Recent books
Hannu Rajamiemi, Summerland. From the author of The Quantum Thief, but you’d never guess it by reading the book. It’s a classic British spy novel, but set in an alternate history. What if instead of just creating radio, the inventors of the early 20th century had discovered a way to communicate with the afterlife? And what if that afterlife were ripe for colonization? Fun read, and much quicker than Rajamiemi’s extremely dense earlier work.
Claire North, 84K. North brings a literary voice to a dystopian novel about a possible future in which everything has been financialized and privatized, including crime and punishment. The fractured timeline makes for some lovely puzzles.
Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Cycle. I just reread this top-notch YA fantasy quartet, because she’s just added a short novelette to the cycle, one which gives a direct view into the head of Opal, aka Orphan Girl. She’s apparently working on a new trilogy primarily about Ronan, and this makes a delicious apertif while we wait for it.
Scott Alexander, Unsong. The first novel from one of my favorite nonfiction bloggers (SlateStarCodex) is really entertaining, and describes an alternate America dominated by Qabalistic magic.
Poison-Taster Ants Help Save Colonies – Seeker
We’ve been poisoning ants this week, so I got curious about what strategies and colonies had evolved for dealing with poisonous food sources in the wild.
On cold, damp days, starving ants often march into homes seeking food, and some homeowners put out poison to try and stop them. But ants have evolved three successful ways to combat both poisonings and famine, including sacrificing some ants as poison tasters.
The findings, accepted for publication in the journal Animal Behavior, may apply to humans — and not just those with ant invasions — because they show how food can be distributed quickly after a famine, while also guarding against sickness, or even death, from poison.
https://www.seeker.com/poison-taster-ants-help-save-colonies-1764994009.html
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal – Good
It took me a long time to get to the point where I had appropriately low expectations of humans…
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal –
Cyriak, not getting any less weird as the years pass…
‘Indigestion’
Why some studies make campus rape look like an epidemic while others say it’s rare – Vox
One of the most alarming things about sexual assault on college campuses is how little we know about it. Is there really an epidemic of campus sexual assault? Or are college-age women just at a risky point in their lifetime, regardless of their campus environment?
“Doxastic”
A charming word that I learned today.
Doxastic logic is a type of logic concerned with reasoning about beliefs.
The Obsessive Search for the Tasmanian Tiger
We have no way to define extinction—or existence—other than through the limits of our own perception. For many years, an animal was considered extinct a half century after the last confirmed sighting. The new standard, adopted in 1994, is that there should be “no reasonable doubt that the last individual has died,” leaving us to debate which doubts are reasonable.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/02/the-obsessive-search-for-the-tasmanian-tiger
How presidential elections are impacted by a 100 million year old coastline | Deep Sea News
I may have posted this back when it came out, but if so, it’s worth posting again. A fascinating example of unusually long-term consequences…
Hale County in west central Alabama and Bamberg County in southern South Carolina are 450 miles apart. Both counties have a population of 16,000 of which around 60% are African American. The median households and per capita incomes are well below their respective state’s median, in Hale nearly $10,000 less. Both were named after confederate officers–Stephen Fowler Hale and Francis Marion Bamberg. And although Hale’s county seat is the self-proclaimed Catfish Capitol, pulling catfish out of the Edisto River in Bamberg County is a favorite past time. These two counties share another unique feature. Amidst a blanket of Republican red both Hale and Bamberg voted primarily Democratic in the 2000, 2004, and again in the 2008 presidential elections. Indeed, Hale and Bamberg belong to a belt of counties cutting through the deep south–Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina–that have voted over 50% Democratic in recent presidential elections. Why? A 100 million year old coastline...
Global Link From Housing in America – The Economist
(2016)
WHAT are the most dysfunctional parts of the global financial system? China’s banking industry, you might say, with its great wall of bad debts and state-sponsored cronyism. Or the euro zone’s taped-together single currency, which stretches across 19 different countries, each with its own debts and frail financial firms. Both are worrying. But if sheer size is your yardstick, nothing beats America’s housing market.
It is the world’s largest asset class, worth $26 trillion, more than America’s stockmarket. The slab of mortgage debt lurking beneath it is the planet’s biggest concentration of financial risk. When house prices started tumbling in the summer of 2006, a chain reaction led to a global crisis in 2008-09. A decade on, the presumption is that the mortgage-debt monster has been tamed. In fact, vast, nationalised, unprofitable and undercapitalised, it remains a menace to the world’s biggest economy.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2016/08/20/nightmare-on-main-street