For those curious, it went on the market today. Our long national nightmare is almost over. I’m flying down there tomorrow for a couple days for some final things, then up to DC for the Galloway Symposium on Space Law.
Government Dietary Guidelines
…are just plain wrong.
Nice to see op-eds like this.
“Neanderthals And Humans”
Apparently they got it on more than we thought, but Neanderthals were humans (or they wouldn’t have been able to interbreed). In fact, last time I checked, they were also Homo sapiens, but a different subspecies, “neanderthalensis,” rather than Homo sapiens sapiens (modern humans).
Sodom And Gomorrah?
This looks like a very interesting paper, suggesting that a Tunguska-like event wiped out the ancient Middle East, and could explain a lot of myths. (Ctrl-F for “Tunguska” to see the specific abstract.)
And of course, it has current implications that we’ve been lucky, and dodging bullets.
[Late-afternoon update]
Forbes has a story.
Social Psychologists
Are they impeded in their work by their refusal to accept evolutionary psychology?
In short, yes. It’s part of the Left’s war on science, and its war on human nature. If people aren’t tabula rasas, how are we to create the New Soviet Man?
[Update a few minutes later]
This is interesting:
On an optimistic note, Buss and von Hippel point out that their survey found that a substantial minority of social psychologists did endorse findings rooted in evolutionary biology. But still there is a long way to go until the schism in psychological and theoretical perspectives is bridged – a situation they believe is likely made worse by the lack of proper training in evolutionary sciences in psychology*. “Not a single degree-granting institution in the United States, to our knowledge, requires even a single course in evolutionary biology as part of a degree in psychology,” they write, adding that this is “an astonishing educational gap that disconnects psychology from the rest of the life sciences.”
I hadn’t been aware of this, but it’s one more reason to not take the field seriously.
The Fourth National Climate Assessment
Anthony Watts is having fun with it.
I continue to be amazed at people who continue to attempt to compare landing a probe on another planet to predicting something as complex as the climate and the economy eight decades from now.
[Thursday-morning update]
Bjorn Lomborg: What the media got all wrong about the report.
Pretty much everything.
[Update Friday morning]
“The NCA’s projections are simply not borne out by the data.”
Unexpectedly!
[Bumped]
[Late-morning update]
How the Trump administration blew it on the NCA:
The Administration now has a problem since some Democrats say they will use the report to oppose a number of the Trump Administration’s attempts to weaken a number of the Obama climate regulations that they have proposed, including using the report to persuade courts to reinstate the original Obama Administration regulations. All this was quite foreseeable. So why did the Administration publish the report without reviewing it? Was it because it was not paying attention to what the bureaucracy was doing? This is hard to believe, but appears now to be the case. One obvious possibility is that they wanted to avoid the charge that they had “corrupted” the report writing process. But the costs are likely to be high. Another possibility is that Acting Administrator Wheeler did not want to endure questions about possible intervention at his confirmation hearing. But the evidence appears to suggest inattention by the Trump Administration was the major problem.
You don’t say.
Welcome To The Narcisscene
This is from last summer, but I finally got around to reading it. I’m wondering what the implications are for space colonies, potential botanical gardens and zoos in the solar system, and the O’Neillian/Bezos vision of earth as a nature park.
[Update a while later]
In reading this:
Because one cannot conceive of the length of geologic time, one cannot comprehend the brevity of the past 75 years in relation to it. The Anthropocene, if officially recognized, would be inconceivably ephemeral, momentary — indeed, instantaneous — existing only in real time. But it will endure until the Götterdämmerung, that is, until humans go extinct; it will run to the end of recorded history — turning the hourglass of geologic time upside down.
…I’m reminded of people who believe that every hurricane or fire is some unprecedented event, caused by our SUVs, when most are unaware of what happened a century ago, let alone millennia.
Junk Science
It’s everywhere, and the media eats it up.
The Great Recession Bailouts
General Motors is a demonstration that they didn’t work.
Of course they didn’t. The point was to bail out the unions, not create viable companies.
Why Are We Still Fat?
This article is sort of amazing in its complete lack of discussion of the keto revolution, and its old timey referrals to “diet” and “exercise” and calories.