Open Thread for July

“Now the opal alcove in which the King sits at evening by the lake stands at the edge of the jungle, and the climbing orchids of the jungle have long since crept from their homes through clefts of the opal alcove, lured by the lights of the lake, and now bloom there exultingly.” Lord Dunsany, The Fall of Babbulkund

Author: Martin R

Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, skeptic, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, boardgamer, geocacher and father of two.

285 thoughts on “Open Thread for July”

  2. This looks like it could be fun – pity I’m not a subscriber. Some of the comments are pretty funny too – unconsciously funny, that is.

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  3. On Tuesday August 3rd, it will be 30 years since racist serial killer John Ausonius (aka ‘the laser man’) murdered his first victim with a rifle using a laser sight.
    He inspired the Norwegian mass murderer.

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  4. I hope this is a hegelian thesis-antithesis thing that will end in a synthesis soon. Things are more tense in UK and USA since they have so much social tensions they have been sweeping under the carpet.
    .
    In Sweden there was a ridicilous controversy over an old hall named the White Sea after a sea east of the Kola Peninsula because it was painted white, back in the early 20th century. Typical virtue signalling.
    This is the kind of crap people do because working for *real* societal change requires a lot of work (Martin can bear witness of the many hours needed each week on top of the ordinary work- this is why I myself restrict my activism to donations these days ).
    .
    I am reminded of some of the BS produced by small communist splinter groups (who inspired a scene in Life of Brian) in the late sixties and early seventies.

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    1. FWIW, I (these days) read the usage of the term “virtue signalling” as, well, a signal that the user has social conservative leanings, possibly even bordering on outright alt-right leanings. Because the use of that term is, in English, almost exclusively limited to people of that socio-political group. I am not saying this because I think you fall in that group, I say this because you are probably not quite aware of the connotations of your choice of words.

      I personally have no issue with a hall named “White Sea”, most probably because I am aware of the water that shares its name. I do think that the terms “master” and “slave” in distributed computing are problematic and (these days) prefer the terms “leader” and one of “worker” or “follower” (depending on the exact counterpart to the “leader” that is intended).

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      1. No. Branding sensible people like Steven Pinker as alt-right or socially conservative is part and parcel of the woke cancel culture. Don’t fall for it.

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      3. I don’t really know (or care) where Steven Pinker is, politically. If he un-ironically uses the term “virtue signalling”, he needs to get out a bit more, because by using it that way, he sounds a wee bit like the fasch.

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      4. I avoid using the terms virtue signalling and grievance studies for this very reason, even though I believe that both refer to things that exist and are ridiculous.

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  5. Venus is low in the evening sky, but may be easier to spot for those living further south.
    The thin visible sliver of moon will pass through Gemini August 5th and 6th.
    Jupiter and Saturn are low in south east as soon as night begins to fall.
    The Perseid meteor shower is due later this month.

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  6. Apparently you can buy access to the future king of Britain, just as you can buy access to the British government.
    Question: Why do people want to meet the bloke who cheated on his first wife and is the embodiment of privilege? Our Swedish king may be a dork, but at least he treats his wife well.

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  8. In my experience/observation, the public don’t panic. They worry more when you don’t tell them the straight-out truth than when you do, but either way they don’t panic. Well, mostly – I have seen a few bank runs in my time, which were symptomatic of panic, but they always involved a minority of the population.

    https://scholars-stage.org/scrap-the-myth-of-panic/

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  9. Nooo! Our Little Fish is currently flying back to HK, straight into the teeth of a typhoon.

    Bit slow off the blocks on that, Siobhan.

    Fortunately, it’s not a bad one, and modern air liners handle typhoon winds very well, including on take off and landing – it takes a lot for them to close the airport.

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  10. Ancient genomes reveal structural shifts after the arrival of Steppe-related ancestry in the Italian Peninsula.
    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33974848/

    The available samples detect Steppe ancestry in about 1600BCE, but that date is almost certainly too late. Steppe ancestry is known to have been in Greece and Spain before 2000BCE, and it is most unlikely to have arrived that much later in Italy – this is just due to a gap in the available samples.

    There is also some evidence of movement from Anatolia through the Balkans to southern Italy around 2000BCE. The differences that are detected between the far south of Italy on the one hand and central and northern Italy on the other could date to the Bronze Age because of this minority component from West Asia, which extends right across the Mediterranean.

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  12. I have to say that I don’t like Tanner Greer, he’s a right wing hawk, but occasionally he writes something good.

    Also, he’s very good on matters military, and he does not have flattering things to say about the state of the armed forces of both the USA and Taiwan. My understanding from what he has said is that if the Mainland does invade Taiwan militarily, they don’t have a hope of defending themselves, and the USA is in neither the position nor the mood to come to their rescue. But I think that is an academic point – I do not believe the Mainland will invade Taiwan; not for the foreseeable future, anyway, which means at least the next 6 years, unless the Americans do something extremely stupid to provoke it. Mind you, Biden and Blinken are both extremely stupid, so…but that guy they have as Secretary for Defence seems a lot more sensible and grounded than they are.

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    1. Mmmph – sorry for being opaque. Tanner Greer is the blogger at The Scholar’s Stage. He’s also not huge on humility.

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  13. Three more covid deaths have been registered in Sweden, the latest July 29th.
    The hospital cases are dominated by young people that have not had both vaccine shots. And we are seeing a slight increase of intensive care cases.

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  14. Movement from Anatolia would have brought people unrelated to the steppe people. If *both* Anatolians and the steppe peoples were speaking indo-european languages at the time it may explain why there are not more relic populations speaking other kinds of languages.

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    1. The related languages spoken in Finland and Estonia are not relics, they are a recent arrival, due to a male mediated migration. It seems the migration stopped in Estonia and hung around there for a while before moving on to Finland.

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      2. Oh, Finns have been through some severe bottle necks in various regions, presumably climate-derived, and as a consequence they are prey to a whole suite of genetically derived diseases and conditions, including (I was intrigued to read) five different kinds of dwarfism. Five. Different. Kinds.

        But I have never seen a Finnish dwarf, that I know of. Maybe they hide them. Or maybe they are just really hard to see.

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  15. USA has at least two awful governors.
    The one in NY is a sexual harasser, the one in Florida is using a disease to kill as many of his voters as possible.

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  16. Fun facts : ancient Israelites invented wooden submarines, and when they got to America the place was totally full of wild horses.
    “Joseph Smith was called a prophet, dum-dum-dum-dum-dum”.

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  17. Anders Björkman, professor at KI wants people who had two shots of the Astra Zeneca vaccine to get a booster shot as soon as possible, because it only provides a 60% protection against symptomatic delta-variant covid. Pfizer gives 80% protection against delta.
    .
    I am in a “listen to God Awful Movies podcast” phase.

    The apocalypse is fun, there will be fire-breathing jews and giant hybrid insect things…. (which will instantly suffocate because insect lungs do not scale up well).
    (the giant insects, not the fire-breathing jews)
    The antichrist will always be in cahoots with “internationalists” that introduce a ‘one world government’ and want to confiscate the guns of Christian Americans (I did not know the bible knew about that continent, maybe the film makers are extrapolating just a little bit).

    Kevin Sorbo (Hercules in TV) is in a lot of those films. I think you will be better off watching the muslim film ‘Day when (sic) Sun Rises In The West; Film (sic) that Shook the World’

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    1. Both the writing and the theology of films and novels in that genre are bad in predictable ways. For many years Fred Clark of Slacktivist had a running series in which he dissected the Left Behind novels; I would actually have to click the link to check whether the podcast was discussing the Left Behind movie or some other movie by somebody of similar inclination. Basically, the only value the Left Behind books have to anybody other than the authors and publisher is as an example of how not to write a novel: normal people do not react as the characters in those books do, there are heavy doses of Artistic License: Geography and Artistic License: Politics, and the books focus heavily on what was supposed to be the technology of the near future (the first book was published in 1995) that became out of date within a decade. Oh, and the interpretation of Revelation the authors use was basically cribbed from Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth” and depends on rather heavily strained readings of the Bible.

      Liked by 1 person

  18. Cleaning up some old stuff: East Asians and Native Americans did not inherit shovel shaped incisors from Neanderthals; it was a case of convergent evolution.

    In modern humans it appears to be mostly derived from a particular mutation that has gone to fixity in East Asians some time during the last 35,000 years – a variant of the EDAR gene, which is associated with a whole suite of disparate and confusing traits: coarse black hair, different disposition of sweat glands, smaller breasts in adult females and various other things, including top incisor teeth shaped like coal shovels. It was so strongly selected that 100% of East Asians and Native Americans have got it, but no one knows why it was so strongly selected. The most likely looking candidate is lactation. I dunno, maybe especially strong incisors is another.

    Shovel shaped incisors were also present in some Neanderthals, but the shape was somewhat different, more like a scoop, and not all of them had it.

    https://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/artcards/krapina-49-maxilla.html

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  19. Cuomo is on his way out in NY.
    Once he is gone, I hope newspapers will give more attention to how the governor in Florida is killing the population, using covid as a weapon.

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  20. The actress Anne Stallybrass -who among other things played Anne, the wife of James Onedin in The Onedin Line- has died at 82.

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  21. I love Fleabag. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is great.

    Just type Fleabag into the Youtube search box, and you should get loads of it.

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  28. Aaargggh! “Explosive increase of covid in Umeå” among unvaccinated young people.
    .
    Some more silver medals today.

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  29. More boring statistics. I bring it up because it is going in the wrong direction as people are crowding in restaurants and pubs.
    .
    Number of people in hospital
    Ordinary wards / ICU
    Nationwide 128 /23
    (up 14 / 3)
    Stockholm 47 / 6
    (up 13 / 0)

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  30. Vertical take off craft with electric propulsion.

    Opener has designed an ultralight named BlackFly that will be available to customers this fall- you have seen plenty of prototypes by different companies with electric propellers all over a tiny fuselage, but this will be the real deal, with mass production
    Ultralights do not need FAA approval so they have chosen that road, with a payload (pilot and luggage) of 200 lb/ 90 kg.

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    1. That would be no use to China’s gold medal winner in the woman’s 87+kg weightlifting – she weighs 150kg. She slept on the floor of her room in the athletes’ village because she didn’t trust the recyclable cardboard beds to hold her.

      All of the column inches and hand wringing devoted to that trans weight lifter Laurel Hubbard from NZ in the 87+ class was a waste of time – s/he didn’t manage to complete a single lift, so I’d say will not appear in any future Olympic Games or world championships. Just not good enough. Her 15 minutes of fame are well and truly over.

      How do you compete against a mountain of a woman (a real one) who weighs 150kg?

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  31. Trevor Noah:
    “Can someone please tell the virus to stop mutating while we figure out how to convince people that dying is bad?”

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  32. You might find this hard to believe, but it’s all true. Anisha Thai has a masters degree in civil engineering, and was in HK supervising a construction project at the grand old age of 22. So she did that. Then she was working here for a French construction contractor (because she grew up in France – she’s what she calls Blasian: her father is Vietnamese and her mother is from Comoros, an island off the east coast of Africa) and one night she decided to go to one of the back streets of the commercial/shopping district of Causeway Bay to make a dance video. Because that’s what you do, right? This was in 2019, so no masks, and before the riots started. That video went viral in HK, one thing led to another, and she won a dance contest on HK free to air TV.

    Now she has quit engineering and runs an Afro dance studio in HK. Life can take unexpected directions.

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  33. The old lines are fracturing.

    HK’s star swimmer is half-Irish, a half-German woman from Canada is competing for China in the heptathlon, and HK are currently battling against Germany for a bronze medal in the women’s teams table tennis, and one of the German players is Chinese.

    It’s all crazee now, and I’m loving it.

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  34. If the Winter Olympics do go ahead in China, despite the efforts of a lot of American politicians to derail them (and if China can get its current big outbreak of Delta under control, which is by no means certain at this point), it is looking very likely that the flag bearer for the Chinese team will be a half-Chinese girl from America.

    I want to see this happen.

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  35. Meanwhile, the HK girls have beaten Germany to take the bronze medal in the table tennis. So little HK has 4 medals so far, and we’re not done yet – we still have Grace Lau (all 4’11” of her) competing for bronze in the Kata (a Karate event that is appearing in the Olympic Games for the first and last time), and we have Sarah Lee in the Keiren (don’t ask me to explain it – it’s a fixed wheel sprint cycling event invented by the Japanese so that Japanese people could gamble on bicycle races, but it’s now an Olympic event – we have big hopes, because Sarah Lee was the world champion at it in 2019, and I guess they didn’t have a world championship in 2020).

    We’ll still be behind Sweden, unless Sarah Lee can win the gold medal in the Keirin. Then it will be a count-back, because Sweden has two gold medals, and more silver medals than HK.

    I suppose we could hope that HK’s Tiffany Chan can win silver or better in the golf, but that isn’t going to happen.

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  38. Grace Lau competing in Kata in Tokyo. I could have done without the annoying commentator. Knocked out of the opening round by Rika Usami, so the best she can hope for is bronze. We’ll see. I read that when little Grace is not being so fearsome she’s ‘bubbly.’ Must be a contrast.

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  39. Nope, Sarah Lee is out of the Keirin, whatever it is. That will be a big shock to a lot of people. She puts her faith in Jesus, Sarah does, so maybe he’s having a day off.

    Even so, this is HK’s most successful Olympics ever by a long way. After the 2019-20 riots, and the ‘crackdown’ (why does everyone use that term, when they don’t know exactly what it is that they are talking about – maybe that’s why) by Beijing on HK (which has or hasn’t happened, depending on who you ask), that might not have been expected. I have seen more than one ‘public intellectual’ in the Anglosphere pronounce that “Hong Kong is finished.”

    No we’re not.

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  40. She’s done it! Grace Lau has won a bronze medal in the Kata for HK. What a little hero.

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  41. ‘Virtue Signal’ is a fictional character in ‘Tooning Out the News’ at The Late Show , Youtube
    She and the other characters often interview real politicians. Recommended.
    .
    Bad news. The global climate change is making the termohaline deep water circulation unstable. When lake Agazzis drained into the north Atlantic near the end of the last glaciation it stopped the circulation for a thousand years with consequences that were sort of “bad”. As in “very bad”.

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    1. I borked the spelling. Agassiz it is.
      Living in a region that used to be under 2000m of ice, this is embarassing.

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  42. Very odd quotes from Youtube .
    ‘Did you order the “Code Red” on Jesus?”
    “Water does not get angry if you yell at it”.
    “OK now that we have landed on Earth we will….WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO THAT EARTHLING??? “

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  43. The headline writers at the South China Morning Post have been keeping me entertained.

    Yesterday we had ‘a miracle’ and ‘a deluge of medals for Hong Kong on Day 13’. The deluge was two bronze medals in one day which, given HK’s abysmal past performances at the Olympics, is noteworthy, but I don’t think you can have a deluge of two of anything.

    Today it’s ‘All eyes on Hong Kong’s women on action packed day 14.’ Erm, well there’s Tiffany Chan who is still coming stone motherless last in the golf and looks like staying there – I doubt anyone except maybe her grandmother and a few aunties are bothering to track her laborious progress around the course. Then later we have the Jesus-inspired cyclist Sarah Lee again, who has already crashed out ignominiously in the mysterious Keirin, but is going to have a crack at the sprint, and something called the Madison – I understand what the Madison is about as well as I do the Keirin, but it seems to involve a two person team, so I guess it will also have to feature the other Ms Lee, who is frankly a heathen no-hoper, so I’m not expecting any miracles.

    So the ‘action’ for HK will basically involve whether Jesus is having another day off or whether he will help Sarah Lee get through the heats of the cycling sprint. Come to think of it, I have no idea about the rules for that as well.

    There’s a big one for Sweden tonight, Tokyo time – they will be taking on Canada in the final of the women’s soccer in Yokohama, in the hope that the weather will be more bearable there than in Tokyo – ummm…I could have sworn that Yokohama would get pretty much the same weather as Tokyo, but what would I know?

    My money is on the Swedes to win a low scoring game. HK can’t catch Sweden in the medal count now, so I may as well support them.

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  44. The Perseid meteors will be visible the night between Wednesday and Thursday next week, if you have an opportunity to get out of town and watch from clear skies not ‘polluted’ by street lights.
    And Jupiter and Saturn will be visible low in the sky.

    Liked by 1 person

  45. Big announcement – Grace Lau, the 4’11” karate lady will carry the HK flag in the closing ceremony. Good.

    I presume that’s because our 6’4″ bloke who is good at poking people with a blunt stick but too introverted to talk to anyone, and gregarious world class swimmer Siobhan Haughey who will happily talk to anyone for hours and hours in whichever language they prefer, are both already back in HK and languishing in quarantine.

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  46. The Jesus-inspired Sarah Lee has put in a mediocre time in the first heat of the women’s sprint cycling, but enough to get her through to the next round.

    The heathen Jessica Lee failed miserably, as expected.

    Just goes to show how much difference it makes when you subscribe to the correct imaginary friend.

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  47. As long as you remember to sacrifice to Mammon and Priapus you will be all right. If you are planning on going into US politics, add Sterculius to the list.
    .
    Goddammit, we now have 29 patients in ICU for covid. People still think they are invulnerable.

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  48. The divinely inspired and thickly thighed Sarah Lee is the last HK athlete still in it, and she is through to the round of the final 8 in the sprint. But I rather fancy her star is waning, so I’m not holding out any big hopes for another miracle like that pulled off by Winnie Soo (she of the bleached blonde hair and crooked teeth) in the women’s team table tennis, when as the acknowledged weakest link in the team, she had some kind of epiphany and powered through two singles matches in succession against the Germans to hand a bronze medal to the HK team. No one was more surprised than she was.

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  49. Bugger. Canada beat Sweden 3-2 on penalties after it was 1-1 at full time in the women’s soccer.

    I really dislike that. They play a full match of football, two evenly matched sides, and then they decide it by what is basically little better than a toss of the die – a stupid penalty shoot out.

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    1. Yes, but how is that different from, say, a 3-2 win? This is small-number statistics. A long time ago there was an article demonstrating that, within the same league, goals scored in matches follow a Poisson distribution. That is, they are essentially random. There might be some exceptions like, say, Bayern München, but in a game like football, the score doesn’t say much about which team is better.

      Better is scoring like tennis, where you have to be substantially better to win.

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  50. Martin and other southerners will get (much-needed) rain tomorrow, and it will move on to us on Sunday. I recall the summer of wildfires 2018 and so rejoice over getting wet.
    Swedish authorities are sending water-bombing planes to Greece, where they are much needed.
    .
    A teenager died today from gunshot injuries of a shooting earlier this week. There is a lot of inertia about changing laws for locking up young offenders but the concern for the many clearly outweigh the rights of the gangbangers. No one forced the fuckwits to pick up guns or -in some cases- grenades.
    And the culture of silence must be broken.

    Liked by 1 person

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