Doug Muir

Bit of a joke there. What the paper is about is, we found a new planet, about 18.2 light years away. That means that we’re seeing the planet as it appeared 18.2 years ago, in the summer of 2007.

Summer 2007: the first iPhone had just hit the market, the last Harry Potter book was fresh on the bookshops, Rihanna’s “Umbrella” was all over the radio, and “The Big Bang Theory” was about to premiere on TV. Britain’s Tony Blair had just handed off to Gordon Brown, while in the US a freshman Senator named Barack Obama was quietly preparing his Presidential bid. And the world economy was sliding inexorably towards the Great Recession.

Anyway, the planet. The planet is a “Super-Earth“. That means it’s basically the same sort of planet as Earth: a ball of rock, probably with an iron core, possibly with an atmosphere. But it’s bigger than Earth, hence the “Super”.  Like, if the Earth was a golf ball, this planet would be more like a cricket ball or a baseball. Definitely bigger, but not so much bigger that it’s a different sort of thing.

Okay, so we’ve found lots of planets around other stars. Like, literally thousands of them.  And we’re finding more new planets every day. So what’s interesting about this one?


[this shows something like one quarter of the currently known planets. and yes, that lower right one is not a proper sphere.]

Well… maybe a couple of things. But first, a brief digression!

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A while back I wrote a series of posts about the 1998-9 Kosovo conflict.  If you’re interested, here they are:  Prelude to War,  The Serbian Ascendancy, Things Fall Apart, And So To War.  This post continues that story up to the unsuccessful Rambouillet peace conference of February-March 1999.

So by early 1999, the Serbian province of Kosovo was the scene of an ugly guerrilla war.  Civilian casualties were mounting rapidly.  There were bombings and curfews and disappearances.  Over 100,000 people were already refugees, and the situation was clearly going to get worse and not better. 

There was a concerted effort to solve the problem by holding a peace conference in the spring of 1999. This was the Rambouillet Conference, and its goal was to produce a peace agreement between Serbia and the Kosovo Albanians. It failed, leading directly and immediately to the Kosovo War.

Does an unsuccessful peace conference from the previous century hold any lessons?  Or is this purely of academic interest?  

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A trolley problem, some personal stuff, a bit of Islamic jurisprudence, and then the Honda. 

1)  Trolley time.  Let’s start with the trolley problem.  People proposing trolley problems often do them in two parts.  First, there’s the anodyne one with the easy answer:

A trolley is rushing down the tracks towards a group of five people.  If it hits them, they will die.  If you pull a switch, you can divert the trolley onto a different track.  There is one person on that track, and they will die instead of the five.  Do you pull the switch?



And of course you answer “yes” and then you get sucker-punched with something like this:

Five people are dying of organ failure, from different organs.  If they get transplants they will live out their normal lives,  Without the transplants, they will die.  In front of you is a healthy person who has the organs that they need.  If you kill the healthy person you will save the five.  Do you kill them?



Okay so on one hand trolley problems can be a legitimate tool for exploring values and morality.  There’s a lot of interesting stuff you can unpack with them. But on the other hand these little bait-and-switches can be, frankly, very irritating.  They’re set up to put our rationality at war with our intuitions, emotions, and habits of thought. 

Yes, that can sometimes be a useful or at least informative exercise.  But for most of us, the likely response is going to be less “Hmm, maybe deontological ethics are more appropriate here than a simple utilitarian analysis” and more “Oh, ffs.  Now you’re just being ridiculous.”



We’ll return to this shortly.  First, a short digression on living green.

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I seem to have become CT’s resident moderate techno-optimist. So let me push back a little: here are five things that we’re not going to see between now and 2050.

1) Nobody is going to Mars. Let me refine that a little: nobody is going to Mars and coming back alive.  A one-way suicide mission is just barely plausible.


[spoiler:  he does get home]

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I do these occasional posts about science papers.  Some are just for fun.  But sometimes — honest! — there’s an underlying connection to the greater Crooked Timber project.

This post is one of that sort, because it’s about the limits of understanding.  Unsurprisingly, it involves biology. 

So we all learned back in high school that our nerves are sheathed in a coating, like insulation on a copper wire. The coating is made of a special substance called myelin.  If your tenth grade biology text mentioned myelin, it probably said something like “myelin allows impulses to flow along the nerves faster and more efficiently”.   Which is true!  It may also do some other things, but “myelin = faster and more efficient transmission” is what we all learned in sophomore biology back when, and it’s basically correct.



Occasionally something goes wrong, and either the myelin sheath doesn’t form right, or the body’s immune system gets confused and attacks it. This can lead to serious problems, conditions like multiple sclerosis and muscular dystrophy. Also, newborn babies haven’t finished forming their myelin sheathing yet.  That’s why newborns are so very weak and uncoordinated. That magic moment, around the three month mark, where the kid suddenly starts holding up their head, looking around, and intentionally reaching for stuff?   That’s when “myelinization” is complete.

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I was recently part of an online discussion that asked this question. People were talking about industry, democracy, civil society, world leadership, you name it. But nobody was asking the obvious question: when, in fact, will the sun set on the United States?

Yes, I’m going there. [click to continue…]

There’s been a lack of cheer on this site lately.  The obvious response: some analysis of trivial, ephemeral pop culture. 

So, a question before the jump:  If I were to mention “the MacBride and Kennedy stories”, who would raise a hand and say “I know!” ?   — It’s okay to say “no idea”, btw. This is a fairly deep cut.  But here’s a hint:  it connects to a recently released summer blockbuster.  

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So a few days ago I posted about newts, and I mentioned that there was an American newt that was ridiculously toxic. But then (I said) there wasn’t space or time to go into why.  And of course I was immediately bombarded by many* comments and e-mails asking why. 

*three

Well, fine.  The world’s most toxic newt is Taricha granulosa, the Rough-Skinned Newt, a modest little amphibian native to the North American Pacific Northwest, west of the Cascades from around Santa Cruz, CA up to the Alaska Panhandle.

It’s so toxic that the poison from a single newt can easily kill several adult humans. You could literally die from licking this newt, just once.

(But note that the newt is toxic, not venomous. It doesn’t bite or sting. You could handle one safely, as long as you washed your hands thoroughly afterwards. Very, very thoroughly.)

Okay, but… why?  Lots of newts are mildly toxic.  Why is this particularly newt so extremely toxic?

Turns out this is a fairly deep rabbit hole!  I’ll try to teal deer it.

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So a few days ago I posted about newts, and I mentioned that there was an American newt that was ridiculously toxic. But then (I said) there wasn’t space or time to go into why.  And of course I was immediately bombarded by many* comments and e-mails asking why. 

*three

Well, fine.  The world’s most toxic newt is Taricha granulosa, the Rough-Skinned Newt, a modest little amphibian native to the North American Pacific Northwest, west of the Cascades from around Santa Cruz, CA up to the Alaska Panhandle.

It’s so toxic that the poison from a single newt can easily kill several adult humans. You could literally die from licking this newt, just once.

(But note that the newt is toxic, not venomous. It doesn’t bite or sting. You could handle one safely, as long as you washed your hands thoroughly afterwards. Very, very thoroughly.)

Okay, but… why?  Lots of newts are mildly toxic.  Why is this particularly newt so extremely toxic?

Turns out this is a fairly deep rabbit hole!  I’ll try to teal deer it.

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Unemployed, I spent a week in April digging a small pond in our back yard. At the time, it was a distraction. Now it is… actually, a different sort of distraction.

Because although it’s not a very big pond — about 3 meters by 2, maximum depth about 70 cm — it has very quickly and suddenly filled up with life. The first water skater appeared literally on day one. Now there are about a dozen of them. We’ve also picked up water beetles, a couple of aquatic snails, some little swimming shrimp-like things, and several of these guys:



Ichthyosaura alpestris, “fish-lizard of the Alps”, aka the Alpine Newt.

But how did they get there?
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This is the second in a very occasional series of posts discussing the following proposition: 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. The first post, on kids’ animated cartoons, is here.

As noted in that post, “intended for children” here means mass media particularly targeting children aged 4-12 as the primary audience. So, Disney movies are included here, while 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.)  Movies means movies in theaters, not including TV movies or straight-to-video stuff.

So then: from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, movies for children were generally mediocre to bad. There were individual works that were good or excellent, but not many; and 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 suddenly started getting better, and then around 1995 they started getting very good indeed. The period 1970-1986 was a dark age for kid’s movies; the period 1995-2012 (0r so) was an astonishing age of gold. There was a massive cultural transformation here, and it happened fairly quickly.

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And then the light of an older heaven was in my eyes
and when my vision cleared, I saw Titans.

— Alan Moore

Today’s Occasional Paper comes to us from the James Webb Space Telescope.

So let’s start with some basics:  nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.  So when a telescope looks out into space, it’s also looking back into time.  Look at the moon?  You’re seeing it as it was when the light left it’s surface about 1.5 seconds ago.  Look at the Sun?  You’re seeing it as it was 8 minutes ago.  The Sun could have exploded 5 minutes ago, and there’s no way you could possibly know about it until 3 minutes from now.

Okay, so keep going.  Look at the nearest star?  You’re seeing it as it was about four years ago.  Look at the center of our galaxy?  30,000 years.  The light from there left around the high point of the last Ice Age.  Look out of our galaxy, at our neighbor galaxy Andromeda?  About 3 million years.

Now it starts to get weird and interesting.  Because as we start to look at things that are billions-with-a-b light years away — very distant galaxies — things start to change.  That’s because we’re looking back into the distant past of the Universe.  And the Universe is only 13.5 billion years old, so… yeah.  In theory, if you had a strong enough telescope, you could see back to the Big Bang and the beginning of everything.

Of course it’s not that simple.  The Universe is expanding.  Distant galaxies are receding from us.  More distant galaxies are receding faster, often at significant fractions of the speed of light (from our perspective).  This means that the distance to them is greater than you might expect.  It also means that their light is “red shifted” by the Doppler effect.  Also, while the Big Bang was very bright, once it cooled down the Universe was just a hot dark cloud of gas, mostly hydrogen with a bit of helium mixed in.  In that earliest pre-dawn epoch, there was not much to see, and no light to see with… until the first stars switched on.

And now for a brief historical digression.

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Today I’d like to talk about that delightful little companion of field and garden: the shrike.

[copyright Rosemary Mosco, 2024, birdandmoon.com]

If you know, you know.  And if you don’t know… well, let’s talk about shrikes.

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Here are two groups of Western philosophers. We’ll call them Group A and Group B. Here’s Group A:

Plato, Epicurus, Plotinus, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Newton, Leibniz, David Hume, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Schopenhauer, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kurt Gödel, Karl Popper, Jeremy Bentham, Alan Turing, Saul Kripke.

And here’s Group B:

Aristotle, Socrates, Descartes, Bishop George Berkeley, Rousseau, Heidegger, Hegel, Marx, Frege, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Albert Camus, Frantz Fanon, John Rawls, Willard Quine.

Okay, so: what distinguishes these two groups?

Answer under the cut, but… stare at those two lists. Take a moment; give it a try. Do you see it?

Hints: It’s something pretty straightforward. Frege is an edge case. And while Rousseau is formally part of Group B, he really belongs with Group A.

If you have a guess, put it in a comment, then come and look. [click to continue…]

The blue-ringed octopus! An elegant little creature, native to the southwest Pacific, particularly the waters around Australia. Pretty to look at… but mostly famous for being very, very venomous. The blue-ring’s bite is deadly.  A single sharp nip can kill an adult human in minutes.

But why? The blue-ring is a modest little creature that lives in shallow water, preying on small fish and crustaceans. A bite that can paralyze a 10 gram fish or a 20 gram crab, sure. A bite that can kill a 70 kilogram human dead? What’s the point of that?

Well: the good news is, a recent paper has discovered just why the blue-ringed octopus is so deadly. The bad news is… um, it’s kind of disturbing.

Trigger warning for sexual assault, cannibalism, and existential horror. I am not kidding.

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