Tag: images

Against Smoking

Meanwhile, Switzerland is still a shithole when it comes to being molested by smoking. 1 of many areas where Europe is the laggard.

Belmont is the first city in the nation to ban smoking on its streets and almost everywhere else.

2007-07-22: What’s not to love about an artist (Adriana Salazar) who creates machines that smoke or try to tie shoes?

2007-10-18: Oxygen Smoker

A 90-year-old Ypsilanti woman was critically injured when the oxygen system she was using to breathe caught on fire while she was smoking.

2008-02-01: The scale of the epidemic

Vile indeed, but habit-forming and therefore lethally dangerous: it cuts short the lives of 33-50% of its practitioners. Perhaps 100m people died prematurely during the 20th century as a result of tobacco, making it the leading preventable cause of death and one of the top killers overall. Another 1b more may die from it in this century if current trends continue unchecked.

2008-03-13: Lung ashtray for the fatalistic smoker in your life.

2008-07-24: Fighting the smoking epidemic

Bill Gates and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced on that they would spend $500m to stop people around the world from smoking.

2008-05-08: Second-hand smoke is terrible.

a 30-minute exposure to the level of secondhand smoke that one might normally inhale in an average bar setting was enough to result in blood vessel injury in young and otherwise healthy lifelong nonsmokers. Compounding the injury to the blood vessels themselves, the exposure to smoke impedes the function of the body’s natural repair mechanisms that are activated in the face of the blood vessels’ injury. Many of these effects persisted 24 hours later.

2014-12-11: China is far behind developed nations when it comes to smoking. Turns out, the government makes 7% of its revenue from tobacco, so little incentive to make the population healthier.
2017-06-25: The $10K life

Cigarette companies make about $10K for every 1M cigarettes purchased. Since there is 1 death for every 1M cigarettes sold (or smoked), a tobacco manufacturer will make about $10K for every death caused by their products. The value of a human life to a cigarette manufacturer is therefore about $10K

2018-04-20: Smoking decline

From the 1920s to the 1980s, the United States was the most smoking country in the developed world. In the 1960s, consumption peaked over 10 a day, per capita. But now it’s near the bottom of the chart—only Britain smokes less, among rich western countries.


2019-06-19: Corporate absolution

Philip Morris is pivoting to smoke-free cigarettes, because “society expects us to act responsibly, and we are doing just that by designing a smoke-free future”. Also, KFC “promises not to let vegans down” with their new meatless chicken-like nuggets. They’ll have to compete with factory-farming mega-conglomerate Tyson Foods, who are coming out with their own vegetarian chicken option. If evil companies want to do good, you should let them. If they have a line of retreat, they won’t fight so hard against change. If Tyson Foods wants to use its lobbyists to support meat substitutes instead of sabotaging them, that’s good for everybody. If they want to use their research budget to push plant-based meats forward, so much the better. After companies have started doing evil, we might want to break our previous precommitment and switch to “let evil companies avoid punishment if they stop doing evil”. And after companies have stopped doing evil, we might want (if only for the sake of our own sense of justice) to break both of our previous precommitments and go with “punish them after all”. What is the right action? I’m not sure, but I lean toward “buy the meatless chicken from KFC”, for a few reasons.

2023-08-31: An update on smoking in Europe. Switzerland is still at 25.5%.

The overall smoking rate in Germany was 34% in July 2023. In March 2020, the rate was 26.5%. The smoking rate for US adults in 2021 dropped to 11.5%.

Neanderthals

Pääbo may have the entire Neanderthal genome sequenced in the next 18 months.

2009-02-13: Draft Genome is announced. Bookmarked also for the nice facial reconstruction.

2009-05-17: We ate them

Neanderthals met a violent end at our hands and in some cases we ate them

2010-09-28: The cloning arguments are nothing new, but I was struck by

There were no cities when the Neanderthals went extinct, and at their population’s peak there may have only been 10k of them spread across Europe. A cloned Neanderthal might be missing the genetic adaptations we have evolved to cope with the world’s greater population density, whatever those adaptations might be. But, not everyone agrees that Neanderthals were so different from modern humans that they would automatically be shunned as outcasts.

2013-08-16: Neanderthal leather-working

Excavations of Neanderthal sites 40 ka BP have uncovered a kind of tool that leather workers still use to make hides more lustrous and water resistant. The bone tools, known as lissoirs, had previously been associated only with modern humans. The latest finds indicate that Neanderthals and modern humans might have invented the tools independently.

2016-05-25: 176 ka ago is unimaginably old. This is more than 15x older than Gobekli Tepe.

After drilling into the stalagmites and pulling out cylinders of rock, the team could see an obvious transition between 2 layers. On one side were old minerals that were part of the original stalagmites; on the other were newer layers that had been laid down after the fragments were broken off by the cave’s former users. By measuring uranium levels on either side of the divide, the team could accurately tell when each stalagmite had been snapped off for construction.

Their date? 176 ka ago, give or take a few millennia. “When I announced the age to Jacques, he asked me to repeat it because it was so incredible”. Outside Bruniquel Cave, the earliest, unambiguous human constructions are just 20 ka old. Most of these are ruins—collapsed collections of mammoth bones and deer antlers. By comparison, the Bruniquel stalagmite rings are well-preserved and far more ancient.

2016-05-27: More Neanderthal than human

In some spots of our genome, we are more Neanderthal than human. the sequences we inherited from archaic hominins helped us survive and reproduce

2017-01-15: Neanderthals Were People, Too

For millenniums, some scientists believe, before modern humans poured in from Africa, the climate in Europe was exceptionally unstable. The landscape kept flipping between temperate forest and cold, treeless steppe. The fauna that Neanderthals subsisted on kept migrating away, faster than they could. Though Neanderthals survived this turbulence, they were never able to build up their numbers. (Across all of Eurasia, at any point in history, “there probably weren’t enough of them to fill a stadium.”) With the demographics so skewed, even the slightest modern human advantage would be amplified tremendously: a single innovation, something like sewing needles, might protect just enough babies from the elements to lower the infant mortality rate and allow modern humans to conclusively overtake the Neanderthals. And yet Stringer is careful not to conflate innovation with superior intelligence. Innovation, too, can be a function of population size. “We live in an age where information, where good ideas, spread like wildfire, and we build on them. But it wasn’t like that 50 ka ago.” The more members your species has, the more likely 1 member will stumble on a useful new technology — and that, once stumbled upon, the innovation will spread; you need sufficient human tinder for those sparks of culture to catch.

2017-09-05: 200 ka Neanderthal Glue

As far back as 200 ka ago Neanderthals were using a tar-based adhesive to glue axe heads and spears to their handles. Researchers have attempted to recreate the Neander-glue, which could help scientists figure out just how technologically sophisticated the species was. Archaeologists have found lumps of adhesive tar likely made from birch bark at Neanderthal sites in Italy and Germany. But just how they made the substance puzzled researchers, especially because they did it without the aid of ceramic pots, which were used by later cultures to produce large quantities of tar.

2019-06-12: Did Neanderthals Speak?

Neanderthals had the anatomical properties to create the sounds that could form the basis of speech, though any words they produced would have sounded a bit unfamiliar to modern human ears

2020-03-04: long distance Neanderthals

Their intercontinental odyssey over 1000s of kilometers is a rarely observed case of long-distance dispersal in the Paleolithic and highlights the value of stone tools as culturally informative markers of ancient population movements.

2022-11-19: Interbreeding in Africa

The human-like Y chromosome entered the Neanderthal gene pool well before the migration out of Africa 80ka BP – perhaps 270ka BP. Which means that many of the Neanderthals that those migrants encountered must have already had human-like Y chromosomes! The Neanderthal Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA are 2 new lines of evidence that point to a much more complex and ancient relationship between us and our closest cousins than we otherwise would have known.

2023-12-15: A new book, The Naked Neanderthal, looks interesting

Next, he explores evidence from skeletal remains for butchery and cannibalism of the dead in Neanderthal communities at Moula Guercy. Some researchers have proposed that such findings are a sign of starvation — evidence that Neanderthals were not able to adapt to the warm Eemian forests. Slimak concludes instead that these behaviors were a natural part of hominin social interactions, citing growing evidence from both archaeology and primatology that such practices were relatively common among humans right through prehistory.
Humans temporarily replaced local Neanderthals 54ka BP over an extraordinarily short time — potentially less than 1 year. The author uses this to argue that extermination, rather than assimilation, is the most likely explanation for the Neanderthals’ eventual extinction.

Ocean DNA

In this elegant research vessel, Craig Venter set sail around the world to shotgun sequence the millions of viruses and bacteria in every spoonful of seawater. From the first 5 ocean samples, this team grew the number of known genes on the planet by 10x and the number of genes involved in solar energy conversion by 100x. The ocean microorganisms have evolved over a longer period of time and have pathways that are more efficient than photosynthesis. Another discovery: every 300 km across the open ocean, the microbial genes are 85% different. The oceans are not homogenous masses. They consist of myriad uncharted regions of ecological diversity… and the world’s largest genetic database.

Excel as a database

So true. And the facial expressions are accurate, too

As a developer, you’ve probably, at some unfortunate point in your life (possibly several points, actually), been handed an Excel file that has been crammed full of “data” by someone in marketing and told to “do something with it.”

Columns probably didn’t line up, and 1000 different fonts were used. Every feature of Excel was probably abused and abused again in order to avoid having to use an actual database application for storage of the data.