The history of urbanization

January 2, 2017 • 1:30 pm

From Metrocosm, and now on YouTube, we have a cool animation of the growth of the world’s cities starting with Eridu, which had attained “city” status by about 3000 BC.

For each city, this map shows the date of the earliest recorded population figure, which is not necessarily the date when the city was founded. The size of each dot corresponds to its population at that time.

By 2030, 75 percent of the world’s population is expected to be living in cities. Today, about 54 percent of us do. In 1960, only 34 percent of the world lived in cities.

Urbanization didn’t begin in the 1960’s. But until recently, tracking its history much further back than that was a challenging task. The most comprehensive collection of urban population data available, U.N. World Urbanization Prospects, goes back only to 1950. But thanks to a report released last week by a Yale-led team of researchers, it’s now possible to analyze the history of cities over a much longer time frame.

The researchers compiled the data by digitizing, geocoding, and standardizing information from past research published about historical urban populations. The result is a clean, accessible dataset of cities, their locations, and their populations over time, going as far back as 3700 B.C.

As the authors of acknowledge, the data has a number of limitations and is “far from comprehensive.” Certain parts of world are better represented than others, and some well known cities do not appear until centuries after they were founded. That said, for such an ambitious project (the historical populations of every city ever built anywhere in the world), I think they managed to piece together an impressive amount of data.

Note the huge explosion of urbanization around 1900 AD:

h/t: Matthew Cobb

Dawkins’s answer to the Edge question: the genome as palimpsest

January 2, 2017 • 12:00 pm

As I posted yesterday, a lot of contributors gave their answers to the 2017 annual Edge Question, “What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?” (See all responses here.) In the last 24 hours Richard Dawkins has weighed in with his answer, “The genetic book of the dead,” which involves reverse-engineering our DNA sequences to reconstruct the ancestral environments of living species. While Dawkins has discussed this before, most notably in Unweaving the Rainbow, not everyone’s read that book. It’s worth considering that an organism’s genome may be a palimpsest of its ancestry, which in turn reflects in part the environments to which those ancestors were adapted.

You can read Richard’s piece for yourself; I’ll give one brief excerpt:

Given a key, you can reconstruct the lock that it fits. Given an animal, you should be able to reconstruct the environments in which its ancestors survived. A knowledgeable zoologist, handed a previously unknown animal, can reconstruct some of the locks that its keys are equipped to open. Many of these are obvious. Webbed feet indicate an aquatic way of life. Camouflaged animals literally carry on their backs a picture of the environments in which their ancestors evaded predation.

But most of the keys that an animal brandishes are not obvious on the surface. Many are buried in cellular chemistry. All of them are, in a sense which is harder to decipher, also buried in the genome. If only we could read the genome in the appropriate way, it would be a kind of negative imprint of ancient worlds, a description of the ancestral environments of the species: the Genetic Book of the Dead.

Naturally the book’s contents will be weighted in favour of recent ancestral environments. The book of a camel’s genome describes recent milennia in deserts. But in there too must be descriptions of Devonian seas from before the mammals’ remote ancestors crawled out on the land. The genetic book of a giant tortoise most vividly portrays the Galapagos island habitat of its recent ancestors; before that the South American mainland where its smaller ancestors thrived. But we know that all modern land tortoises descend earlier from marine turtles, so our Galapagos tortoise’s genetic book will describe somewhat older marine scenes. But those marine ancestral turtles were themselves descended from much older, Triassic, land tortoises.  And, like all tetrapods, those Triassic tortoises themselves were descended from fish. So the genetic book of our Galapagos giant is a bewildering palimpsest of water, overlain by land, overlain by water, overlain by land.

We can already reconstruct the features of ancestors by looking at some bits of the genome, especially those “dead genes” that were useful to our ancestors but no longer to their descendants. For example, as I mention in WEIT, the human genome contains three dead genes that are very similar in sequence to active genes that make proteins in the egg yolks of living birds and reptiles. That’s almost irrefutable evidence that we descended from animals with yolked eggs. That says a bit about our ancestral environments, but we can do better. Humans also have a number of dead “olfactory receptor genes” that enabled our ancestors to smell particular molecules (one per gene). Those genes are still active in our relatives like dogs and mice. This tells us that our lineage experienced reduced selection for olfaction, almost certainly because our lineage became more dependent on vision and hearing.

In fact, whales have a huge set of olfactory genes, but every single one of them is inactive. That tells us that the environment of their ancestors was terrestrial.

Can we go further than that? Yes, in principle it’s possible. Richard suggests this solution:

I have a sort of dim inkling of a plan. For simplicity of illustration, I’ll stick to mammals. Gather together a list of mammals who live in water and make them as taxonomically diverse as possible: whales, dugongs, seals, water shrews, otters, yapoks. Now make a similar list of mammals that live in deserts: camels, desert foxes, jerboas etc. Another list of taxonomically diverse mammals who live up trees: monkeys, squirrels, koalas, sugar gliders. Another list of mammals that live underground: moles, marsupial moles, golden moles, mole rats. Now borrow from the statistical techniques of the numerical taxonomists, but use them in a kind of upside-down way. Take specimens of all those lists of mammals and measure as many features as possible, morphological, biochemical and genetic. Now feed all the measurements into the computer and ask it (here’s where I get really vague and ask mathematicians for help) to find features that all the aquatic animals have in common, features that all the desert animals have in common, and so on. Some of these will be obvious, like webbed feet. Others will be non-obvious, and that is why the exercise is worth doing. The most interesting of the non-obvious features will be in the genes. And they will enable us to read the Genetic Book of the Dead.

There are a few problems here, though. One is convergent evolution. A marsupial mole evolved its morphology and behavior independently from those of placental moles, and it’s very likely that the genetic signature of a fossorial life will differ at least somewhat between these two groups. Likewise for arboreal koalas and monkeys, and many desert animals. In such cases, looking at the genes might tell us very little about their ancestral environment of animals whose forebears lived underground, in trees, or in deserts. In other cases,  genes no longer used will degrade, making it more difficult to decide what function they served. (That hasn’t happened for olfactory receptor genes or egg-yolk genes, though, telling us that useful genetic information can be preserved for millions of years.) Richard takes that into account when he says the reverse engineering is more effective for more recent ancestors.

Finally, there’s another genetic way to reconstruct ancestral environments: using DNA to make phylogenies, or “family trees” and combining that with the fossil record or the existence of vestigial features. Doing that, for instance, has told us that whales not only descended from terrestrial mammals, but fossils add that it’s probably descended from a deer-like artiodactyl called Indohyus. We can tell what the environment of Indohyus was from its morphology. And in many cases ancestral environments might be better reconstructed from fossils, which bear signs of their adaptations, than the DNA sequences themselves. Also, using DNA-based phylogenies can give us ideas of when certain characters appeared on the lineage: which are ancestral and which are derived. From that kind of reconstruction, for instance, we know that the one species ancestral to social bees was monogamous–singly mated–giving support to the notion that kin selection was an impetus for the evolution of eusociality (kin from single matings are more closely related to each other than kin from multiple matings). The reference is given below.

Regardless, it’s fascinating to see organisms as palimpsests of the past: a thing that we evolutionists have known for a while but that the layperson may not appreciate. Our many vestigial organs (like the muscles that I can use to move my ears) testify to that, and now, with DNA sequencing, we get more testimony from our genes.

Below are the three ear muscles that we inherited but (with some individual exceptions like me) can no longer use. The big muscle atop the ear, and the thin ones in front and back, are the three vestigial ones. In animals like dogs and horses they’re used to move the ear around for hearing; in humans they have no use—except to amuse my students.

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Hughes, W. O. H., B. P. Oldroyd, M. Beekman, and F. L. W. Ratnieks. 2008. Ancestral monogamy shows kin selection is key to the evolution of eusociality. Science 320:1213-1216.

Another word on free will: does compulsion eliminate it?

January 2, 2017 • 10:30 am

In my post on the Annual Edge Question the other day, which gave a link to my short piece on “determinism” on the Edge website, reader Coel made this comment:

A hope for the new year is that some commenters here might persuade PCC-E that many compatibilists do not see compatibilist notions of “free will” and “choice” as carny tricks or as evasion, nor as being what we tell the little people, but that we see them as useful and indeed necessary concepts for understanding human interactions. [JAC: In fact, I have several quotes from people like Dennett that we can’t spread the view of determinism in society lest there be dire social consequences; these quotes are explicitly “little people” quotes.]

To that end, I shall ask a question:

Is there a meaningful sense in which one can say that wearing a hijab is a “choice” in America but not a choice in Iran or Saudi Arabia?

Any determinist who answers “Yes” has then adopted the essentials of the compatibilist perspective (even if they then want to re-write the language).

[And I presume that no determinist will answer “no”, and say that in neither country is there any meaningful “choice” in the matter, since whether one wears a hijab is just determined by the laws of physics, are they?]

I responded with this:

What I would say, to be accurate, is this: “The government compels its citizens to wear the hijab in Iran, but doesn’t in the U.S.”

I do use the word “choice,” but I always realize that its dualistic connotation is illusory. And, as I’ve already said (but don’t want to argue this again), I frankly don’t care about the semantic machinations of compatibilists. You and I both know that the laws of physics underlie whether one wears a hijab or not, and where. What is important to me is to grasp PHYSICAL DETERMINISM and work out its consequences. It’s a semantic trick to do compatibilism because it undercuts what virtually everyone sees as “free will”: a dualistic free will. It’s as if you’re saying we can redefine “religious” to mean “full of awe” because there are similarities between religious people and Carl Sagan.

Now let me expand on that brief comment.

It’s a common notion of compatibilist “free will” that we have that sort of will when we experience no external compulsion that forces us to do something. So a hijabi in Iran is under legal compulsion to veil her head, while a hijabi in, say, New York is not; therefore the later has a “free choice.” That, say compatibilists, is a meaningful sort of free will. My contention is that there is no meaningful difference here.

While I agree that the forms of environmental constraint that make one wear a hijab in Iran may differ from those affecting hijabis in the U.S., I think it’s important to recognize that “compulsion”, whether it comes from the government or from your parents, is a.) still mediated through your neurons to result in a given behavior; b.) still a compulsion that cannot be resisted; and c.) still dictated, at bottom, by the laws of physics.

In my response I avoided using the word “choice” because I think you can express the same idea without the confusion of “choice.” But I still use that word in my daily life, yet when I think about it I always realize that it’s an ostensible or illusory choice. And in writing about free will I do try to avoid it because of its common connotations, which might confuse the reader. Or I might put quotes around it: “choice.”

Regardless, though, is there a meaningful difference between a government decree on the one hand, or one’s parents and one’s peers whose influence makes you wear the hijab on the other? Both are part of the environment that affects one’s brain, resulting in the donning of a headscarf.

But that’s not all. Your brain, though the working of the environment (both developmental and social) on your evolved neural equipment, is always the source of compulsion. If you believe, as most readers do, that at any time there is only one possible action you can take, and that is determined by your genes and environment, then you are being compelled to act by your brain. Is there a substantive difference between the government acting on your brain, making you wear a hijab because you’ll be punished if you don’t, your parents and peers working on your brain, making you wear a hijab because you’ll get social opprobrium if you don’t, or other influences working on your brain, compelling you to wear a hijab because you want to feel more “Muslim,” or you like the way it looks?

In none of those cases could you have behaved otherwise. The only distinction was which environmental circumstances dictated your actions.

That is why I think there is no meaningful difference between doing something because you’re being “forced” to or because you ostensibly “choose to.” In all cases you are being forced; the only thing that differs are the relevant forces. At what point, then, do we say that an American hijabi has exercised a compatibilist form of “free will”? If her parents pressure her? If her peers pressure her mildly? And remember that, in a social creature, external societal pressures nearly always help dictate what you do.

As I’ve always said, I don’t care so much if you want to define the absence of government compulsion—or other issues like “humans have a very complex evolved brain”—as factors giving us “compatiabilist free will”. The issue for me has always been determinism of behavior, a determinism that rests on the laws of physics. To me that’s important not only because it dispels the dualistic tenets of religion, but also can give us more empathy toward the downtrodden and the malefactors, and well as mitigating the regret we might feel for not having done different things.

Compulsion is compulsion, and it’s always enacted through your neurons, whether those neurons be conditioned by the Iranian government, the views of your parents, or your need to feel more “Muslim”.

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Bad science reporting at WaPo: Reporter gets Ken Ham’s dino “theory” completely wrong

January 2, 2017 • 9:00 am

UPDATE:  Ken Ham is steamed that the Washington Post misrepresented the views of his organization, and has issued this tw**t:

HuffPo has a brief piece on the Twitter fight, which isn’t notable except for this reader’s comment:

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On December 30, the Washington Post‘s “Health and Science” section (can we please stop mixing those two topics?) published a piece about dinosaurs and Ken Ham’s Ark Park by Vicky Hallett, “Now there’s a theory that dinosaurs were wiped out in Noah’s flood.” While not endorsing that “theory,” Hallett, described as “a freelancer and former MisFits columnist,” says that the dinosaur/flood idea is both new and presented at the “Ark Encounter” theme park (my emphasis in the excerpt from Hallett’s piece below):

Folks who identify as “creation scientists” have no problem with the notion that dinosaurs once roamed the Earth. They just think the beasts lived alongside humans on a planet that’s only about 6,000 years old.

Their extinction theory? The dinos were wiped out 4,000 years ago in the worldwide flood described in Genesis.

This is the version of history on display at the Ark Encounter, a $100 million theme park in Williamstown, Ky., that features a reproduction of Noah’s boat. And it’s the subject of “We Believe in Dinosaurs,” an upcoming documentary that is fundraising through Indiegogo.

It goes on to describe the documentary movie (you might want to contribute to it, as it’s nearing its funding goal), as well as some of the creationist responses to dinosaur fossils.  But this very short article makes four errors:

1.) The Ark Park’s dino notion (which Hallett misrepresents; see below) isn’t a “theory”: it’s a wild speculation completely unsupported by evidence. Hallett’s title reinforces the view that an idea as stupid as dinos being wiped out by the Flood can be considered a “theory.” It isn’t, and that plays into the public view that evolution is “only a theory.” It would be better if she’d used “notion” or “idea” rather than “theory.”

2). Ken Ham’s view has never been that all the dinosaurs were wiped out by the Flood. The “version of history on display” at the Ark Encounter that Hallett mentions is not true. In fact, the Ark Park claims that some dinosaurs were actually taken onto the Ark and survived, later to live alongside humans. A PuffHo article says this:

Ham, a “young Earth” creationist, explained in a 2000 blog post exactly how massive dinosaurs could fit on the ship:

“Although there are about 668 names of dinosaurs, there are perhaps only 55 different ‘kinds’ of dinosaurs. Furthermore, not all dinosaurs were huge like the brachiosaurus, and even those dinosaurs on the Ark were probably ‘teenagers’ or young adults.”

Ham said the ark had 8,000 “animal genera” or about 16,000 in total, including some that are now extinct, like those dinosaurs.

“Without getting into all the math, the 16,000-plus animals would have occupied much less than half the space in the Ark (even allowing them some moving-around space),” he wrote.

Along with dinosaurs, NPR reported that there were other eyebrow-raising “animals” on display, including unicorns.

That piece even shows several pictures of dinos on the Ark, including these two—pictures that completely invalidate Hallett’s claim:

A visitor looks into a cage containing a model dinosaur inside a replica Noah's Ark at the Ark Encounter theme park during a media preview day, Tuesday, July 5, 2016, in Williamstown, Ky. The long-awaited theme park based on the story of a man who got a warning from God about a worldwide flood will debut in central Kentucky this Thursday. The Christian group behind the 510 foot-long wooden ark says it will demonstrate that the stories of the Bible are true. Its construction has rankled opponents who say the attraction will be detrimental to science education. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Children look into a cage containing model baby dinosaurs inside a replica Noah's Ark at the Ark Encounter theme park during a media preview day, Tuesday, July 5, 2016, in Williamstown, Ky. The long-awaited theme park based on the story of a man who got a warning from God about a worldwide flood will debut in central Kentucky this Thursday. The Christian group behind the 510 foot-long wooden ark says it will demonstrate that the stories of the Bible are true. Its construction has rankled opponents who say the attraction will be detrimental to science education. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

And it’s been the consistent position of Answers in Genesis (AIG), Ham’s Organization, that some but not all dinosaurs (like all non-dino species, represented on the Ark only by “kinds”) were drowned in the Flood, but others survived (see this AIG post from 2007 and this one from 2013).  The latter says this:

Or can the disappearance of dinosaurs be explained by some other catastrophe? Many dinosaurs died in the global Flood, but not all of them! Two of every kind of air-breathing, land-dwelling animal—and that includes dinosaurs—were on board Noah’s Ark to ride out the Flood, so there were still dinosaurs on the earth after the Flood.

Ham then claims that the factors that drove the dinosaurs extinct after they left the Ark are those things that drive all species extinct, and that some dinosaurs lived until a few centuries ago. (Of course, in reality they’re still with us in the form of birds!):

The global Flood not only changed earth’s surface but also created conditions that produced the Ice Age and ultimately long term changes in climate patterns. All animals had to adjust to new conditions as they reproduced and repopulated the world. Historical accounts and artistic depictions produced in the four thousand plus years since the global Flood have shown that many people around the world have long been familiar with animals that looked like dinosaurs. Therefore it is probable that some kinds of dinosaurs, though rare, were still alive until several centuries ago.

Dinosaurs faced the same sorts of challenges in the post-Flood world that endangered animals do today. In addition to adjusting to habitat changes, alterations in food availability, and competition from other animals, post-Flood dinosaur populations may have gradually succumbed to diseases or been hunted until their populations dwindled. So how did dinosaurs die? The same sorts of problems that drive today’s animals to extinction took their toll on earth’s remaining dinosaurs. But just as we don’t need a cosmic culprit like a giant asteroid to explain the extinction of other animals, we don’t need it to explain why we don’t find dinosaurs in our zoos either.

“Wiped out” means “completely extinct,” “singing with the choir invisible,” or “bereft of life, they rested in peace.” Author Hallett errs in claiming that dinos differed from any other group of animals in their Flood and post-Flood fate.

3.) Other creationist organizations have said that dinos were driven extinct by the Flood, but that theory has been around for a long time (see here, here, and here, for instance). So the “theory” (rather, dumb hypothesis) that the dinos were “wiped out” is neither new nor Ken Ham’s.

4.) Why was this article published given that it was both wrong and not newsworthy?  The idea that dinos were either on the Ark or drowned in the Flood is bogus, and every thinking person knows that. There is no evidence for a worldwide flood in the last 10,000 years. Hallett doesn’t really go after the idea very much, either, although statements by others in her article implies that it’s scientifically questionable.

Yes, it’s pretty bad journalism (and I’ll put the link to this post in the 400+ comments after her piece). If you look at some of those comments, you’ll either be heartened by those who defended evolution and criticized the religious claims (most comments), or disheartened by remarks like these:

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Joel Sartore’s photos of (mostly) endangered species

January 2, 2017 • 8:00 am

The readers’ wildlife tank is emptying (send in your good photos, please), so today I’ll repost some of the superb work of National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore (yes, the magazine’s content is going downhill, but the photos are and have always been the best part). Sartore took a year off to help his wife during a bout of breast cancer, and, as the BBC reports, he decided to call attention to the plight of the world’s endangered species:

“I thought maybe if we do eye-contact, if we photograph animals where there are no distractions, all equal in size on black and white backgrounds, where a mouse is every bit as big and amazing as an elephant, then maybe we could get the public hooked into the plight of endangered species and extinction,” he says.

Traveling the world for Nat. Geo., he got photos like this (captions from the BBC site, whose words are indented; and I’ve added my own link and words (flush left):

The Florida panther is an endangered species of cougar. Once down to only 20 individuals, there seem to be about 160 now:

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Florida Panther (Puma concolor coryi) Lowry Park Zoo, Tampa, Florida © Photo by Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

As the project grew, it caught the attention of editors at National Geographic, who commissioned Sartore to produce a few series of photographs, on amphibians for example, and America’s endangered species.

The photographer began travelling the world armed with different-sized tents in which to photograph smaller animals like birds and lizards. For the larger ones, he remained reliant on the safer environment of zoos.

This species is a frugivorous denizen of the Amazon basin, and is not considered endangered:

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Curl-crested araçari (Pteroglossus beauharnaesii) Dallas World Aquarium, Texas © Photo by Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

Sartore has also photographed one of the last surviving northern white rhinos in a zoo in the Czech Republic.

“We got to her just in time,” he says of the animal, who was called Nabire.

“We got a very nice portrait of her and she laid down and went to sleep at the end of the shoot because she slept a lot at the end of her life.”

She died about a week later.

With her death, and the death of another northern white rhino in San Diego not long afterwards, there are only three of the species left, all living under armed-guard in Kenya. They are too old to breed, though a conservation project is attempting to create an embryo through IVF which would be implanted in the womb of a similar rhino species.

“It’s not just the little things we’re allowing to slip into extinction,” says Sartore.

“It’s the big stuff too, unfortunately.”

This species occurs in Indonesia and New Guinea, and was described only in 1990. It’s known for the “smiley face” it often seems to have:

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Reimann’s snake-necked turtle (Chelodina reimanni) Atlanta Zoo, Atlanta © Photo by Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

Like its cousin the naked mole rat, the Damaraland mole rat, from southern Africa, is eusocial (one breeding female and worker castes)—they’re the only two mammals known to be eusocial.

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Damaraland mole rats (Fukomys damarensis) Houston Zoo, Houston, Texas © Photo by Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

The fennec, from the Sahara desert, is the world’s smallest canid, weighing about half as much as a house cat. It’s not endangered. Notice the large ears to facilitate heat loss.

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Fennec Fox (Vulpes zerda) St. Louis Zoo, Missouri © Photo by Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

I’m not sure what species this quilled fellow belongs to; perhaps readers can help.

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“This animal was the sweetest little guy. He gave us all sorts of different body languages and facial expressions during the shoot. I remember also that he was eating through most of the portrait session as well. So he may look shy, but he was actually very happy at this moment.” © Photo by Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

Like all lemurs, this sifaka is found in Madagascar. Living in only two small protected areas, it’s considered endangered.

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Coquerel’s sifaka (Propithecus coquereli) Houston Zoo, Houston, Texas © Photo by Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

From equatorial Africa, this pangolin is considered threatened:

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African White-Bellied Tree Pangolin (Phataginus tricuspis) Pangolin Conservation, St. Augustine, Florida © Photo by Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

Sartore:

Joel Sartore on assignment in Brazil's Pantanal region.
Joel Sartore on assignment in Brazil’s Pantanal region.

 

h/t: Michael F.

Monday: Hili dialogue

January 2, 2017 • 7:00 am

It’s January 2, 2017, which means that we’ll have to read “President Trump” in the papers—and hear it on the news—in only 18 days. My heart sinks. As for holidays, today’s both National Buffet Day (a good idea, especially if it’s an Indian buffet) and National Cream Puff Day. It’s also National Science Fiction Day, commemorating the birth of Isaac Asimov on January 2, 1920.

On this day in 1967, Ronald Reagan became governor of California and, in 1971, the Ibrox Disaster took place, in which a spectator crush at a soccer match in Glasgow between Rangers and Celtic killed 66 people and injured more than 200 (you can see a one-hour documentary here). On this day in 1999, the Great Midwestern Snowstorm dumped huge quantities of the stuff over this part of the country, including 19 inches (!) in Chicago, with attendant temperatures of -25°C. I remember that well, but don’t want to experience it again. I slogged to work with snowdrifts up to my hips, and was exhausted at the end of what is normally an 11-minute stroll.

Notables born on this day include Barry Goldwater (1909), Isaac Asimov (see above), Roger Miller (1936), Lynda Barry (1956), and Christy Turlington (1969). I’m a Lynda Barry fan, and here’s a typical cartoon:

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Those who died on this day include Dick Powell (1963) and Erroll Garner (1967). It was not a notable day for either news or celebrities. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, who has at least a rudimentary political consciousness, is bewailing the dire state of Polish politics:

A: Holidays ended. It’s time to go back to work.
Hili: Don’t tell this to the politicians. They might do it.
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In Polish:
Ja: Święta się skończyły, pora zabrać się do roboty.
Hili: Nie mów tego politykom, bo posłuchają.

And in nearby Wloclawek, the Dark Tabby seeks his food:

Leon: Wasn’t my bowl here?15732335_1363888263631771_6826992143669968923_o

Reader Vera sent a video of her cat Grisélidis watching the television show “Game of Thrones”:

And, from reader Ivan, an “Only a dream” meme:

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Once again: Read Da Roolz

January 1, 2017 • 2:01 pm

I know that new people are always coming on board here, but they may be unaware of the rules for posting (see “Da Roolz” on the left sidebar or here), which emphasize civility toward one’s host (i.e., ME) and toward your fellow commenters.

If you’re new here, and aren’t aware of the commenting policy, do read those rules. If you violate them, you may be mildly warned (either on this site or in a private email), asked to apologize (and if you don’t, you’re gone), or just flat-out banned. Incivility is the prime banning offense, followed by obtuseness.  And please do not dominate a thread; the guidelines for that are also laid out in the rules.

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That said, happy new year!

Quillette has a Patreon site

January 1, 2017 • 12:00 pm

I’ve mentioned the site Quillette before, describing it “as a site you should be bookmarking. Think of it as Slate, but more serious, more intellectual, and without any Regressive Leftism.” (The editor in fact quotes that in her appeal for funds that I’m highlighting here.) It’s a true progressivist site, but it’s growing and needs money.

Unlike HuffPo, editor Claire Lehmann strives to at least pay a nominal fee for contributions, which is only fair. But that takes dosh, and so Quillette has established a Patreon page where you can sign up for monthly donations. The rationale is here, and the Patreon page here. They’re not asking for much: just a total of $1000 per month, and of that they’ve got $332. And check out some of the article highlighted on the Patreon page.

With minimal resources, Claire has done a terrific job so far. But with more money they could become the progressivist and anti-regressive-Leftist site. Check out their content, and, if you feel so inclined, offer a monthly contribution. They’re fighting the good fight. And here’s their “road map for 2017”:

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