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First the link to this week's complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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There is a corollary to Park & MacDonald: Everyone in a blissful partnership and unlucky to lose their spouse early has a good chance to find happiness again while all those ending in a contentious split may be best advised not to try again but rather stay single. Looking around myself that rule seems to be borne out by observation.
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My personal rule of thumb has always been to trust all those implicitly, who leave their valuables lying around unattended, and to mistrust everyone who is meticulous about locking up or supervising all his belongings. Contrary to the ridicule from my family, it seems that according to Engelmann et al. I was and am not that far off the mark.
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From the first time I read them in Desmond Morris' The Naked Ape I've always found the arguments for the Aquatic Ape hypothesis quite convincing and hard to explain in any other way. The hypothesis is disproved in its traditional form, but Joordens et al. offer an alternative scenario that can also explain those human peculiarities.
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Let’s take a look at Haegel et al.. Returning 14 % of an investment in half a year sounds good. It takes seven such periods to pay off the initial cost and from the eighth onward you begin to see a profit. Does a current accumulator have a reliable life expectancy of more than three and a half years under heavy use?
The fuel tank in my car holds about 200 kWh of useable energy after losses (about four hours continuous operation at 50 kW power output). At the battery target price stated – target, not current! – that equates to 30 k$ for the tank alone. My whole car only cost 9 k$ new – a more than four-fold price increase. And my current fuel tank will easily outlive the rest of the car.
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Berger et al. confirm what I've said before: If you can rule out contamination by extraneous lead, then lead isotopes are the only available means of provenancing tin. That said I don't understand their conclusions. Their data too point to a source in Africa for the Uluburun and Hishuley tin. I've no idea where their 290 Ma come from and they don't tell us.
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Voosen again confirms two points: Complex models have a lot of parameter space and can be tweaked to yield just about any desired outcome. Carbon dioxide as the only or even the dominant driver of climate variation is simplistic and ignores many other possible and probable inputs.
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