Petrified bears
England's oldest tourist attraction turns teddy bears into stone, notes Tom Scott:
Guardian on free will
The Guardian asks whether people have free will. Excerpt:
Consider the case of Charles Whitman. Just after midnight on 1 August 1966, Whitman – an outgoing and apparently stable 25-year-old former US Marine – drove to his mother’s apartment in Austin, Texas, where he stabbed her to death. He returned home, where he killed his wife in the same manner. Later that day, he took an assortment of weapons to the top of a high building on the campus of the University of Texas, where he began shooting randomly for about an hour and a half. By the time Whitman was killed by police, 12 more people were dead, and one more died of his injuries years afterwards – a spree that remains the US’s 10th worst mass shooting.
Within hours of the massacre, the authorities discovered a note that Whitman had typed the night before. “I don’t quite understand what compels me to type this letter,” he wrote. “Perhaps it is to leave some vague reason for the actions I have recently performed. I don’t really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can’t recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts [which] constantly recur, and it requires a tremendous mental effort to concentrate on useful and progressive tasks … After my death I wish that an autopsy would be performed to see if there is any visible physical disorder.” Following the first two murders, he added a coda: “Maybe research can prevent further tragedies of this type.” An autopsy was performed, revealing the presence of a substantial brain tumour, pressing on Whitman’s amygdala, the part of the brain governing “fight or flight” responses to fear.
Boycott China Olympics?
TLDR news wonders whether countries will boycott the 2022 winter Olympics due to be held in Beijing:
How wokeness updates its narrative
BJ Campbell looks at how wokeness updates its narrative:
The Woke don’t say they’re woke. If you ask them whether they’re woke or not, they’ll say “there is no such thing as Woke. We are just following the basic rules of human decency.” But Dolezal was following the rules, and then the rules shifted underneath her, and she was nailed to a Woke Cross for violating a rule that wasn’t a rule until it was.
This, to borrow a term, is problematic.
It’s unassailably true that cultures evolve over time. Slavery was a part of basic human decency until it wasn’t. Genocide was practiced by cultures across the globe until the 20th Century, and was practiced several notable times during it, sometimes eliciting a global response and sometimes a blind eye. Human sacrifice was practiced as recently as the 1500s here in North America, and if you challenged the “basic human decency” of human sacrifice you were likely to get hauled up on a pyramid.
I am reminded of Iain Banks' Culture novels where there's a sapient warship called Just Another Victim Of The Ambient Morality.
Sperm counts falling
TLDR news notes that sperm counts more than halved between 1973 and 2011. Chemicals such as perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances may be partly responsible. These chemicals also allegedly shrink penises.
Big Tech contra democracy
Social media algorithms threaten democracy, experts tell senators:
Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president for content policy, said it would be “self-defeating” for social media companies to direct users toward extreme content.
But Tristan Harris, a former industry executive who became a data ethicist and now runs the Center for Humane Technology, told the committee that no matter what steps the companies took, their core business would still depend on steering users into individual “rabbit holes of reality.”
“It’s almost like having the heads of Exxon, BP, and Shell here and asking about what you’re doing to responsibly stop climate change,” Harris said. “Their business model is to create a society that’s addicted, outraged, polarized, performative and disinformed.”
3D-printed house
Tenants move in to Europe's first 3D-printed house, in Eindhoven in the Netherlands:
those behind the Dutch house, which boasts 94sq meters of living space, are said to have pipped their rivals to the post by being the first legally habitable and commercially rented property where the load-bearing walls have been made using a 3D printer nozzle.
“This is also the first one which is 100% permitted by the local authorities and which is habited by people who actually pay for living in this house,” said Bas Huysmans, chief executive of Weber Benelux, a construction offshoot of its French parent company Saint-Gobain.
Wings contra Sturgeon
Stuart Campbell isn't a big fan of Nicola Sturgeon, saying she has failed to persuade Scots of the case for independence:
Building the case for independence is literally [Sturgeon's] job, and she’s now been doing it for six and a half years. So how much progress have we made?
The first 10 opinion polls after Sturgeon took charge of the SNP two months after the 2014 indyref returned an average Yes vote (excluding Don’t Knows) of 45.6% and an average No lead of 1.1 points.
The 10 most recent polls have found, on the same measure, an average Yes vote of 44.9% and an average No lead of 1.2 points. For mathematically challenged readers that’s a decrease of 0.7% in the Yes vote and an increase of 0.1% in the Unionist lead.
(If you try to help Sturgeon out by taking 20 polls rather than 10, to include much more of the recent pro-Yes sequence, her first 20 average to 45.5% and her most recent 20 average to 45.45%, still a decrease.)
[...] The cold statistical facts are that Nicola Sturgeon, with every political advantage imaginable landing in her lap and no domestic opposition, has taken independence backwards.
Europa Universalis 4
In the first of a series of posts, Bret Devereaux asks how historically realistic the game Europa Universalis 4 is. Europa Universalis IV gives the player a states-eye-view of things:
I want to expand on some of the ways that EU4‘s focus on states distorts its image of history. We’ve essentially now discussed how that vision of history tends to hide the agency of things which are not states (institutions, peoples, polities, movements, etc), but it also tends to wildly overstate the power of states. And it begins with the state’s power to see.
One facet of this expression of state power (and player convenience) is the absolutely vast amount of information the player has. […] the player has effectively perfect information about their own state.
... but EU4 does not show the underlying reality, that a state's efforts to make its territory more "legible" and increase the tax base, often meant oppressing the population:
There is no sense that sometimes increased state power is actually bad for the people that the state nominally protects or works for, even though as Scott points out with case study after case study, historically rising state administrative capacity could be very bad (though it could also be quite good) for the subjects of those states. Instead, these interactions are viewed entirely through the state’s eyes, where increased legibility leads to increased state power, which is good.
/end/
That poor man would have been detected and helped by the NHS in any civilized country?