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First the link to this week's complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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As far as I can tell, Thunström & Noy's study is meaningless. From personal experience I can say that while I appreciate prayers from friends and acquaintances, paying strangers to do so strongly smacks of magic. Also a genuine atheist should not care the least bit about incantations muttered by anyone and would not waste money to stop them. Besides a fear of magic there is another explanation here. Many atheists show a marked missionary zeal and their answers given here may well be just another example of costly signaling. Of course the same may be true for self-declared Christians, whether they actually believe in prayer or not. This artificial setup has nothing to do with and tells us nothing about the genuine belief and valuation of prayer.
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Fu et al. is one more example of an organism reacting to environmental change with a higher rate of mutation and adapting to it. What Fu et al. can nor and do not tell us is how that same emmer reacted to the onset of the Little Ice Age several centuries ago. One thing is certain, the current one is neither the only nor the strongest change that species has experienced since the onset of the Holocene and it's still here and going strong.
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Bradley et al. demonstrate another example of anthropogenic climate change through an increase in population density and irrigation. Earthquakes are as yet not man-made[1] but their results can be. Landslides can also be triggered by massive downpours. The recently observed rise of magnitude and damage from these events need not actually point to a change in climate but rather susceptibility.
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Labbé et al. looks like that sought-after rarity of real climate data instead of computer models. Looking more closely they too have been tampered with. Before 1718 Labbé et al. have added an artificial offset of seven days, in effect projecting the height of the Little Ice Age into the far past. Even so the bend around 1980 and the near-linear trend from then on in their figure 8 look quite compelling.
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I cannot accept the two examples given by Shaham et al. as intentional art and consider them use-wear from some rotational operation. As they clearly recognise themselves all those circular traces are centred around a point of mechanical affordability. Their paragraph on Gestalt perception applies at least as much to recent archaeologists as to ancient Neanderthals.
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