“Humans are strange…We are the aliens,” observes Columbia University astrophysicist, Caleb Scharf, noting that humans are a striking anomaly in the natural world. “We also have a truly outsize impact on the planetary environment without much in the way of natural attrition to trim our influence (at least not yet).
“Like a Sudden Invasion by Extraterrestrials”
“But the strangest thing of all,” notes Scharf for Scientific American, “is how we generate, exploit, and propagate information that is not encoded in our heritable genetic material, yet travels with us through time and space. Not only is much of that information represented in purely symbolic forms alphabets, languages, binary codes it is also represented in each brick, alloy, machine, and structure we build from the materials around us. Even the symbolic stuff is housed in some material form or the other, whether as ink on pages or electrical charges in nanoscale pieces of silicon.
To begin with,
Anunnaki translates to “princely blood” or “seed of Anu”, not “those who came down” or “those who came from heaven to earth”, as many modern sources have claimed. The Anunnaki are “the Sumerian deities of the old primordial time;” a pantheon of gods who were the children of the sky god Anu and his sister, Ki. Significantly, some scholars have come to realize that the Anunnaki should more appropriately be considered demi-gods or
semi-divine beings. Apparently, Anu’s sister Ki was not originally considered a deity and was only ascribed the status of a goddess much later in the history of the myth cycle.
In one of my first and favorite undergraduate psychology courses, we read Thomas Kuhn’s
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn helped us to see that scientific progress through the accumulation of knowledge (which we believe to be fact) is not as solid and linear as scientists might believe. Rather, there are cycles of learning across history. Every so often we will be challenged, leading to a paradigm shift where what we believed to be absolutely true might be completely discarded. After such a shift occurs, the way we look at knowledge in a field is never the same again. This important academic lesson has everything to do with Native health and “Good Medicine” today because the paradigm from which we are working determines what we think the problems are, as well as what we think is possible in terms of interventions.
The Trump administration’s pursuit of protectionist trade policies was predicated to some extent on the belief that America was too lucrative a market to face retaliation. Using the most detailed data set of bilateral trade flows constructed to date for the interwar period, this column shows that in fact the US faced substantial and widespread retaliation from trade partners