Anthropologist. Co-Director of the Omo Valley Research Project @theOVRP
Nyangatom, Ethiopia
Joined August 2018
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The consequences high sea levels for understanding human evolution are large. Likely many of the most important areas had high complexity and are underwater today. doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbeh…
Terrific @TheAtlantic piece on archaeologists' and anthropologists' slowly dawning realization that now-submerged areas on the coastal shelf--swathes of land drowned when the glaciers melted--may be where much of our species' early history took place. (Link in reply)
There are many systems of knowledge production: metaphysics, religion, traditional knowledge systems and so on. Some even use deductive and inductive inference. But there is only one science. No qualifiers. Just science. And anyone anywhere can use it.
"In Lakota science, there are four parts—matter, energy, relationality, and a unifying life force" That @ScienceMagazine, arguably the world's preeminent science journal, would publish this is mind boggling.
NASA seeking astronauts. Applications due December 3rd. The ad is fascinating and worth a read. usajobs.gov/job/891970300
"In Lakota science, there are four parts—matter, energy, relationality, and a unifying life force" That @ScienceMagazine, arguably the world's preeminent science journal, would publish this is mind boggling.
Here's your chance to go as Bill Gates next Halloween. His Microsoft ID is up for auction.
historical.ha.com/itm/autogr…
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Some closure to the Kenyan mass starvation cult case.
I wish anthros would get interested again in studying unusual forms of social organization and belief. How do you get hundreds of adults to starve themselves and their children?
reuters.com/world/africa/ken…
Descartes created some of the first drawings of the earth's magnetic field proposing that tiny particles circulated in through the south pole and out through the north pole.
Rene Descartes made some of the earliest known drawings of snowflakes. The minds of truly curious people know no bounds. cambridge.org/core/journals/…
A year ago quantum computing was the biggest threat to encryption. It seemed almost implausible that in 12 months it would be AI. Yet, here we are.
How A.I. Just Blew Up a Key Tenet of Computer Science nytimes.com/2026/11/06/scien…
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When did cumulative cultural evolution begin? This extensive analysis of 3.3 million years of stone tools suggests a rapid increase in complexity around 600,000 years ago. The birth of cumulative culture. pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pna…
"There is a fox in me . . . a silver-gray fox . . . I sniff and guess . . . I pick things out of the wind and air . . . I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers . . . I circle and loop and double-cross."
Love these lines by Sandburg
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Not surprising but still very cool. What may look like a mess of snowflakes is actually patterned, the shape predicted by temperature and humidity.
Rene Descartes made some of the earliest known drawings of snowflakes. The minds of truly curious people know no bounds. cambridge.org/core/journals/…
This is why I am against scholarship as activism.
"The dream is to have evidence-based policy... but instead what happens a lot of the time is policy-based evidence. So you actually start with a very strong assumption and then create analyses which are inherently going to support it." youtube.com/watch?v=NVquFYsy…
Pervasive patterns in bird songs resemble those in human speech and song. Foundational work in evolutionary cognitive science science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
Spiders sleep. Spiders might also have REM and even dream. The more we learn about our world, the wilder it becomes. science.org/content/article/… @ScienceMagazine
Rene Descartes made some of the earliest known drawings of snowflakes. The minds of truly curious people know no bounds. cambridge.org/core/journals/…
This is exactly the kind of perspective that will keep us from unlocking the potential of AI to improve scientific publication. Using AI to improve the review process, doesn't mean eliminating the human element.
AI is now better than than human peer reviewers on nearly every metric. If editors and journals are paying attention, this should change academic publishing for the better. gking.harvard.edu/files/peer…
AI is now better than than human peer reviewers on nearly every metric. If editors and journals are paying attention, this should change academic publishing for the better. gking.harvard.edu/files/peer…
If this is true, then it has big implications for how we should understand academic debates. I don't think the Academy can deal with this kind of external PR.
Meta had an internal PR plan to try and discredit Jon Haidt because he was a critic of social media.
Meta was going to recruit academics, like Andrew Gelman, to write take down pieces. They were trying to turn academics against one another through a "whisper strategy".
This is a very serious problem for open academic debate. If academics who share negative evidence about a platform are targeted by campaigns to smear our credibility, we are in deep, deep trouble.
This creates a very serious conflict of interest for anyone who is paid to do this.
law360.com/articles/2542517/…
