The main advantage of the displacing hunter gatherers was not any sort of technology or organization, but simply the institution of private property that enabled them to settle much more densely than anyone else.

"It is evidently easier to invent a system of writing or learn to predict the eclipse of the sun than it is to invent the bow and arrow."

In 1200 AD native Americans in the central US were largely agricultural and somewhat politically complex. By the time Columbus arrived 300 years later, agriculturalists had been mostly wiped out and replaced with intensive hunter-gatherers.

Hunting-gathering as of 1500.

Hunting-gathering as of 1500.

Hard to overstate how much universities will have to change with serious civil rights enforcement. All of them. Here's a FOIAed search plan from—not Harvard, not Columbia—the University of Nebraska. The "'diversity' scores were equal to the other scored areas..."

Crazy how much specialization there is in insect pests. Been dealing with squash bugs and squash vine borers, learned about cherry fruit flies earlier this season, and now I discover there's a parsley worm (black swallowtail).

An important read from Prof. Netta Barak-Corren in the WSJ. It isn't just Gaza. "In every conflict I have studied—Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Ethiopia and Gaza—the same aid trucks double as cash machines for warlords, militias and authoritarian regimes."

But seriously, if words mean anything, "decolonizing the academy" means leaning *into* the Western intellectual tradition.

What if Apple did a UI based on liquid fuzz instead