Month: December 2017

NYC Rats

this seems to scale. humans didn’t use to travel more than 30 km from their place of birth in historical times.

When Combs looked closer, distinct rat subpopulations emerged. Manhattan has 2 genetically distinguishable groups of rats: the uptown rats and the downtown rats, separated by the geographic barrier that is midtown. It’s not that midtown is rat-free—such a notion is inconceivable—but the commercial district lacks the household trash (aka food) and backyards (aka shelter) that rats like. Since rats tend to move only a few blocks in their lifetimes, the uptown rats and downtown rats don’t mix much.

Ainu

For much of the 20th century, Japanese government officials and academics tried to hide the Ainu. They were an inconvenient culture at a time when the government was steadfastly creating a national myth of homogeneity. So officials tucked the Ainu into files marked “human migration mysteries,” or “aberrant hunter-gatherers of the modern age,” or “lost Caucasoid race,” or “enigma,” or “dying race,” or even “extinct.” But in 2006, under international pressure, the government finally recognized the Ainu as an Indigenous population. And today, the Japanese appear to be all in.

on the Ainu, which have been on the islands of japan for more than 10x as long as the japanese people, who came from korea 3 ka ago.

War for the Future

Not only that, it has created the opportunity for new forms of authoritarianism to emerge online. An authoritarianism that threatens to usher in a long night of repression and darkness. So far, I’ve identified 3 authoritarian movements (significant departures from the forms we’ve seen in the past), each dangerous in their own way: An open source insurgency, a socially networked orthodoxy, and an algorithmic lockdown.