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

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

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

Source: Boing Boing

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

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

Source: Atlas Obscura

Survivors of CIA’s torture-decade describe their ordeals

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

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

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

Source: Boing Boing

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

Source: Big Think

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

Source: Vox

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

Source: Atlas Obscura

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

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

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

Source: The New York Times Book Review

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

Source: Vox

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

Source: Open Culture

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

Source:  Atlas Obscura

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

Source: Vox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Vox

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

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

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

Source: Big Think

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

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

Source: Gizmodo

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

Source: Gizmodo

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

Via The Atlantic

Via JSTOR Daily:

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

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

Source: Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine

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

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

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

Source: Atlas Obscura

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

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

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

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

Via Edge

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

Have you been asking:

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

Via New Scientist

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

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

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

Via Edge

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

Via Microsoft Research

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

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

Source: Ars Technica

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

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

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

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

Source: Big Think

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

Source: Food Republic

[Chocoholics unite!]

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

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

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

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

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

Via The Economist

Here is a 2.5 page mathematical analysis:

Source: It’s Okay To Be Smart

… It Has Already Begun

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

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

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

Source: The New York Times

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

Source: Gizmodo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Boing Boing

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

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

Source: Motherboard

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

Source: Big Think

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

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

Source: Slate

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

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

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

Source: Boing Boing

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

Source: Neurosciencestuff Tumblr

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

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

Source: Motherboard

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Motherboard

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

Source: Motherboard

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

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

Source: Big Think

Big fan of grumpiness here.

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

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

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

Source: New Scientist

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

Source: The Economist

‘The Perseid meteor shower is at its peak—a stellar show that occurs every August and can be seen by anyone living in the Northern Hemisphere. But what if we didn’t have to wait till August or the next meteor shower–what if we could create our own?

…Japanese company ALE says it’s working on creating the future of entertainment in space as part of it’s project Sky Canvas. Yup, artificial “meteor” showers. The company says it has plans to release a satellite capable of mimicking these stellar shows into orbit within the next two years…’

Source: Big Think

‘This is a cyborg stingray. It’s as big as a penny, guided by a laser, and moves on its own when exposed to blue light. And it’s the brainchild of Kevin Kit Parker…

“I had this whole idea of a laser-guided, tissue-engineered stingray made out of rat,” Parker told Phys.org. As he described the idea to mechanical engineer Sung-Jin Park, he had a less than enthusiastic response. “He looked at me like a hog staring at a wristwatch,” Parker continued. “He was like, ‘Have I trusted my career to this yahoo’? I think he thought I was unglued.” …’

Source: Big Think

‘At four to five meters in length, the Greenland shark (Squaliformes, Somniosus microcephalus) is the largest fish native to the Arctic waters. Getting that big must take a while, and scientists have long known that these sharks grow less than one cm per year. So these sharks probably live a very long time, but little was known about their longevity and maturation.

In an investigation recently published in Science, a team of researchers used radiocarbon dating to put together a timeline of the Greenland shark’s lifespan.Because Greenland sharks lack bones—they’re cartilaginous fish—conventional methods of tracking growth, like carbon dating of bones, won’t work. Instead, the team used a modified radiocarbon dating technique that has worked before on other boneless animals: tracking the chronology of the eye lens. The eye lens nucleus is composed of inert proteins. The central portion of the lens is formed during prenatal development, and during growth, the tissue retains the original proteins, which were largely made before birth.

As a result, carbon-dating these proteins can help determine how long ago the shark was born. For this work, researchers performed radiocarbon dating on the eyes of 28 female sharks that were collected in Greenland during scientific surveys that took place between 2010 and 2013. According to the radiocarbon dating, these sharks live at least 272 years…’

Source: Ars Technica

‘L. humile isn’t your stereotypical ant, with one queen and many workers laboring in a single nest. Argentine ants have multiple queens per colony, and there can be as many as 300 queens for every 1,000 workers. This makes them virtually impossible to kill with poison bait traps, which work on the principle that workers bring the tasty toxins back to the queen, whose death destroys the colony. When you have a lot of queens, that’s not an effective strategy.

Argentine ants are unusual in another way, too. They don’t build one large nest with lots of tunnels and rooms. Instead, they live in constantly shifting networks of temporary, shallow nests that change from day to day. .. Queens and workers are used to transiting from nest to nest, rarely staying put for long.

Despite their name, Argentine ants have now lived in the United States for more than 120 ant generations, which are roughly a year long due to their short lifespans. It’s been a struggle. The environment in North America is dramatically different from the tropical ecosystems where the ants originally evolved. These ants had to become an urban species to survive, living almost exclusively in cities and agricultural areas where plumbing and irrigation provide the water they desperately need. Entirely thanks to humans, Argentine ants have now become the dominant ant species in California cities, driving out dozens of native species. Today they’ve actually invaded most major landmasses in the world, including North America, Europe, Australia, Africa, Asia, and quite a few islands…’

Source: Ars Technica

‘The puzzle is that the proton — the positively charged particle found in atomic nuclei, which is actually a fuzzy ball of quarks and gluons — is measured to be ever so slightly larger when it is orbited by an electron than when it is orbited by a muon, a sibling of the electron that’s 207 times as heavy but otherwise identical. It’s as if the proton tightens its belt in the muon’s presence. And yet, according to the reigning theory of particle physics, the proton should interact with the muon and the electron in exactly the same way. As hundreds of papers have pointed out since the proton radius puzzle was born in 2010, a shrinking of the proton in the presence of a muon would most likely signify the existence of a previously unknown fundamental force — one that acts between protons and muons, but not between protons and electrons…’

Source: Quanta Magazine

‘Every year, the Perseids are a spectacular show. But this year, they’re something even more special than usual, and you shouldn’t miss it. Here’s how, when, and where to watch the Perseid meteor shower—and what you should be looking for when you do.

The Perseids are an annual meteor shower that shows up right at the height of summer in August. Usually, the shower comes to an impressive peak of almost 100 meteors per hour. That number is already enough to tie it with the Geminids for the most prolific shower of the year, but this year we should see rates of almost double the normal amount, with 160-200 meteors each hour. It’s called an outburst—and this is the first one we’ve seen in the Perseids since 2009. The already considerably thick blanket of meteors we see during the Perseids is due to the trail of dust and debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle. This year, however, the comet’s trail is pulled a little closer to us by Jupiter’s gravity—and that means that instead of skirting the trail’s edges, our planet passes straight through the thick of it, doubling the amount of debris we see burn up beautifully in our atmosphere as meteors…’

Source: Gizmodo

I’ll be out there… Will you?

‘The explicit-sounding call to violence is bad enough. But even worse is that, intentionally or not, Trump has been laying the groundwork for this idea for a while. From his talk of “rigged elections” to his suggestion that we need Russia to hack Clinton’s emails if the Justice Department won’t indict her, Trump’s message is clear: Clinton is so corrupt, and the system that favors her is so broken, that our ordinary democratic and legal processes aren’t equipped to handle it. She should be thrown in jail, but she probably won’t be.It’s a pretty short step from that idea to violent fantasies of going outside the law for real justice — even from official sources like the Republican Party of Riverside County, California, which recently tweeted a picture of a hangman captioned “Ready For Hillary.”

And there’s an unsettling parallel for this kind of rhetoric and what it can lead to, as law professor David S. Cohen pointed out Wednesday in a Rolling Stone op-ed: anti-abortion terrorism. Cohen, who has studied and written about violence and intimidation against abortion providers, points out that while anti-abortion violence is usually carried out by a “lone wolf” — like the Planned Parenthood shooter in Colorado Springs — it’s also incited, quite predictably, by the inflammatory rhetoric of prominent groups or officials. Cohen says that this phenomenon is called “stochastic terrorism”: using language and other forms of communication to incite random acts of violence that are “statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.” It’s not a legal term, but it can help us understand just how dangerous Trump’s statements are…’

Source: Vox

‘In a video clip circulating today from a campaign event in Wilmington, NC, Trump jokes that the “Second Amendment, people” might be the only thing that could stop a President Clinton from selecting Supreme Court justices during her term. This appears to be a fancy Trump way of saying to his “base” that she should totally be assassinated, and specifically, shot to death with a gun…’

Source: Boing Boing

Is there really another way to interpret this statement?

‘Members of the press, in their misguided attempt to be “balanced”, love to point out that we face a presidential contest between the two least-popular candidates ever. What they fail to do is analyze their own complicity in blindly adhering to the cartoon version of Hillary Clinton. Trump is unpopular — even with many Republicans who weakly support him — because of his stated positions. Secretary Clinton is unpopular largely because of an aggressive campaign of fictions and slander. That campaign has succeeded largely because of systemic misogyny…’

Source: Social Justice For All

‘Dressed in a long white tunic decorated with beads and glass, and gold headgear covered in a patchwork of brightly colored stones, the Ottamthullal dancer is almost ready to take the stage. Just time to practice some of the quivering facial expressions that form a vital part of the act. As this video shows, the Ottamthullal performer is able to contort his face muscles with incredible elasticity, variety and speed…’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘Of all the turf wars that have complicated the landscape of grammar over the past few hundred years, the most complicated and frustrating may be that of the singular they.It may be the most controversial word use in the English language—because it highlights a hole where a better-fitting word should go.

It creates a conflict between writers and editors who want things to follow the natural symmetry of Latin, and people who find they the only logical option for referring to a single person without a gender attached.

And there has been a lot written about it—it’s something of a hot topic this year, thanks to a vote by the American Dialect Society to name they its word of the year for 2015. “In the past year, new expressions of gender identity have generated a deal of discussion, and singular they has become a particularly significant element of that conversation,” Ben Zimmer, the chairman of ADS’ New Words Committee, explained back in January. “While many novel gender-neutral pronouns have been proposed, they has the advantage of already being part of the language.” …’

Source: Atlas Obscura

I am a firm believer in and a strong user of the singluar ‘they’. How about you?

‘It is entirely uncontroversial to state that the national media have consistently treated Hillary with profound contempt. We need to understand why #HillaryCoverageIsCrap — and we need to fight back against the ritual humiliation of the first woman with a viable shot at the presidency…’

Source: Melissa McEwan, Blue Nation Review

“Now, if Trump does win, okay, it’s going to be a real opportunity for people like white nationalists, acting intelligently to build upon that…”

Source: BuzzFeed

‘In 2011 a crested macaque in Indonesia took a selfie using photographer David J. Slater’s camera. After Slater claimed copyright of the photo, PETA sued on behalf of the monkey, claiming it was the copyright holder. But in January a federal judge tossed out the lawsuit, ruling that non-human animals are not allowed to own a copyright. Earlier this week PETA filed an appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘Sen. Marco Rubio said Saturday that he doesn’t believe a pregnant woman infected with the Zika virus should have the right to an abortion — even if she had reason to believe the child would be born with severe microcephaly…’

Source: Politico

‘Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero is planning to perform the first-ever head transplant in December 2017. He will put the head of a terminally ill, wheelchair-bound Russian citizen Valery Spiridonov (31) on an entirely new body.  Spiridonov, a computer scientist, has Werdnig-Hoffman disease, a rare and incurable spinal muscular atrophy. As the disease is sure to kill him, Spiridonov sees the head transplant as his one shot to have a new body.

The controversial surgeon Canavero, dubbed by some “Dr. Frankenstein,” has been criticized for intending to do a possibly unethical and certainly dangerous operation. There are numerous things that could go wrong in such a medical feat that’s never been successfully carried out on humans. The main difficulty is seen in the fusion of the spinal cords. One positive precedent has been set earlier this year by a team of Chinese surgeons, who successfully transplanted a monkey’s head…’

Source: Big Think

‘The species identified include elephants, gorillas, rhinoceroses, lions, tigers, bears (oh my), wolves, and other large mammals. And it’s a serious problem. According to the paper, 59 percent of the world’s largest carnivores and 60 percent of the largest herbivores are facing extinction, particularly in Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, where they are prey to illegal hunting, deforestation, human population growth and expansion, and other factors that we can control to an extent…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘A presidential or vice-presidential candidate had never quit a race in modern history before the Eagleton affair, but this year might offer an even grander political spectacle, thanks to Donald Trump. In recent days, Republicans have been expressing increasing nervousness about Donald Trump’s candidacy, with many urging him to quit. Trump might also quit on his own volition, having done the math and decided that bowing out now is better than losing by a landslide in November.

Would Trump actually quit,,,[W]e’ve never seen a candidate like him, and for someone who seemingly entered the race on a whim it wouldn’t be outrageous to see him exit in a similar fashion. And from the standpoint of Republican Party rules, Trump quitting, while unprecedented, would, in fact be a reasonably easy problem to solve. That’s mostly because the party’s rules lay out pretty clearly what would happen next… The rules …define a simple process of replacement: another vote by members of the RNC that could happen at a second national convention or remotely. Whichever candidate gets a majority of the votes, wins the nomination. (The candidates, in this scenario, could come from anywhere—not just those candidates that ran in the primaries and caucuses, which is why some Republicans see House Speaker Paul Ryan getting the nod.)

A far trickier problem, however, are the actual ballots. And it’s that process, separate from the nominating process, that could be a bit messier, and is also where timing becomes important. In the U.S., each individual state controls the election process, from making and printing ballots, to counting votes on Election Day, to certifying election results.Election law in the U.S. is a 50-state patchwork. From voting machines to filing deadlines, each state has different rules. And it’s the deadlines in particular that might concern party officials should Trump quit. That’s because the closer it gets to the November election, the harder and harder it will get to keep Trump’s name from appearing on state ballots, as state deadlines for certifying nominees’ names come and go.

It’s already impossible, in fact, to keep Trump off all 50: according to the Daily Beast, Delaware’s deadline to certify names for the ballot has already passed, meaning that even if Trump quits today you’ll still be able to vote for him in Delaware in three months. Even so, most of these deadlines aren’t until September or October, meaning that, for the next few weeks at least, Republicans could likely still get another name on the ballot in most states by November.

State control of elections provides for other sources of potential mayhem, however, because of the Electoral College…’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘ “It’s kind of an armchair sport to diagnose public figures, especially politicians,” says Stephen Hinshaw, professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. Cathartic? Sure. But psychologists say it is almost impossible to gain any real insight into a person’s mind and behavior based on such an analysis. Not only is it wrong, it is a perversion of what psychological diagnoses are meant to do: help people work through mental illness. Casually assigning medical jargon to an erratic politician’s baffling ideologies may actually add to the stigma surrounding mental illness. And that is bad for America…’

Source: WIRED

‘As Shakespeare put it in “As You Like It”: “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”That conventional wisdom is backed up by a Cornell University study conducted by David Dunning and Justin Kruger. The phenomenon is now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. So, if you’re not too sure about your own intellect, it actually might be a indication that you’re pretty intelligent — thoughtful enough to realize your limitations, at least.Here are some subtle signs that you are considerably smarter than you think…’

Source: Business Insider

Uh oh. The fact that I’m confident of my own intelligence, thus, is an indication that I’m not really so smart (although I do know my limitations, I think). And I only scored 11 out of 17 of the above factors…

‘Italian physicist Enrico Fermi once famously exclaimed “Where is everybody?” We have been trying to answer his paradox — we exist, so aliens should exist, too — ever since. According to one new solution, we have not seen or heard from any galactic neighbors because we are still waiting for them to be born…

So says a team of astronomers in a new study, to be published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. The researchers calculated the probability that life as we know it should exist at any given point in the universe. Based on their assumptions, Earthly life is quite likely premature…’

Source: The Washington Post

Essentially, the argument proceeds from the fact that the conditions for life depend on the stellar environment. The star is the source of radiant energy, the furnace in which the heavier elements on which life is based are created, and creates a habitable temperature zone in which liquid water can exist.  The new study suggests that our stellar environment is an anomaly, centered on a yellow dwarf far less long-lived and less prevalent than the less massive, longer-lived and far more prevalent red dwarf stars that make up the bulk of the galaxy. If such low-mass starts are able to support life, then we are the rarity because of how early in the  life of the universe, and how transient by comparison, Sun-like conditions are.

“Many more stars that all last much longer than our Sun ensures there’s simply more opportunity for life to arise in the future on a small dwarf star than in the last 13 billion years of cosmic time,” as Alan Duffy, an Australian astronomer at Swinburne University of Technology, who was not involved in the study, commented.

Here’s why, and why you should be worried.

‘Faced with a loose-cannon 2016 GOP presidential nominee who disagrees with them on key issues, Charles and David Koch — the two billionaire “Koch brothers” — are directing the vast resources of their political network toward down-ballot races. This should alarm liberals greatly.’

Source: Vox

‘At least 90 people have been hospitalized from an anthrax outbreak in Russia, including 50 children. Eight are confirmed as infected with anthrax. Doctors believe at least 6 patients have the more virulent intestinal form of the disease, which killed one boy, age 12. Authorities say it’s the first fatal anthrax outbreak in Russia in more than 75 years.

The outbreak originated in a Siberian community after a heat wave melted the permafrost where spores of anthrax remained alive inside the frozen carcass of an infected reindeer. Animals fed on that thawed carcass, which may have been up to a hundred years old, then transmitted it to reindeer that nomadic herders killed and ate…’

Source: Boing Boing

Spoiler alert: None of those options are good.

Source: Vox

‘Of the 17 largest land carnivores, most hunt prey that are either already threatened or are in decline…’

Source: National Geographic

‘New research supports a “luxury effect,” in which higher income neighborhoods host more biodiversity…’

Source: National Geographic

Via The New York Times:

‘Meg Whitman, a Hewlett Packard executive and Republican fund-raiser, said Tuesday that she would support Hillary Clinton for president and give a “substantial” contribution to her campaign in order to stop Donald J. Trump, whom she berated as a threat to American democracy.

“I will vote for Hillary, I will talk to my Republican friends about helping her, and I will donate to her campaign and try to raise money for her,” Ms. Whitman said in a telephone interview.

She revealed that Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic nominee, had reached out to her in a phone call about a month ago, one of the first indications that Mrs. Clinton is aggressively courting Republican leaders. While acknowledging she diverged from Mrs. Clinton on many policy issues, Ms. Whitman said it was time for Republicans “to put country first before party.” …’

Source: WIRED

The acclaimed chef has struggled to distill the principles accounting for the ecstatic gustatory experiences he inspires at Momofuku, early on apparently as surprising to him as to his patrons. What may result, he suggests, is a more comprehensible and systematic process for culinary innovation. Or maybe it is so much smoke, mirrors and hand waving, justifying serendipity after the fact. Read it, napkin at hand for the mouthwatering, and see what you think.

Source: One Billion Rising

August 3rd marks the two-year anniversary of the brutal attack on the Yazidi people in Sinjar Province in the Northern region of Iraq in which ISIS forces stormed towns and villages in the historic homeland of the ethno-religious group, killing over 5,000 men and elders, enslaving over 7,000 women and children and displacing over 400,000 more, desecrating homes and holy sites. Thousands of internally displaced Yazidis surrounded by ISIS forces were trapped on Sinjar Mountain, dying of exposure and dehydration.

The displaced Yazidi community continues to face a humanitarian crisis; tens of thousands are homeless and unsupported and many, especially children, suffer from malnutrition and health issues. Since the beginning of this crisis, ISIS has sold thousands of Yazidi women into sexual slavery and committed crimes of rape and sexual violence against thousands of Yazidi women and children in captivity. The group abducted at least 5000 Yazidis during their assault on Sinjar, mostly women and children and has relocated abductees to different regions where they are offered for sale as sexual slaves. To date, dozens of women have been killed in captivity while many others have committed suicide. New York Times reporter Rukmina Calimachi has written extensively about the crisis, for instance breaking the story about Isis forcing birth control pills on their captive sexual slaves.

A UN report notes:

“ISIS has committed the crime of genocide as well as multiple crimes against humanity and war crimes against the Yazidis, thousands of whom are held captive in the Syrian Arab Republic where they are subjected to almost unimaginable horrors.ISIS has sought to destroy the Yazidis through killings; sexual slavery, enslavement, torture and inhuman and degrading treatment and forcible transfer. The public statements and conduct of ISIS and its fighters clearly demonstrate that ISIS intended to destroy the Yazidis of Sinjar, composing the majority of the world’s Yazidi population, in whole or in part.”

My wife, a specialist in psychological trauma and refugee crises, and other colleagues at the Victims of Violence Program in Cambridge MA, have been consuting and assisting in the development of the Psychosocial Treatment and Trauma Support Center in Kurdish-controlled Dohuk, northern Iraq, to address the abuse and sexual violence suffered by Yazidi women and girls in ISIS captivity by:

– ensuring urgent medical care and hospital treatment for the aftermath of sexual and physical violence endured;
– ensuring counseling and trauma support for every victim through the center directly or through referral to a specialist organization;

– facilitating pilgrimages for survivors to the holy temple of Lalish to meet with Yazidi religious leaders;

– providing education and training in marketable skills to help victims reclaim their lives and assist them in moving towards self-sufficiency and independence;

– partnering with other local and international organizations and surrounding communities to work to facilitate survivors’ reintegration into society.

The center is being developed under the aegis of YAZDA, a global Yazidi organization established after the genocide against them in northern Iraq. The mission of YAZDA is to support the surviving victims of genocide and to ensure the future safety of the Yazidi ethnoreligious minority group. Know more about their work and ways to help and show solidarity by visiting their website or making a donation.

Source: LA Times via Sean Bonner’s newsletter Just Another Crowd

Safecast is a movement started within days of the Fukushima nuclear disaster and arising out of conversations among the chief technology officer of a large securities firm Pieter Franken, LA tech entrepreneur Sean Bonner and Joichi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab. Local volunteers with self-built radiation monitoring equipment are making a continuous crowd-sourced dump of radiation levels around the region — now 50 million readings and counting, all logged and mapped on a website anyone can see. As The Japanese government continues with its extensive effort to decontaminate areas around Fukushima Daiichi and reopen evacuated towns and villages, potential returnees say they want a way to verify official numbers that indicate radiation really has dropped to safe levels.

Funded by grants, foundation support and individual donation, the group holds regular sessions to teach people to assemble their own devices and also posts instructions online, on the principle that people who build their own equipment are more likely to use it. Even Japan’s postal service has cooperated with Safecast, putting its monitors on carriers’ motorbikes in some towns and gathering data.

“Safecast is an interesting social experiment, in a fairly anarchistic kind of way,” says Franken. “It taps into trends including maker-spaces, the Internet of things and even artists. We attract people who want to break out of the traditional way of solving problems.”

The group’s approach has expanded to include radiation monitoring activities elsewhere around the globe and other citizen-based environmental monitoring such as examining air quality around LA and methane readings around Porter Ranch, CA during the recent disastrous gas leak there. Advocates point to incidents such as the recent scandal over the lead-tainted water supply in Flint, Mich., as an example of where deeper community-based scientific knowledge could have improved debate and policymaking.

Franken describes Safecast’s goal now as, essentially,

“base-lining the world,” crowdsourcing environmental data from every corner of the Earth. “We should start with measuring our environments. Then we can talk about things like global warming and air pollution; from there, activism can start. Once you know, for example, that your street is polluted, you can start to make a change. That’s where we can make a difference.”

As more local cases are announced in Florida, the CDC confirms that Zika can be spread sexually from men or women.

Source: National Geographic

‘If Friday’s announcement that the New York Botanical Garden’s corpse flower was in bloom—the first occurrence in the city since 1939—inspired a sense of dejá vu, it may not be all in your head. The Wall Street Journal has pointed out that over half a dozen of the gigantic plants have bloomed this year in the United States, unusually, at the same time. What’s going on? …’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘In the same underground observatory in Japan where, 18 years ago, neutrinos were first seen oscillating from one “flavor” to another — a landmark discovery that earned two physicists the 2015 Nobel Prize — a tiny anomaly has begun to surface in the neutrinos’ oscillations that could herald an answer to one of the biggest mysteries in physics: why matter dominates over antimatter in the universe.

The anomaly, detected by the T2K experiment, is not yet pronounced enough to be sure of, but it and the findings of two related experiments “are all pointing in the same direction,” said Hirohisa Tanaka of the University of Toronto, a member of the T2K team who presented the result to a packed audience in London earlier this month…

The long-standing puzzle to be solved is why we and everything we see is matter-made. More to the point, why does anything — matter or antimatter — exist at all? The reigning laws of particle physics, known as the Standard Model, treat matter and antimatter nearly equivalently, respecting (with one known exception) so-called charge-parity, or “CP,” symmetry: For every particle decay that produces, say, a negatively charged electron, the mirror-image decay yielding a positively charged antielectron occurs at the same rate. But this cannot be the whole story. If equal amounts of matter and antimatter were produced during the Big Bang, equal amounts should have existed shortly thereafter. And since matter and antimatter annihilate upon contact, such a situation would have led to the wholesale destruction of both, resulting in an empty cosmos.

Somehow, significantly more matter than antimatter must have been created, such that a matter surplus survived the annihilation and now holds sway. The question is, what CP-violating process beyond the Standard Model favored the production of matter over antimatter? Many physicists suspect that the answer lies with neutrinos — ultra-elusive, omnipresent particles that pass unfelt through your body by the trillions each second…’

Source: Quanta Magazine

She passes. It’s clear you don’t have to lie or exaggerate to counter the Donald’s bloviation.

Via NPR

‘A quarter of a century after the end of the Cold War, it seems, we cannot get enough of its most famous chronicler.Finally, we in Britain may have realised what that great American writer Philip Roth understood in 1986, when he described A Perfect Spy as “the best English novel since the war”. Is John le Carré, author of enormously popular novels since 1961, when he published Call for the Dead, our greatest living writer?…’

Source: 3quarksdaily

‘Anger is both poisonous and popular. Even when people acknowledge its destructive tendencies, they still so often cling to it, seeing it as a strong emotion, connected to self-respect and manliness (or, for women, to the vindication of equality). If you react to insults and wrongs without anger you’ll be seen as spineless and downtrodden. When people wrong you, says conventional wisdom, you should use justified rage to put them in their place, exact a penalty. We could call this football politics, but we’d have to acknowledge right away that athletes, whatever their rhetoric, have to be disciplined people who know how to transcend anger in pursuit of a team goal.

If we think closely about anger, we can begin to see why it is a stupid way to run one’s life. A good place to begin is Aristotle’s definition: not perfect, but useful, and a starting point for a long Western tradition of reflection. Aristotle says that anger is a response to a significant damage to something or someone one cares about, and a damage that the angry person believes to have been wrongfully inflicted. He adds that although anger is painful, it also contains within itself a hope for payback. So: significant damage, pertaining to one’s own values or circle of cares, and wrongfulness. All this seems both true and uncontroversial. More controversial, perhaps, is his idea (in which, however, all Western philosophers who write about anger concur) that the angry person wants some type of payback, and that this is a conceptual part of what anger is. In other words, if you don’t want some type of payback, your emotion is something else (grief, perhaps), but not really anger…’

Source: 3quarksdaily

‘Could what happened in Fukushima happen 35 miles (56 kilometers) north of New York City?That’s what many activists and former nuclear regulators fear for the Indian Point Energy Center, a nuclear power plant that has operated in Westchester County for more than four decades. The plant provides a good chunk of the energy needs for the surrounding area, but it has come under fire in recent years for safety and environmental concerns, including its warming of the Hudson River and a recent case of bolts missing in one of its reactors. Two of the plant’s three reactor units are currently operating on expired licenses, with the state of New York having denied parent company Entergy’s extension requests due to suspected violations of the federal Clean Water Act…’

Source: Fukushima in New York? This Nuclear Plant Has Regulators Nervous.

‘There is a lot being written and spoken about Trump by intelligent and articulate commentators whose insights I respect. But as a longtime researcher in cognitive science and linguistics, I bring a perspective from these sciences to an understanding of the Trump phenomenon.

This perspective is hardly unknown…Yet you will probably not read what I have to say in the NY Times, nor hear it from your favorite political commentators. You will also not hear it from Democratic candidates or party strategists. There are reasons, and we will discuss them later I this piece. I am writing it because I think it is right and it is needed, even though it comes from the cognitive and brain sciences, not from the normal political sources. I think it is imperative to bring these considerations into public political discourse. But it cannot be done in a 650-word op-ed. My apologies. It is untweetable.

I will begin with an updated version of an earlier piece on who is supporting Trump and why — and why policy details are irrelevant to them. I then move to a section on how Trump uses your brain against you. I finish up discussing how Democratic campaigns could do better, and why they need to do better if we are to avert a Trump presidency…’

Source: Blog « George Lakoff

‘YESTERDAY, THE 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia aired a five and a half minute video about climate change. Directed by James Cameron and narrated by Sigourney Weaver, it featured Don Cheadle, Jack Black, America Ferrera, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and other celebs. Instead of scientists and hockey sticks, it had forest fires, Hurricane Sandy survivors, and a summer blockbuster soundtrack. The gist: Climate change is causing awful things in America and abroad. If you care to stop it, vote for Hillary Clinton.

None of that is as remarkable as the context in which it was shown. In the decades since scientists first warned a US president that greenhouse gas emissions would doom us all, no political party has ever presented itself as taking the issue seriously during a presidential election. This year is different. And not because the Republican candidate calls climate change a hoax. What’s new is Democrats are going on the offense. Speaker after speaker at the convention has laid into Donald Trump and his party’s denialism. Climate action is a prominent plank in the Democratic Party platform. They’ve made the stakes clear: A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for planet Earth…’

Source: WIRED

‘DONALD TRUMP’S SCHADENFREUDE in the DNC’s embarrassing email leak is standard practice in America’s messy electoral politics. Today, though, his casual request that Russian hackers dig up Hillary Clinton’s emails—sent while she was U.S. Secretary of State—for his own political gain has sparked a new level of outrage among cybersecurity experts…’

Source: WIRED

(I know I promised not to feature the angry groundhog’s mug as much, but I couldn’t resist sharing this photo.)

‘The rate of new HIV infections peaked globally in 1997 with 3.3 million cases. From there, a steady decrease was seen until 2005, when the average number of new infections had decreased to 2.6 million per year. This rate has remained more or less constant since then, according to a new study published in the Lancet HIV, with the result being a steady growth of total HIV cases to approximately 38.8 million in 2015.

These are discouraging results; one should expect that, given increasing public awareness, infections would consistently continue to decline.

The same study notes, however, that HIV mortality is falling globally. In 2005, 1.8 million people died from the illness, while that number fell to 1.2 million in 2015. The decrease here can be primarily attributed to two things: The scale-up of antiretroviral therapy (ART), which can keep the virus at bay almost indefinitely in infected patients, and prevention of mother-to-child transmission…’

Source: Motherboard

‘This is one of the best sounds you can hear when eavesdropping on scientists: “Oh, what is that?” The research team of the E/V Nautilus, a vessel of the Ocean Exploration Trust, was using their remotely operated underwater vehicle to check out the deep sea around the Channel Islands when they saw something they never had before: a small, glowing purple blob…’

Source: Atlas Obscura

One widely-used pesticide was found to reduce bee sperm counts.

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘Gonzalo Ciruelos set out to discover which country was the roundest in shape:

We can define roundness in many ways. For example, as you may know, the circle is the shape that given a fixed perimeter maximizes the area. This definition has many problems. One of the problems is that countries generally have chaotic perimeters (also known as borders), so they tend to be much longer than they seem to be.For that reason, we have to define roundness some other way. We represent countries as a plane region, i.e., a compact set C⊂R2C⊂R2. I will define its roundness as…

That’s about where I tune out! Turns out the answer is Sierra Leone. Click through to see lots of mathy thingies on the screen, the runners-up, the least round countries, and the source code.’

Source: Boing Boing

‘John Hinckley Jr., 35-years after he tried to kill a president, has won his freedom.A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has granted a request for Hinckley to leave the mental hospital where he’s resided for decades, to go live full-time with his elderly mother in Williamsburg, Va.

The release could happen as early as next week, the judge ruled. Under the terms of the order, Hinckley is not allowed to contact his victims, their relatives or actress Jodie Foster, with whom he was obsessed. Hinckley also will not be permitted to “knowingly travel” to areas where the current president or members of Congress are present. The judge said Hinckley could be allowed to live on his own or in a group home after one year…’

Source: NPR

‘As long as it is “properly packaged, labeled and declared,” one may take Victorian philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s mummified head onto your flight. The TSA added that travelers may simply snap a picture and tweet it to @AskTSA if they are in any doubt about the flight-legality of any desiccated human remains with which they wish to fly…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘One of the newest areas of bio-bot research involves the creation of soft robots, where the idea is to take a cue from animals like the octopus and starfish and make a robot that is only made of soft components. Soft robotics is, in essence, the art and science of designing artificial muscles.

Just in the last five years engineers have seen enormous breakthroughs in soft robotics, but a fundamental problem still remains: these robots are still moving at starfish-like speeds. This is why a new approach to engineering robot muscles pioneered by researchers at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences which allows for flexible, efficient circuitry is being heralded by soft roboticists as “the holy grail” of the field…’

Source: Motherboard

‘Friends:

I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I gave it to you straight last summer when I told you that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for president. And now I have even more awful, depressing news for you: Donald J. Trump is going to win in November. This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath is going to be our next president. President Trump. Go ahead and say the words, ‘cause you’ll be saying them for the next four years: “PRESIDENT TRUMP.”

Never in my life have I wanted to be proven wrong more than I do right now.I can see what you’re doing right now. You’re shaking your head wildly – “No, Mike, this won’t happen!” Unfortunately, you are living in a bubble that comes with an adjoining echo chamber where you and your friends are convinced the American people are not going to elect an idiot for president. You alternate between being appalled at him and laughing at him because of his latest crazy comment or his embarrassingly narcissistic stance on everything because everything is about him. And then you listen to Hillary and you behold our very first female president, someone the world respects, someone who is whip-smart and cares about kids, who will continue the Obama legacy because that is what the American people clearly want! Yes! Four more years of this!

You need to exit that bubble right now…’

Source: MICHAEL MOORE

‘There have been instances of humpback whales coming to the aid of seals being attacked by killer whales, and scientists are baffled. Interspecies altruism is adorable when it’s framed as a “cute animal friends” special on Animal Planet, but in the wild, it’s rare. Even so, there have been multiple sightings of humpback whales getting into fights with killer whales when there’s a seal present, making it seem like they’re actually protecting the seal…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘…In more than an hour of unremitting darkness, Trump wove a narrative with the chief purpose of convincing swing voters that the United States is on the verge of collapse from “crime and violence” — and that the only way to avert that collapse is to elect him president…

But it was a con job: a fraudulent, desperate attempt by a losing candidate to snooker the American public into electing him.Trump’s speech hinges on the idea that crime is surging to terrifying levels. But this simply isn’t borne out by the evidence. So to make his case, Trump uses a combination of cherry-picked and out-of-context statistics, incomplete data, and flat out erroneous information to invent a crisis…’

Source: Vox

‘Donald Trump’s speech accepting the nomination for Republican presidential nominee was scary. Really scary. Last night on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Elizabeth Warren said that Trump sounded like “some two-bit dictator of a country you couldn’t find on a map.”

“I wanna defend him for a second here” Colbert responded. “He’s not a two-bit dictator. He sounded like a billionaire dictator.” Warren stressed the stakes while on The Late Show, saying that all jokes aside, Trump should not be underestimated. She called the RNC the “nastiest, most divisive convention that we’ve seen in half a century,” acknowledging that people have a right to be angry over issues (college debt, flat incomes, high rent), but “Donald Trump does not have the answers.” …’

Source: Vox

‘…[T]he biggest drawback in picking Kaine, from a liberal perspective, is his record on abortion. Clinton, so far, has pushed hard on choice, conspicuously dropping the “rare” from “safe, legal, and rare” and calling for restoring federal funding for abortion. But while Kaine hasn’t called for overturning the Roe v. Wade decision, he positioned himself as personally opposed to abortion, and in sympathy with many pro-life causes, during his run for Virginia governor in 2005.

As he wrote on his campaign site back then:

I have a faith-based objection to abortion. As governor, I will work in good faith to reduce abortions by

1. Enforcing the current Virginia restrictions on abortion and passing an enforceable ban on partial birth abortion that protects the life and health of the mother;

2. Fighting teen pregnancy through abstinence-focused education;

3. Ensuring women’s access to health care (including legal contraception) and economic opportunity; and

4. Promoting adoption as an alternative for women facing unwanted pregnancies.

Virginia’s restrictions at that point, which Kaine wanted to uphold, included a 24-hour waiting period for abortions and a parental notification requirement, along with restrictions on Medicaid funding. What’s more, Kaine’s actions as governor continually aggravated pro-choice groups, including approving funding for “crisis pregnancy centers” that try to steer women away from abortion and signing into law a bill creating “Choose Life” license plates.

Lately, however, Kaine has shifted his rhetoric on abortion toward that of a generic pro-choice Democrat. “We all share the goal of reducing unwanted pregnancies and abortions,” his Senate website currently states…’

Source: Vox

‘Being president of the United States is hard work, it’s important work, and Donald Trump has proven time and again he’s much too lazy to do the job. Not too lazy in the sense of sleeps in too much — he’s clearly happy to maintain a frenetic pace of activity when doing things that engage him, like tweeting or doing television or phone interviews — but too lazy in the sense of being unwilling to put in the time and repetition necessary to master new things.

That is the unescapable message of the interview he conducted with David Sanger and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times that’s published today on their website. It’s an interview that demands to be read in full, because the full context is much more horrifying than the one headline featured where Trump suggests he would unilaterally abrogate America’s NATO commitments to the Baltic countries and possibly spark a third world war.

The problem with Trump is not just the specific things he says but the casual way in which he says them and the comical “logic” that ties them together. Most of all, it’s the repetition — the fact that it keeps happening without Trump showing any capacity for growth or any interest in doing the work that would make him better at answering questions. For better or worse, Trump is now the GOP nominee, and there are hundreds of professional Republican Party politicians and operatives around the country who would gladly help him become a sharper, better-informed candidate.

It doesn’t happen because he can’t be bothered. It’s terrifying…’

Source: Vox

However, George W. Bush too was not too swift and decidedly anti-intellectual. In this blog, I wrote at length about how appalling the attractiveness of such a stupid man was until I realized that this was part of his appeal to Republican voters. And, I fear, is again.

By the way, I regret that, with such heavy coverage of Trump, I have made you stare at his loathsome face so many times in the thumbnails which accompany my posts. I am considering refraining…

‘During the 1968 election, Richard Nixon successfully ran as the candidate of law and order against a backdrop of rising crime and civil unrest. There was then, as there is now, a very unsubtle racial element at play in the statement. In ’68, Nixon plastered Americans’ TVs with images of protests and urban upheaval, urging the nation to “vote like your whole world depended on it.”

Today, Trump vows that without his guidance regarding Hispanic immigrants, Muslims, and the “threat” of Black Lives Matter, “we will cease to have a country.

“That’s because “law and order” in American politics has always been a dog whistle — a way of speaking in code to one group of Americans to exploit their fears regarding another.

But it’s not just racist posturing. Appealing to white America’s anxieties about black crime was more than smart election strategy for Nixon — it ended up shaping the criminal justice policies of both his administration and the ones that followed. The result was an unprecedented explosion in incarceration and aggressive community policing that continues to disproportionately target people of color…’

Source: Vox