Modern man a wimp says anthropologist Dawn (hat tip DoctoRx)
Arctic to be ‘ice-free in summer’ BBC
Noise pollution threatens animals BBC
Schools And Students React To Surge Of Homelessness Huffington Post. And the Dow broke 10,000 today….
Trading emotionally? Device warns of stress Reuters
City bankers ‘regularly offer prostitutes to clients’ Guardian. I’m shocked, shocked!
Harrods to sell gold bullion for first time Telegraph. No disclosure as to the markup.
NFIB Uses Newspeak to Write an Upbeat Headline DoctoRx
AIG Bonuses Were a Treasury ‘Failure,’ Barofsky Says Wall Street Journal
Innumeracy Robert Waldman, Angry Bear
EU warns UK’s debt is ‘unsustainable’ Independent
U.S. Foreclosure Filings Jump 23% to Record in Third Quarter Bloomberg versus U.S. foreclosures fall 2nd straight month Reuters. So which version do you want to believe?
Will Goldman Sachs “Do It Again”? Dude, Where’s the Dharma?
Intellectually Bankrupt, Firms Try to Squash Dissent Dean Starkman, Columbia Journalism Review
Wall Street Smarts Calvin Trillin, New York Times. Today’s must read.
Antidote du jour (hat tip Richard). Before you deem this to be implausible, my 11 pound cat once chased two adult men out of an office.
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‘Sorry if I startled you, I was just looking for directions, you see I’m kinda lost.’
That is one cute picture. The deer that come to my yard alternate between chasing the cats and being chased by them. Bless you for having a beeg kitty. They can be quite full of themselves.
Re “Arctic to be ice-free in summer”.
Reporting global warming stories critically is not the BBC’s strong point.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/15/top-ten-reasons-why-i-think-catlin-arctic-ice-survey-data-cant-be-trusted/
On Caitlin and the BBC: Caitlin is a tool of Big Oil.
See Big Oil hired Caitlin to do a sham study—that was so unbelievably shoddy…in order to pull a ruse. Big Oil did this in order to convince people that climate change science is a scam.
I can’t believe you fell for it.
Please try not to be so naive and gullible. Anything that might discredit apocalyptic climate change is a lie.
Yes, “Pointless ice walk stunt will confuse Dan Duncan again” might have been a better headline.
Richard, I’m definitely confused…but it’s by your reply: “Pointless ice walk stunt will confuse Dan Duncan again”…What??? It doesn’t even make any sense. I’m utterly befuddled.
I definitely get Anon Jones’ comment, below…about my confidence being unwarranted. [BTW: My girlfriend absolutely loved that one!] Now that comment is certainly warranted…and it’s a good retort.
But yours about pointless ice walk confusing me…”again”? What does that even mean? Reading this, I feel like I used to after reading one of those “jokes” on a Bazooka Bubble-gum wrapper….I’m chewing my new piece of gum, looking over a punchline that reads: “Hey Bob, the spoon was dry!”
And I’m hitting myself over the head: “WTF!? How could this possibly be funny? How? Why?”
Then, of course, I invariably begin to think of the Comic Wrapper Production Meeting that approved this comedic assault…Who could have possibly thought this was funny?!
Seriously…this kind of stuff is the one-hand-clapping of humor.
Although it so pains me to be on the same side as Dan’s snark (honestly, just a little, use some of that incisive wit on your own deep-seated prejudices and unwarranted confidence…we all know a little less than we think we do), I do appreciate Gordon’s link. That post seems to be a very balanced, fact-filled rebuttal to Catlin, and I always hunger for more intelligent discussion on this topic, which almost always tends toward idiocy, ignorance and wildly inappropriate anger.
I appreciated the story on homelessness: I think homelessness has been vastly underreported. In the areas I frequent I would guess the homeless population is a multiple of what it was three years ago.
re city bankers offer prostitutes- they share their politicians too?
I am looking for a ghost writer for my upcoming ‘Idiots’ Guide On How To Deal With The Next Species To Replace Homo Not-So-Sapiens Not-So-Sapiens.’
There will be a chapter on how the Pentagon will defend the current species against the neuveau species.
That will show those anthropologists how wimpy we are!
Actually, the book will show that we humans are not the end product, not the finest, of evolution. So, stop being so narcissistic!!!
Regarding noise pollution, I hope some ‘world saving’ rock stars will hold a fundrasing rock concert for those ‘losing hearing irreversibly from listening to too much rock in their youth.’
Here’s the story of the cat and bear –
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5067912.stm
(Sorry, I don’t know how to do links)
Re: Modern Man; I am having a difficult time believing the authors’ premise, when he seems to be completely unaware of the significant increase in average height among populations in developed countries over the last hundred years. For any natural environment benefits that better muscle strength and speed may have had, earlier man was severely limited by the quantity of nutrients available, particularly during childhood and teenage years. Modern man may or may not have weaker genetics, but with much better nutrition, I think it’s a difficult argument to make that earlier man was significantly stronger or faster.
Re: Cap and Trade. I honestly don’t care what the numbers are, it is self-evident to me that any scheme with a high level of complexity that involves financial intermediaries will be inefficient at best, and riddled with speculation and corruption at worst. The problem with the cap and trade argument is that it is being compared to the “do nothing” approach, when the reality is that it compares poorly in virtually every way with a straight carbon tax approach, a proven entity which we have already partially implemented in the form of the gas tax. The critical question here is whether the interests of the rapidly growing eco-rent-seeking industry are in line with the interests of the public or even of the environment, a question whose answer is becoming ever more clear the more the carbon tax approach is ignored in this debate.
“For any natural environment benefits that better muscle strength and speed may have had, earlier man was severely limited by the quantity of nutrients available, particularly during childhood and teenage years.”
This is actually not true- hunter-gatherer societies are well known to have had access to surplus protein and were extremely well nourished by comparison to the relatively sick, poor agrarian societies which replaced them. They had comparable statures to modern humans and no doubt similar physiological capabilities. That said, I share your general skepticism about the overall premise- it seems wildly implausible that prehistoric humans could have had such vastly different genetics that they could have regularly achieved feats that are impossible to modern professional athletes with all the benefits of constant training, endless dietary variety, drugs, steroids, etc.
dbt wrote: “That said, I share your general skepticism about the overall premise- it seems wildly implausible that prehistoric humans could have had such vastly different genetics that they could have regularly achieved feats that are impossible to modern professional athletes with all the benefits of constant training, endless dietary variety, drugs, steroids, etc.”
You underestimate the power of adrenaline. Ancient man was the equivalent of a street fighter to our modern-day boxer, Prehistoric man had no safety net, as well. There is ample evidence in the medical literature of the role of adrenaline on muscle strength, and, in fact, on super-human feats. Witness the apparent “weakling” lifting a pick up truck to save another trapped beneath it. The answer is adrenaline and related chemical compounds manufactured by the body.
> hunter-gatherer societies (…) were extremely well nourished by comparison to the relatively sick, poor agrarian societies which replaced them.
They had access to a large variety of nutrients except a large, stable source of calories that gave agrarian societies the edge.
There is considerable evidence that average lifespans fell in early agrarian societies, notably Egypt. And we have a modern analogy: city dwellers have shorter lifespans, yet migration to cities continues.
It’s not only US firms trying to squash dissent. Read about Trafigura’s antics and weep…
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/commons-protest-as-trafigura-gag-lifted-1802229.html