"The Bajau show evidence of selection for both larger spleens, capable of storing more oxygenated red blood, and genes coding for the human diving reflex."
Tristan S. Rapp on the biological adaptations of the Bajau sea-nomads to a lifetime spent underwater.
Quillette
23.3K posts
Ten Years of Ideas.
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- Here is the question. Did Michael Jackson sexually abuse children? Not: was he acquitted? Not: was he a genius? Not: do we separate the art from the artist? The question is simpler and uglier than any of those. Did he do it?If you follow the evidence, there's only one answer. Based on @AndrewHammel1's hit essay for Quillette.
- Humans have shaped their own evolution through chosen environments and lifestyles, from Bajau divers to lactose tolerance in Europe. @Hieraaetus
- Quillette reposted"Stop treating energy as something to atone for. Energy is the master resource, the thing that buys us nearly every other good. The whole of human history is the story of harnessing ever more energy to improve our lives and to hold the lethal forces of nature at bay." The
- Canadian journalists won awards for a story that was never true. @_CryMiaRiver and @stellaomalley3 interview @jonkay on the Kamloops graves hoax, the church burnings that followed, and why secular societies are uniquely vulnerable to this kind of mass hysteria.
00:00 - "He believed that modern viewers, raised on photography's frozen viewpoint, had lost the ability to distinguish between a painted figure and a photographed one—between a human eye's encounter with the world and a mechanical lens's record of it." Julia Friedman on David Hockney.
- Quillette repostedClausewitz warned that war without politics can only be “something pointless and devoid of sense.” This is a fitting verdict for Trump’s squalid operation in Iran. My latest in @Quillette:
- Quillette repostedWhich continent is the world record holder in heat deaths? The dubious distinction goes to... Europe—the place with the fewest hot days on Earth. The culprit isn't the climate. It's two letters Europeans refuse to learn: A/C. My latest piece in @Quillette.👇
- Here is a trivia question: which continent suffers the most heat-related deaths per capita?Replying to @QuillettePart of the story is of course demographic. Europe has one of the oldest populations in the world, and the elderly are far more vulnerable to high temperatures. But age explains only a sliver of the gap. The United States is greying too, and Japan is older still than both—yet theThe real explanation comes down to two letters Europe stubbornly refuses to learn: A/C. Across the continent, only about a fifth of homes have air-conditioning, against nearly 90 percent in the United States and more than 90 percent in Japan. More from @mboudry here:
- One in five young Chinese adults is unemployed. Some academics put it closer to one in two. Meanwhile Beijing is spending $700 billion a year on AI and robots. Something has to give, writes @aaron_sarin.
- “Operation Epic Fury has been an epic failure from inception because the war aims and the theory of victory were hopelessly muddled in the minds of its divided architects. This resulted in confused messaging that invited the Islamic Revolutionary Guards to prepare for the worst






