More from Melting Asphalt
Harry Stevens at The Washington Post recently published a very elegant simulation of how a disease like COVID-19 spreads. If you haven't already, I highly recommend checking it out. Today I want to follow up with something I've been working… Read more ›
Background: This is an interactive blog post. I wanted to host it here, but don't know how to make it play nice with WordPress. So I decided to host it on another part of the site instead. Click here for… Read more ›
A mashup of ideas from David Deutsch, Geoffrey Miller, and Richard Prum, with a little César Hidalgo thrown in for good measure. —— Of all the problems that can plague a discussion of beauty — and there are several — perhaps… Read more ›
It's finally here! The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life — my first book, coauthored with Robin Hanson — is now widely available. You can find the ebook version on Kindle, Google Play, and iBooks. It's also… Read more ›
I've long turned up my nose at sermons and related forms of mass moralizing. One reason, quite simply, is that they bore me. Honesty good. Violence bad. My eyes glaze over. Empathy, rah! Racism, boo! Please, don't we know this… Read more ›
More in science
I’m an Australian father of four, living in the US. Something of a corner case. Nevertheless, getting my kids Australian citizenship by descent, and then Australian passports so we can fly home legally, has kicked off a carnival of errors with a very dark side. Australia is generally thought of as a developed western liberal country with relatively high state capacity. And I have generally found that at least state government services, now administered through centralized offices, have become more efficient over time. Passport applications for children living overseas, however, remain a time machine with a difficult security overhang. Australian …
Researchers created a dataset of photos of thousands of paper-thin slices of a male and female cadaver to create one of the most detailed datasets about the human body.
In a remote corner of the driest state in the country, Anne Heggli's team has been keeping watch over some of Earth’s oldest beings. Since 02012, Heggli’s NevCAN network has recorded conditions at the Nevada Bristlecone Preserve every eight minutes. The result is more than 120 million data points and a high-resolution portrait of how a bristlecone pine thrives. Paleoclimatologist Adam Csank showed how bristlecone microcores reveal the droughts and floods these trees survived long before us, a history that fine-tunes models of what's ahead. Artist and philosopher Jonathon Keats went further. “The most accurate clock,” he said, “is a tree.” His monumental artwork Centuries of the Bristlecone keeps bristlecone time, a clock calibrated to the trees' own growth over millennia. Together, Heggli, Keats and Csank made the case for long science: patient, continuous observation that will help us answer future urgent questions. “Data at this resolution,” Csank said, “is like a Rosetta Stone” for understanding nature’s resilience. At fourteen years young, the bristlecone record is just beginning, Heggli said, but it already holds the key to questions like these: How will bristlecones adapt? What happens when the droughts and floods they've weathered for millennia arrive faster and more frequently? “We can't answer the questions if we're not watching,” said Csank. “We are the stewards of this data,” Heggli concluded. “This is why we need long science.”
Prende y se apaga sola, sale después de hora. CHARLY GARCÍA La máquina de ser feliz I’ve learned to tolerate them, and sometimes even like them, but Zoom meetings are weird. Even in familiar contexts: I have weekly check-ins with … Continue reading →