‘No one argues that the American addiction treatment system is anywhere near optimal — even its cheerleaders recognize that there’s miles to go before all people with addiction have access to respectful, ethical, effective, and evidence-based care. Worse, the past year has seen myriad media exposes and financial, sexual, and maltreatment scandals.

Of course, done right, addiction treatment can transform lives, with a hugely positive impact on society. It is often the difference between life and death, or between a productive recovery and a life of despair. Yet all too often that opportunity is being blown.So what is the best way forward? And what are the biggest steps the industry itself can take to improve?

So what is the best way forward? And what are the biggest steps the industry itself can take to improve? …’

Source: Pacific Standard

‘In the weeks leading up to the presidential election, Donald Trump has urged his followers to spend time on Election Day intimidating nonwhite voters. He tells them that after they vote on November 8, it’s their duty to go en masse to “some other place” and make sure that no one’s engaging in voter fraud. “Go sit there with your friends and make sure it’s on the up-and-up,” he’s said.

Trump doesn’t explicitly say the “other place” needs to be somewhere nonwhite people are voting. Sometimes he says “specific areas”; on one occasion, during an appearance in Pennsylvania, he called out Philadelphia.But at least some of his supporters are picking up on the subtext. And some are openly admitting to reporters — like Matt Viser and Tracy Jan of the Boston Globe — that they’re going to engage in some “racial profiling” at the polls, and make supposedly foreign-looking voters “a little bit nervous.”

But at least some of his supporters are picking up on the subtext. And some are openly admitting to reporters — like Matt Viser and Tracy Jan of the Boston Globe — that they’re going to engage in some “racial profiling” at the polls, and make supposedly foreign-looking voters “a little bit nervous.” …’

Source: Vox

‘Liberals are feeling better than they have in months about the congressional elections. Donald Trump’s recent implosion risks bringing down the rest of his party with him, opening up the possibility that Democrats can win back not only the Senate but also the House of Representatives this November.

But while the news may look good for congressional Democrats right now, there’s also reason to believe they’ll be dealing with an even more ferocious opposition party in 2017.

And that’s because the House Republicans set to lose this fall are among the most moderate members of their caucus. In turn, that will only increase the relative influence of the 15 or so “Freedom Caucus” hard-liners making up the Republicans’ most conservative faction, according to Georgetown political scientist Michele Swers…’

Source: Vox

It sounds as if support for Trump is in freefall not necessarily with voters but where it matters — with big money backers. “He is a dangerous demagogue completely unsuited to the responsibilities of a United States president,” said one $3M contributor. “Even for loyalists, there is a line beyond which the obvious moral failings of a candidate are impossible to disregard,” he wrote. “That line has been clearly breached.”

And poor RNC chairman Reince Priebus is having sleepless nights as he watches years of careful GOP organizing unravel. But, incredibly enough, the article cites many others who still cling to a concept of loyalty to this sexual abuser and feel that bailing on him would be cowardice.

Source: New York Times

‘About 400 light years from our solar system, there is a celestial body that looks like Saturn on steroids. Its rings are about 200 times larger than its counterpart here, measuring about 75 million miles in diameter. The ring system is so large, in fact, that scientists aren’t sure why it doesn’t get ripped apart by the gravity of the star it orbits.

One reason the rings might stay intact has to do with the direction in which they spin around the object at their center, called J1407b. Scientists are not sure whether J1407b is a gigantic planet that measures many times larger than Saturn, or a failed star called a brown dwarf.’

Source: New York Times

As a psychiatrist, I’m finding it really difficult to bite my tongue and avoid doing pronouncements about Trump’s evident (and considerable) psychopathology. But there is an ethical mandate in my profession to avoid armchair diagnosis when one has no treatment relationship with someone and has not examined them face-to-face. So I think I’ll just continue to call him names instead.

Fascinating thinking by Matt Yglesias (Vox). He notes that, while complaining about media coverage is nothing new from a political campaign, Trump goes further with “a wholesale, broad-brush effort to entirely discredit the entire existing media ecosystem… Trump’s thesis is not that reporters are out of touch with the struggles of ordinary Americans or implicitly biased in favor of liberals. He argues instead that the whole enterprise is root and branch untrustworthy…” and that scapegoating the media will be the explanation for the faithful about why he lost the election (as he surely will). This will be his route to rehabilitating his unflattering image with the wider universe of conservatives who feel he has blown what should have been a very winnable race for the GOP.

“And the media is in many ways a perfect scapegoat, because it sets up Trump for a next act… Trump is likely setting himself up as a media entrepreneur.”

The CEO of his campaign, Steve Bannon, used to run Breitbart.com, where he has shown savvy in building a digital conservative brand. Combine that with the “on-camera talent” of Trump himself, as a reality TV host, and his friend Sean Hannity (thought to be considering a departure from Fox News). Add into the mix Roger Ailes, who built the Fox juggernaut before his recent ouster for sexual harassment; and Trump’s so-in-law Jared Kushner, who owns the New York Observer. Looks like the right mix to “operate a successful media company, folding the existing Breitbart and Hannity franchises together with the Trump brand to form Trump TV or Trump Media.” But this would only work if this blowhard with a pathological inability to take responsibility for any of his failings can successfully overcome the stink of a loser, A “campaign to scapegoat the establishment press for Trump’s electoral defeat makes the perfect exit strategy.”

‘At a rally in West Palm Beach, Florida, Donald Trump fired back against the accusations from women that he had sexually assaulted them. He said the New York Times story claiming he had assaulted a woman on an airplane was a “totally fabricated and false story.”

He seemed to imply that a People magazine reporter who accused him of kissing her against her will wasn’t attractive enough: “Take a look. You look at her. Look at her words. You tell me what you think. I don’t think so.”

He said he was preparing a lawsuit against the New York Times, saying reporters “collaborate and conspire directly with the Clinton campaign.”

And Trump’s rants didn’t stop there. He attacked Hillary Clinton, saying she should be “locked up”; accused the “Clinton machine” of engaging in a historically unprecedented cover-up; and said Clinton “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty.”

A partial transcript follows…’

Source: Vox

‘Two-thirds of Republican senators are still supporting Trump, as are an even higher proportion of House of Representatives members and a majority of GOP governors.The RNC under Reince Priebus is still enthusiastically supporting Trump, despite some rumors to the contrary. The GOP’s top House and Senate leaders — including Paul Ryan — are still endorsing Trump, despite Ryan saying he won’t campaign with Trump or defend him (which he already wasn’t doing).

Several top conservative evangelical leaders are still backing Trump. And many top 2020 Republican contenders, including Sens. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Tom Cotton, haven’t renounced Trump, some more reluctantly than others. All this remains true even after Trump’s leaked tape scandal. There has all along been a larger than usual group of prominent party members who were refusing to back Trump (including the Bush family, Mitt Romney, John Kasich, and a few senators and governors).That group did get a little bigger this weekend, most notably through the addition of Sen. John McCain. But then it got a little smaller, when Fischer and Thune got cold feet. And all along, it was very clearly a minority in Republican politics. Overall, the dam is still holding.

All this remains true even after Trump’s leaked tape scandal. There has all along been a larger than usual group of prominent party members who were refusing to back Trump (including the Bush family, Mitt Romney, John Kasich, and a few senators and governors).That group did get a little bigger this weekend, most notably through the addition of Sen. John McCain. But then it got a little smaller, when Fischer and Thune got cold feet. And all along, it was very clearly a minority in Republican politics. Overall, the dam is still holding…’

Source: Vox

‘The history of 20th-century music offers plenty of stories of luminaries meeting, playing together, and sometimes even entering into long-term collaboration. But it typically only happened within traditions: encounters between rock and rock, jazz and jazz, modernism and modernism. And so it still thrills to hear of the time in 1951 when Charlie Parker added one more story to the most storied jazz club of all by performing for Igor Stravinsky at Birdland…’

Source: Open Culture

‘Over many months, The New York Times did what the United States government has not — examine the long-term mental harm of torture and coercive methods used in C.I.A. prisons and Guantánamo Bay. Many of the men subjected to such treatment have emerged with the same psychological symptoms as tortured American P.O.W.s…’

Source: The New York Times, via abby

You’ve probably never tasted Bitrex, but it’s all over your home.

Source: Atlas Obscura

5 compelling reasons to stop calling Trump’s comments “locker room talk”: Donald Trump and his surrogates have been trying to dismiss the leaked tape that turned his campaign upside-down as being just “locker room talk.” He did so in a written statement immediately following the tape’s release, and during Sunday night’s presidential debate when he repeatedly dodged Anderson Cooper’s direct questions about what he said on the tape.But let’s be clear: The footage features Donald Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women.

The Daily Show dismantles Trump’s nonsense excuse about “locker room talk”: “If you conduct ‘locker room talk’ everywhere, it’s not the locker room,” Trevor Noah said. “It’s you.”

Dear Donald Trump: I played in the NFL. Here’s what we really talk about in the locker room. You’re wrong, and only the type of wrong an over-tanned ham hock like yourself can accomplish, plummeting past the morass of gross incivility into the abyss of depraved sociopathy. — Chris Kluwe.

Why Donald Trump’s furious tweetstorm at Paul Ryan is so revealing: He’s trailing Hillary Clinton by double digits in some polls, but Donald Trump has now adopted a promising strategy that could rejuvenate his flailing campaign.Haha, just kidding! Trump has decided to declare war on his own party via Twitter, attacking Paul Ryan and turning the GOP into a circular firing squad just four weeks from Election Day.

Watch Samantha Bee take down Donald Trump with the “vagina monologue” he deserves: “In fact, ‘Take a Tic Tac and grab them by the pussy’ is the closest thing to a plan Trump has described this election,” Bee said.

Trump: Warren Buffett avoids taxes like me. Buffett: Nope, and here’s my taxes to prove it.  As a final knife twist, Buffett notes that he is currently being audited — but is releasing information from his return anyway, since that is totally allowed, despite Trump’s protests to the contrary.

Donald Trump’s threat to imprison Hillary Clinton is a threat to democracy: There is no way to sugarcoat this: At Sunday night’s presidential debate, Donald Trump threatened to throw Hillary Clinton in jail if he wins the presidency. This — threatening to jail one’s political opponents — is how democratic norms die.

‘LSD and mushrooms in one-tenth doses are becoming more popular among you professionals, especially in the tech industry. Since 2010, on the advice of LSD’s [discoverer] Albert Hofmann, Dr. James Fadiman has been encouraging dozen of contacts to keep journals of their experiences microdosing, usually a couple of times a week…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘Plenty of columnists have already highlighted how nauseating the GOP’s moral calculus has been. Donald Trump was tolerable when he depicted Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers. He was fine when he proposed shredding the First Amendment to restrict Muslims from entering the country. He was fine insulting POWs and the parents of a soldier killed in action. He was fine when he mocked the disabled and when he framed womanhood as its own disability. He was fine with his history of racist housing discrimination, and he was even fine early Friday afternoon, when he reasserted the guilt of the Central Park 5 – all minorities, all exonerated by DNA evidence.

But later that afternoon, it turned out that he went after white women – apparently literally, with his hands. He went after people who vote for Republicans in numbers. Suddenly, after 17 months, there were real victims involved. The imminent GOP crack-up seemed like all it needed was someone to give it a big push…’

Source: Rolling Stone

As Paul Krugman puts it, ‘Is there a partisan pattern here?’ Although Republicans are trying to distance themselves from Trump after his boasts about sexual assault, no one should be fooled that the GOP has any enduring concern about the matter. Trump is not an anomaly here; he is rather a pure distillation of his party’s predatory values.

Source: The New York Times

‘Every Republican who endorsed and normalized Trump bears part of the blame for this moment.’

Source: Ezra Klein @ Vox

131,000 people in the United States wait for an organ donation every single day. Only 10% of them will get one – unless we allow organ donations from drug deaths.

Source: Big Think

‘The Washington Post has just published a video of Donald Trump on the set of Days of Our Lives in 2005. In it, Donald J. Trump, the Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States, is heard describing how he likes to sexually assault women. The entire clip is gross and horrifying, even for Donald Trump. Here are some of the choicer quotes from a man who has said that he “would be the best for women” …’

Source: Deadspin

Mike Pence identifies himself first as a Christian. However, despite looking squeaky-clean, down home and humble,  some of his more unique distinctions are quite un-Christian — doing nasty things to vulnerable people.

‘The irony is that Trump appears to be the extremist when he is a hollow grifter with a personality disorder. Mike Pence is the real deal.”

Pence has:

— signed a law banning abortions of fetuses with Downs syndrome and other genetic conditions and forcing a woman to bury or cremate fetal remains even after a miscarriage

— signed a law (later overturned on constitutional grounds) legalizing anti-LGBT discrimination by people, churches and businesses

— faced with a devastating HIV outbreak in a small poor Indiana town, he ignored the criris for months, opposed a needed needle exchange and only under mounting pressure from health officials, legislators and the press conceded he should go home and “pray on it.”. Still opposing needle exchange, he is rumored to have instructed the state legislature to provide so little support for similar programs in five more Indiana counties faced with HIV outbreaks as to ensure the failure of these programs.

— His other idea for the prevention of the HIV epidemic? Mandatory conversion therapy to “de-gay” people, often youth pressured by homophobic parents.

— opposed FDA regulation of cigarettes on the grounds that “despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill.”

— led GOP efforts to destroy Planned Parenthood, at one point threatening to shut down the government if funding for the organization was in the appropriations bill

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Source: AlterNet

‘For a long time, many researchers have believed that a major reason human beings alone exhibit unique forms of communication, cooperation and culture is that we’re the only animals to have a complete theory of mind. But is this ability really unique to humans? …Our new findings suggest, however, that great apes may actually be a bit more similar to us than we previously thought…’

Source: The onversation

Video of Mike Pence denying Trump said any of the horrible, racist, stupid, uninformed and generally embarrassing things he spouts all day long, matched with Trump saying the stuff.

Source: Boing Boing

[A commenter said, “Someone please tell Mike Pence who his running mate is.”]

‘A massive black hole that’s more than 100,000 times the mass of our sun has been detected in the outer regions of a galaxy located about 4.5 billion light years from Earth. Astronomers suspect that this “wandering” black hole was originally located at the core of a smaller galaxy, but it became dislodged during a merger with a larger one. Now homeless, it’s settled into the outer reaches of the usurping galaxy.

Black holes—objects so heavy that not even light can escape them—come in a range of sizes. Stellar black holes measure about 10 miles across, and are up to 20 times heavier than our sun. Massive black holes, or so-called intermediate black holes, are 100 to 100,000 times heavier than our sun. At the top of the scale are supermassive black holes, which have upper masses ranging between 100,000 to 10 billion times that of the sun.

Both intermediate black holes and supermassive black holes are parked at the center of their galaxies, but astronomers have theorized about the existence of “rogue” black holes—objects that have been jostled away from their galactic cores following a collision with a galaxy containing its own massive black hole. The stars, dust, and gas from the second galaxy would disperse through the first one—along with its now displaced black hole…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘Telescopes on a sacred mountain constitute a form of “colonial violence,” in the words of J. Kehaulani Kauanui, an anthropologist at Wesleyan University.

Or as Robert Kirshner, a Harvard professor who is now also chief science officer at the Moore Foundation, put it, “The question in that case become not so much whether you did the environmental impact statement right, but whose island is it?” …’

Source: The New York Times

‘The image of the bill, now shared widely on Reddit, shows a charge for “skin to skin after c sec.” The Reddit user who posted it explained more in a few comments. He wasn’t exactly mad about the charge — he said the hospital did a great job delivering his son. Instead, it more of spoke to the absurdity of American health care…’

Source: Vox

‘The Japanese climate is not exactly conducive to mummification. There are no peat bogs, no arid deserts, and no alpine peaks perennially encased in ice. The summers are hot and humid. Yet somehow a group of Buddhist monks from the Shingon sect discovered a way to mummify themselves through rigorous ascetic training in the shadow of a particularly sacred peak in the mountainous northern prefecture of Yamagata.

Between 1081 and 1903, at least 17 monks managed to mummify themselves. The number may well be higher, however, as it is likely some mummies were never recovered from the alpine tombs.

These monks undertook such a practice in emulation of a ninth-century monk named Kūkai, known posthumously as Kōbō Daishi, who founded the esoteric Shingon school of Buddhism in 806. In the 11th century a hagiography of Kūkai appeared claiming that, upon his death in 835, the monk did not die at all, but crawled into his tomb and entered nyūjō, a state of meditation so profound that it induces suspended animation. According to this hagiography, Kūkai plans to emerge in approximately 5.67 million years to usher a predetermined number of souls into nirvana.’

Continue to read for a detailed and harrowing description of the three-year process leading to mummification before death, via Atlas Obscura

Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton … Donald Trump? It could happen, according to a law professor and consumer-protection expert.

Source: Pacific Standard

Should patients be able to access their doctor’s political affiliation as easily as their educational background?

Source: Vox

‘Trump has too long a history of being Trump to ever make a concrete shift toward being presidential… Remember that moment in the first presidential debate when Trump gave an angered speech about how good his temperament is. Yeah. That’s what we’re talking about.’

Source: Vox

Although these pieces may seem tiresome, I feel it is incredibly important we keep them in the public eye to prevent being inured to Trump’s incompetence and menace.

‘…Though names may differ from one set of teachings to another, almost every religion on the planet features the concept of an underworld—a place to which the souls of the dead are banished, for penance or punishment. So in honor of 31 Days of Halloween, we mined the Atlas for the various purported entrances to the netherworld, scattered across the globe, ranging from Mayan caves to Japanese swamps. But remember: If you should decide to visit any of these sites, it should be noted by way of a disclaimer that we take no responsibility whatsoever for the consequences of your attempts to open an infernal portal…’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘One of the world’s foremost experts on the subject of flying saucers doesn’t believe in alien abduction, little green men, or government cover-ups one bit. Instead, author and saucer aficionado Jack Womack is interested in the people who believe that they’ve seen UFOs. He’s so fascinated by these true believers, in fact, that he’s collected nearly every single book — some of which there were only handful of copies printed — by authors who claim to have seen flying saucers.

“I can study TB without catching it, preferably, and I can be a student of the Bible without being a Christian,” Womack says, explaining his intense interest in these claims without actually believing any of them. “I collected these books because they gave me the same kind of escapism kicks other people get from reading science fiction, or my friends get from writing it.” …’

Source:  Inverse

‘The pangolin is the only known mammal with scales. Pangolins are beautiful, precious little creatures, often likened to an artichoke with legs. According to NPR, they’re also the world’s most trafficked mammals. Luckily for these little cuties, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, has officially banned commercial trading of pangolins…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘The journal Neurology published a unique and touching paper today: it’s by artist Susan Schneider Williams, the widow of actor Robin Williams, who died by suicide in August 2014. It’s titled The terrorist inside my husband’s brain, the ‘terrorist’ being Lewy Body disease (LBD), the neurodegenerative disorder that, as Schneider Williams recounts, destroyed his life…’

Source: Neuroskeptic

‘Will we ever salute Vulcans or cuddle tribbles? An astrobiologist explores the latest thinking on the forms alien life might really take…’

Source: National Geographic

‘All the Times has is three pages of Trump’s records from 1995. Everything else is informed speculation, extrapolation, and the word “could,” which appears again and again through the article.

Think about how dangerous that was for the paper. Trump could have released his tax returns and proven them wrong. Trump could have shown their speculation to be mere speculation, and used it as a cudgel to discredit their reporting on his campaign. The Times was far, far out on a limb.

But the Times bet correctly. Trump still isn’t releasing his returns. And here’s what that means: whatever is in his returns is worse than what the New York Times is telling the world is in his returns. The Trump campaign has decided it prefers the picture the Times is painting — a picture where Trump didn’t pay taxes for 18 years — to the picture Trump’s real records would paint.

What is in those returns? ‘

Source: Vox

‘For the past several months, creepy clowns have been terrorizing America, with sightings of actual clowns in at least 10 different states.

These fiendish clowns have reportedly tried to lure women and children into the woods, chased people with knives and machetes, and yelled at people from cars. They’ve been spotted hanging out in cemeteries and they have been caught in the headlights of cars as they appear alongside desolate country roads in the dead of night.

This isn’t the first time there has been a wave of clown sightings in the United States. After eerily similar events occurred in the Boston area in the 1980s, Loren Coleman, a cryptozoologist who studies the folklore behind mythical beasts such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, came up with something called “The Phantom Clown Theory,” which attributes the proliferation of clown sightings to mass hysteria (usually sparked by incidents witnessed only by children).

It’s impossible to determine which of these incidents are hoaxes and which are bona fide tales of clowning around taken to the extreme. Nonetheless, the perpetrators seem to be capitalizing on our longstanding love-hate relationship with clowns, tapping into the primal dread that so many children (and more than a few adults) experience in their presence.

In fact, a 2008 study conducted in England revealed that very few children actually like clowns. It also concluded that the common practice of decorating children’s wards in hospitals with pictures of clowns may create the exact opposite of a nurturing environment. It’s no wonder so many people hate Ronald McDonald.

But as a psychologist, I’m not just interested in pointing out that clowns give us the creeps; I’m also interested in why we find them so disturbing. Earlier this year I published a study entitled “On the Nature of Creepiness” with one of my students, Sara Koehnke, in the journal New Ideas in Psychology. While the study was not specifically looking at the creepiness of clowns, much of what we discovered can help explain this intriguing phenomenon…’

Source: The Conversation

‘Springsteen has long been committed to social justice; in writing about depression, he has perhaps undertaken a new cause, one that seeks to combat the stereotypes and stigmas about mental illness that still exist today.

Struggles with mental illness are common and familiar among rock and pop stars. They include Beyoncé, Eric Clapton, Kurt Cobain, Sheryl Crow, Janet Jackson, Billy Joel, Jon Bon Jovi, Alicia Keys, Lady Gaga, John Lennon, Alanis Morissette and Brian Wilson. Were one also to include artists known to self-medicate with drugs and alcohol but otherwise undiagnosed, the list would be far longer. The medical literature, though limited, strongly indicates that being a rock star is a high-stress lifestyle.

But Springsteen’s disclosure is arguably unique because his image runs counter to stereotypes of depression. According to one study, for years the media has reinforced negative stereotypes of people with mental illness, often depicting them as “inadequate, unlikable, dangerous” and absent a “social identity: single or of unknown marital status, frequently without identifiable employment … confused, aggressive and unpredictable.”

These media depictions, according to public health scholar Heather Stuart, “also model negative reactions to the mentally ill, including fear, rejection, derision and ridicule” and “impair self-esteem, help-seeking behaviors, medication adherence and overall recovery.” Stuart blames the media for fueling much of the stereotypes of the mentally ill that persist today.

Springsteen, however, is a living, breathing repudiation of these media-fueled stereotypes…’

Source: The Conversation

‘In large evolutionary analysis, humans are violent mammals, but on par with primates.’

Source: Ars Technica

‘Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde’s cycle path, illuminated with patterns based on Vincent Van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night, officially opens in Nuenen this evening. The surface of the Van Gogh-Roosegaarde Bicycle Path is coated with a special paint that uses energy gathered during the day to glow after dark.’

Source: Design You Trust

‘In the centuries to come, history books will likely look back on September 2016 as a major milestone for the world’s climate. At a time when atmospheric carbon dioxide is usually at its minimum, the monthly value failed to drop below 400 parts per million.That all but ensures that 2016 will be the year that carbon dioxide officially passed the symbolic 400 ppm mark, never to return below it in our lifetimes, according to scientists…’

Source: Scientific American

‘The Times reports that Trump really, really didn’t like traditional debate prep — the format where you stand up at a podium and, you know, practice debating. So he instead focused “mostly on conversations and discussions with advisers.” When the campaign did try to plan a more traditional debate prep, the reporters write, “Mr. Trump found it hard to focus during those meetings, according to multiple people briefed on the process who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.” …’

Source: Vox

• Hillary Clinton’s debate may have gotten young voters excited about her. Not a moment too soon. “This is the best opportunity she’s had to reset her relationship with millennials,” one pollster said.
• Why the Trump-Clinton debate ratings were both historic — and a little disappointing Monday night’s presidential debate was the most-watched in American history.
• Hillary Clinton laid a surprisingly intricate trap for Donald Trump, and he blundered into it The con man turns out to be a sucker.
• Donald Trump lost Monday’s debate. So did Trumpism. Why Trump’s debate night disappointed the far right.
• The press thought Trump’s first 30 minutes were his best. They were his worst. The press needs to do its job, not the voters’ job.
• Clinton’s debate performance spoke to every woman who has had to humor an incompetent man. We’ve all met that guy. Trump is that guy.
• Hillary Clinton’s 7 subtle and not-so-subtle tricks for baiting Donald Trump. She got under his skin. His reaction proved her point.
• Donald Trump’s strange speaking style, as explained by linguists. Is Donald Trump a throwback to ancient oratory — or an undisciplined rambler?
• Donald Trump’s first presidential debate confirmed he has no idea what he’s talking about. From his very first statement in the debate, Trump revealed a frankly bizarre level of ignorance.
• Yes, it’s possible to fact-check Trump during a debate. In fact, it happened — and it was great. With just Hillary Clinton sharing the stage with Trump, he’s likely to have to talk in depth much more than he did before. Eventually, the gaps in his policy plans could start to show through.
• These tweets will help remind you how weird tonight’s presidential debate is. Americans shouldn’t lose sight of how strange this election is.
• Trump interrupted Clinton 51 times at the debate. She interrupted him just 17 times. For most women, this is a very familiar pattern.

Source: Vox.com

‘So, let’s say that day has arrived, and we finally detect inarguable evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization. What happens next? The distance will be too great to traverse for the foreseeable future, so it’ll still be just us here, but with a mind-boggling piece of new information. How will we react?

…Stuart Langfield spoke to Seth Shostak, senior astronomer for the SETI project in California, who’s no doubt spent a considerable amount of time pondering this very question. After all, it’s likely to be him, a colleague, or someone like them who’ll have to break the news to the rest of us someday…’

Source: Big Think

‘According to a post on NASASpacePlace, everything we thought we knew about the influence the heavens have over our Earthly lives has been thrown into chaos. NASA has announced that the celestial sphere above us contains not twelve canonical zodiacal constellations, but 13. The heretofore overlooked constellation, Ophiuchus, is purported to guide and command events surrounding humans born between November 29 and December 17—so, if you used to be a Sagittarius, then congratulations: you’ve got a new sign, baby!

The addition of Ophiuchus—the snake bearer, in case you were wondering—has obvious and far-reaching implications for the entire western Babylonian-derived zodiac calendar. For one thing, squeezing it in means changing the effective dates of all the other signs. According to Yahoo News, the new 13-sign calendar plays out like this:

• Capricorn: January 20-February 16
• Aquarius: February 16-March 11
• Pisces: March 11-April 18
• Aries: April 18-May 13
• Taurus: May 13-June 21
• Gemini: June 21-July 20
• Cancer: July 20-August 10
• Leo: August 10-September 16
• Virgo: September 16-October 30
• Libra: October 30-November 23
• Scorpio: November 23-November 29
• Ophiuchus: November 29-December 17
• Sagittarius: December 17-January 20

The changes are as sweeping as they are staggering. For example, I woke up this morning firmly believing that I was an outgoing, courageous, independent, generous Leo. However, now I have to come to grips with the fact that I am in fact a stupid, sulky, inconsiderate, pessimistic Cancer. I have gone from lion to crab, and it weighs heavily upon me…’

Source: Ars Technica

Source: NYTimes Editorial Board

‘There was a fundamental asymmetry to the exercise, because of the awful truth that one of the participants had nothing truthful to offer.’

‘So before you feel tricked by a technicality: Inuktitut does have a written language, but it’s just not an alphabet. Instead, as Tom Scott explains, it uses a related system of symbols to express sounds called an abugida.This writing system is in use in the far north of Canada and was originally invented by Christian missionaries. Inuktitut—which can use one compound word to say the equivalent of an English sentence—is built on consonant/vowel pairs. In order to accommodate the language’s sounds and structure, a new set of symbols was developed. (Because different parts of the Arctic were colonized at different times though, Inuktitut is only somewhat comprehensible by people in Alaska or Greenland.)

In written Inuktitut, a letter’s shape determines the consonant sound while its rotation shows the vowels that follows it, e.g. ᐃ or ᐊ. Diacritical marks tell a reader if the vowel sound is long or short, and superscripted symbols show how the sound ends, like the ᖅ in that stop sign image.

This writing system is in use in the far north of Canada and was originally invented by Christian missionaries. Inuktitut—which can use one compound word to say the equivalent of an English sentence—is built on consonant/vowel pairs. In order to accommodate the language’s sounds and structure, a new set of symbols was developed. (Because different parts of the Arctic were colonized at different times though, Inuktitut is only somewhat comprehensible by people in Alaska or Greenland.)In written Inuktitut, a letter’s shape determines the consonant sound while its rotation shows the vowels that follows it, e.g. ᐃ or ᐊ. Diacritical marks tell a reader if the vowel sound is long or short, and superscripted symbols show how the sound ends, like the ᖅ in that stop sign image…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘According to new data, supporters of Donald Trump prefer to get their news from television and enjoy watching crime dramas. These findings might sound insignificant. But they actually offer insight into Trump’s rise. As a presidential candidate, he’s claimed that illegal immigrants are flooding the country with “no regard for the impact on public safety,” while warning that if things don’t change, “we’re not going to have a country anymore – there will be nothing left.”

This rhetoric supplements our current media environment, which, as studies have shown, cultivates a false perception of the world as a mean, violent place. And it’s laid the groundwork for many of Trump’s most successful appeals to fear…’

Source: WThe Conversation

Of course, the flaw is that, while it may be true that Trump supporters watch TV news and crime dramas, it is surely not the case that TV news viewers and crime show aficionados are all Trumpies. Nonetheless, as it is said, a nation of vapid TV viewers gets the leadership it deserves.

‘When Hillary Clinton seemed to collapse while getting helped into the back of a black van earlier this month, Jane Orient, a physician in Tucson, Arizona, says it felt like a vindication. In early August, she’d published an op-ed on the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons’ website questioning whether Clinton has a traumatic brain injury that would make her unfit for the presidency. And this month, the Association—of which Orient is the executive director—published a survey apparently showing that other physicians believe much the same thing. Almost instantly, that survey made it to Facebook’s coveted Trending Topics section.

For Orient—and the many media organizations that have recently been circulating her work—Clinton’s stumble looked like proof that they were right.There’s just one thing: Orient and the Association are not just the broad-based coalition of dispassionate, unbiased medical spectators that the conservative media makes them out to be. Instead, Orient and the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, or AAPS, have been unabashedly anti-Clinton for decades. Contrary to its official-sounding name, the AAPS does not represent hundreds of thousands of physicians like, say, the American Medical Association does. Instead, the small non-profit based out of a medical park in Tucson represents a niche group of fewer than 5,000 members, not all of whom are doctors. While it claims to be non-partisan, even Orient admits the group has a guiding “philosophy,” one that just so happens to correlate with conservative politics on every issue from vaccine mandates to abortion rights to immigration.Now, Clinton’s health is the association’s favorite talking point. Orient and others have chimed in on Clinton’s pneumonia diagnosis and her persistent cough. “We’re not diagnosing her,” Orient says. “We’re just saying questions have been raised.”This isn’t the first time the AAPS has emerged as conservative conspiracy theorists’ favorite signal booster; the organization has existed for nearly three-quarters of a century. But today, thanks to algorithms that decide whether stories are newsworthy, a burgeoning conservative media industry that includes the likes of Breitbart and Infowars, and rampant distrust of mainstream media, the AAPS now has a network ready and willing to broadcast its ideas to millions of readers.

Now, Clinton’s health is the association’s favorite talking point. Orient and others have chimed in on Clinton’s pneumonia diagnosis and her persistent cough. “We’re not diagnosing her,” Orient says. “We’re just saying questions have been raised.”This isn’t the first time the AAPS has emerged as conservative conspiracy theorists’ favorite signal booster; the organization has existed for nearly three-quarters of a century. But today, thanks to algorithms that decide whether stories are newsworthy, a burgeoning conservative media industry that includes the likes of Breitbart and Infowars, and rampant distrust of mainstream media, the AAPS now has a network ready and willing to broadcast its ideas to millions of readers….’

Source: WIRED

Rats in tiny trousers, pseudoscientific bullshit, the personalities of rocks, and Volkswagen’s, shall we say, “creative” approach to emissions testing were among the research topics honored by the 2016 Ig Nobel Prizes. The winners were announced last night at a live webcast ceremony held at Harvard University.

For those unfamiliar with the Ig Nobel Prizes, it’s an annual celebration of silly science. Or a silly celebration of seemingly dubious science, courtesy of the satirical journal Annals of Improbable Research…

This year’s crop of Ig Nobel Laureates is listed below. Those who attended the ceremony were given just 60 seconds for their acceptance speeches, a longstanding rule that was, as always, vigorously enforced (the Oscars could learn a thing or two from the Ig Nobels). If you happen to be in the vicinity of MIT this Saturday afternoon, many of the winners will be giving free public mini-lectures—five minutes each, plus time to answer questions.

Source: Gizmodo

‘Palmer Luckey—founder of Oculus—is funding a Trump group that circulates dirty memes about Hillary Clinton.’

Source: The Daily Beast

“People don’t know why they get so upset about language,” says linguist David Crystal, but for some reason, they do, especially if you appear to break a rule about punctuation. Linguists like Crystal and Gloria E. Jacobs have all heartily assured us that there’s really nothing to fear about innovative linguistic uses of punctuation in the internet age—it certainly doesn’t mean the end of literacy for the texting generation, quite the opposite in fact… but to no avail. The moral panic is real.

For instance, you may have heard recently that recalcitrant texters (and the journalists describing them) have been leaving off periods at the end of their perfectly good sentences for some reason. A recent study has determined that text messages ending with the humble period can weirdly seem less sincere (compared to the exact same messages with periods on a handwritten note). For some, adding a period in online text might even signify anger, according to Ben Crair in the New Republic…’

Source: JSTOR Daily

‘Canada has lifted its ban on prescription heroin. Should the United States follow suit?’

Source: Pacific Standard

A guide to traveling with “the wickedest man in the world.”

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘In this clip from “Good Morning Britain,” His Holiness the Dalai Lama pulls off what may be the greatest Donald Trump impression ever by a Tibetan monk. The interview in which this fabulous impression was given by His Holiness was conducted by Piers Morgan, and for surviving that the Tibetan spiritual leader has our greatest empathy.

Earlier this year, His Holiness was asked by a somewhat less vile American news reporter to comment on Trump in another television interview. “That’s your business,” he said, declining the opportunity to throw shade…’

Source: Boing Boing

The fields are nearly empty, because the crops have been plucked and stored for the coming winter. It is the time of the autumn equinox, Harvest Home, Mabon, the Feast of the Ingathering, Meán Fómhair or Alban Elfed (in Neo-Druidic traditions), is a ritual of thanksgiving. It is a time of plenty, of gratitude, and a recognition of the need to share our abundance with those less fortunate  to secure the blessings of the Goddess and the God during the winter months. Day and night are of equal length, looking forward to the days’ shortening. The Autumn Equinox is the time of the descent of the Goddess into the Underworld. We also bid farewell to the Harvest Lord who was slain at Lammas. Welsh legend brings us the story of Mabon ap Modron, who dwells, a happy captive, in Modron’s magickal Otherworld — his mother’s womb. Only in this way can he be reborn.

In the northern hemisphere this equinox occurs anywhere from September 21 to 24. Among the sabbats, it is the second of the three pagan harvest festivals, preceded by Lammas/Lughnasadh and followed by Samhain. (via Wheel of the Year – Wikipedia).

‘@whostheidiotnow maintains a carefully curated selection of tweets: ones where the author types the exact phrase “your an idiot.” One man’s automated blocklist is another’s breakfast entertainment! …’

Source: Boing Boing

‘Every Saturday a non-governmental organization named La Colifata comes to this “neuropsiquiátrico,” or psychiatric hospital, to host Radio La Colifata: the first radio to be run from inside a mental health institution.

…The patients control the show, which lasts for four hours on Saturday afternoons and is broadcast on local radio as well as online. Regular presenters have their own programs; on a recent Saturday, Silvina read her poetry and Hugo Lopez sang a song about loving his cellphone, followed by a debate about modern technology…’

Source: Atlas Obscura

Survivors of CIA’s torture-decade describe their ordeals

‘For nearly a decade, the CIA kidnapped people from over 20 countries, held them without trial or counsel, and viciously tortured them, sometimes to death — but the only person to serve jail time for the program is the man who blew the whistle on it, and that’s thanks in part to Obama’s insistence that “Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

The survivors of CIA torture and the families of the people the CIA murdered have been stymied in their attempts to get justice in the US courts, because the CIA cites national secrecy and shuts down any attempt to make them account for their crimes.

Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines has interviewed some of the survivors of CIA torture, and the family and friends of one of the CIA’s murder victims. Their harrowing stories may never be heard in a US court, but if you live in the USA, these crimes were committed in your name, by people whose salaries you pay, and you have a duty to learn what was done to these people, especially as the Republican presidential candidate has signalled his enthusiastic support for reviving and broadening this program if he wins…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘…[W]hat do we do if what causes the cosmos can lead to myriad outcomes, of which our universe is just a single, random one? Remove its inevitability, and you remove the ability to empirically test the validity of any of our theories. If what we observe is only one possible outcome, how do we prove or disprove anything? Should we just give up trying? Has the logic of theoretical physics undone science itself?Down the rabbit hole we go…’

Source: Big Think

‘…Trump… joked around with his audience that [Clinton’s] Secret Service agents should be disarmed. “Let’s see what happens to her.”….

Source: Vox

‘Down a dark alley, at the corner of your eye something flickers, probably a trick of the waning light, or a stranger up to some banal task. But what hubris leads you to believe that you can understand what happens in and among these haunted buildings much less this ancient world?  You may have passed down this very street, past this very spot a hundred times and thought it familiar, until today when the light and the time were just right, and this simple alleyway became alien, unknown. Like glimpsing an older, stranger reality existing just beneath our own, but no less terrifyingly real…’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘Ian McEwan’s compact, captivating new novel, “Nutshell,” is also about murderous spirals and lost messages between fathers and unborn sons, although it’s the father’s fate that hangs in the balance here. I promise not to give away the formidable genius of the plot — but the premise, loosely, is this: Trudy, jittery and fragile, lives in a London townhouse as dilapidated as it is valuable, where she spends hot afternoons coldly plotting the murder of her husband, John. She is heavily pregnant with John’s son. They have separated, their love spent; he inspires nothing more in her than a “retinal crust of boredom.” He has moved to Shoreditch (or “sewer-ditch,” as it used to be known), where he scrapes out a living as a poet and publisher. John may or may not be in love with an aspiring poet named Elodie, who writes about owls, and whose name rhymes with “threnody” — a lamentation to the dead.

The accomplice to this murder — “clever and dark and calculating” but also “dull to the point of brilliance, vapid beyond invention . . . a man who whistles continually, not songs but TV jingles, ringtones . . . whose repeated remarks are a witless, thrustless dribble” — is Claude, a real estate developer. Claude — Hamlet’s Claudius — needs no literary disguise: He is John’s brother, a prosperous brute of a man with whom Trudy (Gertrude) is having an affair.

And the narrator of this saga? Listen carefully now: He is Trudy’s son, still in her womb, who hears his mother and uncle plan and connive over lukewarm coffee in their Hamilton Terrace kitchen, and who must countenance the life-threatening ignominy of his uncle’s lovemaking every night….’

Source: The New York Times Book Review

Trump may be a narcissistic blowhard liar, but Clinton is a “freakishly unpopular frontrunner.” Someone’s got to lose, and who that will be seems, unbearably, to be up for grabs.

Source: Vox

Radishes.
Baked apples, with cream.
Fried oysters; stewed oysters. Frogs.
American coffee, with real cream.
American butter.
Fried chicken, Southern style.
Porter-house steak.
Saratoga potatoes.
Broiled chicken, American style.
Hot biscuits, Southern style.
Hot wheat-bread, Southern style.
Hot buckwheat cakes.
American toast. Clear maple syrup.
Virginia bacon, broiled.
Blue points, on the half shell.
Cherry-stone clams.
San Francisco mussels, steamed.
Oyster soup. Clam Soup.
Philadelphia Terapin soup.
Oysters roasted in shell-Northern style.
Soft-shell crabs. Connecticut shad.
Baltimore perch.
Brook trout, from Sierra Nevadas.
Lake trout, from Tahoe.
Sheep-head and croakers, from New Orleans.
Black bass from the Mississippi.
American roast beef.
Roast turkey, Thanksgiving style.
Cranberry sauce. Celery.
Roast wild turkey. Woodcock.
Canvas-back-duck, from Baltimore.
Prairie liens, from Illinois.
Missouri partridges, broiled.
‘Possum. Coon.
Boston bacon and beans.
Bacon and greens, Southern style.
Hominy. Boiled onions. Turnips.
Pumpkin. Squash. Asparagus.
Butter beans. Sweet potatoes.
Lettuce. Succotash. String beans.
Mashed potatoes. Catsup.
Boiled potatoes, in their skins.
New potatoes, minus the skins.
Early rose potatoes, roasted in the ashes, Southern style, served hot.
Sliced tomatoes, with sugar or vinegar. Stewed tomatoes.
Green corn, cut from the ear and served with butter and pepper.
Green corn, on the ear.
Hot corn-pone, with chitlings, Southern style.
Hot hoe-cake, Southern style.
Hot egg-bread, Southern style.
Hot light-bread, Southern style.
Buttermilk. Iced sweet milk.
Apple dumplings, with real cream.
Apple pie. Apple fritters.
Apple puffs, Southern style.
Peach cobbler, Southern style
Peach pie. American mince pie.
Pumpkin pie. Squash pie.
All sorts of American pastry.
Fresh American fruits of all sorts, including strawberries which are not to be doled out as if they were jewelry, but in a more liberal way.
Ice-water—not prepared in the ineffectual goblet, but in the sincere and capable refrigerator.

Source: Open Culture

‘On December 1923, two unlikely travelers arrived in Darjeeling, India intent on finding what could not possibly exist: Shambhala, a kingdom located inside a hollow earth. Along them trailed Soviet spies, Western occultists and Mongolian rebels, all serving their own agendas. Even with so many eyes on them, their expedition still managed to disappear from the face of the earth for months; when they finally emerged, they had a fascinating story to tell and even more secrets to hide…’

Source:  Atlas Obscura

‘The list is very, very long — and it helps show how Trump has numbed people to his nonsense…’

Source: Vox

‘President Obama is the first sitting president to call himself a feminist. His administration is the most diverse in history because he’s made an effort to fill the majority of top policy appointments in his executive branch with women and people of color.

But a fascinating anecdote, reported by Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post on Tuesday, reminds us that even self-identified feminists like Obama can still harbor unconscious gender biases:

When President Obama took office, two-thirds of his top aides were men. Women complained of having to elbow their way into important meetings. And when they got in, their voices were sometimes ignored.

So female staffers adopted a meeting strategy they called “amplification”: When a woman made a key point, other women would repeat it, giving credit to its author. This forced the men in the room to recognize the contribution — and denied them the chance to claim the idea as their own.

“We just started doing it, and made a purpose of doing it. It was an everyday thing,” said one former Obama aide who requested anonymity to speak frankly. Obama noticed, she and others said, and began calling more often on women and junior aides.

The “amplification” strategy seems to have paid off: During Obama’s second term, Eilperin notes, women finally gained parity with men in Obama’s inner circle.

For most women in the workplace, this phenomenon is exhaustingly familiar: A woman offers an idea in a meeting, but nobody notices or acknowledges it until a man later says the same thing.And it’s not in our heads. Decades of research show that women get interrupted more often — by both men and women — and that women are given less credit, or even penalized, for speaking out more…’

Source: Vox

In a May 2015 New Yorker article, satirist Andy Borowitz warned of a “powerful new strain of fact-resistant humans who are threatening the ability of Earth to sustain life.” Although humans are endowed with an ability to “receive and process information,” he writes, these faculties have been rendered “totally inactive.”

Readers enjoy Borowitz because his writing is uncomfortably close to reality. While most articles are close enough to the ballpark you can hear the game, this particular piece hardly seems satirical. The medium of the Internet, where most people get their information and news on a daily basis, is not designed for nuanced, critical thinking; it incites our brain’s reptilian response system: scan it, believe it, rage against it (or proudly repost it without having read the content).

Cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin would agree. In fact, he’s written an entire book on the subject. The author of insightful previous works, This Is Your Brain on Music and The Organized Mind, in A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age he takes to task our seemingly growing inability to weigh multiple ideas in making informed decisions, relying instead on emotional reactivity clouded by invented statistics and murky evidence.

Source: Big Think

‘While working at a remote weather station in the Russian Arctic might sound like a lot of fun, the reality is apparently far grimmer. In addition to the cold, the isolation and the possibility of literally falling off a cliff thanks to climate change, researchers have to deal with unruly locals, like the dozen or so polar bears currently “besieging” scientists on Troynoy Island in Russia’s Great Arctic State Nature Reserve.

According to Russian news agency TASS, the weather station’s five workers have been stuck inside since running out of flares to frighten the bears that arrived late last month, including one that has begun sleeping under their windows…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘Using a brain implant, Stanford researchers have developed a mind-machine interface that allows monkeys to text at the very reasonable rate of 12 words per minute. Eventually, the system could be used to help people with movement disorders to communicate more efficiently. The new technology, developed by Stanford researchers Krishna Shenoy and Paul Nuyujukian, allowed monkeys to move a cursor across a keyboard and select letters without having to lift a finger. The animals transcribed passages from the New York Times and Hamlet at a rate of 12 words per minute…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘Science is just beginning to understand the experience of life’s end. …’

Via The Atlantic

Via JSTOR Daily:

‘The answer to the question of why certain combinations of words make good band names, surprisingly, is related to the fact that people don’t really know what words mean, according to linguist Mark Aronoff. Rather, we connect words and names—even names that we may never have come across before—that exist in the same semantic space, absorbing their recurring patterns. It tells us a lot about how we might form new members of that class.’

‘I had not taken seriously the possibility that Donald Trump could win the presidency until I saw Matt Lauer host an hour-long interview with the two major-party candidates. Lauer’s performance was not merely a failure, it was horrifying and shocking. The shock, for me, was the realization that most Americans inhabit a very different news environment than professional journalists. I not only consume a lot of news, since it’s my job, I also tend to focus on elite print-news sources. Most voters, and all the more so undecided voters, subsist on a news diet supplied by the likes of Matt Lauer. And the reality transmitted to them from Lauer matches the reality of the polls, which is a world in which Clinton and Trump are equivalently flawed…’

Source: Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine

— Ursula Vernon (Bark Like A Fish, Damnit!) via Boing Boing

‘As everyone who cares about America is probably aware, clown hysteria has taken over the Carolinas. The big-shoed menaces are allegedly lurking in the woods near residences, offering candy and money to children. People are chasing the clowns into the woods with machetes and leaning hard on their 911 autodials. At least one apartment complex has issued an official anti-clown warning.

It’s gotten so bad that police are discouraging people in those areas from dressing as clowns at all.Why clowns? Why now? What’s going to happen next? Atlas Obscura spoke with cryptozoologist Loren Coleman—perhaps the world’s foremost authority on mysterious clowns—about this latest outbreak. Spoiler: he blames old wounds, sad journalists, and “the real clown,” Donald Trump…’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘Either the End Times are here, or there has been a chemical leak, but, whatever the case, Russia’s Daldykan River, surrounded by delicate tundra, has turned blood red. And now, according to ABC News, pictures of the bright red waters are being shared all over Russian social media.

The river is located in Norilsk, a heavily polluted industrial city that sits above the Arctic Circle. Built around a number of factories, mostly owned and operated by Russian mining giant Norilsk Nickel, it is the northernmost city in the world with a population of over 100,000, and it seems as though all that industry might have finally seeped out into the surrounding wilderness. Or at least this is one of the first times it has garnered widespread attention…’

Source: A River In Arctic Russia Has Turned Blood Red | Atlas Obscura

“I argue that despite impressions, the long-term trend, though certainly halting and incomplete, is that violence of all kinds is decreasing. This calls for a rehabilitation of a concept of modernity and progress, and for a sense of gratitude for the institutions of civilization and enlightenment that have made it possible.”

Via Edge

Pinker reviews and extrapolates from persuasive data, and discusses six historical trends toward diminution of violence as civilization has progressed. If he is right I find this a significant antidote to despair in the big picture.

Have you been asking:

• How do I know I exist? Could you be living inside a simulation created by a more advanced intelligence? Where does your unerring belief that you are not come from?
• What is consciousness? How does something as physical as the brain create something as immaterial as your sense of self? It could all just be one big trick of the mind
• Why is there something rather than nothing? In part because nothing is not what you think it is. Also don’t forget the multiverse
• What is the meaning of life? Your life may feel important to you, but does it have meaning? It’s the biggest of all questions – and it has more than one answer
• Where do good and evil come from? We all have a sense of morality, and most of us agree on what is good. But in truth, good may not be all that different to pure evil
• Do we have free will? Biology suggests we might not have free will, but everything changes when you get down to the quantum level
• What is reality made of? Molecules are made of atoms, atoms of particles, and particles are quantum fluctuations. But where do consciousness, dark matter and mathematics fit in?
• Is time an illusion? We are born, time passes and we die. So time must exist, right? The trouble is, it’s tricky to pin down what time actually is
• Can we ever know if God exists? No one has proved that God exists, but then no one has proved there is no God. Is working out the truth a supernatural feat?

Via New Scientist

“For the past twelve years”, says [Stanislas] Dehaene, “my research team has been using every available brain research tool, from functional MRI to electro- and magneto-encephalography and even electrodes inserted deep in the human brain, to shed light on the brain mechanisms of consciousness. I am now happy to report that we have acquired a good working hypothesis. In experiment after experiment, we have seen the same signatures of consciousness: physiological markers that all, simultaneously, show a massive change when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information (say a word, a digit or a sound).

“Furthermore, when we render the same information non-conscious or “subliminal”, all the signatures disappear. We have a theory about why these signatures occur, called the global neuronal workspace theory. Realistic computer simulations of neurons reproduce our main experimental findings: when the information processed exceeds a threshold for large-scale communication across many brain areas, the network ignites into a large-scale synchronous state, and all our signatures suddenly appear.

“But this is already more than a theory. We are now applying our ideas to non-communicating patients in coma, vegetative state, or locked-in syndromes. The test that we have designed with Tristan Bekinschtein, Lionel Naccache, and Laurent Cohen, based on our past experiments and theory, seems to reliably sort out which patients retain some residual conscious life and which do not…”

Via Edge

‘Far-fetched tales of West African riches strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. …’

Via Microsoft Research

‘BU08028’s lack of nasty side-effects may hinge on its dual-action biochemistry. Like other opioids, it controls pain by targeting the nervous system’s classic μ-opioid peptide receptors, called MOP receptors. But BU08028 also targets “nonclassical” opioid receptors, called NOP receptors for nociceptin receptors, in the nervous system. These receptor proteins generally don’t interact with opioid drugs, yet they share similarities with the receptors that do. NOP receptors regulate pain, like their MOP counterparts, but they are also involved in a host of other brain functions, such as memory, cardiovascular functions, and anxiety…

Next, the researchers hope to test BU08028 at treating chronic pain without risks of addiction or overdoses. Regardless of BU08028’s fate in subsequent trials, the researchers are hopeful that the strategy of co-activating NOP and MOP receptors will eventually lead to a safer painkiller…’

Source: Ars Technica

[Yeah, but they always seem to be nonaddictive and without abuse potential at this stage in the game…]

‘Quartz recently reported on a study that found ambient noise in hospitals during the day hits 72 deciBels (dB) and 60 dB at night. To give you an idea of what these numbers represent:At 72 dB, non-stop hospital noise is a bit louder than a vacuum cleaner, which is pretty annoying.60 dB is noise loud enough that the World Health Organization believes it increases the risk of heart disease in addition to being an obstacle to restorative sleep.

What’s also worth noting is that hospital noise is getting worse when it’s compared to readings taken in the 60s. Daytime hospital noise has doubled, and night-time noise has quadrupled.

Some people are more sensitive to noise than others, to be sure. But nonetheless, hospitals are considering the sonic landscape in trying to make each patient’s experience as pleasant and healing as possible. Here are some of the things you may see happening in hospitals in coming years…’

Source: Big Think

‘Like craft beer and specialty coffee, chocolate is having a renaissance: Small artisanal makers have started buying whole cocoa beans and roasting, grinding, and refining them into delicious chocolate made from scratch, called “bean to bar” or “craft.”  Ten years ago there were maybe five of these makers in the country. Now there are about 200. Smart ice cream shops are using this high-quality, scratch-made chocolate to intensify and elevate their ice creams. Here are 12 of the best places to find bean-to-bar chocolate ice cream across the U.S. and Canada…’

Source: Food Republic

[Chocoholics unite!]

’Airlines have long seen profitability in investing heavily in first- and business-class while degrading the flying experience in coach to cut costs. But why stop there? Coach, they have discovered, can itself be subdivided, and then subdivided again. First there was the creation of premium economy, which charges passengers extra for what used to be a standard amount of legroom, and for the exit-row seats that were previously the dominion of in-the-know flyers. Now there is a new class, a cut below standard economy. Please welcome “basic economy”, known to some as “last class”.

Delta was the first big airline to introduce basic economy, and it refined it last year as one of its five fare classes. Now United and American have both announced that they will be debuting their versions of basic economy later this year.

So what is basic economy? For frugal travellers, it’s shorthand for giving up some of the few remaining comforts of flying economy. The biggest sacrifice is losing the ability to reserve a seat when booking a flight (so be prepared for a middle seat in the back row). If you are travelling with family or colleagues, forget about sitting together. Passengers flying basic economy also forfeit their right to upgrade their seats and to change or cancel their reservations more than 24 hours after booking.

From the airlines’ perspective, last class is an effort to compete with the profitability of no-frills competitors such as Spirit and Frontier. Airlines can cut costs by limiting the things to which passengers are entitled. Eliminating upgrades and standby flying for certain passengers reduces administrative overheads. And forcing some passengers into the seats no one else wants could reduce the risk that they will remain vacant.

But some people suspect a more nefarious motive: Delta and its rivals are making basic economy so unpleasant that people will pay extra to “upgrade” to standard economy. Indeed, when you try to book a reservation on Delta’s basic economy, a screen pops up warning you of all the downsides and requiring you to check a box stating “I agree to the restrictions” before you can proceed. …’

Via The Economist

Here is a 2.5 page mathematical analysis:

Source: It’s Okay To Be Smart

… It Has Already Begun

‘The inundation of the coast has begun. The sea has crept up to the point that a high tide and a brisk wind are all it takes to send water pouring into streets and homes.

Federal scientists have documented a sharp jump in this nuisance flooding — often called “sunny-day flooding” — along both the East Coast and the Gulf Coast in recent years. The sea is now so near the brim in many places that they believe the problem is likely to worsen quickly. Shifts in the Pacific Ocean mean that the West Coast, partly spared over the past two decades, may be hit hard, too.

These tidal floods are often just a foot or two deep, but they can stop traffic, swamp basements, damage cars, kill lawns and forests, and poison wells with salt. Moreover, the high seas interfere with the drainage of storm water.In coastal regions, that compounds the damage from the increasingly heavy rains plaguing the country, like those that recently caused extensive flooding in Louisiana. Scientists say these rains are also a consequence of human greenhouse emissions…’

Source: The New York Times

‘Sorry, that antibacterial soap isn’t doing anything more to clean you up than any other plain bar of soap. The FDA just announced it is eliminating almost all of the active ingredients used in antibacterial soaps after determining that the soaps didn’t have any more impact on preventing the spread of germs and infections than regular soap. These products will no longer be sold under misleading marketing…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘Entomologist Justin O. Schmidt has written a book called The Sting of the Wild, about his mission to “compare the impacts of stinging insects on humans, mainly using himself as the gauge.” Here’s how he poetically describes a few bug stings, based on his own 4-point “Schmidt Pain Scale for Stinging Insects.”

Red fire ant (1): “Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for the light switch.”Anthophorid bee (1): “Almost pleasant, a lover just bit your earlobe a little too hard.”

California carpenter bee (2): “Swift, sharp, and decisive. Your fingertip has been slammed by a car door.”

Western yellowjacket (2): “Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W.C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.”

Fierce black polybia wasp: (2.5): “A ritual gone wrong, satanic. The gas lamp in the old church explodes in your face when you light it.”

Velvet ant (3): “Explosive and long lasting, you sound insane as you scream. Hot oil from the deep frying spilling over your entire hand.”

Florida harvester ant (3): “Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a power drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.”

Tarantula hawk (4): “Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair dryer has just been dropped into your bubble bath.”

Bullet ant (4): “Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over a flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail embedded in your heel.”

Warrior (or armadillo) wasp: “Torture. You are chained in the flow of an active volcano. Why did I start this list?”

Source: Boing Boing

‘Every single month of 2016 has been the hottest on record, and this uptick in temperature is sure to have wide-ranging consequences around the world. One of the weirdest and least understood of these climate-related side effects is that Arctic boreal lakes are boiling over with methane bubbles. Indeed, some of these areas are such rich producers of methane that scientists can light plumes of the lake’s escaped gas on fire.

These gassy lakes are created by thawing permafrost, which is soil that normally remains frozen all year. But warmer temperatures have caused more permafrost to melt, causing the ground around it to collapse into water-filled sinkholes called thermokarst lakes.’

Source: Motherboard

‘…[R]eaders and eaters, for the love of God, support anywhere you eat that serves excellent cole slaw. If the next lunch you sit down to serves you good cole slaw, know you are eating somewhere run by people who give a damn. Reward them with repeat business and recommendations*, go back for brunch, bring work friends to their happy hour. Vote with your dollars and let them know you recognize their attempt to rise above the common, goopy masses…’

Source: Big Think

‘Virtually every film in modern memory ends with some variation of the same disclaimer: “This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” The cut-and-paste legal rider must be the most boring thing in every movie that features it. Who knew its origins were so lurid?

For that bit of boilerplate, we can indirectly thank none other than Grigori Rasputin, the famously hard-to-assassinate Russian mystic and intimate of the last, doomed Romanovs. It all started when an exiled Russian prince sued MGM in 1933 over the studio’s Rasputin biopic, claiming that the American production did not accurately depict Rasputin’s murder. And the prince ought to have known, having murdered him…’

Source: Slate

‘Paul LePage, the Republican governor of Maine, told reporters that people of color are the enemy in his state.

“When you go to war, if you know the enemy, the enemy dresses in red and you dress in blue, you shoot at red, don’t you? You shoot at the enemy. You try to identify the enemy. And the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority right now coming in are people of color or people of Hispanic origin. I can’t help that. I just can’t help it. Those are the facts.”

The remarks came after he left a voicemail on a state lawmaker’s phone after the Democrat, Drew Gattine, allegedly called him a racist. He also threatened to shoot Gattine…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘Salk Institute scientists have found preliminary evidence that tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and other compounds found in marijuana can promote the cellular removal of amyloid beta, a toxic protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease. While these exploratory studies were conducted in neurons grown in the laboratory, they may offer insight into the role of inflammation in Alzheimer’s disease and could provide clues to developing novel therapeutics for the disorder…’

Source: Neurosciencestuff Tumblr

‘Fusion energy has long been heralded as the power-supply of the future, but the sad joke is, it always will be. The experimental energy source is perennially 30 years away from being viable on a mass-scale. Still, fusion energy could provide us with a low-cost, sustainable energy resource—if only physicists could figure out how to harness the power of the Sun on Earth.

This dream of a sustainable “star in a jar” was brought one step closer to reality this month by physicists at the Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, who demonstrated how the design for a new type of “jar” could lead to the first commercially viable nuclear fusion power plant…’

Source: Motherboard

‘There are billions of galaxies out there besides our own, so it’s something of a given that the Milky Way might have a few “twins,” roughly mirroring its mass and size. And now, scientists think they’ve found one, only it’s like nothing like what they expected.

Called Dragonfly 44, it’s about 330 million light years away and it has almost the same mass as our Milky Way. For years, it eluded detection by scientists because it has so few stars. As a team of researchers reported last week in Astrophysical Journal Letters, a whopping 99.99 percent of Dragonfly 44 is made up of dark matter.

Dragonfly 44 might effectively match the Milky Way in mass, but unlike our own galaxy, it only has one star for every 100. That’s such a thin population, said the study’s author Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University in a statement to Yale News, that without the dark matter to hold it in place, Dragonfly 44 “would quickly be ripped apart unless something was holding it together.” It’s so faint, in fact, that if they hadn’t been using the ultra-powerful telescopes of the Keck and Gemini observatories in Hawaii, van Dokkum and his team may never have found it.

Technically, dark matter galaxies aren’t that unknown. The key difference, though, is that most of the other known examples are so small that they would be better described as clusters. Until now, none of them have been so incomprehensibly massive as Dragonfly 44.

But it’s a significant find, as it means we might be on our way to figuring out what dark matter is…’

Source: Motherboard

‘For the first time, biologists have located a great white “nursery,” where mother sharks deliver pups, alive and fully formed. Researchers with OCEARCH, an ocean research nonprofit, identified the site this week in waters off Montauk, Long Island.This monumental finding is “probably the most significant discovery we’ve ever made on the ocean,” said Chris Fischer, the founding chairman of OCEARCH. In an interview with CBS News, Fischer noted that great white birthing sites are regarded as “the holy grail of research,” and are especially important in the Atlantic Ocean, where the sharks are vulnerable to bycatch and sport fishing…’

Source: Motherboard

‘,,,[H]ow about letting a little anger and grumpiness shine through? Turns out this might just yield the best results. Cranks may be superior negotiators, more discerning decision-makers and cut their risk of having a heart attack. Cynics can expect more stable marriages, higher earnings and longer lives – though, of course, they’ll anticipate the opposite.

The author cites potential pitfalls from excessive positivity: overeating, unsafe sex, binge drinking, gullibility, and selfishness. This is not to argue for baseline aggressiveness. A calm, measured resting face is probably beneficial. While seeing the bright side of things can be a good disposition, forceful reactivity has its place, one that should not be overlooked or disrespected…’

Source: Big Think

Big fan of grumpiness here.

‘ “I hope everyone has buckled their seatbelts because the outer solar system just got a lot weirder.” That’s what Michele Bannister, an astronomer at Queens University, Belfast tweeted on Monday. She was referring to the discovery of a TNO or trans-Neptunian object, something which sits beyond Neptune in the outer solar system. This one is 160,000 times fainter than Neptune, which means the icy world could be less than 200 kilometres in diameter. It’s currently above the plane of the solar system and with every passing day, it’s moving upwards – a fact that makes it an oddity.

The TNO orbits in a plane that’s tilted 110 degrees to the plane of the solar system. What’s more, it swings around the sun backwards unlike most of the other objects in the solar system. With this in mind, the team that discovered the TNO nicknamed it “Niku” after the Chinese adjective for rebellious. To grasp how truly rebellious it is, remember that a flat plane is the signature of a planetary system, as a star-forming gas cloud creates a flat disk of dust and gas around it. “Angular momentum forces everything to have that one spin direction all the same way,” says Bannister. “It’s the same thing with a spinning top, every particle is spinning the same direction.”

That means anything that doesn’t orbit within the plane of the solar system or spins in the opposite direction must have been knocked off course by something else. “It suggests that there’s more going on in the outer solar system than we’re fully aware of,” says Matthew Holman at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, part of the team that discovered Niku using the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System 1 Survey (Pan-STARRS 1) on Haleakala, Maui…’

Source: New Scientist

‘Science is getting to grips with ways to slow ageing. Rejoice, as long as the side-effects can be managed…’

Source: The Economist