Comments for Damn Interesting

Comment on A Blight on Soviet Science by luke

luke — Fri, 05 Mar 2021 02:50:58 +0000

This story was amazing (and amazingly written), and also made me boil with rage. Too often the best of humanity is sacrificed for the worst of humanity. It’s also tragic how otherwise good people are forced to do terrible things in desperate situations. It makes me think that even small acts of integrity and humanism really do add up to something priceless when performed by a people as a whole.

Comment on A Blight on Soviet Science by Jared

Jared — Fri, 05 Mar 2021 02:18:19 +0000

Truth will out.

Comment on A Blight on Soviet Science by obiwanceleri

obiwanceleri — Fri, 05 Mar 2021 01:32:37 +0000

Interesting, well researched article. Congrats.
This being said, what I understand about the battle between Darwinism and Lamarckism is that the foremost believes everything happens by chance mutation while the latter believes mutations are influenced by direct physical conditions.
If you read Koestler’s “Case of the midwife toad” it becomes clear a middle ground is required; according to Koesler, Paul Kammerer discovered, in the 1920’s, that specific types of toads would systemically grow “succion cups” on their feet in 1 or 2 generations after being forced to live in an aquous environment, which according to Darwinism is a complete no-no.
What is more fascinating however is how this debate quickly became completely VERY polarized, much like what we see in this podcast. Koestler recounts how some of Kammerer’s expos were sabotaged and how any opposition to Darwinism was seen as blasphemy and fake science.
Kammerer eventually committed suicide after discovering his reputation was ruined.
Today Kammerer has somewhat been rehabilitated; it took 80+ years to discover there is more to evolution than just genes.
It’s crazy how many human lives have been destroyed by the desire for ideological purity.

Comment on The Man Who Was a Dwarf and a Giant by JarvisLoop

JarvisLoop — Fri, 05 Mar 2021 01:21:05 +0000

I have now lost an inch and a half.

Comment on Yankee Swap by JarvisLoop

JarvisLoop — Fri, 05 Mar 2021 01:18:38 +0000

This is odd. I have a distinct memory both of the article and the photo, and I am sure that I first found it here.

Is this a revised article of the first one?

Comment on A Blight on Soviet Science by Ace

Ace — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 17:23:52 +0000

This was an engrossing informative story, well researched, and well worth the time to read.

Comment on The Anticipated Future of the Moon by Wanna stay for the answer

Wanna stay for the answer — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 22:07:47 +0000

If humans survive 5 billion more years, that in itself will be a great triumph, so who am I to say that we won’t be able to stop the sun’s death throes, which would consume the 3 inner planets. The reason for this happening would be exhaustion of the sun’s current fuel, so we’d face the enormous task of replacing much of the sun’s mass to refuel the sun. This would be an astoundingly energy intensive effort, even for an advanced civiliation, which might worry that such immensely wasteful activites would shorten the time to the ultimate heat death of the universe by a few days or years (that math is beyond me).

Would humans be so godlike in their talents that they’d undertake this activity because they can, or would humans have long since migrated to outer planets or to other, younger stars?

I suppose it’s totally irrelevant to any of us reading this now, but I can’t help but root for humanity 5 – 6 billion years in the future.

Comment on The Razzle Dazzle Camo of World War I by JarvisLoop

JarvisLoop — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 00:48:28 +0000

Astounding. Yet another article that I somehow missed.

Not astounding: This information is completely new to me.

Comment on Radical Solutions by J. A. Macfarlane

J. A. Macfarlane — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 05:54:14 +0000

@Laure:

Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. Unfortunately, I’m not longer quite sure exactly where I got the detail about the Bordeaux club from. It was almost certainly in either Martin Monestier’s or Jean-Noël Jeanneney’s book on duels (both in French), which is where I’d go for further details; unfortunately, one of them has been discarded from the library where I found it and the other is in a library that’s not currently letting people in, so I’m not able at the moment to track the information down. The Internet has also failed me — none of the obvious suspects has any information on the matter.

Sorry about that.

Comment on The Timber Terror by JarvisLoop

JarvisLoop — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 20:04:20 +0000

I wasn’t going to post, but I cannot resist this one.

Three years have passed already? I suspect the next twenty – if I live that long – will be gone in the blink of an eye.