nemo

Seeds can float on the sea for years. Shore birds that are used to flying over the open sea do spread across much larger gaps, but the passerines and other birds adapted to life in trees or on the ground generally avoid long flights over open seas and only wind up there if blown by storms - the ocean is a very deadly place for a typical bird with no desirable resources.*

* In the Americas and some parts of Eurasia there's migratory birds which are passerines that fly over the open seas, but they evolved this behavior for adaptive reasons and only fly over the ocean for migration and then when they've fattened themselves up for weeks and prepared for a dangerous over water journey that not all will survive. In their cases body morphology evolved to allow that migratory flight.

>Intelligence is also not skill, but the thing that makes you skillful in all cognitive tasks.

Careful with that "all", even the most highly intelligent humans still have peaks and deficits in different domains.

I haven't kept up, sounds dubious to me. You and Carrier are both far more invested in the conspiracy theory than the evidence, trying to discredit sources rather than actually read and understand them, more like a religious apologist than a scholar. It's a bad look.

The Testimonium Flavianum is clearly questionable, no one accepts it as genuine, though the question of whence it came is interesting and ultimately IMO slightly strengthens the historicist case, but since it's clearly not a reliable passage it's not worth dwelling on.

The only really significant question is the account of James. He dismisses it because he has to, so claiming it's a forgery is another attempt to dismiss evidence. He's not a real philologist, it's great that he managed to get a peer reviewed journal to accept his work, but it's still a crank conspiracy theory attempting to wave away evidence. If denying evidence to prop up a conspiracy theory is your thing, then Carrier is great, but in truth all his work is weak and a waste of any serious person's time and you'd be better off dropping the conspiracies and fringe scholars and learning about the evidence objectively. The truth is more interesting than Carrier's conspiracies once you learn it.

This is not taken seriously by most historians because there is some very significant evidence you have to discount in Josephus. He was a Jewish general born right around when Jesus was crucified who worked with sources in Judaea to write his history and he refers to Jesus twice. The first passage is clearly corrupted, but the existence of the corrupted passage is not a random insertion but a replacement of Joesphus' original writing about Jesus. That in itself is still notable as a kind of evidence, even if the original text is lost. The second is a description of the crucifixion of James, Jesus' brother. The second passage is consistent stylistically and isn't doubted as authentic by experts. I believe that Carrier tried to claim it was some other James brother of Jesus whose stories match, but by coincidence or something, I mostly only recall feeling pity for Carrier when I saw what he'd sunk to there.

Anyway, the question of historicity is not really important, but sometimes atheists who take on atheism as a new religion rather than dropping a religion will get zealous about arguing about Jesus's historicity. No current working academic historians in ancient history I'm aware of take the position seriously since the Jesus Myth argument is a conspiracy theory that has to explain away a lot of evidence rather than an account that uses the available evidence.

For the record, Carrier is a crank who you should have also many good reasons to doubt his word on topics in ancient history since he always works with an agenda, evidence for him is only useful when it fits. Contemporary historians don't take him seriously, and no one really should, his work isn't serious.

>It would be good to replicate it, just to put down some of the naysayers that quibble over a point or two saying it was staged or influenced.

No, that is not why it would be good to attempt to replicate. Shutting people down isn't the helpful part, but rather shedding light on the truth with evidence is the positive.

There's many strong reasons to consider the study was flawed (mentioned in the article and readily discoverable online), for the record, and the author of the paper's got all the classic signs of a crank, so skepticism would be healthy in this case, and shutting down skeptics would be very foolish.

> what do you have to lose?

Money. There are many unethical alternative medicine practitioners out there scamming with quack treatments.

Many animals can do some form of counting of small numbers where there's no connection to language possible.

It's been a while, but from what I recall with early Macs apps like mail clients and browsers would have their own proxy settings rather than any system-wide setting, so you'd set the proxy in Netscape (or whatever).

Secrets in env variables are a highly attractive hacking target, they leak easily and can spill the keys to the kingdom.

I'm in a suburb in Austin, I did chop out part of the lawn to plant a pollinator garden, but it's nothing really special. I made a project for my house, and I'm at 550 species total, 250 Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies). That's really just a result of regular observations. Every month I pick up at least a few new species. In the spring and fall I pick up a bunch, typically. Keeps adding up over time, and with moths there's a lot of species out there.

Nice! I've got a house iNat project with an ever expanding pollinator garden so I can pick up more species without having to travel. I'm at ~250 Lepidoptera.

The overextension of Byzantine territory under Justinian led to later collapse, and in the end harmed the Romans and (along with the brutality of the Roman tax farmers) was one of the key steps that paved the way towards the Caliphate's conquests. Justinian did valuable things, his legal work left a constructive lasting mark. His architectural work was lovely but left Rome bankrupt and his foolish conquests (pursued under false pretexts and open lies) left Rome worse off by any humane measures. He was a disaster for the Romans who suffered through his reign and past it. Justinian planted the seeds of both Rome's expansion and collapse and his policies in the Italic peninsula were catastrophic.

You really don't need to make excuses for Justinian's incompetence, but if you want to, have at it.

The Gothic Wars left Italy devastated and earned the long term enmity of people living on the peninsula who sometimes preferred the Germanic warlords to the bloodless sociopaths ruling out of Constantinople, opening a wedge that would continue to sow division over the centuries. Those wars depopulated the remnants of Rome that had persisted through the prior sacks, and left Italy even more defenseless against future invasions. Justinian had to destroy Rome to save it.

Yes, the Romans never called themselves Byzantine and personally I prefer sticking with the term "later Roman," "Eastern Roman", etc. but if you're speaking English with other English speaking people in the US then the term "Byzantine" is all they're going to understand. I collect Roman coins from the Republic, through the Imperial period, Dominate, later Roman, and into the late Eastern Roman stuff, my favorite that I'm working on is the Macedonian dynasty. I just got back from a trip to Istanbul and I was thrilled at seeing the Roman stuff, the Hagia Sophia is incredible, but even there in Istanbul the later Roman stuff was sometimes labelled "Byzantine" in write ups with English text. When I go looking for later Roman coins, I hit the "Byzantine" section. When I want to read more about the history of the Eastern Roman Empire after Constantine, the books I read usually have "Byzantine" or "Byzantium" in the title. While I personally avoid the term, one should be realistic about the world you live in and choose to communicate clearly rather than ideologically. With me, "Roman" is better, but in general parlance, it's not necessarily cut and dry.

I said that the term "Byzantine" is a line drawn in the sand to emphasize that it's an arbitrary term that's not grounded in anything specific, for what it's worth.

>To begin at the beginning is tricky. Did the empire begin when the emperor Constantine moved his capital from Rome to Constantinople in 324? When the city was consecrated by both pagan and Christian priests in May 330? Or did it begin in 395 when the two halves of the vast Roman empire were officially divided into East and West, or even later in the late 5th century when Rome was sacked, conquered and governed by the Goths, leaving Constantinople and the East as the sole heir of the empire?

The article explained this here. It is elusive, when the Romans stop being Roman and start being Byzantine is a line drawn in the sand.

Trying to language police the use of the word fascism to describe right-wing authoritarians is a waste of time and for me raises a bright red flag for the person doing the language policing. Instead of trying to get people to stop using a term of common parlance to describe the emerging and growing spread of right-wing authoritarianism, perhaps you might want to consider doing some constructive instead, or just coping with the fact that with the current rise of right-wing authoritarian extremism that mirrors prior rises of the same, some people are going to use a word you don't like to describe it.

Squirrels flash their tails for a lot or reasons, including trying to attract mates, as well as distract predators, but they also use their tails to communicate with each other. Tree squirrels typically can communicate with each other via a kind of semaphore sent by flashing their tails and most of their tail flashing is squirrels silently communicating with each other.

>So if you start paying the Andean villagers a lot of money for vicuna wool, all their neighbors will start raising vicunas, because who doesn't want to get rich raising sheep in the mountains?

Vicuñas are dromedaries, they're not closely related to sheep. You can't just raise them. They're the wild animal that was domesticated into the alpaca. They're not a domesticated animal, they are a wild animal with very poor temperament and locals do not keep them, they capture wild vicuñas to shear. There's no realistic way to flood the market, the supply is limited by nature.

Under U.S. copyright law, the person who creates a work is the copyright owner. So if a photographer takes a picture of an artwork, they own the rights to their image.

Read more here: https://www.copyright.gov/engage/visual-artists/

The aesthetics really matter with these coins, the Ancient Greek coins held to a fairly high standard of art and collectors often see the nicer Greek coins as ancient art objects are much as coins. The portrait of Athena and the stylization of the owl on the Athenian tetradrachma are part of why people like them, nicely struck examples with centered art and no wear are the most expensive.

The ancient tests didn't just chop into the edges like the article mentioned, but cut gashes into Athena's face, into the owl, and often both with several severe gashes marring the coin, significantly reducing their value as an ancient art object.

I'm a collector with a few fourrées and a few other ancient counterfeits, they often are a bit cheaper and so long as they're still decent to look at they've just got added interest to me. I've got other ancient forgeries too, I collect ancient fakes since they're interesting.

My Athenian owl doesn't have test cuts since I'd rather have one that's prettier to look at, but if I could get my hands on an ancient forgery of an Athenian tetradrachma with a forged test cut then I'd be interested. Those exist, the counterfeiters escalating to fake marks of authenticity was inevitable, and those have a fun enough story that the fact that they're ugly wouldn't bother me so much, but in general I prefer more attractive examples that I like to look at. The test cuts were definitely not all on the side, lots of circulated coins are severely marred with 1 or more face gashes or owl gashes which is why they're not desired.

It's worth noting that the reason the calends had slipped so badly is because it was Julius Caesar's job as pontifex maximus to handle the periodic updates to the calends that kept it in sync with the solar year. But he was too busy fighting in Gaul and having his adventures to bother with it for years, so the calendar slipped into chaos due to his mismanagement. He then went on to fix his screw-up, but he didn't just decide to fix the calendar, he was in a position where he'd screwed up so long he had to fix it.

One of the Nazi slogans was "we think with our blood," and while Mussolini wrote ideological tracts when he was transitioning from being a young socialist, that ideology was immediately discarded once he took power. Right-wing authoritarian movements aren't ideological, and especially not the fascists. The fact that you tried to claim that fascism was ideological made me assume you had very limited knowledge. our response confirms that you aren't as familiar as you imagine, I'd really recommend you read up a lot more, especially in a time of rising global right-wing authoritarianism.

Instead of making up your own strict, carefully selected, and historically inaccurate definition (no historic fascists ever cared about ideology as anything other than a pretext for their authoritarianism.) I'd recommend reading up on this, just making things up as you go along isn't a great way to approach this particular topic. There's plenty you could read, though I'd recommend starting with Eco's Ur-Fascism as a bridge to start learning about the topic. There's more current work that's worth reading, but since you aren't familiar with any of it I'd recommend starting with the light material, it's more approachable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism

>Sorry but complaining about things like this and calling it fascism or end of the world or whatever looks like a joke

Sorry but denying the reality of the current GOP's open efforts to subvert democracy while they speak openly of sedition and overthrowing democracy really makes you look like a fascist apologist. At CPAC ending democracy was the buzz among attendant, Posobiec got applause for saying it was time to end democracy in America.

The study's questionable, and at the very least not universally generalizable. My handwriting is so bad notes are pointless typically, and I avoid hand writing anything so far as possible since writing is painful as well as pointless. I do not learn better taking written notes, I've tested this, personally I've tried it a few times and always found hand writing notes actually hinders my learning - I associate the subject with needless pain and busy-work.

I have spent time working out how to most effectively learn news things. Associating the learning with something you enjoy is critical, I hate physical writing, it can only hinder learning for me.

I'd suggest reading the article which quotes experts in the field explaining that the fossil record does not fit this model.