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Wednesday, October 09, 2024

2,000-year-old Roman Military Camp Found High in the Swiss Alps

 Opinion: We Need More Consequences for Reckless Driving. “‘Punishment’ and ‘consequences’ aren’t synonyms — and when we confuse the two, we lose lives on our 

Fly Brain Breakthrough ‘Huge Leap’ To Unlock Human Mind BBC


2-billion-year-old rock home to living microbesScienceDaily 


Ants can be used to make yogurt – and now we know how it works New Scientist


Scientists Release an Astounding, Detailed Map of a Fly Brain in Groundbreaking Study Colossal


Mass extinctions on Earth can help us find alien life in the cosmos. Here’s how Space.com




The Potato's Advantage Over Wheat That Changed World History

Every place developed a staple crop that serves to keep a population from starvation: Europe grew wheat, Asia has rice, North America has corn, Africa has yams, and South America is where we got potatoes. Successful societies learn to allocate those crops to bolster their population. The potato allowed the Inca Empire to build its armies and those massive cities. When potatoes were first exported to Europe, it made all the difference in several nations for feeding people (potatoes are more nutritious than wheat) and for a nation's defense. Defense? It all came down to the fact that potatoes are grown underground, and they can stay there until they are needed, while wheat must be harvested and stored for future use. This fact threw a wrench into the military strategies of invading nations. Read how the strategy of growing potatoes changed the history of the world at JStor. -via Strange Company


Someone once explained the old adage "starve a cold, feed a fever" to me as meaning that if a person with a cold doesn't feel like eating, don't make them eat. They need to rest. But if they have a fever, make them warmer if you can. They probably already have the chills despite their temperature, and they seek greater warmth. I've heard other interpretations of the adage that are so varied that it has become meaningless. 

But why would you stoke the fires of a fever, and how much is too much? It's a delicate balance between feeding a fever and fighting a fever, when your body just wants to kill an infection. Kurzgesagt, an organization that has explained the immune system to us a few times, explains what happens at the cellular level when your body produces a fever. This video ends at 9:40; the rest is advertising and promotional material. 


The Top Celebrities at a True Crime Convention

The Republic of Kiribati (pronounced "Kirr-ih-bass") is, by population, a very small nation with only 117,000 people. It consists of 33 islands, of which a third are inhabited, stretching across 2,400 miles of central Pacific Ocean near the equator and 1,300 miles along the International Date Line.

Kiribati became famous on the internet a few months ago for its unimaginative place naming practices. Yet it has another claim to fame, too. This both large and small nation is spread across four hemispheres: the northern, southern, eastern, and western. The CIA World Factbook identifies it as the only nation so endowed.


AI Data Center Boom Spurs Race to Find Power Wall Street Journal


Cruise Fined $1.5 Million For Failing To Report Robotaxi Crash Involving Pedestrian The Verge


2,000-year-old Roman Military Camp Found High in the Swiss Alps

Around the year 15 BCE, the Roman army was conquering its way through Europe and fought the Suanetes tribe of what is now eastern Switzerland. Students from the University of Basel have been studying the battlefield near the Crap Ses Gorge since 2021. Last fall, they found something intriguing on the mountain above. They discovered the outlines of a Roman camp, perched high above the battlefield at around 7,000 feet in altitude. Using LiDAR technology, they have been able to locate an unearth its boundaries. 

The encampment is bordered by three substantial ditches and a wall. From this high vantage point, the Romans could keep an eye on four important valleys, plus a well-traveled road. Talk about taking the high ground! Artifacts that have been found include Roman weapons and equipment, plus lead slingshot bullets stamped as belonging to the 3rd Legion. It must have been in use for quite some time.  -via Damn Interesting



They Went From Making Tuba Music to Making Pizzas

There are some general rules in business, like 90% of new restaurants fail within a year, only invest where you have experience, and musicians can't get a loan unless they have a record contract. All those rules were upended when Zac Smith and Cheryl Roorda bought a building in Hot Springs, Arkansas, not sure what to do with it. She plays the accordion; he plays an E-flat helicon, an instrument that resembles a tuba. They raised two children by playing gigs wherever they could. The building they found was a wreck, and they spend ten years making it usable. Now it contains a pizza parlor, plus a microbrewery and a radio station, all successful. Their journey involves a lot of hard work, timing, and luck, as evidenced by their story of how they financed the project in 2007.

But this was before the collapse, when they were still going through cemeteries looking for bodies to loan money to. We were able to purchase our home as a tuba-accordion duo, and we were processing the loan, $32,000 on a foreclosure from Fannie Mae, and the strip-mall financier was all, “You know, this would be a lot easier if you took out a $100,000 loan,” and we were like, “What about tuba-accordion duo do you not understand?”

Strangely, the radio station came first, which built goodwill in the community. People will try a new locally-run restaurant, but they won't return unless it is good. Read the heartwarming story of how two musicians founded a quirky but flourishing business at Vox. -via Metafilter


First instincts vs second thoughts, which side are you on? 

Studying the way we stumble into cognitive traps could be key to understanding how to beat misinformation

A first impression suggests that there is nothing to be gained from reading Alex Bellos’s new book of puzzles, Think Twice, except an hour or so of pleasant diversion. But as the book makes clear, first impressions can be misleading. 
Bellos is offering a very particular kind of puzzle: the kind where there is an obvious answer, and the obvious answer is wrong. 
One might describe such puzzles as “trick questions”, but this is no mere frippery. It is hard to think of a conundrum that offers us more practical lessons than the trick question.
For example: which teapot holds more, a tall elegant one, or a squat but slightly wider pot? The answer: look at where the spout ends. The teapot can tower as high as you like, but if the opening of the spout is low down, you won’t find it carrying much tea. The appearance of a grand scale can be deceptive: the lesson is to look for the weakest link in any system.
Or try this one: “Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?” That’s multiple choice: yes, no or cannot be determined. 
Bellos set this one to grizzled veterans of his newspaper puzzle column, and warned them they’d get it wrong. Seventy-two per cent of them did — worse than the proverbial dart-throwing chimp. The psychologist Keith Stanovich has found that the typical failure rate on that puzzle is even higher, at more than 80 per cent.
Or, a classic of the genre: Agatha and Zoe have a combined age of 50. Agatha is 40 years older than Zoe. How old is Zoe? 
That one is absurdly easy if you take a moment to stop and think. Many people don’t and blurt that Zoe is 10 years old. But why would they hesitate anyway? Our minds are machines for reaching swift conclusions in a fast-moving world. Slowing down to reason in fine detail takes an effort of will.
Still, sometimes it pays to stop and think again. Consider the problem facing countless students as they sit multiple-choice exams, writing down an answer and then having second thoughts. Should they stick with their first instincts or should they switch?
There is an overwhelming consensus on this question. Students, instructors and even some exam guides warn the hesitating candidate to stick with their first thought. “Many students who change answers change to the wrong answer,” admonishes one guide — which, when you think about it, may be true but is also not a good basis for advising students not to change. 
While the consensus may be overwhelming, it is quite wrong. A century of academic research into the question demonstrates clearly that when you have second thoughts on a multiple-choice test, it’s a good idea to change your answer. Indeed, the gap between our beliefs and the evidence is so stark that psychologists have given it a name: the “first-instinct fallacy”.
Our first instincts are often right, to be sure. But when we have second thoughts, that’s a sign of trouble: second thoughts usually occur to us for a reason.
Why are we so reluctant to indulge our second thoughts? Psychologists Derrick Wirtz, Dale Miller and Justin Kruger (he of the Dunning-Kruger effect) have conducted experiments showing that we tend to misremember the results of switching answers. We tend to recall times when switching was a mistake, and overestimate how often we got good results from sticking to our first guess. The same researchers also found evidence that people were frustrated by teammates in a quiz game who switched answers, regardless of their overall performance in the game.
And this research on the first-instinct fallacy presumes that the second thoughts even occur. All too often, they do not. Bellos’s book challenges readers to think twice (the clue is in the title), and yet many still stumble into the cognitive traps he sets. When an answer leaps into our heads and feels right, it is easy to mistake that feeling for the truth.
As we step away from multiple-choice questions and puzzle books and into the everyday information environment of media and social media, we are endlessly being confronted with claims that feel intuitively true (or intuitively absurd) and leaping to conclusions. One is rarely warned to think twice on X or Facebook, but the warning would be useful nevertheless. 
This is not mere speculation: Gordon Pennycook, David Rand and others, behavioural scientists who study misinformation and how we respond to it, have found that people who do poorly with tricky puzzle questions (the term of art is “cognitive reflection problems”) are more likely to share online misinformation and they are also more likely to fall for falsehoods of a politically partisan nature.
That’s a striking finding: it suggests that spotting fake news is more a matter of calm reflection than it is of raw intelligence or technical expertise. An encouraging finding, too — if only we can find a few oases of calm on the internet. 
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