Here we go again. New evidence confirming that the (non-avian) dinosaurs weren´t in decline before the asteroid hit. Nupe, they were thriving and doing just fine when the asteroid hit, making that impact a genuine disaster.
Dinosaurs were thriving before asteroid annihilated them all
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| - Is this the way to the festival? |
So is Mahashivaratri tomorrow or on Tuesday? Asking for a friend named Mahadev.
In Sweden, the public service broadcaster is trying to spin Rubio´s speech at Munich as a big win for the European position. Which I suppose it is...kind of. But it seems the US Secretary of State said a few other things in his presentation, too! Too hot?
OK, this was unexpected...
Is it really true that the idea of Friday 13th being an unlucky day comes from the (modern) United States?
Short answer: yes — the idea of Friday the 13th as a single, special “unlucky day” is largely a modern American invention, even though both parts (Friday and 13) were feared earlier in Europe.
Here’s how it actually developed.
In Europe, 13 had been viewed as ominous for centuries:
At the Last Supper there were 13 people, and Judas was the 13th
Many medieval inns, buildings, and ships avoided the number
Folklore associated 13 with disorder breaking perfect 12 (12 months, 12 zodiac signs, 12 apostles, etc.)
So 13 = unlucky was old.
In Christian Europe:
Friday was the day of the Crucifixion
It was associated with execution and mourning
Sailors considered it bad luck to start voyages on Friday
So Friday = unlucky was also old.
Before the 19th century, there is no solid evidence that people feared Friday the 13th in particular.
They feared:
Friday
The number 13
But not the specific calendar date.
No medieval sermons
No Renaissance diaries
No old European folklore
Nothing says “Friday the 13th is unlucky.”
That combination is missing.
The modern superstition appears in the United States in the late 1800s.
The earliest clear reference is from 1881, when a group in New York called the Thirteen Club tried to mock superstition by holding dinners on the 13th — especially on Fridays — to show nothing bad would happen.
Ironically, newspapers reporting on these events began to spread the idea that:
“Friday the 13th is a dangerously unlucky day.”
The publicity backfired.
By the early 1900s:
Newspapers in the US regularly warned about Friday the 13th
Businesses noticed people avoided travel and purchases
Insurance companies tracked higher anxiety on that day
In 1907, a popular American novel called Friday, the Thirteenth portrayed the date as disastrous, locking it into popular culture.
From America, the superstition spread to Europe and the world.
People often connect it to:
The Knights Templar arrests on Friday Oct 13, 1307
Norse myths
The Last Supper
But historians agree:
These links were invented after the superstition already existed.
They are retrofitted explanations.
13 was unlucky in Europe
Friday was unlucky in Europe
But “Friday the 13th” was not
The idea that this specific date is uniquely unlucky was created and popularized in the United States around 1880–1910 — and then exported to the rest of the world.
So yes:
Your instinct is right — this famous superstition is modern, American, and manufactured.
Microsoft Bing actually refused to generate a picture of Krishna surrounded by red hearts (!) so I turned to mi amigo (or is it my valentine) Gemini instead...
Okej, jag måste klaga lite på språkbruket i svenska medier. Igen. Eller propagandan?
För det första: "Vad händer om USA lämnar NATO". Men USA kan inte lämna NATO. Det är USA som bestämmer i NATO. Det är en amerikansk organisation som Europa och Kanada anslutit sig till. Ingenting annat. Om USA lämnar FN, kommer FN fortfarande att finnas till. När Storbritannien lämnade EU, fortsatte EU att existera. (Fråga britterna får ni se!) Men om USA "lämnar NATO" kommer NATO att upphöra att existera. NATO kommer att upplösas. Poängen med denna retorik verkar vara att framställa NATO som en självständig organisation, ungefär som just FN och EU. Ungefär som om det faktiskt vore en norrman eller en flygande holländare som bestämde i den nordatlantiska "alliansen". Den starkaste militärmakten om USA "lämnar" NATO kommer förresten att vara Turkiet. Så näste "generalsekreterare" blir väl en krypto-islamist med uppdämda osmanska stormaktsdrömmar, men whatever.
För det andra: "Ukraina förhandlar med USA". Jo, det stämmer nog att Ukraina faktiskt gör det. Men varför? USA och Ukraina är ju inte jämbördiga parter. Ukraina är nämligen USA:s (NATO:s?) proxy. Vad hindrar USA från att helt enkelt diktera villkoren för sina proxies? Givetvis just ingenting alls. Titta på Israel. Både Biden och Trump dikterade villkoren för Netanyahu. Nu var villkoren inte särskilt hårda, men poängen är att alla vet vem som håller i penningpungen (och vapenleveranserna). Och Israel är förmodligen starkare i förhållande till USA än vad Ukraina är.
Så vad handlar förhandlingarna om egentligen? De hänger antagligen samman med att Trump-administrationen är splittrad i sin syn på Ukraina. Vilket i sin tur avspeglar att det amerikanska etablissemanget med stor sannolikhet stödjer Ukraina. En annan aspekt är nog att Trump vill åt Ukrainas mineraltillgånger. För att få *dem* måste han ju förhandla. USA har inga trupper på marken som bara kan gå in och ta dem. Och många av tillgångarna ligger på eller i närheten av mark som ockuperas av Ryssland. Men i medierna framställs det alltid som att Ukraina är en självständig, jämbördig part med USA (och NATO, och EU...).
För det tredje: "Den regelbaserade liberala världsordningen har gett vika för stormakternas tid. Nu är det stormakterna som gäller. Stormakterna...stormakterna...stormakterna!!!" Detta måste vara den aspekt av retoriken som är mest idiotisk. Misstänker att alla utanför Västeuropa skrattar rått just nu. Det har *alltid* handlat om stormakterna. Alltid. Alla vet att "den regelbaserade liberala världsordningen" uppstod - inte 1945 - utan 1989-91, när USA blev världens enda supermakt. Den upprättades alltså av en dessa förkättrade stormakter. Det (Väst)europa inte gillar är att stormakten som hållit dem om ryggen sedan 1945 har dumpat deras söta små ärschlen. Men i mediernas Eviga Nu får man intrycket att världshistorien började med en väldigt idealiserad Barack Obama!
Eftersom detta inlägg nästan låter "vänster" måste jag väl betona att jag alltså stödjer Israel, Ukraina och EU mot Trump. Jag kanske rentav stödjer "stoooormakterna", vad vet ni. Men det är lite oroväckande att herrarnas propaganda låter både feg och fjollig. Vi snackar copium i kubik. Och jag tror inte enorma mängder av den drogen hjälper mot islamism, putinism eller trumpism...
Ovanstående är två "hälsningar" publicerade på Vita Husets X-konto med anledning av Alla hjärtans dag. På riktigt.
A propos a discussion on another blog...
This question sits right at the boundary between physics, philosophy of limits, and what people sometimes call cosmic pessimism. There is no single “proof” that interstellar travel is impossible — but there are several deep, mutually reinforcing arguments suggesting it may be permanently infeasible for any technological civilization, not just us.
I’ll lay out the main ones.
The universe enforces a hard speed limit: light speed.
From Albert Einstein’s relativity, the energy required to accelerate mass increases without bound as you approach . Even at modest fractions of light speed, the energy cost becomes absurd.
Example:
A tiny 100-ton probe at 0.2c requires energy comparable to the entire annual output of a major nation — just to accelerate it, not to slow it down.
For crewed ships or colony ships:
You need propulsion
Radiation shielding
Life support for centuries
Deceleration fuel at the destination
This is not “hard engineering”.
It is thermodynamic brutality.
The Solar System is energetically cheap. Interstellar space is not.
At relativistic velocities, even a dust grain hits with the energy of a bomb.
At 0.2c:
A grain of sand delivers explosive-level kinetic energy
Hydrogen atoms become hard radiation
To survive, a ship needs:
Shielding thicker than meters of metal or ice
Or massive electromagnetic fields
Which themselves require huge power and mass
This creates a feedback loop:
More shielding → more mass → more energy → more shielding
This is a classic runaway constraint.
Every speculative drive hits a wall:
| Concept | Fatal problem |
|---|---|
| Fusion rockets | Fuel mass > payload |
| Antimatter | Impossible to produce at scale |
| Light sails | Laser arrays must be planetary-scale |
| Bussard ramjets | Interstellar gas is too thin |
| Warp drives | Require negative energy not known to exist |
| Wormholes | Require exotic matter + stability we have no evidence for |
Nothing in known physics allows cheap relativistic mass transport.
You can send tiny probes.
You cannot send civilizations.
Even at optimistic speeds:
Nearest stars: decades to centuries
Colonization waves: millennia
Galactic travel: millions of years
But technological civilizations are fragile.
On Earth:
Industrial civilization is ~200 years old
Writing ~5,000 years
Empires collapse in centuries
Interstellar projects require:
Unbroken political, economic, and cultural continuity for longer than any civilization has ever survived.
That may be a deeper barrier than physics.
If interstellar colonization were easy, the galaxy should already be full.
This is the Enrico Fermi paradox:
“Where is everybody?”
We see:
No probes
No megastructures
No astroengineering
No alien signals
The simplest explanation is:
Interstellar expansion is not viable, even for advanced civilizations.
Even self-replicating AI probes — far easier than sending humans — should have filled the galaxy in a few million years.
They haven’t.
This suggests either:
They are impossible
Or they are universally avoided
Or civilizations reliably destroy themselves before building them
All three point to a hard barrier.
Putting this together yields a bleak but coherent picture:
Stars are islands. Civilizations are trapped on them.
You can explore your own solar system.
You can send robotic scouts to nearby stars.
But no species migrates between stars in a meaningful way.
The universe looks empty not because life is rare — but because distance is fatal.
If aliens could travel between stars cheaply:
Earth would have been visited billions of years ago
The Solar System would show obvious artifacts
Since it doesn’t, the simplest inference is:
They can’t get here.
Not because they aren’t smart — but because the universe is bigger than technology.
The dream of starflight may be psychologically irresistible — especially to a species like ours, so shaped by exploration myths — but the universe may be telling us something very Buddhist in spirit:
Desire does not cancel limitation.
We may be a brilliant, tragic species:
able to see the stars,
but never to reach them. 🌌
I haven´t double-checked this, but it sounds about right. I´ve read something similar in books a couple of years back. This a propos that confused young man from South Korea who claims to be "the world´s IQ record holder" at IQ 276. As I expected, such a high IQ score is simply impossible. And that´s that.
Chris Langan also claims to have a very high IQ (about 200), but he has at least constructed a complex metaphysical system. YoungHoon Kim simply repeats all the usual amateur apologist arguments for Christianity we have heard thousands of time before. In fact, he does so with such great conviction - as if he was saying something new or smart - that he becomes almost a parody of the entire field. His Dunning-Kruger is certainly off the charts...
And yes, I know this is worthless knowledge, but I just can´t help myself...
Short answer: claims like “IQ = 276” are not just unlikely — they are mathematically meaningless.
Let’s unpack why.
Modern IQ tests (like the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale or the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales) do not measure intelligence on an absolute scale.
They are norm-referenced:
where is how many standard deviations above or below the population mean a person is.
So:
IQ 100 = average
IQ 130 = 2 SD above mean (≈ top 2%)
IQ 145 = 3 SD
IQ 160 = 4 SD
…and so on.
But here’s the crucial point:
IQ tests are only calibrated and validated for a limited range of -scores.
Beyond that range, the numbers lose meaning.
To assign a real IQ of, say, 200, a test would need to:
Contain items hard enough to distinguish people at ~7 SD above the mean
Have a large enough norming sample to estimate how rare such performance is
Demonstrate reliability at that level
None of this exists.
For perspective:
5 SD (IQ ≈ 175) → 1 in 3.5 million
6 SD (IQ ≈ 190) → 1 in 500 million
7 SD (IQ ≈ 205) → 1 in ~80 billion (more than the number of humans who have ever lived)
So if someone claims an IQ of 276:
That corresponds to a rarity of about:
1 in 10³¹ humans
That is more than the number of atoms in a cup of water.
It’s not “very rare.”
It is statistically impossible in any meaningful sense.
Most well-designed modern IQ tests:
Can measure reliably up to about IQ 160–170 (≈ 4 SD)
Can give rough estimates up to about IQ 180 (≈ 5 SD)
Beyond that:
Ceiling effects dominate
Scores depend on extrapolation, not measurement
Small errors in raw score become enormous errors in IQ
This is why official manuals usually cap reporting around 160 or 165.
Anything above that is basically:
“You hit the ceiling; you are smarter than this test can tell.”
They usually come from:
Untimed or experimental tests never properly normed
Extrapolating from childhood scores
Using ratios instead of deviation IQs
Self-administered online tests
High-IQ societies inventing their own scales
These violate basic psychometrics.
The numbers look impressive — but they are numerology, not measurement.
In real psychometrics:
| IQ | Meaningfulness |
|---|---|
| ≤145 | Very solid |
| 145–160 | Strongly reliable |
| 160–170 | Still meaningful |
| 170–180 | Rough, ceiling-limited |
| >180 | Not psychometrically real |
So the highest meaningful IQ is about:
~170–180 (4–5 SD above the mean)
Everything above that is not “more genius” — it is outside the measuring instrument’s domain.
People like John von Neumann or Kurt Gödel may well have had cognitive abilities far beyond most test ceilings — but IQ cannot quantify that.
At the extreme high end, intelligence becomes multidimensional, and a single number breaks down.
When you see:
“IQ = 240” or “IQ = 276”
what it really means is:
“Someone took a test that could not measure them, and a big number was invented.”
The real upper bound of meaningful IQ is around 170–180 — after that, the scale stops working.
