“The Solomonic kings of Ethiopia, in Krebs’ retelling, forged trans-regional connections. They ‘discovered’ the kingdoms of late medieval Europe, not the other way around.”

(The authors of this article wrote The Bright Ages, which I enjoyed.)

“Because the drought had worsened since the quotas were set, conservancy members had voluntarily left most of them unfilled. While wildlife surveys earlier in the year had suggested that 75 oryx could be killed without harming the population, for example, only three had been shot so far.”

“Tromelin Island had its rats eradicated in 2005 and has since seen an eightfold increase in seabirds. Six locally extinct species of seabirds have also returned.”

“A major reason that these odd-sided cells were necessary is that the bees will start building at different sites by making honeycombs with different orientations. Thus, as these different segments grow to meet each other, their hexagonal arrays will be oriented with incompatible angles.”

In addition to converting older posts, I’m going to be posting one thing from my backlog every evening, until I’m caught up. Then, who knows, maybe I’ll keep up with this instead of letting it go fallow for almost a year.

Just updated some of the infrastructure behind this microblog. Articles had been unstructured text with tags; now, it supports structured data, which lets me do things like make lists of authors and publications.

I’ve converted some of the newest and oldest posts, and will gradually convert the rest. The list of tags still exists, but with authors and publications all mixed in; those will move to the proper lists as I convert posts.

“Think of it this way: SARS-CoV-2, the virus, causes COVID-19, the disease — and it doesn’t have to. Vaccination can disconnect the two.”

“I’m not sure this networked and weaponized absurdity is the product of ‘vengeful nihilism’ because I’m not sure the message is that ‘lol nothing matters.’ To me, the message is similar to that of any protest: We matter. And you’re going to listen to us.”

Bonus quote: “What you are looking at is an NFT from the popular artist Beeple of a well-endowed Musk walking a version of the Doge meme (a Shiba Inu). It is selling for a very specific six-figure sum that is a combination of the numbers 69 (hehe sex!) and 420 (blaze it!).”

“These people have always been this way. They do not seek to learn or grow, despite the startup mantra about ‘always learning.’ They do not see personal growth as anything other than buffing out the edges on their own sculpture — they do not want to get better in any way that does not optimize their own personal wealth.”

“It seems that, in [Kagan’s] view, Kavanaugh is trying to ‘bank capital’ by flaunting his empathy, as if he can mitigate the unjust effects of his most conservative opinions. His deep concern for the losing party should offset the actual ramifications of his actions.”

“The [New York] Times in particular is a well-resourced standard-bearer for digital journalism, with a robust institutional archiving structure. Their interest in facing the challenge of linkrot indicates that it has yet to be understood or comprehensively addressed across the field.”

“There is a major lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that studies and experiments on coronaviruses, located in the same province what appears to have been the initial outbreak. But no one has even come close to making a positive case for a causal link beyond those coincidental facts and a shrugging ‘it’s possible.’”

“To most consumers, Prime looks like a lovely convenience offering free shipping, and it’s hard to find better prices elsewhere. But the reason you can’t find better prices isn’t because Amazon sells stuff cheap, but because it forces everyone else to sell stuff at higher prices.”

“Dupree and her colleagues suggested that as the star expanded in one of its usual cycles, a portion of the surface accelerated much more rapidly, thanks to a convection cell that had traveled from the interior of the star to its surface. Those two events combined pushed out sufficient material far enough from the star that it cooled down, forming stardust. That dust could account for the dimming.”

“Now, when I look back on the few years that I spent in close proximity to Butler, I find that I cannot do so without experiencing a kind of concomitant regret. I ask myself how I might have succeeded in being a better neighbor or friend to a person whose celebrity status seemed, to me, to mean that she needed neither.”