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Cygnia

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  4. Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

    in Non-Gaming Discussion

    Posted

    A Dentist Found a Jawbone in a Floor Tile

    Quote

    Recently, a man visiting his parents’ newly renovated home recognized an eerily familiar white curve in their tile floor. To the man, a dentist, it looked just like a jawbone. He could even count the teeth—one, two, three, four, five, at least. They seemed much like the ones he stares at all day at work.

    The jawbone appeared at once very humanlike and very old, and the dentist took his suspicions to Reddit. Could it be that his parents’ floor tile contains a rare human fossil? Quite possibly. It’s “clearly hominin,” John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who also bloggedabout the discovery, told me in an email. (Hominin refers to a group including modern humans, archaic humans such as Neanderthals, and all of their ancestors.) It is too soon to say exactly how old the jawbone is or exactly which hominin it belonged to, but signs point to something—or someone—far older than modern humans. “We can see that it is thick and with large teeth,” Amélie Vialet, a paleoanthropologist at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, wrote in an excited email to me about the jawbone. “That’s archaic!”

    An international team of researchers, including Vialet, is now in contact with the dentist to study the floor tile. (I’m not naming him for privacy reasons.) This thin slice of jawbone has a story to tell—about a life lived long ago, in a world very different from ours. It is in fragments of hominin bone like this one that we begin to understand our past as humans.

    How could a hominin bone have ended up in someone’s tiled floor in the first place? Travertine, the type of rock from which this tile was cut, is a popular building material used perhaps most famously by ancient Romans to construct the Colosseum. Today, a good deal of the world’s travertine—including the floor tile with the jawbone, according to the dentist—is quarried in Turkey, from a region where the stone famously forms natural thermal pools that cascade like jewels down the hillside. Travertine tends to be found near hot springs; when mineral-rich water gurgles to the surface, it leaves a thin shell over everything that it touches. In time, the layers accrue into thick, opaque travertine rock. If in the middle of this process a leaf falls in or an animal dies nearby, it too will become entombed in the rock. “Fossils are relatively common in travertine,” says Andrew Leier, a geologist at the University of South Carolina.

    Hominin fossils, specifically, are rare, but at least one has been found in Turkish travertine before. In 2002, a Turkish geologist named M. Cihat Alçiçek discovered a slice of human-looking skull sitting on a shelf in a tile factory. He brought the 35-millimeter-thick fragment to John Kappelman, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, and later also to Vialet in Paris. The skull turned out to belong to Homo erectus, an archaic human species that walked the Earth more than 1 million years ago, long before modern humans. Vialet thinks the newly discovered jawbone could be just as old.

    Vialet and her collaborators are now hoping to extract the tile, ideally intact, from the hallway where it’s been cemented in place. (The dentist is soliciting suggestions on Reddit for how to do so without also destroying his parents’ floor.) Then, chemical signatures in the rock can be used to date the fossil. Vialet also hopes to generate a 3-D model of the jawbone with micro-CT scanning, tracing the curve of the mandible and the roots of the teeth to find anatomical clues about its origin.

     

  6. Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)

    in Non-Gaming Discussion

    Posted

    Trump and his cult reminds me more and more of what A.E. van Vogt called "The Right Man"

     

    Quote

    "...This also explained another characteristic of such men: that they could not bear to be contradicted or shown to be in the wrong: this also threatened their image of themselves as a kind of god or superman. If confronted with proof of their own fallibility, they would explode into violence rather than acknowledge that they had made a mistake. For this reson, Van Vogt labelled this type 'the Right Man' or 'the Violent Man.' To his colleagues at work he might appear perfectly normal and balanced; but his family knew him as a kind of paranoid dictator.

    "Only one thing could undermine this structure of self-delusion. If his wife walked out on him, she had demonstrated beyond all doubt that she rejected him; his tower of self-delusion was undermined, and often the result was mental breakdown, or even suicide.

    "Expressed in this way, it seems clear that the Right Man syndrome is a form of mild insanity. Yet it is alarmingly common; most of us know a Right Man, and some have the misfortune to have a Right Man for a husband or father. The syndrome obviously arises from the sheer competitiveness of the world we are born into. Every normal male has an urge to be a 'winner,' yet he finds himself surrounded by people who seem better qualified for success. One common response is boasting to those who look as if they can be taken in - particularly women. Another is what the late Stephen Potter called 'One-upmanship,' the attempt to make the other person feel inferior by a kind of cheating - or example, by pretending to know far more than you actually know. Another is to bully people over whom one happens to have authority. Many 'Right Men' are so successful in all these departments that they achieve a remarkably high level of self-esteem on remarkably slender talents. Once achieved, this self-esteem is like an addictive drug, and any threat of withdrawl seems terrifying. Hence the violence with which he reacts to anything that challenges it.

    "It is obvious that the Right Man syndrome is a compensatory mechanism for profound self-doubt, and that its essence lies in confincing others of something he feels to be untrue; in other words, it is a form of confidence-trickery. It is, that is to say, a typically criminal form of 'shortcut,' like cheating in an exam, or stealing something instead of saving up to buy it.

     

  12. Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)

    in Non-Gaming Discussion

    Posted

    Republicans Are Suing for the Right To Harass Election Workers

     

    Quote

    You might think that even in today’s highly polarized election environment there would be a bipartisan consensus to protect election workers from intimidation and harassment. If you thought so, you would be wrong. In recent weeks, there have been a series of lawsuits aimed at undoing protections for election workers.

    Nevada recently enacted a new Election Worker Protection Law to combat the increasing threats faced by election workers. The law, which passed the Legislature unanimously and was signed by the Republican governor, makes it a crime “to use or threaten or attempt to use any force, intimidation, coercion, violence, restraint or undue influence with the intent to interfere with the performance of the duties of any elections official relating to an election; or retaliate against any elections official for performing duties relating to an election.”

    Shortly after the law was enacted, the Republican Party’s failed 2022 attorney general candidate — who is currently a Republican National Committeewoman — filed a lawsuit to block the law. Her argument is that the law violates her First Amendment rights and is too vague to understand.

    Meanwhile in Arizona, right wing organizations, including America First Policy Institute founded by former Trump aides, are suing to block the anti-harassment provisions of the state’s Election Procedures Manual from going into effect. Among the provisions they find objectionable are those that prohibit:

    • Any activity by a person with the intent or effect of threatening, harassing, intimidating, or coercing voters (or conspiring with others to do so),
    • Aggressive behavior, such as raising one’s voice or taunting a voter or poll worker,
    • Using threatening, insulting or offensive language to a voter or poll worker,
    • Following voters or poll workers coming to or leaving a voting location, including to or from their vehicles,
    • Questioning, photographing or videotaping voters or poll workers in a harassing or intimidating manner, including when the voter or poll worker is entering or leaving the polling location.

    It is not only election officials that right-wing groups want to be able to harass — it is also voters. In Minnesota, an anti-voting outfit ironically called the Minnesota Voters Alliance is challenging a law that prohibits making statements that intend “to impede or prevent another person from exercising the right to vote”’ within 60 days of an election.

     

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