I always find it fascinating how few (no?) ideas are truly original. We’re always building on some bits of knowledge some other human had somewhere else, at some other time, whether or not we’re aware of their distant contributions. Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution was preceded by this French dude’s similar theses a century earlier. (The Guardian)

In later editions of The Origin of Species, Darwin acknowledged Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, as one of the “few” people who had understood that species change and evolve, before Darwin himself.

Thing is, I bet that humans knew this here and there for quite a while. Any communities involved in multigenerational animal husbandry probably had a pretty good idea of how evolution would later be regarded. It just wasn’t organized or proven in a way that the later scientific community could recognize.

This just reminds me of a tangential story: When I was in high school, my biology teacher was *very* insistent on reminding us that evolution is only a THEORY and that theories can never become facts. (I grew up in a very religious white people town, but I truly didn’t understand how weird these sorts of interactions were until I reached adulthood.)

Scientific fact is directly observable, he said. If you drop a ball, it will fall to the ground. We observe gravity directly. The actions of gravity are a fact, and gravity as the cause remains a theory, or something like that. We really can observe evolution occurring on a small scale — like fruit flies, with their short generations — but his point was 1) flies aren’t greater animals (meaning humans are special, according to his religion), and 2) even observing the changes doesn’t mean that evolution is the cause. For all we know, it’s God.

I do appreciate the perspective I got from that time. I was really exposed to a lot of…stuff…that has not held up through my adulthood, but I value knowing how different people think.

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Here’s a YouTube video of newborn baby pygmy slow lorises, widely* acknowledged as the cutest animal on the planet. Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute is lucky enough to be tending these sweet nuggets.

(*In my house.)

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In the past, my life was saved by blood donations. It didn’t occur to me that there are “blood deserts” (like food deserts) where supply is unavailable. Drone delivery and autotransfusion are options, but don’t completely close the gaps in demand. (NPR)

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Speaking of blood…

Hemolymph, aka insect blood, clots very quickly. (Ars Technica) Turns out it basically congeals and gets sucked back into the body to clog the hole. That’s so cool.

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People rag on Madonna — mostly for aesthetic reasons — but she’s a beloved member of the queer community. She honored victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting at a recent concert. (Variety)

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Bird flu is showing up in dairies in more American states. (NPR) Time to switch to ultra-pasteurized.

Also, NPR reports on a spike in measles.

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Engadget talks about flying drones developed to attach themselves to existing power lines in order to recharge. Although I don’t know enough about the subject to say if it’s a good idea or not, it does seem clever to arrange a way for them to use existing infrastructure. An alternative mentioned is placing charging pads around cities. Current flight time is limited to forty-five minutes or so, which makes me think we’d need a lot of pads. But we already have power lines all over.

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There’s Oscar buzz around Zendaya’s Challengers. (Variety) The cast has been looking tired on the PR circuit, but if they hope to land major noms, they’re going to have to keep at this a while. The Academy has a short memory. And you only win by campaigning. I hope they’re ready.

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We’re getting a fourth Bridget Jones movie. (Vanity Fair) Given the book it’s based on, I’m not surprised Colin Firth hasn’t been cast. I’m not actually opposed to another movie in the series — I’m so easy to please, I loved the third one too — but I don’t really want anything to do with the plot at hand so I might not see it.

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The Film Stage: Don Hertzfeldt and Ari Aster Collaborating on a “Big” Existential Horror Animation

Can’t wait to see anuses bleeding on the big screen!

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Did you know many Renaissance portraits were multi-sided? (Smithsonian Magazine) I didn’t. These are actually a whole lot more interesting to me with the additional painting as context, as ambiguous as the context may seem out of its time.

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Jonathon Majors has to do court-ordered domestic violence therapy rather than jail time. (Variety) My initial reaction was vengefully negative, but I sat with that a minute and realized…this is probably the most constructive sentencing. DV-specific therapy could actually change his behavior profoundly. And I am broadly anti-prison, but that means I need to also apply that philosophy to things that specifically revolt me, like DV. So yeah, this sounds right.

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Quartz talks about “automation innovations” that were actually humans in disguise — what we call Mechanical Turks.

The Mechanical Turk refers to a fraudulent chess-playing machine from the year 1770. It appeared to be an automated machine that could play a competitive chess match against any human. The machine was touted around the world for decades, amazing crowds as the first-ever automaton. However, it was later revealed to be an elaborate hoax, where a master chess player was hiding inside the machine.

Even if the current AI movement isn’t operated by such Mechanical Turks, we do know that a lot of low-paid labor was employed in labeling data for use by algorithms, so there is some element of that at hand. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn there’s more human labor involved than we realize.

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We’ve found more frescoes in Pompeii! (WaPo)

The paintings recently discovered included references to figures from the legendary Trojan War between the early Greeks and the people of Troy in Western Anatolia around the 12th or 13th century B.C., which is featured in ancient Greek works such as the Iliad and Homer’s Odyssey, as well as Roman literature.

The recently discovered artworks include a depiction of the Greek legendary figures Helen of Troy and Paris, the son of the Trojan king who is identified in an inscription by his Greek name, Alexandros. The images also show Cassandra, a figure from Greek mythology who could predict the future, and the god Apollo, who cursed her and left her unable to prevent the capture of Troy.

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Smithsonian Mag shared letters from a twenty-something in 18th century London, giving us a lil glimpse of his life.

In his handwritten letters, Browne described his new job training as a clerk to a lawyer, Richard Rowlandson. He complained about working long hours, copying legal documents from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. In one letter, he expressed frustration with his father’s decision to apprentice him to his employer for five years, rather than a shorter training period. “I have Lost the prime of my Youth,” he wrote.

Often, he asked his family for help, and “his concerns were not so different from those of today’s young people,” writes the Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood. “Mainly: Please send money, everything is so expensive.”

Browne wrote that he needed money to pay rent—and to purchase stockings, breeches, wigs and other items he deemed necessary for his life in London. “Cloaths which [I] have now are but mean in Comparison [with] what they wear here,” he wrote in one letter.

I’ve been stretching my earlobe piercings back out. I was up to 0 gauge, but I was annoyed by the jewelry and removed it for a few years. At that point I assumed they would shrink somewhat. I found some old 6g plugs that still fit loosely, so I got some 4g tunnels. Those also fit. They kept falling out in bed, though — so I ordered 2g tunnels. And you know what? They fit! It seems my earlobes relaxed around them again. I might be able to get back to 0g without seeing a piercer and progress my way up to 00g. Onward, if I like.

0g is about the diameter of a pencil, which is a fun size. But I’m getting older which means I need to get weirder, and bigger holes in my body is cool. I’ve got three holes in my nose now, and three holes elsewhere on my body, and I’m trying to decide what’s next.

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I’ve been dying to see Monkey Man since its first trailer (the unedited one with the great takedowns), but I want to see it even more learning that hijra are key to the movie. (Variety) Dev Patel says it’s a story for the marginalized, and thus must include hijra, who are an underclass of third-gender people in India (to oversimplify it).

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The actress who portrayed The Unknown at the Glasgow Willy Wonka scam experience is getting more jobs, which is good. (Vanity Fair) One dude was behind the scammy bits; the employees were doing their best.

I think there’s a good chance The Unknown becomes an enduring cultural character. Imagine being the sixteen-year-old who originated that…thing.

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Egypt invented taxation as we know it. (Smithsonian Mag) I actually just learned somewhat about Egyptian taxation from reading Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud with my 9yo. The mural he uses to describe sequential story told in art involves taxation of crops, anyway, and I don’t often think about taxation as a direct levy on assets rather than simply taking a percentage of currency.

The Smithsonian article goes into the whole thing in fascinating detail.

For most of its history, ancient Egypt levied taxes on goods, with officials collecting dues in the form of grain, textiles, labor, cattle and other commodities. The amount of taxes owed was often linked to agriculture, with a certain percentage of a field’s harvest earmarked for state-run granaries or administrative storage centers. Interestingly, taxes were adjusted for field productivity—a parallel to modern income tax brackets, with different categories established based on the amount of wealth incurred.

“Fields were taxed in different ways, and the rate was dependent on the individual field productivity and the fertility and quality of the soil,” says Moreno Garcia. “But the government was determining the base tax rate dependent on the height of the Nile.”

On Elephantine, an island in Upper Egypt, 19th-century archaeologists discovered a nilometer, a sprawling staircase used to measure the Nile’s flood levels. (Remnants of other nilometers can be found in the ancient city of Thmuis, on Rhoda Island and elsewhere in Egypt.) If the water rose above a marked line, it signaled flooded fields and a poor harvest; if it fell too low, that meant a drought and dying crops.

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The movie adaptation of Nightbitch is coming out in December. (Variety) I am eager to see Amy Adams going hog on raw steak and pooping on a neighbor’s lawn. Once it’s streaming, of course. Monkey Man might get me out of the house to the theater, but very few movies call to me that way anymore.

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The McDonald’s locations operated in Israel were donating food to the IDF. Apparently McDonald’s corporate didn’t like having such actions reflect on them when they weren’t the ones making the decisions (those locations are owned by a franchisee), so they’ve bought back all those McDonald’s. (NPR)

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The Apple Vision Pro is now compatible with some 8BitDo controllers, and I still don’t have one. :’) (Engadget)

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Denis Villeneuve is going ahead with Dune Messiah after all. (TSFKA Tor dot com) I feel lukewarm about it. Dune is kinda too interesting for Villeneuve? But I doubt they’d reach Messiah if it were done by someone who embraced its weirdness more viscerally.

As The Transmetropolitan Review notes:

Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, lived the happiest parts of his childhood in a failed socialist colony called Burley, located along the Salish Sea near the city of Tacoma, Washington. It was dreary and cold during the fall and winter, and back in the day, before Herbert was born, all the excitement was further down the sea in the anarchist Home Colony, a much more successful experiment in collective living. While the socialists of Burley struggled to replicate their small colony, Home grew bigger every year, even converting some of Burley’s socialists into anarchist defectors. […]

Make no mistake, Home housed some committed, dedicated, and fervent anarchists, and some of them weren’t just homesteaders like Frank Herbert’s family, they were anarchist homesteader militants who smuggled dynamite, fomented uprisings in the coal fields of Vancouver Island, sheltered fugitives, shot at private detectives during strikes, and called for the death of capitalism. Beyond this, these anarchists were directly implicated in the 1910 bombing of the ultra-reactionary and anti-labor Los Angeles Times building, given they helped hide the man who supplied the dynamite, the anarchist David Caplan.

Read the whole thing please, it’s a good one. Dune’s foundation comes from something strongly counter-cultural, opposed to empire in a real way that most people can’t relate to. Herbert was a deeply imperfect man. But it’s basically impossible to make a blockbuster — with the financing involved — that will be honest to its messaging.

In the end, Frank Herbert’s Dune and Dune Messiah serve up some of the oldest anarchist propaganda, not only by commenting on the corrupting influence of centralized power, but by spending nearly 1,000 pages to reaffirm one of anarchism’s oldest slogans: no one is fit to rule, and no one deserves to be a slave.

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Dammit, George Santos just keeps making me laugh. (Vanity Fair)

Given that LaLota was one of Santos’s biggest GOP critics, most people assumed the decision to try to unseat a former colleague had to do with revenge. But according to Santos, that assumption could not be further from the truth. The real reason he’s running for the First? Because it would put him in the suburbs, where he could realize an apparently longtime wish to own chickens.

This dude belongs on a satire show like Veep, not in reality.

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From Gizmodo via Quartz: NASA’s Voyager 1 probe has been glitching for months and we finally know why

NASA engineers pinpointed the cause behind the mission’s odd anomaly, and think they can help the interstellar probe make sense again.

Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory believe the Voyager 1 spacecraft has been sending nonsensical data due to corrupted memory hardware in the spacecraft’s flight data system (FDS).

The engineers are hoping to resolve the issue by finding a way for FDS to operate normally without the corrupted memory hardware, enabling Voyager 1 to begin transmitting data about the cosmos and continue its journey through deep space.

What must I do to stop being so sleepy? I got blood work done recently and I seem to be fine. I’m just SO sleepy. All I wanna do is sleep.

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I’ve wondered what topic Apple didn’t want Jon Stewart to discuss on his show. Turns out it was AI. (Variety) Here’s the Ars Technica version of the article, and here’s the Gizmodo version. Everyone’s talking about Jon Stewart talking about AI now!

He is anti-AI, and I recall Apple said they’re pivoting to AI development since quitting the Apple Car. We’ll see how that goes. I use a lot of Apple products, but I’ve been thinking about going full Luddite. Depending on their execution of AI, it could be what cuts me loose.

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Psyche talks about the near-universal experience of seeing our loved ones after they die. I experienced this strongly after the death of my cat Poe, though I haven’t seen Annie. I grew up with my mom talking about visitations from family after their death. I find it a little disappointing how scientifically/rationally/reductively Psyche (and most other sources) talk about this phenomenon, since I think humans are irrational spiritual beings, and this is a pretty solid example of seeing ghosts.

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NASA is looking for a company to design, build, and deliver a rover to the Moon that can be operated by astronauts under the extreme conditions present. (Ars Technica) I kinda want humans to leave the Moon alone tbh, but this is cool as heck anyway. I feel so conflicted as a SFF nerd who is also a curmudgeon.

Our beloved NASA is also working on developing a Lunar Standard Time (The Guardian), and my whole household is transitioning to this once it’s set. 😉

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This NPR article about safer table saws is interesting to me, vaguely. Every time I’ve seen discussions on Reddit about these safety measures, I’ve also seen swarms of comments about how SawStop-like safeties are undesirable and make things *less* safe. So I’m just wondering…is that true? Is it popular sentiment among woodworkers? Or is this one of those weird things that has been a special interest for marketers/bots on Reddit?

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The Guardian: Everyone in Japan will be called Sato by 2531 unless marriage law changed, says professor

I hardly think anyone needs to be concerned about married names in the 26th century (what do you think was the most common surname in the 16th century? did they use now-common surnames like we do?) but I still got a lil chuckle out of this article. Imagine Japan is like Barbieland. “Hello, Mr Sato! Hello, Mrs Sato!” everywhere you go.

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Amazon dropped its “just walk out” no-cashier technology (Engadget) because, surprise surprise, it was reliant on Mechanical Turks and thus not cost effective. I wonder how many Mechanical Turks are involved in the whole AI movement.

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Oklahoma really wants people to just get over the fact they’re killing imprisoned people so they can do it faster. (The Guardian)

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Homebuying is only for families with six-figure incomes these days, I guess. (NPR) I bought my first house in 2010 for $120k, and my income was around $40k a year…maybe a tidge less. It sucks to think how quickly young people like my young self have been shut out. Something’s gotta give.

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A clinical trial is attempting to grow new human livers out of lymph nodes. (Ars Technica) Even modest liver function (the article says 10-20%) could make a huge difference for people with liver disease.

We get closer to a Star Trek future all the time. Doctor gave me a pill and I grew a new kidney! indeed.

In the meantime, a dude in the USA received a pig kidney transplant and has gone home. (The Guardian) I really hope this works well for him.

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Lawyers, Guns, & Money talks the excess deaths toll related to COVID.