserving its form in stone.

Size of China

I can think of many instructive explanations for China’s early size and unity that are nonetheless derivative. For instance perhaps a common language for writing played a key role, or perhaps the civil service and the exam system bound the country together. I can think of a few factors that might count as fundamental, and often they involve economies of scale:

  • There may be greater economies of scale in Chinese agriculture.
  • There may be economies of scale for fighting land battles with horses.
  • China had lower climate volatility than did Europe.
  • China has 2 main, navigable rivers running east to west.
  • China was formed when the prevailing technologies favored size and scale.
  • China did a better job absorbing the “barbarians” and thus persisted as a larger political unit.

Moon will produce trillionaires

If the single largest asteroid (Ceres) were to be used to build orbital space settlements, the total living area created would be well over 100x the land area of the Earth. This is because Ceres is a solid, 3 dimensional object but orbital space settlements are basically hollow with only air on the inside. Thus, Ceres alone can provide the building materials for uncrowded homes for 100s of billions of people, at least.