Has Trump considered making the ship look like a big horse?

Does this solve Eigen’s paradox?

Any group can be empowering for its members. If it’s a group that already has an unequal amount of power in society, exclusive meetings will tend to exacerbate the inequality. But if it’s a relatively powerless group, it can counter the imbalance.

I studied linguistics in the 90s, and that was the general attitude about Chomsky then (specifically universal grammar and to some extent X-bar theory—his work on generative syntax and formal grammar from the 50s was still considered foundational).

But I’ve lately discovered the research of the Minimalist program that he was working on for the last few decades, and that seems pretty solid and groundbreaking even now.

Chomsky’s attitude seems representative of a lot of men and women (most of whom were younger than him) who had always described themselves as feminists, but who had similar feelings that #metoo was unfounded hysteria.

Epstein was capitalizing on that and promoting it, not just with Chomsky but with a lot of other academics outside of his usual circle.

What I find most damning in the correspondence isn’t Chomsky’s defense of Epstein—he seems to have genuinely believed in his innocence—so much as Chomsky’s subscribing to the framework that the #metoo movement/“cancel culture” and associated wave of sexual assault allegations was a baseless collective “hysteria”. Valeria’s statement implies that this was a stance Chomsky arrived at independently of Epstein.

In terms of software, yes. But HA can be run on nearly anything—there’s no need to buy their hardware to use it.

Having a world map that has pins on it based on location EXIF data in photos

Don’t you get that in NC already, if you go to Maps > My Photos ?

You can have a phenomenon that looks like noise at small sample sizes, but becomes obvious when the size increases.

For one small business, a 5% change in productivity for one day might be business as usual, while for a nation it would be alarming.

That, and Spain (or whoever else) wouldn’t be coming in fresh off the surrender of Granada, with the attitude that all non-Christian states must be conquered as a matter of principle.

Columbus’ return to Spain.

His failure to return discourages further attempts for a while; and when contact is eventually made, it isn’t Spain in the immediate aftermath of the Reconquista looking to continue its momentum.

Meanwhile, the New World is made aware of Europe and perhaps acquires some resistance to Old World diseases before any larger confrontations.

Mysterious micro-burrows in desert marble and limestone were probably made by microbes that lived millions of years ago.

“Millions of years ago”—that narrows it down to 99.95% of the history of life on earth.

Musk gave him the AI that colored it for him.

“Day one” was Groundhog Day.

Orbán also revealed before Thursday’s EU summit that Putin had warned the Hungarian leader that Moscow would take countermeasures if the EU tapped Russian assets to help Ukraine. […] “So we Hungarians have protected ourselves,” Orbán said.

Submitting to extortion is a dubious policy; advertising your susceptibility to extortion is practically an invitation.

“Archaeologists Uncover Evidence of First Archaeologists”

Who picked the name “Vultr” for a hosting provider?

The linked Popular Mechanics article cites this Smithsonian article.

The Smithsonian article cites this National Geographic article and this Science Advances article (among others).

The National Geographic article is paywalled.

The Science Advances research article seems to be the original source—here’s the abstract:

The nature of human dispersals out of Africa has remained elusive because of the poor resolution of paleoecological data in direct association with remains of the earliest non-African people. Here, we report hominin and non-hominin mammalian tracks from an ancient lake deposit in the Arabian Peninsula, dated within the last interglacial. The findings, it is argued, likely represent the oldest securely dated evidence for Homo sapiens in Arabia. The paleoecological evidence indicates a well-watered semi-arid grassland setting during human movements into the Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia. We conclude that visitation to the lake was transient, likely serving as a place to drink and to forage, and that late Pleistocene human and mammalian migrations and landscape use patterns in Arabia were inexorably linked.

It’s like the Sokal affair in reverse.

For the new study, she and 16 graduate and undergraduate students gathered nearly 20,000 photographs of raccoons across the contiguous U.S. from the community science platform iNaturalist. The team found that raccoons in urban environments had a snout that was 3.5 percent shorter than that of their rural cousins.

Or maybe people in cities take more photos of “cuter” animals?