A Cool Natural Stream That Turns On and Off Throughout the Day (AD S4E6)

Short missive tonight because it is my self-appointed NAprilWriMo. The count stands at 6,716 / 50,000. That means there won’t be much more than a few links I found interesting, sorry!

In other personal news, I managed to get shot #1 this week, so short #2 is booked for three weeks. It feels weird that things are going back to “normal” (what is normal, anyway?) but it’s also nice to be able to plan trips again.

”Guanyin (Avalokitesvara)”, Liao dynasty (907–1125), 11th century

Links

• Wars of Future Past is one of those good Substacks — it’s run by a military technology journalist with a rather skeptical eye, so well worth subscribing to if you are interested in (the military|technology|the state of the world). This week he had a guest post/interview about the state of public domain photography and how a surprising amount of it is put out by the Department of Defense, because all works by the US government are public domain by default and the DoD is the department that can hire the most photographers. It raises the interesting question (for those fastidious about copyright, anyway) to what extent our academic image of the world is being filtered through military lens.
• Andrew Batson (China journalist/analyst type) has a post pulling from Charles Kenny’s The Plague Cycle to argue that Malthus’ mistake was not that human population always kept up with advances in food production, thereby limiting the rise in living standards, but actually that disease kept the human population low (indeed, below the carrying capacity of the land), particularly when any economic activity caused densification — and thus it is not just industrialization that caused the current world’s living standards, but specifically industrial medicine (modern sanitation, vaccination, etc).
• This is a cool natural stream that turns on and off throughout the day like a faucet!

What’s New, Rooby-Doo?

Head scratches, that’s what. (He’s much happier with head scratches than he looks in the photo.)