AbouBenAdhem

@remindme@mstdn.social 14,000,000,000 years

Do you get bigger by absorbing air (thereby increasing your buoyancy) or by absorbing water (with the opposite effect)?

For perspective, this author’s previous article was Do Childhood Vaccines Cause Tornadoes? It hasn’t been ruled out.

He seems obsessed with making the rather pedantic point that researchers should never state that anything is impossible based on absence of evidence.

In the sense that the original organic material has been replaced by minerals? I guess that’s a version of the old Ship of Theseus question.

We could use one, and assume we’re operating in the field of complex numbers:

1 N = North
i N = West
i^2^ N = South
i^3^ N = East.

And we could use the complex modulus to indicate distance or speed... or we could map the Riemann sphere onto the surface of the earth and use a single complex number to indicate location.

Yeah, but these are cops we’re talking about—they’re conditioned to escalate at the first sign of noncompliance.

Can you really picture a cop physically intervening, being pushed aside, and saying “ok, never mind”?

I think the framing of questions like this assumes that there are certain “physical” things that follow one intrinsic set of laws, and certain other things that follow a fundamentally different, incommensurate set of laws.

But we don’t actually have direct knowledge of any intrinsic laws, physical or otherwise—the best we have are a set of purely provisional laws we’ve made up and regularly revise on the basis of cumulative evidence. And our method for revising these provisional laws requires that any new evidence that contradicts a law, invalidates it—provisional laws must apply to everything without exception. If we give ourselves the out that contradictory evidence can be attributed to “non-physical” causes, we can never invalidate anything nor update our models. So dualistic models are inherently unscientific—not because they’re wrong, but because starting with such assumptions is incompatible with the scientific method.

The study authors believe an eruption occurred around 1345, about two years before the start of the pandemic, from either a single volcano or a cluster of volcanoes of unknown location, likely in the tropics. The resulting haze from volcanic ash would have partially blocked sunlight across the Mediterranean region over multiple years, causing temperatures to drop and crops to fail.

Wow, that’s exactly what happened just before the Plague of Justinian (i.e., the volcanic winter of 536). I’m surprised they don’t mention that in the article.

It’s almost as if Democratic voters are selecting their candidates based on some other criterion entirely.

• The Everlasting, by Alix Harrow
• Letters from an Imaginary Country, by Theodora Goss
• The Mathematical Structure of Syntactic Merge, by Marcolli, Berwick, and Chomsky (most likely Chomsky’s last linguistics book)
• Creating Democracy: Arendt and Bakhtin in Dialogue, by Charles Hersch

They don’t mention the cause of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum—was the biosphere still experiencing evolutionary adjustments from the Chicxulub impact 9 million years earlier? Or was there a geological cause?

One of Kemp’s central arguments—that some early societies were relatively democratic, and that hierarchical rule is not humanity’s default setting—closely echoes the theory advanced by David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. That book, published in 2021, generated heated debate about the origins of inequality and the reliability of the archaeological record, and it was ultimately admired more for the force of its argument than for its account of the earliest societies.

Is that really the consensus opinion on Dawn of Everything?