tingilinde

bronze age rock art

An impressive passion hobby.

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The thrill of the hunt has naturally led them to speculate on the carvings’ meaning. Because the petroglyphs tend to be more visible in the slanted rays of dusk, or with angled artificial lights, Tangen said he believed that their creators had made deliberate use of shadow and light in their work. Thanks to the sun’s changing angle, petroglyphs can look different depending on the hour of the day, or season, he explained. “I think the images have to do with the awakening of people’s minds to time,” he said.

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and this on a possible very old writing scheme

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A primitive writing system used by ice age hunter-gatherers appears to have been uncovered by an amateur archaeologist, who concluded that the 20,000-year-old markings were a form of lunar calendar.

The research suggests cave drawings were not only a form of artistic expression but also used to record sophisticated information about the timing of animals’ reproductive cycles.

Ben Bacon spent countless hours trying to decode the “proto-writing” system, which is believed to predate other equivalent record-keeping systems by at least 10,000 years.

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a general tip

 

Christian Nationalism is just White Supremacy in Bible drag.

 

 

global warming is not a market force..

In Florida housing at least...

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The research found no evidence that hurricanes are fundamentally altering the long-term demand for housing in hard-hit areas. “Hurricanes are projected to get stronger,” Liao said. “In Florida, at least, it appears that market forces are not encouraging people to move to safer places.”

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I suggest, with some evidence from Florida politics, that a lot of Floridians aren't playing with a full deck

 

well, duh...

Things users have learned.  Physical buttons (and presumably knobs) are more easily accessed than touchscreens in cars.

 

 

sudden cardiac death in athletes

David Epstein has a nice piece.

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You have probably read by now that Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest during a game on January 2. I was delighted to read, a few days later, that he was awake and recovering.

I don’t know what caused Hamlin’s cardiac arrest, and don’t intend to delve into particulars of his case. But I became a science writer specifically in order to write about sudden cardiac death in athletes — it was my journalistic raison d'être for years — and I think it’s worth sharing a lesson or two from my past reporting, and perhaps a tip on what all of us can do to save some lives.

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sorting out migration in the viking age

It turns out they usually practiced DNA-unfriendly cremation of the dead. A surprise slaughter resulted in burials and intact DNA a millennia later.  With DNA you can sort out relations and begin to make sense of migration. 

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His team managed to decode ancient genomes from six men and one woman killed at Sandby Borg. Their DNA, along with samples from a handful of other early sites, showed Iron Age Scandinavians a few centuries before the Viking Age were genetically similar to each other and related to modern-day Swedes, the researchers report today in Cell.

More genomes from other sites confirm that around 750 C.E., as new sailing techniques enabled Scandinavian merchants and raiders to range far beyond their corner of the Baltic, Scandinavia saw an influx of immigrants. People with genetic ancestry from the British Isles, the eastern Baltic, and “Uralic” ancestry from Siberia appear in different parts of Scandinavia. There’s more western ancestry in Sweden and Denmark, for example, and an eastern influence on the island of Gotland.

“They vindicate the idea that there is an upturn in contact with people overseas in the Viking Age,” Sindbæk says.

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a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

 

an auto-coup d’état

Classifying what happened on January 6th two years ago

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But when auto-coup attempts occur, they tend to succeed far more often than the other types. While the success rate for attempted dissident coups is only 16% – that is, only 16% of dissident coup attempts end up throwing the national leader out of power – the success rate for attempted auto-coups is 75%. This far exceeds the success rate for attempted military coups, the category that probably comes readily to mind for most people, which oust legitimate political leaders 56% of the time.

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a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

lake missoula

An old glacial lake that met a sudden end.

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It’s estimated that the biggest flood discharge reached 386 million cubic feet per second. At that rate, it took the lake only a few days to drain, with its waters eventually reaching the Pacific Ocean.

The scariest thing is not the scale of this event—it's that floods of this size happened multiple times. Thousands of years after that first flood, scientists finally pieced together whether it was a one-time deal by looking to the dirt for answers.

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winter in austria

They had a bit of chilly weather, but now it's far too warm-- even for snow making at the resorts.

We'll see increasing periods of very warm, nd even very cool, weather as time goes on with a general increase in average temperatures in many places.  I grew up on the Eastern slope of the Rockies in Montana.  We had periods of bitter cold,  below -40‚ at times, but we also had regular chinooks that took the temperatures well above freezing for a few days at a time.  Many cold climate crops need a constant freeze to over Winter and that limited the type of crops that could be grown.  

 

 

information literacy

NJ becomes the first state to mandate it in schools. 

Devils and details, of course but a start.