LINKS - February 7th, 2024
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human. LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
Hurricanes becoming so strong that new category needed, study says
By Oliver Milman, The Guardian
“Over the past decade, five storms would have been classed at this new category 6 strength, researchers said, which would include all hurricanes with sustained winds of 192mph or more. Such mega-hurricanes are becoming more likely due to global heating, studies have found, due to the warming of the oceans and atmosphere.”
The Mythos of Leadership
By Moshik Temkin, aeon
“Yet even in Machiavelli’s brave new world, in which leaders can supposedly shape their own destinies, not all is possible. Leaders still must deal with quite powerful and resistant things: structures. Systems. Institutions. Other leaders. Adversaries. Enemies. In a Machiavellian world, perhaps the most daunting challenge facing rulers is other people realising that the ruler’s power is not guaranteed and protected by divine authority, so the ruler can be displaced – without incurring God’s wrath. And so, reading about Machiavelli’s prince after reading about King David in the Bible brings us to the big question at the heart of the issue of leadership: does the leader make history or does history make the leader? If we want to understand leadership, and how it works in the world, should we be looking primarily at the ways the leader changed the world? Or should we focus on the ways in which the world produced, and then constrained, the leader?”
Turing test — all my broken hearts
By Gareth Owens, Nature
“As a much younger, much less dented man, Peter had always laughed at the notion of IQ tests. ‘Intelligence … how can you measure something you can’t even define?’ His major concern had never been that machines would pass the Turing test, he’d always been more worried that humans were failing it.”
Vagrant birds and ancient human habitats
“In a way, anthropologists are more like birders than ecologists. We want to find fossils wherever we can, and we’ll record whatever we find. But this haphazard approach means that we can’t rely on maps of fossil discoveries as accurate guides to where ancient hominins lived. Fossil sites have many of the same problems as sightings of vagrant birds.”
Females Dominate Males in Many Primate Species
By Sara Novak, Scientific American
“But a recent study in Animals calls this assumption into question. Though male power is more common overall among primate species, it’s by no means the default social dynamic. In fact, in 42 percent of the species examined in the study, primates lived in groups in which females were either dominant or on a level playing field with males.”