I don't know why George RR Martin takes so long to write his books, but I'll give you an example of why *I* am so slow. Lemme tell you how I just finished an entire day of work wanting to bang my head against the desk. (AI-made "portrait" of GRRM—so bad, but love the 3 legs.) 🧵 For my current project I'm working on a bit about the 1930s Dust Bowl. ~35 yrs ago, a smart economist named Pierre Crosson told me most wind-blown soil from the Dust Bowl was deposited nearby, on other farm fields—and nobody knows what impact it had. resources.org/archives/erosi…

Just got a phone call from an old friend (my college roommate!) about the cancelled NSF grants that DOGE is celebrating in the post below. He’s on the list. But they have the wrong grant. 1/6

https://twitter.com/DOGE/status/1913403692906324405

Bob's trying to figure out why some labs and nuclear facilities are accepted by communities and some aren't. E.g., Reed College, a famously lefty place in lefty Portland, OR, has a nuclear reactor on its campus run by undergrads. Nobody in Portland says boo about it. Why? 2/6

Yesterday, in Science Advances, a US-Canada team reported the bones of a “paleo-Indian” from ~12,800 yrs ago have a composition showing his diet was mostly mammoth. It’s a fine paper bearing on multiple long-festering archaeology disputes—but may not mean what they think. 1/23 First, here’s the paper: science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
Here’s Science News’ coverage: sciencenews.org/article/dietar… 2/23

Interesting note from a pal: Indigenous voters--rarely polled--could tip the election in 5 of the 7 swing states. His countdown:

Wisconsin: 10 electoral votes. 5.9M people. 11 tribes, 147,000 members. In 2016, Clinton lost by ~12K votes. In 2020, Biden won by ~20K votes. 1/8 Michigan: 15 electoral votes. 10M+ people. 12 tribes w/ 242,000 members. Tiny reserves, so you can't see them well on maps. In 2016, Trump won by ~27,000 votes. In 2020, Biden by ~150,000 votes. 2/8

This, from a NY Times newsletter, is a bunch of important admissions about falsehoods spread by gov't and academia during the Covid epidemic. But I wish it went on to talk about how those falsehoods were, all too often, amplified by journalists, including those at the Times. 1/4 If history’s any guide, novel crises like the pandemic inevitably generate panic, lies, and power grabs by elites and wannabe elites. Too often, journos did not call BS on people who were loudly asserting things they couldn’t possibly know. Too many times, they took sides. 2/4

It is not only against the ignorant commoner with whom I contest: to defend all women comes to be the same as to offend almost all men, since rare is he that is not interested in building up his sex at the expense of the other.
Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, Defensa de la mujer (1726) This 1726 book, written by a Spanish monk, was wildly popular and controversial in its day, with hundreds of books and feuilletons being written for and against its strikingly modern rationalist argument that women were the cognitive, social, and moral equal of men.

On three occasions I've written something for an outlet that made people very angry who had some power over the outlet—twice before publication, once after. (I mostly cover science, which typically doesn’t get this kind of reaction, but it happens.) 1/7

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1657422401754259461?s=20

In the two before-publication cases, my article angered the publisher (in one) and a major advertiser (the other). Both times, my editors ran through what I was saying to make sure it was solid—then sent in their resignations. My pieces ran. 2/7
washingtonpost.com/technology/202…

New Science paper argues horses came to the Americas earlier than previously thought—a conclusion that, if it holds up, rewrites the history of the N. American West. Strikingly, the article is from a team of archaeologists, geneticists, and Lakota researchers and elders. 1/15 Both the findings and the collaboration are, in potential, a big deal. Let me explain why I think this. 2/ gifer.com/en/O3R

Reading this kind of article about what teachers can tell students (“Can we say slavery is wrong?” “No?") under the new dispensation makes me wonder what would happen if teachers gave students primary sources, rather than textbooks. washingtonpost.com/education/2023… 1/15 In this article, for instance, one teacher no longer can give students Howard Zinn’s account of Columbus’s voyage. 2/15

@kevin2kelly @chr1sa Sorry for the slow reply, Kevin. I have a terrible cold. But here's my stab at an answer to your good, hard question. @kevin2kelly @chr1sa The biggest problems w/ journalism now are the economics, which are a disaster. People who are wildly overstretched on the job and under siege financially simply won't do
a good job, period.

This new @BTI report deals with an issue little-known to the public but ever more important: figuring out how to reduce the climate impacts of agriculture. thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-ag…

A tiny bit of background, back-of-the-envelope style, in the thread below. 1/9 @BTI ~3/4 of greenhouse emissions come from industry, transportation, power generation, heating, and so on. We know, in theory, how to deal with this: Electrify everything, then generate the energy in a carbon-free way. This is a huge challenge, but we basically know how to do it. 2/9

Detailed study in Nature last month of how Mayapan—the biggest Maya city in Yucatán in ~AD1100-1450—responded to a century of drought may provide insight into our own drought-plagued future. nature.com/articles/s4146… 1/18 Mayapan was the capital of a confederacy of smaller states, the most powerful Maya political entity at the time. It rose after the decline in ~900AD of the famous city-states in the southern Yucatán (e.g., Tikal). (map: Masson and Peraza Lope 2014) 2/18

Modest proposal, occasioned by chats last night at a wedding with some smart, curious, well-educated 20-somethings: All high-school students should be required to take a course called How the System Works. 1/5 The course would have little political content. Instead it would focus on the physical systems that harvest and deliver drinking water, that generate and deliver energy (esp. electricity), that produce and distribute food, and the public-health system. 2/4

I get what Dr Folta is saying here, but I think it's important to understand that two different things are going on. One is the question, "what is reasonable?" The second is the question, "what is right?" I believe Dr Folta misunderstands the relation between them. 1/9

https://twitter.com/kevinfolta/status/1547243287664369665

Dr Folt is making a point about perceived risk, as he mentions here, in a reply to me. And he is 100% right about this, as far as I can tell. But that's not the sphere most people operate in.

https://twitter.com/kevinfolta/status/1547273893987188737

A few days ago, a Spanish publisher (@capitanswing) released a Spanish translation of my book, “1491.” News coverage led to a small kerfluffle, with various people denouncing me online. They got mad because my book supposedly attacks the Spanish Conquest of the Americas. 1/7 @capitanswing The general thrust of the criticism is that the Conquest was justified – even that it was good for Indigenous Americans themselves. 2/7

An extraordinary map: the areas in Canada in which their original inhabitants--First Nations, Inuit, and Metis, to be precise--have regained at least partial sovereignty. 1/10 A bit of explanation. In the 1970s, the Quebec provincial gov't decided to develop a huge hydropower project in the James Bay region to the north. Nobody asked the Cree and Inuit people who lived there. They didn't like that--and sued in 1972. 2/10

While trying to figure how to translate the name of a kind of hat worn by the conquistadors, I came across David Carrasco's translation of Bernal Diaz's history of the conquest, and found a few paragraphs that sum up how most historians today think of Aztec human sacrifice. I’d only add that the conquistadors almost never saw these rituals. Instead they saw Aztecs horribly killing (torturing, skinning alive, etc.) captured Spaniards to scare and intimidate them. But there’s little evidence that regular Aztec ceremonies were quite that sadistic.

Readers of 1491 tell me they're surprised by archaeologists' resistance to claims—like this one, from 2020—that the Americas were settled >20K yrs ago based on fragments of stone tools. In part, that skepticism descends from earlier fights. 1/18 One big example: In the 1880s Benjamin Harrison, a grocer and amateur archaeologist, claimed he found ~5 million yr old “stone tools”—chunks of chipped flint—in Kent. They were dubbed “eoliths” (Greek "eos", dawn, and "lithos", stone). (Cyril Chitty 📷 Maidstone Museum) 2/

Instead of working, I spent the last few days immersed in COVID preprints and papers. FWIW, I emerged with cautious optimism. If I were assigned to write a "state of COVID" piece, I'd sum it by saying the next 6-8 weeks will be awful, but there's reason for hope after that. 1/14 The argument that Omicron will be, for most, less severe (fewer hospitalizations per case) seems solid. Some of this seems due to the inherent properties of the variant itself, but most seems due to lots of people being vaccinated. (Charts from NY Times) 2/14

This Atlantic article says nobody thinks about COVID in the author's small town. I wondered if that were really true. I live in a small town, and plenty of people think about it.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… A few seconds on Google told me his town was Three Rivers, in southwestern MI, pop'n 7,659 in 2019. It's an exurb of Kalamazoo with a weirdly high crime rate (lots of meth, I'm guessing).

This USC-Princeton study in PNAS of the lives lost to COVID has some stunning numbers: pnas.org/content/118/5/… Data thru November suggest the disease has knocked .98-1.22 **YEARS** off US mean life expectancy at birth. To give some idea of how huge that is, recall that annual life-expectancy declines of .1 yr in 2015, '16, and '17 were cited as evidence of social catastrophe--a plague of overdoses, obesity, and suicide hitting the white working class. Case & Deaton wrote a famous book about it.