TheVat

Excellent news! Eight billion is not sustainable if everyone seems to want a western lifestyle. And there are clear quality of life benefits (open green spaces and wilderness preserves and uncut tropical forests producing oxygen and so on) in having population drop back to 2-3 billion. (A plus one to @mistermack for noting the need for reduced population, with a slow decline.) Economic systems that depend on endless growth must be reformed. Endless growth is the doctrine of a cancer cell. I would think so. It will also help free up resources to aid countries that are still struggling to reach their demographic shift.

I think it reflects some personal insecurity about their own sexuality. And conformity (as @swansont referred to) is often felt more strongly by those harbor doubts about themselves. Forming a harsh response to someone else's sexuality gives them a way to minimize their own anxiety and perhaps direct self-loathing outward to others. I've noticed Putin, who is quite homophobic, does other things that show adequacy issues. Maybe it was hard for him growing up and being a short and delicately-chinned man. I doubt anyone is 100% anything. Though seeming straight myself, I remember seeing Robert Redford in "The Sting" and thinking okay I get what the fuss is about, the dude is hot. I wasn't going to switch from AC to DC or anything, but I could see the potential for a man-crush. Ditto Paul Newman.

You probably shouldn't extrapolate from the single data point of yourself.

Not really, no. Natural selection turned out to be eminently testable. Nope. Last sentence doesn't logically follow. First, it assumes other hypotheses (which were provable) are equivalent in their overbroad structure and unsupported assumptions, which is not at all the case. Second, it's a logic error of the form: My tile roof leaks. Therefore, other tile roofs must leak, too. However, it can be reasonably argued that the savannah hypothesis is ALSO a weak umbrella, on its own particular lack of merits, The fact that the SH remains problematic in no way automatically lends support to the AAH, because there is a universe of other hypothetical choices - it's not a binary thing, where one being wrong means the other must then be correct. You really need to stop shouting and swearing and take time to think through these issues, calmly.

Taphonomic bias is the real problem with attempted analysis of hominin diets. Most hominin fossils occur in lake-side environments, and the presence of fish remains is therefore not proof of fish consumption. Really, the deeper problem with AAH is that it's an umbrella hypothesis that can't really be proved or disproved. You could form real hypotheses from pieces of the AAH, and really weigh them on evidence. Fish remains, for example, if one can get past taphonomic bias, could tell us something like they did catch fish and eat them. But that does not warrant a leap to an aquatic ape that's spending huge amounts of time immersed. Or a shore ape that must have ocean-derived iodine and omega-3. In its present form, AAH is a house of cards.

As was already pointed out, the agricultural revolution (which is an eyeblink in our evolutionary history) decreased the range and variety of dietary choices for many humans. The reason inland Indonesians are prone to goiter is due to the limited diet (and often iodine-depleted tropical soils, due to problematic farming practices) of modern developing countries. The contrast between coastal dwellers and inlanders is precisely because of what I'm trying to explain. With a modern limited diet, the addition of seafood (or provision of iodized salt) then becomes an important boost in iodine intake. It does not follow from this that the ancient land-based HG diet was also deficient in iodine, nor have you provided the slightest evidence that it was. This underscores the difficulty in deriving a theory of ancient hunter-gatherers from modern post-agrarian societies. HGs ate everything and lived in ecosystems which did not have depleted soils. I notice you wisely backed away from my further comments on omega 3 PUFAs and their prevalence in a variety of land-based sources. As a side note: as any nutrition scientist can tell you, it's not the quantity of O3 that matters but rather its ratio to O6 PUFAs. (humans actually need relatively little PUFA in the diet, with a greater benefit from MUFA) Because the western diet is so very high in O6 now, due to the heavy use of cooking oils like sunflower and canola in processed foods, the recommendations to bring the ratio closer to parity with O3 lead to largish figures for O3. Those figures would not be valid for an ancient HG.

Beef, lamb, eggs, venison, poultry, etc. all contain the more bioavailable forms of O3 PUFAs. And many plant sources of convertible ALA are out there for inland hunter-gatherers when the game is scarce. Iodine, similarly, is in terrestrial animal tissues and also in such plant foods as green beans, zucchinis, kale, spring greens, watercress, strawberries and potatoes. Your claim that seafood and kelp is necessary would suggest that extant inland H-G peoples are all suffering severe deficiency (or were never viable). Which is nonsensical. Iodine deficiency became more common after the advent of agriculture, when some settlements came to eat a diet less varied than the H-G diet. You have no evidence of rampant goiters and less-developed brains among Bedouins, aborigines, Navajos and Bushmen, do you?

argumentum ad veracundum - logical fallacy You have bupkes. Zilch. Nichts. Nada. BTW just ate some walnuts, yum. My body is busy converting the ALA into DHA, an ability which a land based ape needs, and a pescaterian aquatic ape doesn't. Oh, and I had a free range omelette which despite it's completely terrestrial origins seems to have DHA. Who knew?

Pretty much all the AAT claims made here, like the shoreside DHA theory, do not hold up to the null hypothesis test. And so may be dismissed. Meaningless ad hominem. You've got bupkes.

Seems like a garbled reporting of this paper, or one similar: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.08430 where they propose shooting two entangled photons at each side of a retina, if it's sensitive enough (like a frog's or cat's?). The SciAm citation in the OP linked article has this explanation... The GRW model and its many variants posit wave functions collapse spontaneously; the more massive the object in superposition, the faster its collapse. One consequence of this would be that individual particles could remain in superposition for interminably long times whereas macroscopic objects could not. So, the infamous Schrödinger’s cat, in GRW, can never be in a superposition of being dead and alive. Rather it is always either dead or alive, and we only discover its state when we look. Such theories are said to be “observer-independent” models of reality. If a collapse theory such as GRW is the correct description of nature, it would upend almost a century of thought that has tried to argue observation and measurement are central to the making of reality. Crucially, when the superposed photon lands on an eye, GRW would predict ever-so-slightly different photon counts for the left and the right sides of the eye than does standard quantum mechanics. This is because differently sized systems in the various stages of the photon’s processing—such as two light-sensitive proteins in two rod cells versus two assemblies of rod cells and associated nerves in the retina—would exhibit different spontaneous collapse rates after interacting with a photon. Although both Kwiat and Holmes stress it is highly unlikely they will see a difference in their experiments, they acknowledge that any observed deviation would hint at GRW-like theories.

The pressure of a hot air balloon overall is equalized with the outside. The balloon rises due to buoyancy force only on the top hemispheric portion of the enclosure. I.e. the pressure differential is all in that portion as heated air convects up there, IIRC. With a standard teardrop balloon, the top hemispheric area is a cap that the hot gas pushes upwards against due to buoyancy, i.e. that inverted bowl of gas weighs less than the exterior gas being displaced. The tapering fabric of the balloon below that hemisphere of taut material is cut to match how the ropes will hang down during flight. The fabric in that tapering part of the balloon is not under any force (the ropes are taking the force and transferring to the gondola) and is not billowed out or inflated. At least this is what a balloonist in Albuquerque told me. My observation of that type of balloon seems to fit with this account. IOW, it ain't a party balloon.

https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/blue-eyed-humans-have-a-single-common-ancestor The most interesting question this study raises is asked at the end of the article: how did humanity go from zero blue eyes 10,000 YA to now 20-40% of European countries? What was the selective advantage(s)? Aesthetics? Better night vision?

FWIW, I don't think exchem was refusing to engage, I think he was after a different question on what degree a distaste for homosexual activity (and by extension, any invitations to such) could be genetically mediated. It's really a different question than the social ethics of how one should respond to unwanted advances from a same sex person. The simplest hypothesis I can think of is something like this: in the long period of hunter-gatherer bands, there could be some group selective advantage (where general mortality rates are high, and fertility rates quite variable dependent on ups and downs of food acquisition) in bands where young males reject overtures toward boy-on-boy recreation and focus their attentions on fertile women. If there were any genetic predisposition towards a distaste for non-reproductive sex, it could have a small selective effect. I don't know how this hypothesis would be tested, not is it clear if any genetic role would be specifically directed at "distaste" rather than, say, a general conformity to group rules. Maybe it could just be that H-G bands where there was more respect for the tribal elder telling you, "don't put that in the wrong orifice, or the volcano god will drop hot ashes on you," had a slightly higher fertility rate. Really, this whole thread might fare better in the evolutionary biology forum. Or maybe it's too speculative.

Yes. If you turn up the bass.

A problem is that a small greenhouse is not very analogous to the earth's biosphere and atmosphere. Also worth mentioning that the GH effect of CO2 (as neatly explained by exchemist) is amplified by a feedback from an increase in atmospheric water vapor which is also a GHG. Estimated at around 60% of the GH effect. Not sure how you would reproduce that in a greenhouse, let alone all the other mechanisms in play on the earth. Aside from questions of how to simulate an ocean, winds, Coriolis effect, day/night cycles, seasons, atmospheric particulates, clouds, etc. there is also the fact that a greenhouse is already structurally a, erm, greenhouse, rather than a sphere with an open layer of atmosphere. My guess is that a "mini Earth" is terribly difficult to make in a lab.

What I find hard to believe is that Buzz Aldrin keeps remarrying and is now reported to have done so again on Jan. 20, his 93rd birthday. As Samuel Johnson said, remarriage is the triumph of hope over experience.

A decipede. (it's a ten-footer)

We all have impressions of how others tick that may not be easily answered with evidence. I have no idea if social science based surveys have been done on this, or what percent of straight males are uncomfortable (phobia might be too strong a term) with sexual advances from men. That's probably more a matter of social conditioning in childhood, and defining one's identity within a culture, than any other factor. As a midwestern straight male, I would definitely be nervous about such an advance while recognizing that a citizen of ancient Athens would likely just get a pleasant ego boost.

Culture war over talking candies and Tucker Carlson mourns the loss of sexually alluring candies.... https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7gzqa/mms-says-its-spokescandies-are-retiring-amid-conservative-culture-war

As Coyne points out, science is supposed to be where you leave your identities at the door. Where the Carolinian zealots lost me was here: What? FFS, the entire arc of the Enlightenment and its valuation of reason and science and egalitarianism was AWAY from enslavement and exploitation. That it took a couple centuries for the "female-bodied" (dear God what an idiotic phrase) to reap the benefits of this arc is an indication of the sluggishness inherent in vast social change not an indictment of Enlightenment values.

Anarcho-syndicalism...a method for workers in capitalist society to gain control of an economy and thus control influence in broader society. The end goal of syndicalism is to abolish the wage system, regarding it as wage slavery. Anarcho-syndicalist theory generally focuses on the labour movement. Reflecting the anarchist philosophy from which it draws its primary inspiration, anarcho-syndicalism is centred on the idea that power corrupts and that any hierarchy that cannot be ethically justified must be dismantled. The basic principles of anarcho-syndicalism are solidarity, direct action (action undertaken without the intervention of third parties such as politicians, bureaucrats and arbitrators) and direct democracy, or workers' self-management. ...creating an alternative cooperative economic system with democratic values and production centred on meeting human needs. Anarcho-syndicalists perceive the primary purpose of the state as the defence of private property in the forms of capital goods and thereby of economic, social and political privilege.... (from picky weedia) A Rolling Stone says, "hey you, get off of my cloud!" while a Scotsman says, "Hey McLeod, get off of my ewe!"

https://coinsweekly.com/the-forgotten-d-day-10-versus-12/ Seems like the Brits had some base 12 going on for a while. Divvying up money would be easier, due to the large number of nontrivial factors.

Not sure this opinion is supported by studies finding a lower average IQ in impoverished countries. Clearly nourishment, societal development and education opportunities make some difference. Also worth noting that temperaments that are anxious when any part of testing is timed may, however deep their minds, do less well on IQ tests that have timed problem solving portions. (I know this applies to chess, too: there are brilliant chess players who avoid timed chess because time pressure clouds their thinking)

My observations growing up were that certain traits (task persistence, impulse control) seemed to correlate with functional intelligence. For example, kids who took music lessons early in life and responded well to strong encouragement to buckle down and practice, tended to be smart and do well in school. (similar with families that pushed reading time in evenings and limited tv) Probably less because of inherent neurological advantage and more because they could transfer the learning skills acquired early in music training to other fields. We might do well, so far as children are concerned, with focusing on what promotes elongated attention span, creative resourcefulness and task persistence. And do so without stifling social interaction and blocking emotional intelligence. (maybe why music kids seemed generally smart, because music has both task persistence challenges and built-in social interaction)

The problem, well documented now, of tree planting programs is that they are often greenwashing - species are planted without consideration of their hardiness and water/soil requirements in relation to the bioregion. There's a brief period of being attentive, then most of the saplings die off. A better approach is restoring ecosystems, sometimes called rewilding... https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/19/the-promise-and-the-politics-of-rewilding-india What do you think of massive increases in microplastic pollution, as the balls erode over time? Microplastic pollution is already a major global problem, and threat to oceanic food chains (including phytoplankton).