‘He disputed the Freudian view that dreams held encrypted codes of meaning, believing instead that they resulted from random firings of neurons in the brain..’
— via New York Times
R.I.P. Allan Hobson, Psychiatrist and Dream Theorist
Day: August 1, 2021
How to find a pet tardigrade and care for it
‘Tardigrades, also called “water bears” or “moss piglets” are a “phylum of eight-legged segmented micro-animals (Wikipedia).” Tardigrades are almost microscopic (0.5 mm on average) and extremely resilient. They can survive extreme conditions all around the planet and can live in severe temperatures and pressures, air deprivation, radiation, dehydration, and starvation. Because of this, Tardigrades can live anywhere on earth such as the frozen peaks of the tallest mountains, the bottom of the ocean, inside of erupting volcanoes, and even outer space. They’ve roamed the Earth for 500 million years. …Tardigrades make wonderful pets, and can be found in your own backyard. Here’s a guide on how to find a pet Tardigrade, care for it, and observe it under a microscope. If you’re lucky, you might even see it lay some eggs while looking at it under the microscope….’
— via Boing Boing
Some birds, mammals, and fish are shrinking. Blame climate change.
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Is This the Beginning of Runaway Global Warming?
‘The planet appears to be overheating so fast, so rapidly, so suddenly, that you and I can feel it in our own lifetimes. That’s incredibly fast. It’s why climate scientists are shocked. Usually, the climate changes in relatively slow ways — maybe fast for it, but compared to a human lifetimes, eons. Thousands of years, even millions.
The climate does not change within decades unless something fundamental is broken. It doesn’t change so swiftly and severely that you and I can talk about how different the seasons were just a decade or two ago — or even a few years ago — unless something has gone deeply wrong, in the most basic planetary systems. We should not be able to feel climate change as rapidly and severely as we are — within the span of a single human lifetime — unless something truly mega-catastrophic is happening….’
— umair haque via Eudaimonia
Watching the Watchers
‘Chinese artist Ge Yulu has found a devious way to defy the country’s growing network of surveillance cameras: Staring back….’
— via Sixth Tone
You all need to stop with the Covid schadenfreude
‘We can’t let the conversations about the Covid vaccinated and unvaccinated be infected by polarisation…’
— Condé Nast via WIRED UK
The Real Source of America’s Rising Rage
‘As we all know, Donald Trump isn’t the cause of the Republican Party’s descent into madness. He’s merely the result of decades of evolution that started when Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority,Rush Limbaugh picked up a microphone, and Newt Gingrich reinvented modern conservatism. But these were just warm-up acts. It wasn’t until Fox News was up and running that we started to see permanent changes in the electorate….’
— Kevin Drum via Mother Jones
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