The newest Seymour Hersh blockbuster in the London Review of Books has one big claim: virtually the entire story of Osama bin Laden’s death was an elaborate fiction.

Bin Laden wasn’t hiding out in Abbattobad, as we’ve been told—he was effectively under house arrest, placed there under guard by Pakistan’s security services with financial help from the Saudis. We didn’t track down his address through diligent intelligence work—a Pakistani informant ratted him out to the CIA in exchange for the $25 million reward. And we didn’t kill him in a firefight—he was abandoned by his Pakistani guards and gunned down in cold blood by U.S. troops. The whole operation was supposed to remain secret, with bin Laden’s death publicly chalked up to a drone strike, but an unexpected helicopter crash at the site of the raid forced the U.S. to concoct a complex symphony of lies. According to Hersh. The article, if you believe its almost entirely anonymous sourcing (not that there’s anything wrong with anonymous sources!), casts the Obama White House’s account of the operation as a frantic and harried cover-up designed to valorize a “homicide,” as one anonymous commando put it. Though the Hersh account is by no means new—Hersh fails to credit her, but national security writer R.J. Hillhouse wrote a blog post in 2011 that included substantially the same claims, and generated some mainstream press accounts—his stature in the spook world and track record with previous stories means his account is getting traction. Here are the U.S. lies about the raid, as catalogued by Hersh… (more, via Gawker)

via io9:‘This is Ruhemann’s purple, and you can probably figure out, from the picture, the legal reasons it will ruin your life. Now let’s talk about the chemistry behind that…’

via Motherboard: ‘In Northeast Minnesota, moose numbered about 8,000 a decade ago. Today, that number is roughly 3,500. As new evidence unspools, one clear thread has emerged: in years of warmer, shorter winters, the moose are plagued by health problems. It’s a trend that can be seen across the United States.’

Glenn Greenwald via Boing Boing: “She is essentially a fairly conservative, pro-security state, pro-penal state federal prosecutor who has spent her career supporting and upholding this evil system of mass incarceration. To cheer her simply because of the historic nature of her appointment — which, of course, is significant, her being the first African-American woman to serve in that position — without regard to the things that she’s actually going to do in pursuit of these policies, I think is mind-numbingly irrational.

I do think Eric Holder was pretty horrible in lots of important areas; but in other areas, he was actually quite good — like civil rights enforcement and advocating for more equity and fairness in the criminal justice system. I don’t expect Loretta Lynch to be [that way]…”

via National Geographic: ‘One in six species could disappear as the climate warms over the next century, with animals and plants in South America particularly hard hit while those in North America  would face the lowest risk, according to a major new analysis published Thursday…’

Diet fads are destroying us: ‘Paleo, gluten-free and the lies we tell ourselvesThe author of The Gluten Lie on our fruitless search for clean living, and why we’re so quick to scoff at science…’ (Salon.com).

via Salon.com: ‘Plants are intelligent, argues scientist Stefano Mancuso. And it’s time we start treating them accordingly…’

via The Guardian: ‘Astronomers have discovered what they say is the largest known structure in the universe: an incredibly big hole (circled, at lower right in map above).

The “supervoid”, as it is known, is a spherical blob 1.8 billion light years across that is distinguished by its unusual emptiness.

István Szapudi, who led the work at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, described the object as possibly “the largest individual structure ever identified by humanity”.

Its existence only emerged thanks to a targeted astronomical survey, which confirmed that around 10,000 galaxies were “missing” from the part of the sky it sits in.

Szapudi’s team was intentionally searching for the void because they believed that it could explain previous observations showing that part of the sky is unusually cool.’

Carl Zimmer via The Loom: ‘Earlier this week, Chinese researchers reported that they edited the genes of human embryos using a new technique called CRISPR. While these embryos will not be growing up into genetically modified people, I suspect this week will go down as a pivotal moment in the history of medicine. David Cyranoski and Sara Reardon broke the news today at Nature News. Here I’ve put together a quick guide to the history behind this research, what the Chinese scientists did, and what it may signify.’

via UNESCO: ‘The Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity is made up of those intangible heritage elements that help demonstrate the diversity of this heritage and raise awareness about its importance. In 2008 the Committee incorporated 90 elements (formerly proclaimed Masterpieces) into the Representative List and from 2009 to 2014, it inscribed 224 new elements for an overall number of 314 elements on the Representative List.’

Via io9: ‘A major shallow earthquake hit near Kathmandu in Nepal just before noon on Saturday local time. Between high population densities, intense prolonged shaking, unstable slopes, and inadequate buildings, this has the makings of a very nasty disaster.’

via Gizmodo: ‘There are a few important ways you can contribute to the Nepal earthquake relief effort from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.’

I’m praying for all my friends in Kathmandu.

Related articles

• Police: Death toll from massive Nepal earthquake nears 1,400
• World › At least 100 killed in Nepal quake
• Nepalese Police: At least 1,394 People Confirmed Death After Earthquake
• Nepal earthquake: Nearly 700 killed and hundreds trapped as buildings collapse following tremors

Via National Geographic: ‘A collision between two giant black holes is the most titanic smashup astronomers can imagine. Nobody’s ever seen it happen—but if a new report in Astrophysical Journal Letters is correct, they might not have long to wait….

When that happens, says Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, the collision should release a powerful burst of gravitational waves—ripples in the very fabric of spacetime itself. Physicists have built enormous instruments to detect those waves, which would be a ringing confirmation of the theory.’

Via IFLScience: ‘For Kijito—the 375-pound male gorilla—it may have just been a matter of mixed signals. What the girl found funny, the gorilla deemed aggressive. Officials at Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo said that no one was in danger, even when the pane of glass cracked.

“Shortly before this, we were telling the kids [the gorillas] could not break [the glass],” said Kevin Cave, the father in the video, to Omaha World-Herald. “They will never believe us again.” ‘

Via Salon.com: ‘Why the Republican nomination will go to the highest bidder.’

Via The Verge: ‘On the 81st anniversary of the iconic Surgeon’s Photograph — the fake image claiming to show the head and neck of the Loch Ness Monster — Google Maps will now let you search for Nessie yourself. Street View has been updated to include imagery of the 23-mile-long Loch Ness in Scotland, and Google even sent a team of divers into the depths of the nearly 800-foot-deep loch to capture underwater images of the legendary lake. Is the Loch Ness Monster real? Is it resting at the bottom of Loch Ness? The answer to your questions may now be hidden in a Street View image.’

Monster or not, Loch Ness is one of my favorite spots on earth, so this is good news.

Via The Atlantic: ‘When Department of Health and Human Services administrators decided to base 30 percent of hospitals’ Medicare reimbursement on patient satisfaction survey scores, they likely figured that transparency and accountability would improve healthcare. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) officials wrote, rather reasonably, “Delivery of high-quality, patient-centered care requires us to carefully consider the patient’s experience in the hospital inpatient setting.” They probably had no idea that their methods could end up indirectly harming patients…

Patient-satisfaction surveys have their place. But the potential cost of the subjective scores are leading hospitals to steer focus away from patient health, messing with the highest stakes possible: people’s lives.’

Via Aeon: ‘With a cut, a filmmaker can instantaneously replace most of what is available in your visual field with completely different stuff. This is something that never happened in the 3.5 billion years or so that it took our visual systems to develop. You might think, then, that cutting might cause something of a disturbance when it first appeared. And yet nothing in contemporary reports suggests that it did.’

Via Gawker:

“Oh, your dark chocolate only has 70% cacao? You poor thing. I only eat 97% cacao fair trade raw vegan organic helper monkey picked chocolate that’s been through the digestive system of a spotted African cat.”

Via BBC: ‘Hidden in an unknown corner of Inner Mongolia is a toxic, nightmarish lake created by our thirst for smartphones, consumer gadgets and green tech, discovers Tim Maughan.’

Via Bloomberg Business: ‘A growing number of mental health-care providers are filling their practices with easy-to-treat, cash-paying patients — and leaving the desperately ill with few options…’

Via Gizmodo: ‘Our public lands — including National Forests, wildlife refuges and wilderness areas — are arguably our greatest treasure. Well, almost every Republican Senator just voted to sell them to the highest bidder. This is what you can do about it.’

Via Salon.com:

‘Since Ted Cruz first announced his candidacy, much has been made of his chances of winning, his arrogance and his extreme conservative views. But most of the controversy over his candidacy centers on his lying.It is no surprise to any of us that politicians lie. We generally assume they stretch the truth to get elected, to denigrate their political foes, and to bolster their images. But Cruz may just represent one of the biggest liars in recent history. In fact, he may be a whole new form of political liar.

The Daily Beast reports that, “Cruz’s Politifact track record for publicly asserted falsehoods is the second-highest among front-runners, totaling 56 percent of all statements they’ve looked at.” And Matthew Rozsa tell us that “Googling ‘Ted Cruz lies’ pulls back an astonishing 7,890,000 results, and on Twitter, the two phrases are basically synonymous.”

The trouble with this angle on Cruz’s misstatements is that it presumes that Cruz is, in fact, lying. But lying depends on the liar knowing that what he is saying is false. Cruz shows no signs of such awareness. As Ann Marie Cox points out in her survey of Cruz’s lies, there’s more going on here than just a politician’s twisting of the truth or a partisan spin on data. She wonders whether it is time to take seriously the idea that he really believes what he is saying. “There are objective falsehoods that show Cruz could just be looking at a different set of data. Other, more telling whoppers show that Cruz isn’t just looking at different data, he’s living in a different universe.”

That different universe is Cruz’s world of misinformation. He doesn’t lie because lying would require that he actually know the truth. And that is what makes Cruz an even greater threat to the health of our democracy than all of his lies put together. Cruz represents a turn in GOP politics where political beliefs operate more like religious fervor than reasoned inference.’

Via Salon.com: ‘The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) recently released an in-depth report on terrorism in the United States. Covering April 2009 to February 2015, the report (titled “The Age of the Wolf”) found that during that period, “more people have been killed in America by non-Islamic domestic terrorists than jihadists.” [Although] “the jihadist threat is a tremendous one,” … law enforcement, the SPLC stressed, are doing the public a huge disservice if they view terrorism as an exclusively Islamist phenomenon.’

Via io9: ‘Next time you’re strolling through a museum, pay attention to just the colors of the paintings and the years. Notice anything? Paintings have been getting progressively bluer.

Or, to put it another way, blue is becoming “the new orange,” says Martin Bellander, who put together this chart analyzing color usage in over 120,000 paintings. To make this visualization, he scraped data and images from the BBC’s database of famous paintings through the centuries and analyzed which colors predominated.

Orange is, indeed, far and away the most used color in paintings through the 19th century, and then the usage of other colors — blue, in particular — start to creep upwards so that by our own time, the color spread is fairly evenly spread across the spectrum. Why exactly this happened isn’t clear. But just as interesting is the question of how far we can expect it to go: Will the current state of more-or-less color equilibrium hold, or will a similar chart a few centuries from now show blue sweeping the field, just like orange used to?’

Via Boing Boing: ‘Read only the right-hand page of serious books. “If it’s a frivolous, relaxing book, I read every word. But serious books I read on the right-hand side only because I’ve discovered enormous redundancy in any well-written book, and I find that by reading only the right-hand page this keeps me very wide awake, filling in the other page out of my own noodle.” ‘

Via Salon.com: ‘Male mice sing ultrasonic love songs to woo mates according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers of Behavioral Neuroscience. In fact, the mice perform long, complex strings of syllables the same way as song birds.

“Those songs are really high in pitch, above 50 kilohertz, and are not audible to humans,” said Jonathan Chabout, a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University. “When we pitch them down and play back at real speed, it sounds like a bird.” ‘

Via Motherboard: ‘Indiana’s new “religious freedom” law has ignited a national firestorm of protest—and the tech industry is leading the fight.

The new law, which critics say opens the door to discrimination against lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people, has prompted many leading tech companies to engage in corporate activism on social issues with a newly emboldened intensity, according to LGBT advocates.

“The tech industry’s opposition to this bill is unprecedented,” said Fred Sainz, vice president at Human Rights Campaign, a leading LGBT advocacy group. “Never before have so many tech firms spoken out so loudly against such discriminatory actions.”

Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana says his state’s law is designed to provide legal protection against government action that “substantially” burdens religious freedom. But critics call the measure a bald-faced attempt to legitimize discrimination by allowing businesses to refuse service to LGBT people on “religious” grounds.

The fierce backlash against Indiana’s new law underscores how national attitudes are rapidly changing on the issue of gay rights, and highlights how important LGBT equality has become for some of the country’s most influential tech companies.’

Related articles

• Silicon Valley’s noble goals hit home in Indiana
• Yelp CEO rips Indiana ‘religious freedom’ law
• Human Rights Campaign hopes to fight Arkansas’ religious freedom bill by scaring away Silicon Valley

Via Big Think: ‘Many conflicting theories exist that try and pinpoint the origins of the holiday everyone in your office hates you for. Of all these theories, the most likely root of what we now know as April Fools’ Day dates back to Pope Gregory XIII, who reigned — or if reign isn’t the right word — who pope’d from 1572 to 1584. I’m sure you’re familiar with the calendar hanging on your wall that starts in January, ends in December, and consists of seemingly arbitrary amounts of days per month. You can thank Pope Greg for that. His Gregorian calendar replaced the Julian Calendar in 1582.

One major change with the calendar switch was that New Year’s Day moved from the end of March to the beginning of January. As Tech Times notes, those who didn’t get the memo about the change of date and celebrated the old New Year’s Day at the end of March were thus deemed, naturally, April fools.

Via Salon.com: ‘In 2007, Belgian chocolatier Dominique Persoone decided that guests at a party he catered for the Rolling Stones were too hip to eat their desserts with their mouths. So, he invented the “chocolate shooter” — a little line of cocoa powder designed to get you a little high and keep you tasting chocolate for hours.

Since then, Persoone has sold over 25,000 chocolate shooters and with it, established a super obnoxious trend.

“The mint and the ginger really tinkle your nose,” said the 46-year-old of the spices present in the shooter. “Then the mint flavor goes down and the chocolate stays in your brain.”

Unsurprisingly, this is not good for you. Stop doing it.’

[Just a thought: could the appeal of this have something to do with dyslexia?]

Via WIRED: ‘Here’s what people tend to forget about dogs (and a number of other animals): Elimination fulfills both a physiological purpose and a social one. Whether the deed is done in an open field, the middle of the street, a neighbor’s doorstep, or a bed of ivy, dogs are not just expelling bodily waste; they are depositing piles of really interesting information on the ground.’

You’re Not Alone (va io9): ‘New findings indicate nearly one in five college-age students has been startled awake by an abrupt, loud noise that doesn’t actually exist. Known as “exploding head syndrome,” the psychological condition appears to be more common and disruptive than previously thought.

Some of you may already be familiar with exploding head syndrome (EHS). I know I’ve experienced this on at least one or two occasions, and it’s not pleasant. It’s characterized by an exceptionally loud noise in the head (sometimes described as “an explosion” in the head), usually during sleep-to-wake or wake-to-sleep transitions. Though benign, it can be extremely stressful.

Here’s what Washington State University psychologist Brian Sharpless, a sleep disorder expert and lead author of a recent study study on the prevalence of EHS among college undergraduates, told me about the condition:

Exploding head syndrome episodes by themselves are harmless. They can cause problems with a relatively small number of people if episodes happen too frequently, regularly disturb sleep, or if people react to them in unhealthy ways (e.g., by becoming really anxious before bedtime or fearing that something more serious may be wrong with them).’

 

Via Gawker: ‘Only a few minutes ago, the entire music industry stood on a stage in a collective display of how rich and out of touch they are. They think you are willing to pay up to double the price of other streaming music services to pay for their streaming music service, because they are crazy.

Imagine this: canceling your Spotify subscription, and paying $20 for a Tidal subscription instead. It’s more expensive because it’s “higher quality” and “artist-owned,” which is important because Usher, Daft Punk, and Madonna have been living in wretched penury for far too long, and it’s time for people to give back. The modern-day Our Gang (which counted among its members not only the aforementioned supernovas, but also Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Kanye West, Chris Martin, and Jack White) held a “keynote” to promote Tidal, the already extant European streaming company Jay Z recently purchased for $56 million because he’s bored.

Christian Appy writes in Salon.com: ‘My main argument is that the Vietnam War shattered the central tenet of American national identity—the broad faith that the United States is a unique force for good in the world, superior not only in its military and economic power, but in the quality of its government and institutions, the character and morality of its people, and its way of life.

A common term for this belief is “American exceptionalism.” Because that term has been bandied about so much in recent years as a political slogan and a litmus test of patriotism, we need to be reminded that it has deep roots and meaning throughout our history. In many ways the nation was founded on the faith that it was blessed with unrivaled resources, freedoms, and prospects. So deep were those convictions they took on the power of myth—they were beyond debate. Dissenting movements throughout our history did little to challenge the faith.That’s what made the Vietnam War’s impact so significant. Never before had such a wide range of Americans come to doubt their nation’s superiority; never before had so many questioned its use of military force; never before had so many challenged the assumption that their country had higher moral standards.’

Via Modern Farmer: ‘They don’t have mouths, ears or even a brain, but according to some scientists, plants are talking all the time. We just need to understand their language.

Once we do, we may discover that plants routinely exhibit animal-like behavior. What if, as some research indicates, they communicate with each other and their environment? Perhaps plants hunt, scream, share and nurture their young, just like members of the animal kingdom.’

Matthew Beaumont writes in The Guardian: ‘In an economy in which time, including nighttime, is money, wandering the streets after dark – when most people are sleeping in order to prepare themselves for the next day’s labour – is in symbolic terms subversive. In the aberrant and deviant form celebrated by Dickens in the 19th century, and surreptitiously practised by innumerable others before and since, nightwalking is quintessentially objectless, loitering and vagabond.’

Via National Geographic: ‘It’s one thing to have a tolerant meeting with a wild wolf that goes on for a matter of minutes. But this went on for six years, so we got to know this wolf, whom we came to call Romeo, as an individual. And he got to know us and our dogs.

For want of a better word, the only thing I can say from a human perspective is that it amounted to friendship. If you wanted to be scientifically correct, it would be “social mutual tolerance.” But it was more than that. The wolf would come trotting over to say hi, and give a little bow and a relaxed yawn, and go trotting after us when we went skiing. There was no survival benefit. He obviously just enjoyed our company.’

Via Big Think: ‘Scientist running the world’s biggest physics experiment — the Large Hadron Collider located in Geneva, Switzerland — will soon begin trials that will test for the presence of alternate universes existing in different dimensions of hyperspace.Since detecting the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle, which explains how matter originally obtained mass, the collider has been shut down for two years while undergoing renovations. When it reopens, it will be able to reach energy levels higher than ever before: 13 tera electron volts (TeV). The Higgs boson was discovered at levels of 5.3 TeV.

Sergio Leone

Via Open Culture: ‘Trust a genre-loving auteur like Quentin Tarantino (and one who made his very own Django a few years back) to know Spaghetti westerns inside and out. While even those of us who never turn down the chance to enjoy a good Spaghetti western might struggle to name ten of them, Tarantino can easily run down his personal top twenty:

• The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)
• For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone, 1965)
• Django (Sergio Corbucci, 1966)
• The Mercenary (Sergio Corbucci, 1966)
• Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)
• A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964)
• Day of Anger (Tonino Valerii, 1967)
• Death Rides a Horse (Giulio Petroni, 1967)
• Navajo Joe (Sergio Corbucci,1966)
• The Return of Ringo (Duccio Tessar, 1965)
• The Big Gundown (Sergio Sollima, 1966)
• A Pistol for Ringo (Duccio Tessari, 1965)
• The Dirty Outlaws (Franco Rossetti, 1967)
• The Great Silence (Sergio Corbucci, 1968)
• The Grand Duel (Giancarlo Santi, 1972)
• Shoot the Living, Pray for the Dead (Giuseppe Vari, 1971)
• Tepepa (Giulio Petroni, 1968)
• The Ugly Ones (Eugenio Martin, 1966)
• Viva Django! (Ferdinando Baldi, 1967)
• Machine Gun Killers (Paolo Bianchini, 1968)

You can watch all the trailers of these Spaghetti western masterpieces in the playlist…, created by The Spaghetti Western Database.’

This is a revelation for me. I have always loved Sergio Leone’s films, but I am excited to learn that there is a rich body of work of at least five or six other auteurs of the genre waiting for me out there!

Via The Psychologist: ‘Over the past 25 years the pace of progress in neuroscience research has been extraordinary, with advances in both understanding and technology. We might expect that this would stimulate improved understanding and treatment of mental health problems, yet in general this has not been the case. In fact, our standard treatment approaches have barely changed in decades, and still fail many people suffering from mental distress.’

via Nautilus: ‘…The way that different languages convey information has fascinated linguists, anthropologists, and psychologists for decades. In the 1940s, a chemical engineer called Benjamin Lee Whorf published a wildly popular paper in the MIT Technology Review (pdf) that claimed the way languages express different concepts—like gender, time, and space—influenced the way its speakers thought about the world. For example, if a language didn’t have terms to denote specific times, speakers wouldn’t understand the concept of time flowing.

This argument was later discredited, as researchers concluded that it overstated language’s constraints on our minds. But researchers later found more nuanced ways that these habits of speech can affect our thinking. Linguist Roman Jakobson described this line of investigation thus: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” In other words, the primary way language influences our minds is through what it forces us to think about—not what it prevents us from thinking about.

These five languages reveal how information can be expressed in extremely different ways, and how these habits of thinking can affect us:

• A Language Where You’re Not the Center of the World
• A Language Where Time Flows East to West
• A Language Where Colors Are Metaphors
• A Language That Makes You Provide Evidence
• A Language That Has No Word for “Two” ‘

Via arxiv.org: ‘We use a popular fictional disease, zombies, in order to introduce techniques used in modern epidemiology modelling, and ideas and techniques used in the numerical study of critical phenomena. We consider variants of zombie models, from fully connected continuous time dynamics to a full scale exact stochastic dynamic simulation of a zombie outbreak on the continental United States. Along the way, we offer a closed form analytical expression for the fully connected differential equation, and demonstrate that the single person per site two dimensional square lattice version of zombies lies in the percolation universality class. We end with a quantitative study of the full scale US outbreak, including the average susceptibility of different geographical regions.’

Related articles

• Scientists Determine Safest U.S. Locations During Zombie Apocalypse
• Zombie outbreak? Statistical mechanics reveals the ideal hideout

Via Gizmodo: ‘A study published in Nature Geoscience finds that warm seawater is likely getting under an East Antarctica glacier and melting it from below. If the glacier’s ice shelf melts, runway melting could cause another 11 feet of sea-level rise—that’s on top of previous estimates.’

by Wendy M. Johnson of Tolsona, Alaska

Via Gizmodo: ‘If you’re like me, you’ve spent years heeding forecasters telling you that the northern lights will DEFINITELY be visible tonight—and then seeing nothing but boring old night sky. Tonight, summon your faith and give it one last shot: There’s a severe geomagnetic storm going on.’

Related articles

• Geomagnetic storm cause any electrical disturbances today?
• Rare ‘severe’ geomagnetic storm is hitting Earth right now
• Severe solar storm may disrupt power, satellites
• Northern Lights Dazzle In Rare Display
• Watch the solar eruptions that caused the spectacular auroras on St. Patrick’s Day…
• Colorful Aurora displays light up the sky in Ohio, New York and Minnesota

Via Boing Boing: “Being gluten intolerant means you are entitled to tell people about the offensive things that happen to you if you eat gluten. Because they’re not gluten free, they’re obligated by law to listen.”

Disclaimer to my gluten-intolerant readers: I recognize that the verdict is not in on the reality of non-celiac gluten intolerance. 

Via The Atlantic: ‘For half a century, memories of the Holocaust inoculated the Continent against overt anti-Semitism. That period has ended—the recent fatal attacks in Paris and Copenhagen are merely the latest in a mounting tide. Today, right-wing fascist strains of Jew-hatred are merging with a new threat from radicalized Islamists, confronting Europe with a crisis, and its Jews with an agonizing choice.’

Via Big Think: ‘…[T]he question at the heart of this new report is, “Can the remaining whales ever recover?” Populations remain low — they’re whales after all, not rabbits — and other threats, such as changes in climate, unstable food supplies, and noise from military sonar, could stunt efforts to restore the population.’

Via The Atlantic: ‘What’s sometimes referred to as the global jihadist “movement” is actually extremely fractured. It’s united by a general set of shared ideological beliefs, but divided organizationally and sometimes doctrinally. Whether to fight the “near enemy” (local regimes) or the “far enemy” (such as the United States and the West), for example, has been contentious since the 1990s, when Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States. Rivalry among like-minded militant groups is as common as cooperation. Identities and allegiances shift. Groups align and re-align according to changing expectations about the future of the conflicts they’re involved in, as well as a host of other factors, such as competition for resources, leadership transitions, and the defection of adherents to rival groups that appear to be on the ascendant.’

Via The Morning News: ‘I first learned about Centralia from my friend Ali. He told me there was an abandoned town in eastern Pennsylvania’s coal country that had been on fire since 1962. A controlled burn at the dump, he said, had somehow reached a coal seam beneath it, and the fire spread. Now it’s big—400 acres—and hotter than 1,000 degrees, eating away at the ground beneath the ground. He told me about sinkholes that had swallowed people, and huge cracks in the earth, and poisonous gases that seeped into buildings.

…Emory told me there were hundreds of other coal fires in the U.S. and a handful more in Pennsylvania. I nodded and said, “Really?” so he’d keep talking, but I didn’t believe him. Turns out, he’s right. The Office of Surface Mining has identified 100 fires burning beneath nine states. There are 45 just in Pennsylvania, though none are as famous as the one in Centralia.’

Elias Isquith via Salon.com:  ‘Before I had a chance to peruse the Department of Justice’s long-awaited report on the killing of Michael Brown by former Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson, I had three predictions. The first was that the DOJ would find the city of Ferguson’s finances to be a house of cards built upon a foundation of anti-tax absolutism and white supremacy…

My second prediction about the DOJ report was that it would find the Ferguson Police Department to be rife with bigotry, which would manifest itself most conspicuously through emails filled with the kind of racist “jokes” that many Americans prefer to call “politically incorrect.” I guessed this not because I had any special insight into the office culture of the Ferguson PD, but because the embarrassing disclosure of racist jokes disseminated among employees by email has become a recurring media story throughout the Obama years…

My third and final prediction, meanwhile, was that the media’s coverage of the DOJ report would devote much more attention to the second prediction (the racist emails) than the first (the systemic dysfunction); and that the response on the part of Ferguson’s civilian leadership would similarly concern itself more with “politically incorrect” jokes than with institutional corruption. I imagined that it would play out this way primarily because that’s how it always does.’

Via io9: ‘Unlike dogs and other animals, humans — for the most part — don’t sniff each other. Well, at least that’s what we thought. A rather unsettling new study from the Weizmann Institute shows that practically all of us sniff our hands after handshaking — a possible sign of social chemosignaling behavior.

The new study, published in the journal eLife, suggests that humans use handshakes to exchange important chemical information — information that can alter our behavior is subtle ways. The researchers came to this conclusion by covertly filming 271 subjects as they they were being greeted in a structured event, some with a handshake and some without.’

Justin P. McBrayer in the New York Times: ‘What would you say if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not true that it’s wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests? Would you be surprised?

I was. As a philosopher, I already knew that many college-aged students don’t believe in moral facts. While there are no national surveys quantifying this phenomenon, philosophy professors with whom I have spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshman in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.

What I didn’t know was where this attitude came from…’ (via 3quarksdaily)

Via Big Think: ‘Jesse Singal from NYMag reports that the mobile app market is an under-regulated mess. While the health market has boomed with step, heart rate, and various other personal wellness trackers, Singal warns that there’s no regulation, which means an app’s accuracy can vary from developer to developer. This lack of consistency or regulation standards among applications brings questions of reliability for users that may depend on sound readings.’

Via Telegraph: ‘The launch of a new word in China is threatening to break the internet, with the character being shared millions of times despite no-one knowing what it means.

The character, known as “duang”, has appeared more than 8m times on China’s leading social media site Weibo since it emerged a week ago, generating hundreds of thousands of online conversations.

Foreign Policy, the magazine, has now dubbed the character as a “break the internet” viral meme in the same ilk as last year’s image of Kim Kardashian and last week’s multi-coloured dress.

The new character has connections to film star Jackie Chan. A fake advert featuring Chan, who sponsors numerous products in China, appeared on video streaming site Youku for herbal shampoo Bawang, which Chan endorses. At the end of advert, Chan appears to say of the product: “It’s just … it’s just … duang!” ‘

Via National Geographic:  ‘Dogs may forget an event less than two minutes after it happened, according to a new study.’

Via Gizmodo:  ‘It’s a historic day for the internet. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) just passed the strongest net neutrality rules in this country’s history. This is great news! But let me repeat: The battle for net neutrality is still not over. In a sense, the real battle begins now.’

Via io9:  ‘When a crowd needs to pass through a small doorway – an emergency exit, for example – the opening can quickly become obstructed. Recently, researchers have been using sheep to understand how they might mitigate this potentially catastrophic bottleneck effect.’

Via IFLScience:  ‘The outlook used to be pretty bleak for those who had lost movement in their limbs due to severe nerve damage, but over the last year or so, some incredible advances have been made that are restoring shattered hope for many.

The amazing breakthroughs include spinal cord stimulation that allowed paralyzed men to regain some voluntary control of their legs, a brain implant that enabled a quadriplegic man to move his fingers, and a system that allowed a paralyzed woman to control a robotic arm using her thoughts. Science has definitely been on a roll, but this winning streak isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. Now, the world’s first “bionic reconstructions” have been performed on three Austrian men to help them regain hand function. This technique enabled the newly amputated patients to control prosthetic hands using their minds, allowing them to perform various tasks that most people take for granted.’

Via io9:  ‘As recently as 1997, we discovered that another body, 3753 Cruithne, is a quasi-orbital satellite of Earth.

This simply means that Cruithne doesn’t loop around the Earth in a nice ellipse in the same way as the moon, or indeed the artificial satellites we loft into orbit. Instead, Cruithne scuttles around the inner solar system in what’s called a “horseshoe” orbit.’

Via io9: ‘A study published this week in Biology Letters showed rats remember who is nice to them and return the favor later. National Geographic calls it “the first evidence of direct reciprocation in nonhumans.” ‘

Via Gizmodo: ‘An Italian neuroscientist who has been advocating for head transplants now wants to make one actually happen. He’ll be announcing a project at a surgical conference later this year. Here’s how the proposed human head transplant will work—supposedly…’

Via The Verge:  ‘The worst policies from the war on terror are now in our backyard…’

Via io9:  ‘…it look(s) as if it could be in anyone’s garden. A closer picture shows it to be not quite garden friendly. The thing is covered in spikes, especially on the outer edge of those long, thin, dense leaves that crowd around its base. What do you suppose it does with those? Here’s a hint: Puya chilensis has been informally given the name “the sheep-eating plant.” It’s not unusual to find hairy mammals or small birds trapped in the plant’s leaves.

The plant doesn’t eat them directly. It’s not carnivorous. It just lets them die. Their corpses rot (perhaps attracting more animals with their scent) and fertilize the dirt around the plant. Puya chilensis can then absorb the nutrients from the animals it trapped and slowly starved to death, and go on with its happy life.’

Via Salon.com: ‘How Bernie Sanders just electrified Iowa — and what it means for ’16 . At an under-the-radar town hall in Des Moines, Sanders had the crowd begging for more. Here’s why it matters.’

Via Salon.com: The Oscars and awards-season devalue and pervert art: ‘ “Boyhood” or “Birdman”? Beck or Beyoncé? Who cares. We must stop turning creativity into another dumb competition…’

Via Salon.com: ‘ Islam, Christianity and our tolerance for ancient myths, harmful ideas: Our enduring deference to religion, despite its toxicity and phony explanations for the cosmos, lets it survive.’

Via CDC:  ‘What is Bourbon virus?

Bourbon virus belongs to a group of viruses called thogotoviruses. Viruses in this group are found all over the world. A few of these viruses can cause people to get sick.

How do people get infected with Bourbon virus?

We do not yet fully know how people become infected with Bourbon virus. However, based on what we know about similar viruses, it is likely that Bourbon virus is spread through tick or other insect bites.

Where have cases of Bourbon virus disease occurred?

As of February 12, 2015, only one case of Bourbon virus disease had been identified in eastern Kansas in late spring 2014. The man who was infected later died. At this time, we do not know if the virus might be found in other areas of the United States.

What are the symptoms of Bourbon virus?

Because there has been only one case identified thus far, scientists are still learning about possible symptoms caused by this new virus. In the one person who was diagnosed with Bourbon virus disease, symptoms included fever, tiredness, rash, headache, other body aches, nausea, and vomiting. The person also had low blood counts for cells that fight infection and help prevent bleeding.’

“My boyfriend of 7 years and I are both physicists. Heres how he proposed to me.”

(Imgur via Boing Boing)

I tend to agree with Sam. Big Brother was not merely a backing band for Janis, as clear in the extended back and forth riffing between him and her on numbers such as ‘Ball and Chain’ or ‘Combination of the Two,’ both captured well on Cheap Thrills. Sam, I’m cueing up the LP now. You will be missed.

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The Poetry of Richard Milhous Nixon, a slim volume compiled by Jack S. Margolis and published in 1974, stands as a seminal work in verse. Comprising direct excerpts from the Watergate tapes—arguably the most fecund stage of Nixon’s career—it fuses the rugged rhetoric of statesmanship to the lithe contours of song, all rendered in assured, supple, poignant free verse. Below, to celebrate Presidents’ Day, are four selections from this historic chapbook, which has, lamentably, slipped out of print.

THE POSITION

The position is

To withhold

Information

And to cover up

This is

Totally true.

You could say

This is

Totally untrue.

TOGETHER

We are all

In it

Together.

We take

A few shots

And

It will be over.

Don’t worry.

I wouldn’t

Want to be

On the other side

Right now.

IN THE END

In the end

We are going

To be bled

To death.

And in the end,

It is all going

To come out anyway.

Then you get the worst

Of both worlds.

(via Paris Review)

Via io9:  ‘Another debate popped again this week, one that’s been talked about and argued over for years now—whether we should be actively seeking out and sending messages to habitable planets in the search for life beyond Earth.

Known as Active Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), some researchers and scientists want to continually broadcast messages to known habitable planets in an effort to reach a new alien species. But many disagree. People like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk think a more measured and thought out approach makes more sense, and that historically, races of people who have happily greeted newcomers quickly found them to be conquerors.

The idea of Active Seti is to encode messages in powerful radio signals and send endlessly for centuries to solar systems with habitable planets. According to The Guardian, Seth Shostak, the director of the Seti Institute, wants to just beam the entire contents of the internet, porn and all, to other star systems.’

 

Join the Battle for Net Neutrality. The most important FCC vote of our lifetime is about to happen.On Feb 26 the FCC will vote to save net neutrality or let Comcast and other ISPs create Internet slow lanes. Some members of Congress, on behalf of their Cable donors, are trying to stop the FCC from protecting the Internet we love. There isn’t much time to stop them, contact them now.

via Aeon: ‘The stigma attached to cowardice has caused terrible harm, most obviously to those who have been made to pay for the alleged ‘crime’. Less obvious, but more pervasive, is the damage done by people who, fearing the shame of cowardice, have acted in reckless, often violent ways. Remembering this should make us less ready to use the label of ‘coward’, especially in the case of someone refusing to use violence…’  – Chris Walsh

Via Huffington Post: ‘When disaster strikes, the wildlife clinic at the Phillip Island Nature Park will be ready, equipped to deploy hundreds of tiny wool sweaters at a moment’s notice.

Not tiny sweaters for people, but penguins — knit by a group of volunteers that includes Alfred “Alfie” Date, who at 109 years of age is Australia’s oldest man.’

Via io9: ‘Wildlife photography is not without its perils. Case in point, this recent incident in which a 550-pound mountain gorilla “drunk” on bamboo shoots rushed a photographer with fists clenched.’

Via Motherboard:  ‘Starting this week, dozens of people will pull out $20 bills to find the White House on the back submerged in water: a striking image that comes as part of a new call to action over climate change.

The project is the last of three “currency interventions” by San Francisco-based artist Joseph DeLappe. In the past, he has call​ed attention to drone warfare and police brutality with similar projects.’

Via Salon.com:  ‘Former labor secretary Robert Reich on the dangers of on-demand jobs and our growing intolerance for labor unions’

Via Salon.com:  ‘…[W]hat has been largely missing so far from the whole Kayne vs. Beck conversation has been someone to call West out on his apparent need to take umbrage on Beyonce’s behalf. That, however, was taken care of Monday, when Garbage front woman posted an open letter on Facebook. “It is YOU who is so busy disrespecting artistry,” she wrote, adding, “You disrespect your own remarkable talents and more importantly you disrespect the talent, hard work and tenacity of all artists when you go so rudely and savagely after such an accomplished and humble artist like BECK. You make yourself look small and petty and spoilt. In attempting to reduce the importance of one great talent over another, you make a mockery of all musicians and music from every genre, including your own. Grow up and stop throwing your toys around. You are making yourself look like a complete twat.” But where she really nailed it was in her PS, when she observed, “I am pretty certain Beyonce doesn’t need you fighting any battles on her account. Seems like she’s got everything covered perfectly well on her own.”’

Amen.

Via io9:  ‘The ambition of NoFlyZone, a consortium of (small) drone manufacturers, is to create a nationwide database of homeowners and flight permissions. If you don’t want drones to be able to overfly your residence, the solution is simple: enter your house in the online database, and after the next round of firmware updates, drones will be incapable of overflying your property, in the same way that they’re currently banned from the airspace around airports and, uh, the White House.’

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Via Big Think:  ‘NPR’s Emily Schwing reports on some recent climate-change developments that are affecting Alaska’s Yukon Quest and Iditarod sled dog races. Officials and mushers are beginning to wonder how long the state sport will be able to survive these drastic changes with warm temperatures threatening food supplies and the landscape of the race.’

Via Salon.com:  ‘How deep-rooted cynicism about our national security state has made us enablers of U.S. foreign policy.’

Via Fast Company:  ‘To understand third-wave tea, it’s helpful to understand third wave coffee, which you could characterize as an obsession with tiny, granular details. First wave coffee meant Folgers. At a second-wave establishment like Starbucks, a patron might request non-coffee additives like soy milk, two pumps of sugar-free vanilla, and their name spelled correctly. Third-wave coffee drinkers are more concerned with process, and the coffee beans themselves: What’s the best extraction method? A pour-over? A vacuum pump? What’s the ideal water temperature? Oh! And if you aren’t using a conical Burr grinder, what are you even doing with your life?

If first-wave tea was Lipton coming to the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, and the second wave was the spread of mall emporiums like Teavana, third-wave tea in the U.S. is, like its coffee predecessor, a return to form, with an emphasis on purity and accessibility. It’s simply tea, unadulterated and directly sourced from farmers, usually from Asia.’

Via Boing Boing:  ‘Japanese beer culture has exploded over the past twenty years… But if we’ve entered the golden age of Japanese beer, we’ve missed the golden age of Japanese beer advertising. That came before the Second World War, a time when, if the advertising industry needed drawing, painting, or lettering, it was done by hand.

Asahi, Kirin, and Sapporo were not known for their richly flavorful product, but could command richly evocative imagery for the posters and postcards that promoted it.

A robust market now exists for these antique pieces of advertising and their suitable-for-framing reproductions. Spend enough time hunting for them, and you’ll start to notice that different brands often used the same pictures: what you’d thought of as “the Asahi girl” might well turn up on a Sapporo poster, and so on.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I seem to have developed a sudden thirst for an ice-cold beverage of some kind.’

Via Pacific Standard: ‘The retreat from religious affiliation is, essentially, a retreat from the political right.’

Via Pacific Standard: ‘Senator Charles Grassley has asked a Missouri non-profit hospital to explain why it seizes the wages of thousands of its patients.’

Via Salon.com: ‘Decapitation may be one of the least tor­turous ways to die, but nonetheless it is thought to be painful. Many scientists believe that, however swiftly it is performed, decapitation must cause acute pain for a second or two.

Decapitation in one single motion draws its cultural power from its sheer velocity, and the force of the physical feat challenges that elusive moment of death, because death is presented as instantaneous even though beheadings are still largely inscrutable to science…

Beheading is an extremely bloody business, which is one of the reasons it is no longer used for state executions in the West, even though it is one of the most humane techniques available. Decapitation is faster and more predictable than death by hanging, lethal injection, electric shock or gassing, but the spectacle is too grim for our sensibilities.’

Via Singularity HUB:  ‘By the late 2010s, glasses will beam images directly onto the retina. Ten terabytes of computing power (roughly the same as the human brain) will cost about $1,000.

By the 2020s, most diseases will go away as nanobots become smarter than current medical technology. Normal human eating can be replaced by nanosystems. The Turing test begins to be passable. Self-driving cars begin to take over the roads, and people won’t be allowed to drive on highways.

By the 2030s, virtual reality will begin to feel 100% real. We will be able to upload our mind/consciousness by the end of the decade.

By the 2040s, non-biological intelligence will be a billion times more capable than biological intelligence (a.k.a. us). Nanotech foglets will be able to make food out of thin air and create any object in physical world at a whim.

By 2045, we will multiply our intelligence a billionfold by linking wirelessly from our neocortex to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud.’

Via io9:  ‘Nigiri is… a relative newcomer to Japanese cuisine, invented some time during the 19th century. A sushi shop owner named Yohei Hanaya is often credited with created the hand-squeezed nigiri, but he may have just been the most successful early vendor of the dish. But nigiri definitely got its start in Edo, the city which was renamed Tokyo just a few decades later.

While nigiri quickly became the most popular style of sushi in Edo, it did not immediately dominate the sushi landscape as it does today. In his book The Story of Sushi, Trevor Corson credits two events with the rise in popularity of nigiri outside of Tokyo: One is the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which forced many people (including sushi chefs) to leave Tokyo for their hometowns. When the Tokyo sushi chefs opened up sushi restaurants back home, they made Edomae (Edo-style) sushi, with an emphasis on nigiri.

The other event is where the Americans come in…. During the American occupation after World War II, a food rationing program helped the rise of nigiri outside Tokyo…’

Via Fatherly:  ‘Teach the below to your offspring, and pretty soon they’ll disappear so effectively you won’t be able to find them in your own damn house.’

Via Pacific Standard:  ‘You may be familiar with the fact that the coca in Coca-Cola was originally cocaine. But did you know that the reason we infused such a beverage with the drug in the first place was because of prohibition? Cocaine cola replaced cocaine wine. In fact, when it was debuted in 1886, it was described as “Coca-Cola: The Temperance Drink.”’

Via The Atlantic:  ‘Researchers tracking the evolution of the virus say it might now be more easily transmitted.’

Via Pacific Standard: ‘The idea behind an intervention program in the hospital setting is that, while victims of violence might have other opportunities to connect with social workers or other resources at other times in their lives, the time right when they are recovering from their injuries may be the most crucial. So the people who are surrounding them at that time should be trained to help them make the right choices.’

Via Open Culture: ‘The field of psychology is very different than it used to be. Nowadays, the American Psychological Association has a code of conduct for experiments that ensures a subject’s confidentiality, consent and general mental well being. In the old days, it wasn’t the case.

Back then, you could, for instance, con subjects into thinking that they were electrocuting a man to death, as they did in the infamous 1961 Milgram experiment, which left people traumatized and humbled in the knowledge that deep down they are little more than weak-willed puppets in the face of authority. You could also try to turn a group of unsuspecting orphans into stutterers by methodically undermining their self-esteem as the folks who ran the aptly named Monster Study of 1939 tried to do. But, if you really want to get into the swamp of moral dubiousness, look no further than the Little Albert experiments, which traumatized a baby into hating dogs, Santa Claus and all things fuzzy.’

Via Open Culture: ‘Throughout the novel, ordinary objects and events—especially, of course, the whale itself—acquire such symbolic weight that they become almost cartoonish talismans and leap bewilderingly out of the narrative, forcing the reader to contemplate their significance—no easy task. Depending on your sensibilities and tolerance for Melville’s labyrinthine prose, these very strange features of the novel are either indispensably fascinating or just plain excess baggage. Since many editions are published with the whaling chapters excised, many readers clearly feel they are the latter. That is unfortunate, I think. It’s one of my favorite novels, in all its baroque overstuffedness and philosophical density. But there’s no denying that it works, as they say, “on many levels.” Depending on how you experience the book—it’s either an incredibly gripping adventure tale, or a very dense and puzzling work of history, philosophy, politics, and zoology… or both, and more besides….

Recognizing the power of Melville’s arresting imagery, artist and librarian Matt Kish decided that he would illustrate all 552 pages of the Signet Classic paperback edition of Moby Dick, a book he considers “to be the greatest novel ever written.” He began the project in August of 2009 with the first page, illustrating those famous first words—“Call me Ishmael”—above. (At the top, see page 489, below it page 158, and directly below, page 116). Kish completed his epic project at the end of 2010. He used a variety of media—ink, watercolor, acrylic paint—and incorporated a number of different graphic art styles. As he explains in the comments under the first illustration, he chose “drawing and painting over pages from old books and diagrams because the presence of visual information on those pages would in some ways interfere with, and clutter up, my own obsessive control over my marks.” All in all, it’s a very admirable undertaking, and you can see each individual illustration, and many of the stages of drafting and composition, at Kish’s blog or on this list we’ve compiled. (You can also find links to the first 25 pages at bottom of this post.) The entire project has also been published as a book, Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page, a further irony given the obsessive literariness of Melville’s novel, a work as obsessed with language as Captain Ahab is with his great white nemesis.’

Knowledge of German language in EU

Via The Week: ‘The German language is so perfectly suited for these syndromes, coming down with them in any other language just won’t do.’

Via The Guardian: ‘Chinese officials feasting on critically endangered giant salamander turned violent when journalists photographed the luxury banquet, according to media reports.

The 28 diners included senior police officials from the southern city of Shenzhen, the Global Times said in a report which appeared to show a flouting of Beijing’s austerity campaign.

“In my territory, it is my treat,” it quoted a man in the room as saying.

The giant salamander is believed by some Chinese to have anti-ageing properties, but there is no orthodox evidence to back the claim.

The species is classed as “critically endangered” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) red list of threatened species, which says the population has “declined catastrophically over the last 30 years”.

“Commercial over-exploitation for human consumption is the main threat to this species,” the IUCN said.

Via Salon.com: ‘New research suggests people with wraparound occipital lobes may be more prone to the condition.’

Via Brain Pickings: ‘…(W)hat more humane an act is there than correspondence itself — the art of mutual response — especially amid a culture of knee-jerk reactions that is the hallmark of most communication today? Letters, by their very nature, make us pause to reflect on what the other person is saying and on what we’d like to say to them in response. Only when we step out of the reactive ego, out of the anxious immediacy that text-messaging and email have instilled in us, and contemplate what is being communicated — only then do we stand a chance of being civil to one another, and maybe even kind.’

Via io9: ‘Elon Musk tweeted that he’s naming two SpaceX droneships after Culture ships in Banks’ The Player of Games. One drone ship will be called Just Read The Instructions, and the other will be Of Course I Still Love You.’

Via NPR:  ‘Normally, we wouldn’t call something a living fossil. But the name seems tailor-made for the frilled shark, whose roots are traced to 80 million years ago. Its prehistoric origins are obvious in its primitive body; nearly all of the rare animal’s closest relatives are long extinct.

In the most recent of those 80 million years, the frilled shark has been scaring the bejeezus out of humans who pull it out of the water to find an animal with rows of needle-like teeth in a gaping mouth at the front of its head.

That’s what happened recently off Australia’s coast, where a fishing trawler’s net snagged a frilled shark.

“It was like a large eel, probably 1.5 meters [about 5 feet] long, and the body was quite different to any other shark I’d ever seen,” fisherman David Guillot tells 3AW radio. “The head on it was like something out of a horror movie. It was quite horrific looking.” ‘