Mastodawn

Jonathan Schofield 21m ago

…I find myself fascinated by the parallels between carbon emissions and the obsession with immigration.

#climateDiary

Jonathan Portes says of the UK, “We don’t have control of immigration and we never have”.

If we want lower immigration we must have an *entirely different foreign policy*.

And if we want low carbon emissions we must have an *entirely different economy*.

The two go hand in hand but we cannot collectively contemplate either https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/112592972942108064

ubi 37m ago

Barbara Monaco 5h ago

China has blown up 300 dams and decommissioned more than 300 hydropower stations to try to save upper Yangtse River ecology. It is the largest river restoration ever attempted.
#China
#riverrestoration
#yangtze
#environment

https://indianexpress.com/article/world/china-destroys-300-dams-shuts-down-hydropower-stations-red-river-rare-fish-10120518/

ubi 49m ago

Ciarán Fahey 1h ago

Hungary’s oldest library is fighting to save 100,000 ancient books from a beetle infestation.

Climate change may have contributed.

(AP) #books #history #beetles #climatechange

https://apnews.com/article/hungary-library-abbey-beetle-infestation-pannonhalma-11069ba2713340ed28d27e3d7c8498cf

Hungary's oldest library is fighting to save 100,000 books from a beetle infestation

A medieval abbey in Hungary is battling a beetle infestation threatening its ancient book collection. Workers at the Pannonhalma Archabbey are removing around 100,000 books for disinfection after the drugstore beetle was found damaging the volumes. The beetles are attracted to adhesives in books and have infested about a quarter of the abbey's 400,000 works. The library at the UNESCO World Heritage site houses Hungary's oldest books, including a 13th-century Bible and pre-printing press manuscripts. The abbey blames rising temperatures from climate change for contributing to the infestation. Damaged books will undergo restoration after the six-week, oxygen-free treatment to kill the pests.

AP News

ubi 49m ago

Enrique Gil Alcubilla 1d ago

Buenos días con este pequeño díptero de la familia Conopidae "Physocephala vittata". Al parecer parásito de abejas y avispas.
#insectos #insects #macro #mosca #fly #diptera #photography #nature #naturaleza #fotografia

ubi 50m ago

Doug 23h ago

In the 1700s, teens were accused of being… addicted to novels.
Not alcohol. Not gambling.
Reading.
Across Europe, a strange fear gripped adults. Young people were devouring novels at a pace never seen before. They read at the dinner table, in bed, even while walking through the streets.
This wasn’t seen as a harmless hobby.
It was called “reading fever” or “book addiction.”
Some claimed it would rot their minds.
Others worried it would damage morals, ruin posture, or lead to dangerous daydreaming. Fiction was accused of causing everything from laziness to madness.
Moralists and educators sounded the alarm.
Pamphlets warned parents. Schools debated limits.
It wasn’t just what teens were reading — it was who was writing it.
Books like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) or Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) stirred emotion, imagination, and independence.
They were often written by or for women — a major threat to the era’s social order.
But despite the panic, teens kept reading.
And quietly, something revolutionary was happening.
This “reading mania” helped fuel mass literacy, gave rise to the modern novel, and encouraged generations to explore new ideas through story.
The so-called crisis?
It laid the foundation for modern literature as we know it.
Funny how things change.
Today, we beg kids to pick up a book.
Had you ever heard about the 1700s reading panic?
What do you think society would say if teens got “addicted” to books again?

ubi 51m ago

Tom Forsyth 6h ago

CMYK test finch. Useful for printer calibration.

ubi 51m ago

Dr. Divya 🍉 offline 1h ago

Displacement drive 🚨

I’m writing this 6 hours ago, unsure what the morning will bring for these six families. Friday night left some displaced and others expecting not to survive the night.

We’re helping them with URGENT food & new shelter. 1485/2500: https://chuffed.org/project/hope-giving-circle

#MutualAid #MutualAidRequest

Keep Hope Alive: a Gaza Giving Circle

We are a team of volunteers in the US and UK, led by two sisters passionate about helping our friends on the ground keep their families and neighbors alive with food, water, & shelter. We saw that their campaigns are extremely stagnant and wanted to find a way to direct steady help to them. We distribute your contributions equally every week for sustainable support.

Chuffed

ubi 51m ago

Michael Gale Jun 9

Small acts of rebellion to give you back a sense of control

- Ride your bike
- Shop local and independent
- Use a website instead of an app
- Find a more ethical brand of an everyday item
- Repair something instead of replacing it
- Buy direct from an artist whose work you love
- Turn your phone off for 1 hour
- Block ads with uBlock Origin and Firefox
- Make an actual phone call to a loved one
- Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Add more 👇

~~~~~~~~~~~~
*Update:* THANK YOU everyone for your amazing suggestions. There are around 70 cool things I have published on my website (linked below) for posterity. If you would like to opt-out of having your suggestion included, or have your name removed please let me know here or in a DM. I will totally understand.
~~~~~~~~~~~~

#biketoot #recycle #ublock #art #loneliness #righttorepair

ubi 1h ago

Church of Jeff 11h ago

#BlackLivesMatter #BLM #AlligatorAuschwitz #Bigotry #Racism

ubi 1h ago

Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis 1d ago

@nyhan So, I have been slowly and reluctantly coming to the conclusion that LLMs are the One Ring:

• They are seductive by appealing to a person's best nature

• By convincing the user that what they most ardently desire is almost within their grasp and they are right and good to want it and deserving of having it, they slowly turn the user into Gollum

• They are probably feeding everything the user whispers to it right on to the evil guy on the back end of a Palantir

Today I learned about 'rabbit starvation' and how Neanderthals avoided it.

When you're a hunter-gatherer and it's winter, you may try to survive by eating only meat - like rabbits, but also deer and other game. But this gives you too much protein and not enough carbohydrates and fat: most of this meat is very lean. If you eat enough lean meat to get all the calories you need, you can die from an overdose of protein! It's called 'protein toxicity'.

Hunter-gatherers in this situation sometimes throw away the 'steaks' and 'roasts' - the thighs and shoulders of the animals they kill - or feed them to their dogs. They need FAT to survive! So they focus on eating the fatty parts, including bone marrow.

So, in some cultures, while the men are out hunting, the women spend time making bone grease. This takes a lot of work. They take bones and break them into small pieces with a stone hammer. They boil them for several hours. The fat floats to the top. Then they let the water cool and skim off the fat.

There's been evidence for people doing this as far back as 28,000 BC. But now some scientists have found a Neanderthal 'bone grease factory' that's 125,000 years old!

This was during the last interglacial, in Germany. In a site near a lake, called Neumark-Nord, Neanderthals killed a lot of bison, horses and deer and crushed their bones, leaving behind tens of thousands of small bone fragments.

• Lutz Kindler et al, Large-scale processing of within-bone nutrients by Neanderthals, 125,000 years ago, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adv1257

Thanks to @sarahtaber for spotting this!

Now I better understand how humans domesticated wolves. In winter we weren't just giving them scraps. We were giving them steaks and roasts.

Little Art Histories 2d ago

@johncarlosbaez Yes, definitely by feeding them and by letting them eat human waste for hygienic purposes. One wolf stuck to the humans and now we have pugs.

Simon K-K 1d ago

@art_histories @johncarlosbaez and Chihuahuas...

Estarriol, lucozade dragon 2d ago

this needed a content warning, any dog owners need to make sure the dogs don't see this post!

ma𝕏pool 2d ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-domestication

The open question is, did humans do all the work, or how much did wolfs self-domesticate under evolutionary pressure of snack dispensaries.

"the prevailing domestication hypotheses posit that humans selectively bred wolves that were more docile. However, a competing hypothesis states that wolves that were less hostile towards humans would essentially domesticate themselves by naturally selecting for tamer wolves since that would allow for easier access to food from human settlements."

Rapid evolution of prehistoric dogs from wolves by natural and sexual selection emerges from an agent-based model
12 February 2025 https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2024.2646

John Carlos Baez 1d ago

@maxpool - I've heard claims that wolves accepted humans into their packs because we had useful skills, and they could help us hunt... so that to some extent *they* domesticated *us*.

Now of course we have the complete upper hand in the power dynamic, but it may not have been always thus.

it's interesting to think about, at least.

ma𝕏pool 1d ago

Wolves cooperate with ravens, so maybe with us too?

tom jennings 1d ago

@maxpool

I watch the animals in our yard compete, and cooperate. They all warn about common enemies (hawks). Its hard to not take from this the assumption of every animal for itself is ideological bullshit. It certainly does happen, but not even the norm. Most of the birds and small mammals seem to mostly want to lounge and play. Why would they be any different?

Guill.Jones, Honorary Canadian 1d ago

@johncarlosbaez
Well MY dog is pretty much the boss of me, John Carlos, so this whole domestication thing probably worked in both directions, in my opinion.

Mary Austin VOTED 4 HARRIS!1d ago

@Guillotine_Jones @johncarlosbaez
Yes, we have skills they exploit, such as manufacturing Kong toys and peanut butter.

PermaSolarPotter 1d ago

@Guillotine_Jones @johncarlosbaez came here to argue that we definitely do not have the upper hand 😂

@Guillotine_Jones @johncarlosbaez

NiftyLinks 18h ago

DAE Border Collie? They will run your life if you let them.

Leonard Ritter 1d ago

@maxpool @johncarlosbaez both is true

Alex Haist 1d ago

@johncarlosbaez ahahahha! This is a great take away.

stgiga (they/them)

1d ago

@johncarlosbaez

No wonder they are happy!

Hugs4friends ♾🇺🇦 🇵🇸😷2d ago

@johncarlosbaez Truly, Neanderthal were too intelligent to 'die out'. @sarahtaber

&2i 2d ago

@johncarlosbaez @sarahtaber
I'm wondering how they knew to approach things this way? Did they do a good job of listening to their bodies? Did they observe and deduce about protein toxicity? Both? Or maybe some other means of learning ... ?

@pneumaculturist - it's believed that Neanderthals had language. So once someone, somewhere, somehow, figured out that it was not good to only eat lean meat, this knowledge would get passed down. And natural selection is a powerful force too.

But it would be really cool to be there and watch how they figured this stuff out.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0278416520300544

@pneumaculturist - I'm reading a bit more about it:

“My friend, the way it is with us Bushmen,” he [Tomazo, a Kalahari San] began, “is that we love meat. And even more than that, we love fat. When we hunt we always search for the fat ones, the ones dripping with layers of white fat: fat that turns into a clear, thick oil in the cooking pot, fat that slides down your gullet, fills your stomach and gives you a roaring diarrhea."

“If the Ihalmiut [Inuit, NW Canada] hunter shoots a deer for food when he is on a trip far from the camps, he seldom bothers to go to the trouble of building a fire. Usually his first act is to cut off the lower legs of the deer, strip away the meat, and crack the bones for marrow. Marrow is fat, and an eternal craving for fat is part of the price of living on an all-meat diet."

Radical Anthropology 1d ago

@johncarlosbaez @pneumaculturist
Yeah but most h-gs do not have 'all-meat' diets, only certain contexts and times of year that are critical

@johncarlosbaez @pneumaculturist

Tony Vladusich 2d ago

We may be returning to that lifestyle soon at our current rate of decent!

@TonyVladusich - someday you'll thank me for having warned you to not eat only lean meat. This may be my most useful post ever on... umm.... Mastodon.

Tony Vladusich 2d ago

Man cannot live on octonions alone!

*sparkling anxiety* Evelyn 2d ago

@pneumaculturist @johncarlosbaez @sarahtaber
Have you ever tried to follow a high-protein, low fat diet (whether to lose weight or for some other reason)?
For me, it takes just a couple of weeks before I start craving fat. Removing the skin from a freshly baked piece of chicken has sometimes felt like the hardest thing I've ever done.

An adult woman needs about 3 teaspoons (14.7ml) of fat daily to avoid malnutrition; and most low-fat diets recommend a maximum of 5 teaspoons (24.5ml) daily (both amounts are larger for guys, but I've never had a reason to memorize that info). I have dieted a lot over the years; and, despite working very hard at cutting out fat, seldom ended a day having consumed less than 4.5 teaspoons (about 18.5 ml) of fat. And when I did, I was not just hungry- I was bug-eyed crazy hungry.

The body Wants That Stuff.

John Carlos Baez 1d ago

@Gorfram - No, I never tried such a diet. If so, I would have understood more easily why Neanderthals (or who knows, maybe even earlier hominids!) set up 'bone grease factories'.

llewelly 1d ago

@johncarlosbaez @Gorfram
it is an observation that turns up again and again in historical travel writing; Darwin had a paragraph about it in _The Voyage of the Beagle_, and several others, probably including Nansen and Wallace wrote about it, etc, etc. Unfortunately Darwin's paragraph about it is in the middle of his ham-handed and callous discussion of the colonialist wars against the indigenous peoples of Argentina. But go to https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/944/pg944-images.html#link2HCH0006 and search for Richardson if you want.

The Voyage of the Beagle

baconandcoconut 1d ago

@llewelly @johncarlosbaez @Gorfram I did that diet briefly leading up to gall bladder surgery. (If you are already having gall bladder issues, the recommendation is to try for zero fat.) I was so hungry all the time and nothing tasted like anything.

&2i 1d ago

@Gorfram @johncarlosbaez @sarahtaber really useful in'o. Thanks. I have never had such a diet and hearing from experience in this is clarifying.

Rosy Maths 1d ago

@Gorfram @pneumaculturist @johncarlosbaez @sarahtaber I have elevated cholesterol. The drs assistant (who still talked about BMI(!) told me very seriously I had cut fat and sugar from my diet. I said "pick one". She looked confused and did not invite me back.

I just don't do low fat diets - it makes me miserable!

bazzargh 2d ago

@pneumaculturist @johncarlosbaez @sarahtaber I wondered that too, and looked it up. Refs in wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_marrow_(food)#History suggest that early hominids were scavengers more than hunters - there's not much meat left on a kill by an apex predator, but tool-users can crack open bones and eat marrow and brain.

Bone marrow (food) - Wikipedia

@johncarlosbaez My first academic paper, despite being a Pure Mathematician, was in archaeology.

We applied Linear Programming to solve The Diet Problem for hominids in the late upper paleolithic in the South West of France. Having computed the "Optimal Diet" from first principles, we then predicted what should appear in middens, and achieved very good agreement.

The limiting factor in the diet was, indeed, fat, so despite the wealth of rabbits and roe deer, there was an unexpectedly large amount of nut debris, and this was explained by the calculations.

I should try to find copies of the papers ... I think there were two.

CC: @sarahtaber

-- https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/library/browse/issue.xhtml?recordId=1005775&recordType=Monograph

@johncarlosbaez Ah, here we are:

Conceptual issues in environmental archaeology (1988)

"K V Boyle & C D Wright (283-90) write on 'Foraging theory: mathematical modelling of socio-ecological change', advocating the use of Linear Programming to predict the optimal allocation of scarce resources."

CC: @sarahtaber

Conceptual issues in environmental archaeology

Pozorvlak 2d ago

@ColinTheMathmo @johncarlosbaez @sarahtaber what a cool result!

@pozorvlak The archaeologists were scathing. They particularly hammered us on including nutrients and food sources that they knew weren't in the middens.

"Why include these things in your analysis when we know they won't be relevant?"

In hindsight should we have anticipated that? Don't know ... it's nearly 40 years ago now.

Times have changed, the nature of archaeological research has changed.

Pozorvlak 2d ago

@ColinTheMathmo first they dismiss you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win? @johncarlosbaez @sarahtaber

Pozorvlak 2d ago

@ColinTheMathmo but also, that seems like the kind of thing that a good reviewer should have warned you about so you could explain it better in the paper! @johncarlosbaez @sarahtaber

@pozorvlak It was presented at a conference ... in Oxford I think ... and then converted to a paper. So the normal review processes might not have been followed.

It's a long time ago.

I haven't been able to find a copy of the paper, but it is in Scribd (spit) and I've screen-capped the pages, now I'm wondering about the easiest way to stitch them together.

Everything I've tried on Hugin has failed spectacularly and mysteriously.

@ColinTheMathmo @pozorvlak @johncarlosbaez @sarahtaber

redisle 1d ago

use ImageMagick https://imagemagick.org/index.php

convert [list of images] output.pdf

ImageMagick – Mastering Digital Image Alchemy

ImageMagick is a powerful, open-source software suite for creating, editing, converting, and manipulating images in over 200 formats. Ideal for web developers, graphic designers, and researchers, it offers versatile tools for image processing, including batch processing, format conversion, and complex image transformations.

ImageMagick

@jesshurch The screencaps have significant, but variable overlap, so just using "+append" or "-append" in convert or ImageMagick doesn't work.

It's more complicated than that.

Stitching them by hand requires pixel-level accuracy, otherwise there are visible (and annoying) artefacts.

Dealing with the overlaps is exactly what hugin is supposed to do, but it's being infuriatingly stubborn and not finding obvious matchings for control points, and finding nonsensical matchings, and then screwing up the stitching.

CC: @pozorvlak @johncarlosbaez @sarahtaber

@ColinTheMathmo @pozorvlak @johncarlosbaez @sarahtaber

redisle 1d ago

Ouch, Yes, I've had the odd stitched image where hugin refused to play ball and it's frustrating. I clearly got hold of the wrong end of the stick and thought you just wanted to catenate images

@jesshurch 👍

CC: @pozorvlak @johncarlosbaez @sarahtaber

@johncarlosbaez Also:

Mathematics in archaeology: return to basics. Science and Archaeology 28: 32-7 (1986)

I should see if I can find copies of these on-line. Or indeed, IRL.

CC: @sarahtaber

Sweet Home Alaberta 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ 🇲🇽1d ago

@ColinTheMathmo @johncarlosbaez @sarahtaber
Nuts make sense (late season and can be stored. Is brain fat insufficient to compensate for fatty flesh?

@NMBA In the end we didn't take the analysis that far. It's complicated, but the reaction from the audience was sufficiently negative that my co-author decided not to pursue it. Being a PhD student there are only so many risks you can take.

Sweet Home Alaberta 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ 🇲🇽1d ago

@ColinTheMathmo @johncarlosbaez @sarahtaber
Thanks for the reply! Indigenous folk here use brains to tan hides in summer, but in winter there's no tanning so brains would be a potential fat resource.

@NMBA The adaptations vary considerably across the globe ... we were dealing specifically with the late upper Palaeolithic in the South West of France, so it would be rather different, though obviously there would be common factors and themes.

JD Roy 1d ago

@ColinTheMathmo @johncarlosbaez @sarahtaber Is there any explanation for how cravings can correct dietary deficiencies in ancestral hominids and why modern humans don't seem to make the same kinds of corrections today? Does the craving system only correct for fat and sugar? Do we have no mechanism to crave for fiber and protein? If satiety cannot begin to kick in until 20 minutes after we begin eating, is it ethical to produce calorie dense foods in the first place?

@jdroy That's definitely far enough outside my expertise that I'm not able to comment.

JD Roy 1d ago

@ColinTheMathmo @johncarlosbaez @sarahtaber Thank you, you made me think and research. Probably not grade A answers, but I learned today that sugary drinks and foods you don't chew (like icecream) do not register the same way and can lead to over eating because they never trigger satiety in the first place. Essentially our ancestors only had access to 9kcal/g foods at most and had to work for them. I think that's helpful to know.

@jdroy That's super ... thanks for sharing the results of your investigations.

Very useful, and interesting.

Cheers!

JD Roy 1d ago

@ColinTheMathmo @johncarlosbaez @sarahtaber We do crave protein, but not in the same way we crave fats and oils, so it just leads to a global increase in hunger until our protein needs are satisfied, so one hack that seems common is to intentionally increase protein in order to increase satiety and thereby reduce the likelihood of overeating.

@johncarlosbaez @sarahtaber

Vassil Nikolov 2d ago

Thank you very much!

scy 2d ago

@johncarlosbaez I thought that the mainstream scientific opinion these days is that all genders were involved in hunting? Where are you taking this "making bone grease was a job for women" from?

Hugs4friends ♾🇺🇦 🇵🇸😷1d ago

@scy Yeah. I would guess that the bone breaking was probably a combined effort, as was the boiling...and childminding, and gathering. Modern thinking sets the gender roles. @johncarlosbaez

John Carlos Baez 1d ago

@scy - I'm taking it from the paper I showed you to read:

"On the basis of ethnohistoric accounts, as well as on experimental studies, the production of bone grease, an activity commonly carried out by women, requires considerable time, effort, and fuel [15–19]."

scy 1d ago

@johncarlosbaez Thanks! Indeed the paper says that bone grease production was commonly carried out by women, thanks for pointing me to that.

However, I couldn't find a section in the paper where it's claiming that only the men were hunting. (Of course I might've missed that, too.)

Sorry for being kind of pedantic about this. I just like to make sure that we're sticking to the facts when reporting about these things and not reproduce and reinforce modern-day gender stereotypes.

The gallant knight 2d ago

@johncarlosbaez @sarahtaber To give you a catchy tune: Boneeater 😆

@johncarlosbaez @sarahtaber

Su_G 2d ago

So interesting! Puts the Neanderthal “industrial site” aka 'bone grease factory' (that's 125,000 years old) & the domestication of wolves into dogs (added bonus - great observation) into perspective & sparks off a fascinating discussion!! Also gives perspective to fat stores like “the great butter mountain”. How detached & distant we are from these survival basics! Thanks for kicking this off! 🙂