Some influences: Tooby, Cosmides, Symons, Pinker, (EvPsych); James Thompson, Timothy C. Bates (IQ and genius); Kenneth Harl (History, many Great Courses.)
Santa Barbara, California
Joined February 2009
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Richard Harper retweeted
We’re all hoping they go with humanoid robots.
Richard Harper retweeted
After they held the polls open longer in an ‘emergency’ order by a socialist judge who was Lula’s personal lawyer
Are you getting it yet?
Brazen presidential election theft
Richard Harper retweeted
If banning the SAT got your attention, the government says "Hold my beer: we did it for 44 years" :-[
1980, Carter killed PACE - the national, score-ordered merit exam for federal jobs. It had a hard pass-bar of 70.
They said it was a 5-year fix, with a new test coming.
But they built-in a hand grenade: any new test needed plaintiffs' lawyers' approval. For 44 years (!!!) no new test, and no challenge.
Hiring flipped from objective merit to internal promotion, vague notions such as "Outstanding Scholar", being in top 10% of *your* classroom, or self assessment.
youtube.com/watch?v=PihxtxJF…
Richard Harper retweeted
You should have thought about this when you decided male-only spaces are hateful.
Richard Harper retweeted
The same TSE court built up by USAID in 2022 just stacked the 2026 vote for Lula
Lula beats Bolsonaro in Brazil presidential election after judge extends voting by two hours justthenews.com/politics-pol…
Richard Harper retweeted
Science is not some hobby that serves the self actualization of people in a publicly sponsored job placement program. It is the systematic search for truth.
Richard Harper retweeted
I visited Wurster Hall at UC Berkeley today. It was designed by, and currently houses, the architecture faculty.
The UC Berkeley website notes that "Wurster is often voted Berkeley's ugliest building."
I visited because I was curious about whether it would in person seem as unattractive as it does in photos. And, in short: it does. It's gaunt, austere, and filmed in grime. On an elysian campus, it stands out for its bleak hostility. It reminds me of the German submarine base in Bordeaux.
The UC Berkeley page agrees that it was never designed to be attractive, quoting the curator of their design archives: “Wurster and his handpicked architects didn’t want anything romantic, or sentimental — they hated the idea of ‘making pretty buildings. They wanted a serious building.”
I guess we have to concede success relative to their stated goals, but it does make one wonder what it all says about architecture as a discipline.
Richard Harper retweeted
Fossil fuel emissions may have prevented the next Ice Age
wired.com/story/ice-age-begi…
Richard Harper retweeted
Grok felt that the episode summarized the project’s findings well: xitter.cf/i/grok/share/aede7fece…
Episode 3 of Sold a Story Season 2 is out today apmreports.org/episode/2026/…
Richard Harper retweeted
Global warming is now blocking an ice age that had been already starting. Yay.
Here’s a rather extraordinary discovery: humanity seems to have interrupted the beginning of the next ice age. We thought it might happen in the future, but the evidence suggests it's already happened.
A new study in Science argues that the next major glaciation had already begun roughly 2,000 years ago, before modern warming reversed the trend in the 20th century.
The evidence comes from the Barnes Ice Cap on Baffin Island, the last surviving remnant of the enormous Laurentide Ice Sheet that once covered much of Canada and reached as far south as Illinois.
Because Barnes is frozen directly to its bedrock, advancing ice buries and preserves vegetation beneath it. Researchers radiocarbon dated plants emerging as the ice retreats to reconstruct its history.
They found that after melting to a minimum extent around 3,000 years ago, the ice began expanding again about 2,000 years ago. The researchers interpret this as the earliest stage of the next glacial period.
Left to natural orbital cycles, that cooling would have unfolded extremely slowly, potentially taking tens of thousands of years to rebuild a continent spanning ice sheet.
But around 1960, the trend reversed. Summers became warm enough that Barnes began losing more ice than it gained, despite Northern Hemisphere summer sunlight continuing to slowly decline in a way that should favor renewed glaciation. Greenhouse warming had (thankfully) overwhelmed the natural cooling tendency.
The Barnes ice cap may now disappear entirely within the next few centuries, removing the final remnant of an ice sheet that repeatedly served as the nucleus for much larger glaciations.
There is a remarkable deep time perspective here. For millions of years, orbital cycles have pushed Earth between warmer interglacials and colder glacial periods. According to this study, that ancient cycle had started turning once again.
Then, in the geological equivalent of an instant, humanity pushed hard enough in the opposite direction to stop it.
Just so we're clear, this is a very very good thing.
📸 Geology Sciences
Sources:
1) phys.org/news/2026-10-global…
2) science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
Richard Harper retweeted
Employee theft in Africa. On social media, many small businesses share stories of employee theft.
Labor exploiting capital.
A lack of trustworthy people makes it hard to scale-up businesses and have a functioning labor market.
'I cannot teach you integrity': How employee theft is hurting small businesses in Africa bbc.in/4i5Nj5d
Richard Harper retweeted
They are channeling Beria
Richard Harper retweeted
Correct.
Using Starlink, a civilian commercial service, for offensive drone strikes to kill people has never been allowed, nor should it be.
Starshield, a different system, is controlled by the US government. What they decide to do is up to them.
Ukraine military violated Starlink terms of service and used it for offensive drone strikes to kill people. That loophole was closed last week.
Starlink remains critical to the defense of Ukraine, as it is the only system that cannot be jammed or blown up, at least for now. Were Starlink to be turned off, the Ukrainian front line would collapse immediately. This is NOT a threat, it is simply a statement of fact.
Starlink was also crucial to preventing Russia from overrunning Ukraine in the early days of the war, as all other means of communication were destroyed or jammed by Russia.
SpaceX has done more to defend Ukraine than any private company on Earth BY FAR.
That said, I have nothing but UTTER CONTEMPT for the virtue-signaling evil warmongers who push for endless slaughter and offer no realistic solution to the conflict. May you burn in hell.
End of story.
Richard Harper retweeted
My unified theory of aging and disease
Claude AI did this, using papers I selected as references. See what you think.
The Master Switch: Insulin Resistance
Facchini (2001) showed insulin resistance predicts virtually ALL age-related diseases. That's the trunk of the tree. Everything else branches from it.
What drives insulin resistance?
Kohrt (1993): belly fat, not age. Waist explains >40%, age <2%.
Blagosklonny (2006): chronic mTOR activation. Overfeeding keeps mTOR on, cells grow when they should repair.
PD's iron paper: iron accumulates with age, activates mTOR, and iron + insulin resistance are co-morbid.
What does insulin resistance cause downstream?
Khan (2017): high insulin drives high PAI-1, which drives senescent cell accumulation, shorter telomeres, faster aging. The Amish with half the PAI-1 lived 10 years longer.
DePalma (2010): high ferritin + inflammation = vascular death. Iron and insulin resistance amplify each other.
Madeo (2015): when mTOR is chronically on (from insulin resistance + iron), autophagy is suppressed. Cellular garbage accumulates. Aging accelerates.
What reverses it?
Lim (2011): type 2 diabetes reversed in ONE WEEK with caloric restriction. The damage isn't permanent.
Gibala (2020): 5 minutes of hard exercise produces the same fitness gains as 50 minutes moderate, and improves insulin sensitivity through pathways that bypass insulin entirely (GLUT4).
Fisher (2011) + Wolfe (2006): muscle is a metabolic organ that acts as a glucose sink. More muscle = more insulin sensitivity. Resistance training is the most efficient way to build it.
What's been wrong all along?
Ravnskov (2016) + Siri-Tarino (2010) + Ramsden (2016): the cholesterol/saturated fat hypothesis was wrong. Higher LDL in elderly = lower mortality. Replacing saturated fat with seed oils increased death. The medical establishment spent 50 years focused on the wrong molecule while insulin resistance was the actual killer.
PD's iron paper ties the bow: Iron is the hidden variable connecting all of it. It activates mTOR (Blagosklonny), inhibits autophagy (Madeo), worsens insulin resistance (Facchini/Kohrt), increases PAI-1 and senescence (Khan), and accumulates silently with age in every man and postmenopausal woman. The life-extending compounds (curcumin, green tea, rapamycin, exercise) all either chelate iron or inhibit the pathways iron activates.
The narrative arc for PD's content:
The medical establishment told you aging is inevitable and cholesterol will kill you. They were wrong on both counts. The real driver is insulin resistance, fueled by belly fat and silent iron accumulation, suppressing your body's cleanup systems while accelerating cellular aging. The fix isn't statins or seed oils. It's resistance training, brief intense exercise, fasting, and managing your iron. Every study points to the same conclusion: aging is a lifestyle disease, not a birthday disease.
Richard Harper retweeted
Federal prosecutors expose a massive concession from California election officials who admit in court filings they have no mechanism to verify voter citizenship beyond self-attestation.
Richard Harper retweeted
For the last 60+ years, the government has poured massive amounts of money into programs that explicitly exclude all White owners (~$150b in 2025).
Here are just a few examples:
- SBA 8(a) Business Development Program
- Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA)
- DOT Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE)
- USDA “socially disadvantaged” programs
- Small Disadvantaged Business (SDB) classifications
- EPA Disadvantaged Business Enterprise
- State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI)
- Minority-Serving Institution (MSI) grants
Superconductivity related: The better we understand electrons the closer we get to understanding how to pack atoms close enough together their orbital shells can exchange phonons. Tag: Electromagnetism theory.
Physicists in Okinawa have floated a diamond about a centimetre wide and pushed it up and down using nothing but the spins of electrons inside it, pumped by pulses of green laser light.
That object is roughly a hundred million times heavier than anything moved by spin force before. So, a quantum force now shows up directly on something heavy enough for gravity to matter.