Via io9: ‘The Perseids is my favorite meteor shower of the year, and this year is likely to be the best one in recent memory. Here’s when, where, and how to watch it—and just what is going to make this year so spectacular…’

Via The Awl: ‘“A new report from Facebook into how users express laughter shows that ‘haha’ and its variants are by far the most common terms used on the social network. They accounted for 51.4 percent of mirth in the anonymized comments and posts looked at by Facebook’s data team, with laughter emoji claiming 33.7 percent, and ‘hehe’ and its cognates 13.1 percent. The once-mighty ‘lol’ only appeared in 1.9 percent of the text sampled by Facebook — a pretty staggering fall for an expression that was once synonymous with online txt speak. Although not surprising for such a venerable term, ‘lol’ proved slightly more popular with older users. Differences between generations were not heavily pronounced, but it was emoji that were most popular with users with the youngest median age, while ‘haha,’ ‘hehe,’ and ‘lol’ were favored by progressively older individuals.”..’

Via Neuroskeptic: ‘Meta-analyses are systematic syntheses of scientific evidence, most commonly randomized controlled clinical trials. A meta-analysis combines the results of multiple studies and can lead to new insights and more reliable results.

However, according to Italian surgeon Giovanni Tebala writing in Medical Hypotheses, meta-analyses are becoming too popular, and are in danger of taking over the medical literature.

…Why is this? Tebala suggests that researchers are turning to meta-analyses to bolster their CVs:

Randomized controlled trials require hard work and financial commitment, whereas meta-analyses and systematic reviews can be relatively easy to perform and often get published in high impact journals. Many researchers might decide to devote themselves to the latter approach.

…Tebala doesn’t actually spell out why the glut of meta-analyses is a problem for science; he seems to be concerned at the unfairness of meta-analysts getting credit for their work with “someone else’s data”.

Nonetheless I think there is a scientific problem, which is that as the ratio of meta-analyses to actual data increases, the scientific literature becomes dominated by interpretation and analysis resting on a limited amount of evidence. Put simply, the risk is that science will get “top heavy”…’

Via IFLScience: ‘We’re all screwed. Well, if you’re planning to stick around for a few more billion years.

Researchers have found that galaxies are losing energy at a rather alarming rate, and confirm that all energy in the universe will eventually dissipate into nothingness. A study of 200,000 galaxies found they had lost half their energy in just two billion years. “The universe is slowly dying,” a statement from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) somberly says.

The theory that the universe is dying through an increase in entropy is not new, but this is the most extensive analysis yet of what’s going on. The energy output of a large portion of space containing the galaxies was measured more precisely than ever before. It was studied in 21 wavelengths, from ultraviolet to the far infrared, and all were found to be decreasing…’

Via Gizmodo: ‘A Los Angeles County child is recovering from the plague, and public health agencies are searching the wilderness for the source of the infection.

It’s the third case of plague this year in the U.S. The first two both happened in Colorado, and both were fatal. Earlier this week, an adult in Pueblo County, Colorado, died of the plague, and back in June, the disease killed a Larimer County high school student.

There are about 7 cases of plague in the U.S. every year, mostly in the West, where the disease is endemic among wild mammals, especially rodents, in rural or wilderness areas…’

Via Gizmodo: ‘The Moon may be Earth’s kid brother, but Saturn’s moons seem more gnats on an elephant in this incredible image captured by the Cassini probe.

Pictured here are Saturn’s moons Mimas (right) and Dione (left) staring up at their behemoth of a planet, with the unilluminated side of the rings angled about one degree from the ring plane. They’re certainly large enough to be spotted, but at 240 and 698 miles across respectively, Mimas and Dione are quite a bit smaller than Earth’s moon (2160 miles across). And they’re total pipsqueaks on the scale of the Saturn system: The gas giant itself measures 75,400 miles across, and its ring system extends more than a thousand fold further out into space.

We all grew up learning that the gas giants are massive, but images like this really help put the numbers in perspective….’

Via Big Think: ‘In his final soliloquy, Stewart offered a three-part analysis of the bullshit being slung in America today, along with a warning….’

Via IFLScience: ‘Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto created the animation to display the number of nuclear explosions that went off between 1945 and 1998: a staggering 2,053.

Beginning with the Manhattan Project’s first nuclear device detonated near Los Alamos, New Mexico, the number of explosions starts slowly at first and then quickly speeds up right through to Pakistan’s own nuclear tests in 1998.

Each explosion corresponds to a beep and a flash of color, with the totals for each country rapidly stacking up. It is especially poignant given that today is the 70th anniversary of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, “Little Boy”, at the end of World War Two.

Hashimoto created the animation in 2003, which is why more recent nuclear tests such as those by North Korea in 2006, 2009 and 2013 are excluded.’

Related articles

• 70 years ago, the first atomic bomb exploded in New Mexico
• PBS special ‘The Bomb’ seeks to tell story of atomic weapons
• 16 July 1945: The Atomic Age begins
• NM Residents: US Covered Up Atomic Test That Sickened 30K

For the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, The New Yorker has published online the full text of John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” to which the magazine devoted the entire editorial space of its August 31, 1946 issue. “It does so in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon,” wrote the magazine’s editors, “and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use.”

Via IFLScience: ‘Picture the Arctic and you’re probably imagining vast expanses of pure, white ice or enormous cliffs of jagged glaciers surrounded by icy waters. However, the ice sheets of the Arctic are melting so quickly and in such large amounts that maps of the world must reflect these momentous changes. Atlas of the World makers National Geographic announced last year that there would be major changes made to the 10th edition of its map. In his announcement of plans to fight global warming, President Obama referred to these changes in a speech given at the White House. “Shrinking ice caps forced National Geographic to make the biggest change in its atlas since the Soviet Union broke apart,” Obama said….’

Related articles

• Russia Claims Vast Swathes Of Arctic Territory
• Mutants & Masterminds Rogues Gallery #8: Arctic Fox
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• Putin Demanding Ownership of the North Pole

Via IFLScience: ‘It’s pretty hard to fathom just how big some things in the universe are, but this possible feature is so large that it borders on the ridiculous.

Astronomers think they have found a ring of nine gamma ray bursts (GRBs) inside galaxies that, together, measure 5 billion light-years across. For a comparison, that’s about 50,000 times bigger than the Milky Way, or more than one-ninth the size of the observable universe. The research was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

A GRB is an intense flash of gamma rays caused by a supernova, the dramatic death of a fiery star, and thus their detection indicates the presence of a galaxy – suggesting all nine of the GRBs are in separate galaxies. They are the brightest electromagnetic events in the universe, releasing more energy in a few seconds than the Sun in its entire 10 billion-year lifetime, and thus they can be used to detect distant galaxies.

While it is not one physical whole structure, the Hungarian-American team who made the discovery think the nine galaxies are gravitationally bound to each other – just as our Local Group contains the Milky Way and a few dozen other galaxies.

In this case, all the GRBs studied by a variety of observatories are about 7 billion light-years away from Earth, suggesting that we are seeing the structure “face on.” Alternatively, we may be seeing a projection of a “sphere.”

But there’s one problem. The structure, if confirmed, would break our current models of how large things can be; a previous theoretical limit stood at 1.2 billion light-years. On large scales, the cosmos should be uniform and not have structures like this….’

Related articles

• Dark-Matter ‘Superhighways’ of the Cosmos –“Connecting Vast Bubbles Devoid of Galaxies”
• Dead Galaxies In Coma Cluster May Be Packed With Dark Matter
• Size matters – especially when two star-studded realms collide in space

Via Public Radio International: ‘While the graying Hiroshima Generations who survived the atomic bomb attack seven decades ago are struggling to pass their memories to the younger generations, much of the world has allowed that fateful morning on Aug 6, 1945 to slip from their minds.

About 66,000 people, mostly civilians, perished, according to a report prepared by the US Army one year after the attack. Another 69,000 were injured and tens of thousands more were affected by radiation disease.

But how to show the damage more clearly? We’ve developed an application that allows you to visualize the damage of the same atomic bomb on another location in today’s world, such as your hometown. You may be surprised at the extent of the damage….’

Via Big Think: ‘A vaccine that did not exist a year ago has proven 100 percent effective at preventing people who are at extremely high risk of infection from contracting the Ebola virus.

The recent trial took place in Guinea, a West African nation that, along with Liberia and Sierra Leone, was hit hard by an Ebola epidemic that has killed more than 11,000 people since December 2013…

The vaccine, called rVSV-ZEBOV, is composed of “an attenuated livestock virus engineered to produce an Ebola protein…

Still, the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine is considered a first-generation tool, especially since it must be stored at –80° C and it protects against a limited number of species of the Ebola virus. Researchers are already hard at work developing second-generation iterations….’ 

Via Gizmodo: ‘When hitchBOT the hitchhiking robot started his journey in Boston two weeks ago he wanted to see the entire country. Unfortunately, he never made it out of the Northeast. The researchers who built hitchBOT announced today that they need to stop the experiment because hitchBOT was vandalized in Philadelphia.

From the researchers who built hitchBOT:

hitchBOT’s trip came to an end last night in Philadelphia after having spent a little over two weeks hitchhiking and visiting sites in Boston, Salem, Gloucester, Marblehead, and New York City. Unfortunately, hitchBOT was vandalized overnight in Philadelphia; sometimes bad things happen to good robots. We know that many of hitchBOT’s fans will be disappointed, but we want them to be assured that this great experiment is not over. For now we will focus on the question “what can be learned from this?” and explore future adventures for robots and humans.

The goal of the hitchhiking trip was to see how humans would interact with hitchBOT. And apparently the answer was “not well.” HitchBOT has been around the world, including trips across the entirety of Canada and Germany without major incident. But America is clearly a hard land for our robot brothers and sisters….’

Via io9: ‘Schulz, the author of the New Yorker piece, feels safe enough to continue spending her summers in the Northwest, the area that will be affected by the earthquake. In her follow up bit about survival advice, she strongly suggests that readers avoid spending even one night in the tsunami inundation zone.

“Of the almost thirteen thousand people expected to die in the Cascadia event, one thousand will perish in the earthquake,” Schulz writes. “The others will be killed by the tsunami—and they amount to nearly one in five people who are in the zone when the water arrives. That’s a grim enough figure that it changed my own beach-going behavior in the Northwest. Go to the coast by day, for sure. But if you’re staying overnight, book a vacation rental, hotel room, or campsite outside the inundation zone.”…’

Via Gizmodo: A former robotics researcher who helped develop military robots says they cannot do anything for which they were not programmed. And besides, the bad guys don’t play by the rules. Make any sense??

Related articles

• Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking Call for Ban on Autonomous Military Robots

Via Salon.com:

‘Future president Lindsey Graham declares victory in the war with Iran he’s probably (definitely) going to start…’

Related articles

• Graham: Iran Deal Declares War on Israel
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• Lindsey Graham’s Leaked Voicemails
• Lindsey Graham, 0% GOP Candidate For POTUS: Hillary Could Get Better Iran Deal Than Obama…
• Lindsey Graham Destroys Cell Phone

I recall seeing De Düva at the late lamented Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge in the early ’70’s. After twenty minutes or so, a member of the audience suddenly stood up in the front row, threw his arms heavenward, and shouted out to the audience, “My God! I’m so stoned I can understand Swedish!”

A De Düva lexicon, via The New York Times:

‘Mooska: Cow

Zooner-or-lätsker: Eventually

Skå she vinska, you godda set her freesk: If she wins, you must set her free.

Me yoost haf dis schmatte waschen: I just had this clothing washed.

H20ska: Water

Phalliken zymbol: Cigar…’

Related articles

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ViaThe New York Times: ‘While no one is predicting that the Islamic State will become the steward of an accountable, functioning state anytime soon, the group is putting in place the kinds of measures associated with governing: issuing identification cards for residents, promulgating fishing guidelines to preserve stocks, requiring that cars carry tool kits for emergencies. That transition may demand that the West rethink its military-first approach to combating the group.

“I think that there is no question that the way to look at it is as a revolutionary state-building organization,” said Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is one of a small but growing group of experts who are challenging the conventional wisdom about the Islamic State: that its evil ensures its eventual destruction….’

Via Gizmodo: ‘Utter the words—and we don’t suggest you do—“charge my phone 100 percent” to Siri, and your iPhone will try and call the emergency services, after a five-second grace period in which you can cancel it. But why?

It might be a bug. Or, as The Verge suggests, it could be a feature that allows you to secretly call the police if you’re in trouble. It seems unlikely, but stranger things have happened (like a woman getting in touch with Pizza Hut to save her from a knife attack). So far Apple is yet to confirm why it’s a thing. Any ideas?…’

Gull in harrying pursuit after eagle grabs one of its mates out of a nest Guess who won?

Via io9

Via io9: ‘For its size, the coffee berry borer makes your caffeine consumption look almost laughably manageable, downing an amount that relative to its body mass would be like a person taking 500 shots of espresso in one day—and its habit is becoming a real threat to coffee supplies….’

Murray Gell-Mann lecturing in 2007

Via io9: ‘After restarting to run at higher power than ever, the Large Hadron Collider has made its first proper discovery. Today, a team of scientists announced that they’ve found a new class of sub-atomic particles known as pentaquarks.

Quarks are a series of charged sub-atomic particles that come together to form larger particles—such as protons and neutrons, which are each made of three of the things (a class of particle referred to as baryons). First proposed in 1964 by American physicist Murray Gell-Mann, their existence changed the way people thought about particle physicists.

But quarks can come together to form other entities, too. For a long time, people have speculated that another class of quark ensemble, called the pentaquark, could in theory exist. The pentaquark is, perhaps unsurprisingly, supposed to be made up of five smaller entities—four quarks and an anti-quark. Now, for the first time, researchers working on the LHCb experiment at the Collider have found evidence for their existence….’

Via Vox: ‘— and he will be a particularly towering figure in the history of American progressivism….’

Via Vox: ‘Iran hawks displeased with the nuclear deal struck between Iran, Russia, China, the United States, and the European Union have an awful lot of complaints. But if you look closely at what they are saying, you’ll notice something funny. They don’t actually have any arguments about what Obama has done wrong or how a different administration would park the situation in a better place. What they have instead are a lot of talking points, MacGuffins, red herrings, and distractions that aim to divert attention from the core issue — hawks’ desire to avoid diplomacy and have a war….’

Related articles

• Here’s the full text of the Iran nuclear deal

Via Vox: ‘The political battle over the Iran deal is going to be the biggest foreign policy fight of Obama’s presidency. Congress has the power to destroy the deal, and Republicans will do their damnedest to try to use it, however unlikely it is that they’ll succeed.

But this is more than just a policy dispute, and that’s why the fighting is taking place in more than just Congress. Cable news is spinning itself into a froth over whether the Iran deal is a horrifying catastrophe or a golden day in global progress. Odds are good that you’ve already gotten sucked into, or at least worked to avoid, an argument on Facebook over this.

People have strong feelings about this deal — very strong feelings. Maybe that’s partly because they are just that emotionally invested in the details of arms control agreements, or in the triangulations of American Middle East policy. Or maybe there’s something more going on here….’

Via Vox: ‘Why nuclear experts love the Iran deal…’ 

WIRED.

Via National Geographic: ‘A new study makes the case for building a supersize space telescope that would create images five times sharper than Hubble’s….’

Related articles

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• Astronomers call on peers to dream up deep-space telescope of the future

IFLScience.

Via IFLScience: ‘In the wake of World War II, the United Sates military was suddenly worried about and keen to test out the threats posed by biological warfare. They started experiments looking into how bacteria and their harmful toxins might spread, only using harmless stand-in microbes. They tested these on military bases, infecting soldiers and their families who lived with them, but eventually they stepped things up a notch. Disclosed in 1977, it turns out that the U.S. military carried out 239 secret open-air tests on its own citizens….’

Boing Boing.

Via Boing Boing: ‘A mama bear with two cubs made a habit of sneaking into a mobile home in British Columbia, Canada and raiding the freezer. On one of these visits, conservation officer Bryan Casavant was ordered to kill all three bears. But after putting down the mama bear, he didn’t have the heart to kill the babies.

For his good deed, Casavant is now suspended from his job and under investigation. Fortunately, he’s got a lot of public support for his heroic act….’

Via Boing Boing: ‘The kind of man whose handlers have to explain that he doesn’t actually want to fuck his own daughter is not the kind of man the press lets go quietly into the night….’

Boing Boing.

 Via 3quarksdaily: ‘Prosopagnosia is a neuropsychological condition that impairs the sufferer’s ability to recognize faces. It’s also known as face-blindness, and those who are afflicted lack a skill that comes naturally to most humans, forcing them to find ways to work around this deficit….’

The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

Via Gizmodo: ‘At a UNESCO climate conference last week, scientists declared (once again) that climate change is already happening. The evidence is our wacky weather—even Paris, where the conference was held, was broiling in a historic heatwave. But the biggest red flag is the rise in peak global mean temperatures: Which means rising sea levels will almost certainly be a reality, too.

As a lead up to the bigger UN climate conference this fall, scientists are now modeling two different warming scenarios to help humans plot a roadmap for how to avoid these futures. Status quo—or even going back to “preindustrial levels”—is no longer an option, even if we ceased all carbon-emitting activity right now. One scenario is if the planet will warm by 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, which would be very bad. The other is if the planet will warm by 4 degrees Celsius, which would be very, very bad.

In this month’s Science, a study looked at these warming trends and made some estimates for how these temperature increases would help to accelerate the melting of polar ice sheets. Two or three degrees Celsius would see a rise in sea levels of at least six meters. That’s about 20 feet.

So say we manage to only raise temperatures by 2 degrees Celsius—the best-case scenario. A map made by Climate Central allows you to visit any city to see exactly how much coastlines will change. While there are plenty of usual suspects in this list—Miami would be totally underwater, of course, and we got previews of how rising ocean levels would affect New York City and New Orleans during Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina—there are also some areas that will see a surprising loss of land….’

Of course, I went right to my home city, Boston. The results were quite scary… and that’s only 2 degrees.

Via io9: ‘New Horizons is racing to Pluto so quickly, we’re literally learning new things every single day. Exploration is a true planet-wide “Today I learned…” moment: we now know what makes up Pluto’s atmosphere, what makes up its ice cap, and exactly how big it is….’

WIRED.

Via The Week: ‘You might think that TV and movies and the general mobility of the population would mean accents are getting more and more similar across the country. This turns out not to be the case. Kids don’t learn their accents from TV; they learn them from the people around them. And different regions are in some ways becoming more different from each other….’

Via Neuroskeptic:

‘This is without a doubt the strangest thing I’ve ever read in the pages of a scientific journal. It far outshines the previous record-holder. Otto Rössler is himself a remarkable researcher. A few years ago he was part of an effort that unsuccesfully sued CERN in an attempt to prevent the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) from switching on. Rössler expressed concern that the high-energy physics of the LHC might create a black hole, and thus destroy the world….’

Via Mind Hacks: ‘According to a report from BBC News the Pope ‘plans to chew coca leaves’ during his visit to Bolivia. Although portrayed as a radical encounter, this is really a return to cocaine use after a long period of abstinence in the papal office….’

Via The New York Times: ‘Welcome to calcio storico, a centuries-old competition in Florence with very few rules and the sort of human wreckage generally associated with the gladiators….’ .

Via io9: ‘Since the Hubble launched, we’ve been seeing stunning image of the crowded universe. Most of the images come accompanied by assurances that what we see in the images is just the start. Astronomers have been excitedly guessing at the amount of faint, distant galaxies that they can’t see. Lurkers surely outnumbered visible galaxies.

New simulations done on Blue Waters, a supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications indicate that that isn’t the case. Researchers at Michigan State University simulated the formation of the early universe. The number of bright, luminous galaxies that the simulations predicted just about synced up with the data we can see from the Hubble. But the simulations indicated that number of faint galaxies, which the Hubble can’t see, wasn’t anywhere near what previous predictions had estimated. Conservative estimates reduce the number of faint galaxies ten times, but it’s just possible that the universe has only one hundredth the faint lurker galaxies we previously thought it did….’

Via Salon: ‘Bill Kristol believes we’re on our way to polygamy, while Bobby Jindal shows GOP is the party of stupid after all…’

Via Salon.com: ‘The real story about the NATO buildup that the New York Times won’t tell you.

Our leaders and media push time-worn nonsense about American innocence, while taking aggressive moves. Look out…’

Via Gawker: ‘Appearing on Marc Maron’s podcast today, President Obama addressed what is perhaps one of the longest-living conspiracies in America: the existence of black helicopters. They’re real!

“There are black helicopters,” he said, “but we generally don’t deploy them on U.S. soil.”…’

Via Salon.com: ‘Half of it is nuts, and about half of it could come from a more-or-less mainstream racist politician of the Jesse Helms or Lee Atwater school.

It gives the lie to the ruling conservative meme that Roof was just a loan wacko with no affinities with the white-militia movement that the respectable right has tried to keep offstage. It also shows how the accused killer of nine in a Charleston church has roots in weird ideas that are part of even the think-tank culture of the right: Roof’s manifesto is a kind of distorted, funhouse-mirror reflection of Tea Party-era conservative white America’s core beliefs, and it shares the ahistorical way many conservatives deal with race….’

Via Motherboard: ‘Your body is capable of simulating suffocation in one highly bizarre and accidental circumstance known usually as sleep paralysis. It’s a sensation-slash-circumstance potent enough to generate enough folklore throughout human history to fill volumes, most of it gravitating towards the victim being tortured by witches or demons. In a human history full of flayings, scaphism, and other wildly creative ways to induce misery in others, sleep paralysis remains even beyond our reach: the realm of demons.

For whatever reason, the witch or demon left me alone for about 10 years. Between 2000 and 2003, they were after me every night, sometimes several times before morning, and I thought for sure that eventually I’d wake up once just in time to die for real. The distance between what sleep paralysis felt like most times and actual death felt to be about three or four heartbeats and one terrifyingly labored breath. Although that’s not totally accurate.

The distance often didn’t feel like anything at all. Sleep paralysis itself feels like just-death or the crux of the dying process, or what you might imagine it to feel like when you’re being afraid of dying….’

Via NYTimes ‘The feminist writer Germaine Greer once declared: “Every generation has to discover Nina Simone. She is evidence that female genius is real.” This year, that just might happen for good.

Nina Simone is striking posthumous gold as the inspiration for three films and a star-studded tribute album, and she was name-dropped in John Legend’s Oscar acceptance speech for best song. This flurry comes on the heels of a decade-long resurgence: two biographies, a poetry collection, several plays, and the sampling of her signature haunting contralto by hip-hop performers including Jay Z, the Roots and, most relentlessly, Kanye West.’

Via Boing Boing: ‘At 6:35PM last night a man with his hand wrapped in a towel flagged down the police, apparently seeking help. The police thought he had a gun under the towel on his extended arm, and ordered him to drop it. At least one officer fired and hit the victim in the head, leaving him in critical condition. He was unarmed….’

Via Boing Boing: ‘In just three days 10,000 dogs will be poisoned, beaten, killed and cooked as part of Yulin, China’s annual dog-eating festival. Many of these dogs are family pets stolen from people’s homes. Although this festival is in its eighth year, protesting has never been as strong as it is this year, with close to a million #StopYulin2015 tweets leading the way. Animal rights groups around the world are working to stop this year’s canine mass murder, including many in China….’

This is a country poised to join the community of ‘civilized’ nations??

Stephen Burt in The New Yorker: ‘This pedestrian term is actually the key to my historical period.

A disputatious panel at last year’s professional conference revealed the surprising state of the field (it’s as bad as you think).

My historical period, properly understood, includes yours.

What looked like a moment of failure, confusion, or ugliness in this well-known work is better seen as directions for reading the whole.

A problem you thought you could solve defines your field; you can’t imagine the field without the problem.

The only people able to understand this work properly cannot communicate that understanding to you.

Those two apparently incompatible versions of a thing are better regarded as parts of the same, larger thing.

Quantitative methods have an unexpected use.

Analytical tools developed for, and strongly associated with, a well-defined set of things in fact apply to a much larger set of things.

A public event simultaneous with, but apparently unrelated to, a famous art work in fact shaped that work’s composition or reception.

This famous thing closely resembles, and therefore responds to, that slightly earlier, less famous thing.

If you teach that old thing in this new way, your students will like it.

If you teach that old thing in this new way, your students will like you.

Before a given date, a now obscure, once omnipresent theory meant that all of culture was somehow different.

After a given date, a new technology meant that all of culture was somehow different.

The name we’ve been using for this stuff is anachronistic. Here’s a better name.

Truth-claims from our discipline cannot be properly judged without expertise that almost no one in our discipline has.

Our discipline should study its own disciplinary formation; that study proves that our discipline shouldn’t exist.

An old, prestigious thing still deserves its prestige, but for a heretofore undiscovered reason.

This feature of modern life began slightly earlier than you thought, and my single text proves it.

Please adopt my buzzword.

This author, normally seen as opposed to certain bad things, in fact supported them without realizing it.

This author, normally seen as naïve or untrained, is in fact very self-aware, and hence more like us.

That obscure, élite thing once had a popular audience.

This short text, seen rightly, reveals the contradictions of a whole culture.

A supposedly fanatical, militant movement that readers have been taught to fear makes perfect sense to those who support it.

The true meaning of a famous work can be recovered only through juxtaposition with this long obscure historical moment or artifact.

I found a very small thing in an archive, but I can relate it to a big thing.

To see what this thing meant to its first readers, you must attend meticulously to the physical contexts in which the thing first appeared.

This is why we can’t have nice things….’

‘

What separates living things from everything else? From AI to viruses, the line is fuzzier than we might expect..’ (Aeon Video).

Via NYTimes: ‘The feminist writer Germaine Greer once declared: “Every generation has to discover Nina Simone. She is evidence that female genius is real.” This year, that just might happen for good.
Nina Simone is striking posthumous gold as the inspiration for three films and a star-studded tribute album, and she was name-dropped in John Legend’s Oscar acceptance speech for best song. This flurry comes on the heels of a decade-long resurgence: two biographies, a poetry collection, several plays, and the sampling of her signature haunting contralto by hip-hop performers including Jay Z, the Roots and, most relentlessly, Kanye West.’

Coat of arms of Syria

Via New York Times: ‘After a decade of waging long-distance war through their video screens, America’s drone operators are burning out, and the Air Force is being forced to cut back on the flights even as military and intelligence officials are demanding more of them over intensifying combat zones in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

The Air Force plans to trim the flights by the armed surveillance drones to 60 a day by October from a recent peak of 65 as it deals with the first serious exodus of the crew members who helped usher in the era of war by remote control….’

Via io9: ‘In March 2001, the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan, a pair of giant statues dating to the 6th century in the Bamyan valley in central Afghanistan. Now, the statues have been resurrected with 3D light projection technology.

A Chinese couple, Janson Yu and Liyan Hu worked to develop a projector at the cost of $120,000, which they first tested in China before bringing the system to the UNESCO World Heritage Site this past weekend. With the permission of UNESCO and the Afghan Government, they were able to project a 3D image into the slots in the cliffside that housed one of the statues. For the evening, the statues stood once again in a symbolic work of art. While the statues are physically gone, they cannot be easily erased from our collective memory….’

Via The Smart Set: ‘The fine arts don’t matter any more to most educated people. This is not a statement of opinion; it is a statement of fact….’

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: ‘To see how we treat the concept of truth these days, one might think we just don’t care anymore….’

via ​Motherboard: ‘Today, commentary on the happenings in Game of Thrones‘ Season 5, Episode 10 are the most-read stories on the web’s most-read websites…

At time of writing, four of Vox’s most popular stories were Game of Thrones-related, including the top three. Buzzfeed’s most popular post is a rundown of a GoT fan theory, and three more are comfortably slotted in the top ten. Two out of three of Gawker Media’s “trending stories” are about GoT. A discussion of the GoT finale was the most popular article at The Atlantic, a literary magazine founded in 1857. The show got an entire, dedicated feature spread over at New York Magazine. A straight-up episode recap even slid into the New York Times’ vaunted “Most Viewed” list.’

Via Seriously Science?: ‘What happens to a body buried in cement? How long does it take to decompose? If the mafia were to do an experiment, it might well be this one! These (Italian) scientists set out to answer these questions using (what else? ) piglet corpses. Don’t worry, the authors assure us that they died of “natural causes”……’

Now It’s Sir Van Morrison (BBC News): “Throughout my career I have always preferred to let my music speak for me, and it is a huge honour to now have that body of work recognised in this way.”

Via Boing Boing: ‘Kenlissia Jones, 23, of Georgia has been charged with murder after a hospital social worker reported her to the police for taking cytotec pills she purchased online to terminate her pregnancy. She is being held on charges of malice murder and possession of a dangerous drug. Leaders in both pro-choice and anti-abortion groups said they were surprised by the charges….

[UPDATE: Murder charges dropped. Jones still faces a misdemeanor charge of possession of a dangerous drug.]’

Via NYTimes.com: ‘When it comes to insomnia, comparative effectiveness studies reveal that sleep medications aren’t the best bet for a cure, despite what the commercials say. Several clinical trials have found that they’re outperformed by cognitive behavioral therapy. C.B.T. for insomnia (or C.B.T.-I.) goes beyond the “sleep hygiene” most people know, though many don’t employ — like avoiding alcohol or caffeine near bedtime and reserving one’s bed for sleep (not reading or watching TV, for example). C.B.T. adds — through therapy visits or via self-guided treatments — sticking to a consistent wake time (even on weekends), relaxation techniques and learning to rid oneself of negative attitudes and thoughts about sleep….’

/blockquote>

Via New Scientist

Sacrifice of a Christian Child

Via Motherboard: ‘A series of videos recently uploaded on YouTube show two young children divulging disturbing information about a secret society active in north London.

The siblings reveal that they have been the victims of satanic ritual abuse, inflicted upon them at school and church in the affluent suburb of Hampstead. In hours of video footage that has been viewed millions of times, they describe the sacrificing and eating of babies, grotesque sex parties, and rituals of satanic worship.

“The assertions were that babies had been abused, tortured and then sacrificed,” a judge later put it. “Their throats were slit, blood was drunk and cult members would then dance wearing babies’ skulls—sometimes with blood and hair still attached—on their bodies.”

They name dozens of perpetrators, claiming teachers and the parents of other pupils belong to the pedophilic cult lead by their own father.

Naturally the police took these initial accusations seriously.

But after six officers searched the church, they found no reason to suspect any satanic behaviour. Eventually, after two police interviews, the children admitted it was false—citing physical and psychological abuse from their own mother Ella Draper and her partner Abraham Christie, who pressured them to lie.

“That was all made up,” the 9-year-old girl explains to the police. “He told me to say that, and I said ‘Why, Abraham? That’s not true though’ and he said ‘Yes, that is true, so don’t lie and say that to the police. They dance around with baby skulls in the church, don’t they?’ That’s what Abraham told me, and I said ‘no, they don’t’ and he said ‘yes, they do—stop lying, you little brat.’”

Despite the confession, campaigners are adamant that there is more to this case then we are being lead to believe. “Believe the children!” “Satanists!” were some of the cries that could been heard just a few weeks ago at a demonstration outside the school.

How did huge numbers of people become so frenzied over baseless accusations, and how did the line between fact and fiction become so blurred?

Meanwhile, High Court Justice Pauffley determined in March that there had been no satanic cult. “I am able to state with complete conviction that none of the allegations are true,” she said. “I am entirely certain that everything Ms. Draper, her partner Abraham Christie, and the children said about those matters was fabricated. The claims are baseless. The stories came about as the result of relentless emotional and psychological pressure as well as significant physical abuse.”

“Both [children] P and Q have suffered significantly. Their innocence was invaded. Their grip on reality was imperilled.”

“Their minds were scrambled.”

***

As bizarre as this story seems, it’s far from the first time someone has contrived a story about satanic horrors—and repeated it so many times that they themselves almost began to believe it. In fact, it’s been happening since the early 1980s. In a BBC Radio 4 documentary, journalist David Aaronovitch identifies the controversial book Sybil, published in 1973, as the predominant cause of what came to be known as “the satanic panic.”…’

Related articles

• Back to the ’80s, because we never left them (part 2)
• The ongoing legacy of the great satanic sex abuse panic
• Pro Tips: Alien Abduction or Satanic Ritual Abuse?
• Mass Hysteria and mass movements – related?

Via Salon.com: ‘A lot can happen between now and Election Day — and with no GOP adult in the room, that’s a frightening thought…

There was a time when the well-worn “clown car” description of the Republican presidential primary field wasn’t so on-the-nose. But as of right now, not even a few months into the process, it’s impossible to avoid daily news items in which one GOP candidate or another is self-immolating with ludicrous remarks or unforced errors. Frankly, it’d be really fun to observe if it weren’t for a nagging sense of danger….’

Via Boing Boing: ‘Cary… informs us that the world has finally made some sense, a Great Pyrenees has been elected mayor of a Minnesota town….’

Signature of James Joyce 

Via Motherboard: ‘Can a computer produce nonsense of sufficient nonsensical quality to convince a reader that they’re actually reading James Joyce? Or, rather, that they’re reading James Joyce’s unreadable opus Finnegan’s Wake, literature’s towering force of impenetrability?

Or, rather, can a James Joyce convince a reader that they’re not reading nonsense produced by a computer program and are indeed consuming high literature?…’

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Via Salon.com: ‘Why would I ever want to break up with the thing that had brought me actual mental health? And why hadn’t I known how hard it would be?…’

Via Salon.com: ‘New poll data suggest a majority of Americans now hold a favorable opinion of W. Here’s what they’re forgetting…’

Via Boing Boing: ‘“The tiny nation of the Republic of the Marshall Islands is once again at the center of international activism, filing two lawsuits, one in US federal court against the United States, and one in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against all nine countries that possess nuclear weapons,” writes Robert Alvarez at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

The Pacific island nation is suing the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China for failure to eliminate their nuclear arsenals, as called for by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and also names India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel as defendants….’

Via WIRED: ‘YOU KNOW THAT scene in the newish King Kong where those folks get eaten alive in a pit of giant insects? It’s a damn character assassination, through and through. The huge cricket-like bugs among them are based on the giant weta, the heaviest reliably reported insect on Earth, at 2.5 ounces. And really, the movie bugs could have been even bigger for all I care—it’s that their crummy attitude is all wrong. Giant weta, for their monstrous size, are actually quite sweet….’

Via io9: ‘If you don’t remember Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit, let me recap it for you. Three sinners are sent to hell and their punishment is each other. Confined to a room, the three people form a toxic triad, each one locked to another, each craving the love, respect, or approval that the others cannot give. Lose any one of the three and they’re all free,

but put them all together and they’re stuck.

Physicists apparently looked at that play and thought they’d recreate it. It started small. A young Russian physicist, Vitaly Efimov, thought he’d usher the 1970s with a new theory. Cool a group of three atoms down to superlow temperatures, and although any two members of the triad would repel each other alone, the three will become suddenly unable to escape each other. They will pull together in what would eventually be called an Efimov State….’

via National Geographic: ‘Nothing hurts like your dog not taking your calls….If your dog won’t give you the FaceTime of day, don’t worry, it’s not you.’

via 3quarksdaily: ‘So Jeb Bush gets asked if he would have invaded Iraq “knowing what we know now,” and he flubs his answer.

But he got asked the wrong question.

The right question to ask Jeb Bush is this:

“How dare you run for president when you should be dying of shame instead, because your brother is a war criminal?”

We seemed to have banished simple morality from all our discussions of public policy.

We call the Iraq War our “most serious foreign policy blunder” instead of what it really was: a war crime.’

Related articles

• Jeb Bush is the new Hillary Clinton
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via Boing Boing: ‘A snorkeler dragged in this 18-foot dead oarfish he found just off Catalina Island near Los Angeles on Sunday. Oarfish are rarely seen this large and usually found in deep open ocean waters.

“Not a whole lot is known about them, because they are sort of secretive,” ichthyology collections manager Rick Fennel at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County told the Los Angeles Times.’

Via Gizmodo: ‘As a student project for his degree in fine arts at Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm, Sweden, Oskar Pernefeldt designed this international flag to “be used while representing planet Earth” and “remind the people of Earth that we share this planet”…’

Via Motherboard: ‘Thankfully (if unfortunately) there’s something of a blueprint for conquering a sustained scorch: Australia’s Millennium Drought. Spanning from 1995 to 2009, it may not have been quite long enough to earn the mantle of “megadrought,” a term that typically describes a drought that lasts over two decades. But the Millennium Drought was long, harsh, and painful. It was the longest in Australia’s recorded history, yet the afflicted communities adapted, even thrived, in spite of the parch….’

Via Motherboard: ‘As of midnight on Sunday, for the first time since 2001, the NSA lost its legal authority to collect Americans phone records in bulk.

 

The Senate let three provisions of the Patriot Act expire on Sunday, including the controversial Section 215, which allows the spy agency to collect all phone records from telephone companies every three months, a practice that was ruled ruled illegal by a judge less than a month ago.

 

Two other provisions of the Patriot Act also expired. One of them allowed the government to obtain warrants from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on suspected “lone wolf” terrorists; and the other, known as the “roving wiretap,” allowed investigators to obtain permission to spy on multiple phones owned by one suspect with just one application.

 

While this might seem like a victory for anti-surveillance advocates, the truth is that most of the Patriot Act stands, and even this victory is going to be a short lived one….’

Related articles

• President Obama signs USA Freedom Act, a major NSA-reform bill, into law
• What Americans think about NSA surveillance, national security and privacy | Pew Research Center
• Senate Advances Reform Bill Curbing NSA Spy Powers
• Patriot Act expires
• Obama signs USA Freedom Act in major security policy reversal

Via Bitch Media (thanks to Boing Boing): ‘Columbia University student Emma Sulkowicz carried her mattress across the stage at her graduation ceremony this morning. Sulkowicz and her friends have been carrying the mattress around for the whole academic year in protest of the way the school handles sexual assault issues.  As New York Magazine explains, for her senior thesis in visual art, Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight), Sulkowicz vowed that she would carry her dorm-room mattress whenever she was on campus as long as her alleged rapist remained on campus. “The piece could potentially take a day, or it could go on until I graduate,” she said….’

I live in the overall Safest State in the US (WalletHub®).

Via Salon.com: ‘In just over two minutes, the Massachusetts senator nails how the 1 percent has conquered the U.S. government…’

Via Boing Boing: ‘The most outstanding and urgent hour of audio you’ll hear this week is the On the Media history of the PATRIOT Act (MP3), and the most important website you’ll visit this week is Sunset the PATRIOT Act, which lets you do something about it.

The On The Media special tells the story of how the PATRIOT Act was not only passed without any debate, but without any chance for Congress to read it, but goes on to point out all the ways in which mass surveillance, torture, and other gross abridgments of liberty were carried out without support from PATRIOT.

Our great and good friends at Fight for the Future, ringleaders of the SOPA and Net Neutrality fights, are using Sunset the PATRIOT Act activist site to pour the heat on the Senate, who have until the close of today’s session to kill the mass surveillance parts of PATRIOT….’

Via National Geographic: ‘Polar explorer Thomas Ulrich skis across a melt pond on sea ice near Champ Island, in Russia’s Franz Josef Land, in 2009. Climate change is making Arctic ice melt faster, making it more perilous to cross….’

Via Mental Floss: ‘The Dictionary of American Regional English, or DARE, contains all of the weird and wonderful words and phrases that make up the vocabulary of the 50 states. First published in 1985, the catalog of regional nuances is an ever-evolving document of American English as it’s spoken—but recently, DARE has fallen into danger due to lack of funding. A campaign is underway to raise $25,000 to help the organization retain its employees and continue its mission. To celebrate DARE and the treasures it contains, here are 29 words that should really extend beyond their regions….’

Interesting — not many of these are from the Northeast, and I have only ever heard one of the 29 (#7) used in conversation. If you come from a different region of the US, do some of the listed terms from your region sound familiar? Are they anything you have actually encountered?

Via 3quarksdaily: ‘The word psychosomatic refers to physical symptoms that occur for psychological reasons. Tears and blushing are examples of this, but they are normal responses that do not represent illness. It is only when psychosomatic symptoms go beyond the ordinary and impair our ability to function that illness results. Modern society likes the idea that we can think ourselves better. When we are unwell, we tell ourselves that if we adopt a positive mental attitude, we will have a better chance of recovery. I am sure that is correct. But society has not fully woken up to the frequency with which people do the opposite – unconsciously think themselves ill….’

San Andreas fault in the Carrizo Plain, Central California

Via Earthquake Country Alliance: What the movie got right and wrong based on earthquake science.

And: Fact Checking San Andreas with a Seismologist (Via Gizmodo)

Also: I guess we dodged the Really Big One this week.

Via Boing Boing: ‘It wasn’t until readers showed outrage that a Pennsylvania newspaper realized its wrongdoing. On Memorial Day, The Daily Item of Sunbury, PA ran an editorial piece by W. Richard Stover, who thought America needed a “regime change,” and the best way to go about this would be “execution by guillotine, firing squad, public hanging.”…’

Via Vox: ‘Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day often get equated, but there is an essential distinction between the two. Veteran’s Day honors all who have served the American military in wars. Memorial Day honors those who’ve perished. It’s an annual reminder that wars have grave human costs, which must be both recognized and minimized.

Those costs are not inevitable. We ought to also set aside time to remember those throughout American history who have tried hardest to reduce them, to prevent unnecessary loss of life both American and foreign: war resisters….’

The end of the world is just the beginning in NEAL STEPHENSON’s new novel (via Boing Boing): ‘The #1 New York Times bestselling author, known for Anathem (the Locus Award winner for Best Science Fiction Novel that the New York Times called “immensely entertaining”) and Reamde (which Cory Doctorow called “a triumph” in these pages) strikes again with exactly the kind of complex and mind-altering epic you’d hope for.

SEVENEVES. (You say “seven eves” with no pause.)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was described as being about “the end of the world and the happy-go-lucky days that follow.” Well, these End Times aren’t as freewheeling, but they’re endlessly fascinating, stocked with characters and concepts that will immerse you completely in their fracturing world. (Prepare yourself with the GLOSSARY.)

The story: A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space.

But the complexities and unpredictability of human nature coupled with unforeseen challenges and dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain . . .

Five thousand years later, their progeny—seven distinct races now three billion strong—embark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown . . . to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth.

A writer of dazzling genius and imaginative vision, Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, technology, psychology, and literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is both extraordinary and eerily recognizable.

As he did in Anathem, Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle, and Reamde, Stephenson explores some of our biggest ideas and perplexing challenges in a breathtaking saga that is daring, engrossing, and altogether brilliant….’

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Derek Beres via Big Think: ‘The mystical is chemical. When …

 egoistic brain centers shut down, crosstalk occurs between neural regions that don’t otherwise communicate. Religious literature has expressed the sentiments that result for eons: unity, serenity, peacefulness, compassion. Given the frayed wires so many humans grapple with today, I’m not sure what could be more therapeutic, or spiritual, than this….’

Via Big Think: ‘Well, we’re about a week into the @POTUS era so here’s what we now know:

Obama’s not a big fan of the men’s rights movement.

He still doesn’t care for the Cubs.

Tweeting at him may or may not get you entered into a scary White House database.

Really, that’s about it….’

Via Salon.com: ‘Debunking the phony case that more guns will stop crime: The NRA and some researchers claim we just need more good guys with guns. The math shows they’re all dead wrong…’

Via NYTimes.com: ‘Ireland became the first nation to approve same-sex marriage by a popular vote, sweeping aside the opposition of the Roman Catholic Church in a resounding victory Saturday for the gay rights movement and placing the country at the vanguard of social change.

With the final ballots counted, the vote was 62 percent in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage, and 38 percent opposed….’

Related articles

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Chris Bucholz via Cracked.com: ‘Despite the perfectly healthy and sane number of times I’ve taken my child for a walk through the deepest, darkest part of the woods, I’ve never even come close to losing him in there. But, as my psychiatrist loves to ask me, what if? What’s the worst that could happen? To find out, I turned to the ever-growing number of books and movies featuring feral children that I’ve extensively collected while giggling over the past year, and I pored through them looking for common themes. The next time my shrink smugly asks about my woods/children practices, I’ll be ready with an answer….’

Belinda Carroll via Cracked.com: ‘When we in the gay community got our “Now That You Are Queer” welcome packet, it never said how much responsibility came with it. It implied that being gay was just a matter of having great sex, awesome parties, and some light weather-changing capabilities. We in no way realized that we were going to cause some of the largest disasters in human history….’

Via Lifehacker: ‘Retailers are darn good at inventing tricks to separate us from our money. Whether it be through the price points they choose, how they market their products, or their discounting techniques, they are experts at getting inside our brains and influencing our buying decisions. Here are a few of the most popular pricing tricks retailers’ use, along with some easy ways to fight back…’

Via Vox: ‘A Cleveland police officer on Saturday was found not guilty of two counts of voluntary manslaughter for taking part in a 2012 shooting that killed two unarmed suspects, the Associated Press’s Mark Gillespie reported.

Michael Brelo, who is white, was one of several police officers who fired nearly 140 bullets into a car occupied by Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, both of whom were black and unarmed, following a police chase that involved more than 100 officers. Brelo was the only officer charged for the shooting, so none of the cops involved will be convicted unless someone else is charged.

The chase and shooting prompted a US Department of Justice investigation that found a pattern of abuse and misuse of force at the Cleveland Police Department.

The Justice Department will review the shooting and verdict in another investigation’