submit book chapters, not the whole neverest, two polite 'n' scathing rejections taught me. you will prolly live forever, just so long as you stay clever
watched flow (2024), open source software generated, secretarybird (a raptor) raptured, bay of fundy life of pi, sentient whale sans petunia sidekick
read..
(1) the most beautiful flowers sometimes bloom on the edge of the abyss
because
of the constant and unpredictable bombardment, my book presentation,
like most cultural events, was held underground. the most desirable
hotel, too, is not the one with gorgeous views from the eighth floor but
rather the one that has windowless underground bedrooms
i've
rarely encountered such a place with such intense local patriotism. at
another event, i asked a group of students what they would consider
victory for ukraine. one replied, "when everyone in our country loves
ukraine as much as we love kharkiv"
during the cold war the city
was a center of soviet military-industrial complex, which is why its
subway is dug deep and strongly fortified, in order to survive an
american attack
the
population of the city is holding up at over one million (it used to be
1.4 million), although perhaps 300,000 of those are refugees from the
territories to the east that are either occupied by the russians or
close to the front line. how do they know the overall number? terekhov
gave the ghost of a smile. it's a very old method, he said: we count
the loaves of bread sold. but to cross-check, they also monitor how
many mobile phones are in use
george orwell's homage to catalonia
teaches political writers who follow in his footsteps that you must be
honest about the failings of your own side
(2) kidnapping children to punish parents is a mythic kind of barbarity
(3) if the fighting stopped tomorrow, both ukrainians and russians would immediately begin to prepare for the next round
ukrainians
kept asking me why the us was helping to shoot down missles aimed by
iran at israel but not doing the same for them. if it did, they said,
then everything would be different. the difference, of course, is that,
at least for now, iran is not a nuclear power
four shopping bags stuffed with possessions, including some orchids
when the war began in 2014 and russia seized most of the donbas region, ukraine lost 80 percent of its coal deposits
the difference is that east germans and north koreans remained and remain germans and koreans.."anything ukrainian is wiped out"
(4) ketill ketilsson, the last man to touch a living great auk
two
hundred years ago..the word "extinction" was used almost exclusively in
relation to britain's landed gentry - a lineage described as having
become "extinct" when the family name died out
flightless, the north atlantic's ecological equivalent of the penguins
funk island, newfoundland
kept at the court of louis xiv at versailles
the cambridge museum of zoology's oological collection
the
tenkile tree kangaroo of papua new guinea, whose last colony, of around
a hundred individuals, survived in a place called sweipini, which was
reputed to be the haunt of evil spirits. the village priest exorcised
the demons, and within a year the tree kangaroos were almost entirely
killed off
the icelanders' sense of time. some did not know how old they were
giving a presentation to the cambridge university railway club
(6) ransomware as a service (raas)
'spear phishing', where the attack is tailored to a specific victim
the world's most prolific hacker was revealed to be the us government. the backlash following snowden's revelations forced congress to repeal the bulk surveillance programme in 2019
a plague pandemic around 3000 bce..cleared the way for the incursion into europe of the western steppe herders, speaking the indo-european languages
the pathogen of bubonic plague is the bacterium yersina pestis..'strains had their origin in the tien shan mountains,' in modern kyrgyzstan, where the host has always been the grey marmot
england did not return to its pre-plague population until about 1625, 280 years after the first strike. during most of the that period western europe had about half the population it had in 1345. and yet 1400-1500 'is the very century in which western europe's global expansion began'
plagues are different from other catastrophes. fire, flood and war destroy property as well as people. famine makes people eat their seed corn and their animals. plague does none of these things. if it halves the population then it doubles the amount of capital available per head
(8) the indian ocean used to be a great ocean
in 1415, portuguese explorers began incursions into western africa and finally landed in senegal in 1444. two papal bulls followed, dum diversas (1452) and romanus pontifex (1455), granting king alfonso v licence 'to invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue all saracens and pagans whatsoever . . . and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery'
of the 1500 ships from the us that visited east africa between 1786 and 1860, roughly half were merchant vessels, most of them slavers. the rest were whalers, and the indian ocean was an important hunting ground: more than a third of moby-dick takes place there
a second period of creative experimentation that (in hindsight) reached its peak with calvin and hobbes - only to die suddenly, with the death of the physical newspaper, almost exactly a century after its birth
(10) "the one capacity that distinguishes homo sapiens absolutely from other creatures"
chomsky himself
the argument between the long-timescale and short-timescale folks rages on
the metabolically expensive enlargement of the hominin brain that began in earnest around two million years ago
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