I only found out about Rayleigh scattering recently. It's an interesting phenomenon. In essence, light from the sun is scattered on its way coming from the sun. We, with the way our eyes and nervous systems are oriented, perceive this distorted light as a blue sky.
So is the sky blue? There are other ways that it could be perceived, and the cause is something else. But yes. The sky is blue to us, and that counts for something.
One book I'm reading now is Seven Skeletons by Lydia Pyne. In it, Pyne provides detailed narratives for as many human/hominin fossil finds that have occurred in the last 200 years. These include Piltdown Man and the Taung Child. And there's a certain interrelation there.
Raymond Dart was assigned to a post in the early twentieth century, when it was not the place to be for a natural historian interested in human origins. Good thing for him, because he wound up finding the Taung Child, the first recognized Australopithecus skeleton. His discovery and his conclusion weren't universally accepted, certainly not at first, but he wound up adding more evidence to the idea that human life began in Africa, as Darwin had thought.
By that time it was generally accepted in the scientific community that Darwin had been wrong on that point, and that humans had begun in Asia or possibly Europe. And Piltdown Man seemed to supThport that theory, being a skeleton with humanlike and apelike features, as much of a missing link as anyone could ask for, and found in Britain. So perfect that it, of course, turned out to be a hoax.
This is a brief rundown of the case, but it does go to show just how much of a consensus-based practice science isn't, or at least shouldn't be.
I just finished reading Philp K. Dick's The Simulacra. Kind of a weird read because a lot of elements of it feel like predictions of what the world is like now. I know it doesn't work like that, but it's still an eerie feeling.
One thing amuses me, though. A set of characters run into mutans whose teeth are messed up so that they can't eat meat. One of the regular human characters says that makes them like Neanderthals.
I don't know how long scientists clung to the idea that Neanderthals were obligate vegetarians, but it must have landed with a thud.
The younger generation of scientists are like children who have been raised by wolves. They have learned the techniques but have no feel for the proper aims, attitudes and evaluations of science. What little culture they have comes not from science but from bureaucrats: they utterly lack scientific culture; they do not talk science, instead they spout procedures.It has now become implicitly accepted among the mass of professional ‘scientists’ that the decisions which matter most in science are those imposed upon science by outside forces: by employers (who gets the jobs, who gets promotion), funders (who gets the big money), publishers (who gets their work in the big journals), bureaucratic regulators (who gets allowed to do work), and the law courts (whose ideas get backed-up, or criminalized, by the courts). It is these bureaucratic mechanisms that constitute ‘real life’ and the ‘bottom line’ for scientific practice. The tradition has been broken.
We live in an era where a cloak of obscurity is being drawn over science. Science is something that a few experts and institutions know about, and that the rest of us must accept when we're told about it.
We don't all have access to big numbers. But the essence of science is observation. Sometimes enhanced with experimentation, depending on the topic. The essential methods are in fact available to us all.
Adrienne Mayor's 2005 book Fossil Legends of the First Americans gains a special relevance in this time. Mayor is a scholar of natural history folklore, a fascinating field that until just now I didn't even know existed. But the native tribes of the Americas have been finding and collecting fossils for centuries, well before the bulk of European settlement. And the stories that they came up with by way of explanation have in many cases been based on good, solid observation, leading to insights on the kinds of animals that lived in the Americas in the deep past. In general they haven't really gotten credit for this, as Mayor reports.
Yet much more historical and natural knowledge has been retained and for a longer time span than is generally appreciated. To find these nuggets of genuine knowledge, the Iroquois scholar Barbra Mann suggests that one should look for the "consistent elements" in the layered matrix of storytelling over the ages. Many scholars have questioned whether oral traditions are "real history." Anthropologist Robert Lowie, for example, who studied several Native American cultures in the 1930s, famously declared in 1915 that "oral traditions [have no] historical value whatsoever under any conditions whatsoever." But Lowie's grip is loosening: today many mythologists and historians would agree with Roger Echo-Hawk, a Pawnee historian, that oral histories should be treated as "respectable siblings of written documents," as valuable sources for reconstructing "ancient American history." The most recent analyses of the mythmaking process, drawing on modern linguistics with datable historical, astronomical, or geological events, are revealing that accurate geomythology can extend back over millennia.
The Americas have a rich natural history in terms of both dinosaurs and other large reptiles and--in more recent epochs--mammalian megafauna. As far as we know now, that doesn't much extend to paleoanthropology. There are no known humans or hominids before anatomically modern humans to have lived in the Americans. Of course if this state of knowledge changes, it will be a tremendous shock and will require large amounts of scrutiny. To understand it we'll need to look at all potential sources of knowledge.
Novelist Ann Bauer has published a piece that I think I really can call a must-read. It's both quite personal and historically informative. Takeaways:
1. Bruno Bettelheim, who I was a bit familiar with but not all the details, should have stuck with literary criticism. His attempts to heal children's souls almost certainly did more harm than good, especially to their families.
2. There are and have been more theories on what causes autism than there are stars in the sky. A shocking number have been used to punish parents and bring their families under outside control.
3. The manipulation, bullying, and gaslighting that Bauer experienced as the mother of an autistic child did seem to prepare her for life in the COVID era. Would I wish these experiences on anyone? Hell no. But she knows how to recognize patterns.
According to modern science, what first appeared in the Big Bang was light. Then as the universe grew the galaxies and stars were formed; then the solar system came into being; then as the earth cooled, the seas and the dry land were formed; then life arose in the primeval broth; then plants began to evolve; then animals, first in water and then on dry land; then birds and mammals evolved from reptiles; and finally Homo sapiens arose from apelike ancestors.
This sequence differs from the ancient story in the Book of Genesis in several respects, perhaps the most notable being the creation of the sun and moon after the earth and the vegetation upon it. In the scientific account, of course, the sun is supposed to have been formed before this planet, or at least around the same time. Opinions still differ as to the origin of the moon: some astronomers hold that it came into being together with the earth and the planets; others maintain that it originated later and may even have split off from the earth. Another difference is that Genesis places the origin of birds before the origin of reptiles, whereas evolutionary theory derives birds from reptiles.
Nevertheless, the broad outlines of the Genesis myth and the contemporary scientific account are not dissimilar; they have a strong family resemblance. The scientific account is of course far more detailed, and attributes creativity to chance rather than to God. But both, by their very nature as accounts of origins, refer to events that happened before there were people to witness them and can therefore only be imagined, calculated, inferred, or modelled. They can never be statements of observable or observed facts.
Recently I've been reading Marc J. Seifer's Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla. Tesla, of course, has become a posthumous cult icon, and his appearances in various types of fiction... well, see for yourself. And i'm not immune. There's a fascinating story there.
Reading about him I see that he was indeed a brilliant man and inventor and a seemingly tireless worker. A mixture of unlikely odd jobs and skillful gambling - especially pool - paid his way through engineering school. From then on he had more ideas than really anyone knew what to do with.
He was also a great self-promoter who knew how to use the exoticism of his Serbian/Croatian background to his advantage. If television had become a mass medium during his lifetime he would have been on one talk show or another every day of the week.
Tesla is the perfect subject for romanticization through books and movies. Thomas Edison, though he suffered some reversals, is too much of an establishment figure. Someone like William E. Sawyer, a prolific inventor who died young well before the twentieth century started, is too obscure, his story too depressing. Nikola Tesla is Goldilocks' just right. Even those who root for the underdog, as a rule, don't choose the lowest ones.
The Neko Milgram experiment, in which the majority of subjects proved willing to apply massive, even fatal jolts to confederates as long as they had moral permission, has disturbed and depressed many people over the years. The results, however, may have been misinterpreted.
Gina Perry, for her book, Behind the Shock Machine, traced as many participants in the Milgram experiment as she could, and re-examined the notes of the experiment. Milgram claimed that seventy-five percent of the participants believed in the reality of the experiment, but Perry puts the number at about half. The change makes a big difference in the results. The people who didn't buy that they were actually shocking people were far more willing to increase the intensity of the shocks. They wanted to know how far the experimenters would go in the ruse, while the experimenters were wondering the same thing about them. Those that believed that they were shocking people were much more likely to keep the shocks down low. While Perry still thinks about a third of the people would crank up the shocks even if they believed, that's a big drop in overall percentage.
This actually stands to reason. If I were a subject in the experiment, my thinking would go thus: The researcher is legally responsible for whatever goes on here. Obviously, he'll be in deep shit if someone he's experimenting on dies. He'd be stupid to let me harm or kill that person. Ergo, if he's telling me to ignore that person's cries for mercy, something else must be going on here.
Not sure what I'd do after I reached that conclusion.
Now does that mean that people are good? Not necessarily. In truth "Are people good?" seems to me to be a uselessly vague question. But it's nice to know there aren't quite that many Jack-Lint-in-Brazil types.
The takeaways from this story are:
1. There was such a thing as eye chlamydia in Roman times
and2. Such a thing still exists, and in areas that it's safe to say had their share of troubles already
Yikes.
To address the possibility that the two groups would not have seen one another as potential mates, the researchers also examined the possible impacts of social barriers to mating in their models. They found that unless social taboos were nearly 100 percent effective, it would have not made any difference in outcomes over time as the gene pools mixed, Barton said.
"This is one of the first attempts to explicitly address the impact of various degrees of social avoidance on possible hybridization between the two groups," added Riel-Salvatore.
"Other than the fact that they disappeared, there is no evidence that Neanderthals were any less fit as hunter-gatherers of the late Pleistocene than any other human ancestor living at that time. It looks like they were as capable as anyone else," Barton said.
Human skin is teeming with microbes—communities of bacteria, many of which are harmless, live alongside the more infamous microbes sometimes found on the skin. Nina Rountree from North Carolina State University and colleagues set out to dispel the myth that all bacteria on the skin are disease-causing germs. The researchers cultured the bacterial communities living within bellybuttons of 391 individuals from across the U.S. and published photos of the cultures anonymously in the online Bellybutton Bacteria Culture database. They chose bellybuttons as an area of the body that is generally protected from excretions, soaps and ultraviolet ray exposure.
The experiment generated interest among citizen scientists and provided clues about the stability of bacterial communities over time, the significant turnover between participants' bacterial communities and similarities of bacterial communities between family members. The Bellybutton Bacteria Culture database received 55,000 visitors in only three months.
