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bitcuriouson Clues to disappearance of North America's large mammals 50k years ago

> Things like the creation of the Amazon rainforest

Kind of a ridiculous myth when you consider the diversity of life uniquely adapted to the various micro environments of the amazon rainforest. It would be multi-million-year terraforming project.

bitcuriouson Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel

The US hasn't been especially loud about it, but it's been a dominant force in 'internet warfare.'

bitcuriouson Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

Can you speak more to your perspective? The only way I can understand your take is to say that the West Bank is rightfully Israeli and therefore its residents should be citizens with voting rights. Are you opposed to an independent Palestinian state?

bitcuriouson Most of Europe is glowing pink under the aurora

> Ok why is it that some people say northern lights look EXACTLY like these spectacular photos, and others say in real life they are actually barely visible and you need a camera and very dark skies?

There is a lot of variability in people’s night vision. I viewed this past aurora with a friend, we went to a relatively dark sky location and let our eyes adjust for 30 minutes. In that setting, I could make out the green and red coloration while she mostly saw it as a while glow.

bitcuriouson Israel shuts down local Al Jazeera offices

> https://www.memri.org/reports/al-jazeera-arabic-qatari-owned...

This is obviously a source with a considerable bias, but they link to many concerning examples of Al Jazeera reporting. I personally don’t speak Arabic but anecdotally I’ve heard that the translations are accurate, the bias is manifest in choosing what to translate. This example was especially concerning, exacerbating civilian deaths:

> Al-Jazeera Fabricates Information Designed To Thwart Israel's Instructions To The Gaza Population

>Al-Jazeera broadcast footage of bodies of civilians strewn over a road, presenting them as victims of an Israeli attack against people who had abided by the IDF instructions to evacuate to southern Gaza.[91] Israel in fact had secured safe passage to the south for those civilians who wished to go there, while Hamas exerted pressure on them to remain put in order to use civilians as human shields.[92]

bitcuriouson Israel shuts down local Al Jazeera offices

>I’m not aware of any such ratio used by the IDF.

The IDF has a robust decision making process, in excess of a single “ratio” approach. Here is an article that talks about an aspect of this:

http://law-disrupted.fm/idf-lawyer-advises-war-gaza-military...

>> They also discuss the three cardinal principles of targeting: distinction (which prohibits intentionally targeting civilians or civilian objects), precautions (which requires taking all feasible measures to mitigate civilian harm), and proportionality (which for each individual attack requires balancing the anticipated military advantage against the expected civilian harm) and the rules, procedures, and policies the IDF has in place to follow these principles in every attack.

> Given that Israel also does not seem to acknowledge the 30,000+ lower bound on total deaths from IDF attacks in Gaza, it's entirely possible that Israel's ratio could be as low as 2 civilians per combatant in aggregate. But it’s worth noting that this would still be much higher than anything used by any “Western” military

The most comparable recent US engagement was destroying ISIS in Mosul. The US had a 2.5:1 civilian combatant casualty ratio. Source: https://twitter.com/SpencerGuard/status/1786612914117349769#

bitcuriouson Silk Helped the Armies of Genghis Khan Conquer Asia

Note the context: I corrected your use of “Russians” in favor of “Soviets.”

bitcuriouson Silk Helped the Armies of Genghis Khan Conquer Asia

The Soviets* pretty clearly did not kill all of the civilians in Germany, nor did they attempt to. Unlike the Germans themselves, who exterminated whole towns and had a plan that involved total genocide of their conquered peoples. Pretty wild to miss such an obvious example.

*really neither the sins nor the wins in WWII belong exclusively to the Russians. Another subtlety misleading aspect of this post.

bitcuriouson Silk Helped the Armies of Genghis Khan Conquer Asia

The typical phrase is “infantry wins battles, logistics wins wars.” It gets at the same idea as you.

https://www.czdefence.com/article/infantry-wins-battles-logi....

bitcuriouson Google workers fired for protesting Israeli contract file NLRB complaint

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/29/nyregion/college-protests...

A fairly credible source discussing just this question. A pretty blatant example is a linked video of protestors intimidating three Jewish students while claiming that they are “zionists” without any evidence except the students’ Jewishness.

bitcuriouson The beautiful dissociation of the Japanese language

Interesting article. The history of the various scripts actually does have at least a limited parallel in the world - Ancient Egypt.

>Although many people think of Egyptian hieroglyphs as logographic or pictographic, it actually combines symbols for entire words with symbols for individual sounds. That is, it is a system that is partly logographic and partly alphabetic. It can be called logophonetic. [0]

This evolution continued for a while yet! The monumental hieroglyphs into a more easy to write cursive called "hieratic". The hieratic script further evolved into "demotic" - this was closer to a real alphabet, with directionality and ease of writing driving this change. The hieroglyphic roots are essentially lost at this point. Demotic then mixed with the greek alphabet by the Coptic community into the Coptic script!

> Generally, Hieroglyphics were used for monumental inscriptions and decorative texts, and Hieratic was used for administrative texts which placed more importance in content than appearance, which were written by hand, and which needed to be written quickly. Demotic writing developed around 600 BC. It was derived from Hieratic writing, but developed into a highly cursive form so that the pictographic element of some symbols was lost. Although many single symbols were still used to write whole words or concepts, the symbol did not necessarily visually resemble the concept it represented. [1]

Script comparison (see page 5): https://www.egyptologyforum.org/bbs/Stableford/Roberson,%20A...

Hieratic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieratic

Demotic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demotic_(Egyptian)

Coptic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_script

[0] https://web.mnstate.edu/houtsli/tesl551/Writing/page4.htm#:~....

[1] https://scriptsource.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=entry_...

bitcuriouson NPR suspends veteran editor as it grapples with his public criticism

Older episodes of RadioLab are absolute gems. Around the time Robert Krulwich retired I noticed a palpable shift. The new hosts' motivation shifted from inform to influence. It still has good stories, but the framing is somewhat more manipulative, in a way that's hard to pin down but makes me distinctly uncomfortable and sometimes exhausted.

bitcuriouson A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

> Yet they don't seem to exist yet? Is this harder to do than it sounds?

It exists, but isn’t advertised much as it’s essentially a military technology. If you read about the homegrown attack drones Ukraine is building they use a variation of this tech. Various US platforms do something similar. You won’t see this in a consumer drone anytime soon, but a skilled hobbyist could rig something together.

bitcuriouson Notes on El Salvador

Re: France and the United States, you have the timeline mixed up a bit. France & the French intellectuals of course played a large role in the American revolution, but it was America that became a democracy first. Lafayette, one of the key players in the French Revolution, served under Washington and lead troops in the US before coming back to France and playing a key role in the founding of the First Republic.

bitcuriouson Notes on El Salvador

The US became absurdly wealthy during the 20th century. Canada did well too. Poland, Czechia, Estonia and a few other recently independent democracies are thriving as well.

bitcuriouson Marissa Mayer's Startup

Something approaching a personal CRM is a huge gap in the current market. Sunshine seems to be backing into that.

bitcuriouson U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

Apple's main fitness competitor Peloton supports non-peloton fitness bands, cadence meters, etc.

bitcuriouson U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

A Garmin watch can’t track heart rate during an Apple Fitness Plus workout, an example.

bitcuriouson Starship's Third Flight Test [video]

> know they can relight the engine on the booster and we know they can relight for landing burns.

Do we know that? Booster crashed into the water at full speed; landing reignition failed.

bitcuriouson Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

During/post covid there has been a massive migration out of urban centers into rural places. Thus far the effect has been that affordable places are less affordable, while expensive places stayed expensive.

bitcuriouson Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

I’ll admit that I merely skimmed the study, but as I read it states that local/municipal property taxes in many cases don’t cover the road infrastructure required to support those homes. To make the argument that they are subsidized you’d also have to factor in municipal and state income taxes.

bitcuriouson A ragtag band of internet friends became the best at forecasting world events

If I wanted to try my hand at this hobby, what’s the best place to get started?

bitcuriouson OpenAI – transformer debugger release

If you bought the winning lottery ticket, you’d be a lottery winner.

bitcuriouson Webb and Hubble confirm Universe's expansion rate

Could we use gravity lensing to directly measure the difference in redshift of the same star at different points in time?

bitcuriouson Google confirmed it 'terminated' an employee who staged a protest against Israel

The engineer in question said that they refused to work for a company that participated in project Nimbus/contracting with Israeli state. Is that not a resignation?

bitcuriouson Flexagon

Cool thing about wiki is that you can edit it! That way the next person to read it gets the benefit of your knowledge.

bitcuriouson Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

Unless you consider it as funding in a seed round. These days, OpenAI is worth double digit billions at the very least. If Musk funded the venture as a startup, he’d have increased his net worth by at least a few billion.

bitcuriouson What's Behind the Evolution of Neanderthal Portraits

That's a pretty strong statement, maybe expand on what's false, incorrect, or misrepresented?

bitcuriouson Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues

If the prompt is in English it should presume an American/British/Canadian/Australian nurse, and represent the diversity of those populations. If the prompt is in Chinese, the nurses should demonstrate the diversity of the Chinese speaking people, with their many ethnicities and subcultures.

bitcuriouson Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues

>Is it acceptable to correct the answer to the query "Eminent scientist" from 95% men, 5% woment to 50%/50% or to the current ratio of men/women in science ? Should we correct the ratio of black to white people in answering a generic question to average across the globe or US ?

It’s a great question, and one where you won’t find consensus. I believe we should aim to avoid arrogance. Rather than prescribing a world view, prescribe a default and let the users overwrite. Diversity vs. reality should be a setting, in the users’ control.