So in the last three years or so — since COVID, basically — Romania and Taiwan have both joined a very special club of countries.
There are not a lot of countries in this club. If you’re very generous, you could include perhaps a dozen or so. But to my way of thinking, there are only about eight. They include:
Ireland (pretty much the type specimen)
South Korea
Singapore
All three Baltic states — Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia
Taiwan
Romania
There are some definitional issues. Romania, in particular, s a borderline case. It only qualifies as… half a member, let’s say. Microstates are excluded; to join this club, you must have at least half a million people. In theory, you could argue for the list to include Australia, Israel, Slovenia, and even the United States, but I except them because reasons.
Okay, so: What is this club?
The answer is below the cut. But first: take a moment, look at that list, think about it. (Here’s a hint: remember what I do for a living.) Try to come up with an answer, and then put it in the comments. I’ll be curious to see what people think.
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Doug Muir
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There’s been a a certain amount of negativity floating around lately. So, let’s talk about a toxic, venomous freak of nature and the parasite that afflicts it.
Biology warning, this gets slightly squicky. [click to continue…]
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Every few years the UN publishes one of these big papers on “world population prospects”, which are… exactly what they sound like: a best guess at what’s going to happen with the world’s population over the next few decades.
Nut graph after the jump:
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So my wife took this picture in our garden yesterday, here in Kigali, Rwanda:
Take a close look. This little bird — about the size of an American cardinal, or a European robin — is facing us. It’s also facing the sun, though you can’t see that. It is holding two twigs with its little claws, and… it’s puffing out its breast feathers in a very weird way. It looks like a breeze is ruffling them. But there is no breeze.
So we did a quick look-up and found: this is Colius Striatus, the Speckled Mousebird. Long tail, “scruffy” crest, check. Thin, rather hairlike breast feathers, check. Very common across tropical Africa, okay. And then this:
“Speckled mousebirds… can often be spotted roosting in groups where they’ll buff up their feathers. They do this to allow more sunlight to hit their bodies which helps speed up the fermentation process.”
Wait, what?
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So in the last couple of decades we’ve discovered that many plants rely on networks of soil fungi to bring them critical trace nutrients. This is a symbiotic relationship: the fungal network can access these nutrients much better than plants can, and in return the plants provide the fungus with other stuff — particularly energy, in the form of glucose sugar, made from photosynthesis.
It turns out this relationship is particularly important for large, long-lived trees. That’s because trees spend years as seedlings, struggling in the shade of their bigger relatives. If they’re going to survive, they’ll need help.
The fungal network gives them that help. The fungus not only provides micronutrients, it actually can pump glucose into young seedlings, compensating for the sunlight that they can’t yet reach. This is no small thing, because the fungus can’t produce glucose for itself! Normally it trades nutrients to trees and takes glucose from them in repayment. So it’s reaching into its own stored reserves to keep the baby seedling alive.
Gosh that’s beautiful isn’t Nature great! Well… yes and no.
Because the fungus isn’t doing this selflessly. The nutrients and glucose aren’t a gift. They’re a loan, and the fungus expects to be repaid.
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“You’re always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines. I got no idea why I’m here now, you know that? But if the run goes off tonight, you’ll have finally managed the real thing.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s ‘you’ in the collective. Your species.”
— William Gibson, Neuromancer
Sometime in the next 100 days, a star will explode.
The star’s name is T Coronae Borealis, and normally you can’t see it without a telescope: it’s too far away. But when it explodes, you’ll be able to see it just fine. It won’t be the brightest star in the sky, or anything like that. But it will be a reasonably bright star — “second magnitude”, if you’re an astronomer or a nerd — in a place where there was no star before.
It won’t last, of course. The new star — “nova” is the term, which of course just means “new” in Latin — will shine for a few days, then gradually fade back into obscurity.
Maybe you’ve heard of a supernova? Okay, so this isn’t that. This is it’s less spectacular little cousin, the plain and simple nova. A nearby supernova would light up the sky, potentially glowing as bright as the full Moon. This will just be a middling bright star that will (to our eyes) appear from nowhere and then, over a few days or weeks, fade away.
Here’s a metaphor. There’s an elderly person you’ve known for years. Not a close relative, no, but someone whose career you’ve followed. You feel tremendous respect for them, maybe some affection. They’re getting old and frail, but they’ve kept active. Now and then you might see an article or something, and you’ll think, huh: still with us.
And then something terrible happens, and they’re incapacitated, helpless, unable to speak anything but gibberish. Death seems imminent.
So the family rolls the dice on high risk, experimental brain surgery. And to everyone’s surprise, it works!
Mostly works. Your friend is still very frail, and they’ve definitely lost a step. The inevitable end has only been delayed.
But — they can speak, slowly but clearly. They can take care of themselves and carry out basic functions. They’re alive. You can talk to them. They’re even still able to work! At least, a little. So you maybe haven’t seen the last article. It’s an unexpected, surprise reprieve: you have them for a bit longer, another year or two or three.
That’s what it feels like.
A transcript from memory of an evening conversation with my two older sons:
“I heard that Jeff Bezos could run through the streets every day, throwing hundred dollar bills in the air, and he’d still be making money.”
“I wonder if that’s true?” [click to continue…]
Thesis: in the English-speaking world, the last 50 years has seen a dramatic increase in the quantity *and quality* of text and visual mass media intended for children.
Let’s define some terms. I’m talking about books, cartoons, TV, and movies. Music is not included; comics and graphic novels are a special case. When I say “intended for children”, I am talking about mass media that is targeting children aged 4-12 as the primary audience. So, yes Disney movies are included here, no the original Star Wars movies are not. Kids absolutely watched Star Wars — I watched it as a kid — but they weren’t the primary audience.
Stuff aimed at the youngest children is excluded here, as is Young Adult stuff. (I agree that the boundaries of the latter category are very slippery.)
Detail to the thesis: this transformation was not smooth. To simplify, from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, text and visual mass media products for children were generally mediocre to bad. There were individual works that were good or excellent, but the average was dismally low. And the quality was not much better at the end of this period than at the beginning.
But starting in the back half of the 1980s, kids movies, TV, books and cartoons suddenly started getting /better/. And they got steadily better and better for the next 15 or 20 years, until by the middle 2000s they had reached a new plateau of excellence, from which they are perhaps only now just starting to descend. The period 1970-1985 was a dark age of kid stuff; the period 2000-2020 was a golden age. There was a massive cultural transformation here. And it happened fairly quickly, and it’s been discussed much less than you might expect.
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So about five hundred million years ago, give or take, there was this little creature called Plectronoceras. It was about 2 cm long — just under an inch — and it had a conical shell with a bunch of tentacles sticking out. It was a cephalopod, an early member of the group that includes octopuses and squid. And it was an /armored/ cephalopod, with most of its soft body protected by that hard little shell.
Let’s pause here and rewind: this was five hundred million years ago. That’s the late Cambrian, if you’re a geology nerd. It’s before the dinosaurs. It’s before sharks or cockroaches or ferns. This is *old*. Complex life had barely gotten started. Life in general was pretty much confined to the oceans. But there were no fish yet — just invertebrates. Half a billion years, yeah? Long, long time.
And a lot of the stuff swimming around was weirdly alien. Again, if you’re a geology nerd, you know about stuff like Opabinia, Anomalocaris, or Hallucigenia. If you don’t, then let’s just say that you wouldn’t have recognized much from those ancient seas. Not just “no fish”. There were no clams or lobsters, no starfish or barnacles or crabs or anemones, no coral or kelp. The world was new. Those things hadn’t evolved yet.
But almost from the beginning, there was this thing: shell, plus tentacles.
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Okay so, we all know how the Earth ends, right? In six billion years or so, the Sun swells up into a red giant, and the Earth gets melted. Pretty straightforward.
But it turns out that /life/ on Earth will end long before that. There are reasons to think that the biosphere will collapse about a billion years from now — long enough! But still long before the planet itself gets melted.
Why? Basically two reasons.
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Billions of miles away at the edge of the Solar System, Voyager 1 has gone mad and has begun to die.
Let’s start with the “billions of miles”. Voyager 1 was launched in early September 1977. Jimmy Carter was a hopeful new President. Yugoslavia and the USSR were going concerns, as were American Motors, Pan Am, F.W. Woolworth, Fotomat booths, Borders bookshops, and Pier 1. Americans were watching Happy Days, M*A*S*H and Charlie’s Angels on television; their British cousins were watching George and Mildred, The Goodies, and Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor. If you turned on the radio, “Hotel California” by The Eagles was alternating with “Dancing Queen” by Abba (and, if we want to be completely honest, “Car Wash” by Rose Royce). Most cars still ran on leaded gasoline, most phones were still rotary dial, and the Internet was a wonky idea that was still a few weeks from a working prototype.
_The Thorn Birds_ was on top of everyone’s bestseller list. The first Apple II home computer had just gone on sale. The Sex Pistols were in the studio wrapping up _Never Mind The Bollocks_; they would tour on it for just three months and then break up, and within another year Sid Vicious would be dead of a heroin overdose. Barack Obama was a high school junior living with his grandparents in Honolulu, Hawaii: his grades were okay, but he spent most of his time hanging with his pot-smoking friends in the “Choom Gang”. Boris Johnson was tucked away at the elite Ashdown House boarding school while his parents marriage was slowly collapsing: although he was only thirteen, he had already adopted his signature hair style. Elvis had just died on the toilet a few weeks ago. It was the summer of Star Wars.
And Voyager 1 was blasting off for a tour of the Solar System.
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So when I joined the team last month, I mentioned that I work in development. That means I move around to different countries, to work on various projects. And in two weeks, I will be moving to Rwanda, in Central Africa.
A couple of notes on this, for those who find such things interesting.
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RIPLEY: How do we kill it, Ash? There’s gotta be a way of killing it – how, how do we do it?
ASH: You can’t.
PARKER: That’s bullshit!
ASH: You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you? A perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.
LAMBERT: You admire it…
ASH: I admire its purity. A survivor. Unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.
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Okay, this one is short. In an interview, an evolutionary biologist explains why cats are, in an evolutionary sense, perfect. There are big cats and little cats, but otherwise they vary surprisingly little in shape, diet and behavior. They’re all doing one thing and they’re all doing it superbly well.
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No, I’m not kidding. The US football season is wrapping up with its usual bang: two playoff games this weekend, then the Super Bowl two weeks later. So if you’ve never checked it out, this might be a time.
So, in the spirit of philosophical discussion, let’s start with some reasons you might not want to watch American football.
— “I don’t consume media about team sports. The exploitation and commodification of the players, the hysteria of the fans, the endless advertisements, the disgusting late-capitalist excess generally, all appall me.”
Okay so 1) this is a perfectly defensible and legitimate philosophical position, and 2) you can stop reading now. I’m trying to explain to a bunch of white meat fans why beef is actually pretty great, and you’re a vegetarian. Nothing wrong with being a vegetarian, it’s great, but this post isn’t for you.
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