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3 stars
‘They take you out of life, out of time’: a journey into Spain’s astonishing cave paintings | The Guardian
12-minute read
The aurochs, the mammoth and the steppe bison are long extinct, but their painted likenesses still look relatively fresh across the walls and roofs of Altamira. Or so said Diego Garate Maidagan, who is one of the very few humans allowed to enter that exalted cave in northern Spain.
I met Garate last summer in a small Basque village called Gautegiz Arteaga. A professor of prehistory and Palaeolithic art at the University of Cantabria, he told me he’d been inside Altamira as recently as the week before, furthering his lifelong investigations of the prep work, tools and methodologies developed by early Homo sapiens painters.
About 34,000 years ago, our distant ancestors began making frescoes with chiaroscuro effects through that suite of subterranean vaults, which remained in use for many millennia, until the cave mouth was sealed by a rockfall. The best part of a geological epoch passed before a curious gun dog clawed its way across the threshold in 1868, leading a succession of witnesses into the first such prehistoric gallery ever seen by modern eyes.
The technique on display at Altamira seemed much too sophisticated for troglodytic numbskulls, as Palaeolithic people were then assumed to be, and self-appointed experts from France initially declared the whole thing a hoax. (Those accusers were to look pretty stupid when similar caves were found in their own country.) Pablo Picasso is said to have visited, or at least looked at some photos, and the quote attributed to him is possibly apocryphal, but an appraisal for the ages nonetheless: “After Altamira, all is decadence.”
2 stars
Why Almost Everyone Loses—Except a Few Sharks—on Prediction Markets | Wall Street Journal
8-minute read
Kalshi and its competitor Polymarket advertise themselves as life-changing tools for regular people—implying everyone has a fair chance to score. “I was about to be unable to pay my rent, but I got two years of rent through Kalshi’s predictions,” gushed one woman in a Kalshi ad on TikTok.
But for most users the reality is nothing like that.
Instead, casual traders are bleeding cash while a small number of sophisticated pros—including trading firms with access to vast streams of data—eat their lunch, according to a Journal analysis of platform data and interviews with traders.
On Polymarket, the Journal found, 67% of profits go to just 0.1% of accounts. That means less than 2,000 accounts netted a total of nearly half a billion dollars. The Journal analyzed 1.6 million Polymarket accounts that have traded since November 2022. There are at least 2.3 million total accounts on the site.
Original link | Archive.is link
Your Body Didn’t Evolve To Give Birth Easily | Motherhood Until Yesterday
10-minute read
In high school biology class, I learned about something called the “Obstetric Dilemma,” often referred to as the “OD,” which has been the dominant theory for thinking about childbirth since the 1960s. The idea is that the human female pelvis is an evolutionary compromise. A narrower pelvis is more efficient for upright bipedal locomotion while a wider pelvis makes giving birth to our big-brained babies easier. So there were simultaneous selective pressures on humans to have a narrow enough pelvis to walk and run efficiently, thereby conserving valuable calories, while also having a wide enough pelvis to, well, not die from obstructed labor.
The theory was first proposed by anthropologist Sherwood Washburn in 1960, in a paper that was elegant, intuitive, and enormously influential — and that the medical establishment seized on with considerable enthusiasm. If the human birth canal is a structural compromise baked into our evolutionary architecture, the logic goes, then obstetric intervention is not an intrusion on a natural process but a brilliant correction to an evolutionary design flaw. The OD became, in other words, a justification — for inductions, for C-sections, for the entire apparatus of managed, medicalized birth.
Then came the wave of backlash. In 2015, anthropologist Anna Warrener and colleagues at Harvard published a study that directly tested one of the OD’s core assumptions — that wider hips in women come at a cost to walking efficiency. Their results showed that pelvic width does not predict hip abductor mechanics or locomotor cost in either women or men, and that women and men are equally efficient at both walking and running (source). In other words, the supposed trade-off between wide hips and efficient bipedal locomotion — the entire mechanical foundation of the obstetric dilemma — did not hold up when actually tested. Oops.
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BUT ANYWAY, regardless of which evolutionary pressures most strongly constrained female pelvic width (my money is on the pelvic floor theory), the tight human birth canal is almost certainly a compromise between two opposing forces, which explains why obstructed labor was not more strongly selected against.
I don’t think we are close to “AI scientists” | Understanding AI
7-minute read
In an interview last month, Sam Altman said that OpenAI is aiming to build an “automated AI researcher” by March 2028. Some people expect this (or similar breakthroughs by rivals) to set off a recursive self-improvement loop that radically accelerates scientific and technological progress.
That might happen eventually, but I think it will take a while.
As human scientists perform experiments, their brains are hunting for patterns in the data that could give rise to new insights and new models of how the world works. But an AI scientist — at least one based on today’s LLMs and agent architectures — can’t learn from experiments in the same rich way. They have no reliable or scalable way to build implicit knowledge from data they see at inference time.
Fixing that may require fundamentally rethinking the transformer architecture at the heart of today’s frontier models. At a minimum, it’s going to require overhauling today’s agentic frameworks.
The Courage of Vulnerability: Teenage Frida Kahlo’s Moving Letters to Her First Love | The Marginalian
5-minute read
One of the 35 girls among the 2,000 students at Mexico’s National Preparatory School, Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907–July 13, 1954) was fifteen when she met Alejandro Gómez Arias. Both were passionate and erudite, both were members of the anarchist student group known as Los Cachuchas for the pointed cloth caps they wore in defiance of the era’s restrictive dress code, both became each other’s first love. Alejandro was on the bus with Frida that fateful late-summer day shortly after her eighteenth birthday when a tram collision killed several other passengers and left her so severely injured — her pelvis fractured, her stomach and uterus punctured by a rail, her spine broken in three places and her leg in eleven — that the doctors at the Red Cross Hospital did not think she could be saved. It was Alejandro’s unrelenting insistence that made them try. Against all odds, Frida lived — but her life was irrevocably changed. How she coped with what she had to live through in turn changed the history of art.
Her letters to Alejandro, collected in the altogether stirring volume Frida Kahlo: Love Letters, edited by Suzanne Barbezat, offer a rare glimpse of her becoming — as an artist, as a lover, as a person who lived with extraordinary vulnerability, extraordinary courage, and the precocious awareness that the conversation between the two is the measure of a life.
Bitter Lessons from the ISSpresso | Mars For The Rest of Us
7-minute read
The Italian space agency’s official technical report on designing the ISSpresso barely masks their astronauts’ horror at the conditions they found when they first drifted aboard the International Space Station. The Americans were up there drinking instant coffee, like animali.
After two years, four prototypes, and a great deal of paperwork, Lavazza and the Italian space agency sent a proper espresso machine to the ISS in 2015. On Earth, a basic Lavazza espresso maker costs about $150 and weighs 3.5 kilograms. The coffee machine’s spaceborne cousin was a 20kg box about the size of an oven. The cost to build it was not disclosed, but was likely in the single-digit millions
Asking how a coffee machine got to be so huge and expensive in space is a good way of understanding the cost drivers in human space flight.
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There is a truism in aerospace: when you pay $500 for an aviation-certified thumbtack, what you’re really paying for is the ten binders of compliance documents, certifications, and tests that accompany it through the production process, along with a promise that someone will go to jail if any part of that process is falsified.
The Process is painful, but it’s not unique to NASA. We run versions of it in aviation, military, and medical contexts, wherever human lives are at stake. It is often ridiculous and everyone hates it. But some version of it is the only way to be sure systems behave as intended.
The Stanford Freshmen Who Want to Rule the World | The Atlantic
11-minute read
When I was a freshman at Stanford University, I learned to shotgun a beer from a guy in a frat. Soon after, he dropped out and started an AI company. Six months later, it was valued at more than $1 billion.
For most students, Stanford is a normal competitive school, where people go to class and coffee shops and fall in love and freak out over finals. But a select few attend something else: a Stanford inside Stanford, where venture capitalists pursue 18- and 19-year-olds, handing out mentorships and money and invites to yacht parties in an attempt to convert promise into profit.
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These teenagers are sometimes handed “pre-idea funding”—hundreds of thousands of dollars, or in rare cases, even millions—before they have the glimmer of an actual company in mind. Plied with excess and access, they have little oversight; innovation and fraud co-develop. And all of this is happening as tech companies assume more power over our lives than ever before.
This is a story about the kids being groomed to rule the world—and what they’re learning from those who already do.
Original link | Archive.is link
1 star
John Thomson’s China | Heading East
1-minute read
Between 1868 and 1872 Scottish photographer John Thomson made a series of trips in China travelling from Hong Kong to Beijing by boat and from Shanghai up the Yangtze to the Three Gorges.
He produced a book of over 200 photos, arranged as a travelogue taking Europeans into Chinese homes of rich and poor. The photo above for example was taken in the home of Mr. Yang “a gentleman enormously rich, and holding an official rank in Peking.” (Thomson was clearly enchanted with Yang’s courtyard home which he described as “a paradise.”)
Many of the interior windows were covered with rice paper. Thomson noted that women (who were sequestered from the men) would touch their tounges to the paper making it temporarily transparent to peer through the spots as he passed by.
Look at these images full sized. There’s a lot hidden in the details. Unlike many other early photographers he didn’t spend all his time photographing palaces and ruins. He also captured a lot of daily life including peasants, merchants, and criminals.
It’s an extraordinary peek into a the complex layered society that would be swept away by the series of wars and revolutions that would roil China for the much of the next 80 years.
The History Behind the Signs Lighting Up Our Daily Lives: Vacuum-Form Signage and Human Connection | Beth Mathews Design
4-minute read
There’s a certain type of sign hanging on every Main Street in America, seen on every road trip exit ramp, and shining brightly above the doorways to our local car mechanic, salon, and bar. These plastic, bubbly, lit-up signs have quietly ingrained themselves in our history and cultural identity here in the US, sometimes without thought or recognition, guiding us into the businesses that have sustained our local communities and economies for decades. And once you’re aware of their folk art glory, you’ll notice that they are…everywhere.
What can singing mice say about human speech? | Phys.org
2-minute read
Speech is a crowning achievement of human evolution, the skill that separates us from every other animal. So, it would stand to reason that evolving this capability required some enormous leap in brain complexity. A study published in Nature suggests otherwise.
Earth’s underground fungal network is so massive, it would span 10% of the Milky Way, map reveals | Live Science
3-minute read
Earth’s underground fungal network is so vast that, if it were in outer space, it would span roughly 10% of the Milky Way if placed in a straight line, a new study finds.
These subterranean structures, called arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks, work in partnership with most of the world’s land plants, feeding plants nitrogen and phosphorus in return for their carbon. Now, the first global map of this fungal network has revealed where their intricate branching structures are most densely packed.
A small object past Pluto may have a thin atmosphere | Science News
1-minute read
The possible atmosphere around 2002 XV93 would be a first for a small object beyond Pluto