Twitter in the Aurignacian?

Heh, why not?

The curious fact is that a flint stone engraving recently found in the Aurignacian layers of Cantalouette II (Dordogne, SW France) bears a striking resemblance to the logo of the social network, what is quite funny at the very least.

Otherwise it is a very impressive early artistic expression of a rare type (avians are not common in Upper Paleolithic rock art). The Cantalouette II site was a flint stone quarry used by groups of the area and Arkeobasque (which is my source) speculates that it could be an expression of "art for the sake of art", an artist's caprice with no further meaning but excellent and very unusual technique, that was probably abandoned after its execution.

Bayesian modeling in lighter news (humor)

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:

Adaptionism (humor)

From the often great comic strip (cum video theater) Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:

Anti-yessed (linguistic fun by the hand of SMBC)

As we are having heated linguistic discussions (again) and, coincidentally, one of my favorite comics, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, has an ad hoc quite funny strip today that I thought pretty relevant, even if in a somewhat oblique manner:

Guess that the morals could be: beware of what you think you know because you may end being funny when you mean to be serious... and your Harvard applicatrix may be anti-yessed indeed.

Genetic reason...

This is today's thoughtful cartoon by Zach Weiner on the relevance of genetics in our motivations:

The main fallacy is that inbreeding, at least some inbreeding, does happen.

The other fallacy is that some 99.5% (exact figure anyone?) of the base pairs are identical among all humans and highly conservative (they won't change on risk of death or otherwise extreme crippling), so the time to your total genetic dilution (notwithstanding inbreeding) is a lot shorter that Weiner assumes.

Actually I estimate 150,000 variable base pairs, so following the cartoon's logic, only 18 generations would be needed to total dilution, so only 450 years are needed for (theoretical) total dilution. 

I was going to illustrate this talking about some random person from Columbus' times... but in that time Earth's human population was low enough to allow some of that almost necessary inbreeding of the sort suggested in the cartoon. But now? Now there's more people on Earth than all the base pairs in our genome! Now such necessary inbreeding cannot be taken for granted and will probably not happen in most cases.

Carpe diem (live the day) or just discuss?