I’m sure the thinking is that art appearing in both Europe and Indonesia suggests that they both inherited it from their common ancestors in Africa.

But when the earliest art was thought to have been European, the idea that art originated in Europe and spread from there via cultural diffusion was considered a reasonable hypothesis. Now that earlier art has been found outside Europe, the flip scenario—that art spread from Indonesia to Europe via cultural diffusion instead of shared ancestry—isn’t even mentioned.

“This find reinforces the idea that representational art was first produced in Africa, before 50,000 years ago, and the concept spread as our species spread.

Representational art arising first in Africa seems plausible, but how does finding art a quarter of the way around the world reinforce that location specifically?

All ai projects should be forced to show the entirety of their training data.

Agreed—but note that in this case the information was only discovered because the organizations involved (Common Crawl and LAION) do show their data. We should assume that proprietary data sets have similar issues—but this case should be seen as an opportunity to improve one of the rare open data sets, not to penalize its openness and further entrench proprietary sources.

Other than the fediverse support, are there any other differences from last year?

Eh, he can take care of that stuff while waiting for the prints to complete.

we know from paintings this is what it looked like

Do we, though? The article says “warriors were prominently featured in the Mycenaean art with numerous depictions showing their helmets, swords, spears, bows, and arrows in great detail. Armors, however, were mysteriously absent.”

Does it need to be accessible via API (e.g. SQL) or just a spreadsheet-style web interface?

So they talk about this as if it were a new innovation at the time—but could it be that this kind of woodworking was more widespread and this was just the only example to survive? Could it have been a standard part of the Acheulian toolkit?

You can use any port for SSH—or you can use something like Cockpit with a browser-based terminal instead of SSH.

If you didn’t map a local config file into the container, it’s using the default version inside the container at /app/public/conf.yml (and any changes will get overwritten when you rebuild the container). If you want to make changes to the configuration for the widget, you’ll want to use the -v option with a local config file so the changes you make will persist.

The authors liken the newly discovered hippocampal barcodes to computer hash codes, which are patterns assigned as unique identifiers to different events.

Could the birds be using something analogous to a spatial Bloom filter?

I assume we can’t actually resolve spatial detail on the planet, so the effect must have been temporal. Would it have been something like a spike moving through the visible spectrum as the planet transits its star?

In addition to the wall, archaeologists found shards of pottery and animal bones at the site

Clearly, the only conclusion accounting for all the evidence is that the wall was built to keep the animals from getting into the pottery.

From the article:

But what we know is that it works. We have no indication of any big destruction after the castrum was built.

They say the study was published in the “Advancing Earth and Space Science Journal”, without mentioning the authors, date, or title.

“Advancing Earth and Space Science” is the tagline of the American Geophysical Union, which has 24 journals—none of which are actually called the “Advancing Earth and Space Science Journal”. Presumably they were reading an article from one of those journals on the AGU website, and mistook the tagline at the top of the page for the journal name.

So does anyone know what study they’re actually referring to?

If it’s in low earth orbit as described, it would mostly be intercepting sunlight that would hit the earth’s surface anyway (although she also says it could collect light 24 hours a day, which would imply a much higher orbit).

But solar panels only convert a fraction of the incident light into usable power—most of it is re-radiated as waste heat. In that respect an orbital array would heat the earth less than a surface array, whose waste heat is trapped by the atmosphere. (And either one would heat the earth less than burning fossil fuels.)

It’s not science fiction, but my favorite of his novels is The Years of Rice and Salt.

It seems like the obvious next step would be to see if the behavior of Kuiper belt objects can also explained by dark matter.

So the ultimate fate of the Earth may be to become a metallic scar on the face of the ghost of the Sun?

Every species is simultaneously facing two types of evolutionary pressure: pressure to adapt to best exploit its niche, and pressure to prevent everything else from adapting to exploit it.

The best strategy to deal with the second type of pressure is to proactively keep changing any attributes not constrained by the first type of pressure.