‘In 2024, if all goes to plan, a spacecraft named the Europa Clipper will embark on a journey to an icy, gray moon of Jupiter covered in rust-colored gashes. It will swim along the Jovian satellite’s gravitational tides, half facing the orb from orbit, half exposed to the airless ocean of space. And alongside its high-tech spectrometer, radar system, optical imager and other instruments built to search for proof of alien habitats, the Europa Clipper will be bringing my name. It can bring yours, too.
You just have to sign up for NASA’s free “Message in a Bottle program” here. The campaign closes at 11:59 p.m. EST on Dec. 31 (0459 GMT on Jan. 1); at the time I’m writing this, almost 900,000 names have been entered….’ (Space)
‘The transportation sector generates the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, almost all of it from cars and trucks. Yet the nation is starkly divided on the solution. An overlay placed on the states most hostile to electric vehicle policies would dovetail almost perfectly with those that voted for Donald Trump in 2020. According to a trade association quarterly report, deep red Wyoming, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Mississippi, and North Dakota have the nation’s lowest rates of EV sales. And good luck finding a public charging station in the Deep South or the Great Plains….’ ( By Renée Loth via Boston Globe)
Almost every values-based difference in American society dovetails neatly with the Red-Blue divide. The only way to avoid being brutalized by the culture wars is to retreat to your corner. Incontrovertible to me that we don’t live in one country… and probably shouldn’t.
‘trump isn’t hiding it any more, nor are his people. The Republican “frontrunner” is openly campaigning on creating a fascist state, praising dictators, and now trying to sound like one…
The New York Times’ Peter Baker summed up… : “Spokesman denies that trump rhetoric echoes that of dictators like Hitler and Mussolini and declares that those who say it does will find ‘their entire existence will be crushed when president trump returns to the White House.'”
Also responding to The Post’s report was author and MSNBC analyst Jonathan Alter, who wrote: “As we learned from Mein Kampf, when a demagogue tells you what he is going to do, believe him.”.’ (Boing Boing)
Not exactly, although there are some near misses. Perhaps it is unsurprising that the words that are nearly universal are mostly related to foods that originated in one place, and then spread around the world. Not having developed independently, you would not expect their names to have developed independently. ( Cindy Blanco via DuoLingo Blog)
‘Some neuroscientists now believe that the drugs’ mental-health benefits don’t come from tripping….’ ( Cornell-Weill director of psychopharmacology Dr Richard A. Friedman via The Atlantic)
The toolbar is irretrievable but following the space station in orbit. Surprisingly bright and visible from earth with binoculars. ( By Robert Lea published 1 day ago via Space)
‘From the passenger pigeon to the woolly mammoth, a variety of techniques could potentially resurrect extinct species, whether completely extinct or merely extirpated from the wild….’ (Discover Magazine)
‘Giant black holes were supposed to be bit players in the early cosmic story. But James Webb Space Telescope observations are finding an unexpected abundance of the beasts….’ (WIRED)
‘Explaining the phenomenon of pareidolia, which causes us to see facial patterns in ordinary objects and surfaces. I also discuss illusions, paintings, and psychological research related to it….’
I have previously written on this phenomenon, which I love. Clarke says he thinks it arises from the fact that we are exposed to faces early and thus overlearn the skill of recognizing them. I think it is more than that — pattern recognition is not all one thing and face perception uses different, and favored, ‘software’ than object perception given its evolutionary advantages.
‘Australian restaurateur Paul Mathis is on a quest to introduce a symbol for the most common word in written English: “The.” Mathis envisions the new symbol as a time- and space-saving tool, much like the ampersand (&). The symbol looks like the marriage of a “T” and lowercase “h,” and is quite similar to the Serbian Cyrillic letter “Tshe.” The new symbol is available to Android users on the app THE Keyboard Pro 1….’ (Laughing Squid)
‘Every time you try to open your favorite apps, wait. Take a deep breath in, and let it out slowly. one sec gives you the chance to pause and think twice – before you get sucked into an endless loophole designed to draw you in for hours again….’
In observance of Guy Fawkes Day, as I have written in years past:
“Don’t you remember the 5th of November Is gunpowder treason and plot? I don’t see the reason why gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot A stick and a stake, for Queen Victoria’s Sake I pray master give us a faggit If you dont give us one well take two The better for us and the worse for you”
Tonight is Guy Fawkes Night (Bonfire Night or Gunpowder Night), the anniversary of the ambitious but abortive Gunpowder Plot of 1605, a failed attempt by a group of persecuted English Catholics to assassinate Anglican King James I of England and. VI of Scotland in order to replace him with a Catholic. Guy Fawkes, who was left in charge of the gunpowder placed underneath the House of Lords, was discovered and arrested and the plot unmasked. Fawkes, along with other surviving conspirators, was executed in January 1606 (hung, drawn and quartered).
A law establishing the anniversary of the thwarted plot as a day of thanksgiving was quickly passed and became the annual occasion for anti-Catholic fervor, with the ringing of church bells and the lighting of bonfires, to the point of forgetting the deliverance of the monarch. “Although Guy Fawkes’ actions have been considered acts of terrorism by many people, cynical Britons… sometimes joke that he was the only man to go to Parliament with honourable intentions.”
Fun fact: it seems that the term Guy (which now simply refers to a man or even more broadly a person) became a pejorative to describe someone grotesque because of the conception of Guy Fawkes’ villainy.
Celebrations of Guy Fawkes Day persist through the British Isles and become occasions for revelling in the burning of effigies (“guys”) of the hate figures of the day alongside Fawkes.The ritual has included Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Boris Johnson, donald trump, and disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein among others.
The annual festival has become much more about festive fun than solemn remembrance:
“One important aspect of the celebration is certainly venting! Shouting into the nights air is a wonderful release and an important part of the celebration through the centuries. There is something magic and healing about noise — cannons, bells and chants. Divide the group and assign each a different chant. Let them compete for noise and drama. Great fun. The chants are important aspects of freedom of expression and freedom to hold one’s own beliefs. Like much of that which is pure celebration chants need not be considered incantations or wishes of ill will at all times. Taken with the rest of celebration they contribute to a much more abstract whole where fun is the primary message for most.”
Some say that the celebration of Guy Fawkes Night helped shape the modern tradition of trick or treating, although it has ancient pre-Christian origins. Some American colonists celebrated Guy Fawkes Day and those fleeing the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s helped popularize Hallowe’en. By the 19th century, British children wearing masks and carrying effigies of Fawkes were roaming the streets on the evening of November 5 asking for “a penny for the Guy,” with any money gathered being used to buy fireworks — the explosives never used by the plotters — to be set off while the Guy was immolated on the bonfire.
Many feel that Guy Fawkes (Bonfire Night) has a particularly Pagan feel. As with Hallowe’en, it may be no accident that Guy Fawkes Day coincides with the Celtic festival of Samhain, one of the moon festivals featuring large bonfires. Some think of Guy Fawkes Night as a sort of detached Samhain celebration and the effigies of Guy Fawkes burned on the bonfires compare with the diabolical images associated with Samhain or Hallowe’en. But, as one fan says, “Guy Fawkes Night has never sold out to Hallmark… Halloween is all about fakery – makeup, facepaint, costumes, imitation blood. Fireworks Night is about very real, very powerful, very hot flames.”
But the folklore of the holiday does continue to morph. We don’t celebrate the thwarting of the plot because we are happy with our oppressive rulers, and Guy Fawkes has gone from being reviled as a villain to revered as a hero. His reputation has gone from that of a religious extremist to one of a populist underdog, especially after Alan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta and its 2005 film adaptation, in which the masked knife-wielding V, who also plots to bomb the Houses of Parliament, lashes out against the fascist state in a dystopian future Britain. (It was Moore’s collaborator David Lloyd who developed the idea of dressing V as Guy Fawkes.) Since then, protestors have donned V’s mask as an all-purpose badge of rebellion in anti-government demonstrations and the anti-capitalist movement, particularly Occupy. The hacktivist group Anonymous has adopted the Guy Fawkes mask as their symbol. In 2011, it was the top-selling mask on Amazon and has been seen throughout the ongoing Hong Kong protests against Chinese repression. David Lloyd commented, “The Guy Fawkes mask has now become a common brand and a convenient placard to use in protest against tyranny – and I’m happy with people using it, it seems quite unique, an icon of popular culture being used this way.”
Here is a collection of verse in celebration of Guy Fawkes Day. You are also welcome to don your masks, listen for some fireworks, scan the horizon from a high place for bonfires dedicated to smashing the state, or free yourself from your unwanted burdens by watching them go up in flames.
‘Watching these Hot Wheels toy cars zoom down an empty waterslide made me feel like a kid again for 5 minutes. I love how the video is filmed from the POV of a camera rolling down the slide with the cars, making it feel like as a viewer, you’re sitting on top of it….’ (Boing Boing)
This is surprisingly comforting, and what a great collection of Hot Wheels cars!
Streamer wastes scammers’ time on an unprecedented scale
‘Scambaiting – or the act of deliberately wasting a scam caller’s time – is one of my guilty pleasures of late, and YouTuber/Twitch streamer Kitboga is one of the undisputed masters of it. It’s often said that every minute of a scammer’s time that you waste is time they can’t spend hounding an actual victim, and Kitboga put together an ingenious way of maximizing the time spent wasted: a fake crypto-transfer website.
Scammers log on after being baited in by an initial phone call with Kitboga or one of his team, thinking that they’re just a few clicks away from a wallet full of Bitcoin, but are thrown into an endless labyrinth of captchas, “security questions”, and held phone calls instead….’ (Boing Boing)
‘It’s a crazy idea—and it unfortunately needs debunking…’ (Antonio De Loera-Brust, former special assistant to the U.S. Secretary of State,via Foreign Policy)
‘”If crooked Joe and the Democrats get away with removing my name from the ballot, then there will never be a free election in America again. We will have become a dictatorship where your president is chosen for you,” he continued, forgetting about the 11 other Republican candidates voters have to choose from. “You will no longer have a vote, or certainly won’t have a meaningful vote, and you could say, frankly, that that has already begun.” Yes, you could say that again. It began on June 16, 2015, when trump launched his first MAGA presidential campaign. (See his Truth Social video, reposted by Patriot Takes.)…’. (Boing Boingi)
A reprise of my traditional Hallowe’en post of past years:
It is that time of year again. What has become a time of disinhibited hijinx and mayhem, and a growing marketing bonanza for the kitsch-manufacturers and -importers, has primeval origins as the Celtic New Year’s Eve, Samhain (pronounced “sow-en”). The harvest is over, summer ends and winter begins, the Old God dies and returns to the Land of the Dead to await his rebirth at Yule, and the land is cast into darkness. The veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead becomes frayed and thin, and dispossessed dead mingle with the living, perhaps seeking a body to possess for the next year as their only chance to remain connected with the living, who hope to scare them away with ghoulish costumes and behavior, escape their menace by masquerading as one of them, or placate them with offerings of food, in hopes that they will go away before the new year comes. For those prepared, a journey to the other side could be made at this time.
With Christianity, perhaps because with calendar reform it was no longer the last day of the year, All Hallows’ Eve became decathected, a day for innocent masquerading and fun, taking its name Hallowe’en as a contraction and corruption of All Hallows’ Eve.
All Saints’ Day may have originated in its modern form with the 8th century Pope Gregory III. Hallowe’en customs reputedly came to the New World with the Irish immigrants of the 1840’s. The prominence of trick-or-treating has a slightly different origin, however.
The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have originated not with the Irish Celts, but with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On November 2, All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for “soul cakes,” made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers, could expedite a soul’s passage to heaven.
English: A traditional Irish turnip Jack-o’-lantern from the early 20th century.
Jack-o’-lanterns were reportedly originally turnips; the Irish began using pumpkins after they immigrated to North America, given how plentiful they were here. The Jack-o-lantern custom probably comes from Irish folklore. As the tale is told, a man named Jack, who was notorious as a drunkard and trickster, tricked Satan into climbing a tree. Jack then carved an image of a cross in the tree’s trunk, trapping the devil up the tree. Jack made a deal with the devil that, if he would never tempt him again, he would promise to let him down the tree.
According to the folk tale, after Jack died, he was denied entrance to Heaven because of his evil ways, but he was also denied access to Hell because he had tricked the devil. Instead, the devil gave him a single ember to light his way through the frigid darkness. The ember was placed inside a hollowed-out turnip to keep it glowing longer.
Nowadays, a reported 99% of cultivated pumpkin sales in the US go for jack-o-lanterns.
Folk traditions that were in the past associated with All Hallows’ Eve took much of their power, as with the New Year’s customs about which I write here every Dec. 31st, from the magic of boundary states, transition, and liminality.
The idea behind ducking, dooking or bobbing for apples seems to have been that snatching a bite from the apple enables the person to grasp good fortune. Samhain is a time for getting rid of weakness, as pagans once slaughtered weak animals which were unlikely to survive the winter. A common ritual calls for writing down weaknesses on a piece of paper or parchment, and tossing it into the fire. There used to be a custom of placing a stone in the hot ashes of the bonfire. If in the morning a person found that the stone had been removed or had cracked, it was a sign of bad fortune. Nuts have been used for divination: whether they burned quietly or exploded indicated good or bad luck. Peeling an apple and throwing the peel over one’s shoulder was supposed to reveal the initial of one’s future spouse. One way of looking for omens of death was for peope to visit churchyards
The Witches’ Sabbath aspect of Hallowe’en seems to result from Germanic influence and fusion with the notion of Walpurgisnacht. (You may be familiar with the magnificent musical evocation of this, Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain.)
Although probably not yet in a position to shape mainstream American Hallowe’en traditions, Mexican Dia de los Muertos observances have started to contribute some delightful and whimsical iconography to our encounter with the eerie and unearthly as well. As this article in The Smithsonian reviews, ‘In the United States, Halloween is mostly about candy, but elsewhere in the world celebrations honoring the departed have a spiritual meaning…’
Reportedly, more than 80% of American families decorate their homes, at least minimally, for Hallowe’en. What was the holiday like forty or fifty years ago in the U.S. when, bastardized as it has now become with respect to its pagan origins, it retained a much more traditional flair? Before the era of the pay-per-view ’spooky-world’ type haunted attractions and its Martha Stewart yuppification with, as this irreverent Salon article from several years ago [via walker] put it, monogrammed jack-o’-lanterns and the like? One issue may be that, as NPR observed,
‘”Adults have hijacked Halloween… Two in three adults feel Halloween is a holiday for them and not just kids,” Forbes opined in 2012, citing a public relations survey. True that when the holiday was imported from Celtic nations in the mid-19th century — along with a wave of immigrants fleeing Irelands potato famine — it was essentially a younger persons’ game. But a little research reveals that adults have long enjoyed Halloween — right alongside young spooks and spirits.’
Is that necessarily a bad thing? A 1984 essay by Richard Seltzer, frequently referenced in other sources, entitled “Why Bother to Save Hallowe’en?”, argues as I do that reverence for Hallowe’en is good for the soul, young or old.
“Maybe at one time Hallowe’en helped exorcise fears of death and ghosts and goblins by making fun of them. Maybe, too, in a time of rigidly prescribed social behavior, Hallowe’en was the occasion for socially condoned mischief — a time for misrule and letting loose. Although such elements still remain, the emphasis has shifted and the importance of the day and its rituals has actually grown.…(D)on’t just abandon a tradition that you yourself loved as a child, that your own children look forward to months in advance, and that helps preserve our sense of fellowship and community with our neighbors in the midst of all this madness.”
That would be anathema to certain segments of society, however. Hallowe’en certainly inspires a backlash by fundamentalists who consider it a blasphemous abomination. ‘Amateur scholar’ Isaac Bonewits details academically the Hallowe’en errors and lies he feels contribute to its being reviled. Some of the panic over Hallowe’en is akin to the hysteria, fortunately now debunked, over the supposed epidemic of ‘ritual Satanic abuse’ that swept the Western world in the ’90’s.
The horror film has become inextricably linked to Hallowe’en tradition, although the holiday itself did not figure in the movies until John Carpenter took the slasher genre singlehandedly by storm. Googling “scariest films”, you will, grimly, reap a mother lode of opinions about how to pierce the veil to journey to the netherworld and reconnect with that magical, eerie creepiness in the dark (if not the over-the-top blood and gore that has largely replaced the subtlety of earlier horror films).
The Carfax Abbey Horror Films and Movies Database includes best-ever-horror-films lists from Entertainment Weekly, Mr. Showbiz and Hollywood.com. I’ve seen most of these; some of their choices are not that scary, some are just plain silly, and they give extremely short shrift to my real favorites, the evocative classics of the ’30’s and ’40’s when most eeriness was allusive and not explicit. And here’s what claims to be a compilation of links to the darkest and most gruesome sites on the web. “Hours and hours of fun for morbidity lovers.”
Boing Boing does homage to a morbid masterpiece of wretched existential horror, two of the tensest, scariest hours of my life repeated every time I watch it:
‘…The Thing starts. It had been 9 years since The Exorcist scared the living shit out of audiences in New York and sent people fleeing into the street. Really … up the aisle and out the door at full gallop. You would think that people had calmed down a bit since then. No…
The tone of The Thing is one of isolation and dread from the moment it starts. By the time our guys go to the Norwegian outpost and find a monstrous steaming corpse with two merged faces pulling in opposite directions the audience is shifting in their seats. Next comes the dog that splits open with bloody tentacles flying in all directions. The women are covering their eyes….’
Meanwhile, what could be creepier in the movies than the phenomenon of evil children? Gawker knows what shadows lurk in the hearts of the cinematic young:
‘In celebration of Halloween, we took a shallow dive into the horror subgenre of evil-child horror movies. Weird-kid cinema stretches back at least to 1956’s The Bad Seed, and has experienced a resurgence recently via movies like The Babadook, Goodnight Mommy, and Cooties. You could look at this trend as a natural extension of the focus on domesticity seen in horror via the wave of haunted-house movies that 2009’s Paranormal Activity helped usher in. Or maybe we’re just wizening up as a culture and realizing that children are evil and that film is a great way to warn people of this truth. Happy Halloween. Hope you don’t get killed by trick-or-treaters.’
In any case: trick or treat! …And may your Hallowe’en soothe your soul.
‘There’s a theory I like that suggests why the nineteenth century is so rich in ghost stories and hauntings. Carbon monoxide poisoning from gas lamps.
Street lighting and indoor lighting burned coal gas, which is sooty and noxious. It gives off methane and carbon monoxide. Outdoors, the flickering flames of the gas lamps pumped carbon monoxide into the air—air that was often trapped low down in the narrow streets and cramped courtyards of industrial cities and towns. Indoors, windows closed against the chilly weather prevented fresh oxygen from reaching those sitting up late by lamplight.
Low-level carbon monoxide poisoning produces symptoms of choking, dizziness, paranoia, including feelings of dread, and hallucinations. Where better to hallucinate than in the already dark and shadowy streets of Victorian London? Or in the muffled and stifling interiors of New England?…’ ( Jeanette Winterson via The Paris Review)
‘‘I want to start a group to go to breakfast, 10 of us, and we each bring $100 to tip the waiter,’ Richard Brooks wrote on Facebook…’ ( via Washington Post)
‘Last week, Delta Air Lines announced changes to its SkyMiles program that will make accruing status and taking advantage of perks much harder. Instead of relying on a combination of dollars spent and miles traveled in the air, Delta will grant status based on a single metric—dollars spent—and raise the amount of spending required to get it. In short, SkyMiles is no longer a frequent-flier program; it’s a big-spender program. These changes are so drastic that one of the reporters at the preeminent travel-rewards website The Points Guy declared that he’s going to “stop chasing airline status.”
When even the points insiders are sick of playing the mileage game, something has clearly gone wrong. In fact, frequent-flier programs are a symptom of a much deeper rot in the American air-travel industry. And although getting mad at airlines is perfectly reasonable, the blame ultimately lies with Congress….’ (The Atlantic)
‘donald trump has never been shy with his language, but recently, the Times editor Alex Kingsbury argues, his violent speech has escalated. In the past few weeks alone, trump suggested that his own former general was treasonous, said that shoplifters should be shot and exhorted his followers to “go after” New York’s attorney general. Alex says he understands why voters tune trump out but stresses the need to pay attention and take action for the sake of American democracy….’ (Opinion – The New York Times)
‘Public fascination with dissociation and its disorders has endured for many years — examples include the books “Sybil” and “The Three Faces of Eve,” both adapted into wildly popular feature films, each about a woman with “multiple personalities.” …Now people are capturing their experiences with dissociation and posting them on social media. …as conversations about mental health continue to migrate into public forums. But research suggests that much of this content isn’t providing reliable information. We asked several mental health providers to explain more about dissociation….’ (The New York Times)
One of my colleagues and mentors, Dr Judith Herman, psychiatric pioneer in trauma studies, is quoted as opining that dissociation is “way under diagnosed.” There is a sense in which she and others with similar views are right. I am constantly diagnosing dissociative disorders that have not been recognized by mental health professionals not familiar enough with their recognition, often resulting in years or decades of unsuccessful treatment and needless distress for patients whose difficulties have been misdiagnosed.
But the opposite problem is also emerging. Fueled by the easy online dissemination of psychiatric information both accurate and inaccurate, dissociation and dissociative identity disorder have joined a series of faddish diagnoses with which people self-label themselves. These have included chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, ADD and ADHD, bipolar disorder, and OCD. Encouraging patients to seek responsible diagnosis by trained and experienced professionals rather than doing the research themselves often leads to dismissive claims that we want to maintain a monopoly on esoteric knowledge that should be democratized and freely available. Self-diagnosis has come to be seen as a virtue, but it is anything but. It should not be seen in terms of the issue of access to the information. The old adage in the field, “A physician who treats themself has a fool for a patient” is truer still for a non-physician, and especially so in mental health care.
Sometimes a patient presenting with an insistence on having a particular diagnosis represents wishful thinking. The aphorism “You see what you want to see and you hear what you want to hear” is pervasive, but someone discerning pointed out that the “second ‘you’ in each clause is not actually ‘you’.” The important thing to figure out in their treatment is what part of them is longing to construe things that way and why. Sometimes you might simply assume that the insistence, for example, on having a dissociative disorder is because explaining things that way represents a hopeful move in the direction of applying the effective treatment. But many of us feel that there are no treatment approaches found to be of established specificity and effectiveness for dissociative experiences. This is different from the situation in, say, insisting that your life struggles are explained by having ADHD, when a request for treatment with a stimulant like Adderail is often not far behind. Or, sometimes, a patient’s investment in having a given disorder may represent a wish to be let ‘off the hook,’ in this age of rampant medicalization of behaviors and behavioral disorders and deflection of personal responsibility.
I think it is no surprise that the therapeutic advances in psychiatry creating the most excitement these days — ketamine, TMS, and psychedelic treatment — all to some degree share one appeal, that of being relatively ‘quick fixes’ in contrast to the preexisting modalities of treatment we have offered. Do they represent true exciting advances or simply what needs to be offered to appeal in times of changing political, economic, social and cultural conditions?
Related: New Study Evaluates Quality of Information on YouTube, TikTok About Dissociative Identity Disorder (American Psychiatric Association)
‘Not only are vaccine cards no longer necessary to track your shots or to prove your vaccination status, the CDC has stopped issuing them. So if you can’t find yours, no worries. And if you do still have it handy, tuck it away to pass on to your grandchildren, as a souvenir of that time you lived through a pandemic….’
‘When two ions passed by each other without colliding, some of their virtual photons interacted and turned into real photons with very high energy. These photons then collided with each other and produced electron-positron pairs, which were detected by the STAR detector at RHIC. The scientists analyzed more than 6,000 such pairs and found that their angular distribution matched the theoretical prediction for matter creation from light….’ ( science and space via rightnes)
‘America has begun to treat Covid-19 like just any other disease — boosters are now arriving on an annual fall cycle, on the flu model, with large portions of the country not bothering with them, also on the flu model.
But, objectively, Covid is not just another disease — not yet. Last year, it was the only infectious disease among the country’s top 10 causes of death. We are obviously on an off-ramp from the pandemic emergency, since even though many more Americans have gotten Covid over the last year, many fewer are dying than did in the first two years of Covid-19. But while the worst is behind us, it’s also not quite right to see the disease as epidemiological wallpaper.
This is precisely the long transition from emergency to normality that the immunologist and epidemiologist Michael Mina has predicted since almost the beginning of the pandemic. Beginning in 2020, Mina took pains to describe Covid-19 as a “textbook virus,” with features that may have startled lay people — long Covid and post-acute sequelae, waning immunity and reinfection — but were, in his view, simply what could be expected from a new pathogen spreading through a global population with no immunity….’ (The New York Times)
‘On Wednesday, October 4 in the U.S., the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will test its Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) system. At 2:20 p.m. Eastern, people will receive a message on their mobile phones that reads, “THIS IS A TEST of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed.” In addition to the message, your iPhone will vibrate and play “a special sound that’s similar to an alarm” even if your iPhone is on silent. The alert will appear in Spanish for users who set their devices for that language.
FEMA says that the test will run for 30 minutes, so if your phone is off at the start of the test but then turned on during the 30-minute window, you will get a test message. The test message should be sent only once and you can delete the message after it is received. If a person subscribes to a wireless provider that does not participate in WEA, they will not receive the test….’ (Macworld)
‘There’s a new COVID booster at pharmacies, and the simple thing to say about it is this: It’s good, it’s free, and you should get it. Unfortunately, the process of getting one of these shots isn’t going smoothly for everyone, with some people being told they’ll need to pay for it, and some having appointments canceled at the last minute. Let’s talk about what’s going on, and what you can do about it.
The underlying reason for the confusion, by the way, is that we are no longer in the national public health emergency that was declared in early 2020. This means that certain vaccination and testing programs no longer operate the way they used to. Previously, state-run vaccine programs coordinated shipment and payment for vaccines; now, it’s up to manufacturers, pharmacies, and insurance companies to fold COVID vaccination into their “business as usual” operations. And that transition has been a bit bumpy….’ (Lifehacker)
‘First it was chess and Go. Now AI can beat us at Diplomacy, the most human of board games. The way it wins offers hope that maybe AI will be a delight….’ (WIRED)
‘donald trump admired a Glock handgun today during a campaign stop in South Carolina with Marjorie Taylor Greene cheering him on. “I want to buy one,” the MAGA conman said. (See video posted by The Recount.)
His campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, even posted a video (different angle from the one below) about Trump’s shopping spree at the gun store, tweeting, “President trump purchases a @GlockInc in South Carolina!” (See image at bottom of this post.)
And then, after the tweet went viral, it mysteriously disappeared. And Cheung suddenly denied the purchase.
Hmm, looks like somebody just remembered that the former one-term president is also a four-times indicted crook — and perhaps not the best match under federal law to purchase or possess a handgun….’ (Boing Boing)
‘In their new book Tyranny of the Minority, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — the authors of How Democracies Die — argue America’s founders faced [a problem analogous to Scylla and Charybdis]: navigating between two types of dictatorship that threatened to devour the new country.
The founders, per Levitsky and Ziblatt, were myopically focused on one of them: the fear of a majority-backed demagogue seizing power. As a result, they made it exceptionally difficult to pass new laws and amend the constitution. But the founders, the pair argues, lost sight of a potentially more dangerous monster on the other side of the strait: a determined minority abusing this system to impose its will on the democratic majority.
“By steering the republic so sharply away from the Scylla of majority tyranny, America’s founders left it vulnerable to the Charybdis of minority rule,” they write….’ (Vox)
“The Witches’ Thanksgiving and the second harvest. 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, who dwells, a happy captive, in Modron’s magickal Otherworld — his mother’s womb. Only in this way can he be reborn.”
‘Sarah Palin has a gift for uttering semi-coherent statements that make her out to be a victim of nefarious agents of the deep state. Whenever she or any of her MAGA compatriots stumble into mishaps or display questionable judgment and subsequently face repercussions, Palin is quick to weave a narrative of misunderstood heroes facing unjust punishment.
In a recent appearance on Newsmax, hosted by Eric Bolling, Palin voiced her discontent regarding the prison terms handed to members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers for their attempts to overthrow the US government:
It’s so disheartening, the examples that you’ve given, Eric. It makes the populace lose a lot of faith in our government and that’s an understatement. Unfortunately, what this leads to, when we recognize the examples that you just gave, the two-tier different justice systems that apply according to politics, you know it makes the good guy think “what’s the use in being a good guy?” We’re gonna be punished, you know, we’re picked on, is what we are under this system. But we can’t feel helpless and hopeless.
Palin seems to suggest that she and her fellow pseudo-patriots should abandon their “good guy” personas. These “good guys” have been found guilty by a jury of their peers of participating in a seditious conspiracy to violently subvert the Presidential election and impose a dictator. It makes you wonder; what does she want them to do as “bad guys?”…’ (Boing Boing)
‘Webcam video … of Mexico’s Popocatépet volcano showed a fleet of UFOs exiting the crater and zipping off into the sky. This shouldn’t be a surprise as, according to Coast to Coast, Popocatépetl has long been thought to be an entrance to a secret UFO base deep within the Earth’s core. This is undeniable proof of that theory unless you somehow believe the wildly outlandish proposition that what you’re seeing is actually a line of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites crossing the sky at an angle that makes them appear to be exiting the volcano….’ (Boing Boing)
‘As the U.S. government built its latest stretch of border wall, Mexico made a statement of its own by laying remains of the Berlin Wall a few steps away. The 3-ton pockmarked, gray concrete slab sits between a bullring, a lighthouse and the border wall, which extends into the Pacific Ocean…
Shards of the Berlin Wall scattered worldwide after it crumbled in 1989, with collectors putting them in hotels, schools, transit stations and parks. Marcos Cline, who makes commercials and other digital productions in Los Angeles, needed a home for his artifact and found an ally in Tijuana’s mayor…
President Joe Biden issued an executive order his first day in office to halt wall construction, ending a signature effort by his predecessor, Donald Trump. But his administration has moved ahead with small, already-contracted projects, including replacing a two-layered wall in San Diego standing 18 feet (5.5 meters) high with one rising 30 feet (9.1 meters) and stretching 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) to the ocean..’ (POLITICO)
Interestingly, Tijuana’s mayor Montserrat Caballero, who is married to an American living in San Diego, used to negotiate the Tijuana-San Diego border crossing with frequency. However, since alerted by US intelligence to credible threats against her (probably cartel-related) and an assassination attempt on her bodyguard, she and her son have been living in a military barracks in Tijuana under Mexican government protection.
‘A majority of Americans say their concern about artificial intelligence in daily life outweighs their excitement about it, according to a Pew Research Center survey of more than 11,000 US adults. The results come at a time when a growing number of people are paying attention to news about AI in their daily lives. Pew has run this survey twice before and reports that the number of people more concerned than excited about AI jumped from 37 percent in 2021 to 52 percent this month….’ (WIRED)
Woolly Mammoth Coming Back to Life by 2027: De-Extinction Details
‘Colossal recently added $60 million in funding to move toward a 2027 de-extinction of the woolly mammoth.
The Dallas-based company is now working to edit the genes for the reincarnation of the mammal.
Colossal planned to reintroduce the woolly mammoth into Russia, but that may shift….’ (Popular Mechanic)
‘David LaFlamme, who infused the psychedelic rock of the 1960s with the plaintive sounds of an electric violin as a founder of It’s a Beautiful Day, the ethereal San Francisco band whose breakout hit, “White Bird,” encapsulated the hippie-era longing for freedom, died on Aug. 6 in Santa Rosa, Calif. He was 82.
His daughter Kira LaFlamme said the cause of his death, at a health care facility, was complications of Parkinson’s disease.
Mr. LaFlamme had seemed an unlikely fit for the role of flower-power troubadour. He was a classically trained violinist who had performed with the Utah Symphony Orchestra. He was an Army veteran. “When I was a young man, I carried my M-1 very proudly and was ready to do my duty to defend my country,” he said in a 2007 video interview….’ (New York Times obituary)
‘A new POLITICO Magazine/Ipsos poll provides some bad news for trump: Even as he remains the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination, the cascading indictments are likely to take a toll on his general election prospects.
The survey results suggest Americans are taking the cases seriously — particularly the Justice Department’s 2020 election case — and that most people are skeptical of trump’s claim to be the victim of a legally baseless witch hunt or an elaborate, multi-jurisdictional effort to “weaponize” law enforcement authorities against him….’ (POLITICO)
‘I’ve been studying nonverbal communication for over 50 years, 25 of them as an FBI agent specializing in decoding human behavior. I learned that humans are fairly good at lying — but they’re lousy at concealing their true emotions, especially when stressed. We reveal our unspoken thoughts in our bodies: faces flushed with embarrassment, lips pursed at unwelcome questions, fingers covering the neck dimple when discussing a touchy subject…
Here’s what I noticed at this debate:…’ (POLITICO)
‘9/11 Truther Vivek Ramaswamy won the hearts and minds of GOP voters last night by exuding the smarmy smugness of incel streamer Nick Fuentes while siding with Russia, calling for an increase in the combustion of fossil fuels, and for repeatedly interrupting the debate to hurl insults at the other candidates. Last night’s performance has cemented his reputation as a younger, nastier, and more energetic version of Donald Trump. DeSantis’s tactic of angrily yelling his answers didn’t have a chance against Ramaswamy’s stage-commanding presence.
Another selling point for Ramaswamy is the fact that the company that made him rich, Roivant Sciences, has never been profitable. For Republicans, “beating the system” in a Trump-like fashion is a badge of honor.
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Wikikpedia reports that while serving as CEO of Roivant Sciences, Ramaswamy engineered high-profile deals that brought in major investments and generated massive personal profits for himself through share sales, even as later failures wiped out billions in shareholder value. Ramaswamy was insulated from company losses because he held his stake partially through the parent firm Roivant. For example, when clinical trials failed for Alzheimer’s drug intepirdine from Roivant subsidiary Axovant, shareholders lost over 75% of their investment overnight while Ramaswamy pocketed cashed out $37 million in Axovant shares before problems emerged. In this way, Ramaswamy personally enriched himself on speculative biotech investments, while regular shareholders bore the greatest losses when expectations were not met….’ (Boing Boing)
‘Fulton County is bracing for the worst. trump has called for protests, but few supporters show up anymore. Perhaps they have seen the hundreds of January 6th adherents get charged, and the jail sentences that have been rolling out.
The donald has also shuffled the deck chairs on his Georgia representation, hiring a new lawyer that most assume is intended to represent well on TV….’ (Boing Boing)
‘donald trump, known for his orange makeup, blasted Fox & Friends for displaying photos of him looking, well, orange.
After complaining in one of his tantrum tweets, posted this morning, that the Fox program has refused to find nonexistent polls between Biden and himself that place him way ahead, the modest ex-president then raged against Fox for showing viewers what he looked like, and was especially upset that the program allowed trump’s chin to show….’ (Boing Boing)
‘On Monday, September 11, the 4K restoration of Jonathan Demme’s classic Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense will premier at the Toronto International Film Festival. Trailer below. In attendance will be David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Jerry Harrison, and Chris Frantz. This will be the first time the band will be together publicly since their 2002 induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The four will participate in a panel discussion hosted by Spike Lee following the film. So far, there is no announcement of a performance. Meanwhile though, David Byrne has expressed his “regrets” about the acrimony within the band….’ (Boing Boing)
One of the two greatest rock’n’roll concert films of all time, together with The Last Waltz. Rewatched the latter recently after Robbie Robertson’s passing; time to rewatch Stop Making Sense again!
Neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley reconstructed Pink Floyd’s classic rock song “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1” using recordings of the brain activity of 29 patients who heard the song while undergoing brain surgery. ( Daniela Hernandez via WSJ)
‘The Georgia case sweeps more broadly than prior indictments — and for the first time, some of the charges carry a mandatory minimum prison sentence….’ (POLITICO)
‘The single most effective method for resolving debts is carefully sending a series of letters invoking one’s rights under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act of 1978 (and other legislation) to a debt collector who is operationally incapable of respecting those rights, then threatening them with legal or regulatory action when they inevitably infringe upon them in writing, leading to them abandoning further attempts at collection.
This effectively makes paying consumer debts basically optional in the United States, contingent on one being sufficiently organized and informed. That is likely a surprising result to many people. Is the financial industry unaware of this? Oh no. Issuing consumer debt is an enormously profitable business. The vast majority of consumers, including those with the socioeconomic wherewithal to walk away from their debts, feel themselves morally bound and pay as agreed….’ (Boing Boing)
‘It seems Ice Cube has become quite the conservative media darling lately, sitting down with not just Carlson, but Joe Rogan and Piers Morgan as well. He’s joining a long list of rappers – Kanye West, Da Baby, Kodak Black, Lil Pump – who have all put themselves in dangerous proximity to conservative politicians even as rightwing populism threatens to destroy their communities….’ (The Guardian)
‘The music he matched to his passionate yarns mined the roots of every essential American genre, including folk, country, blues and gospel. Yet when his history-minded compositions first appeared on albums by the Band in the late 1960s, they felt vital as well as vintage….’ (The New York Times obituary)
When I came home from traveling during the summer of 1968, my good friend and partner in music discovery said “I’m not sure you’re going to like this,” handing me the newly-released Music From Big Pink, The Band’s seminal first album. He could not have been more wrong and he did not stop apologizing for a long while. No music moved me more, or brought me more joy, during the late ’60’s and into the ’70’s. The deaths of Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, Levon Helm, its pathos-ridden vocalists, and now Robertson, the Band’s guitar voice, leave all our hearts more speechless.
‘We have a rich picture of the beginnings of language, thanks to decades of scientific research with children, infants, and even babies in the womb. But if you wanted to know how language ends in the dying, there’s next to nothing to look up, only firsthand knowledge gained painfully….’ (The Atlantic)
‘[V]iolent extremist groups have begun to mesh over a unifying figure: trump. The former president has become a focal point of domestic extremism, and by not denouncing them — and sometimes courting them — he has been adopted by these groups as a de facto spiritual leader. In some ways, Trump has also co-opted these groups to boost his own support. This, in my assessment, makes the former president a leading driver of domestic extremism, and an unprecedented danger to our security….’ (POLITICO)
‘The rates of suicide, depression, anxiety, and substance abuse are skyrocketing. And it’s not just because of climate change, but we know that anytime this population is asked about climate change, it is clearly a source of severe distress,” he said. “People are deciding not to have children, people are worried about their future….’ ( Sarah Owermohle via Stat)
‘“It’s just more evidence that these justices on the Supreme Court, these conservative justices, just see themselves as politicians,” Murphy said….’ (POLITICO)
‘Very little can stop the average American from eating beef — and quite a lot of it. On a per-capita basis, Americans eat nearly 60 pounds of red meat a year, equivalent to more than one quarter-pound hamburger every other day. But there’s one obstacle to our meat-loving tendencies that may not be surmountable: the tiny but aggressive lone star tick.
The tick (named for the female’s distinctive white dot on its back) can spread something called sugar alpha-gal via its spit. That sugar can trigger alpha-gal syndrome, or AGS, a condition that causes hives, nausea, heartburn, diarrhea, difficulty breathing, and a drop in blood pressure, among other symptoms, in sufferers around two to six hours after they eat beef, pork, and other mammal products. Essentially, sufferers become severely allergic to red meat….’ (Vox)
‘South Korean researchers say they’ve discovered, an alleged room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor, as reported in IFLScience. As the name implies, superconductors conduct electricity with negligible resistance, unlike metal wires. Traditional superconductors that require extremely low temperatures, but LK-99 is claimed to function under everyday conditions. Its critical temperature, below which it exhibits superconductivity, is 261 °F.
If verified, this discovery could have far-reaching implications for technological applications, including magnets, motors, cables, levitation trains, power cables, qubits for quantum computers, and THz antennas. “We believe that our new development will be a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind,” say the researchers, whose paper was uploaded to arXiv….’ (Boing Boing)
‘Extreme heat and other weather events are driving bears closer to humans’ campgrounds and hiking trails—and that’s no good for either species….’ (WIRED)
‘Bullshit’s no laughing matter. Climate denialism bullshit, for example, is harmful. Misinformation about SARS-CoV-2 clearly cost lives. In fact, the biologist Carl Bergstrom, while watching the pandemic unfold, argued that “detecting bullshit” should be a top scientific priority. In 2020, Bergstrom coauthored a book called Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World. In their preface, he and his coauthor paid respect to the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, who died on Sunday at the age of 94. Frankfurt, they noted, “recognized that the ubiquity of bullshit is a defining characteristic of our time.”
Frankfurt, the author of the surprise 2005 bestseller On Bullshit, maintained that bullshit isn’t the same thing as a lie. The bullshitter is unaware of the facts. They’re just “bullshitting,” as we say, often in order to persuade others to go along with something, like a plan. But the liar deceives knowing what’s true and obscures it, with language or charts and figures. The good news is that we don’t have to resign ourselves to observing the spread of bullshit—or lies.
In a new study published in Nature Human Behavior, researchers came away optimistic about efforts to combat bullshit about COVID-19, which continues apace….’ (Nautilus)
‘A woman in France recently enjoying coffee with her friend was struck by a small meteorite in what is considered an extremely rare event, according to local news.
The woman was chatting with her friend outside on a terrace when she was hit in the ribs by a mysterious pebble, French newspaper Les Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace (DNA) reported….’ ( Aristos Georgiou via Newsweek)
Update: ‘Meteorite’ that struck French woman was just a regular Earth rock
‘The deadliest animal in the world is smaller than a pencil eraser and weighs around two-thousandths of a gram — less than the weight of a single raindrop. Every year, it kills an estimated 700,000 people by partaking in what scientists grimly call a “blood meal.”
It’s the mosquito — and, increasingly, it’s on the move.
These global shifts, which will only accelerate as the planet warms, have sparked concern that the diseases mosquitoes carry will exact an even higher toll in the months and years to come.
In June alone, five cases of locally transmitted malaria were discovered in Texas and Florida: the first cases acquired in the United States in two decades. These cases, experts say, are unlikely to have a connection to warming temperatures — conditions in Florida and Texas are already suitable for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. But as urban heat islands expand and temperatures rise, mosquito-borne diseases are expected to travel outside of their typical regions….’ (The Washington Post)
‘He leaned across his desk, surrounded by enough high-powered computers to heat up his entire office, and stared at what could only be an impossible conclusion: Over the past fifty years, his calculations found, a third of North America’s birds had vanished. “Well, that can’t be right,” he thought. “I must have made a mistake somewhere.”
Smith, one of the hemisphere’s top specialists in bird populations, just sat for a while in his cluttered cubicle at the Canadian Wildlife Service, which was decorated with caribou antlers, a musk-ox skull, and early drawings from his twin boys. Then it dawned on him. “This would be a massive change, an absolutely profound change in the natural system,” he said. “And we weren’t even aware of it.”…’ ( Anders Gyllenhaal via Nautilus)
‘…(A) secretive, underground network of wildlife enthusiasts (is) returning species back into the landscape without asking permission first. It’s not just beavers: There are boar bombers, a “butterfly brigade” that breeds and releases rare species of butterfly and a clandestine group returning the pine marten — one of Britain’s rarest mammals — to British forests. …’ ( Isobel Cockerell via Coda Story)
‘Throughout its nearly 50-year career, the Kronos Quartet has been known for a dual commitment, both to contemporary music and to helping train young musical ensembles. But for a long time, there was a practical tension between those two goals.
“The quartet does a lot of teaching and coaching when they’re on tour and at home,” said Janet Cowperthwaite, the ensemble’s longtime executive director. “We’d be setting up these sessions, and we’d ask if the young group had something contemporary they could work on together. And they’d go, ‘well … ’ ”
What was needed, clearly, was a body of new music for budding string quartets to train on — scores as readily available as the old standbys by Haydn and Dvorák, but responsive to the needs of a 21st century ensemble.
That’s where “50 for the Future” came in….’ (Datebook)
‘According to Daily Beast, the two power hungry lawmakers are competing to impeach President Biden, and Greene blew up when she discovered that “Boebert leveraged a procedural tool to force a vote on her own impeachment resolution within days—undercutting Greene, who had offered her own resolution, but not with the procedural advantages of forcing a vote.”…’ (Boing Boing)
‘Two years ago, Brendan, an ex-leader of a white nationalist group, experienced a significant shift in his radical views after participating in a University of Chicago study involving MDMA (also known as ecstasy or molly). Harriet de Wit, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the university, conducted the experiment to explore MDMA’s role in enhancing the enjoyment of social touch. She was unaware that a white supremacist had participated in her study until after it concluded.
Previously, Brendan had been a member of a notorious Midwest white nationalist group. Before the study, he lost his job when his affiliation was exposed by a Chicago-based antifascist group. Even his siblings and friends who weren’t involved in white nationalism distanced themselves from him. However, an intensely personal experience during the study prompted Brendan to rethink his supremacist beliefs, leading him to stress the value of love and connection….’ (Boing Boing)
The New York Times asked 17 columnists to choose a piece of culture that best captures America. One columnist chose the 1956 horror movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” as a metaphor for America’s toxic transformation, where many have fallen prey to ideas, slogans, conspiracy theories, lies and emotions, leading to a collapse of individuality that goes against the very trait the country was founded on. The fear of invasion in the movie is a recurring theme in American life, with Covid and social media being cited as modern-day invaders threatening to subsume people’s identities. (Maureen Dowd in The New York Times)
(Far better than the remakes, except for Jerry Garcia having a cameo in the 1978 version.)
‘The second half of Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning was added in 1962 to provide greater detail of Logotherapy, in which patients must hear difficult things in contrast to psychoanalysts provoking telling difficult things. It’s less introspective and more focused on our place in the world:
“Logotherapy defocuses all the vicious-circle formations and feedback mechanisms which play such a great role in the development of neuroses. Thus the typical self-centeredness of the neurotic is broken up instead of being continually fostered and reinforced . . . the patient is actually confronted with and reoriented toward the meaning of his life. . . . Striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man. That is why I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered, as well as in contrast to the will to power on which Adlerian psychology, using the term ‘striving for superiority,’ is focused”…’ (3 Quarks Daily)
‘Midsummer is one of the four solar holidays and is considered the turning point at which summer reaches its height and the sun shines longest. Among the Wiccan sabbats, Midsummer is preceded by Beltane, and followed by Lammas or Lughnasadh. Some Wiccan traditions call the festival Litha, a name occurring in Bede’s The Reckoning of Time (De Temporum Ratione, eighth century), which preserves a list of the (then-obsolete) Anglo-Saxon names for the month of the early Germanic calendar. Ærra Liða (first or preceding Liða) roughly corresponds to June in the Gregorian calendar, and Æfterra Liða (following Liða) to July. Bede writes that “Litha means gentle or navigable, because in both these months the calm breezes are gentle and they were wont to sail upon the smooth sea”.[31] Modern Druids celebrate this festival as Alban Hefin. The sun in its greatest strength is greeted and celebrated on this holiday. While it is the time of greatest strength of the solar current, it also marks a turning point, for the sun also begins its time of decline as the wheel of the year turns. Arguably the most important festival of the Druid traditions, due to the great focus on the sun and its light as a symbol of divine inspiration. Druid groups frequently celebrate this event at Stonehenge.[32]…’ (Wheel of the Year – Wikipedia)
‘Sara Imari Walker, a theoretical physicist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University, has a radical new theory that purports to transform our understanding of what it is to be alive.
Most attempts to describe life use Earth as a blueprint. Instead, by pushing past cells and their chemistry to general principles about how complex objects come into existence, Walker claims to have reached a deeper understanding.
The idea, known as Assembly Theory, explains why certain complex objects have become more abundant than others by placing fresh emphasis on their histories. Now, Walker and her colleagues are testing the theory on lab-grown microworlds. In experiments, they have already discovered a threshold – namely the number of steps on the way to complexity – that seems like it must be met for something to be considered alive.
If Assembly Theory proves correct, she tells New Scientist, it will redefine what we mean by “living” things and show that we have been going about the search for life beyond Earth all wrong. In the process, she says, we could even end up creating alien life in a laboratory….’ (New Scientist)
‘Changes in the distribution of groundwater around the planet between 1993 and 2010 were enough to make Earth’s poles drift by 80 centimetres…’ (New Scientist)
A new dialect of English is taking shape in South Florida, shaped by sustained contact between Spanish and English speakers, particularly when speakers translated directly from Spanish…. (Inverse)
‘Public health and law enforcement agencies around the U.S. are scrambling to blunt the impact of xylazine, a deadly new threat to Americans who use street drugs.
That effort is complicated — some critics say crippled — by the fact that no one’s sure who’s mixing the dangerous chemical into fentanyl, methamphetamines and other street drugs. It’s also unclear why they’re doing it.
“Why has it gone national? I don’t know why. Tough question out of the gate,” said Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta, a researcher at the University of North Carolina who tests street drugs collected around the country.
Xylazine, or “tranq,” is a horse tranquilizer used by the veterinary industry. Dasgupta says the mystery around it points to a wider public health problem: State and federal agencies lack the capacity to identify and track new drug threats in real time….’ (NPR)
‘As hate groups edge toward the political mainstream, experts say they’re employing new tactics and taking on new forms. In June, the Southern Poverty Law Center added 12 conservative “parents’ rights” groups to its list of extremist and anti-government organizations. SPLC’s Susan Corke joins John Yang to discuss why the center added organizations like Moms for Liberty to their list….’ (John Yang and Kalsha Young on PBS News Weekend)
‘The bright, red star Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion has shown some unexpected behavior. In late 2019 and 2020, it became fainter than we had ever seen it — at least in records going back more than a century. Briefly, it became fainter (just about) than Bellatrix, the third brightest star of Orion. This event became known as the “great dimming.”
But Betelgeuse has since become bright again. For a few days this year, it was the brightest star in Orion — brighter than we have ever seen it. Both events led to speculation about whether its demise in the form of an explosion was imminent. But is there any evidence to support this idea? And how would such an explosion affect us here on Earth?…’ (Inverse)
Social Media Reacts to Release of trump Jr.’s Derogatory Emails About Black New Yorkers and other minorities
‘Suspicions regarding donald trump Jr., the eldest son of the 45th president of the United States, seem to have been confirmed after a series of racist and derogatory emails were released in a lawsuit involving one of his friends.
The emails are from a lawsuit between trump Jr.’s friend Gentry Beach, a man who served as one of trump’s groomsmen in his wedding, and Beach’s former boss, Paul Touradji, the founder of Touradji Capital Management.
In them there are off-color jokes about hunting Jews, shooting Mexicans, and the influx of African-American families in predominantly white sections of Manhattan….’ (Atlanta Black Star)
‘This is the bizarre mystery of an abandoned Boeing 737, which remains planted in the middle of a field in Bali – and to this day, no one knows how it got there.
Situated in a limestone quarry near the Raya Nusa Dua Selatan Highway, it is only a short journey from the popular Pandawa beach.
As is often the case with the bizarre and unexplained, plenty of theories have circulated as to how the plane got there….’ (Unilad)
‘We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information. Finding unbiased and independent product reviews, expert tech support, and all manner of helpful advice will now resemble the process by which one now searches for illegal sports streams or pirated journal articles. The decades of real human conversation hosted at places like Reddit will prove useful training material for the mindless bots and deceptive marketers that replace it….’ (Alex Pareene via Defector)
‘Daniel Ellsberg, the U.S. military analyst whose change of heart on the Vietnam War led him to leak the classified “Pentagon Papers,” revealing U.S. government deception about the war and setting off a major freedom-of-the-press battle, died on Friday at the age of 92, his family said in a statement….’ ( Bill Trott via Reuters)
‘US intelligence officer David Charles Grusch recently made headlines as a whistleblower after making public claims that the Pentagon has been hiding known evidence of non-human technology. Grusch expanded on these claims in a recent interview with NewsNation, in which he suggested — among other things — that the Vatican may also be in on this whole conspiracy regarding intelligent technology from non-sources. In fact, the Pope’s involvement even pre-dates the Roswell incident!…’ (Boing Boing)
‘Now, a new study in the journal Science Advances from researchers at the University of Melbourne and the University of Cambridge — Elizabeth Bowman, David Coghill, Carsten Murawski, and Peter Bossaerts — finds that far from making users smarter, smart drugs seem to actually undermine cognitive performance.
The authors tested the effects of three drugs — methylphenidate (more commonly known through one of its brand names, Ritalin), modafinil, and dextroamphetamine* (brand name Dexedrine, among others) — on a cognitive task designed to more closely mimic the complexities of real-world problems than past stimulant studies.
Far from simply concluding that smart drugs offer little benefit, the researchers found that the drugs actually seemed to leave users worse off. While study subjects worked harder while on the drugs compared to placebo, the “quality of effort,” or productivity, actually declined. The upshot is that smart drugs led users to spend more effort working while being less productive — not exactly a picture of cognitive enhancement….’ (Vox)
* one of the two active components of popular ADHD stimulant Adderall -ed.
‘The earth has about 36 billion acres of dry land. Who owns those acres? Madison Trust Company put together a list of who owns the most land of anyone on earth. You may have your own little acre, or part of one, but that’s nothing compared to what the British royal family owns- 6,600,000,000 acres! That puts them at the top of the biggest landowners on earth. And we thought the British Empire was a thing of the past.
What’s really impressive is that, of the top 19 landowners, only one is an individual person. That is Gina Rinehart of Australia, who personally owns 23,969,000 acres, putting her at #4 on the list. The next individual landowner is at #20. The rest are families, corporations, or communities. An awful lot of them are in Australia, which is a big country with a small population concentrated in the eastern cities.
Did you guess the #2 landowner in the world? It is the Catholic Church. You might feel better about #3, which is the Inuit People of Nunavut, who own 87,500,000 acres in Northern Canada. You can see the list in both infographic and text form, plus more information about what they are using their land for, in this post….’ (Neatorama)
‘At a bar in a once-occupied Ukrainian village, dehumanizing messages on the walls were a stark reminder that the Kremlin wants to stamp out Ukraine and its culture….’ (The New York Times)
‘Newly announced modifications to the autocorrect feature used on iPhones will better understand a word’s context in a text message, saving users some blushes….’ (The New York Times)
‘What his victory in America’s election would mean…’ ( via The Economist )
‘The transportation sector generates the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, almost all of it from cars and trucks. Yet the nation is starkly divided on the solution. An overlay placed on the states most hostile to electric vehicle policies would dovetail almost perfectly with those that voted for Donald Trump in 2020. According to a trade association quarterly report, deep red Wyoming, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Mississippi, and North Dakota have the nation’s lowest rates of EV sales. And good luck finding a public charging station in the Deep South or the Great Plains….’ ( By Renée Loth via Boston Globe )
Not exactly, although there are some near misses. Perhaps it is unsurprising that the words that are nearly universal are mostly related to foods that originated in one place, and then spread around the world. Not having developed independently, you would not expect their names to have developed independently. ( Cindy Blanco via DuoLingo Blog )‘Some neuroscientists now believe that the drugs’ mental-health benefits don’t come from tripping….’ ( Cornell-Weill director of psychopharmacology Dr Richard A. Friedman via The Atlantic )
The toolbar is irretrievable but following the space station in orbit. Surprisingly bright and visible from earth with binoculars. ( By Robert Lea published 1 day ago via Space )
occasion for anti-Catholic fervor, with the ringing of church bells and the lighting of bonfires, to the point of forgetting the deliverance of the monarch. “Although Guy Fawkes’ actions have been considered acts of terrorism by many people, cynical Britons… sometimes joke that he was the only man to go to Parliament with honourable intentions.”
The annual festival has become much more about festive fun than solemn remembrance:
Some say that the celebration of Guy Fawkes Night helped shape the modern tradition of trick or treating, although it has ancient pre-Christian origins. Some American colonists celebrated Guy Fawkes Day and those fleeing the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s helped popularize Hallowe’en. By the 19th century, British children wearing masks and carrying effigies of Fawkes were roaming the streets on the evening of November 5 asking for “a penny for the Guy,” with any money gathered being used to buy fireworks — the explosives never used by the plotters — to be set off while the Guy was immolated on the bonfire.
Many feel that Guy Fawkes (Bonfire Night) has a particularly Pagan feel. As with Hallowe’en, it may be no accident that Guy Fawkes Day coincides with the Celtic festival of Samhain, one of the moon festivals featuring large bonfires. Some think of Guy Fawkes Night as a sort of detached Samhain celebration and the effigies of Guy Fawkes burned on the bonfires compare with the diabolical images associated with Samhain or Hallowe’en. But, as one fan says, “Guy Fawkes Night has never sold out to Hallmark… Halloween is all about fakery – makeup, facepaint, costumes, imitation blood. Fireworks Night is about very real, very powerful, very hot flames.”
‘Watching these Hot Wheels toy cars zoom down an empty waterslide made me feel like a kid again for 5 minutes. I love how the video is filmed from the POV of a camera rolling down the slide with the cars, making it feel like as a viewer, you’re sitting on top of it….’ (Boing Boing)
‘It’s a crazy idea—and it unfortunately needs debunking…’ (Antonio De Loera-Brust, former special assistant to the U.S. Secretary of State,via Foreign Policy )
‘There’s a theory I like that suggests why the nineteenth century is so rich in ghost stories and hauntings. Carbon monoxide poisoning from gas lamps.
‘Course exploring impact of magic and witchcraft on society comes amid growing interest in folklore…’ ( Rachel Hall via The Guardian )
‘According to Pennsylvania law, fortune-telling is a crime….’ ( Zoe Greenberg via Philadelphia Inquirer )
‘‘I want to start a group to go to breakfast, 10 of us, and we each bring $100 to tip the waiter,’ Richard Brooks wrote on Facebook…’ ( via Washington Post )
‘When two ions passed by each other without colliding, some of their virtual photons interacted and turned into real photons with very high energy. These photons then collided with each other and produced electron-positron pairs, which were detected by the STAR detector at RHIC. The scientists analyzed more than 6,000 such pairs and found that their angular distribution matched the theoretical prediction for matter creation from light….’ ( science and space via rightnes )
‘donald trump, known for his orange makeup, blasted Fox & Friends for displaying photos of him looking, well, orange.
‘On Monday, September 11, the 4K restoration of Jonathan Demme’s classic Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense will premier at the Toronto International Film Festival. Trailer below. In attendance will be David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Jerry Harrison, and Chris Frantz. This will be the first time the band will be together publicly since their 2002 induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The four will participate in a panel discussion hosted by Spike Lee following the film. So far, there is no announcement of a performance. Meanwhile though, David Byrne has expressed his “regrets” about the acrimony within the band….’ (Boing Boing)
‘Two years ago, Brendan, an ex-leader of a white nationalist group, experienced a significant shift in his radical views after participating in a University of Chicago study involving MDMA (also known as ecstasy or molly). Harriet de Wit, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the university, conducted the experiment to explore MDMA’s role in enhancing the enjoyment of social touch. She was unaware that a white supremacist had participated in her study until after it concluded.
‘Midsummer is one of the four solar holidays and is considered the turning point at which summer reaches its height and the sun shines longest. Among the Wiccan sabbats, Midsummer is preceded by Beltane, and followed by Lammas or Lughnasadh. Some Wiccan traditions call the festival Litha, a name occurring in Bede’s The Reckoning of Time (De Temporum Ratione, eighth century), which preserves a list of the (then-obsolete) Anglo-Saxon names for the month of the early Germanic calendar. Ærra Liða (first or preceding Liða) roughly corresponds to June in the Gregorian calendar, and Æfterra Liða (following Liða) to July. Bede writes that “Litha means gentle or navigable, because in both these months the calm breezes are gentle and they were wont to sail upon the smooth sea”.[31] Modern Druids celebrate this festival as Alban Hefin. The sun in its greatest strength is greeted and celebrated on this holiday. While it is the time of greatest strength of the solar current, it also marks a turning point, for the sun also begins its time of decline as the wheel of the year turns. Arguably the most important festival of the Druid traditions, due to the great focus on the sun and its light as a symbol of divine inspiration. Druid groups frequently celebrate this event at Stonehenge.[32]…’ (Wheel of the Year – Wikipedia)
‘As hate groups edge toward the political mainstream, experts say they’re employing new tactics and taking on new forms. In June, the Southern Poverty Law Center added 12 conservative “parents’ rights” groups to its list of extremist and anti-government organizations. SPLC’s Susan Corke joins John Yang to discuss why the center added organizations like Moms for Liberty to their list….’ (John Yang and Kalsha Young on PBS News Weekend)
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