Notices by Peter Gallagher (pwgallagher@qoto.org)

Until about 3 million years ago, camels were confined to their continent of origin... North America 🐫

@freemo @arteteco @solanaceae You’ve reached an amicable conclusion. I’m late to the party (sorry). Your debate on the possible truth states of unfalsifiable propositions is interesting. I have recently realized (been convinced) that the “Popperian” views on fasifiability I thought I held are sort of out-of-date. The alternative view, which I now accept, is that in physics (& economics AFAIK) most hypoths. are never in fact falsified but rather “implausified” and everyone (or most) moves on to the next thing. I find this an attractive idea both from experience and for its Humean character (ie. his argument that our belief in causation is nothing more than a series of “more and more plausible” — eventually convincing — associations). The most intriguing discussion I have seen of this general subject is in connection with contemporary efforts to escape the “dead end” in the Standard Model of physics/cosmology: Sabine Hossenfelder’s “Lost In Math” — a book that I highly recommend, if you have not read it. Here’s a good, sympathetic, review/précis of the argument::http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=10314

‘“Censorship is a very dangerous thing & absolutely impossible to police,” [Mr Trump] continued. “Let everybody participate, good & bad, and we will all just have to figure it out!”’::https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-slams-social-media-companies-for-censorship-of-the-right-1534609973

Go tell the Spartans... “The 19th AU and 6th NZ were to hold the [Thermopylae] passes as long as possible, allowing the other units to withdraw. The Germans... met fierce resistance...& sustained considerable casualties. The Allies held out the entire day;”https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Greece#Hitler's_decision_to_attack_and_British_aid_to_Greece

Long, interesting report about the evolution of theory, from one side of the (venemous) dispute over the Cretaceous “asteroid impact” and alternative extinctions:: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/dinosaur-extinction-debate/565769/

A reply to @joel_olbrich on the “QWERTY” effect. Apologies to Joel.I don’t know (yet) how to make replies public. BEGINS
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English language keyboards have a letter-layout begining QWERTY... apparently because this order facilitated the mechanical operation of early typewriters. There was no linguistic logic in the design: there seem to be several layouts that would be easier to learn and faster to use. But the early manufacturers standardised, by default, on the QWERTY layout and it became universal. No typewriter having a different layout would sell because users had accommodated to the idiosyncrasy of QWERTY. The “QWERTY Effect” is, by analogy, any structure, however idiosyncratic, that has been entrenched by use. But, on reflection, the “Twitter effect” is not due so much to its QWERTY-ness but to the natural monopoly effect of network scale economies. First movers in many network spaces (railways, airlines, telephone networks, Twitter) who secure large scale quickly can often block new entrants simply because the scale of investments needed to compete against the reach of their established network is too large for new entrants (who have no customers, at first) to justify. #longwinded

A would-be refugee (?) from Twitter. Interested in myself, mainly. Also rationality, liberality and... lots of ‘isms’.