‘As the tide of refugees rises in Europe, so does the frequency and amplitude of some very nasty rumours about these “others.”

These rumours echo historical slander against Jews, Gypsies, and other groups of outsiders previously seen as threatening. You’ve probably heard variations of some of these:

Their customs are barbaric and they hold ours in contempt; they don’t feel bound by our rules and laws; they get preferential treatment from the government; they harass, rape, and kill; they have too many children, and they’re here to “take over.”

Many of these stories are very specific and detailed, and thus sound convincing. Yet they usually have no clear source, and often they grow taller in the telling. It’s the classic urban legend syndrome, seasoned with a dose of racism — and enhanced by Twitter, Facebook, and other modern means of communication.

One concerned German netizen has decided to fight back against this rising tide of viral xenophobia.

“Since the middle of last year, we’re witnessing an increasing trend of rumours about asylum seekers going viral — ranging from them poaching swans to desecrating graves. Those stories are collected here,” writes Karolin Schwarz on Hoaxmap, which has gone live on 8 February.

Hoaxmap uses a map of Germany and Austria as the geographic backdrop for a growing collection of rumours reported and invalidated. Each rumour is described, dated, localized, categorized — and refuted, with a link to the evidence.  Some examples…’

Source: Big Think

‘Donald Trump finally made some bold and provocative claims that were largely true, and the Republican Party finally closed ranks to attack him.

Saying Mexican immigrants are rapists didn’t do it. Calling for a return of torture didn’t do it. Calling for a ban on Muslim immigration didn’t do it. Raising questions about Barack Obama’s status as an American citizen didn’t do it. Pretending that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered 9/11 didn’t do it.

So what did? Trump said that invading Iraq was a disaster, that the country was misled into invading Iraq by the Bush administration, and that the claim that Bush kept the country safe from terrorism is ridiculous because 9/11 happened on his watch…’

Source: Vox

‘Until a recent study led by researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas was published online last month in PLOS ONE, there was no scientific evidence to back up the anecdotal stories of people… who reported aberrant sensations and neuropathic pain around cellphone towers and other technology that produce radio-frequency electromagnetic fields.

“Our study provides evidence, for the first time, that subjects exposed to cellphone towers at low, regular levels can actually perceive pain,” said Dr. Mario Romero-Ortega, senior author of the study and an associate professor of bioengineering in the University’s Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science. “Our study also points to a specific nerve pathway that may contribute to our main finding.” ‘

Source: The University of Texas at Dallas (thanks, abby)

‘A prank originating from 4chan claims that if you set your iPhone’s (5s models and up) date back to 1970, it’ll display a retro Apple logo…

What actually happens if you decide to set your iPhone back to January 1st, 1970? It’ll brick your device, and there’s no fix for it: even Apple’s own Geniuses can’t figure out how to fix it, and you’ll have to get the phone completely replaced.

Update: according to Ars Technica, … allowing the phone’s battery to go completely dead (or disconnecting the battery) will reset the date…’

Source: Gizmodo

Einstein was right — in predicting gravitational waves — and wrong — in feeling they would remain too feeble to be detected:

‘A “revolutionary” new era in science has just begun with a violent event deep in space.

Today researchers announced that they have detected ripples in the fabric of space called gravitational waves. It’s a groundbreaking discovery that has eluded Earth’s brightest minds and most sensitive machines for decades…’

Source: Tech Insider

LIGO’s Discovery will open new era in cosmological research

‘In deep space, two black holes spiraled toward each other, their tremendous mass warping spacetime and propagating gravitational waves across the fabric of the universe at light-speed. The two black holes eventually crashed into one another and merged into one even bigger black hole, emitting a crescendo of waves.That quiet tremolo on the catgut of reality made it to Earth, where the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory was listening. For 13 years LIGO heard, it seemed, every vibration but the one it was supposed to. But on September 14, 2015 it detected those black-hole-crashing swells as they washed over the planet.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves,” David Reitze, LIGO’s Executive Director, declared today at a press conference. “We did it.” This is big-deal physics, a long-awaited bit of evidence that vindicates the work of Albert Einstein, opens a new scientific field, and gives astronomers a peek at a side of the universe they’ve never seen.

Decoding the data gave it more specificity. The waves came from black holes with 26 and 39 times the mass of the sun, respectively. Merged, the newly created black hole had 62 times the mass of the sun. Right, that arithmetic doesn’t exactly work, but don’t worry about it. The newly-formed body emitted energy to stabilize, a process called “ringdown.” That energy, emitted as gravitational waves, came from three suns’ worth of stuff…’

Source: WIRED

‘If recent rumors are true, scientists have finally detected gravitational waves—shockwaves rippling through space and time itself.

Albert Einstein first proposed the existence of gravitational waves 100 years ago, and directly observing them would provide the final vindication for his masterwork: the theory of general relativity.

On Thursday, we’ll find out if Einstein is right one last time. Researchers from Caltech and MIT will convene for a press conference where they may announce that they’ve picked up the tiny wobble of gravitational waves produced by two colliding black holes…’

Source: NatGeo

Scientists to announce detection of gravitational waves. Here’s how to watch.

Source: Tech Insider

See how hard it is to detect gravitational waves by playing this maddening online game

Source: Tech Insider

‘Fourteen women and nine men were found in a cremation burial near Stonehenge. These findings help support the theory that Stonehenge functioned as a cremation cemetery for people of high status…’

Source: Tech Insider

‘Horses understand human facial expressions, and they can tell the difference between happy and angry faces, according to a new Biology Letters study published this week.

Previous work has revealed that horses are able to produce complex facial expressions and also perceive these in other members of their species. They’re also sensitive to signals from us, too. After all, the ability to read emotions across the species barrier would be especially helpful for social, domesticated species – no matter how different our faces might look from theirs.

To see if they can discern our expressions, a University of Sussex team led by Amy Smith showed photographs to 28 domestic horses (Equus caballus) aged four to 23, recruited from five stables in Sussex and Surrey in the U.K. These color photos were of two unfamiliar men smiling or frowning (pictured to the right). In order for the researchers to get spontaneous reactions, the horses received no training for this experiment. The team measured the horses’ heart rate, which is correlated to stress, and recorded their responses with camcorders.

When the horses saw photos of the men making an angry face, their heart rate increased faster than when they looked at photos of the men smiling. Additionally, many of them also moved their heads to look at the angry photo with their left eye – a behavioral response previously linked to negative stimuli perception.

The right brain hemisphere, which handles information from the left eye, is specialized for processing threatening stimuli. “It is particularly important for animals to recognize threats in their environment,” Smith explains in a statement. “In this context, recognizing angry faces may act as a warning system, allowing horses to anticipate negative human behavior such as rough handling.” This is called the left-gaze bias, and dogs do it too. Neither species showed a gaze bias towards the happy facial expressions, since these aren’t threatening cues…’

Source: IFLScience

‘John McCain is very angry about the way the Republican race is going — on the specific issue of torturing detainees suspected of terrorism.”It’s been so disappointing to see some presidential candidates engaged in loose talk on the campaign trail about reviving waterboarding and other inhumane interrogation techniques,” McCain, who was himself tortured while he was held prisoner during the Vietnam War, said during a Tuesday Senate speech. “Our enemies act without conscience. We must not.”

McCain has good reason to be angry. Several Republicans have suggested that they’d be open to torturing suspected terrorists if elected — especially New Hampshire primary winner Donald Trump. “Waterboarding is fine, and much tougher than that is fine,” Trump said at a Monday campaign event in New Hampshire. “When we’re with these animals, we can’t be soft and weak, like our politicians.” Previously, Trump promised to “bring back” types of torture “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding” during Saturday’s Republican debate. The rest of the GOP field took a somewhat more nuanced position. Marco Rubio categorically refused to rule out any torture techniques, for fear of helping terrorists “practice how to evade us.” …’

Source: Vox

‘Famed Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates finally confessed to whom he’s supporting in the Democratic primary. It seems the MacArthur Genius Grant recipient is feeling the Bern. “I will be voting for Sen. Sanders,” Coates told host Amy Goodman on Democracy Now. Coates said he was initially avoiding the question, hoping to separate his role as a writer from his views as a private citizen, but no longer saw value in staying neutral. He said his son, who was present for the interview, convinced him to reach that point…’

Source: Vox

Upscale couple in Irvine CA who mistook the volunteer tennis coach’s comment as insulting their son’s intelligence end up planting drugs in her car when they can’t get her fired. And it goes on from there. Source: The Washington Post

‘A dictionary of the extinct language of ancient Mesopotamia has been completed after 90 years of work.’

Source: BBC News

‘It’s not just your imagination. Horror films are much more scary than they were in the past. Here’s how they do it…

This new brand of film, the neurothriller, creates a spiral of fear or lust, a warm bath of sorrow, not through classic narrative, but with sound, image, and sophisticated computer technology, all of it tapping the circuitry of the ancient emotional brain…’

Source: Aeon

Via The Atlantic:

”For close to a decade, the trauma of the Iraq War left Americans wary of launching new wars in the Middle East. That caution is largely gone. Most of the leading presidential candidates demand that the United States escalate its air war in Iraq and Syria, send additional Special Forces, or enforce a buffer zone, which the head of Central Command, General Lloyd Austin, has said would require deploying U.S. ground troops. Most Americans now favor doing just that.

The primary justification for this new hawkishness is stopping the Islamic State, or isis, from striking the United States. Which is ironic, because at least in the short term, America’s intervention will likely spark more terrorism against the United States, thus fueling demands for yet greater military action. After a period of relative restraint, the United States is heading back into the terror trap…’

This article is not primarily about Trump. It describes social science research based on so-called Moral Foundations Theory, codified by one of the co-authors, which describes six moral factors the patterns of which form a powerful explanatory framework differentiating the supporters of the major candidates, left and right. Oh yes, and Trump is an outlier, as if that would be a surprise…

Source: Vox

‘…[O]ver 2,000 people have already moved to New Hampshire (referred to simply as “the shire” by the group), purchasing upwards of $30 million in real estate. The group has chosen New Hampshire for a number of reasons, although chief among them is that the group is able to “maximize [its] odds of success” because of “the easy access to politics.” (New Hampshire has the largest state legislature in the US at 400 persons.)

In the 13 years since its founding, the group has made large strides toward establishing its libertarian utopia. This is most noticeable in the group’s widespread adoption of Bitcoin, which has earned the state the unofficial moniker of “Bitcoin Capital of America.” Self-identified Free Staters in New Hampshire launched Lamassu, one of the most popular Bitcoin ATMs, in 2013. SatoshiDice, the Bitcoin gambling website, was also launched out of New Hampshire in 2012 by Bitcoin mogul and Free Stater Erik Vorhees.

Although both of these Bitcoin businesses have been forced out of the US by various regulatory agencies, the Free State Project hopes to garner enough influence in New Hampshire politics to make the state more friendly to liberty-minded businesses. They seem to be well on their way to this goal, with 16 Free State Project members now serving in the state’s House of Representatives…’

Source: Motherboard

Oh, this is very sad, in the same week as two giants from Jefferson Airplane. One of the liabilities of my continuing romance with the music of my young adulthood is that its important practitioners are dropping like flies. My classic jazz and blues musician faves are long gone and more contemporary indie and alternative performers by and large still have a lot of life in them.

Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks have always had, and will always have, a constant place in my favorites playlist. So pleased I got to see him live, in intimate venues, a couple of times in the last decade. Go out and find “Where’s the Money,” “I Scare Myself” “Walkin’ One and Only” or “I Feel Like Singing” for a never-ending kick.

Via The New York Times:
‘In the seven months since declaring his candidacy for president, Donald Trump has used Twitter to lob insults at presidential candidates, journalists, news organizations, nations, a Neil Young song and even a lectern in the Oval Office. We know this because we’ve read, tagged and quoted them all. Below, a directory of sorts, with links to the original tweets.’

Here’s hoping they keep it current.

A sweet mama dog named Maggie who had been separated from her puppies when she was adopted, responded to two rescued 9-week old female puppies (Hannah and Kari) who were also being boarded at the B…’

Source: Laughing Squid

‘One of the most disturbing developments of the 2016 Republican race for president has been Donald Trump’s popularity among the most racist elements in US society. The New Yorker, for example, had lengthy piece over the summer detailing the excitement he has generated in the neo-Nazi movement. But here’s the thing: Trump isn’t the only guy with dangerous supporters. The media don’t talk about it as much, but Ted Cruz – Trump’s closest competitor for GOP front-runner status – has also won the backing of some downright terrifying people…’

Source: Truth-Out

‘The Kangbashi District of Ordos, China is a marvel of urban planning, 137-square miles of shining towers, futuristic architecture and pristine parks carved out of the grassland of Inner Mongolia. It is a thoroughly modern city, but for one thing: No one lives there.

…Kangbashi is one of hundreds of sparkling new cities sitting relatively empty throughout China, built by a government eager to urbanize the country but shunned by people unable to afford it or hesitant to leave the rural communities they know. Chicago photographer Kai Caemmerer visited Kangbashi and two other cities for his ongoing series Unborn Cities. The photos capture the eerie sensation of standing on a silent street surrounded by empty skyscrapers and public spaces devoid of life…’

Source: WIRED

‘Facebook ran the numbers and concluded that we are all much closer than the traditional “six degrees of separation.”The social media giant released a report on its blog Thursday announcing “each person in the world” is separated from every other by “an average of three and a half other people.” …’

Source: The New York Times

Via NYTimes:

‘Two fireballs streaked across the sky in the past week, creating dazzling, ephemeral displays for hundreds of people below. Dashboard cameras, rooftop cameras and even one mounted on a small airplane captured footage of the bright objects in the night skies.’

Includes wonderful albeit brief videos.

Via Medium: ‘MIT neuroscientist Earl Miller notes that our brains are “not wired to multitask well… when people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost.” This constant task-switching encourages bad brain habits. When we complete a tiny task (sending an email, answering a text message, posting a tweet), we are hit with a dollop of dopamine, our reward hormone. Our brains love that dopamine, and so we’re encouraged to keep switching between small mini-tasks that give us instant gratification.’

“Since Donald Trump dropped out of Fox News’ final GOP debate, Stephen decided to hold the classiest, Trumpiest debate of all time.”

I am heartbroken. The Airplane and its spinoff groups (before Jefferson Starship descended into kitsch in the following decade) were the pinnacle of the best decade’s music for me. At least Paul will be joining Jerry, Janis, Jim and Jimi in the heavenly choir. Going home to put Blows Against the Empire on loud!

The Voracious Fish That Looks Like a Pug and Stings Like a Bee:

‘…The bulging eyes and frowny mouth that make [the stargazer] look like an aquatic pug are brilliant adaptations for an ambush predator. And even beyond its … singular looks, this is one of the sea’s most remarkable fishes—it’s venomous and it shocks like an electric eel…’

Source: WIRED

‘Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is a Twitter addict and often uses the medium to issue comments, responses and campaign pronouncements. But he also lets others do the talking, simply by retweeting them. 62 percent of those he retweets are white supremacists…’

Source: Boing Boing

Via Engadget:

‘Even if you have thousands of Facebook friends, you can probably only count on a handful in a pinch, according to a new study. The author, anthropologist Robin Dunbar, should know. He’s the guy who came up with Dunbar’s number, which shows that in the real world, people can only maintain about 150 stable relationships… ‘

‘Donald Trump has led polls for the Republican presidential contest for over six months now. Nothing, it appears, can dislodge him from that top position — not his many offensive comments, not his lackluster debate performances, not his seeming lack of knowledge on basic public policy issues. His seemingly endless poll dominance is a truly bizarre phenomenon — one that Trump himself acknowledged at a campaign stop in Sioux Center, Iowa on Saturday. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?” Trump bragged. “It’s, like, incredible.” …’

Source: Vox

‘At around the turn of the millennium, some disturbing findings surfaced in the biomedical literature. Macrophages—immune cells whose function is to attack and kill microbes and other threats to the body—do not gather at tumor sites to destroy cancer cells, as had been optimistically imagined. Instead, they encourage the cancer cells to continue their mad reproductive rampage. Frances Balkwill, the British cell biologist who performed some of the key studies of treasonous immune cell behavior, described her colleagues in the field as being “horrified.” …’

Source: Barbara Ehrenreich, The Baffler

1980, the year of Ronald Reagan’s election, was probably more significant for

‘…an utterly private event whose significance would not be noticed for years. Charles and David Koch, the enormously rich proprietors of an oil company based in Kansas, decided that they would spend huge amounts of money to elect conservatives at all levels of American government. David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian ticket in 1980, but when the campaign was over, he resolved never to seek public office again. That wouldn’t be necessary, he and his brother concluded; they could invest in the campaigns of others, and essentially buy their way to political power.

Thirty years later, the midterm elections of 2010 ushered in the political system that the Kochs had spent so many years plotting to bring about. After the voting that year, Republicans dominated state legislatures; they controlled a clear majority of the governorships; they had taken one chamber of Congress and were on their way to winning the other. Perhaps most important, a good many of the Republicans who had won these offices were not middle-of-the-road pragmatists. They were antigovernment libertarians of the Kochs’ own political stripe. The brothers had spent or raised hundreds of millions of dollars to create majorities in their image. They had succeeded. And not merely at the polls: They had helped to finance and organize an interlocking network of think tanks, academic programs and news media outlets that far exceeded anything the liberal opposition could put together…’

Source: Jane Mayer – The New York Times

‘Prayer occurs in many faiths. It stays recognisable despite its varied forms. It must be good for something – but what?’

Source: Benjamin Dueholm, Aeon

‘Don’t want to get sick this season?Sure, you’ve heard the basics: Carry hand sanitizer everywhere. Grab public-bathroom door handles with paper towels. Hold your breath when your unwell-looking subway seat partner starts coughing.Bad news, germaphobe — your meticulous habits likely aren’t doing much to protect you.Here’s a look at all the weird germ-avoidance behaviors that are probably useless…’

Source: Business Insider

Via Tech Insider:

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‘Over the next two weeks, five planets will line up for a cosmic dance that will dazzle skywatchers all over the world.Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are aligning for the first time in over a decade, and there’s no need for telescopes or binoculars to see the event, since all five planets will look like bright stars in the morning twilight.’

Source: National Geographic

The Man Who Saw His Cat As An Impostor: ‘Capgras syndrome is a strange disorder in which the sufferer becomes convinced that someone close to them has been replaced by an impostor. Yet now, a new and even stranger variant of the syndrome has been reported – “Cat-gras”. This is the name coined by Harvard neurologists R. Ryan Darby and David Caplan in a new paper in the journal Neurocase. The authors describe the case of a man who believed that his cat was in fact a different cat…’

Source: Neuroskeptic

Retired fisherman uses sonar equipment to uncover new crevice nine miles east of Inverness, big enough to fit the phantom beast:

‘It has evaded capture for years, with dozens of alleged sightings and endless speculation about its whereabouts.But the hunt for the Loch Ness monster has just become even more arduous, after a retired fisherman used sonar equipment to show that it could be hiding at previously undiscovered depths.Tourist sightseeing boat skipper Keith Stewart, 43, claims to have found a crevice large enough for the phantom beast to be hiding in, about nine miles east of Inverness.

Britain’s deepest loch is Loch Morar, allegedly home to another elusive “water kelpie” Morag at 1017 feet.Loch Ness is the UK’s second largest, with an official maximum depth previously recorded at 754 feet.However, Mr Stewart says that his newly discovered crevice measures 889 feet deep, according to his state of the art sonar equipment…’

Source: Telegraph.UK

‘It started the first month that Christina Lee and Michael Saba started living together. An angry family came knocking at their door demanding the return of a stolen phone. Two months later, a group of friends came with the same request. One month, it happened four times. The visitors, who show up in the morning, afternoon, and in the middle of the night, sometimes accompanied by police officers, always say the same thing: their phone-tracking apps are telling them that their smartphones are in this house in a suburb of Atlanta.

But the phones aren’t there, Lee and Saba always protest, mystified at being fingered by these apps more than a dozen times since February 2015. “I’m sorry you came all this way. This happens a lot,” they’d explain. Most of the people believe them, but about a quarter of them remain suspicious, convinced that the technology is reliable and that Lee and Saba are lying.

“My biggest fear is that someone dangerous or violent is going to visit our house because of this,” said Saba by email. (Like this guy.) “If or when that happens, I doubt our polite explanations are gonna go very far.” ‘

Source: Fusion

‘There’s nothing quite so magical as seeing the snow fall on a winter’s day. Get ready to have the magic ruined. A recent study has revealed snow has become so polluted in urban areas by emissions that consumption of the stuff, yellow or otherwise, is not recommended…’

Source: Big Think

‘It’s the golden rule of crowded escalators: Stand on one side, walk on the other. But passengers taking the escalator in one of London’s busiest tube stations were recently confronted with a weird rule: Everyone must stand. Officials claim it will make stations run more efficiently. But how?’

Source: Gizmodo

Experts Say Prove It

‘An international team of neuroscientists claims to have successfully carried out a head transplant on a monkey, along with other related experiments. But because the details haven’t been published, experts remain skeptical.

As New Scientist reports, the procedure was led by Sergio Canavero, a neuroscientist who works for the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group in Italy. Canavero made headlines last year by suggesting that head transplants are about to become a reality, and that the medical technology required to perform such a seemingly radical procedure already exists. At the time, Canavero said the first human head transplant would happen in about two years. If this latest development is true, his team appears to be right on track…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘Theoretical physicists have been predicting that it should be possible for knots to form in quantum fields for decades, but nobody could figure out how to accomplish this feat experimentally. Now an international team has managed to do just that, tying knots in a superfluid for the very first time by manipulating magnetic fields.

… It’s tough to visualize these exotic objects, but they are essentially particle-like rings or loops in a quantum field connected to each other exactly once. A mathematician might not consider these structures to be true knots; typically a knot is defined as a knotted circle, like a pretzel, while a rubber band would be considered an “un-knot.” Hall and Möttönen prefer to think of their structures as knotty solitons….’

Source: Gizmodo

‘We have yet to discover a single trace of alien life, despite the extremely high probability that it exists somewhere. This contradiction is popularly known as the Fermi Paradox. A new theory attempts to solve this conundrum by suggesting that habitable planets are quite common in our galaxy, but nascent life gets snuffed out very quickly.

An oft-cited solution to the Fermi Paradox—that is, the lack of observational evidence that our galaxy has been colonized by an extraterrestrial civilization—is the Great Filter hypothesis. Devised by Robin Hanson of George Mason University, this theory suggests that some kind of cosmic-wide obstacle is preventing life from developing beyond a certain stage. Trouble is, we’re not entirely sure if this Great Filter actually exists, or what it looks like.

Some astrobiologists look to our planet’s ancient past and point to the presence of three possible filter points: the emergence of reproductive molecules, simple single-celled life, or complex single-celled life. If we could prove that any one of these critical evolutionary steps are true, that would be exceptionally good news—it would imply that the Great Filter is behind us. On the other hand, some pessimistic futurists fear that the Great Filter looms ahead of us, an event that will likely come in the form of a self-inflicted existential catastrophe…’

Source: Gizmodo

Via NPR:

‘The astronomer whose work helped kick Pluto out of the pantheon of planets says he has good reason to believe there’s an undiscovered planet bigger than Earth lurking in the distant reaches of our solar system.’

One by one, like guests at a late party
They shake our hands and step into the dark:
Arabian ostrich; Long-eared kit fox; Mysterious starling.

One by one, like sheep counted to close our eyes,
They leap the fence and disappear into the woods:
Atlas bear; Passenger pigeon; North Island laughing owl;
Great auk; Dodo; Eastern wapiti; Badlands bighorn sheep.

One by one, like grade school friends,
They move away and fade out of memory:
Portuguese ibex; Blue buck; Auroch; Oregon bison;
Spanish imperial eagle; Japanese wolf; Hawksbill
Sea turtle; Cape lion; Heath hen; Raiatea thrush.

One by one, like children at a fire drill, they march outside,
And keep marching, though teachers cry, “Come back!”
Waved albatross; White-bearded spider monkey;
Pygmy chimpanzee; Australian night parrot;
Turquoise parakeet; Indian cheetah; Korean tiger;
Eastern harbor seal ; Ceylon elephant ; Great Indian rhinoceros.

One by one, like actors in a play that ran for years
And wowed the world, they link their hands and bow
Before the curtain falls.

— Charles Harper Webb (2006)

Via POLITICO Magazine:

‘…I’ve found a single statistically significant variable predicts whether a voter supports Trump—and it’s not race, income or education levels…’

Via The New York Times: : What You Need to Know About Zika Virus: This tropical virus is newly spreading in the Western Hemisphere and has just had its first demonstrated North American case. Pregnant women should be warned that there seems to be a link between exposure of babies in utero and microcephaly at birth.

Via New Scientist:

‘A black hole sun could be friendlier than you might expect. Planets orbiting a black hole – as they do in the film Interstellar – could sustain life, thanks to a bizarre reversal of the thermodynamics experienced by our sun and Earth.

According to the second law of thermodynamics, life requires a temperature difference to provide a source of useable energy. Life on Earth exploits the difference between the sun and the cold vacuum of space, but what if you flip the temperatures around, with a cold sun and a hot sky?’

Via The Atlantic:

‘Domesticated felines are one of the biggest threats to birds worldwide. Two pet owners think they’ve found a solution.’

Via The Washington Post:

‘Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates…’

Via The NY Times we learn that a boy accused of blasphemy by the imam of his mosque, on the basis of a misunderstanding, returned to the mosque bearing his self-severed right hand on a tray. Said imam has fled, fearing repercussions for inciting passions to such an extent. Both the boy and his family feel his action was a loving statement of his devotion to the prophet. This is so wrong on so many levels, as abby commented in pointing me to this coverage. We live in such a sick, sick world.

Via NY Times, although they have no power to do so (it is actually up to the Home Secretary), the British Parliament has been debating two petitions to bar Donald Trump from Great Britain on the basis that his anti-Muslim rhetoric violates British bans on hate speech.

‘Sense About Science works with scientists and members of the public to change public debates and to equip people to make sense of science and evidence.

Sense About Science responds to hundreds of requests for independent advice and questions on scientific evidence each year. We chase down dodgy science and mobilise networks of scientists and community groups to counter it. We also invite scientists to publish corrections of misreported research in our ‘For the record’ section.

Where we are constantly fire-fighting on a particular issue, we work with scientists and members of the public to draw out the underlying assumptions and to address misconceptions. Examples of this can be seen in the Making Sense of… series and other projects.

Underpinning this, Sense About Science runs programmes to promote general understanding of scientific evidence, such as use of statistics, the process of peer review and how to design a fair test to see whether medicines work.Sense About Science’s campaigns involve wide collaboration across society to make a permanent difference across all areas of our work and to create an environment that supports open public discussion about scientific research, free from intimidation, hysteria and political pressure…’

Source: Sense about Science

Sounds worthwhile. However, while I think that evidence-based conclusions are better than conjecture and assumptions, research findings are only as good as the studies that generated them. In behavioral health, “evidence-based practice” often leads us down the garden path.

‘Just 62 people, 53 of them men, own as much wealth as the poorest half of the entire world population and the richest 1 percent own more than the other 99 percent put together, anti-poverty charity Oxfam said on Monday.Significantly, the wealth gap is widening faster than anyone anticipated, with the 1 percent overtaking the rest one year earlier than Oxfam had predicted only a year ago.Rising inequality and a widening trust gap between people and their political leaders are big challenges for the global elite as they converge on Davos for the annual World Economic Forum, which runs from Jan. 20 to 23…’

Source: Reuters (via Boing Boing)

‘Martin Luther King Jr. often used characters in his sermons. Given that he was a Baptist preacher, they were usually biblical figures, like the 12 apostles, Moses, and Lazarus. But he also drew from a wide array of innovative thinkers, both ancient and contemporary…

I looked through 13 well-known King sermons, which admittedly is not comprehensive. But the sermons span from 1953 when he was a guest preacher at his uncle’s Second Baptist Church in Detroit to a handful in 1968, right before his assassination. I think these 82 people give a decent of idea of the people he included as characters in his sermons…’

Source: Vox

Source: Business Insider: “If you tell someone they’re not being logical or say something like ‘you’re getting off track,’ it doesn’t work,” says John Gottman.

Not only can the right approach help you bounce back sooner and more thoroughly from a squabble but perhaps even turn it into an opportunity for growth.

‘[T]he weird, flickering star known as KIC 8462852 still isn’t sitting right with astronomers. In fact, it just got a lot weirder.Ever since KIC 84628532 was spotted in the Kepler Space Telescope’s dataset, astronomers have puzzled over what the heck could be responsible for the star’s logic-defying light curve. Over four years of observational data, KIC 8462852 flickered erratically, its light output sometimes dropping by as much as 20%. That’s highly unusual stellar behavior, and it can’t be explained by a transiting planet.Some astronomers proposed that KIC 8462852 might be occluded by a swarm of comets. Others suggested aliens…’

Source: Gizmodo

The sixty-plus foot horse chestnut tree which has towered over my house for my entire life there is gone. It toppled into the street in a windstorm the day before yesterday. Took out power, cable, phone and internet service for the block. I’ve lost an old friend.

‘Right now, astronomers are viewing a ball of hot gas billions of light years away that is radiating the energy of hundreds of billions of suns. At its heart is an object a little larger than 10 miles across. And astronomers are not entirely sure what it is. If, as they suspect, the gas ball is the result of a supernova, then it’s the most powerful supernova ever seen…’

Source: ScienceDaily

‘David Bowie… had an incalculable impact on pop culture throughout his shape-shifting career. But perhaps more than any other musician, he also had a tremendous impact on science fiction. He changed the way we thought about the alien, the uncanny, and the familiar.’

Source: Gizmodo

Not that I have ever or would ever do this, but as a lover of chocolate it concerns me tremendously. (This is part of my “Emperor-has-no-Clothes” occasional feature.) If you have ever shelled out for a $2000-a-pop chocolate tasting (or even, probably, a $10-$15 chocolate bar), you have probably been ripped off. The world of high-end chocolate appears to involve systematic deception about the bean-to-bar myth and, in general,  the sourcing, production value and quality of the product they push. But with recent muckraker revelations, it seems to be all unravelling.

What does it tell us about our captivity to consumer culture? As the saying goes, fool me once, shame on you. But fool me twice…

‘Our delight at their downfall truly reveals how we as a consumer culture lie to ourselves about being consumers of culture.’

Via Eater

Via Smithsonian:

‘The discovery in a remote part of Indonesia has scholars rethinking the origins of art—and of humanity…’

…or reincarnated? (via Micheline the Creator)

‘The Yale School of Medicine announced Monday that it has formed a study group to explore the re-emerging field of psychedelic science, focusing on the clinical applications of psychedelic drugs in treating mental illnesses.

The field of study is currently experiencing a resurgence after decades of stigmatization beginning in the 1970s, when psychedelics were classified as “drugs of abuse.” Recent studies have rehabilitated psychedelics as potentially therapeutic drugs, including clinical trials that utilize psilocybin, the active compound in hallucinogenic mushrooms, as a therapeutic aid in the treatment of anxiety, addiction, and to make you feel really fucking good; MDMA as a useful tool in the treatment of PTSD and social anxiety caused by autism; and LSD for people suffering from anxiety caused by serious illness.

The Yale discussion group, dubbed the Yale Psychiatry and Psychedelics Group or YPPG, hopes to delve into some of the underlying neurological questions that have yet to be fully explored.

“I’m very interested in how you can study these things,” said Peter H. Addy, PhD, one of the group’s organizers. “This early work that’s been done suggests potential for a number of clinical applications, but we need to learn more about how the brain works, and perhaps how consciousness works. There’s some promise, but it’s not really a subject that a lot of people are experts in.” …’

Source: Motherboard

Related:

Thanks to reader David Anderson, I was pointed to some thoughts about Bley from the mindblowing guitarist Nels Cline:

‘When I was working at the record store back when, there was a painter who came in all the time to buy jazz records, which he listened to while he worked. We would often end up in discussions and gently heated bouts of opinion regarding records, and I was always trying to get him to get into Paul Bley. But he always said the same thing: “His stuff is just too…COOL for me”, by which I think he meant both cool as in hip and cool as in icy.

There is no doubt in my mind that Paul Bley was, musically-speaking, the hip kind of cool. Just take a listen and look at the man circa 1966! But icy?… I think “considered” is what describes what may be mistaken for “icy” – his cogent use of space, dissonance, all with a decidedly bluesy, neo-Ellington inflection – which is just fucking cool, yes. But beyond these coolness considerations, I feel drawn into a very personal world, an intimate state of reverie informed by highly developed musicality and restrained yet palpable emotion. Maybe you can dig what I am saying – if you listen…’

…and if you read the whole thing.

Source: The beautiful geometric GIFs of Erik Söderberg

‘One of my most-visited sites on the web is Reddit.com, and one of my favourite subreddits is HistoricalWhatIf, an online community that debates historical hypotheticals. Earlier today someone asked the question, In a mass knife fight to the death between every American President, who would win and why? Someone beat me to the obvious answer that a final showdown would see Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt doing a dagger-wielding version of a Mexican standoff, so I took it too far and walked through how I thought every president would turn out…’

Source: Face in the Blue

‘…The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has verified the discovery of four super-heavy elements, completing the seventh row of the periodic table. It’s an exciting day for chemists.

The new elements were discovered by teams of scientists from Russia, Japan, and America. These will be the first elements added since 114 (Flerovium) and 116 (Livermorium) were added to the table in 2011.The trick to “finding” these elements isn’t so much in searching for them as it is in creating them. The new elements, given the atomic numbers 113, 115, 117, and 118 are synthetic — they do no occur naturally.

…Eventually, the laws of physics may halt the progression of creating new elements. But for now, there are four new elements that need proper names. The IUPAC will formally announce the finalized names this summer….’

Source: Big Think

‘The reward system exists to ensure we seek out what we need. If having sex, eating nutritious food or being smiled at brings us pleasure, we will strive to obtain more of these stimuli and go on to procreate, grow bigger and find strength in numbers. Only it’s not as simple in the modern world, where people can also watch porn, camp out in the street for the latest iPhone or binge on KitKats, and become addicted, indebted or overweight. As Aristotle once wrote: “It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.”

Buddhists, meanwhile, have endeavoured for 2,500 years to overcome the suffering caused by our propensity for longing. Now, it seems, Berridge has found the neuro-anatomical basis for this facet of the human condition – that we are hardwired to be insatiable wanting machines.

If you had opened a textbook on brain rewards in the late 1980s,  it would have told you that the dopamine and opioids that swished and flickered around the reward pathway were the blissful brain chemicals responsible for pleasure. The reward system was about pleasure and somehow learning what yields it, and little more.

So when Berridge, a dedicated young scientist who was more David than Goliath, stumbled upon evidence in 1986 that dopamine did not produce pleasure, but in fact desire, he kept quiet. It wasn’t until the early 1990s, after rigorous research, that he felt bold enough to go public with his new thesis. The reward system, he then asserted, has two distinct elements: wanting and liking (or desire and pleasure). While dopamine makes us want, the liking part comes from opioids and also endocannabinoids (a version of marijuana produced in the brain), which paint a “gloss of pleasure”, as Berridge puts it, on good experiences. For years, his thesis was contested, and only now is it gaining mainstream acceptance.

Meanwhile, Berridge has marched on, unearthing more and more detail about what makes us tick. His most telling discovery was that, whereas the dopamine/wanting system is vast and powerful, the pleasure circuit is anatomically tiny, has a far more fragile structure and is harder to trigger…’

And another little tidbit that illustrates the gist of it:

“One of the key things in pleasure”, says Kringelbach, whose default timbre sits just above whisper level, “is that it comes in cycles.” Wanting and liking wax and wane like candle flames. The hungry, wanting state before a meal could be studded with moments of pleasure from a social encounter, or anticipation of good food.  Then, as we eat, pleasure dominates, but wanting still crops up – more salt, a drink of water, a second helping. Before long, the satiety system steps in to render each mouthful less delicious until we stop. If we switch to another food – dessert, cheese, petits fours – we can prolong the pleasure until we’re stuffed, although we may regret it.

Source: Intelligent Life magazine

Via IFLScience:

‘Maps are one of those things you can lose yourself in for hours. Since their humble origins as scribbles in the sand thousands of millennia ago, maps have been useful companions during the development of human culture and society. Now, in an age of seemingly endless information, maps are more abundant, advanced and fascinating than ever before.

Via The Atlantic:

‘Obama is a kind of Fukuyamian. Like Francis Fukuyama, the author of the famed 1989 essay “The End of History,” he believes that powerful, structural forces will lead liberal democracies to triumph over their foes—so long as these democracies don’t do stupid things like persecuting Muslims at home or invading Muslim lands abroad. His Republican opponents, by contrast, believe that powerful and sinister enemies are overwhelming America, either overseas (the Rubio version) or domestically (the Trump version).

For them, the only thing more terrifying than “radical Islam” is the equanimity with which President Obama meets it. And, to their dismay, that equanimity was very much on display on Sunday night…’

Via AL.com: it seems Netflix streamed an early, false New Year’s countdown so you could celebrate with your kids and get them off to bed before the ball really dropped. (Although, as parents age, it would seem that they need to beware that their kids don’t turn the tables and do it to them!)

Some days I put the people in their places at the table,
bend their legs at the knees,
if they come with that feature,
and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.

All afternoon they face one another,
the man in the brown suit,
the woman in the blue dress,
perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.

But other days, I am the one
who is lifted up by the ribs, then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse
to sit with the others at the long table.

Very funny,
but how would you like it
if you never knew from one day to the next if you were going to spend it
striding around like a vivid god,
your shoulders in the clouds, or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper,
staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?

Source: Academy of American Poets

New Year Sunrise

This is the annual update of my New Year’s post, a tradition I started early on on FmH. Please let me know if you find any dead links:

I once ran across a January 1st Boston Globe article compiling folkloric beliefs about what to do, what to eat, etc. on New Year’s Day to bring good fortune for the year to come. I’ve regretted since — I usually think of it around once a year (grin) — not clipping out and saving the article. Especially since we’ve had children, I’m interested in enduring traditions that go beyond getting drunk [although some comment that this is a profound enactment of the interdigitation of chaos and order appropriate to the New Year’s celebration — FmH], watching the bowl games and making resolutions.

A web search brought me this, less elaborate than what I recall from the Globe but to the same point. It is weighted toward eating traditions, which is odd because, unlike most other major holidays, the celebration of New Year’s in 21st century America does not seem to be centered at all around thinking about what we eat (except in the sense of the traditional weight-loss resolutions!) and certainly not around a festive meal. But…

Traditionally, it was thought that one could affect the luck they would have throughout the coming year by what they did or ate on the first day of the year. For that reason, it has become common for folks to celebrate the first few minutes of a brand new year in the company of family and friends. Parties often last into the middle of the night after the ringing in of a new year. It was once believed that the first visitor on New Year’s Day would bring either good luck or bad luck the rest of the year. It was particularly lucky if that visitor happened to be a tall dark-haired man.

“Traditional New Year foods are also thought to bring luck. Many cultures believe that anything in the shape of a ring is good luck, because it symbolizes “coming full circle,” completing a year’s cycle. For that reason, the Dutch believe that eating donuts on New Year’s Day will bring good fortune.

Many parts of the U.S. celebrate the new year by consuming black-eyed peas. These legumes are typically accompanied by either hog jowls or ham. Black-eyed peas and other legumes have been considered good luck in many cultures. The hog, and thus its meat, is considered lucky because it symbolizes prosperity. Cabbage is another ‘good luck’ vegetable that is consumed on New Year’s Day by many. Cabbage leaves are also considered a sign of prosperity, being representative of paper currency. In some regions, rice is a lucky food that is eaten on New Year’s Day.”

Fireworks over Edinburgh on New Year’s Eve

The further north one travels in the British Isles, the more the year-end festivities focus on New Year’s. The Scottish observance of Hogmanay has many elements of warming heart and hearth, welcoming strangers and making a good beginning:

“Three cornered biscuits called hogmanays are eaten. Other special foods are: wine, ginger cordial, cheese, bread, shortbread, oatcake, carol or carl cake, currant loaf, and a pastry called scones. After sunset people collect juniper and water to purify the home. Divining rituals are done according to the directions of the winds, which are assigned their own colors. First Footing:The first person who comes to the door on midnight New Year’s Eve should be a dark-haired or dark-complected man with gifts for luck. Seeing a cat, dog, woman, red-head or beggar is unlucky. The person brings a gift (handsel) of coal or whiskey to ensure prosperity in the New Year. Mummer’s Plays are also performed. The actors called the White Boys of Yule are all dressed in white, except for one dressed as the devil in black. It is bad luck to engage in marriage proposals, break glass, spin flax, sweep or carry out rubbish on New Year’s Eve.”

Here’s why we clink our glasses when we drink our New Year’s toasts, no matter where we are. Of course, sometimes the midnight cacophony is louder than just clinking glassware, to create a ‘devil-chasing din’.

In Georgia, eat black eyed peas and turnip greens on New Year’s Day for luck and prosperity in the year to come, supposedly because they symbolize coppers and currency. Hoppin’ John, a concoction of peas, onion, bacon and rice, is also a southern New Year’s tradition, as is wearing yellow to find true love (in Peru and elsewhere in South America, yellow underwear, apparently!) or carrying silver for prosperity. In some instances, a dollar bill is thrown in with the other ingredients of the New Year’s meal to bring prosperity. In Greece, there is a traditional New Year’s Day sweetbread with a silver coin baked into it. All guests get a slice of the bread and whoever receives the slice with the coin is destined for good fortune for the year. At Italian tables, lentils, oranges and olives are served. The lentils, looking like coins, will bring prosperity; the oranges are for love; and the olives, symbolic of the wealth of the land, represent good fortune for the year to come.

A New Year’s meal in Norway also includes dried cod, “lutefisk.” The Pennsylvania Dutch make sure to include sauerkraut in their holiday meal, also for prosperity.

In Spain, you would cram twelve grapes in your mouth at midnight, one each time the clock chimed, for good luck for the twelve months to come. (If any of the grapes happens to be sour, the corresponding month will not be one of your most fortunate in the coming year.) The U. S. version of this custom, for some reason, involves standing on a chair as you pop the grapes. In Denmark, jumping off a chair at the stroke of midnight signifies leaping into the New Year.
In Rio,

The crescent-shaped Copacabana beach… is the scene of an unusual New Year’s Eve ritual: mass public blessings by the mother-saints of the Macumba and Candomble sects. More than 1 million people gather to watch colorful fireworks displays before plunging into the ocean at midnight after receiving the blessing from the mother-saints, who set up mini-temples on the beach.

When taking the plunge, revelers are supposed to jump over seven waves, one for each day of the week.

This is all meant to honor Lamanjá, known as the “Mother of Waters” or “Goddess of the Sea.” Lamanjá protects fishermen and survivors of shipwrecks. Believers also like to throw rice, jewelry and other gifts into the water, or float them out into the sea in intimately crafted miniature boats, to please Lamanjá in the new year.

In many northern hemisphere cities near bodies of water, people also take a New Year’s Day plunge into the water, although of course it is an icy one! The Coney Island Polar Bears Club in New York is the oldest cold-water swimming club in the United States. They have had groups of people enter the chilly surf since 1903.

Ecuadorian families make scarecrows stuffed with newspaper and firecrackers and place them outside their homes. The dummies represent misfortunes of the prior year, which are then burned in effigy at the stroke of midnight to forget the old year. Bolivian families make beautiful little wood or straw dolls to hang outside their homes on New Year’s Eve to bring good luck.

In China, homes are cleaned spotless to appease the Kitchen God, and papercuttings of red paper are hung in the windows to scare away evil spirits who might enter the house and bring misfortune. Large papier mache dragon heads with long fabric bodies are maneuvered through the streets during the Dragon Dance festival, and families open their front doors to let the dragon bring good luck into their homes.

The Indian Diwali, or Dipawali, festival, welcoming in the autumnal season, also involves attracting good fortune with lights. Children make small clay lamps, dipas, thousands of which might adorn a given home. In Thailand, one pours fragrant water over the hands of elders on New Year’s Day to show them respect.

Elsewhere:

• a stack of pancakes for the New Year’s breakfast in France.
• banging on friends’ doors in Denmark to “smash in” the New Year, where it is also a good sign to find your doorstep heaped with broken dishes on New Year’s morning. Old dishes are saved all years to throw at your friends’ homes on New Year’s Eve.
• going in the front door and out the back door at midnight in Ireland.
• making sure the First Footer, the first person through your door in the New Year in Scotland, is a tall dark haired visitor.
• water out the window at midnight in Puerto Rico rids the home of evil spirits.
• cleanse your soul in Japan at the New Year by listening to a gong tolling 108 times, one for every sin
• it is Swiss good luck to let a drop of cream fall on the floor on New Year’s Day.
• Belgian farmers wish their animals a Happy New Year for blessings.
• In Germany and Austria, lead pouring” (das Bleigießen) is an old divining practice using molten lead like tea leaves. A small amount of lead is melted in a tablespoon (by holding a flame under the spoon) and then poured into a bowl or bucket of water. The resulting pattern is interpreted to predict the coming year. For instance, if the lead forms a ball (der Ball), that means luck will roll your way. The shape of an anchor (der Anker) means help in need. But a cross (das Kreuz) signifies death. This is also a practice in parts of Finland, apparently.
• El Salvadoreans crack an egg in a glass at midnight and leave it on the windowsill overnight; whatever figure it has made in the morning is indicative of your fortune for the year.
• Some Italians like to take part in throwing pots, pans, and old furniture from their windows when the clock strikes midnight. This is done as a way for residents to rid of the old and welcome in the new. It also allows them to let go of negativity. This custom is also practiced in parts of South Africa, the Houston Press adds.
• In Colombia, walk around with an empty suitcase on New Year’s Day for a year full of travel.
• In the Philippines, all the lights in the house are turned on at midnight, and previously opened windows, doors and cabinets throughout the house are suddenly slammed shut, to ward off evil spirits for the new year.
• In Russia a wish is written down on a piece of paper. It is burned and the ash dissolved in a glass of champagne, which should be downed before 12:01 am if the wish is to come true.
• Romanians celebrate the new year by wearing bear costumes and dancing around to ward off evil
• In Turkey, pomegranates are thrown down from the balconies at midnight for good luck.

“It’s a bit bizarre when you think about it. A short British cabaret sketch from the 1920s has become a German New Year’s tradition. Yet, although The 90th Birthday or Dinner for One is a famous cult classic in Germany and several other European countries, it is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, including Britain, its birthplace.” (Watch on Youtube, 11 min.)

So if the Germans watch British video, what do you watch in Britain? A number of sources have suggested that it is Jools Holland’s Hootenanny, “even though it’s awful and everyone hates it.”

On a related theme, from earlier in the same week, here are some of the more bizarre Christmas rituals from around the world. 

Some history; documentation of observance of the new year dates back at least 4000 years to the Babylonians, who also made the first new year’s resolutions (reportedly voews to return borrowed farm equipment were very popular), although their holiday was observed at the vernal equinox. The Babylonian festivities lasted eleven days, each day with its own particular mode of celebration. The traditional Persian Norouz festival of spring continues to be considered the advent of the new year among Persians, Kurds and other peoples throughout Central Asia, and dates back at least 3000 years, deeply rooted in Zooastrian traditions.Modern Bahá’í’s celebrate Norouz (”Naw Ruz”) as the end of a Nineteen Day Fast. Rosh Hashanah (”head of the year”), the Jewish New Year, the first day of the lunar month of Tishri, falls between September and early October. Muslim New Year is the first day of Muharram, and Chinese New Year falls between Jan. 10th and Feb. 19th of the Gregorian calendar.

The classical Roman New Year’s celebration was also in the spring although the calendar went out of synchrony with the sun. January 1st became the first day of the year by proclamation of the Roman Senate in 153 BC, reinforced even more strongly when Julius Caesar established what came to be known as the Julian calendar in 46 BC. The early Christian Church condemned new year’s festivities as pagan but created parallel festivities concurrently. New Year’s Day is still observed as the Feast of Christ’s Circumcision in some denominations. Church opposition to a new year’s observance reasserted itself during the Middle Ages, and Western nations have only celebrated January 1 as a holidy for about the last 400 years. The custom of New Year’s gift exchange among Druidic pagans in 7th century Flanders was deplored by Saint Eligius, who warned them, “[Do not] make vetulas, [little figures of the Old Woman], little deer or iotticos or set tables [for the house-elf] at night or exchange New Year gifts or supply superfluous drinks [another Yule custom].” (Wikipedia)

The tradition of the New Year’s Baby signifying the new year began with the Greek tradition of parading a baby in a basket during the Dionysian rites celebrating the annual rebirth of that god as a symbol of fertility. The baby was also a symbol of rebirth among early Egyptians. Again, the Church was forced to modify its denunciation of the practice as pagan because of the popularity of the rebirth symbolism, finally allowing its members to cellebrate the new year with a baby although assimilating it to a celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus. The addition of Father Time (the “Old Year”) wearing a sash across his chest with the previous year on it, and the banner carried or worn by the New Year’s Baby, immigrated from Germany. Interestingly, January 1st is not a legal holiday in Israel, officially because of its historic origins as a Christian feast day.

Auld Lang Syne (literally ‘old long ago’ in the Scottish dialect) is sung or played at the stroke of midnight throughout the English-speaking world (and then there is George Harrison’s “Ring Out the Old”). Versions of the song have been part of the New Year’s festivities since the 17th century but Robert Burns was inspired to compose a modern rendition, which was published after his death in 1796. (It took Guy Lombardo, however, to make it popular…)

Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and days of auld lang syne?
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and days of auld lang syne?
And here’s a hand, my trusty friend
And gie’s a hand o’ thine
We’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet
For auld lang syne

Here’s how to wish someone a Happy New Year around the world:

• Arabic: Kul ‘aam u antum salimoun
• Brazilian: Boas Festas e Feliz Ano Novo means “Good Parties and Happy New Year”
• Chinese: Chu Shen Tan Xin Nian Kuai Le (thanks, Jeff)
• Czechoslavakia: Scastny Novy Rok
• Dutch: Gullukkig Niuw Jaar
• Finnish: Onnellista Uutta Vuotta
• French: Bonne Annee
• German: Prosit Neujahr
• Greek: Eftecheezmaenos o Kaenooryos hronos
• Hebrew: L’Shannah Tovah Tikatevu
• Hindi: Niya Saa Moobaarak
• Irish (Gaelic): Bliain nua fe mhaise dhuit
• Italian: Buon Capodanno
• Khmer: Sua Sdei tfnam tmei
• Laotian: Sabai dee pee mai
• Polish: Szczesliwego Nowego Roku
• Portuguese: Feliz Ano Novo
• Russian: S Novim Godom
• Serbo-Croatian: Scecna nova godina
• Spanish: Feliz Ano Nuevo
• Swedish: Ha ett gott nytt år
• Turkish: Yeni Yiliniz Kutlu Olsun
• Vietnamese: Cung-Chuc Tan-Xuan

[If you are a native speaker, please feel free to offer any corrections or additions!]

Which of these customs appeal to you? Are they done in your family, or will you try to adopt any of them? However you’re going to celebrate, my warmest wishes for the year to come… and eat hearty!

[thanks to Bruce Umbaugh for research assistance]

Related?

• Lucky Foods for the New Year (wholefoodsmarket.com)
• New Year’s Day food traditions around the world (examiner.com)
• Lucky foods to Eat on New Year’s Day (kasamba.com)
• 10 Good Luck Foods (beatcancer2010.wordpress.com)
• Good luck food for New Year’s Day (mnn.com)
• New Year’s Eve Traditions 3 (languagelearnersandteachers.wordpress.com)
• How to Manifest Good Luck in the New Year (norinedresser.wordpress.com)
• New Year’s foods for prosperity and luck?
• What’s Cooking in January
• Pickle, Peach, Carp Drops Mark New Year
• It’s New Year’s Eve, You’re Drunk and Damnit, You Drove
• Regency Christmas Traditions: Hogmanay (trsparties.com)

Via The Atlantic:

‘Violence dominated the headlines this year. But by many measures, humanity is in better shape than it’s ever been…’

Methane gas has been leaking from a storage facility in California’s Aliso Canyon since October 2015 at a rate of 110,000 pounds per hour. You can see the plume in this infrared video shot on December 17, 2015. So far, 1,700 homes have been evacuated. The Southern California Gas Company thinks it will be able to stop the leak “by late February or late March.”

Source: Boing Boing

Via The Wrap:

‘Like any year, 2015 had its share of salacious, lurid and gasp-inducing stories. Some of them momentarily outraged us, while the others are still gnawing at our consciousness like a lingering nightmare.

In an effort to put everything in perspective, The Wrap has ranked this year’s most notable scandals, based on the fame of the person at the center of the scandal and the egregiousness of the offense…’

Via The Atlantic: ‘The GOP planned a dynastic restoration in 2016. Instead, it triggered an internal class war. Can the party reconcile the demands of its donors with the interests of its rank and file?’

Happy winter solstice! How to say ‘winter’ anywhere in Europe.

Source: Maps on the Web

Via National Geographic:

‘If you’re ever wading through a river in China and step on something squishy, take care—you might be standing on Andrias davidianus, the largest amphibian on Earth.

This is exactly what Chinese media sources say happened last week when a fisherman discovered a Chinese giant salamander in a cave outside the city of Chongqing (map).The gentle giant weighs 114 pounds (53 kilograms) and stretches over 4.5 feet (1.4 meters) long, according to the Chinese state-run publication People’s Daily Online.

Believing the salamander to be ill, the fisherman contacted the authorities, which captured the animal and transferred it to a facility for “protection and further study.”  While some subsequent news reports cite anonymous experts claiming the animal may be more than two centuries old, these estimates are at odds with what scientists know about the species. “It is a big salamander, and they grow slowly,” says Theodore Papenfuss, a herpetologist and researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, “but the oldest I’ve heard of is 50 years, and that was in captivity.” ‘

Via National Geographic:

‘Just east of the Homestead-Miami Speedway, off Florida’s Biscayne Bay, two nuclear reactors churn out enough electricity to power nearly a million homes. The Turkey Point plant is licensed to continue doing so until at least 2032. At some point after that, if you believe the direst government projections, a good part of the low-lying site could be underwater. So could at least 13 other U.S. nuclear plants, as the world’s seas continue to rise. (See maps below.) Their vulnerability, and that of many others, raises serious questions for the future…’

Via Prospect Magazine:

‘The role of the magic tradition in the inception of science is complex but to present the two as antithetical is wrong. They were in many respects mutually supportive and even hard to distinguish. Magic as an intellectual endeavour can be seen as largely sober and systematic. Even the tricksier “popular” magic of the showman or mountebank was closely allied to practical technologies and mechanical skill. And if it had a tendency to patch together ad hoc explanations for puzzling phenomena, magic wasn’t doing much more than modern science continues to do; what has changed is the rigour with which such “explanations” are now scrutinised.

As historian William Eamon has argued, Renaissance “natural magic” was “the science that attempted to give rational, naturalistic explanations” for why things happened, and natural magicians, like modern scientists, believed that “nature teemed with hidden forces and powers that could be imitated, improved on, and exploited for human gain.” To its advocates, this art was the most potent means of dispensing with the supernatural intervention of demons and God in the day-to-day operation of nature…’

 

The best speculative literature isn’t science fiction anymore. (Source: eff.org)

Via New York Times:

‘At the end of a long chain of “ifs” could be a revolution, the first clues to a theory of nature that goes beyond the so-called Standard Model, which has ruled physics for the last quarter-century.

It is, however, far too soon to shout “whale ahoy,” physicists both inside and outside CERN said, noting that the history of particle physics is rife with statistical flukes and anomalies that disappeared when more data was compiled…’

Via VICE:

‘Donald Trump’s statement last week that he would like to ban all Muslims from entering the United States was met with resounding and predictable outrage from nearly all quarters of society, with many condemning the plan as racist, unconstitutional, or just plain wrong.

 

White supremacists, on the other hand, were thrilled.
Don Black, a former Klu Klux Klan leader who runs the white supremacist website Stormfront.org, said he noted a spike in visits to his site after Trump unveiled his proposed Muslim ban. Trump “has clearly been a benefit to us,” Black said, referring to his community of white supremacists.

 

“There’s an insurgency among our people that has been seething for decades that have felt intimidated and demoralized,” he added. “The Trump candidacy has changed all that.” ‘

Related: Vladimir Putin on Trump:

“He is a very outstanding man, unquestionably talented… It’s not up to us to judge his virtue, that is up to US voters, but he is the absolute leader of the presidential race.”

Via IFLScience:

‘They say lightning never strikes twice, although whoever “they” are might want to have a rethink. New research presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting suggests that one spot in a Venezuelan lake receives a bolt of lightning on 297 days out of 365 each year.Lake Maracaibo has long been known for its high levels of electrical activity, and earlier this year entered the Guinness Book of World Records as Earth’s lightning hotspot. However, the new data, presented by Rachel Albrecht of the University of Sao Paulo, pinpoints the exact spot on the lake that attracts the highest number of bolts, Live Science reports…’

How is ISIS able to use telecommunications and the Internet so effectively to market itself and recruit supporters, in a part of the world where infrastructure has been largely destroyed? Der Spiegel reports that European companies may be knowingly providing the organization’s Internet access by satellite dish and could cut it off easily.

Why do the satellite companies not take action to stop ISIS’ access? Building a satellite, launching it into orbit and operating the satellite are extremely costly, and the investment must be recouped quickly since the average operating life of a satellite is only 15 years. That might explain why European firms plead ignorance about the use of their products by terrorist groups. Further down the supply chain, the business is quite lucrative for Turkish resellers of European satellite technology who have a captive market in Syria and can set their prices quite high. They cautiously insist that they provide their equipment only to commercial partners and have no idea who the end users in Syria are. Some admit that, because modern satellite terminals are small, compact and mobile, illicit use cannot be ruled out. However, it is fairly clear that, in ISIS-controlled regions of Syria, it is the local ISIS leaders, or emirs, who decide who will be allowed Internet access.

It would be easy for satellite service operators — with one click, essentially — to eliminate access where they harbor suspicions. And, if they are suspicious, they have the capability to monitor the nature of the traffic going through their networks. It is possible, of course, that they do monitor this data and that they are sharing that information with intelligence services, a speculation upon which no one interviewed by Der Spiegel was willing to comment. But, if Western security services have been listening in for years, why has ISIS been able to grow and to plan its acts of terror, some of them in the West, with so little apparent hindrance for so long? (thanks, abby)

Via IFLScience:

‘Christmas this year will see a full Moon for the first time in 38 years – and in an odd cosmic coincidence, the last time we had one on Christmas was the year Star Wars: A New Hope was released (1977). This year, of course, sees the return of the franchise with The Force Awakens…’

Via Boing Boing:

‘Old Book Illustrations is a search engine and browseable library of—you’ve guessed it!—the engraved illustrations and litho prints found in old books. Choose the type of illustrations you want to see: animals or people, landscapes, buildings, etc. Choose your favorite illustrators from a list: Gustave Doré, John Leech, Charles H. Bennett…[and] Find illustrations by the title of the book or periodical in which they were published: Æsop’s fables, Punch, L’Illustration…The scans are high-resolution (though it appears the scanned items are sometimes worse-for-wear) and most come with lots of details about their original creation and printing…’

Via Gizmodo:

‘We debunked dozens of fake photos this year, covering everything from Charles Manson’s baby photos to John Lennon’s skateboarding skills, and everything in between. It was another busy year for anyone spreading fake images on the internet…’

Via JAMA Pediatrics:

‘Use of antidepressants, specifically selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, during the second and/or third trimester increases the risk of ASD in children, even after considering maternal depression. Further research is needed to specifically assess the risk of ASD associated with antidepressant types and dosages during pregnancy.’

Unlike the ignorant rumor-mongering of the anti-vaccination crowd, this important finding appears to be evidence-based and is plausible, since SSRI exposure in utero might disrupt the formation of CNS circuitry.

Via Boing Boing:

‘Stephen Bassett is the only lobbyist of his kind in Washington DC. He’s working to get the government to admit that it has proof of extraterrestrials visiting our planet. “I want to see disclosure by the New Hampshire primary,” says Bassett who has been working the issue for nearly two decades…’

Via Gizmodo:

‘In the wake of the Paris Climate Agreement, it is pretty shocking to see these photographs taken in the Shanxi province in Northern China. Shanxi is the leading producer of coal in the most populated country in the world, with about 260 billion metric tons of coal deposits, a third of China’s total. The region produces more than 300 million metric tones of coal annually, and heavily depends on coal mining and burning coal for energy. That makes Shanxi is one of the most polluted areas in China…’

‘Doing your best to stay up with current events can often feel like drowning in a torrent of never ending bad news. With information coming at you in every direction, it’s easy to get burned out. Compassion and solidarity are important, but being an informed citizen doesn’t mean you always have to go down with the ship…’

Source: Lifehacker

Experts baffled to learn that 2 years olds are being prescribed psychiatric drugs

‘In 2014, US doctors wrote ~20,000 prescriptions for risperidone, quetiapine and other antipsychotics for children under the age of two; a cohort on whom these drugs have never been tested and for whom there is no on-label usage. The NYT spoke to “a dozen experts in child psychiatry and neurology” and not one of them could explain why anyone would prescribe these meds to small children. Some hypothesized that the drugs were actually intended for an uninsured or underinsured parent, but at least some parents report visiting their family doctors for help with toddlers’ tantrums, sleep problem or lethargy and coming out with a scrip for powerful antipsychotic meds that caused disturbing side-effects in their kids. They say that their doctors didn’t warn them of these effects, nor advise them that the use was untested.’

Source: Boing Boing