Is SCIENCE!!!! still weird and cool in 2025? You betcha.

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Science as a techy observation appears to be hated in the pious state of passions ... where there is no room for knowledge and anything like it!

Then there is the matter of whether that strange light in the Middle East was opposed to religious nationalism whereas small countries would be eaten up by power and other corruptive influences on diversity.

Do you suppose this conception could enter the domain of mist wisdom and a darker form of Sophie? Maybe a Miri Am ... relatively tiny "I AM" as humbled ... as haggis is hadji in other tongues of those having taken the weird journey into the mental abstract ...

Be cautious of trip up's ... the thing doesn't want you cautious when given up a bit of Gen Ed IHC material ... the generation ahead of you! Thus thoughtless shots ... according to a generation of troubadour's ... many of these are closed cases! Bonny hard and requiring difficult mulling and chewing ... as some golfers ... illegitimate droppers!

With proper denial they believe that their cheating is unseen ... erroneous? Eros NU's ... everything is seen mostly by the all seeing ... Cosmo?
 
ExtinctZoo is a channel that I am watching more and more. Their videos are on the longer end and their titles get a click-baity, but they do research their topics fairly well and hit on some interesting topics. This one touches on the rarely discussed period immediately after the end Cretaceous extinction. It's a rather different world from either the Cretaceous or the subsequent periods when mammals came to dominate. A few dinosaurs lingered, expiring in the first millennia of this period, but it is mostly dominated by other reptiles (snakes, turtles, and various crocodilomorphs) and the slow diversification and evolution of mammals and birds. The birds, of course, are the only remnant of the dinosaurs to remain and thrive after the end of the Cretaceous). Interestingly, they've found evidence that marine life repopulated the impact area relatively soon after the infamous asteroid collision (the crater is mostly in the Caribbean on the North coast of the Yucatan). Many years ago now, I gave a UU sermon on the resilience and ability of life to come back from catastrophe. I can't find it right now, but the recovery of the world after mass extinctions is something that I am pretty sure I touched on there.

 
Every day, we use language, whether written, spoken, or (for some of us) signed. But when did that start? How did hominins begin "speaking" to each other beyond simple calls and other sounds like most mammals produce? Well, the answer is that we still do not really know. There's lots of hypotheses, but not a lot of evidence to deal with. Written language and indirect evidence like producing symbolic artifacts (symbolism is a function of language) are the easiest, since they produce archaeological evidence and seem to go back maybe 10,000 or more years. Looking at physical structures like the voice box gives some idea of when spoken language might have started, but gives no evidence for signing or other non-verbal language. And genetics gives clues, but not hard answers since language itself is not genetic, but things that play into its development can be. So scientists keep debating, discussing, and looking for new strands of evidence. Here's a SciShow piece on the subject.

 
Mendalla said:
Every day, we use language, whether written, spoken, or (for some of us) signed. But when did that start? How did hominins begin "speaking" to each other beyond simple calls and other sounds like most mammals produce? Well, the answer is that we still do not really know. There's lots of hypotheses, but not a lot of evidence to deal with. Written language and indirect evidence like producing symbolic artifacts (symbolism is a function of language) are the easiest, since they produce archaeological evidence and seem to go back maybe 10,000 or more years. Looking at physical structures like the voice box gives some idea of when spoken language might have started, but gives no evidence for signing or other non-verbal language. And genetics gives clues, but not hard answers since language itself is not genetic, but things that play into its development can be. So scientists keep debating, discussing, and looking for new strands of evidence. Here's a SciShow piece on the subject.

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And it all started from nothing as ineffable ... about the sound of silence needing something to echo within ... like in the Graduate ... water under a bridge?

Trolls for abstract ... like it was nothing, or OZ ... saw dust? Some of it glowed ...
 
Since we probably had organized societies 100,000 years ago, we probably had language longer than that. I would guess 200,000 to 500,000 years
 
jimkenney12 said:
Since we probably had organized societies 100,000 years ago, we probably had language longer than that. I would guess 200,000 to 500,000 years
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That's kind of where this is going. Somewhere between 400,000 and 135,000 years ago or something like that. I forget the exact numbers. But some argue it's even older, possibly going back to homo erectus, who were not capable of vocalizing as we know it but could have used signing or similar. That potentially puts us back 1 or 2 million years.

The biggest debate is actually how it happened per that episode. Did it develop gradually over time or did other traits that supported it develop over time and then language itself happened fairly quickly. Chimps (from whom we branched off something like 7 million years ago) and baboons (ever earlier) actually have the regions in the brain that correlate to language but do not have language as we normally define it, so that suggests the latter; that characteristics needed to support language developed over time but language itself happened fairly quickly.
 
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Just for fun, some science humour from xkcd.

where_babies_come_from.png
 
Mendalla said:
Just for fun, some science humour from xkcd.

where_babies_come_from.png
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It all began in a period of silence whence a storm was brewing ... because of folks encountering a Declaration of Independence from some old iron rule! It was something to do with the people having a rite to express disagreement with the government.

If they wanted they cut the breeding program for military supplies ... thus interfering with directions for plundering, etc. The alternate turned on the plunderer with a vicious bite ...

The mechanics of war didn't plan on this within their own ranks ... random access item! It is very complex and sophisticated ...
 
Nobody thought it through because the administrators directed those at lower levels not to peek above the horizon ...

Alas ... something came up ... my grandfather would say: "well jumped-up!" That was Jack ... the myth continues to rise ...
 
Only when you spot her setting her network can you run in the other direction from the widow maker ... a tree? Maneater ... stiff sentence ...
 
Randall Munroe makes an interesting point here. There's things that we take for granted about our world that would seem weird to someone from a very different world. For instance, our tides only exist because we have an enormous (relatively speaking, Jupiter and Saturn have some bigger moons but proportionate to the size of the planet, ours is huge) satellite that exerts enough gravitational influence on the Earth's oceans to create them. A world with no moon or only tiny ones like Mars has would not have our highly noticeable and measurable tides.

sea_level.png
 
Mendalla said:
Randall Munroe makes an interesting point here. There's things that we take for granted about our world that would seem weird to someone from a very different world. For instance, our tides only exist because we have an enormous (relatively speaking, Jupiter and Saturn have some bigger moons but proportionate to the size of the planet, ours is huge) satellite that exerts enough gravitational influence on the Earth's oceans to create them. A world with no moon or only tiny ones like Mars has would not have our highly noticeable and measurable tides.

sea_level.png
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Thought and/or intelligence is like that depending on draw between multiple points of density ... inclusive of time ...

Without associative relations consider the result ... often mortally denied ... thus subtle thought nature ...
 
So why exactly did vertebrates come on land anyhow? Where did those legs come from? It's a question that's still up for debate and discussion, with fossils from that era being not exactly common. Interestingly, though, one hypothesis that keeps coming back is that fins became legs not for getting out of water, but for better navigating in shallow, swampy waterways or, in an earlier version, so fish could move between waterways during dry periods. IOW, fish evolved legs first to help with life in the water. Living on land then followed, leading to the first amphibians and eventually to us. PBS Eons for this week is a good piece on the subject.


And one point that I have made on WC2 and other places is that science is NOT about a fixed body of knowledge. It is rather about a method for learning about the world and then testing that knowledge through observation. Hypotheses rise and fall based on the evidence. For instance, Newton's theory of gravity mostly works and is still used for things like orbital mechanics around planets, but it took Einstein's General Relativity to fully explain gravity and deal with some outside cases like the orbit of Mercury (and it has, so far, mostly stood up to testing). Yes, you have people who focus on the body of knowledge created by that method and maybe start treating it like gospel truth, but that's doing it wrong. So here's a piece from SciShow about 5 hypotheses/ideas that scientists got wrong and were overturned by subsequent testing.

 
Mendalla said:
So why exactly did vertebrates come on land anyhow? Where did those legs come from? It's a question that's still up for debate and discussion, with fossils from that era being not exactly common. Interestingly, though, one hypothesis that keeps coming back is that fins became legs not for getting out of water, but for better navigating in shallow, swampy waterways or, in an earlier version, so fish could move between waterways during dry periods. IOW, fish evolved legs first to help with life in the water. Living on land then followed, leading to the first amphibians and eventually to us. PBS Eons for this week is a good piece on the subject.


And one point that I have made on WC2 and other places is that science is NOT about a fixed body of knowledge. It is rather about a method for learning about the world and then testing that knowledge through observation. Hypotheses rise and fall based on the evidence. For instance, Newton's theory of gravity mostly works and is still used for things like orbital mechanics around planets, but it took Einstein's General Relativity to fully explain gravity and deal with some outside cases like the orbit of Mercury (and it has, so far, mostly stood up to testing). Yes, you have people who focus on the body of knowledge created by that method and maybe start treating it like gospel truth, but that's doing it wrong. So here's a piece from SciShow about 5 hypotheses/ideas that scientists got wrong and were overturned by subsequent testing.

Click to expand...

But accept that someone will attempt to nail it down because they hate change ... a' nihilation follows ... just another word as bad people never escape ... they're captivated! Phishing roue's ... until we run out of word ...
 
Snakes are quite the creatures, ranging in size from a few inches to OMGWTFBBQ KEEP IT AWAY FROM ME!!!! But for all that some modern snakes like anacondas and pythons can be frighteningly big, a few of their ancient cousins were even bigger. For a long time, the champ was believed to be the aptly named Titanoboa. Now, though, there's another contender. All I can say is that there are some extinct animals that should stay extinct. I am fond of snakes up to a point, but snakes big enough to swallow me whole is a line I would rather not cross. Also interesting how these giant snakes keep getting mistaken for crocodilians (another family that has some frightening members, esp. if you look back in their family tree).

 
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An ongoing problem in science is that for all its ideal is rather dispassionate analysis of observations to generate and test hypotheses, scientists are human and prone to the kind of professional competitiveness, jealousy, and such that all humans are prone to. This next story about what might be one of our oldest bipedal ancestors is one of the those. A fragmented skull, a missing femur that seems to be been covered up, and controversy about where it truly fits in both chronologically and evolutionarily. There's probably a movie or at least a TV episode in here somewhere.

 
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