I’m not sure threatening performers with million-dollar lawsuits is the best way to attract new performers to your venue.

The actual article copy is ok—I was referring to the title (“South Carolina pastor charged with allegedly cyberstalking wife before she died by suicide”).

This (mis)use of “allegedly” is a bit of a pet peeve of mine: he’s not charged with allegedly cyberstalking her, he’s charged with actually doing it. A charge is already a type of allegation, and you can’t just nest in an extra “alleged” for good measure—it’s not idempotent.

And it matters because sprinkling the word into articles without regard for its meaning gradually strips it of meaning, leaving it with nothing but a general association with crime (which negates its ostensible function).

I dunno—on the one hand, I can see where data consent that’s folded into a long user agreement might get overlooked and approved without thinking, and a second verification would be helpful; but on the other hand, the more times users are asked for consent, the more likely they are to agree reflexively to everything.

It seems like a user-configurable setting would be the best solution.

Orbán also revealed before Thursday’s EU summit that Putin had warned the Hungarian leader that Moscow would take countermeasures if the EU tapped Russian assets to help Ukraine. […] “So we Hungarians have protected ourselves,” Orbán said.

Submitting to extortion is a dubious policy; advertising your susceptibility to extortion is practically an invitation.

“Archaeologists Uncover Evidence of First Archaeologists”

For anyone else trying to follow this research, the article is describing the paper by Moody et al. from a year and a half ago.

strung together two comments Trump made more than 54 minutes apart

Isn’t that about the normal interval it takes for him to progress from one coherent thought to the next?

@[email protected] 14,000,000,000 years

Who picked the name “Vultr” for a hosting provider?

For perspective, this author’s previous article was Do Childhood Vaccines Cause Tornadoes? It hasn’t been ruled out.

He seems obsessed with making the rather pedantic point that researchers should never state that anything is impossible based on absence of evidence.

The linked Popular Mechanics article cites this Smithsonian article.

The Smithsonian article cites this National Geographic article and this Science Advances article (among others).

The National Geographic article is paywalled.

The Science Advances research article seems to be the original source—here’s the abstract:

The nature of human dispersals out of Africa has remained elusive because of the poor resolution of paleoecological data in direct association with remains of the earliest non-African people. Here, we report hominin and non-hominin mammalian tracks from an ancient lake deposit in the Arabian Peninsula, dated within the last interglacial. The findings, it is argued, likely represent the oldest securely dated evidence for Homo sapiens in Arabia. The paleoecological evidence indicates a well-watered semi-arid grassland setting during human movements into the Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia. We conclude that visitation to the lake was transient, likely serving as a place to drink and to forage, and that late Pleistocene human and mammalian migrations and landscape use patterns in Arabia were inexorably linked.

Yeah, but these are cops we’re talking about—they’re conditioned to escalate at the first sign of noncompliance.

Can you really picture a cop physically intervening, being pushed aside, and saying “ok, never mind”?

It’s like the Sokal affair in reverse.

It’s almost as if Democratic voters are selecting their candidates based on some other criterion entirely.

One of Kemp’s central arguments—that some early societies were relatively democratic, and that hierarchical rule is not humanity’s default setting—closely echoes the theory advanced by David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. That book, published in 2021, generated heated debate about the origins of inequality and the reliability of the archaeological record, and it was ultimately admired more for the force of its argument than for its account of the earliest societies.

Is that really the consensus opinion on Dawn of Everything?

Even regular laws should have a trial period, and only get confirmed after demonstrating that they have the intended effect.

They’re seeing gamma rays from suspected dark matter collisions—that’s actually more substantially accurate than I was expecting.

For the new study, she and 16 graduate and undergraduate students gathered nearly 20,000 photographs of raccoons across the contiguous U.S. from the community science platform iNaturalist. The team found that raccoons in urban environments had a snout that was 3.5 percent shorter than that of their rural cousins.

Or maybe people in cities take more photos of “cuter” animals?

Saag paneer.