⚓Nimis Audax Mundo, Nimis Stultus Caelo. Master's in biology at Aarhus University & Co-founder of @theextinctions
Denmark
Joined July 2011
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NEW from me: from the high ridges of Tibet and the Andes to the shallow seas of Southeast Asia, from the ability to consume dairy to the fine structure of our metabolisms - humans remain enmeshed in the process of biological evolution, yet how does our unique agency impact it?
Humans have shaped their own evolution through chosen environments and lifestyles, from Bajau divers to lactose tolerance in Europe.
@Hieraaetus
quillette.com/2026/06/25/age…
We are now swiftly drawing near the season of "No, Halloween is not pagan, no Anglophone Halloween does not significantly derive from Irish Samhain, no it's not something the Americans invented either"
The great majority of people will always be far more into military history, great heroes and villains, or perhaps relatedly impressive fields such as grand architectural achievements, rather than the Early Medieval grain economy or coinage in Byzantine Italy. And that's fine.
People like Beard make a big point out of the need to relate to ordinary people in history, but the one thing you can be sure of about said ordinary people is that they, too, in their own time, were mostly interested in history as it related to battles, triumphs and great tales.
Tristan S. Rapp retweeted
Did you see the good news? Two Sumatran rhino calves are on the way — Ratu and Delilah are pregnant! With fewer than 50 Sumatran rhinos remaining, every successful pregnancy and birth plays a crucial role. We can't wait to see two new calves exploring the SRS next summer!
What's remarkable about modern architects is that they genuinely can't help themselves. They will make long, buzzwordy speeches about "incorporating local designs," "drawing on vernacular heritage" etc etc, and then you see the render and it's just this, literally every time.
Oxford is building a new neighbourhood on its west end
The design brief says it should 'use cues from the Oxford skyline'
The renders show modern geometric glass and brick buildings
Oxford's historic skyline is spires and carved stone
Nobody in Oxford can explain why a city built in stone is designing its expansion in the material that replaced it
@Gondor_Ind
The one, overriding, despairingly universal element in this style of architecture is its utter refusal of symmetry. Why oh why do all the windows have to be asymmetric? We *know* from countless studies at this point that symmetry is key to a soothing, pleasant environment.
A lot of people are making fun of this, not entirely without reason (several of those streets look perfectly fine, almost any northern European city will look quite depressing on an overcast January day).
However, it's also true that much modern architecture does little to help
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I noticed this, as regards much more traditional architecture, when traveling Ireland - the Irish really love painting their houses in shades of white and grey, often uniformly so across whole villages, which I find does little to compliment the island's dreary tendencies.
Tristan S. Rapp retweeted
New cat alert! A call from a wildlife sanctuary about a "weird cat" has led to the first new cat species discovered in over 100 years in Bolivia’s Yungas forest ecoregion. Learn more about this feline surprise: on.natgeo.com/JRuaGj
This is not per se wrong, but it is also not necessary. It is true that if you stick to the path of least resistance tourist experience, you will probably sample a functionally identical lifestyle, maybe with some elephants thrown in. However, you can go off the beaten track.
modern travel is increasingly flying 10 hours to experience a slightly different version of the same globally optimized lifestyle.
same third wave coffee. same natural wine bar. same brutalist menu. same sourdough. same beige hotel. same tasteful ceramics. same instagram lighting.
what a ridiculous convergence.
The hotels will not be so nice, the people will try to scam you, the roads may be bad, safety will probably be a real concern, you will almost certainly get food poisoning.
But you can do it - you can literally just do it. Probably costs less than the default experience.
People love to say these things, and look, there's not *nothing* to the laments, I wrote a whole article about cultural homogenization over at @Quillette. But it just simply is not true that rural Kenya is the same as Strasbourg, nor are either the same as Chongqing which is not the same as anywhere in Samoa. You can say it, it gets clicks, but it's not true.
xitter.cf/AutismCapital/status/2…
This is unfortunately the consequence of globalism. It's also the consequence of capitalism. It's the consequence of optimizing for scale. If the whole world is the same, you have a larger audience to sell to. It goes further. If all *people* are the same, you have the largest audience to sell to. In the pursuit of profit maximization the market forces have consolidated all global cultural and human uniqueness/diversity into one homogenous grey blob.