61 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2024
    1. 2023 haben Böden und Landpflanzen fast kein CO2 absorbiert. Dieser Kollaps der Landsenken vor allem durch Dürren und Waldbrände wurde in diesem Ausmaß kaum vorausgesehen, und es ist nicht klar, ob auf ihn eine Regeneration folgt. Er stellt Klimamodelle ebenso in Frage wie die meisten nationalen Pläne zum Erreichen von CO2-Neutralität, weil sie auf natürlichen Senken an Land beruhen. Es gibt Anzeichen dafür, dass die steigenden Temperaturen inzwischen auch die CO2-Aufnahmefähigkeit der Meere schwächen. Überblicksartikel mit Links zu Studien https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/14/nature-carbon-sink-collapse-global-heating-models-emissions-targets-evidence-aoe

    1. Noch nie ist die CO2-Konzentration in der Atmosphäre so stark gestiegen wie im vergangenen Jahr, nämlich um 3,37 parts per million (PPM). Die Konzentration liegt jetzt bei 422 PPM. Vor allem die sehr geringe CO2-Aufnahme durch Ozean- und Landsenken hat diese Steigerung verursacht https://taz.de/Hiobsbotschaft-fuers-Klima/!6040258/

  2. Sep 2024
  3. Apr 2024
    1. Research shows that groundwater levels are rapidly declining, especially in dry regions with extensive croplands, and has accelerated over the past four decades in 30% of the world's regional aquifers
    2. eclining food production and nutrient losses will result in severe stunting affecting 1 million children in Africa alone and cause 183 million additional people to go hungry by 2050 (92).
  4. Dec 2023
    1. Mind1, which refers to the neurocognitive activity that allows you to behave in the world.
      • for: hard problem of consciousness - UTok, question - consciosness - UTok mind 1a, Gregg Henrique

      • comment

      • question - consciousness - UTok mind 1b
        • This is a great diagram and conveys a lot in a succinct manner.
        • However, I have a gut feeling that the Mind 01a is not quite the right representation
        • If language and analysis is in the Mind 3 domain, then it is combined with Mind 1b as neurocognition is itself a mental construction, rather than an object
        • All this addresses that there is a deep entanglement between many scientifically analytically rich "objects" and constructed ideas
          • Scientific objects are spoken about and mixed with non-scientifically-laden objects in the world as if they are one and the same. They are not. Scientifically-laden objects have a huge amount of analytic theory behind them. Without familiarity with that theory, the object loses its validity, especially to the lay person.
          • This could be a possible explanation of why scientists are losing their credibility in modernity and giving rise to alternative facts, misinformation and fake news
  5. Aug 2023
    1. there's no uh uh catastrophe even if things plug along as they're going and there's no mass die off of humans or anything like that 00:36:47 the population is set to decline i don't know when the peak is supposed to come but uh the peak is supposed to come at you know within the next 10 20 years or so 00:36:59 and after that the world population will start to decline how is how is this growth capitalism model growth-based capitalism model how is that going to 00:37:12 function when the world is shrinking
      • for: population decline, economic growth vs population decline
      • comment
        • John makes a good point
        • how will humans negotiate a growth economy when population is shrinking?
        • it may be that AI automation may lessen the need for human capacity, but the future is unknown how these forces will balance out
    1. Participation in a religious community generally correlates with better health outcomes and longer life, higher financial generosity, and more stable families—all of which are desperately needed in a nation with rising rates of loneliness, mental illness, and alcohol and drug dependency.

      It's really saying something that in paragraph 2 the "sell" for religion is the health and social benefits and outcomes rather than the love or support of god(s)!

  6. Jul 2023
    1. "When their antennae become clogged with pollution particles, insects struggle to smell food, a mate, or a place to lay their eggs, and it follows that their populations will decline,"
      • quote
        • "When their antennae become clogged with pollution particles,
        • insects struggle to
          • smell food,
          • smell a mate, or
          • smell a place to lay their eggs,
        • and it follows that their populations will decline,"
      • Author
        • Prof Mark Elgar
  7. Aug 2022
  8. Jul 2022
    1. Yet there were still many traps along the way. In what is now Iraq, the Sumerian civilization (one of the world’s first) withered and died as the irrigation systems it invented turned the fields into salty desert. Some two thousand years later, in the Mediterranean basin, chronic soil erosion steadily undermined the Classical World: first the Greeks, then the Romans at the height of their power. And a few centuries after Rome’s fall, the Classic Maya, one of only two high civilizations to thrive in tropical rainforest (the other being the Khmer), eventually wore out nature’s welcome at the heart of Central America.

      Progress traps through history: * 1. Sumerian civilization (Iraq) irrigation system turned fields into salty desert * Greek and Roman empire - chronic soil erosion also eroded these empires * Classic Mayan empire may have collapsed due to the last 2 of 7 megadroughts because it was over-urbanized and used up all water sources, leaving no buffer in case of drought: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/02/new-clues-about-how-and-why-the-maya-culture-collapsed/

    1. The Southern Levant, situated between modern day southern Syria via Israel to Sinai, has a spatiotemporally dense and continuous Paleolithic archaeological record offering a unique opportunity to detect faunal changes, including those predating the appearance of Homo sapiens (Bar-Yosef, 1980; Stutz, 2014). It is thus a suitable model to test long-term changes in the body mass of mammalian assemblages, in view of paleoclimates and changing human lineages, to decipher whether climate and/or humans are responsible for animal body size declines. The excellent archaeological record can further illuminate whether size declines are observed since hominins first colonized the region, or whether they start with the emergence of Homo sapiens (Louys et al., 2021), or are concentrated in the last glacial and its aftermath. We tested whether the size, and size changes, in hominin prey through the Pleistocene and early Holocene were related to time, the prevailing human lineages and cultures, paleoenvironment, and temperatures.

      Southern Levant is unique for providing records for this study.

  9. Apr 2022
    1. Carl T. Bergstrom. (2021, August 18). 1. There has been lots of talk about recent data from Israel that seem to suggest a decline in vaccine efficacy against severe disease due to Delta, waning protection, or both. This may have even been a motivation for Biden’s announcement that the US would be adopting boosters. [Tweet]. @CT_Bergstrom. https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1427767356600688646

  10. Feb 2022
  11. Jan 2022
  12. Dec 2021
    1. That, Pinker tells us, is the kind of dismal fate ordained for usby evolution. We have only escaped it by virtue of our willingness toplace ourselves under the common protection of nation states,courts of law and police forces; and also by embracing virtues ofreasoned debate and self-contro

      It's interesting to note that the founders of the United States famously including Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr regularly participated in duel culture which often ended in death despite its use as a means of defending one's honor and relieving tensions between people.

    2. When archaeologistsundertake balanced appraisals of hunter-gatherer burials from thePalaeolithic, they find high frequencies of health-related disabilities –but also surprisingly high levels of care until the time of death (andbeyond, since some of these funerals were remarkably lavish).16
      1. Formicola, Vincenzo. 2007. ‘From the Sungir children to the Romito dwarf: aspects of the Upper Palaeolithic funerary landscape.’ Current Anthropology 48: 446–53.

      It will require some investigation, but on it's face this reference to Formicola seems to be about a small number of cases and doesn't point to or back up their claim about high frequencies of societal care and support. Where is their evidence within the archaeological record.

    3. ‘What is it about the ancients,’ Pinker asks at one point, ‘that theycouldn’t leave us an interesting corpse without resorting to foul play?’

      Part of their point here seems to be that Pinker is suffering from a form of bias related to the most sensational cases which will tend to heighten the availability bias. (Is there a name for this sort of sensationalism effect?)

      Is there also some survivorship bias at play here as well?

      We don't have access to a wide statistical survey of dead bodies from a large swath of times and places which makes it difficult to determine actual numbers.

    4. Now, this may seem counter-intuitive to anyone who spendsmuch time watching the news, let alone who knows much about thehistory of the twentieth century.

      Are they suffering from potential availability heuristic (cognitive bias) here? Are they encouraging it in us? Just because we see violence on the news every day doesn't mean it's ubiquitous.

      Apparently we'll need real evidence here to provide actual indications.

      Does Steven Pinker provide archaeological evidence in his book? What are the per capita rates of violence and/or death over time?

    1. Simultaneously, there was a revival of the old art of excerpting and the use of commonplace books. Yet, the latter were perceived no longer as memory aids but as true secondary memo-ries. Scholars, in turn, became increasingly aware that to address the informa-tion overload produced by printing, the best solution was to train a card index instead of their own individual consciousness.

      Another reason for the downfall of older Western memory traditions is the increased emphasis and focus on the use of commonplaces and commonplace books in the late 1400s onward.

      Cross reference the popularity of manuals by Erasmus, Agricola, and Melanchthon.

  13. Nov 2021
    1. Anyone who accidentally creates discomfort—whether through their teaching methods, their editorial standards, their opinions, or their personality—may suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of not just a student or a colleague but an entire bureaucracy, one dedicated to weeding out people who make other people uncomfortable. And these bureaucracies are illiberal. They do not necessarily follow rules of fact-based investigation, rational argument, or due process. Instead, the formal and informal administrative bodies that judge the fate of people who have broken social codes are very much part of a swirling, emotive public conversation, one governed not by the rules of the courtroom or logic or the Enlightenment but by social-media algorithms that encourage anger and emotion, and by the economy of likes and shares that pushes people to feel—and to perform—outrage. The interaction between the angry mob and the illiberal bureaucracy engenders a thirst for blood, for sacrifices to be offered up to the pious and unforgiving gods of outrage—a story we see in other eras of history, from the Inquisition to the more recent past.

      Certainly this modern inquisition is a more gentle one than the original Inquisition of the Catholic Church.

      Is this a supporting data point on the continuum of decreasing violence for Steven Pinker's decline of violence thesis?

      Is the totality of what we may be giving up worth it for the greater overall comfort for society?

  14. Oct 2021
  15. Sep 2021
  16. Aug 2021
    1. After a long and influential career, commonplace books lost their influence in the late seventeenth century. Classical passages were relegated to the anti- quarian scholar; they no longer molded discourse and life. Men who sought confirmation in empirical evidence and scientific measurement had little use for commonplace books.

      I believe that Earle Havens disputes the idea of the waning of the commonplace book after this.

      I would draw issue with it as well. Perhaps it lost some ground in the classrooms of the youth, but Harvard was teaching the idea during Ralph Waldo Emerson's time during the 1800s. Then there's the rise of the Zettelkasten in Germany in the 1700s (and later officially in the 1900s).

      Lichtenberg specifically mentions using his commonplace as a scientific tool for sharpening his ideas.

      Can we find references to other commonplacers like Francis Bacon mentioning the use of them for science?

  17. Jul 2021
  18. Jun 2021
  19. May 2021
  20. Mar 2021
  21. Feb 2021
  22. Oct 2020
  23. Sep 2020
  24. Aug 2020
  25. Jul 2020
  26. Jun 2020
  27. May 2020
    1. Myers, K. R., Tham, W. Y., Yin, Y., Cohodes, N., Thursby, J. G., Thursby, M. C., Schiffer, P. E., Walsh, J. T., Lakhani, K. R., & Wang, D. (2020). Quantifying the Immediate Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Scientists. ArXiv:2005.11358 [Physics]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2005.11358