Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Because I was too tired to get home any other way. Not kidding: I was up working on the proofs I had to present today until about three in the morning. I was up at seven to give a lecture at nine. The rest of the day was full of coating, meetings, and another lecture. When I finally left at 5:30 PM, I thought of taking the subway. But I was too tired to fight with the crowds for space. Then I thought I might get a cab. But I was too tired to look around to find one and lift my arm up to hail one. Lyft? No, I was too tired to deal with my new Lyft app. So I just walked. It was the easiest thing to do. 

“Never mind the astronomical prices: every item is well worth it!” “No finer place to shop on this earth!” Etc. 

I am not one to shout "cultural imperialism" at the drop of a hat. But nature documentaries drive me nuts: pretty much every person who is not from a first-world country speaks something called "native language" in the closed-captioning system. French people speak French, and German people speak German... but even people from the Faroe Islands speak Faroese, a language that is used by only 70,000 people! Meanwhile, in Assam, the elephant herders speak... "native language." Dear documentary captioner, let me venture a guess that they might be speaking... maybe... Assamese ?! That wasn't that hard, was it? You could bother figuring out that the egg hunters on the Faroe Islands speak Faroese... but Assamese, a language with roughly 200 times the speakers, that was too hard to look up?

Do you think these interactions are just novel to the researcher in question, or did electrons recently decide that the same old interactions with molecules were getting boring?

But more nature documentary nonsense: “The macaques friendly social behavior is caused by the abundance of their environment.” But, there are lots of other animals in the same environment, and, in fact, the macaques are extraordinary for just how gregarious they are. If we could really assign evolutionary causes in this simple-minded way, every single animal in that environment who have to be similarly gregarious.

David Attenborough presents himself as a serious naturalist, yet he is willing to narrate a nature film about some raptors preying on some bats by saying: "The enormous number of bats emerging from the cave defeats the efforts of the raptors, so that most of the bats survive." He talks as though the bats were the raptors enemy , and the raptors' goal was to wipe out the bats. Of course, the bats are not the raptors' enemy, no more than chickens are humans' enemy, and the raptors no more would like to wipe out bats then we would like to wipe out chickens!

"It's a human right" is what you say when you favor some political position but don't have any good arguments handy for it: You want universal healthcare? "It's a human right!" Free school lunch? "It's a human right!" I encountered a perfect reductio of this tendency recently when I was told that "The students receiving a syllabus that clearly lays out grading rubrics is a human right!"