Have you ever wondered why we don’t find fossils in the Appalachian mountains? The truth is, we do, they’re just not the kind of fossils you might think of—there are no mammals, no dinosaurs, no reptiles. There’s something else entirely. ��
— Alex (he/him) is fighting for trans kids ⚧��️*⚧️ (@AlexPetrovnia) July 15, 2021
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Peering from the top of Mount Stupid
In one of the later maps (which I can't link directly to to save my fucking life ), he shows how Florida and the gulf coast got basically added up into the southeast United States at one point, which hugely clarifies this other thing I seen about how the middle of Alabama used to be a coastline. (Previously I had been like "sure okay if you say so but I'm not entirely grokking it")
In one of the later maps (which I can't link directly to to save my fucking life ), he shows how Florida and the gulf coast got basically added up into the southeast United States at one point, which hugely clarifies this other thing I seen about how the middle of Alabama used to be a coastline. (Previously I had been like "sure okay if you say so but I'm not entirely grokking it")
A reply added this explanation for that interesting map:
Quote:
Someone posted this on some map group I'm in on facebook. It had this as a caption.
"If (like me) you enjoy looking at maps, you might sometimes wonder why a map looks a the way it does. The events leading to a certain demographic being more common here, or a border being drawn there, can often be very complex, and fascinating. Here I’ve gathered 6 maps of the US state of Alabama. Together, these maps tell a story that links a coastline from the time of the dinosaurs, to modern political demographics, via one of the darkest periods of American history.
Map 1 shows us the Cretaceous sediments of Alabama. These sediments are rocks and minerals laid down along the swampy southern coast of the continent of Appalachia, which existed around 100 million years ago. North America had not yet formed at this time.
Map 2 shows the location of Blackland Prairie soil. This soil is known for its high fertility, as a result of the nutrients deposited during the Cretaceous period.
Map 3 shows us modern farm sizes in Alabama. The largest farms (shown in red) can be found in areas with the most fertile soil. This shows us how economically important Blackland Prairie soil is.
Map 4 shows slave populations according to the 1860 census. At that time, slaves accounted for 45% of the state’s population. Only 3% of the state population was made up of free Black citizens. In the darkest regions of the map, enslaved people accounted for over 80% of the population. Slaves mainly worked on cotton plantations, and these plantations were most common in the areas with the most fertile soil.
Map 5 shows us the modern Black population of Alabama. The darkest red areas show more than 44% of the population of the region is Black. Despite the 150 years between these maps, these is still a close correlation between the historic slave populations, and the modern Black populations.
And finally map 6 shows us the results of the 2020 election. Areas with large Black populations are much more likely to vote for the Democratic party (shown in blue). This trend continues to the east and west of Alabama, along the so called “Black Belt” of the southern USA, and along the buried coastline of the Cretaceous continent of Appalachia.
When we look at maps and data about the modern world, it’s easy to forget that everything about our world has been dictated and shaped by the events of history, and prehistory. From ancient continents to terrible atrocities, our world is a product of its past, and understanding that past can be key to helping us better understand the present."
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Peering from the top of Mount Stupid
Random thoughts here, but it’s weird to watch science educators fuck up on educating people on science, it’s both a bit disappointing, but also strange because it’s a minor fuck up in actual science education, no one said to exterminate the jews or defended their child sex trafficking buddy or something. What even is *minor* disappointment anyway? I’m so used to people showing themselves as complete dicks.
Steve Mould and Electroboom are pulling from the verratasium school of science education and having a gentlemen’s bet argument over “the mould effect” both publishing videos that are teaching people that science is about competing and being right, not about finding the truth. Worse yet neither of them explained the full phenomenon.
Very shortly, the polymer syphon effect is when you poor a long chain polymer and it continues dragging itself up and over the lip of the glass. The mould effect is that when done with a metal rod and ball chain the chain goes way up and over the glass, to the tune of a meter or more if the chain falls far enough.
Related to science education and how I think smart phones could revolutionize it, a question to ponder with a bad drawing,
A plastic bottle is placed on its side against a block with some water in it, the rest is filled with an air fuel mixture. The cap contains a hole from which it is lit. What happens?
(I’ve done this with my crap phone slomo and was surprised by the results.)
To triple post as this is indeed drive by science, not drive by questions, the answer, with slo mo footage.
I was quite surprised at how smoothly the fire wave moves above the water, barely a ripple, until finally the atmosphere reasserts itself crushing the bottle.
Take away the block in front and it goes zoom, but more than that, this is a great demonstration of objects at rest. The pressure from the fire isn’t so much pushing the water out the back as it’s pushing the lighter bottle *off* the water and the bottle and finally cap happens to get in the way.
In the Galapagos there is an island called Daphne Major and it’s pretty perfect to study finches because it’s isolated and small and very few animals live there. The finches and the plants they eat.
When I took evolutionary biology, The Beak of the Finch was one of our supplemental texts.
So when I saw this headline that scientists observed speciation, I wasn’t surprised to see it was done on Daphne Major.
Quote:
The arrival 36 years ago of a strange bird to a remote island in the Galápagos archipelago has provided direct genetic evidence of a novel way in which new species arise.
On Nov. 23 in the journal Science, researchers from Princeton University and Uppsala University in Sweden report that the newcomer belonging to one species mated with a member of another species resident on the island, giving rise to a new species that today consists of roughly 30 individuals.
The study comes from work conducted on Darwin’s finches, which live on the Galápagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean. The remote location has enabled researchers to study the evolution of biodiversity due to natural selection under pristine conditions.
The direct observation of the origin of this new species occurred during field work carried out over the last four decades by B. Rosemary Grant and Peter Grant, a wife-and-husband team of scientists from Princeton, on the small island of Daphne Major.
Homoploid hybrid speciation in animals has been inferred frequently from patterns of variation, but few examples have withstood critical scrutiny. Here we report a directly documented example, from its origin to reproductive isolation. An immigrant Darwin’s finch to Daphne Major in the Galápagos archipelago initiated a new genetic lineage by breeding with a resident finch (Geospiza fortis). Genome sequencing of the immigrant identified it as a G. conirostris male that originated on Espańola >100 kilometers from Daphne Major. From the second generation onward, the lineage bred endogamously and, despite intense inbreeding, was ecologically successful and showed transgressive segregation of bill morphology. This example shows that reproductive isolation, which typically develops over hundreds of generations, can be established in only three.
Every place on Earth has a distinct chemical signature based on differences in its geology. The ratios of various isotopes of elements such as strontium and oxygen in the bedrock and water create a unique profile specific to that location that remains consistent over millennia, and is incorporated into soil and plants. As mammoths grazed on the Arctic plains, these isotopic signatures were integrated into their ever-growing tusks, creating a permanent record of the animals’ whereabouts with almost daily resolution.
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The researchers used lasers to sample the tusk’s chemical composition at approximately 340,000 points along the full length of the cone tips. They then compared the isotopic profiles at each of these data points with a geological map of Alaska and northwest Canada, and used a computer algorithm to map out the most probable routes for the mammoth to have travelled, backtracking from where its remains were found.
It seems to have wandered over a really wide area, but then for reasons unknown stayed with in a much smaller area in the last year or two and died of starvation at a relatively young age.
Quote:
Scientists estimate that mammoths usually lived into their sixties or seventies, but at only 28 years old, this mammoth was starting to die. Over the last year of its life, the levels of nitrogen isotopes in its tusk started to spike, a pattern that indicates starvation in mammals.
I came across this askhistorians pist outlining the hypothesis that syphilis was a new world disease.
Diamond in guns, germs and steel mentioned it, but this is probably the most succinct and up to date explanation that I’ve read.
Quote:
There is a popular theory in the medical community that Syphilis originated in the New World and was brought back to Europe by either the returning Columbian explorers or by the captive native American people that they brought with them.
This theory is supported by documents belonging to Fernandez de Oviedo and Ruy Diaz de Isla, two physicians with Spanish origins who were present at the moment when Christopher Columbus returned from America. The former, sent by King Ferdinand of Spain in the New World, confirms that the disease he had encountered for the first time in Europe was familiar at that time to the indigenous people who had already developed treatment methods.
Ruy Diaz de Isla acknowledges syphilis as an “unknown disease, so far not seen and never described”, that had onset in Barcelona in 1493 and originated in Espańola Island. Ruy Diaz de Isla is also the one that states in a manuscript that Pinzon de Palos, the pilot of Columbus, and also other members of the crew already suffered from syphilis on their return from the New World.
Opponents of the Colombian origination theory have attempted to disprove it through use of radio-carbon dating on skeletons with lesions unique to the disease. This has proven problematic in that no European skeletons with the lesions have been "reliably" dated before 1492. New World skeletons show the lesioning as far back as several thousand years.
Opponents of the theory point to 16 cases of skeletal lesions dated to the middle 1400s as evidence that syphilis was endemic to Europe prior to the return of Columbus. Those cases were revisited in 2011 and found that they all came from communities with significant seafood diets. This lead to the possibility of "old carbon" where older carbon from deep ocean upwelling is added to the community. This additional error brings the dating window inconclusive before 1492.
The first well documented outbreak of syphilis occured during the battle of Fornova in the war of Napolitano Succession, which occurred in July of 1495. It is also recorded that syphilis was at the time significantly more deadly. This would be consistent with new introduction of the pathogens to a group with no prior exposure to the disease, similar to the introduction of smallpox to the New World by Europeans.
In 2008 genetic sequencing of modern syphilis led researchers to tie the disease to an ancestral precursor disease "yaws" that is endemic to South America.
The genetic evidence, outbreak timing, and lack of historic contravening skeletal evidence before the 15th century means that Columbian exchange is the prevailing current understanding for European origin of syphilis.
So yes it does appear that there was exchange of diseases during the European conquest of the Americas, but smallpox being a respiratory droplet spread viral disease and syphilis being a sexually transmitted bacterial disease means that there was not parity with the virulence and spread of the exchanged diseases
They are developing a vaccine for the covid vaccine.
The covid vaccine stimulates the immune response, sometimes too much, so you will be able to get a vaccine which mutes that response.
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What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. ... The origin of myths is explained in this way.
The double pendulum is a famous example of chaos theory, where a small change in the starting condition can balloon out into a completely different movement in a short time.
Ten thousand and a million pendulums all started very close but not exactly in the same spot. It’s fascinating how the in phase to out of phase transition happens all at once.
Compared to the almost-paranoia about malaria in Britain and in South Africa if you say you are going to an area where malaria is endemic - everyone including the doctors insists malaria pills are mandatory and everyone except the doctors has horror stories about one or other type of malaria pill - the situation in west and east Africa is that's just what life is like. I've had customers in Uganda and Kenya say "sorry, can we postpone our meeting to next week? I have malaria".
Reducing the prevalence would be a huge benefit in those regions.
If we are in a simulation then 'simulating the universe' has no meaning.
I watched a show on cosmology that showed the results of a simulation based on the BB an the Standard Model. Crude galaxy looking objects appeared. It took a long time to run.
An actual simulation down to the particle level would be difficult. Regardless of the form of the computer C is still going to limit speeds I would think. And also energy requirements.
If the unversed is of infinite extents as I think it is, then a simulation is impossible.
The idea of being in simulation sounds like a modern form of looking for a god.
If we are in a simulation then 'simulating the universe' has no meaning.
Why? Sure, it's (probably) impossible to simulate the entire universe inside the same universe, or even to simulate a part of it with full accuracy, but approximate simulations for large-scale behaviour are clearly possible. Why would be inside a simulation change that?
Quote:
Originally Posted by steve_bank
The idea of being in simulation sounds like a modern form of looking for a god.
With you on that. "Why these initial / boundary conditions? Why these physical laws?" "The mind of The Simulator is unknowable."
If we are in a simulation then 'simulating the universe' has no meaning.
Why? Sure, it's (probably) impossible to simulate the entire universe inside the same universe, or even to simulate a part of it with full accuracy, but approximate simulations for large-scale behaviour are clearly possible. Why would be inside a simulation change that?
Quote:
Originally Posted by steve_bank
The idea of being in simulation sounds like a modern form of looking for a god.
With you on that. "Why these initial / boundary conditions? Why these physical laws?" "The mind of The Simulator is unknowable."
For me the universe seen and unseen just is, there is no why. Laws and scientific models are just models created by our brains.
The use of the word law can be misleading. The universe does not obey our laws of science, laws of sconce are descriptions of the universe always subject to revision.
Re: Drive by science
), he shows how Florida and the gulf coast got basically added up into the southeast United States at one point, which hugely clarifies this other thing I seen about how the middle of Alabama used to be a coastline. (Previously I had been like "sure okay if you say so but I'm not entirely grokking it")
steve_bank! How did you find 
?
"The mind of The Simulator is unknowable."
Linear Mode
