insignia or fossil-fuelled

The Atlantic science correspondent Ed Yong unearths the intriguing stories behind the forty-three of the fifty American states that have designated a State Fossil, including polities where the subject of evolution is contentious and not to be mentioned in polite company, via Neatorama.
While most choose to enshrine a dinosaur whose fossil specimen was discovered locally, others were more esoteric in their selection—going for petrified tree bark or other mega fauna, a giant ground sloth and several states going for mammoths or mysteriously (for Connecticut) a track of footprint impressions left a couple hundred million years ago by an unknown hunter. I wonder if this this same dicey and political process is repeated for other national symbols.

stochastic engineering

The ever stimulating Kottke directs our attention to a nifty widget that simulates complex systems with representative emojis that you populate your environment with and add protocols about how they interact and then the resulting models can provide forecasts for things like weather-patterns, wildfires, predation or epidemics—or for whatever scenario you can imagine rules for. This experiment, which examines the stability and sustainability of environments, reveals our weaknesses and fallacies when it comes to complicated and contingent reactions. This tool reminds me of that Microsoft Windows Game of Life, which simulated evolution with pixels forming larger, more complex shapes and gaining locomotion by a few simple rules.

vine-ripened or food for thought

I was remiss in not mentioning the contribution and suggested subject of a reader until weeks afterward, as the subject of food waste and the broader implications of nutritional policy and food-security are coming under scrutiny and have become major talking points in the news. The infographic and article at the link is an in depth but an accessible and circumspect look at the different arenas of food waste that may not occur to one as having knock-on effects beyond wonky fruits and vegetables or faulting green-grocers for tossing out edible food rather than sharing it with the needy (the statistics focus on the UK but surely it’s global in applicability and consequence).
Markets and restaurants, in fact, have been quite forthcoming in redistributing foodstuffs, though there’s always room for improvement and sometimes it is easier and cheaper to dispose of or repurpose ingredients in situ rather than delivering it to a foodbank. Household consumers are big contributors in terms food being thrown away but that’s in part due to promotions that encourage people to buy more than they need, reflected up the chain by markets that can quickly change suppliers to impact the livelihoods of farmers and state-subsidies. Surplus production can find other outlets but the production itself—even without considering the packaging and transportation—has significant environmental repercussions and small efforts towards reducing this loss can not only benefit economically, they could also help Britain and many other countries be more in compliance with their ecological pledges.

check-digit or super-symmetries

The maths world is a little giddy over a new mystery discovered through brute computing force. No one is quite sure what to make of it, but examining the distribution of prime numbers, mathematicians are realising that they try to be more different from the nearest neighbours on the number line than they need to be.

Prime numbers, above the single digits can only end (regardless of their size) in one of four numbers: 9,7,3 or 1—otherwise, you needn’t bother checking. One might expect that the law of averages would hold across infinity and there would be a one-in-four chance that one prime might end with the same digit. That does not happen, though, and mathematicians, should the findings hold, are wondering what these apparent aberrations might mean, and whether this might suggest that there is a way to break encryption and unsettle a formerly secure foundation.

gatekeeper and key-master

The European Union is reaching out to Turkey in order to help stem the tides of humanity washing up against the Greek coast and halted at the Macedonian border. The agreement currently being tendered has the country that spans two continents offering to take one migrant in limbo on the edges of Europe in exchange for resettling one Syrian refugee hosted by Turkey in EU lands.  Presumably, non-Syrian refugees deported from Greece and Italy back to Turkey will be then returned to their countries of origin—Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc. after an appeals process, which could not be conducted in the chaos of camps and choke-points along the Balkan route.
I don’t know what to think, and know there’s real terror and reason to flee and that determination to survive and protect one’s family is not broken by the bartering going on in Brussels, but as if this deal did not seem tenuous enough already, Turkey (knowingly, as the EU needs Turkey just now more than Turkey needs the EU) has asked for extra concessions to include three billion euro in aid, visa-free travel for its citizens to the EU and accelerating its ascension into the economic bloc. While I truly hope the lives and aspirations of millions are not subject to such political horse-swapping—all the more exacerbated by the upcoming plebiscite over the so-called Brexit—or become a political hot-potato over the leverage that the Turkish government has garnered. Seldom is heard a discouraging word—however, as no one dare speak about deportment past and recent that this new partner has displayed on the international and domestic stage: internal political and ethnic strife that is approaching a civil war of its own, aggression towards Russia, collusion with smugglers, terror attacks, and a despotic suppression of press-freedoms that barely register a mention. What do you think? Should Europe enter into this pact?