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2 stars
Was Nico Harrison Wrong? | Sharp Text
9-minute read
The Luka trade was derided first and foremost because the whole world agreed it was certifiably insane to trade a future Hall of Famer who was 25 years old, nine months removed from an NBA Finals appearance, and all set to sign a 5-year, $345 million contract extension that would have kept him in Dallas through 2031. Sure, the return was deemed insufficient, but the shock of trading a beloved prodigy in the middle of his prime, suddenly deciding that Luka was a bad bet, is why the world lost its mind. It’s why a quick Google search finds The Ringer calling Harrison an all-time embarrassment and the Wall Street Journal calling the Luka deal the worst trade in NBA history.
We’re approaching the one year anniversary of all that madness—Luka and the Lakers are also set to visit Dallas on Saturday night—and Greatest of All Talk listeners will remember that elements of the volcanic backlash to the trade annoyed me even last February. For one thing, there were lots of extremely personal attacks on Harrison and his intelligence that didn’t sit right with me. More generally, everyone was speaking and writing with so much authority and certainty on how all this will be remembered, and it set off some of my bullshit alarms.
Luka was being discussed like he was 25 year-old Michael Jordan, and there was no humility with respect to NBA history, and how much of this particular story remained unwritten. There was not much curiosity as to why people like Harrison and Jason Kidd, who were around Luka every day, might have moved on, or the many different outcomes that were—and are!—still on the board.
Let’s save the human species! | Noahpinion
8-minute read
But since the mid-2010s, the fertility decline has accelerated, and there seems to be no bottom to the new collapse; every year, statistical agencies revise their already negative projections downward even more.
When they confront these stark numbers, there are several things that people tell themselves (or shout on social media) to try to cope with the notion of a shrinking humanity. I’ll go through the most common of these coping statements, and explain why each of them is wrong.
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Humanity has always relied on technical solutions to get us out of our worst problems. It was research into green energy that has given us hope of stopping climate change. Vaccine research has given us hope of stopping pandemics. The Green Revolution staved off mass starvation from population growth, and so on.
Collapsing fertility is a bit different from those other problems, because it’s fundamentally a social problem rather than a physical threat like climate change, disease, or starvation. Social science research is typically much more expensive and much less conclusive than research in the physical sciences.
But despite that big hurdle, it stands to reason that the human race should be doing lots and lots of research on how to avert this imminent and nearly existential threat.
A Few Things I’m Pretty Sure About | Collaborative Fund
3-minute read
I heard someone say recently that the reason so many people are skeptical AI will improve society – or are terrified it will do the opposite – is because it’s not clear the internet (and phones) made their life better.
That’s a subjective point, but it got me thinking: Imagine if you asked people 25 years after these things were invented whether life was better or worse because of their existence: Electricity, radio, airplane, refrigeration, air conditioning, antibiotics, etc.
I think nearly everyone would say “better.” It wouldn’t even be a question.
The internet is unique in the history of technology because there’s a list of things it improved (communication, access to information) but another list of things it likely made worse for almost everybody (political polarization, dopamine addiction from social media, less in-person interaction, lower attention spans, the spread of misinformation.)
There aren’t many examples throughout history of technology so universal with so many obvious downsides relative to what existed before it. But the wounds are so fresh that it’s not surprising many look at AI with the same fear.
Disney Was in Distress During the Late 1940s. Then ‘Cinderella’ Came to the Rescue and Saved the Company From Financial Disaster | Smithsonian Magazine
4-minute read
In 1948, Walt Disney Studios was in trouble. The company, started in 1923 by advertising artist and animator Walt Disney and his brother, Roy, had brought the Mickey Mouse character into millions of American homes through cartoons and merchandise. In 1937, it had produced Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, which was a huge success. Upon initial release, it earned around $8 million, nearly $185 million today.
But with the 1940s came World War II and workers’ strikes, and Disney lost its foreign markets, most of its box office sales and many of its creative staff. After the company spent the war producing propaganda and training films for the government, it faced a debt of $4.5 million (around $65 million today).
Disney needed a hit.
Knud Rasmussen and the making of modern Greenland | Engelsberg ideas
5-minute read
In 1925, Knud Rasmussen thanked his fate that he was ‘born in a time in which polar exploration by dogsled was not yet obsolete’. That year, the Norwegian Roald Amundsen and American Lincoln Ellsworth almost reached the North Pole by aeroplane; the next year they were successful. By the 1930s, mapping and exploration were conducted increasingly by air. Rasmussen died in 1933, just in time to witness – and, in his final expedition, participate in – this new era. But before then, the Danish-Greenlandic explorer had become the first to cross the Northwest Passage by dogsled, and from his base in Thule he did more than anyone to map and explore the north of Greenland. Through his investigations of the Inuit language and culture, he is widely considered the founder of Eskimology. He spent his career travelling across the extreme north and presenting his findings to a mesmerised public.
What happens if the world pulls its money out of America? | Noahpinion
10-minute read
This past week, the world was treated to another fun and exciting episode of “Donald Trump almost wrecks the U.S. economy”. Trump escalated his threats to invade Greenland, causing the Danish territory to actually begin preparing for war. The U.S. President seemed to signal his seriousness by threatening to impose 10% tariffs on any European country that opposed his seizure of the island.
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The “sell America” trade is particularly worrying because people all around the world — both governments and private investors — have long bet that the U.S. is still special. If that bet unravels, it could have dramatic consequences.
Not one penny | The Pursuit of Happiness
4-minute read
This post is not aimed at convincing you that Trump is wrong—anyone with half a brain knows that he’s going about this in the wrong way. Rather it is directed at very smart people that oppose Trump’s ham-handed approach but nonetheless believe Greenland to be a valuable asset. It isn’t. It’s not worth a penny.
Pair-Bonding Laid The Foundation for Collaborative Child Rearing | Motherhood Until Yesterday
5-minute read
This is a bit of a bummer story for those of use who would like to believe that evolution favored monogamy so that dads could actually help, but before you pour yourself a stiff glass of whiskey and pledge your allegiance to the Korean feminist 4B movement that forbids all sexual relations with men, we haven’t quite finished with the story here.
You see, evolution is lazy. It makes use of whatever is available. So while mate-guarding may have been the original driver of human monogamy, once dads were around and available, evolution began to favor the more helpful among them, especially as our brains got bigger, babies were born more helpless and immature, and human childhoods got longer. Most anthropologists believe that securing extra childcare for our needy young was probably one of the primary drivers of monogamous human behavior, even if it came later.
My day of extreme comfort and luxury | Thread
2-minute read
I’m thinking a lot about immigration. In particular, about the immigrants who were the beginning of my American family, our American life. I’ve been thinking about how little I know of how they arrived, why they left, where they left from, what their lives were like when they got here. Maybe I don’t know what happened to my ancestors because it was bad and they didn’t speak about it. Maybe I don’t know it because I was the third generation born here, on my father’s side, and the stories had softened and blurred.
These members of my family left Europe during the pogroms of the late 1800s, when thousands of Jewish people fled eastern Europe for places that seemed safer. They became refugees when a right-wing movement blamed them for various political, economic and social problems, and drove them out of their homes via terror, violence, and murder.
Doing a little bit of research, I recently learned from some documents that one of my great-grandmothers arrived in America as a child with her parents, but not her younger brother, because he died en route. That’s what it says on the papers recording their arrival: ‘En route’.
Oldest cave painting could rewrite origins of human creativity | BBC News
3-minute read
A stencilled outline of a hand found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi is the world’s oldest known cave painting, researchers say. It shows a red outline of a hand whose fingers were reworked, researchers say, to create a claw-like motif which indicates an early leap in symbolic imagination. The painting has been dated to at least 67,800 years ago – around 1,100 years before the previous record, a controversial hand stencil in Spain.
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“When I went to university in the mid to late 90s, that’s what we were taught – the creative explosion in humans occurred in a small part of Europe. But now we’re seeing traits of modern human behaviour, including narrative art in Indonesia, which makes that Eurocentric argument very hard to sustain”.
Cell-Sized Robots Can Sense, Decide, And Move Without Outside Control | StudyFinds
4-minute read
Robots the size of a single-celled organism can now sense their environment, make decisions, and act on them without any outside help. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan created microscopic machines measuring just 210 to 340 micrometers wide (roughly the size of a paramecium or two human hairs laid side by side) that pack in an onboard computer, temperature sensors, memory, communication systems, and propulsion.
1 star
‘The most incredible display of aurora I’ve ever seen in my 20 years of flying’. Pilot captures historic northern lights show from 37,000 feet (photos) | Space
2-minute read
I’ve been fortunate enough to witness some incredible aurora displays over the years — and to receive stunning photos from readers and photographers — but this latest series of images from airline pilot Matt Melnyk may be the best I’ve ever seen.
Which one doesn’t belong? | The Pursuit of Happiness
4-minute read
Gold notes, fiat currency and Bitcoin
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Which one doesn’t belong? Which type of money is the most distinct from the other two? The answer depends on which attribute you believe is the most important.
When I taught monetary theory, I used to pass around these two currency notes in class. At the time they looked almost identical, but Jackson’s head was enlarged in 1998, as you can see. That’s unfortunate, as previously they were a good example of how two objects that look quite similar could be radically different. The 1928 currency note could be redeemed at the Treasury for nearly an ounce of gold, now worth over $4000.
Saturn’s biggest moon might not have a global ocean — but the search for life isn’t over | UW News
3-minute read
Careful reanalysis of data from more than a decade ago indicates that Saturn’s biggest moon, Titan, does not have a vast ocean beneath its icy surface, as suggested previously.
Experience: I live as a crane | The Guardian
2-minute read
One day, a colleague threw a sheet over himself. A lot of the staff thought he was crazy, but he started developing a more elaborate costume, adding feathers and even wearing pants that matched the colour of cranes’ legs.
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Whenever I see a video of us running and flapping, it does look kind of ridiculous, but the chicks get the idea. It makes me feel like a proud parent to see them take flight.