another must read, Peter Turchin’s Ultrasociety, How 10 ka of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. This seems like an excellent complement to Ian Morris’ War! What Is It Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots, which I have not managed to get to read, in part because I want to hit Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve. Yet I’ve read a fair number of Peter’s books (see my 10 questions for him), so I’ll probably be moving this up the stack.
Peter is a serious thinker, and human social complexity and cooperation is an important, and unresolved topic (I am not as sanguine or flip on this David Sloan Wilson).
Category: Uncategorized
Failed
Why do we say someone passed when they died? Shouldn’t it be failed?
Vermeer 1658 street view
fun bit of art history research with old tax maps etc to determine that vermeer’s view of houses in delft is really a 1658 street view of Vlamingstraat 40
Drones controlled by face recognition
there’s so many selfie takers that it shouldn’t be hard to perfect the face recognition:
Of course, it’s a small step from this technology to surveillance drones with facial recognition and autonomous weaponized unmanned aerial vehicles
Parks Without Borders
at least now we’re getting some benefit for all the constant surveillance. as i’ve argued before, it makes fences redundant.
Using design and landscaping strategies—and by subtracting as much as they’re adding—park designers mean to edit and revise a number of parks to better meet their neighborhoods. The program also targets a special site category called “park-adjacent spaces.” These are those vexing parcels that seem to have been forgotten or neglected or excluded by park planners. “Very often we have these dead spaces that are just concrete, sitting there unprogrammed, next to parks. We’re now incorporating these into the parks themselves. We believe ‘park’ is not land for the park but the sidewalk next to the park as well.”
Kane has been found
Athenians and Spartans clashed at the isle of Kane in 406 BC, one of the last battles of the Great Peloponnesian War. Some 100 ships were sent to the bottom of the Aegean Sea as a result of the prolonged, hard-fought naval battle. Archaeologists have long debated the location of Kane, but none of the islands in the Aegean seemed to fit the descriptions. At long last, thanks to artifacts and core samples, the location of Kane has been identified, as has the reason it took so long to find it: It isn’t an island anymore.
Essentially significant p=0.10
100s of ways to say your paper wasn’t significant, but i’ll publish it anyway:
not significant in the narrow sense of the word (P=0.29)
Exoplanets visualization
a lot of creative license (i very much doubt we have that high res pictures from any exoplanets) but the sizes and temperatures should be correct.
Micropigs
“We had a bigger crowd than anyone. People were attached to them. Everyone wanted to hold them.” In the United States, people wanted a porcine lap pet, but were disappointed when animals touted as ‘teacup’ pigs weighing only 5 kilograms grew into 50-kilogram animals. Genetically-edited micropigs stay reliably small.
Choosing eye color
Our clinical trials thus far have been limited to changing eye color from brown to blue, since that is both the simplest and most sought-after color change. We will soon begin testing dark brown to light brown color change, as well as changing hazel or green to blue, and it is possible that our first commercial laser will also be able to accommodate these color changes. Changing brown or hazel eyes to green is more complicated, and it is unlikely our initial laser will be able to accomplish this. Because our technology relies upon the removal of pigment, it will not change eye color from light to dark, e.g., blue to green, green to hazel, or hazel to brown.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 