Category: Social media

Californian kingsnake!

I know, it sounds like a phrase you’d encounter in a political rant about California, dream to nightmare, blah blah.

Actually, it’s an actual type of snake.

Why we have narcissistic rich guys

I like this:

The job of billionaires is to live a better life, and while doing that pay for it to go from being an expensive luxury to a cheap and universal commonplace.

People moan about “trickle down” economics, often claiming that it doesn’t even happen. I only have to look at my flat screen TV, upon which I am now happily watching cricket, to know that this is wrong.

Post box cosy with swan and cygnets

Posted by a friend on Facebook today:

Swans being so very elegant, I am only one of many who likes to photo them, and there’s nothing special about my swan photos, unless the swans are the wrong colour, that being a posting here that keeps on being visited from time to time. But these knitted swans are definitely swans with a difference.

The BBC has more.

New footbridge in Hull

New bridges, even footbridges, of any distinction are somewhat rare these days. So this new bridge, in Hull, is welcome:

I found that photo here. Read more about it, and see more photos of it, here.

Says Jonathan McDowell, director of Matter Architecture:

It’s wonderful to see people beginning to make use of the new routes and viewpoints, and we are proud to see the dramatic form of the bridge already becoming a landmark within the city’s identity.

“Becoming a landmark” is what this is all about. Making a real bridge, for trains or heavy lorries, look “iconic” is very expensive. But do this to a footbridge and if you do it okay, it’s not a lot of money, very well spent. That being why architects got involved in this at all.

Neptune appears on the south coast

Seen by me on Twitter:

I think it said that this was claimed to have been photoed this morning. Unfortunately I lost the tweet where I saw this and could not find it again, so do not know the provenance of this photo. I hate it when clickbait sites omit their sources for such things, and apologise for doing this myself.

But, good I think. I especially hope that 6k likes this photo.

As well as the face, I like the hand.

Do you love robots now that they can dance?

I watched this video, and resolved to repost it here, only then to realise that I had encountered it because my favourite Twitterer, Steve Stewart-Williams was the reason I was seeing it in the first place:

Remarkable. And, I agree with SS-W, a bit scary too.

Taiwan Blue Magpie

The plan is to spend my blogging day writing a piece for Samizdata about why there has been, as yet, no Paper Money Collapse. So, here, today, I will fob you off with a photo of a Taiwan Blue Magpie:

Impressive, I hope you agree.

Colourful photoing like this is creating a very colourful virtual world. Then the kids go outdoors and see Monochrome Modernism, and they say: Brighten It Up! I’m not saying I’ll necessarily like all of what then happens, but I am saying it’ll happen. We are now seeing only little glimpses of this, but any decade now the floodgates of architectural colour will open.

Expect big paintings of, e.g., Taiwan Blue Magpies, on the sides of Modernist boringnesses.

“This video makes me feel like CRT is a cult …”

CRT, as referred to in this posting, and in this tweet, stands for Critical Race Theory. I say that because I very much like the idea that at least some of my readers here have no notion of what “CRT” stands for. After all I do not bang on here very much about such things, having other preoccupations nowadays, here anyway.

However, this snatch of video strikes me a truly remarkable:

(“CRT” also causes me to remember a libertarian collaborator from my earlier late twentieth century life, Christopher Ronald Tame. Chris would have detested what CRT means now.)

I doubt that “Cardinal Pritchard” is really a cardinal, and if he’s not then I don’t know what else he is besides a (Not The) Babylon Bee writer, but this is what the Cardinal says about this bit of video.

In all seriousness though, this is one of the strangest things I’ve seen in a while. And I’m willing to bet that only like four people in that entire group found the experience “a little weird.” Cuz it seems like most of them are super into it.

If this feels like a “cult”, then I say that, in the days of my youth when I was an unwilling participant in it, Church of England congregations sounded to me just like this also. I suppose a religion is a cult that has achieved social respectability, by stabilising into a part of the social furniture and by becoming less pushy and obnoxious, and people no longer want to complain about it by calling it a cult.

But cult, religion, whatever. This is very clearly a religion-like event.

National Geographic on the evidence for evolution

Following my recent medical disappointments, I have been pondering, as you do in such circumstances, the big questions. Like: What Do I Really Believe? And it turns out that one of the biggest things I believe in is evolution, as the best explanation for why we humans are the sort of creatures we are, altruistic and selfish, affectionate and murderously aggressive, doomed to die, and so on. I was raised by Church of England atheists, and that is what I still am. The older I get the more this is so.

But what is the evidence for the truth of evolution, as opposed to the rival god-did-it explanations which evolution is slowly but surely replacing?

Was Darwin Wrong? asks a recent National Geographic cover. Inside, in very big capitals, the answer: NO. (Thank you Steve Stewart-Williams.) I opened up the article, to learn what I hoped would be more about all this evidence.

No one observation of the natural world would be enough to convert a convinced god-ist, because after all, god can do anything he pleases. Atheism is hard to prove with one knock-out punch. But evolution wins, for me, overwhelmingly, on points. Point after point after point, each point being made perfect sense of by the idea of natural selection of chance variations, and each point meaning that any god is going to have to have been the kind of god who, for no very obvious reason, wanted all creatures without exception to look exactly as if they had all evolved. Simply, evolution makes sense to me, while god, especially the idea of God that Christians and Muslims proclaim, makes, to me, no sense at all. It’s the range and volume of evidence that is so convincing.

Two of the many points made in the National Geographic article made particular sense to me. It’s not that I’d never thought before about such things, just that this time around, they both hit home with particular force.

Point one:

All vertebrate animals have backbones. Among vertebrates, birds have feathers, whereas reptiles have scales. Mammals have fur and mammary glands, not feathers or scales. Among mammals, some have pouches in which they nurse their tiny young. Among these species, the marsupials, some have huge rear legs and strong tails by which they go hopping across miles of arid outback; we call them kangaroos. Bring in modern microscopic and molecular evidence, and you can trace the similarities still further back. All plants and fungi, as well as animals, have nuclei within their cells. All living organisms contain DNA and RNA (except some viruses with RNA only), two related forms of information-coding molecules.

Such a pattern of tiered resemblances — groups of similar species nested within broader groupings, and all descending from a single source — isn’t naturally present among other collections of items. You won’t find anything equivalent if you try to categorize rocks, or musical instruments, or jewelry. Why not? Because rock types and styles of jewelry don’t reflect unbroken descent from common ancestors. Biological diversity does. …

Point two:

Vestigial characteristics are still another form of morphological evidence, illuminating to contemplate because they show that the living world is full of small, tolerable imperfections. Why do male mammals (including human males) have nipples? Why do some snakes (notably boa constrictors) carry the rudiments of a pelvis and tiny legs buried inside their sleek profiles? Why do certain species of flightless beetle have wings, sealed beneath wing covers that never open? Darwin raised all these questions, and answered them, in The Origin of Species. Vestigial structures stand as remnants of the evolutionary history of a lineage.

As I tried to explain in this conversation with Patrick Crozier, evolution performs, for me, many of the functions of a religion, in that it gives the best answers we humans have to the “big questions”, like: Where did we come from? And: Why does life feel the way it does for us? It even makes sense of things which we personally reproach ourselves for feeling, like an extreme and “irrational” fear of irrationally hostile strangers.

What I do not feel, now or ever, is any need to believe anything to be true that I do not in fact believe to be true. In that sense, evolution is not my “faith”, if that’s what faith is. Doubting Thomas, in the Bible (here comes my Church of England upbringing), says to Jesus: “Lord I believe. Help thou mine unbelief.” I simply believe what I believe, and doubt whatever I doubt. I believe in evolution, not just as true but as very helpfully and very illuminatingly true, and I do not doubt it.

When checking the links in the above, I discovered that National Geographic doesn’t want me to read that article again. It seems I have gone beyond my limit. I hope that if you want to read it, you’ll be luckier.