Links - October & November 2022

Published Nov 2022

Edvard Munch, Five Puppies on the Carpet, 1919

Here are some interesting links I found in October & November:

1. Britain 'secretly backed' Mussolini's march on Rome.
2. Should 'Indigenous People’s Day' replace 'Columbus Day' ?
   All of our best holidays have begun as anti-holidays to neutralize older rites. Jesus was born in the spring; they moved Christmas to December to neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration. Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eostre. Hanukkah was originally a minor celebration of a third-tier Bible story; American Jews bumped it up several notches of importance in order to neutralize Christmas. Labor Day was invented to screw up Communists’ attempts to coordinate around May Day as a labor protest holiday. This isn’t something modern liberals invented. It’s a tradition as old as the West. Give anti-holidays enough time and they become proper celebrations; in a hundred years, your descendants will be horrified at the thought of missing an Indigenous Peoples’ Day observance!
3. Chat log exhibits from Twitter v. Musk case.
   Parag: You are free to tweet "is Twitter dying?" or anything else about Twitter - but it's my responsibility to tell you that it's not helping me make Twitter better in the current context. Next time we speak, I'd like to you provide you perspective on the level of internal distraction right now and how it hurting our ability to do work. I hope the AMA will help people get to know you, to understand why you believe in Twitter, and to trust you -and I'd like the company to get to a place where we are more resilient and don't get distracted, but we aren't there right now.
   
   Elon: What did you get done this week?
   
   Elon: I'm not joining the board. This is a waste of time.
   
   Elon: Will make an offer to take Twitter private.
   
   Parag: Can we talk?
4. Things that increase female reproductive lifespan.
5. Universal daycare in Quebec led to much greater aggression and antisocial behavior in boys.
6. How Brian Eno created "Ambient 1: Music For Airports".
7. The Windrush generation as the central myth of the British progressive establishment.
   Even as late as the 1991 census, “White British” accounted for almost 95%. But by 2016, the native-born share of the population had fallen to less than 80%, and the current figure is likely to be lower still.
   Nevertheless, neither the British nor colonial governments had any power to prevent Commonwealth migration after the British Nationality Act (1948) formalized the right of all colonial subjects to settle in Britain. The framers intended this as a symbolic gesture against decolonization; they did not expect it to lead to mass migration.
   At the heart of the Windrush myth is the claim of a postwar labor shortage. In fact, postwar Britain was a country with a pronounced labor surplus. Accordingly, between 1946 and 1960, 1.5 to 2 million people – 3.2-4.3% of the population – left the country, mostly for the Dominions and the USA. Despite Winston Churchill’s remonstrations – he described emigrants as “rats leaving a sinking ship” and pleaded “we cannot spare you!” – statements often repeated today as evidence of a labor shortage, this emigration was encouraged by both the Conservatives and Labour and fares were heavily subsidized.
8. 90% certain that honey works against coughing.
9. Someone improved my code by 40,832,277,770%.
10. Military rank words.
11. Mosquito attraction to humans is associated with skin-derived carboxylic acid levels.
12. Why boys fall behind.
    
    The bottom line is that Finland’s internationally acclaimed educational performance is entirely explained by the stunning performance of Finnish girls. (In fact, American boys do just as well as Finnish boys do on the Pisa reading test.)
    The cerebellum, for example, reaches full size at the age of 11 for girls, but not until age 15 for boys. The correct answer to the question so many teenage boys hear, ‘Why can’t you be more like your sister?’ is something like, ‘Because, Mum, there are sexually dimorphic trajectories for cortical and subcortical gray matter!’.
13. Life of Qian Xuesen.
14. NIH is clamping down on a broad range of attempts to explore the relationship between genetics and intelligence.
15. Iranian man who didn't wash for half a century dies at 94.
    But, local media say, Amou Haji finally succumbed to pressure and washed a few months ago... He became ill shortly afterwards and died on Sunday.
16. How genes can leap from snakes to frogs in Madagascar.
17. Why did Vikings appear out of nowhere?
    Researchers have suggested that Vikings may have originally started sailing and raiding due to a need to seek out women from foreign lands. Rich and powerful Viking men tended to have many wives and concubines; these polygynous relationships may have led to a shortage of eligible women for the average Viking male. Due to this, the average Viking man could have been forced to perform riskier actions to gain wealth and power to be able to find suitable women. Viking men would often buy or capture women and make them into their wives or concubines.
18. The mirage of European sovereignty.
19. What moneyball-for-everything has done to American culture.
20. The gut microbiome helps social skills develop in the brain.
21. The leveraged portfolio that has done best since 1871 has a β of 2.28.
22. China's last eunuch spills sex secrets.
    Sun’s impoverished family set him on this painful, risky path in hopes that he might one day be able to crush a bullying village landlord who stole their fields and burned their house.
    His desperate father performed the castration on the bed of their mud-walled home, with no anesthetic and only oil-soaked paper as a bandage. A goose quill was inserted in Sun’s urethra to prevent it getting blocked as the wound healed.
    He was unconscious for three days and could barely move for two months. When he finally rose from his bed, history played the first of a series of cruel tricks on him - he discovered the emperor he hoped to serve had abdicated several weeks earlier.
23. India equity performance has been well ahead of China for the last 30 years.
    
24. How coastal west Africa will shape the coming century.
25. Port Moresby, has treated more than 500 men who injected baby oil and other foreign substances into their penises to make them bigger.