World

Climate

Obviously we need to move on this much faster. Ways cities can adapt to heat waves:

How Climate Models work:

Ancient food exhibit:

Pelasgians? I’d never heard this name for an ancient people. Apparently Greeks, or Greek neighbors on the Adriatic. But, I’ve not travelled around the whole Adriatic enough. I’d love to explore it more and one of my favorite things is to read up on the history while I’m in-situ. So, I read this travel article on Offida, Italy. Which mentions Pelasgians - “Offida came about in the Bronze Age, when the Pelasgians first arrived in the region, bringing with them civilization.” I guess it shows my limited classical education.

Digital Maps of the (Western) Ancient World:

Maybe you’re not as keen about human diffusion as I am. In which case this new Nature publication on “Early contact between late farming and pastoralist societies in southeastern Europe” won’t interest you.

  • Apparently there was genetic and cultural contact in Southeastern Europe between farmers and pastoralists about 1000 years earlier than previously anticipated: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06334-8
  • aDNA is Ancient DNA. This is a really good NYT article on the history techniques, and scientists involved in aDNA. It also shows how academics can be like middle-school girls with their jealousies and cliques. I still begrudge main stream Archaeology for holding on to the Clovis dogma so long and so hard. The key thing to keep in mind is that aDNA is so new, and samples so relatively small, that conclusions may be utterly skewed. But, those samples are growing in number and the techniques keep getting better. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/magazine/ancient-dna-paleogenomics.html

North and South America

Two relatively new (to me) findings for ancient peopling of North and South America.

I’m a bit of a military history buff. I’ve found a Youtuber who does really excellent map based stories on historical battles. If you like this stuff at all I highly recommend Montemayor.

US

America has better geography for fast trains than France. While that statement may be true, the structure of US cities is far different. We have sprawling suburbs with absolutely terrible transit infrastructure. We lived in Berlin for years with no car. That would be impossible in all but perhaps 3 American cities (NYC, Chicago, DC). I am 1000% for more rail transit. And 1000% for High Speed Rail (HSR). But I despair because the US seemingly will never get there. Even if we funded it initially, we couldn’t build it without some crazy high multiple of cost. We not only do not have the political will to build HSR but we have lost the infrastructure chops to build it at the same cost as the Europeans or Japanese. Or, the Chinese. Look at what they did for HSR and how fast they did it. Maybe we should hire the Japanese to design it and the Chinese to build it.

GeoEngineering

I don’t think we’ve had this topic in GeoCraic yet. GeoEngineering is a set of ideas for humans engineering climate cooling solutions that are interesting. Some are obvious and we should do them (Albedo enhancement - painting your roof white) but others are potentially very dangerous and cannot be rolled back if there are unintended negative consequences. This is the first time I’ve seen anything official from the US government, in the form of a Congressionally mandated report. It may actually support limited research in the area. “The fact that this report even exists is probably the most consequential component of this release,” said Shuchi Talati, the executive director of the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering, a nonprofit that seeks to include developing countries in the debate over solar modification. “This report also signals that the U.S. government is supportive of well-governed research, including outdoor experimentation, which I think is quite significant.”