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

Coat of arms of Syria

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

/blockquote>

Via New Scientist

Sacrifice of a Christian Child

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

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

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

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

Naturally the police took these initial accusations seriously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Their minds were scrambled.”

***

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

Related articles

• Back to the ’80s, because we never left them (part 2)
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Via Salon.com: ‘A lot can happen between now and Election Day — and with no GOP adult in the room, that’s a frightening thought…

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

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

Signature of James Joyce 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

but put them all together and they’re stuck.

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

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

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

But he got asked the wrong question.

The right question to ask Jeb Bush is this:

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

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

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

Related articles

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Related articles

• President Obama signs USA Freedom Act, a major NSA-reform bill, into law
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• Patriot Act expires
• Obama signs USA Freedom Act in major security policy reversal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

San Andreas fault in the Carrizo Plain, Central California

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He still doesn’t care for the Cubs.

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

Really, that’s about it….’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He may not capture the Democratic nomination, but the

Via Salon.com:‘He may not capture the Democratic nomination, but the Vermont senator still has a chance to reshape the party.’ 

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

                              — Wendell Berry (1973)

Via Vox: ‘Will the Illuminati kill me for reading this article? If they do still exist, you already know too much.’

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Via Vox: ‘The month before a huge Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage is expected, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg presided over a same-sex wedding, and her words and gestures are being scrutinized for hints of how the case might come out.The New York Times’s Maureen Dowd was a guest at the wedding of Shakespeare Theatre Company artistic director Michael Kahn and New York architect Charles Mitchem. After the ceremony, Dowd wrote in her column that Ginsburg had pronounced the two men married by the powers vested in her by the Constitution of the United States, and that she’d emphasized the word “Constitution” and given “a sly look.”‘

Via Vox: ‘Forty-six states now have laws that explicitly ban texting while driving. But smartphones can distract drivers in many other ways, too, a new survey commissioned by AT&T shows.While it found that texting was the most common distraction, lots of drivers said they emailed, browsed the internet, checked Facebook, took selfies or other photos, or even video chatted while driving’

Via Vox: ‘Americans increasingly think that animals should have the same rights as people, according to Gallup polling on the issue.’

Via Salon.com: ‘From “Mad Men” to “Sopranos,” our obsession with endings gets everything backwards. We debate them to death, but there are no perfect endings. We’d enjoy our favorite shows more if we accepted that. ‘

Via Boing Boing: ‘Many Baby Boomers who grew up in Alabama learned the: ‘history of their state from a racist 1957 textbook called Know’ Alabama. John Archibald of AL.com presented some samples…’

The Neuromancer Movie Lives Again (io9). As one of my favorite visionary novels of all time, I can’t decide if I’m over-the-top excited about this or dreading it.

Via The Verge: ‘Antarctica‘s once-massive Larsen B Ice Shelf is melting rapidly, and will likely be entirely gone by the end of this decade, according to a new report from NASA. A team led by Ala Khazendar of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) found the shelf is developing large cracks while its tributary glaciers rapidly disintegrate.”Although it’s fascinating scientifically to have a front-row seat to watch the ice shelf becoming unstable and breaking up, it’s bad news for our planet,” Khazendar said in a statement. “This ice shelf has existed for at least 10,000 years, and soon it will be gone.” ‘

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Via Motherboard: ‘[A] team led by cosmologist Joseph Hennawi has discovered four of these objects—a quasar quartet—huddled together in a nebula 10 billion light years away. This is the first time such a large gaggle of quasars has ever been imaged, and according to Hennawi team, the odds of finding such an event are 10 million to one.’

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Via WIRED: ‘[The] problem of a lack of commercial investment in antibiotics can be solved relatively quickly and without a dramatic increase on what governments and private patients spend on antibiotics globally today (approximately $40 billion US dollars a year)…’

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via WIRED: ‘Almost half of New Zealand’s native bird species are now extinct, while a particularly bizarre bird is teetering on the edge: the kakapo. It is the world’s only flightless parrot. It can live 100 years. Its sex life is best described as … involved. And there are just 126 left in the wild…’

via New Scientist: ‘Millions of ancient galaxies thought to be all but extinct today seem to have been hiding in plain sight, concealed by discs of stars stolen from other galaxies. Even our own Milky Way may be hiding one in its centre.’

via Salon.com: ‘Officials are touting the USA Freedom Act as an end to government phone surveillance. The truth is more complicated.’

via io9: ‘I have a friend who says three in the morning is the time we all spend laying awake, staring at darkness, and thinking about all the mistakes we’ve made in our lives. Everyone reading this knows that she’s right. But it doesn’t need to be this way. We could use this time productively, the way our ancestors did.

The concept of first sleep and second sleep is a very old one. As the light waned in the evenings, people would go to bed and sleep for about four hours. In the middle of the night, they’d wake up and stay awake for a few hours. People would usually use this time for quiet recreation. They’d talk a bit, eat a little, perhaps read or pray, and most people agreed that this was the best time for married couples to roll around on the mattress.

After a few hours, they’d get sleepy once again and settle back down to sleep. The second sleep would see them through until dawn, when they’d get up and take on their day. It’s easy to see why the concept of two sleeps was popular. Instead of being dead tired at the end of the day, you could fall into bed and sleep for a few hours before waking up and having fun. It would allow a more complete break between one day and the next, a little bubble of “me time” between working days. And it might eliminate those three o’clock thoughts.’

via Gizmodo: ‘Where the hell did the antimatter come from? That’s what atmospheric scientist Joseph Dwyer has been trying to figure out for the past six years, after his research plane accidentally flew through a thunderstorm into a cloud of antimatter in 2009…’

via The Verge: ‘I mean, the headline says it all really. This is a website you go to and type something in and then that something gets turned into a drum beat. You can literally stick any words you like into it — famous words, rude words, long words, made-up words, you get the idea. The whole project is the creation of developer Kyle Stetz and follows in a long line of musical-keyboard-procrastination tools. (See also Daft Punk keyboard and Patatap.) You’d be mad not to at least type your name in.’

via Lifehacker: ‘Under the Affordable Care Act, you should be able to get any approved type of birth control without a co-pay. But many insurers are charging anyway—sometimes because of loopholes, and sometimes they’re just plain breaking the law. Here’s what you can do.’

via Salon: ‘Students have a rich world available to them to develop and train their minds. It’s not school — but it could be…’

via MacDrifter: ‘I’ll tell you a secret that is likely to make me a pariah among the nerds. I don’t like Malcolm Gladwell or Seth Godin or really most of the TED genre of pop culture factoids. I’m sure they are all fine upstanding citizens of the world but their brand of storytelling does not appeal to me. I avoid most science journalism as I avoid life-hack mythology. This is my problem with pop science and the cult of science tourism. It is too final. Too conclusive. Too bite-sized. These morsels of facts are portrayed as in-depth studies. They are wrapped with a crudely drawn distribution curve on the cover and published to a tourism market anxious to become the indisputable happy hour experts on the psychology and physics of self-driving cars. They lead to unearned certainty in our wold views and act as bludgeons against later course corrections. I’m skeptical of big problems with small answers.’

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.