> However, the hip bite probably isn’t what killed 6DT19. “We think the individual was incapacitated in some way, and then the animal came along, bit and dragged the body away,” Dr. Thompson said.
Sounds like a polite way to say he was eaten alive
Likely not the case, given (1) the body was peri-mortem decapitated (by a human) and (2) apparent structural damage was limited to a single bite mark (on the ilium), with no signs of "taphonomic" damage (indicating limited soft tissue trauma)? [1]
(1)
> 6DT19 had been decapitated with a single cut between the second and third cervical vertebrae , delivered from behind.
(2)
> Additional [to the decapitation] peri-mortem trauma was present in the form of a series of small depressions on both sides of the pelvis [..]
> Taphonomic damage alone is also unlikely due to the appearance and margins of the lesions, which are the same colour as the surrounding bone (this differs if the break is post-mortem; [56]), and the adherence of bony fragments at the injury site (which occurs when soft tissue is present) .
I wonder how many times a Deloitte, PwC, KPMG, Bain, EY, McKinsey, or BCG consultant naively tried putting him on a shortlist for being “impacted” over the years because he was in the Top X of a spreadsheet sorted on Y.
"Look this guy's job seems to be mainly writing blog posts. We could replace that with AI and get it to regularly pitch the new Visual Enshitify 2.0 product launch as a bonus. Win win win!"
Awesome! In my opinion, an intrusive linked-list is almost always what you really want when you reach for a linked list. An external linked list is often worse than a vector.
He was sentenced as a fourth felony habitual offender having had 5 previous convictions for cocaine possession and a previous conviction for possession with intent to distribute.
In addition, an appeals court found the 20 year sentence illegally lenient (he should have been sentenced to 30 years) but because neither the state nor the defendant brought it up, declined to correct this.
> As I mentioned earlier, right from the start whale oil had other uses, beyond lighting. It was used to grease naval clocks, as well as being deployed in pharmaceuticals, paints and explosives.
Kerosene replaced the widespread, low margin, highly price sensitive use of spermaceti oil.
If the common person is using spermaceti oil for light every single day, there is no politically tenable way you can restrict the supply.
Kerosene replaces that, and now the common person doesn't really know or care about spermaceti oil.
Notice also the other use cases are generally higher up in the value chain than just burning it for light. Naval clocks, pharmaceuticals, paints, explosives. In addition, the users are more concentrated. Everybody burned spermaceti oil for lamps. There are only a few places that make naval clocks, pharmaceuticals, paints, and explosives. And they have the ability to absorb R&D costs for different lubricants because that is a high value use case.
A similar example of this is CFCs being banned. They were used in high value use cases with a limited amount of users. And even there, there was pushback with regard to home AC units - things that affected the common people.
The lesson we should take from this is that we need technology to provide us with alternatives for the common, price sensitive, widespread uses of something, before it becomes tenable to enact any type of supply restriction on it.
And then we can rely on the high value use cases finding alternatives.
The article goes on to make the same error again though.
If the common person's automatic transmission needs whale oil you can't ban it.
The kind of oil that can be produced in the conditions of a mammal's body tends to not hold up to well in a 300deg automatic transmission. Synthetic oil was developed because using a factory to do "this can't happen in a body" things to tree oil results in a superior performing product. These products were adopted because they're better. And then there was little need to use whale oil, so it got banned at which point the synthetic new hotness got back ported into the older specifications of oil.
News from the time [0], certainly suggests that regulation was the cause, rather than synthetics being "better".
> The trouble involved the cooling unit for the automatic transmission oil, which is placed in the car's radiator. The fittings between the cooling unit and the radiator gave no trouble when whale oil was the fluid, but the substitute allowed the fittings to corrode. That permitted the oil to get into the radiator's cooling system and the radiator's antifreeze to get into the transmission.
You seem to have a strong claim you'd like to make on this point. It might be true, but it's a claim offered without much evidence.
I guess one thing I'd be curious about is: were non-synthetic non-animal alternatives substituted for whale oil in large quantities before synthetics took over? If so, that would be one data point in favor of the idea that regulation (and possibly the decline of the species) was the driving factor, rather than the superiority of synthetics.
> The belt’s tectonic activity has birthed many of the world’s most impressive mountain ranges, including the Alps, the Atlas Mountains, and the Himalayas.
I though the Himalayas were formed from the Indian subcontinent slamming into the Eurasian land mass?
Simultaneously with India, also Africa and Arabia have collided with Eurasia.
So the Himalayas have formed at the same time with a great number of mountain ranges, from the Atlas and the Pyrenees at the Western extremity, passing through many other mountains, e.g. the Alps, the Carpathians, the Caucasus, the Hindu Kush, the Pamir etc., until the Himalayas at the Eastern extremity.
It might help to think of it less as "Indian subcontinent slamming in" and more as the "Tethys ocean basin closing".
India being pulled away from Africa/Madagascar and eventually beneath the Eurasian continental crust is all related to the closing of the Tethys. ...This is a lot easier to explain with pictures...
If it helps, remember that continents are just lighter and thicker "rafts" of stuff. They're not plates themselves. They're often attached to oceanic crust as part of a plate. When one side of that oceanic crust becomes cold and thick enough to start to subduct, the entire plate gets pulled along.
If you look at the very successful research organizations they were basically funded by monopolies, hired a bunch of smart people, and allowed them to think long-term without quarterly or even annual pressure to produce.
And you know, government labs, which have generated more than a few Nobels, had a lot in similarity with these monopoly-created private sector labs, I mention them because we are at a time when the government of the US doesn't seem to understand that these labs have value.
Government labs are valuable but what made industrial labs even more valuable was that they were tied to companies that were deploying these technologies and thus had clearer missions. That’s a key distinction between Bell Labs and the DOE labs.
What the government potentially offers more paths to opportunity and success though, in that they do the research and then spin it out into the public sector to commercialize. So things that might not even get off the ground in the public sector get their chance and yet there is still a path for commercialization. That said, I’m sitting here a stones throw away from the national lab in Richland and I’m not sure why we don’t see even more innovation happening in the public sector here given the per capita number of phds, scientists and engineers here - my guess is we haven’t built the public sector infrastructure for it.
True, but AT&T and Xerox were kind of infamous for not capitalizing on what Bell Labs and PARC were creating. If you have either an iPhone or an Android phone you are using an OS based on UNIX and yet AT&T gets none of that money. If you are using Windows, Mac, or a graphical interface on Linux, you are using interface concepts created by Xerox, although likewise they "fumbled the future" (as a famous book about PARC put it).
Article's point is though that they shoveled useful and relevant problems at them. This is extremely clear if you spend some time reading the BSTJ or the phenomenal "The History Of Engineering and Science in the Bell System" books.
So while there were not significant pressures to produce products there was a culture of working on relevant problems or in areas connected to relevant problems. ... rather than going full open-loop gazing deep into the category theory of their navels -- which appears to be an occasional failure mode of academia.
In working with academics in niche areas there often is a thirst for applications-- like you've found some interesting idea but where to go next? What constraints need to be solved for to make this interesting property into something useful. Applications would be a good guide if anyone would provide some, but the connections often don't exist. Part of the magic sauce of Bell labs must have been this enormous science and engineering driven industrial corporation that could just flood real problems at people who needed them.
I have known of a hundred person organization that was supposed to do R&D and after six years produced nothing of value. I have seen a team of twenty launch a hardware product in a year. Purpose is important!
I'd argue that a concise explanation for these organizations having keen abilities to make great impact with their research is related to their participation in the golden age of "operations research" ... they had a plethora of real problems to solve, some of these being in a wartime environment, and collections of bright and capable engineers/scientists/mathemeticians/physicists/etc that were motivated to solve those problems.
They were also allowed to explore areas where they reasonably believed value might exist without being forced to ship quarterly or being forced to pursue and sell their pursuit of what would be sexy to investors
What is crazy is that in the entire ocean, with its massive size and biomes, we know what the scariest creature is, and that creature has never killed a human in the wild best we can tell.
The more I learn about how smart Orcas are the more I think the only reason humans can go in the ocean and come back alive is that they choose to let us.
They've seen humans whaling, actually helped out in some places, notably at Eden south east Australia, perhaps they know we're pretty smart and don't want to FAFO.
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