Alan Burdick's Blog, page 4
August 11, 2017
Looking Ahead to the English Premier League���s Game of Thrones
August 4, 2017
An Ancient Lunchbox Emerges from the Ice
July 19, 2017
Science, Politics, and the Ugliness Premium
July 2, 2017
The Case for a Fourth of July Seder
June 21, 2017
On This Summer Solstice, Be Glad You Live on Earth
June 7, 2017
The Oldest Human Fossils Ever Discovered Have Stories to Tell
The first fossil skeleton of a human ever discovered was found, in 1823, in southern Wales, ceremonially buried under six inches of soil in a limestone cave facing the sea. William Buckland, the Oxford geologist who unearthed it, didn’t know what he had come upon. Buckland had been busy exploring caves in England and Germany, noting the loamy soils and the animal bones they contained as indications of “the last great convulsion that has affected our planet’’—the Biblical flood, he meant. In Goat’s Hole Cave, in Wales, he found the bones of a hyena, a bear, a rhinoceros, an elephant (actually a mastodon), deer, rats, and birds, and roughly half of a human skeleton, which had been stained with red ochre and laid to rest with periwinkle shells and an assortment of ivory rods and broken armlets. At first, Buckland thought it was a man—perhaps a taxman killed by smugglers—but then he decided that it was a woman, maybe a fortune-teller, or a witch, or a prostitute from the days of the Roman occupation. He called her the Red Lady of Paviland. Whoever she’d been, Buckland wrote, she was “clearly postdiluvian,” a relatively recent deposit.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:The Return of the Florida Panther
The Secret Life of Secrets
A Prehistoric Killer, Buried in Muck
June 1, 2017
To Save Yourself from Sextortion, Send Naked Mole Rats, Not Nudes
Where to start with the naked mole rat? Four inches long, hairless, pale, wrinkled, and spindly-legged, it lives in vast underground colonies in Africa, like a termite, and is more closely related to porcupines and guinea pigs than to moles or rats. It is the world’s only eusocial mammal, with hundreds of sterile workers serving a single, constantly pregnant queen. Virtually blind, it digs networks of tunnels using its four protruding incisors, which it can move individually, like chopsticks. It can run as quickly backward as forward. To aid its digestion, it eats its own feces. The naked mole rat can’t regulate its body temperature, as other mammals can, but it is immune to most forms of pain, doesn’t get cancer, and can live for thirty years, nine times longer than other rodents of similar size. Last month, scientists reported that naked mole rats can go without oxygen for as long as eighteen minutes—conditions that would kill a mouse in forty-five seconds and most humans twice over. They manage this by switching their metabolism to run on fructose instead of glucose, as no other animal can.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:The Human Toll of Protecting the Internet from the Worst of Humanity
The Bitter Legacy of Canada’s Forced-Assimilation Boarding Schools
Barry Crimmins’s Life-Changing Comedy
May 27, 2017
The Secret Life of Secrets
Everybody has secrets. You do. I do. Maybe even the President of the United States does. For better or worse, science can’t much help in revealing the details of any particular secret. But it is gaining a better handle on the nature of secrets generally. For instance, according to a recent study by Michael Slepian, a professor of management at Columbia Business School, and two of his colleagues, the average person keeps thirteen secrets, five of which he or she has never shared with anyone else. If the President is anything like this average person, there’s a forty-seven-per-cent chance that one of his secrets involves a violation of trust; a sixty-plus-per-cent chance that it involves a lie or a financial impropriety; and a roughly thirty-three-per-cent chance that it involves a theft, some sort of hidden relationship, or unhappiness at work.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Jane Doe Du Jour
May 18, 2017
If Donald Trump Were Actually a Battery
Donald Trump is a battery. This was first revealed last year, in “Trump Revealed,” a book by the Washington Post reporters Marc Fisher and Michael Kranish. “After Trump mostly gave up his personal athletic interests, he came to view time spent playing sports as time wasted,” they wrote. “Trump believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted. So he didn’t work out.”
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:What Kind of Loyalty Does a President Need?
A Special Rule for Robert Mueller
The Single Greatest Witch Hunt in American History, for Real
May 13, 2017
Why Swearing Makes You Stronger
By several accounts, Donald Trump has spent a decent amount of time in recent weeks screaming at his television. Almost certainly he’s been swearing at it; what else do you scream at your television but expletives? Besides, the President doesn’t often censor himself, even in public. On the campaign trail, he vowed to “bomb the shit out of ISIS,” suggested that U.S. companies that move their operations overseas should “go fuck themselves,” and proposed to begin trade negotiations with China by saying, “Listen, you motherfuckers.” As he told the audience at February’s National Prayer Breakfast, “The hell with it.”
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Cormac McCarthy Explains the Unconscious
Amazon, the Times, and “Go the Fuck to Sleep”
Bonfire of the Profanities
