Month: June 2021

Antarctica in 650?

A new paper combines literature and oral histories, and concludes that Māori, the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand, were likely the first people to explore Antarctica’s surrounding waters, and possibly the continent in the distance. They write that Māori and Polynesian journeys to the deep south have been occurring for a long time, perhaps as far back as 650, and are recorded in a variety of oral traditions.

2023-06-24: This claim is false and ideologically motivated.

“These stories, presented without nuance, qualification or critique, make extraordinary claims without offering commensurable evidence”. The Hui Te Rangiora story was a Rarotongan tradition translated by ethnologist Stephenson Percy Smith​ near the end of the 19th century and debunked by Te Rangi Hīroa​ (Sir Peter Buck​) who wrote that “so much post-European information has been included in the native text” he could no longer accept the traditions as accurate and ancient.

This means O’Regan, Tau and the others were in the position of repeating work Te Rangi Hīroa did 100 years ago.

In serious historical circles, relying on Smith is problematic.

“These scholars haven’t learned anything over the past 50 years”.

Numbers inevitable?

Why do we use numbers so much? Is it something about the world? Or is it more something about us? We discussed above the example of fundamental physics. And we argued that even though at the most fundamental level numbers really aren’t involved, our sampling of what happens in the universe leads us to a description that does involve numbers. And in this case, the origin of the way we sample the universe has deep roots in the nature of our consciousness, and our fundamental way of experiencing the universe, with our particular sensory apparatus, place in the universe, etc. As long as we preserve core aspects of our experience as what we consider conscious observers some version of numbers will in the end be inevitable for us. We can aspire to generalize from numbers, and, for example, sample other representations of computational reducibility. But for now, numbers seem to be inextricably connected to core aspects of our existence.

Mesopelagic Fish

Mesopelagic fish that live 100-1000m below the surface constitute 95% of the world’s fish biomass, 10-30x more than previously thought. “This very large stock of fish that we have just discovered is untouched by fishers.”

2023-02-24: The seafloor is similarly underappreciated

The majority of the bottom of the ocean is covered in morbid ooze, 100m deep. This substance is made of the skeletons of an uncountable number of tiny creatures, raining down from above. The passage of material through this ooze is a substantial part of several biological, chemical, and geological cycles.

Ocean 20% mapped

Modern measurements of the depth and shape of the seabed now encompass 20.6% of the total area under water. When Seabed 2030 was launched in 2017, only 6% of the oceans had been mapped to modern standards. So, it is possible to make swift and meaningful gains. For example, a big jump in coverage would be achieved if all governments, companies, and research institutions released their embargoed data. Seabed 2030 is not seeking 5m resolution of the entire floor (close to something we already have of the Moon’s surface). 1 depth sounding in a 100m grid square down to 1500m will suffice; even less in much deeper waters.

Retron Library Recombineering

RLR generates up to millions of mutations simultaneously, and “barcodes” mutant cells so that the entire pool can be screened at once, enabling massive amounts of data to be easily generated and analyzed. “RLR enabled us to do something that’s impossible to do with CRISPR: we randomly chopped up a bacterial genome, turned those genetic fragments into single-stranded DNA in situ, and used them to screen millions of sequences simultaneously. RLR is a simpler, more flexible gene editing tool that can be used for highly multiplexed experiments, which eliminates the toxicity often observed with CRISPR and improves researchers’ ability to explore mutations at the genome level.”

COVID Civilizational Shift

What we have learned — what we were forced to learn — during the COVID lockdowns has permanently shattered these assumptions. It turns out many of the best jobs really can be performed from anywhere, through screens and the internet. It turns out people really can live in a smaller city or a small town or in rural nowhere and still be just as productive as if they lived in a tiny one-room walk-up in a big city. It turns out companies really are capable of organizing and sustaining remote work even — perhaps especially — in the most sophisticated and complex fields. This is, I believe, a permanent civilizational shift. It is perhaps the most important thing that’s happened in my lifetime, a consequence of the internet that’s maybe even more important than the internet. Permanently divorcing physical location from economic opportunity gives us a real shot at radically expanding the number of good jobs in the world while also dramatically improving quality of life for millions, or billions, of people. We may, at long last, shatter the geographic lottery, opening up opportunity to countless people who weren’t lucky enough to be born in the right place. And people are leaping at the opportunities this shift is already creating, moving both homes and jobs at furious rates. It will take years to understand where this leads, but I am extremely optimistic.

Dengue Progress

Her team released Wolbachia-carrying mosquitoes in parts of Yogyakarta as part of a randomized controlled trial. Wolbachia rapidly spread among the local mosquitoes, and reduced the incidence of dengue by 77%. “That provides the gold standard of evidence that Wolbachia is a highly effective intervention against dengue. It has the potential to revolutionize mosquito control.”

La Villa Pizzeria

Brooklyn is the true homeland of pizza. It offers the broadest range of styles, fuels, and toppings, and in Brooklyn, one can still be astonished by a pizza, as I recently was at the rather grand-looking, but little known, La Villa Pizzeria in Park Slope, where I encountered a stuffed-crust pie from Abruzzo. It was a stuffed crust pie but not like the ones at Domino’s. When it arrived at the table, it was rectangular and had achieved a beautiful shade of brown on the top crust, with a bottom crust twice as thick, nicely charred underneath here and there. The pie was sealed on the sides, boxing the ingredients, and when cut into 10 square pieces, the cheese seductively oozed out.

K/T extinction event

66 ma ago, maybe on a Tuesday afternoon, life was the same as it had been the day before or 1 ka before or pretty much 1 ma before. Things were good for our feathered dinosaur buddies. Until a tiny, tiny detail in the sky changed.

2021-04-06: Chicxulub created rainforest

the dinosaur extinction was also a massive reset event for neotropical ecosystems, putting their evolution on an entirely new path leading directly to the extraordinary, diverse, spectacular and gravely threatened rainforests in the region today.

2022-10-05: The Chicxulub Impact Produced a Powerful Global Tsunami

The Chicxulub asteroid impact produced a global tsunami 30k times more energetic than any modern-day tsunami produced by earthquakes. Here we model the first 10 min of the event with a crater impact model, and the subsequent propagation throughout the world oceans using 2 different global tsunami models. The Chicxulub tsunami approached most coastlines of the North Atlantic and South Pacific with waves of 10m high and flow velocities of 1 m/s offshore. The tsunami was strong enough to scour the seafloor in these regions, thus removing the sedimentary records of conditions before and during this cataclysmic event in Earth history and leaving either a gap in these records or a jumble of highly disturbed older sediments.