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Sunday, January 27, 2013
Shouldn’t Derek Jeter be more concerned about glacial movement than glacial melting?
Bunting for climate change
Surprise! Derek Jeter was here in Davos; PepsiCo flew him out to talk climate change and raise awareness. Jeter said: “Regardless of how you feel about it, it’s something that needs to be addressed because we’re seeing more and more natural disasters each year, it seems like. Something has to be causing it.”
...There have been a lot of publicity stunts to bring attention to climate change. But surely the only thing less effective than global climate summits is having Derek Jeter tackle the issue. As he’s speaking, the only pressing question on anyone’s mind is the status of that left ankle and whether he’ll be ready for Opening Day.
Repoz
Posted: January 27, 2013 at 07:18 AM | 135 comment(s)
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So much for urgency when a huge solution is in our midst. Somewhere Einstein (more respected for bagels, among the left, than helping to pioneer nuclear technology) is rolling in his grave.
If Eratosthenes was worth listening to they'd have called him "Alpha". Haw haw, burn!
I'm generally a believer in the Eleventh Commandment myself, but I'm happy to make an exception in 'zop's case. If his smug elitism is the hallmark of being a true Republican or conservative, I wouldn't want to be one.
It ain't bragging if you can back it up. You'd think someone on a baseball site would remember that.
To bring the two threads together, the use of linguistics to trace human migration/populations is super ####### cool. It blows my mind that, for example, we have no idea who the Melanesians are and when and how they got to where they are. They're just . . . there. And the DNA analysis hasn't yet answered the question, which is even cooler.
Not even the Catholic Church really believed the Earth was flat -- at least, not its scientifically accomplished divines, including those surrounding the Popes and the Pope himself: Urban VIII was actually a close friend of Galileo and an admirer of his astronomical theories. No, the Galileo affair had nothing whatsoever to do with arguments about the actual truth or falsehood of his theories (the Scripture, in this case, was used by his persecutors as a cynical bludgeon rather than an appeal to actual scientific truth), and everything to do with the Pope's internecine political battle with Spanish (Dominican) faction within the context of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, where the Spaniards were accusing the Italians of being too 'soft' in their defense of the power and respect of the Church.
The more you know!
Uh huh. How'd you end up a lawyer, anyway?
Wait, let me guess: You were too smart for science?
What they CANNOT do -- and in fact must NEVER be taken to do -- is explain the spread of languages or cultures. The reason for this (which isn't immediately apparent to most people but instantly makes sense the minute it's pointed out) is that languages are not people: they don't always or exclusively spread with an ethnically homogenous group of people. Languages spread for tons of reasons, and mass migration is actually one of the LESS common ones. (More common: cultural or political prestige, as with Latin, or a situation where an insular warrior caste conquers a substrate population, passing its language on but not its genetics, as with Hittite.)
For example, proto-Greeks clearly spread into the Peloponnese from a staging area in the Balkans...but they didn't occupy empty ground. There was a population of pre-Greek Europeans already living there, and the fusion of the two populations gave us the dark Mediterannean coloring of the Greek peoples as well as their language and religion: it's a notable fact that the names of nearly every single Greek divinity, and every major city, are of demonstrably non Indo-European derivation.
Or another, even more obvious example: English is spoken all over the world, including by African-Americans, Indians, Native Americans, Hispanics (and that's another ball of wax right there: Central American populations are probably something like 85-90% Native American genetically, if not more, yet they all speak an Indo-European Romance language), Chinese, etc. That tells you nothing about the ethnic/genetic heritage of those populations. Language and ethnicity are concepts that do overlap, but are IMO better kept at a careful distance from one another during these sorts of analyses.
You know what else is ####### cool? The new world primates. Rafting? Across the (admittedly much smaller) Atlantic? How small must the founder population have been?
Basque is quite literally the ONLY surviving living remnant of the human beings who occupied Western Europe prior to the spread of Indo-European peoples and languages. Every other one was eradicated, and early on at that. (Etruscan, the origins of which -- i.e. whether it's a native European language or was brought by a more recent exogenously invading culture -- are still disputed, seems to be only other one that survived to historical times with any significant amount of written evidence.) It is quite plausible to view the Basques (linguistically at least) as the descendants of the first modern human populations to occupy Europe, the ones that pushed out the Neanderthals.
It does amuse me to see the 11th Commandment in action even when it's not clearly invoked. Wingers studiously avoid criticizing the GOP except to point out when someone is not winger enough, and the modern GOP's party discipline has been pretty remarkable while the Democratic Party spends nearly as much time fighting itself as it Republicans.
The idea that people thought the Earth was flat during the age of Columbus is a popular myth.
Columbus was a bit of a crackpot. He embraced an unreasonably small estimated value for the circumference of the earth, and then bet his life on it. The true risk that he and anyone who signed on with him was taking was that of dying in some unrecorded fashion (starvation, disintegration of the ships, etc.) in the middle of an ocean, hopelessly far from landfall. If there were no Americas, that's exactly what would have happened - west to Asia was beyond the capabilities of his voyage.
Yes, luckily for the United States, Ronald Reagan didn't believe in unilateral disarmament.
Incorrect. The Eleventh Commandment dates to the 1960s, and originated with California's GOP chairman.
I don't understand why this is a source of contention. Reagan gleefully went after the Republican establishment in his day, all the way up until he became the Republican establishment. This isn't even criticism of St. Ron, it was just what he did.
Still incorrect. Reagan famously adhered to the 11th Commandment and got beat in primary after primary. It was only after realizing the folly of unilateral disarmament that he started to "bloody" anyone.
I have no idea what this means. What does it mean?
As for political correctness, I agree. The way the right tries to shut down 'offensive' speech such as that illuminating economic problems by screaming 'class warfare' like a pack of beaten bitches definitely needs addressing.
The 11th Commandment didn't include a command for people to turn the other cheek. That one came from some other famous guy.
1968:
1972:
I guess if you want to say the 11th Commandment doesn't include trying to stab your party's incumbents in the neck, then sure, whatever. I apologize for even suggesting St. Ron might have been politically ambitious or calculating in some way.
The fact that the Indo-European eye/hair phenotype remained (remains) dominant down to the present day in Baltic, Slavic, Germanic, and Celtic speaking regions suggests that those areas experienced genuine population replacement (i.e. authentic mass migration + conquest + diminution/extermination of the original native population over time). Meanwhile, in Iberia, Italy, Greece, and the Caucasus (Armenian) there was a much greater amount of interbreeding and intermingling, as befits regions that were natural crossroads of civilizations over the millenia due to their proximity to the Mediterranean.
The Indo-Iranians are a special case (note that modern day Iranian and modern day Hindi descended from a single common ancestor, spoken around 3,500 years ago or so). The Indo-Aryans lost their classically Indo-European physical features as they pushed further south into the Indian peninsula and intermingled with the native Dravidian populations; this historical fact both explains why northern Indians (and Pakistanis) are generally lighter skinned than southern Indians, and the origin of their unique caste system exists: it was originally a racial hierarchical code imposed by the conquering Indo-Aryans upon a subject "other" population of dark-skinned Dravidians. As for the Iranian-family speakers, their historical seat (which was vastly larger than current day Iran) smack in the middle of the crossroads between Asia and Europe, where migrating peoples constantly traversed, meant that they absorbed a little bit from pretty much every group that came along.
In the eternal words of Andy Dufresne, "How can you be so obtuse?"
You talk as if Nixon and Ford did nothing but sing Reagan's praises while Reagan hurled invective back at them, which is nonsense. For about the eighth time, the 11th Commandment was an idealistic "command"/recommendation for the GOP as a whole. It was not understood to be a requirement that Republicans unilaterally disarm in the course of political campaigns or a command for them to turn the other cheek.
I'm with snapper on this one. Pre-industrial societies were a lot more sensitive to climate changes than our present one. The highs and lows of European civilization before the 19th century track quite closely with changes in climate.
James Burke talks about this quite a bit in After the Warming. But that show now seems a bit dated, despite being made ten years after Connections which seems as strong as ever!
Here's the episode where he spends a bit of time discussing climate change and the medieval period.
It's almost like... we improved that nascent (in relative scientific terms) field...?
(a) The church is not "science," so I'm not sure how they can determine what is "settled science."
(b) No it didn't. The church made it's big anti-rational stance about heliocentrism, not about the flatness of the earth. The curvature of the earth has always been fairly obvious to anyone who is paying attention. Heliocentrism, not so much.
Which ties in nicely with James Burke, who starts Connections with a Wittgenstein thought exercise of what the sunrise would look like if the sun was revolving around the earth - his answer being, exactly the same.
I hear he can "record" up to five of her at a time.
So what would you rather have, a vaccine without an epidemic or an epidemic without a vaccine?
Wow. I go away for a weekend and I miss three more Bush administrations?
And who in the global warming crowd has told scientists to do no further study? A cite would be great.
Well, the hijackers were certainly aliens, anybody know their shoe size?
The above couldn't be less true. Scientists, and our scientific system, encourages folks to challenge accepted truths about global warming. I guarantee you that there is no easier way to get your paper into Nature than to establish that anthropogenic global warming does not exist.* There are dozens of papers published every year questioning assumptions about global warming and its effects; just in the past few weeks, Nature Climate published a paper where they finally got a temperature record from the Eemian (the last interglacial) out of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Why is this paper interesting? Because even though the Eemian was warmer than the current interglacial, and may be a good analog for a warmer Earth decades down the road, their record shows much less melting of the Greenland ice sheet than the consensus predictions would have indicated for that amount of warming.
This sort of thing is published all the time. The reason you don't see papers in big journals questioning the major underpinnings of climate science - i.e., that the earth will warm globally as a result of CO2 emissions - is the same reason you don't see papers in major journals questioning the existence of gravity. Global warming - on a macro scale - is obvious. The local effects are not obvious - and, as you'd expect, there's lots of on-going debate and questioning of predictions.
*FN: Perhaps if you cured cancer.
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