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AbouBenAdhem

@ AbouBenAdhem @lemmy.world

Posts
11
Comments
1201
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Chinese company Tencent enlisting U.S. cloud hosting provider Vultr to enforce censorship well beyond the borders of China

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  • Who picked the name “Vultr” for a hosting provider?

  • Yes, Some Children May Have Died From COVID Shots

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  • Are all dinosaur fossils 'replicas'?

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  • In the sense that the original organic material has been replaced by minerals? I guess that’s a version of the old Ship of Theseus question.

  • Archaeologists Found 115,000-Year-Old Human Footprints Where They Shouldn’t Be

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  • The linked Popular Mechanics article cites this Smithsonian article.

    The Smithsonian article cites this National Geographic article and this Science Advances article (among others).

    The National Geographic article is paywalled.

    The Science Advances research article seems to be the original source—here’s the abstract:

    The nature of human dispersals out of Africa has remained elusive because of the poor resolution of paleoecological data in direct association with remains of the earliest non-African people. Here, we report hominin and non-hominin mammalian tracks from an ancient lake deposit in the Arabian Peninsula, dated within the last interglacial. The findings, it is argued, likely represent the oldest securely dated evidence for Homo sapiens in Arabia. The paleoecological evidence indicates a well-watered semi-arid grassland setting during human movements into the Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia. We conclude that visitation to the lake was transient, likely serving as a place to drink and to forage, and that late Pleistocene human and mammalian migrations and landscape use patterns in Arabia were inexorably linked.

  • Why don't compasses have just two Cardinal directions (North, East, -North, -East)?

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  • We could use one, and assume we’re operating in the field of complex numbers:

    1 N = Northi N = Westi2 N = Southi3 N = East.

    And we could use the complex modulus to indicate distance or speed... or we could map the Riemann sphere onto the surface of the earth and use a single complex number to indicate location.

  • Minneapolis police chief warns officers: Stop unlawful force by ICE or lose your job

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  • Yeah, but these are cops we’re talking about—they’re conditioned to escalate at the first sign of noncompliance.

    Can you really picture a cop physically intervening, being pushed aside, and saying “ok, never mind”?

  • Has there ever been a viable alternative to the phsycialist model of the universe?

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  • I think the framing of questions like this assumes that there are certain “physical” things that follow one intrinsic set of laws, and certain other things that follow a fundamentally different, incommensurate set of laws.

    But we don’t actually have direct knowledge of any intrinsic laws, physical or otherwise—the best we have are a set of purely provisional laws we’ve made up and regularly revise on the basis of cumulative evidence. And our method for revising these provisional laws requires that any new evidence that contradicts a law, invalidates it—provisional laws must apply to everything without exception. If we give ourselves the out that contradictory evidence can be attributed to “non-physical” causes, we can never invalidate anything nor update our models. So dualistic models are inherently unscientific—not because they’re wrong, but because starting with such assumptions is incompatible with the scientific method.

  • Volcanic eruption led to the Black Death, new research suggests

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  • The study authors believe an eruption occurred around 1345, about two years before the start of the pandemic, from either a single volcano or a cluster of volcanoes of unknown location, likely in the tropics. The resulting haze from volcanic ash would have partially blocked sunlight across the Mediterranean region over multiple years, causing temperatures to drop and crops to fail.

    Wow, that’s exactly what happened just before the Plague of Justinian (i.e., the volcanic winter of 536). I’m surprised they don’t mention that in the article.

  • Theoretical Physics with Generative AI

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  • It’s like the Sokal affair in reverse.

  • Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego Groans His Party Doesn't Allow 'Women to Be Hot' in Leaked Texts: 'Dem Women Look Like Dem Men'

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  • It’s almost as if Democratic voters are selecting their candidates based on some other criterion entirely.

  • 56 million years ago, the Earth suddenly heated up – and many plants stopped working properly

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  • They don’t mention the cause of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum—was the biosphere still experiencing evolutionary adjustments from the Chicxulub impact 9 million years earlier? Or was there a geological cause?

  • What History’s Fallen Societies Have in Common | A new book argues that civilizations built on centralized wealth and power contain the seeds of their own destruction.

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  • One of Kemp’s central arguments—that some early societies were relatively democratic, and that hierarchical rule is not humanity’s default setting—closely echoes the theory advanced by David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. That book, published in 2021, generated heated debate about the origins of inequality and the reliability of the archaeological record, and it was ultimately admired more for the force of its argument than for its account of the earliest societies.

    Is that really the consensus opinion on Dawn of Everything?

  • How come there is not a pope without grey hair? I mean a much younger pope like 30s 40s. Really can't be that hard. You got an ocean of cardinals and priests who pretty much tell say?

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  • Many of the people electing the pope have hopes of becoming pope one day themselves, so they elect someone they expect to outlive.

  • Why is the process of initializing and starting software called 'execute'?

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  • The original usage was to carry out (a command). In that original sense it was sentence, rather than the prisoner, who was executed; but the meaning got transferred over time.

  • A stand against Coal could push Oakland toward bankruptcy. A Kentucky company wants Oakland to pay hundreds of millions of dollars

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  • It’s not the stand against coal that’s pushing Oakland toward bankruptcy.

    It’s the city council’s decision in 2013 to sell out the city and the environment to Phil Tagami and the coal industry.

  • If humanity continuously experiences the rise and fall of capitalism for millions and millions of years what evolved traits do humans develop?

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  • Unionized mitochondria.

  • Trump says he plans to cancel most of Biden’s executive orders

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  • Even regular laws should have a trial period, and only get confirmed after demonstrating that they have the intended effect.

  • Assuming humanity last another few hundred years; How many human languages do you think are gonna be left in 100 years? In 200 years?

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  • Once we get good, universal real-time translation, we might start to see a new proliferation of local languages. And of small groups inventing their own cryptolects for privacy, trying to evolve them faster than AI can keep up.

  • Forward Party - Not Left. Not Right. FORWARD.

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  • Their “Values” reads just like the Bush-era Republican platform—so I guess it’s the kind of FORWARD that goes all the way around and points exactly backward again.

  • Showerthoughts @lemmy.world
    AbouBenAdhem @lemmy.world

    Maybe "CAESAR STABBED IN BACK BY BRUTUS AND CASSIUS" was just an ancient clickbait headline, and the actual event was a minor policy dispute instead of a literal assassination.

  • California @lemmy.world
    AbouBenAdhem @lemmy.world

    California opened college savings accounts for millions of kids. Why do so few know about it?

    oaklandnorth.net /2025/11/03/california-opened-college-savings-accounts-for-millions-of-kids-why-do-so-few-know-about-it/
  • Wikipedia @lemmy.world
    AbouBenAdhem @lemmy.world

    Shift-and-persist model

    en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Shift-and-persist_model
  • Showerthoughts @lemmy.world
    AbouBenAdhem @lemmy.world

    The first century BCE and the last century BCE are the same century.

  • Showerthoughts @lemmy.world
    AbouBenAdhem @lemmy.world

    People with six fingers can get away with anything, because everyone will assume that any videos of them were AI-generated.

  • Ask Science @lemmy.world
    AbouBenAdhem @lemmy.world

    What would be the drawbacks of a genetic code with 6 nucleotides instead of 4, but each amino acid could be coded with 2 base pairs instead of 3 (so the genome could be 33% shorter)?

  • California @lemmy.world
    AbouBenAdhem @lemmy.world

    Governor Newsom to deliver major address to Californians ("Democracy at a Crossroads")

  • Showerthoughts @lemmy.world
    AbouBenAdhem @lemmy.world

    If the Romans had put Jesus in a box with Schrödinger's cat, Christians’ souls would be in a quantum superposition of saved and damned.

  • Showerthoughts @lemmy.world
    AbouBenAdhem @lemmy.world

    Trying to build viable third parties by voting for them in presidential elections is like trying to build a third door in your house by repeatedly walking into the wall where you want the door to be.

  • Biodiversity @mander.xyz
    AbouBenAdhem @lemmy.world

    Emerging niche clustering results from both competition and predation. (My takeaway: more species can coexist in an ecological niche if they have distinct predators.)

    onlinelibrary.wiley.com /doi/full/10.1111/ele.14230
  • Showerthoughts @lemmy.world
    AbouBenAdhem @lemmy.world

    If whales are ignorant of conditions on land, they probably think humans are an endangered species.