For #RomanSiteSaturday let's go to a huge pile of #trash - Monte Testaccio in #Rome. A huge artificial hill located next to the Tiber River. It was made up of millions of broken amphorae (mostly oil amphorae from southern Spain) during the...1/2
— Nina Willburger (@DrNWillburger) May 6, 2023
#RomanArchaeology pic.twitter.com/5UijEO7vBC
In general, commute times are lower in the US than in public transport dependent countries (like the EU) (50% higher commute time in EU than US https://t.co/KPRvcIfZ78. )
— Laurence Wilse-Samson (@lwsamson) April 24, 2023
In the world of animal models, naked mole rats are the supermodels. They rarely get cancer, are resistant to some types of pain, and can survive up to 18 minutes without oxygen. But perhaps their greatest feat, a new paper suggests, is that they don't age https://t.co/D4n1bXuNBR pic.twitter.com/sAO3r46OUW
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 1, 2023
1% of the population are accountable for 63% of all violent crime convictions (and 3.9% of the population are accountable for 100% of all violent crime convictions) 🤔 https://t.co/W0zpLXgg9f
— Oliver Scott Curry (@Oliver_S_Curry) April 14, 2023
A selection of #Roman lead sling-bullets, cast with letters or images which identified whose army was firing them (although in some cases, sling-bullets bore insults directed towards the enemy and/or their commander, which are always fun) #Archaeology #AncientRome pic.twitter.com/HJ9s328Qf2
— Dr Jo Ball (@DrJEBall) April 26, 2023
Female share of BA Degrees by College Major, 1971-2021. Women earn the majority of degrees in 10 fields and are near parity with men in 4 other fields and are only a minority in only 2 fields: Engineering and Computer Science, the only two gender disparities we ever hear about. pic.twitter.com/mZ5NFpoYnv
— Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) April 18, 2023
Greta oto, also known as glasswinged butterfly, has transparent wings with a span of 5.6 to 6.1 cm
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 29, 2023
[read more: https://t.co/kRf49LRWok] pic.twitter.com/26MH84jh3X
So many of the study techniques we learned in school were actually ineffective.
— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) March 1, 2023
Here are the result of a large meta-analysis of study techniques. You should skip highlighting, summarizing, and rereading. Instead, practice, quiz & explain. https://t.co/lTCDSLscZg
AI can help! 1/ pic.twitter.com/SkOhkZnP4p
The Romans had specially-designed ships for transporting elephants across the Mediterranean
— Ancient History Hit (@AncientsHH) April 17, 2023
Image Credit: Carole Raddato (@carolemadge) / CC. pic.twitter.com/15JUooJWvV
“Nature gave us one mouth but two ears so that we may talk less and listen more.”
— sententiae antiquae (@sentantiq) April 17, 2023
quemadmodum natura os unicum, aures vero duas cuilibet ministravit, ita nos et loqui pauca et audire plurima debemus #Apuleius
This is WILD.
— Lorenzo Green 〰️ (@mrgreen) April 7, 2023
Boston Dynamics robots can dance with more rhythm than most of us...
I’m not sure whether to be impressed or disturbed.
(sound on 🔊) pic.twitter.com/YmylhiGLGS
A new report out of the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that the number of prior arrests persons admitted to state prisons have before admissions is usually huge. Here's how it looks for everyone: pic.twitter.com/Wj0cpStAqn
— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) April 15, 2023
Girls dancing in rural Finland. Photo by Pekka Kyytinen. Finnish Heritage Agency photo, circa 1940. pic.twitter.com/FAO6JzuiZX
— Laocoon of Troy (@LaocoonofTroy) April 17, 2023
If you just went by media coverage of the policy push, you'd never in a million years know this https://t.co/IXZG8uvfZF
— Sunny McSunnyface (@sunnyright) April 16, 2023
This shadowy landscape of majestic mountains and icy plains stretches toward the horizon on a small, distant world.
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 13, 2023
It was captured from ~18,000 km when New Horizons looked back toward Pluto, 15 minutes after its closest approach https://t.co/kFbgtktcM4pic.twitter.com/HOEPXH5EDC
An amazing blockbuster paper (about 8 papers in 1) from @BenjaminEnke 👏👏👏 tldr: analysis of ethnographic atlas etc: + family ties = + group loyalty, - trust for strangers, + guilt, + interpersonal revenge, + respect for authority, + shame, - fairness https://t.co/RM1SA6Pz1i
— Oliver Scott Curry (@Oliver_S_Curry) April 12, 2023
Love the fact that the city of Nottingham derives its name from some dude named Snothttps://t.co/krWldWhQnh pic.twitter.com/bwCDtZ2T7e
— Pete 🇬🇧 (@post_liberal) April 16, 2023
"Often children—and adults—need external incentives to take the first steps in an activity that requires a difficult restructuring of attention. Most enjoyable activities are not natural; they demand an effort that initially one is reluctant to make." https://t.co/AyQmHozzOs pic.twitter.com/77qNNsVRGA
— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) April 15, 2023
Wombats have a backward-facing pouch: The advantage is that when digging, the wombat does not gather soil in its pouch over its young. Bonus: the baby can easily eat and stay warm at the same time.
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 12, 2023
[📹Sarah Time: https://t.co/ukxz7BiRDu]pic.twitter.com/mx2olBB58p
In terms of violent and nonviolent delinquency, homosexuals are shifted towards the delinquency rates of the opposite sex. pic.twitter.com/t3Fn2IA1zI
— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) April 12, 2023
What an absolutely stunning photo! The 35m-long #Roman shipwreck, along with its cargo of 6,000 (!) amphorae was discovered in 2019 off the coast of the Greek Island of Kefalonia.
— Nina Willburger (@DrNWillburger) April 16, 2023
It’s one of the largest Roman shipwrecks found in the Mediterranean.
Photo: Ionian Aquarium pic.twitter.com/wti88nwfUK
Perfect illustration of how scumbag reporters lie:
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 12, 2023
This BBC hack claimed he's seen more hate on Twitter. When asked, he can't name a single example because he hasn't look. Then claims @ISDglobal -- funded by US, EU and neoliberal billionaires - said it:pic.twitter.com/Z0F8eGm1wp
A sneaker wave is a disproportionately large coastal wave that can appear in a wave train without warning. This video was shared by Marcella Ogata-Day to help bring awareness of the dangers of sneaker waves
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 10, 2023
[source, read more: https://t.co/goar0ni9xu]pic.twitter.com/YBNQ2z6wsF
One of my favorite charts of all time (by @salonium):
— Alec Stapp (@AlecStapp) April 12, 2023
“Before 2000 – when pre-registration of studies was not required – most candidate drugs to treat or prevent cardiovascular disease showed large benefits.
But most trials published after 2000 showed no benefit.” pic.twitter.com/IQtBn5Mx4p
How do you incubate a mind virus? How do you cause a culture to self-destruct? In 1984, this KGB defector exposed the 4-stages identified by Soviet intelligence as the necessary steps to cause the psychological implosion of American society.
— Benjamin Carlson (@bfcarlson) April 12, 2023
Stage 1: Demoralization (15–20 yrs) pic.twitter.com/GDzDwXILHt
States and their municipalities have been on a spending binge for the past three years, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to see any payoff. https://t.co/ND7M2ENyS4 via Steven Malanga
— City Journal (@CityJournal) April 11, 2023
One pretty cool geological fun fact is that the Scottish Highlands, the Appalachians, and the Atlas are the same mountain range, once connected as the Central Pangean Mountains
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 10, 2023
[source: https://t.co/u9taoxLu3O]
[read more: https://t.co/eFPLlBDg0X] pic.twitter.com/PdTn1QQ5y8
On the principle of democracyThere need not be much integrity for a monarchical or despotic government to maintain or sustain itself. The force of the laws in the one and the prince’s ever-raised arm in the other can rule or contain the whole. But in a popular state there must be an additional spring, which is VIRTUE.What I say is confirmed by the entire body of history and is quite in conformity with the nature of things. For it is clear that less virtue is needed in a monarchy, where the one who sees to the execution of the laws judges himself above the laws, than in a popular government, where the one who sees to the execution of the laws feels that he is subject to them himself and that he will bear their weight.It is also clear that the monarch who ceases to see to the execution of the laws, through bad counsel or negligence, may easily repair the damage; he has only to change his counsel or correct his own negligence. But in a popular government when the laws have ceased to be executed, as this can come only from the corruption of the republic, the state is already lost.It was a fine spectacle in the last century to see the impotent attempts of the English to establish democracy among themselves. As those who took part in public affairs had no virtue at all, as their ambition was excited by the success of the most audacious one and the spirit of one faction was repressed only by the spirit of another, the government was constantly changing; the people, stunned, sought democracy and found it nowhere. Finally, after much motion and many shocks and jolts, they had to come to rest on the very government that had been proscribed.
Great Awokening is a global phenomenon. No evidence it started in US media. Analysis of 98 million news articles across 36 countries quantifies. Exception: state-controlled media from China/Russia/Iran using wokeness terminology to criticize/mock the Westhttps://t.co/yHwPMSR4D0 pic.twitter.com/RF30c2UmWQ
— David Rozado (@DavidRozado) April 6, 2023
Madghacen Royal Tomb, (400-300 BC). It is a royal mausoleum-temple of Berber Numidian Kings near Batna in Numidia, Algeria.
— Archaeo - Histories (@archeohistories) April 11, 2023
This ancient Punic tomb is known as Bazina. Madghis was a king of independent kingdoms of Numidia between 300-200 BC.#archaeohistories pic.twitter.com/setUTTo0We
Anotha one.
— Wilfred X. Reilly, Californian (@wil_da_beast630) April 10, 2023
The thing about these "conspiracies," like 'kidnap Whitmer' or 'PBs go to J6,' is that we're not talking about one G-man keeping an eye on the criminals......but instead them being driven totally by the feds. https://t.co/PKkTmzJpok
Ankole cattle also known as Watusi cattle, are a breed of cattle indigenous to East Africa. Their long horns are useful for defensive purposes as well as thermoregulation. The blood vessels in the horns help dissipate heat
— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) April 6, 2023
📹 IG oliverwatusipic.twitter.com/Cc7E9zFvvg
ReasonEmpiricismFacts and evidenceLogicScientific Method
"Bullying is a means for mediocre scientists to rise to the top. Some star academics reached their position because they are bullies, not in spite of it." - Excellent piece about bullying in academia (and really any other professional environment). https://t.co/JTqGBaAuuf pic.twitter.com/IMu3I2KP8j
— Claudia Gonzaga-Jauregui (@cgonzagaj) April 8, 2023
Consent of the GovernedProperty Rights and MarketsFrictionless communication/Freedom of speech, religion, movement, assembly, press, etc.Individual responsibility for actions, outcomes and consequences
Rule of Law and Equality before the Law
In general, economic publications have a very strong bias in favor of papers that show what government can do to solve problems. My takes reflect the fact that I have lived long enough to see urban poverty, mental illness, childhood education deficiencies, and “problems with our health care system” manage to survive in spite of all of these well-researched solutions. Or maybe I’m just an old libertarian crank
Partisan segregation within the news audience buffers many Americans from countervailing political views, posing a risk to democracy. Empirical studies of the online media ecosystem suggest that only a small minority of Americans, driven by a mix of demand and algorithms, are siloed according to their political ideology. However, such research omits the comparatively larger television audience and often ignores temporal dynamics underlying news consumption. By analyzing billions of browsing and viewing events between 2016 and 2019, with a novel framework for measuring partisan audiences, we first estimate that 17% of Americans are partisan-segregated through television versus roughly 4% online. Second, television news consumers are several times more likely to maintain their partisan news diets month-over-month. Third, TV viewers’ news diets are far more concentrated on preferred sources. Last, partisan news channels’ audiences are growing even as the TV news audience is shrinking. Our results suggest that television is the top driver of partisan audience segregation among Americans.
These unresolved issues notwithstanding, we close by noting that any resulting inferential errors would have to be very large to alter our main conclusions regarding the relative state of partisan-segregated news consumption online and on TV. With respect to online, partisan-segregated news consumption affects at most a few percent of Americans (Fig. 1), only a few percent of those people remain partisan-segregated for more than a few months (Fig. 2), and even those few percent consume a nonnegligible fraction of nonpartisan news. Although highly concentrated consumption of highly partisan material can be a cause for concern even if it affects only a small number of people—if, say, it facilitates extremist or violent behavior— longstanding concerns about the supposed ubiquity of online filter bubbles are not supported. With respect to TV, the picture is more complicated. On the one hand, our results make clear that partisansegregated consumption is far more prevalent on TV than it is online, affecting as much as 17% of the population (Fig. 1). It is also considerably stickier and more concentrated: After 6 months, the fraction who remain partisan-segregated is several times larger than it is online (Fig. 2), and the inhabitants of the most partisan archetypes consume partisan content almost exclusively (Fig. 3). On the other hand, whether even these much larger numbers should be considered large depends very much on what they are being compared with. If one were under the impression that the entire country was living in echo chambers, for example, 17% might sound reassuringly small. Likewise, if one had assumed that an echo chamber, once inhabited, was a permanent state of affairs, then it might be reassuring to learn that three quarters of inhabitants had left after 6 months. However, viewed from another perspective—say the percentage of voters needed to sway an election—17% may seem like a very large number indeed. Between these differing interpretations, our own is that partisan segregation in TV audiences—whether it is large enough to be considered alarming—is large enough to justify TV news receiving at least the same level of scrutiny as its online counterpart.
A cuneiform tablet with a recipe for a savoury pastry pie, with a filling including bird meat, leek, onion, garlic, dill, mint, & cinnamon - sounds rather delicious. The human taste for pie is clearly longstanding - this recipe is about 3750 years old..! (📷 Yale) #Archaeology pic.twitter.com/AtSqpBSIHn
— Dr Jo Ball (@DrJEBall) April 10, 2023
"institutions were captured by a small number of radicals...because the elites running the institutions didn’t have a clue how to stand up to the incoming wave of moral cant, guilt-tripping, and bullying from younger and differently socialised generations"https://t.co/rYPk4Kuy8Z
— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) April 6, 2023
Some mushrooms glow, and it's because the light emitted from those fungi attracts the attention of insects, including beetles, flies, wasps, and ants. Those insect visitors are apparently good for the fungi because they spread the fungal spores around https://t.co/Dm628XUUxI pic.twitter.com/0xtju8XKuu
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 4, 2023
On Board Shipby C. P. CavafyIt’s like him, of course,this little pencil portrait.Hurriedly sketched, on the ship’s deck,the afternoon magical,the Ionian Sea around us.It’s like him. But I remember him as better looking.He was sensitive almost to the point of illness,and this highlighted his expression.He appears to me better lookingnow that my soul brings him back, out of Time.Out of Time. All these things are from very long ago—the sketch, the ship, the afternoon.
Liberal women are roughly 4x as censorious as conservative men. https://t.co/cO3BzZAURt
— Wilfred X. Reilly, Californian (@wil_da_beast630) April 10, 2023
I went to the Battle of Ideas at the Barbican last weekend, a free speech festival organised by the Brexit party MEP Claire Fox, and listened to an interesting discussion about Life of Brian. The Monty Python film is exactly 40 years old, having been released in the UK on 8 November 1979.The opinion of the panel, made up of comedians and intellectuals, was that its lampooning of rigid, orthodox thinking is more relevant today than ever, since we’re in the midst of a new wave of puritanism, albeit one inspired by left-wing identity politics rather than Christianity. After all, what is ‘hate speech’ if not a type of blasphemy?When I got home I watched the famous TV debate between John Cleese, Michael Palin, Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood, then the Bishop of Southwark, which is on YouTube. It’s worth viewing for the old-fashioned put-downs alone. ‘Now I wasn’t in the least bit horrified,’ says Stockwood, who’d been to a BBC screening just beforehand. ‘People said, “Oh now, Bishop, when you go there you’ll be absolutely horrified,” but I wasn’t at all. After all, I wasn’t vicar of the University Church for nothing. I’m familiar with undergraduate humour. And I’m also the governor of a mentally deficient school and once I was a prep-school master, so I felt frightfully at home.’The consensus is that the young Turks got the better of the two elderly Christians — and that was certainly my view when I watched the debate in 1979 aged 16. But seeing it again, I was struck by how callow the liberal pieties of Cleese and Palin sounded. They maintained that the satirical target of Life of Brian wasn’t just Christianity, but all forms of received wisdom. What they objected to was the idea that we should take anything on faith, particularly a belief system with a strong moral component — and Cleese cited Marxism as another example. Rather, we should resist the gravitational pull of all these doctrines — whether embodied in the Church of England or the Judean People’s Front — and work things out for ourselves.I believed that 40 years ago, but it’s hard to get around the fact that the rapid decline of Christianity in Britain and America in the intervening period has not led to a new age of enlightenment. On the contrary, we appear to be in the grip of various secular belief systems that are far more dogmatic than modern Christianity. Turns out, the Pythons were naive in thinking that mankind’s yearning for religious faith was an aspect of our nature we could outgrow. The ebbing away of the Christian tide has left a God-shaped hole in the Anglosphere and it has been filled with something more sinister — a constantly mutating moral absolutism. Its latest manifestation is Extinction Rebellion, but no doubt it will be something even more fanatical and millenarian in a few years’ time. These quasi-religious movements resemble Christianity in its fundamentalist, pre-Reformation period when believers were less willing to forgive heretics and sinners.The irony of Life of Brian is that by lampooning Christian beliefs for perfectly honourable reasons, the makers of the film contributed to the demise of the church’s authority and that, in turn, created a vacuum that has been filled by far more egregious examples of the closed mindset they objected to. The Pythons didn’t realise it 40 years ago, but the muscular Christianity that had been drummed into them at their private schools and which they hated with a kind of life-defining passion was acting as a bulwark against less organised forms of irrationality. They couldn’t imagine anything more suffocating or tedious than that ‘vast, moth-eaten musical brocade’; but they were wrong.
The Emancipation SequenceThe politics of the transformative future are profoundly different from standard attempts to do better.In many ways, Western societies have been doing better for centuries. We can identify an Emancipation Sequence marching through Western (especially Anglo) history: abolition of the slave trade, then of slavery; Catholic emancipation in the Anglican United Kingdom; Jewish emancipation; adult male suffrage; women’s suffrage; equal opportunities for women; civil rights in the US, and finally gay and lesbian equality.The common element in these widenings of legal equality and political participation is that each step in the sequence was not about social transformation. It was about being included, about a place at the table. The basic claim was “we want to have the legal and social standing to participate in society that you have”.This claim did not depend on some elevated valorisation of the to-be-included group, merely an appeal to a common humanity. Indeed, both Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi regularly criticised failings among those on whose behalf they spoke.Again and again, this appeal to a common humanity was powerful and persuasive. Every single advance in the Emancipation Sequence came from successfully convincing folk who were not from the group seeking inclusion. Most obviously, every single women’s movement advance came about by persuading men.A persistent feature of human societies has been presumptive sex roles. It has always included cultural endorsement and management of the presumptive sex roles within each society or collection of societies. The speed of the success within Western societies in achieving legal equality—and the acceptance of women’s participation in all walks of life—is, in historical terms, astonishing.In the case of the UK, the process started with the Married Women’s Property Act (1882). Most women were granted the right to vote at the same time as all adult men were, in 1918. By 2015, a survey in the UK found that 84 per cent of men and 81 per cent of women endorsed equal opportunity for women. The concept of presumptive sex roles had become attenuated to the point of near complete disappearance.To acknowledge the Emancipation Sequence and its successful inclusions is to undermine any division between the moral wonder of the imagined future and the moral perdition of the past or present. This is why those who promote the politics of the transformative future ignore or disparage that history and those successes.
Those who endorse the politics of the transformative future seek to claim the Emancipation Sequence’s moral lustre, particularly that of the civil rights movement, while rejecting its underlying principles and devaluing its achievements. It also regularly eschews the politics of open political bargaining—which, after all, might not go the way you want—for the non-electoral politics of institutional capture.[snip]This politics of institutional capture intimidates, seeking to destroy careers while censoring dissent. Dissent from the moral project is taken to be either malfeasance or the tacit endorsement or facilitation of evil. This view of dissent rejects the bargaining politics that is inherent to democratic process and parliamentary politics.The politics of the transformative future is not about doing better within society as it is. It is about transcending that society and its heritage. It creates such a conceptual and moral gap between what is, what has been, and what ought to be, that the transformational future become endless fodder for status-and-social-leverage strategies. The problem with having practical aims—such as legal equality—is that such aims come with end-points.
Feminism is where the politics of inclusion—of the Emancipation Sequence—came to be distorted and derailed. It’s where the sequence went past “we want what you have too, because we are human” to systematic self-valorisation based on drawing a moral distinction between groups (specifically, between men and women).We are now seeing explicit rejection of equal opportunity.Feminism’s fundamental problem is one of differentiation. If there is no profound moral distinction to be made between men and women, what is the point of feminism? Liberal feminism just becomes liberalism, socialist feminism just becomes socialism, and so on.Feminism has thus openly valorised its own group. This is not a feature of previous inclusion movements. Feminism spoke as though, somehow, patriarchal constraints throughout history had turned women into a finer form of Homo sapien. This valorisation entailed denigration of men and masculinity.This combination of denigration and valorisation is antipathetic to the politics of bargaining of electoral politics but well-suited to the politics of institutional capture through piety display*, intimidation and censorship. So, the more feminism comes to lean on moral distinction—and the less it becomes about practical politics—the more it shifts to the politics of institutional capture.
The more genuinely gender-egalitarian society becomes, the fewer legal or other barriers there are to women, the more feminism has to lean on making moral distinctions between men and women. It’s no longer about getting rid of various barriers, about the practical politics of inclusion as per the Emancipation Sequence, about investing in parliamentary politics and open persuasion. Instead, it becomes a status-and-social-leverage strategy.The tendency to self-valorise women at times becomes a form of collective narcissism (“believe all women”, which permits conviction by accusation). Feminism has come to lean heavily on an updated version of the Victorian era cult of womanhood: that men are the brutes women have to civilise.
As part of group self-valorisation, feminism became the first movement in the Emancipation Sequence not to seek to generalise dignity, but to redistribute it so women have more than men. Seeking an unequal redistribution of dignity—of presumptive social standing—is now standard across social justice progressivism.
David Pierce of The Verge has a story on the Neeva shutdown, here.And, speaking of lost eras in computing, here is a story I wrote in The Atlantic 41 years ago, about what the advent of personal computing might mean. Some of it now seems as if it was from a prehistoric age. Some of it could have been written last night.
I'd sell my computer before I'd sell my children. But the kids better watch their step. When have the children helped me meet a deadline? When has the computer dragged in a dead cat it found in the back yard?The Processor Technology SOL-20 came into my life when Darlene went out. It was a bleak, frigid day in January of 1979, and I was finishing a long article for this magazine. The final draft ran for 100 pages, double-spaced. Interminable as it may have seemed to those who read it, it seemed far longer to me, for through the various stages of composition I had typed the whole thing nine or ten times. My system of writing was to type my way through successive drafts until their ungainliness quotient declined. This consumed much paper and time. In the case of that article, it consumed so much time that, as the deadline day drew near, I knew I had no chance of retyping a legible copy to send to the home office.I turned hopefully to the services sector of our economy. I picked a temporary-secretary agency out of the phone book and was greeted the next morning by a gum-chewing young woman named Darlene. I escorted her to my basement office and explained the challenge. The manuscript had to leave my house by 6:30 the following evening. No sweat, I thought, now that a professional is on hand.But five hours after Darlene's arrival, I glanced at the product of her efforts. Stacked in a neat pile next to the typewriter were eight completed pages. This worked out to a typing rate of about six and a half words per minute. In fairness to Darlene, she had come to a near-total halt on first encountering the word "Brzezinski" and never fully regained her stride. Still, at this pace Darlene and I would both be dead—first I'd kill her, then I'd kill myself—before she came close to finishing the piece. Hustling her out the door at the end of the day, with $49 in wages in her pocket and eleven pages of finished manuscript left behind, I trudged downstairs to face the typewriter myself. Twenty-four hours later, I handed the bulky parcel to the Federal Express man and said, "Never again."
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