Groaning Oldies

From Friar's Club Encyclopedia of Jokes by Barry Dougherty.

Ants can carry twenty times their own body weight, which is useful information if you’re moving and you need help carrying a potato chip across town.

History

An amazing terracotta oil lamp in the shape of a turreted war #elephant with a rider.
Elephants were first used in warfare by Indian and Persian armies. Alexander the Great encountered the impressive animals on his campaign. His successors as well as the ..1/2#archaeology pic.twitter.com/XWHegkK09D

— Nina Willburger (@DrNWillburger) July 5, 2022

 

An Insight

Re: my previous tweet abt very smart scientists having insane, wrong ideas outside their domain. Might be (to some extent) a feature, not a bug (consequence of being open-minded/contrarian).

Best example of this is probably Lynn Margulis, who came up w/ the endosymbiosis theory. https://t.co/Xv1yyJIGhY

— Ruxandra Tesloianu (@RuxandraTeslo) July 2, 2022

 

I see wonderful things

A stunning cloudburst over Lake Millstatt, Austria captured by photographer Peter Maier. pic.twitter.com/7vUVnePvBD

— Wonder of Science (@wonderofscience) July 5, 2022

 

Offbeat Humor

Working on it Mr. President. In the meantime - have a Happy 4th and please make sure the WH intern who posted this tweet registers for Econ 101 for the fall semester... https://t.co/6yLpbDDRKc

— US Oil & Gas Association (@US_OGA) July 3, 2022

 

Destructive well-meaning is still the enemy of civilization

Thinking that it might be an archaeological article about the Roman light tower, Rutupaie, which guided the ships in the dark to the safety of harbor in civilized Roman Britain, I clicked over to The Light of Rutupaie Going Out by Sgt. Mom.  In Rosemary Sutcliffe's Eagle of the Ninth series about Roman and Dark Ages Britain, Rutupaie features prominently in the Lantern Bearers.

And indeed, Sgt. Mom's piece is not about archaeology but is a meditation about the forces of civilization in contention with barbarians and the challenges presented when the barbarians are within the walls.  A modern fifth column of barbarians if you will, made up of the Woke, the MSM, academia, the social advocates and employees of the state.

The fight is easier and clearer when the enemy is outside the walls.  It is harder when the enemy is within.  Harder still when the enemy is well-intentioned but ignorant or unwise.

Data Talks

All the classic problems described by @deevybee are here: exploratory analyses in small samples, covariate mining, lack of defined hypotheses, p-hacking, HARKing, publication bias... https://t.co/5tBrJ14wM8 pic.twitter.com/xepGkubWSg

— Kevin Mitchell (@WiringTheBrain) July 1, 2022

Summer Evening on Skagen Sønderstrand, 1893 by P.S. Krøyer (Norwegian-b. Danish, 1851-1909)

Summer Evening on Skagen Sønderstrand,  1893 by P.S. Krøyer (Norwegian-b. Danish, 1851-1909)

Click to enlarge.

Groaning Oldies

From Friar's Club Encyclopedia of Jokes by Barry Dougherty.

A guy walks into a bar with a dog under his arm, puts the dog on the bar, and announces that the dog can talk and that he has a hundred dollars he’s willing to bet anyone who says he can’t. The bartender quickly takes the bet and the owner looks at the dog and asks, “What’s the thing on top of this building, which keeps the rain from coming inside?”

The dog answers, “ROOF.”

The bartender says, “Who are you kidding? I’m not paying.” The dog’s owner says, “How about double or nothing and I’ll ask him something else.”

The bartender agrees and the owner turns to the dog and asks, “Who was the greatest ballplayer of all time?” The dog answers with a muffled “RUTH.”

With that the bartender picks them both up and throws them out the door. As they bounce on the sidewalk, the dog looks at his owner and says, “DiMaggio?”

Only nine newspapers have more than 100,000 subscribers in a nation of 330 million people

From The Decline and Fall of Newspapers by Charles Lipson.  For most of my adult life I have had ink in the blood, subscribing to multiple physical newspapers and many weekly or monthly magazines.  And those days are behind us for many of the reasons outlined by Lipson.  I enjoyed it at the time and miss it but that level of quality reporting is gone.  Now the quality has to be sought in special niches and the big purveyors are focused on opinions, emotions, clicks, and press release journalism. 

Lipson has some fascinating data in the midst of the elegy.

The most important point is the most obvious: The changes are huge – and irreversible. One recent study shows that in our country of 332 million people, no newspaper has a print circulation of more than 1 million. Only nine have more than 100,000 subscribers. Among the 25 largest papers, only one showed an increase in circulation, and it serves a retirement community. It’s shocking, really, that a paper with less than 50,000 subscribers is among the nation’s largest.

The decline is relentless. Print papers are losing one out of eight subscribers every year. Their daily circulation, over 63 million at its peak in the 1980s, is now about one-third that size. Over 25% of all American newspapers have died in the past 15 years.

Several "papers" have more than a million subscribers but most of those are electronic subscriptions, not physically printed papers.  

Most of the remaining “print” papers have become essentially online operations. The Washington Post, for example, has only 159,000 print subscribers but over 3 million online. 

It is a different epistemic world with pros and cons.  But it is hard to let go of the smell of ink print and the rustle of paper.