Brian Wood
Professor of anthropology at UCLA. Interested in evolutionary anthropology research, science, travel, music, the world out there. Director of the Hadza Fund.
- Feeling blue? Here are the named ggplot2 colors in the blue part of the spectrum.
- 1/2 My lord, the new searchable Jeffrey Epstein library is a voyeuristic treasure trove for historians, cultural critiques, psychologists, and sociologists of science. Search your keyword of choice here and behold www.justice.gov/epstein.
- Native stingless honey bees have reportedly been given legal rights in parts of Peru. bit.ly/3Yur3Hs. Important "legal first" or a performative fools errand? How will they be legally represented? What level of bee-harming honey-harvesting by people is considered just? Who decides, who enforces?
- "At Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of undergraduates are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent." Accommodation Nation: America’s colleges have an extra-time-on-tests problem. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...
- This study provides fundamental insights into aging, health burdens and sex differences of such in chimpanzees. Invaluable for understanding how humans evolved such long lives. health burdens across the lifespan in wild chimpanzees @apesemory.bsky.social academic.oup.com/emph/article...
- Reposted by Brian WoodAfter the Ngogo chimpanzee group killed 21 members of neighboring groups and expanded their territory by 22%, female birth rates more than doubled and infant survival increased sharply—showing clear fitness benefits from intergroup killing. In PNAS: ow.ly/TKmf50XuPjY
- In 2008, after killing many of their neighbors, Ngogo chimpanzees expanded their territory. Female fertility then doubled, and infant mortality plummeted. Adaptive violence in our ape cousins, documented in this new paper. www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....
- AI broke the college essay, and in-class writing is the new (old) way to go. Thus, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is key for grading student writing. I just compared the OCR output of the venerable Adobe Acrobat product to that of Gemini. Adobe is AWFUL. LLM problem, LLM solution.
- RIP Jane Goodall. Two of the most inspirational books I've ever read are her works: "In the Shadow of Man" and "Chimpanzees of Gombe". Now teaching at UCLA, I honor her, her work, and what she stood for. Thank you Jane for a life so well lived, and for your example.
- Day one traveling in Tanzania right now, finding my ability to small talk politics with taxi drivers much harder than usual. Swahili primer for 2025.
- Great casting! deadline.com/2025/05/matt...
- "Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths" Lloyd-Jones & Projecto Sego advance knowledge of honeyguides again: "To Bees or Not to Bees: Greater Honeyguides Sometimes Guide Humans to Animals Other Than Bees, but Likely Not as Punishment" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
- Revealing how primatologists influence the endangered primates they observe is important science. An encouraging new NIA-funded study @Ngogo "Decreases in chimpanzee respiratory disease signs and enteric viral quantity following... " goo.gl/scholar/Lpxwur
- Consider how inaccurate this rendered illustration of the specific fossil KNM-ER 3733 is. It is an anatomical misrepresentation. The landmarks are completely bonkers-wrong. This kind of image is allowed by OpenAI policies, but photorealistic images of hypothetical human ancestors are not?
- OpenAI's restriction on generating depictions of human ancestors is based on a hodgepodge of weak arguments e.g. "Photorealism Suggests Certainty" and "Scientific Reconstructions Are Themselves Hypotheses" (no shit). By these same criteria, almost everything this tool generates should be verboten.
- 3/3 Then the image disappears and the error message "I wasn't able to generate the requested image, as it involves content that is currently restricted by our image generation policies--specifically, lifelike depictions of ancient human ancestors".
- 2/3 A first glimpse of the partially rendered image is displayed, in truly stunning detail. Wow! What a great teaching tool this could be!
- 1/3 ChatGPT today released new capabilities to generate truly amazing photorealistic images. Sadly, depictions of human ancestors run afoul of their content policies. WHY???? The prompt "Make a photorealistic image of the ancient human ancestor homo ergaster using an achulean handaxe".
- Reposted by Brian Wood[Not loaded yet]
