Thursday Throughput: Cretaceous Edition – That Means Dinosaurs
Photo by Malopez 21, CC BY-SA 4.0
[ThTh1] I don’t know what it is about dinosaurs that so enraptures children. Maybe it is, as Dave Barry said, that dinosaurs never get told to go to bed or eat their veggies. Or maybe it’s that children often develop a fascination for the idea that there was a world before they existed and dinosaurs connect them to it in a very tangible way. Or maybe it’s just that dinosaurs are awesome.
Whatever it is, dinosaurs are in the media again because of the release of the third Jurassic World movie. I watched the three Jurassic Park movies and the first World. I haven’t watched Fallen Kingdom and have little intention of watching the new one because they crossed me as cynical echoes of the 1993 original, which is still one of my favorite movies.
You see, Jurassic Park is not just a good movie; it represented a sea change in how our culture views dinosaurs. Before then, they were mostly seen as monsters. But Jurassic Park showed a culture shifting to viewing dinosaurs as animals — creatures that had habitats, behaviors and instincts. Consider one of the most famous scenes from the movie, when the dinosaurs are first shown
Normally, a dinosaur appearing on screen would be something terrifying. But this scene is infused with a sense of wonder. Williams’ soaring music, the paleontologists rapturous reaction, the panning shots of dinosaurs moving in herds and feeding. It’s a wonderful, amazing cinematic moment. But it also changed how we our culture thought about dinosaurs.
The World movies cross me as much more cynical, a return to monster movies with a few buzzwords thrown in vaguely related to animal behavior (e.g., “Oh, he’s the alpha!”). But if you want to see something that will still inspire awe and wonder, I’m going to recommend the new BBC/Apple TV+ series Prehistoric Planet.1
This documentary is done by David Attenborough and the team that has created such wondrous documentaries as Planet Earth and Life in Color. It basically takes that approach to CGI-generated dinosaurs, creating a documentary that looks as though they were actually filming them in the Late Cretaceous. It follows individuals and herds as they eat, mate and migrate, with Attenborough’s iconic narration over the images.
And it’s a marvel. It’s so well-done and so realistic that my 8-year-old son is convinced they invented a time machine and filmed actual dinosaurs. Sure, some of it speculative. But they have online resources detailing the science behind these speculations.
The more we look at our world, the more amazing at gets. And the more we learn about dinosaurs — what we knew when I was eight years old is a fraction of what we’ve learned since — the more amazing they get. They were every bit as complicated, intelligent and dynamic as the creatures that inhabit our world today.
Humans arrived on this world partway through a long and amazing story. And Prehistoric Planet shows a glimpse of the many chapters that preceded us. I hope they do a lot more. And I hope Attenborough lives to be 120.
[ThTh2] I love optical illusions. If you look at any one of these spheres in particular, you’ll see that it’s brown. But seen out of your peripheral vision, they look different colors.
All the spheres are brown pic.twitter.com/81kEEyDXn6
— Angry SpyCrane (@AngrySkycrane) June 15, 2022
[ThTh3] In old plague news, we are close to pinning down the origin of the Black Death.
[ThTh4] In new plague news, bivalent vaccines are continuing to show promise.
[ThTh5] Gaia, the most amazing mission you’ve probably not heard of, had its third data release with some spectacular results. In principle, Gaia measures the positions and brightnesses of billions of stars, allowing us to measure their distances and motions very precisely. But all sorts of stunning results are coming out of this, including new understandings of how starquakes work.
[ThTh6] Is the inflation rate really 15%, as folks like Jordan Peterson claim? No. That post gets into the technical details but I’ll just use a rule of thumb. According to their stats, the real price of things has septupled since 2000. If, in that year, you were able to buy a state-of-the-art computer for $200 or a good new car for $7,000 or a gallon of milk (or gasoline) for $0.50, I’d sure like to know where you were living.
[ThTh7] One of the drums I will beat until my hands bleed is that we need to be preparing for future pandemics. A new analysis indicates that for $24 billion, we could develop prototype vaccines for all 26 viral families, basically putting us to the position we were with COVID-19, where we could develop a working vaccine in a short period of time. Let’s say it would be four times as expensive. That’s a fraction of what the pandemic has cost us. This seems like a worthwhile investment.
[ThTh8] I’m not going to pretend I understand time crystals, but it sounds cool.
[ThTh9] Want to play an 8-bit game that simulates the Roman telescope? Sure you do.
[ThTh10] When the Cray-1 supercomputer came out, it was a monumental machine. You can now create something that massively exceeds its computing capacity with few credit-card sized processors and a 3-D printer.
[ThTh11] Wow. What you’re looking at is lightning within the ionosphere.
Bucketlist capture early this morning over Kansas. After thousands of hours with TLE’s , finally a Giagantic Jet- still in disbelief. It also may be the furthest north ever captured- lots of analysis to do on this one. #kswx #okwx @NASAEarth pic.twitter.com/Jl9V7saUqL
— Paul M Smith (@PaulMSmithPhoto) May 31, 2022
[ThTh12] Two things to note about this lunar eclipse as viewed from the South Pole. First, the moon appears to be moving sideways because it is. At the poles, the Sun and Moon don’t so much rise and set as circle through the sky. Second … look at the aurorae!
A timelapse of the Lunar eclipse at the #SouthPole. Exposures in this video ranged between 1/13-20s to cover the crazy dynamic range of the full moon and the dark night sky, smoothly ramped with @LRTimelapse to show how the stars and the Milky Way emerged further into the eclipse pic.twitter.com/YxnryEBauw
— Aman Chokshi (@aman_chokshi) May 29, 2022
[ThTh13] What protons really look like.
[ThTh14] A white dwarf star is gobbling up planets.
[ThTh15] The Great Salt Lake is drying up, which could be a huge disaster for Utah.
[ThTh16] A wonderful story, courtesy of Andrew: a woman went from working at McDonald’s to support her family to flying in space. Whatever else one thinks of Bezos, he is hitting these feel-good stories pretty hard.
ThTh2: Not just any brown, though. It’s a hue of brown that has a mix of those RGB hues as well.
ThTh7: Yeah, that’s a no brainer.
ThTh11: Holy crap! That’s cool!
ThTh13: Do I see strings in there…?Report
ThTh16: Now if he were just as energetic about getting BE-4 engines to the ULA. I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop after the exodus of engineering talent from Blue Origin over the last few months. That is, I expect another indeterminant but lengthy delay in the delivery of flight-rated engines. The ULA is now being awarded national security contracts that they cannot fulfill if they don’t have Vulcan flying regularly rather soon.Report
I’ve always associated children’s interest in dinosaurs with children’s desire for, fear of, and general fascination with power. Think about other common themes: super heroes, princesses, large animals… all things seemingly imbued with immense power. For little beings who have VERY little power but who REALLY want to understand what power they do have and how they can get more of it, dinosaurs fit into that as well.Report
ThTh6: That was the same thought I had when I saw the ShadowStats inflation claims for the first time years ago.
By the way, we can apply similar logic to rebut populist claims about falling real wages and the death of the middle class. If real wages have fallen, then real standards of living should have fallen as well. But on every major dimension, standards of living have risen since the 70s. We have better, cheaper food (by “cheaper” I mean relative to wages; due to huge cumulative increases in the money supply, nominal prices are higher for just about everything). Clothes are cheaper. Cars are cheaper, more durable, safer, and require less gas. Health care, though more expensive, is clearly better, with life expectancy having increased by several years despite the obesity epidemic. We get more education. On average we work about 10% fewer hours. We live in bigger homes. There are whole classes of consumer products that everyone has now that simply didn’t exist back then.
All of the real data point to CPI overstating increases in the cost of living, leading to understatement of real wage growth. And in fact, there are known methodological problems in the CPI that cause it to bias inflation upwards, and there’s a strong consensus on this point among economists:
https://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/us-median-income/
In short, the vast majority of experts agree that claims about real wage growth that you see in pop media and from left-wing think tanks like the EPI are flat-out wrong, and that the CPI is an inappropriate index to use for this purpose, but people keep doing it for some combination of historical and ideological reasons.Report
By the way, I suspect that the single biggest factor in real wage growth slowing (but remaining positive) in recent decades is the artificial constraints on housing supply, which drive up housing costs in the cities everyone is crowding into. A corollary of this is that it may also be one of the main drivers of the socialism fad. Here’s hoping that the recent increases in housing starts help put an end to that foolishness.Report
Health care, though more expensive, is clearly better, with life expectancy having increased by several years despite the obesity epidemic.
I am not sure that the assumption that obesity is without upside, longevity-wise, is a good assumption.Report
There have been a number of high profile studies finding that overweight or even class I obesity (BMI 30-35) is associated with lower mortality than normal weight. However, these studies have a couple of serious methodological flaws.
First, older studies often didn’t control for smoking. Smoking kills you, and also suppresses weight gain, so that’s pretty serious confounder. This has been a known problem for a long time, and controlling for current or former smoker status is pretty much standard practice by now.
Addtionally, waist circumference or various ratios based on it (most commonly waist–height ratio or waist–hip ratio) is a better predictor of mortality than BMI, due to the fact that BMI can be confounded by variation in lean body mass. This has been known for at least 10-20 years, but for some reason it’s still very common to see studies that only use BMI, possibly because it’s available in older data sets that may not have waist measurements.
Finally—this is the big one—reverse causality is a major problem. Many serious diseases cause weight loss, often starting years before death and/or diagnosis. So if you get your cohort and weigh them all at the beginning of the study, some of the people in the normal and underweight categories are going to be in those categories only because they have an undiagnosed terminal disease. Probably not a lot, but it doesn’t take many to screw up your results.
There are a couple of approaches to dealing with this problem, but the most interesting one is to look at lifetime maximum BMI instead of BMI at the beginning of the study. So if you have a BMI of 27 when the study starts, but you had a peak BMI of 31 five years earlier, you’re considered obese rather than overweight for purposes of the study. This eliminate confounding from undiagnosed diseases. And when we do this, we find a much clearer relationship between obesity and mortality.
Perhaps more interestingly, omentectomy (surgical removal of visceral fat) greatly improves symptoms of metabolic syndrome. It’s not that obesity is a benign side effect of overeating and overeating is the real culprit—visceral fat is actually actively harmful. Subcutaneous fat appears to be relatively benign, but it’s not clear that there’s a way to selectively put on subcutaneous fat.Report
Hey, I’m not arguing for body positivity or anything like that.
I am, however, pushing back against the hidden assumptions in “despite the obesity epidemic”.
Sure, I’m willing to agree that there is a problem among the 800 pounders. Cheerfully.
It’s the Class I Obesity that might have upsides that we can’t imagine because we’re locked into the whole “I don’t understand why expectancy has gone up despite the number of chubs!” thing.Report
[ThTh1]: When my boys were wee ones we had a series on DVD called “Walking With Dinosaurs” which was similar. I really want to say that we had some “Prehistoric Planet” episodes on DVD as well, but it’s been ages. Really good, engaging stuff, though.Report