It took billions of years of universe-stretching for the CMB to redshift to microwave, I don’t think me pushing pedal to the metal for a few seconds on a rocket ship is going to counteract all those years.
We do see shifts in the CMBR due to local velocity changes though—for instance, we can tell that the sun is moving at about 370 km/s relative to the CMBR frame due to its radial movement through the galaxy and the motion of the galaxy itself through space.
There have been studies suggesting prefrontal synthesis (the ability to consciously construct novel mental images) doesn’t develop in humans unless they learn a language before the age of five or so.
The wavelength of a photon isn’t intrinsic to the photon itself—it depends on the observer’s inertial frame. The Hubble redshift occurs because expansion affects the velocity of observers relative to the photons’ original frame, not because it affects photons directly.
But without that explanation, the claim that the Indonesia site supports the Africa hypothesis isn’t true—and it actually reinforces the same Eurocentrism that motivates hypothesis 2.
On the face of it, the claim that representational art originated wherever we find the earliest evidence of it seems innocent enough. And if you really believe it innocently, the Indonesia site doesn’t affect your belief one way or the other. It’s only if you had an underlying Eurocentric motive for believing the earliest-evidence theory that the Indonesia site motivates you to switch to the alternative theory (which at least still credits the direct ancestors of Europeans with the invention of art). So saying the new site supports the Africa theory is taking for granted the Eurocentric worldview that would motivate that switch.
Hypothesis 2 was never plausible.
That’s my point: if 2 was never plausible in the first place, then changing the proposed origin from Europe to Indonesia doesn’t affect the likelihood one way or the other. Saying the Indonesian evidence supports the African hypothesis without explaining why is quietly letting the implied white supremacism off the hook without calling it out.
Sure, the African-origin hypothesis is plausible—IMO it was the obvious answer all along. But taking the Indonesian art as “reinforcement” of that hypothesis requires a bit of a logical leap.
Consider the two traditional hypotheses:
Representational art originated in Africa with the ancestors of modern humans, and spread with their migrations; or
Representational art originated where we find the earliest examples of it, and spread from there via cultural diffusion.
Hypothesis 2 was considered plausible as long as the earliest examples were from Europe. Finding earlier art in Indonesia doesn’t inherently support hypothesis 1 over hypothesis 2 unless you combine it with the assumption that cultural innovations spreading from Europe is more plausible than innovations spreading from Indonesia. But that assumption isn’t even addressed—it’s just silently taken for granted.
“We will now remove content that targets ‘Zionists’ with dehumanizing comparisons, calls for harm, or denials of existence on the basis that ‘Zionist’ in those instances often appears to be a proxy for Jewish or Israeli people,” Meta said in a blog post.
So dehumanization and calls for harm are fine, as long as the target isn’t a proxy for Jews or Israelis?
Even if the Senate voted unanimously to remove him, the Supreme Court would just rule it unconstitutional.
The fallacy is imagining that “lawfulness” is an attribute that can be reliably detected on an implementation level.
I guess having a lot of unhappy customers implies that a lot of people previously purchased the product.
While we’re at it, maybe we can solve the healthcare crisis by punishing sickness!
The article says there are other (perhaps older) similar regional breads that later came to be considered types of ciabatta. Maybe that’s what they’re referring to?
I’m sure the thinking is that art appearing in both Europe and Indonesia suggests that they both inherited it from their common ancestors in Africa.
But when the earliest art was thought to have been European, the idea that art originated in Europe and spread from there via cultural diffusion was considered a reasonable hypothesis. Now that earlier art has been found outside Europe, the flip scenario—that art spread from Indonesia to Europe via cultural diffusion instead of shared ancestry—isn’t even mentioned.
“This find reinforces the idea that representational art was first produced in Africa, before 50,000 years ago, and the concept spread as our species spread.
Representational art arising first in Africa seems plausible, but how does finding art a quarter of the way around the world reinforce that location specifically?
He was just an excitable boy!
All ai projects should be forced to show the entirety of their training data.
Agreed—but note that in this case the information was only discovered because the organizations involved (Common Crawl and LAION) do show their data. We should assume that proprietary data sets have similar issues—but this case should be seen as an opportunity to improve one of the rare open data sets, not to penalize its openness and further entrench proprietary sources.
Michaels, 79, told Vanity Fair in an interview published Wednesday that he was initially “very skeptical” of the proposal from NBCUniversal executives — until he heard the AI-generated version of his speaking voice, which is capable of greeting viewers by name.
Was this a phone interview, by any chance?
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Plus… this isn’t a remote area—you can walk across the whole range from Santa Cruz to Los Gatos in less than a day. Even if you were too panicked to think of an obvious strategy like “follow a stream” or “always walk downhill” and were essentially stumbling around blind, it seems like you’d be bound to run into a hiking trail or other landmark by chance alone within a day or two.
Wasn’t the Great Pyramid built around the 27th century BCE?