And: on the 'r' side of the r/K reproductive strategy. Whales are literally the exemplar of K-selection, that is a very small number of high-quality offspring.
Whale lifespans are long, populations and fecundity / brood sizes are small, sexual maturity relatively late, and childhood mortality relatively high. All of these make for slower rather than more rapid evolution.
Species such as krill (on which many whales feed) are far more likely to evolve rapidly in the face of increasing selection pressures. Whales might well find themselves boxed into an inescapable evolutionary corner.
I'll also note: David Runciman is one of my absolute favourite podcasters. I'd discovered him through his earlier London Review of Boooks-affiliated Talking Politics, and followed his transition to Past, Present, Future. He's also contributed to several episodes of Intelligence Squared UK and a few free-standing lectures and YouTube videos.
For those not familiar with him:
- He's British, and a former professor of politics (largely political history) at the University of Cambridge. He left that post to pursue podcasting full-time.
- The podcasts (PPF, TP) focus largely on political history and philosophy, ranging from Greek times through the present. For the most part Runciman doesn't dwell on the Sturm und Drang of current events, though he'll occasionally reference them or discuss them in context. At the same time, the background he brings to these events has proved tremendously useful to me. Runciman provides the context missing from so much contemporary discussion and news.
- Runciman's analysis tends strongly to avoid the trite and commonplace. He treats friendly voices critically (as in the series referenced above on Orwell), and those he views poorly, fairly. Among the latter includes an exceedingly insightful analysis of Atlas Shrugged, a book he takes a dim opinion of but nonetheless revealed several points I and a friend, both of whom had read the work numerous times, were surprised by. (The points are well-backed by evidence.) He rarely makes glaring errors (one of the few I can think of was in a recent discussion of the Hiroshima bombing in which WWII-era B-29s are consistently referred to as Cold-War era B-52s), and in one piece where Runciman gives an account of Max Weber's definition of government, as that entity which has "the claim to the legitimate use on physical force" (emphasis added), which is often bastardised to "monopoly on violence". The latter characterisation utterly misplaces the focus from legitimacy to force, and is baldly false. Runciman's account appears in this episode: <https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/weberonleadership>, at about 15 minutes.
- He's a peer of the realm, 4th Viscount Runciman of Doxford, and related by marriage to John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, 13th Marquess of Groppoli, better knonwn as Lord Acton, famous for the dictum "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". I find this delightful, though Runciman himself doesn't make a point of this (the relationship is revealed via associated Wikipedia articles).
As someone who's immensely fatigued by current political chaos and much news, Runciman's information and delivery (admittedly dry and quite RP, both of which I see as good aspects) are a breath of fresh air. Unreserved recommendation.
Oh, and one more element: Runciman likes doing mini-series on various themes. Past ones have been: political books, films, and trials. A history of bad ideas (interesting, and a few countering my own viewpoints), counterfactuals (what if things had gone differently), great essays, revolutionary ideas, globalisation. Those are indexed under tabs on the pod's homepage:
Graffiti is not possible without a stylus, or at the very least is vastly less effective.
Android and iOS are both "finger first" interfaces. You can use a stylus, but you don't have to. And everything is designed around finger-fatness. Icons, gestures, on-screen keyboard.
I much prefer the stylus. You only need to see artist that paint and do sculpting with Wacom displays to see that this has a much better potential than finger-based touch. The latter is ok for light consumption, but for not so much for productivity.
Stylus for pointing. Hard keyboard for serious text input, though Graffiti isn't bad, and is significantly preferable to a soft keyboard.
Finger input is more convenient, for very casual use. Stylus suffers from both loss of the stylus itself (particularly when these are integrated into storage on the device itself), and inconsistent sizing of styli, even by the same manufacturer and nominal device model and version.
For the latter, Motorola's Stylus Android phones retain the same model and version number while the stylus dimensions change sufficiently to make them incompatible. This may induce a certain level of frustration....
Or you can buy a citrus juicer and make it yourself. A couple or three oranges and a few seconds in the morning.
OXO Good Grips runs about $20, it's a squeeze-by-hand option. You can get a wooden reamer, or spend about or upwards of a Franklin for something complicated, though I find simpler is saner.
I have both an old school glass dish reamer as well as a wooden reamer. Use it for making lemon/lime iced tea (using actual tea, not that powered sugar crap) for the summer months.
It would be more illuminating to reference the General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy directly, in which GM and other defendants (Firestone, tyre company, Standard Oil of California, Philips Petroleum, and Mac Trucks) were convicted of violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act in both monopolising the market for buses and the demolition of extant streetcar lines in numerous US cities:
Here in San Diego we're still suffering from those removals.
New trolley lines aren't installed in a way to serve daily resident commutes, as the original trolley lines did, instead they're primarily organized to serve as tourist disneyland rides...
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory>
Whale lifespans are long, populations and fecundity / brood sizes are small, sexual maturity relatively late, and childhood mortality relatively high. All of these make for slower rather than more rapid evolution.
Species such as krill (on which many whales feed) are far more likely to evolve rapidly in the face of increasing selection pressures. Whales might well find themselves boxed into an inescapable evolutionary corner.
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