January Pieces Of My Mind #2

"A charming old lady who I got to know in the local historical society in the 90s has died. Her children are emailing the sad news to everybody the old lady corresponded with, using her own email account. Death customs of an on-line culture."

Yes, that happened to me too (i.e. getting such an email, not dying), as it happened from someone in Sweden. In some cases the children might be in for big surprises. :-)

"...unless quantum is involved". Fixed it!

In my field, things written before the First World War can contain insights which are not part of common knowledge, precisely because people often just cite older scholarship for form's sake without reading it. Sometimes a theory is proposed, someone wrote a devastating rebuttal, nobody writes about the idea for 50 years or so, then someone notices the same evidence which inspired the first theory and reinvents it unaware of the rebuttal. Therefore marking when older scholarship contains important ideas and is not just being included for completeness is useful to me.

I’m told that a hundred years ago, Sears, Roebuck sold house kits in the US.

Sean, I agree, we should mark when the old work contains something useful. But what we should not do is preen in what we write now because we found that old work.

I’m told that a hundred years ago, Sears, Roebuck sold house kits in the US.

They did indeed. They are called "Craftsman" houses. I don't think they were sold after the 1920s, but the name survived for some decades as a line of hardware tools. A few of them still exist in my neck of the woods.

"Died of cancer, age 37, leaving a wife and two small kids"
cancer sucks.
I hope that two generations from now people will fail to undertand what a shadow cancer cast over our generation, the way the young ones today don't understand what it meant to live during the cold war and Mutual Assured destruction.
(OT) Scientists find 800,000-year-old footprints in UK http://phys.org/news/2014-02-scientists-year-old-footprints-uk.html

(OT) Denying climate change isn't scepticism – it's 'motivated reasoning' http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/05/denying-climate-change-s…
As men t ioned in the a r ticle, other examples include nuclea r ene rgy and possibly GM organisms.

@Birger - the Guardian article is interesting, and exposes exactly the problem with right wing ideologies. If their proponents were open to objective examination of the facts their own movements would collapse immediately. Sadly they aren't called "conservative" for nothing.

Jane, a subset of (American) rightwingery is creationism.
-Fellow skeptic Ethan Siegel provides a string of respectful, no-sarcasm answers to questions from creationists that might just cause some of them to open their minds https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/8712e42fbb0d

Nice article. I wish it *would* cause them to open their minds, if only because I hate the thought that creationists are bringing up their children to think the same way.

For a completely snarky look at creationism, see John Scalzi's report on his visit to the Creation Museum a few years back:

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2007/11/12/your-creation-museum-report/

As is his wont, Mr Scalzi not only described his visit and took a large number of highly entertaining photos, he also got people to donate just so that he would go at all - then gave the money to an organisation that works to achieve separation of church and state in the US.

Iraqi Christians: Most were living safely alongside their muslim neighbours until a salafist-inspired antichristian campaign after the whole cartoon-of-Muhammed stuff in Denmark.
This campaign was launched to distract Saudis from the corruption that caused a mass death by trampling in Mecca during the pilgrimage- the money alloted to building safe ways for the mass of pilgrims had been embezzled.
Ultimately an internal Saudi corruption scandal forced hundreds of thousands of Iraqi christians to escape abroad. Note this happened on the watch of the US occupation, with a US president who claimed to be super-christian.
Also re. Iraq: there is a Kurdish sect that worship an angel -Melek Taus- with the same name attributed by muslims to Satan, causing much repression from the muslims. And sunnis and shi'a are fighting each other, stirred up by corrupt politicians. For a while a Swedish suburb had more iraqi refugees than all of USA and Britain together.

Ah yes, the Yazidi and their Peacock Angel!

"Everything happens for a reason" is a kind of thinking that ties into fate, portents etc.
Here is a bit of skepticism about the most famous portent of all:
" The Star of Bethlehem: A Skeptical View" http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Star-Bethlehem-Skeptical-View/dp/0956694861…
As Randolph Hearst said: "never check a good story!"

Cancer: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/02/09/this-is-a-real-thing-…
The mentined site seems to have t aken down the image now, possibly after protests.

there is a Kurdish sect that worship an angel -Melek Taus- with the same name attributed by muslims to Satan

"Divine" and "devil" come from the same root. It's a question of whether you are talking about the obviously real god that my people worship, or the obviously false god that those people over there worship ;-).

I like the way many fundies seem almost to believe more in the Devil than in God. d-;

Totally OT, but here are some new love poems to cheer up your rainy February days:
http://www.gocomics.com/richards-poor-almanac/2014/02/10
The imagery is very...non-standard.

Not John or Jesus: The Messiah of Sochi
"The Saga of Bob Costas and Vlad Putin, by John Scalzi and Tom Tomorrow"
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/02/11/the-saga-of-bob-and-vlad-by-john-…

And in other totally unsurprising news, the Solutrean Hypothesis is shown to be utter rubbish:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v506/n7487/full/nature13025.html

From an African perspective, it would hardly matter which way the post-african migrants took to Alaska, but one group has an epicantic* fold and the other has not. If you like to puke, you can read a horrible white-supremacy novel (White Apocalypse) based on the Solutrean Hypothesis.
Actually the book is unintentionally funny, if you are one of those who like the "Rocky Horror Picture Show".
*forgive the spelling.

John, that's excellent news! Thank you!

Birger, my own crackpot theory is that it may have been due simply to founder effect in very small effective population sizes at the time of divergence, and that it derives from ancient population groups within Africa. Not selection. Not enhanced resistance to dust storms in the Gobi Desert (I did actually see that theory in a paper once). Just chance.

There's a whole generation of young Korean girls having eye surgery who are probably cursing that ancient ancestor, if they actually think of it in those terms. Personally I wish they would just leave themselves alone; it is a feature I find singularly attractive and endearing. It never hurt Sandy Lam: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lxu0SPunkBw My daughter tells me that singing in Cantonese is even more difficult than singing in Mandarin, for self-evident tonal reasons: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inaxogxd2cM

Maybe not everyone's cup of tea, but hardly physically repellent: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSuyCsc4ZwA The common joke about Sandy among Chinese when she was young was that she always looks half asleep.

Unravelling genetic substructure in sub-Saharan Africa is one of the particularly interesting/exciting things going on at the moment, although it is inevitably accompanied by the usual nauseating wave of white supremacist lunacy. The finding that Neanderthal introgression probably affected mostly skin and hair (and maybe lactation, sweating and teeth morphology, but that's my own crackpot theorising again), not brain size or intelligence, barely slowed them down. They seem to have carefully sidelined the finding that East Asians, and therefore Native Americans, have 20% more of it than everyone else outside of sub-Saharan Africa, due to a second hybridisation event after divergence.

(And here is a light note on which to end the week:)

Hoax debunked: Kola Borehole http://xkcd.com/1330/

Martin, I don't properly understand this, but if you haven't seen it before, scroll down to the map at the bottom.

http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2014/01/13/001792.full.pdf

What I need is a continuous 4 dimensional map of climate/environment so I can get my head around how many of who went where when and why.

There are no figures provided on numbers of paper bags, but the people headed into Central Asia didn't seem to need any.

overall higher female than male effective population sizes

In other words, it's much easier for a woman than a man to get laid.

(OT) Winter haikus! http://www.gocomics.com/richards-poor-almanac/2014/02/17