Tuesday, July 31, 2018

"I DO NOT HELP MY WIFE"



"I am not a help at home, I am part of the house. And as for praising, I asked my friend when it was the last time after his wife finished cleaning the house, washing clothes, changing bed sheets, bathing her children, cooking, organizing, etc. You said thank you
But a thank you of the type: Wow, sweetheart !!! You are fantastic!!!
Does that seem absurd to you? Are you looking strange? When you, once in a lifetime, cleaned the floor, you expected in the least, a prize of excellence with great glory … why? You never thought about that, my friend?"

I feel like there's also a bigger thing going here with our society, with some people who are supposed to clean up the moral mistakes of others. It's the liberal white person mentality, that by like signing an online petition they are" helping the minorities advance their rights" - - instead of "I am doing the work I need to be doing to counter my mess and my community's mess". 



Related: “You should’ve asked

Monday, July 30, 2018

"Why the Myth of Meritocracy Hurts Kids of Color"



"“Students who are told that things are fair implode pretty quickly in middle school as self-doubt hits them,” he said, “and they begin to blame themselves for problems they can’t control.”

Barrett’s personal observation is validated by a newly published study in the peer-reviewed journal Child Development that finds traditionally marginalized youth who grew up believing in the American ideal that hard work and perseverance naturally lead to success show a decline in self-esteem and an increase in risky behaviors during their middle-school years. The research is considered the first evidence linking preteens’ emotional and behavioral outcomes to their belief in meritocracy, the widely held assertion that individual merit is always rewarded... 

What’s more, for youth who perceived more discrimination from an early age, system-justifying beliefs were associated with less-risky behavior in sixth grade, but with a sharp rise in such behaviors by seventh grade. Godfrey attributes this spike to a “perfect storm” in which marginalized young people are experiencing more discrimination; beginning to understand the systemic and institutionalized nature of that discrimination; and starting to strongly identify as a member of a marginalized group, seeing that group as one that’s being discriminated against. As for why this leads to more risky behavior, Godfrey points to research that suggests people who really believe the system is fair internalize stereotypes—believing and acting out false and negative claims about their group—more readily than those who disavow these views... 

David Stovall, professor of educational-policy studies and African American studies at University of Illinois at Chicago, said the paper is a confirmation of decades of analysis on the education of marginalized and isolated youth. It’s a “good preliminary piece” that lays the foundation for more academic study of historically disenfranchised adolescents and their motivations, he said."


Sometimes I imagine how pleasent it must be for the white men I grew up with, who didn't have to spend huge parts of their childhood struggling with the inconsistencies in their reality. How comforting that must have been. And how uncomfortable it must have been when they got to college and people started making those cracks visible to them. Like, stuff that was obvious to me at age 7. 


FB: "System justification is a distinctively American notion, Godfrey said, built on myths used to justify inequities, like “If you just work hard enough you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps … it’s just a matter of motivation and talent and grit.” Yet, as she and her colleagues discovered, these beliefs can be a liability for disadvantaged adolescents once their identity as a member of a marginalized group begins to gel—and once they become keenly aware of how institutional discrimination disadvantages them and their group."

Sunday, July 29, 2018

"Capturing the Treasured Wisdom of Female Shamans in Russia"


"Despite Russia often being regarded as very white and Orthodox Christian, the spectrum of religions, cultures, and beliefs within its vast territory is incredibly diverse, from organized religions such as Buddhism and Islam to the rituals of the Mari people, who are regarded as the last pagans of Europe. An authentic local tradition of spiritual practices has been going in Tuva for centuries... 

Being a shaman in Tuva is open to both men and women. On her first trip Ivanova met female shaman, Tatiana, who's become one of her favourite subjects to photograph. "Tatiana speaks both Russian and Tuvan, and she is a treasury of myths, legends, tales and all kind of Eastern wisdom. You can ask her about anything and get mind-blowing answers to any questions. She was showing me incredible places and telling its legends.

"In the shaman's world every rock, every mountain, every river has its own story and purpose. I filmed one of her rituals on the sacred mount Khaiyrakan. The atmosphere there is out of this world. The foundation of this mountain consists of special minerals and ores which create magnetic fields, so time there flows in a different way than in the rest of the world."


Saturday, July 28, 2018

"Young Men Are Playing Video Games Instead of Getting Jobs. That's OK. (For Now.)"



"Since 2000, men in their 20s without a bachelor's degree are working considerably less and spending far more time engaged in leisure activities, which overwhelmingly means playing video games. Over the same time frame, this group of men has also grown more likely to be single, to have no children, and to live with parents or other family members.
The surprising thing about the stereotypical aimless young man, detached from work and society, playing video games in his parents' basement: He's actually happier than ever... 

Andromeda is not the most entertaining game I have ever played, but with its endless array of tasks to complete and objectives to achieve, it is among the most job-like in its approach to game design. At times it hit rather close to home... 

Eventually I quit playing. I already have a job, and though I enjoy it quite a bit, I didn't feel as if I needed another one.
But what about those who aren't employed? It's easy to imagine a game like Andromeda taking the place of work... 

You might think that this would be demoralizing. A life spent unemployed, living at home, without romantic prospects, playing digital time wasters does not sound particularly appealing on its face.
Yet this group reports far higher levels of overall happiness than low-skilled young men from the turn of the 21st century. In contrast, self-reported happiness for older workers without college degrees fell during the same period. For low-skilled young women and men with college degrees, it stayed basically the same. A significant part of the difference comes down to what Hurst has called "innovations in leisure computer activities for young men."
The problems come later."

Interesting. 

I've been ill and there's a thing when you're sick and you think "as long as I'm home, I have all these things gs I can get done! All those projects that I've been meaning to work on!"... But actually, you're sick, you're brain doesn't work and then you fall asleep. So, I've been desperately trying to find things that I CAN do during my hours of wakefulness because otherwise I'm suckingly bored. And I've been getting back into computer games, and I realize that they can help give structure to otherwise empty days. 


FB: "What video games appear to do is ease the psychic pain of joblessness—and to do it in a way that is, if not permanent, at least long-lasting." 

Friday, July 27, 2018

"Learning Styles: A Misguided Attempt to Highlight Individual Differences in Learners"



"they highlight an important and new criticism of the learning styles approach: They state that “learning styles theories are a blend of borrowed constructs or measures from other, better-developed theories”. They further claim that within the learning styles framework, these borrowed constructs are misused and incorrectly interpreted leading to detrimental and useless recommendations. In this review, an attempt is made to connect existing learning styles concepts back to actual evidence-based concepts of human cognition and tie them to helpful recommendations for teachers. It acknowledges that there are individual differences between learners, but not as conceptualized by the learning styles approach... 

Combining verbal and visual representations will allow the to-be-learned material to stick better. The learning styles approach rigidly assigns a dominant learning style to a person and recommends that this guides instruction and studying. However, doing so severely limits the learner and hinders them to use their cognitive abilities to the fullest...

the concrete-abstract dichotomy is less a trait within a learner, but rather describes a state of a learner on her way to obtain more and more expertise on a topic. An and Carr rightly notice that “this transition will not occur if the teacher matches the instruction to the learning style and makes no effort to move the students to a more abstract representation” (p. 4)."


I feel like "learning types" is one of those cultural beliefs that people from other societies probably find absurd 



FB: "An and Carr argue that a learning preference can indicate that a student lacks a specific skill and that “it makes no sense to focus exclusively on modalities that are strong and ignore less well-developed skills when selecting activities” (p. 3)." 

Thursday, July 26, 2018

"The Human Brain Can Create Structures in Up to 11 Dimensions"



"The team used algebraic topology, a branch of mathematics used to describe the properties of objects and spaces regardless of how they change shape. They found that groups of neurons connect into 'cliques', and that the number of neurons in a clique would lead to its size as a high-dimensional geometric object.
"We found a world that we had never imagined," says lead researcher,neuroscientist Henry Markram from the EPFL institute in Switzerland.
"There are tens of millions of these objects even in a small speck of the brain, up through seven dimensions. In some networks, we even found structures with up to 11 dimensions.""


Ack, that's so cool. 

I'm interpreting this to mean that these networks vary across 7 variables, perhaps things like time, brain state (ex. sleep vs. wake), neurotransmitter use,... 

FB: "When researchers gave their virtual brain tissue a stimulus, they saw that neurons were reacting to it in a highly organised manner.

"It is as if the brain reacts to a stimulus by building [and] then razing a tower of multi-dimensional blocks, starting with rods (1D), then planks (2D), then cubes (3D), and then more complex geometries with 4D, 5D, etc," says one of the team, mathematician Ran Levi from Aberdeen University in Scotland."

Wednesday, July 25, 2018

"White Men"



"When race keeps intruding into your romances, you start to wonder why. You look for patterns. I used to think the problem with white men is that they want control, a childish and obvious hankering. They’re used to it, socialized to seek it. But over time, I started to believe that the problem is that they’re unformed, shapeless. White men have had nothing to battle against or fight for; their identity is this amorphous default. They ooze around, taking up space. They manspread and mansplain. Even the ones who know better mandream on the sly. It always breaks my heart when I get wind of my white boyfriends’ secret fantasies: to rescue, to rebel, to rule. Every single one of them wants to own a motorcycle. It’s all so boring. It’s all just history."


Tuesday, July 24, 2018

"From the archive, 24 July 1930: Women free to swim without fear of arrest"

"Few realise the hard work that their mothers and grandmothers have had to get the taboo removed from fresh-water swimming for women. I remember how bitter it was in our childhood to be told, when we saw our brothers going joyously out to swim in any river or pond handy: “Little ladies may only bathe in the sea; God made the canals and rivers for boys. You are very rude girls to want to go.”

Even last century the logical mind of girlhood asked: “Why is salt water more moral than fresh?” In the tropical days of the summer of 1881, with the thermometer soaring into the eighties a poor woman of Coal Court, Drury Lane, was seen bathing in the lake, arrested at once by a scandalised policeman, and dragged before a magistrate, while 200 male persons were left happily swimming.

The bright young people of that day were deeply moved at such injustice, at such a scandalous example of laws made by men for men. The leaven of sex equality was working in our veins; we were out for the “right to swim” as well as the “right to vote.”...

In North London a few enthusiasts worked hard for years to get some of the Heath ponds open for women at least one day a week. At the first informal meeting our plan was mocked out of court. All the men present sat back in their chairs and roared with laughter at the very thought. The crowds would be so great on the banks that people would be crushed to death, and the tramways and North London Railway would run special excursions to see such a sight. However, we worked on, heedless of ridicule, owing much to the influence of the few women on the L.C.C. and the Borough Councils."


Sunday, July 22, 2018

"Brainier People Stereotype More"



"It’s been long established that the ability to detect patterns enables us to learn languages, recognize faces, and detect others’ emotions, among other benefits. In this research, the authors considered how pattern recognition could be detrimental in terms of social bias.

“Stereotypes are generalizations about the traits of social groups that are applied to individual members of those groups,” the authors note. “To make such generalizations, people must first detect a pattern among members of a particular group and then categorize an individual as belonging to that group.

“Because pattern detection is a core component of human intelligence, people with superior cognitive abilities may be equipped to efficiently learn and use stereotypes about social groups.”...

Critically, however, the researchers also found that superior pattern detectors could more readily update their stereotypes based on new knowledge, making them particularly susceptible to counter-stereotype training and the ability to change one’s existing bias"


Saturday, July 21, 2018

"Decolonisation in Europe: Sámi Musician Sofia Jannok Points to Life beyond Colonialism"

"In the north of Scandinavia, there is an Indigenous culture that has persisted against colonisation. The land is called Sápmi. The Sámi, like all Arctic Indigenous peoples, are experiencing the severe effects of rapid global warming and decolonisation is now more than ever a matter of survival...

This fact does not stop the Swedish state from telling its own story about the Sámi. In one of Jannok’s samplings from the hearing, the state attorney questions the concept of ethnicity and its relevance to the description of the situation in Sápmi. Listening to this, I remember the music video to Jannok’s song “Viellja jearrá” (“Brother asks”) where the history of racial biological studies on the Sámi is shown. In the light of the history of Swedish eugenics, we can begin to understand the degree of disrespect shown by the state when it now refuses the Sámi the right to define themselves as an Indigenous community. The state in the past studied the Sámi as a “lower race” and now instead wants to do away with the concept of ethnicity."


I'd really love to know what Europe was like before Roman colonization. 

And also, like, when is a group "indigenous" - does that word even make sense if we had no colonizers?

FB: "The nomadic Sámi population and the settlers of the north coexisted in the past and both groups benefited from their cooperation. Some non-Sámi people had reindeer and many farmers housed Sámi families on the move between summer and winter pastures...


This decolonised story of the past is slowly gaining space in mainstream media because of the music and activism of people like Jannok, and finally also in some history books"

Friday, July 20, 2018

"Is California A Sunken Place For Black People?"



"California’s stance on what I always perceived to be progressive multiracial liberalism has limits that are quietly anti-black and perplexing. I’ve found that many black people actively subdue their black identity and highlight their other racial or cultural identities instead. A black coworker of mine informed me that their 10-year-old child just found out that they were black. When I asked how that was possible, I was told that California’s education system stresses multicultural colorblindness, to the extent that it’s completely normal for a black child not to “see” their own race...

Throughout California, most universities only have an average black population of 3 percent. This is alarming considering that California is home to the fifth largest black population nationwide. It’s also shocking because it’s a stark contrast from the on screen well-educated and rich characters of Think Like a Man, Being Mary Jane, Love & Basketball, etc. But it makes sense given that the University of California regents abolished race as a factor for consideration for college admission in 1995, resulting in an instant plummet in black student enrollment...

California’s has a horrific history of white supremacy. Immigration bans against Chinese and Mexicans? Check. Government-sponsored relocation of Japanese Americans? Yup. KKK-led reigns of terroragainst black vets seeking better housing? You got it. “Sundown towns,” small towns with policies stating that blacks weren’t allowed in public after dusk, were a fact of life for black residents from Hawthorne to the East Bay in the early twentieth century. Given this history, my daunting conversations with black Californians about racial identity and success should come as no surprise."


THIS IS SO ACCURATE TO MY CALIFORNIA CHILDHOOD.

California blackness isn't a thing, we are all subsumed by the white liberalism. History is aggressively ignored, denied, not taught. 

I love my state, but there isn't a place of safety to grow up a black child.

(also, still haven't seen Get Out because I know it's going to be too real) 

Related: Palo Alto racism; staring into the sun (because there is something here about the mysticism of California sun)


FB: well this is super real. California is a case study for the disaster of performative color blindness

Thursday, July 19, 2018

"All Spicy Food Is From Latin America"



"many Indonesians, or Malaysians, etc., do know the botanical history of the capsicum, just like some Texans know that conquistadoresactually brought over their “longhorns” and many Italians know that pasta is probably originally Arab (not Chinese, like in that Marco Polo story, which is fake) and that their famous red sauces often lean pretty hard on the Central American tomatl, (one of a few words from Nahuatl that actually traveled into Western European society, instead of the other way around).

But for people in India or Thailand who don’t know that all spicy food is from the Americas, it can be pretty jarring. Here’s a conversation I just had with a well-educated, multilingual Indonesian...

She got really mad at me, and I understand why. There is a lot about deep globalization and its effects that is so counterintuitive that it’s hard to process easily. We have been changing the world in strange ways for a long time. But humans have stupid primate brains, and we tend to naturalize whatever is right in front of us...

In a few hundred years, we may look back at our own times, and think it was just as insane that we privileged deregulated financial capitalism and #branding over all other possible versions of globalization, remaking the world in the image of Coldplay and Uber rather than, say, universalizing democracy or labor rights."



FB: There is so much erased Native history. So much cultural and technological work done by these civilizations that we now assume is just natural. "The fact that, when talking of the capsicum family, we say that chili “peppers” are “spicy,” means we are committing a double linguistic anachronism (which is fine). It was of course “spices” that all those Spanish and Portuguese were looking for (especially black pepper) in Indonesia in the first place. And since chilis kinda make your mouth pop in the same way as black pepper, they got named “peppers,” and we call them “spicy,” though the biology and sensation produced are actually totally different. The word “Chili” itself is Nahuatl."

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

"Diverse Teams Feel Less Comfortable — and That’s Why They Perform Better"

"With so much at stake, why aren’t these companies making more headway? One reason could be that, despite the evidence about their results, homogenous teams just feel more effective. In addition, people believe that diverse teams breed greater conflict than they actually do. Bringing these biases to light may enable ways to combat them... 

There’s a common bias that psychologists call the fluency heuristic: We prefer information that is processed more easily, or fluently, judging it to be truer or more beautiful. The effect partially explains that we gain greater appreciation of songs or paintings when they become familiar because they’re more easily processed. The fluency heuristic leads many people to study incorrectly; they often simply reread the material. The information becomes more familiar without much effort, and so they feel that they’re learning... 

There’s another bias at play here, too: A 2015 paper in Organization Science, summarized in this HBR article, suggests that people overestimate the amount of conflict that actually exists on diverse teams... 

research suggests that when people with different perspectives are brought together, people may seek to gloss over those differences in the interest of group harmony — when, in fact, differences should actually be taken seriously and highlighted.



At some point I'm my childhood, I learned that I had to actively put groups of white people at ease if I was trying to join them. Sitting next to new people in school, joining a new extracurricular, whatever... Let them know that I wasn't going to be disruptive, that I would play along. Because there is a way that people shrink back and close off a bit then relax back out when you successfully project casual safety. 


FB: "This type of unconscious bias can clearly have a significant impact not only on hiring but also on the ways in which leaders create teams and encourage collaboration.  Without realizing it, they may be reluctant to add diversity to a team or to assign colleagues with different backgrounds to work together, in response to an (overblown) fear of the tension and difficulty that could ensue."

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

"Downloading a Nightmare"



"The events unfolding in Joseph’s home—the SWAT team, the stunned parents, the vast collection of child pornography on a hard drive—have become increasingly familiar to autism clinicians and advocates. They are part of a troubling and complex collision between the justice system and a developmental disability that, despite its prevalence, remains largely misunderstood in courts across the country

The result for defendants can be the crushing impact of a system that clinicians say confuses autistic behavior with criminal intent and assumes, without hard evidence, that looking at images could be the precursor to illicit and dangerous contact with kids...

The line between legal and illegal in the world of online pornography may be especially blurry for someone without an inherent understanding of social mores and taboos. Some pursue their curiosity well beyond that line, viewing and downloading thousands of images of children—many of them prepubescent, some much younger. Until it is clearly explained to them, clinicians say, many cannot fathom what most people intuit: that the children in the pictures and videos are the victims of horrific abuse...

“There’s always a part of me that feels I should have known better, but the fact is, I didn’t,” he said. “After the fact, once it’s explained to you, it becomes obvious. How could I have not known that? But that’s wherea lot of shame comes from.” 

When Larry Dubin first began to research his son’s charges, he was shocked to find that autism clinicians were already aware of the issue. “It never filtered down,” he said. “Everyone kind of knows about it, at some level, but it’s like a snowball that needs to roll down that hill.”...

For all child pornography defendants, outcomes depend largely on geography. Some judges stick close to the federally-recommended sentences, while others have spoken out against the increased punishments. But for autistic defendants, the outcomes seem also to depend on how autism is explained to the court."


Monday, July 16, 2018

"Uncovering the African Presence in Medieval Europe"



"Medieval Nubia existed roughly during the same time span that scholars attribute to the European Middle Ages: the long thousand years between the fall of the Kingdom of Meroe in the 4thcentury CE, and its eventual cultural conquest by Arab Muslims from the north over the 15th century.

Over most of that 1100 year span, Nubia was a Christian kingdom—it was “officially” Christianized by Byzantine missionaries in the 6th century. It stood as one of several black African Christian cultures in the region. Until around the 8th century, the Nubian region consisted of three separate kingdoms: Nobadia, Makuria, and Alwa. But at some point at the beginning of the 8th century Makuria annexed Nobadia, leaving two kingdoms.

Despite being one of the “Churches of the East”—i.e. non-European Christians—Nubia (and its neighbour Ethiopia) are rarely mentioned in discussions of early Christianity. Despite this, they stand alongside the Christian communities that existed in Syria, Armenia, Georgia, India, or even Egypt. And more, they existed not just as isolated churches, but as explicitly Christian Kingdoms...

Beginning in 1402, multiple Ethiopian embassies arrived throughout Europe (notably in Spain, France, and Italy). This contact was sustained—by the 1480s, the church of Santo Stefano degli Abissini was built/restored in Rome specifically for Ethiopians to use"


Sunday, July 15, 2018

"Hebrew was the only language ever to be revived from extinction. There may soon be another"


"Most language experts are unaware of the extent of this renaissance. Cornish is one of nine languages that Ethnologue, the standard reference guide to all the world’s languages, lists as “reawakening”. These languages have “no known L1 speakers, but emerging L2 speakers”, which means no native speakers, but a few adults who have acquired the rudiments of the language later in life. Yet, as I learned on a recent visit to Cornwall, and previously unbeknownst to the data-gatherers at Ethnologue, Cornish in fact now has several adult native speakers—L1s—as well as perhaps several hundred fluent second-language speakers... 

It also distinguishes Cornish from Hebrew, which, though not spoken as an everyday tongue for some 2,000 years, was never truly extinct—it was used by millions of Jews as a language of prayer, literature, commerce, and study throughout their history. If Cornish can reestablish itself robustly it would show that linguistic resurrection doesn’t require the fervor that comes with a religion or state-building. Instead, with minimal and intermittent support, a few true believers can do the trick... 

It is usually said that Dorothy (“Dolly”) Pentreath, who died in 1777, was the last native speaker. Today’s enthusiasts for the language eagerly point to evidence that it continued to be spoken among farmers and fishermen, and perhaps among the Cornish diaspora. A conference held in September 2016 in the Cornish town of Penryn heard word of an Australian matriarch recorded reciting a memorised Cornish prayer in 1970. Jenefer Lowe, an independent scholar of the Celtic languages, says that when she began teaching enthusiasts in the 1980s she was surprised by what they already knew: “These women would come out with these things that were pure Cornish.”

https://qz.com/969597/hebrew-was-the-only-language-ever-to-be-revived-from-extinction-there-may-soon-be-another/

I fully did not realize this about Hebrew. 


It's also interesting how many parts of the "United Kingdom" were really colonized by English-speakers and still struggling with that

Saturday, July 14, 2018

"The (Sometimes Unintentional) Subtext of Digital Conversations"



"It’s not surprising that professors’ and students’ practices would vary, given the difference in power and age. But even best friends can have very different ideas about appropriate ways to use social media. Noelle Miesfeld and Rachel Jacobson had been close friends since college, and they stayed in close touch after graduation, often having long telephone conversations, catching up. After a number of years, however, they began communicating more through texting. This meant more frequent conversations—often daily or even multiple times a day. So Noelle was surprised when Rachel registered a complaint: She’d been telling Noelle about a problem, and she felt that Noelle’s responses seemed too casual and brief to show real concern. Rachel missed her caring, emotionally supportive friend. They traced the trouble to their contrasting assumptions about texting. To Noelle, comforting closeness resided in the frequency of their exchanges. To Rachel, frequency didn’t substitute for the expression of feeling and detailed discussion of her situation that they’d shared in the past—the kinds of conversations that Noelle didn’t feel could or should take place through texting."



This is probably most useful for that one friend who is always sending unintentionally cold texts. 

FB: For that one friend everyone has who always sounds angry in their texts

Friday, July 13, 2018

"Does your accent make you sound smarter?"

"Linguist and author Rosina Lippi-Green refers to this as “the standard language ideology”, where many people believe the dialect with the highest social prestige is also the only correct and valid form of the language. In fact, all dialects and accents are linguistically valid... 

It’s thanks to these language attitudes that for some, an accent becomes a source of cultural pride, but for others, a secret source of shame. But these attitudes about the way we sound are so pervasive that even non-standard speakers may judge their own dialects and accents just as harshly as others do, perpetuating the erroneous belief that their native speech is “incorrect” and needs to change."



Related: New York accent going away

Thursday, July 12, 2018

"Why whales grew to such monster sizes"



"Next, Slater and his colleagues checked to see what was happening in the world at the time to cause the change. They found that the baleen whales' growth spurt coincided with the beginning of the first ice ages. As glaciers expanded, spring and summer runoff poured nutrients into the coastal ocean, fueling explosive growth in krill and small animals the whales consumed, they speculate. Until that time, prey had been uniformly distributed and plentiful, but the climate change caused many fish and big sea animals to disappear, and productivity plummeted. That seasonal runoff created a new pattern of food availability: seasonal patches of very abundant food spaced far apart over the course of the year.

Goldbogen helped Slater and Pyenson understand how that change was important. He studies whale eating and diving, and his work indicates that the more concentrated the food, the more efficient the feeding, especially in whales with really, really big mouths. Furthermore, larger whales can travel faster between patches of prey. So baleen whales that got bigger, faster, thrived, whereas smaller species went extinct. And their giant size may have even promoted greater productivity, “by bringing up nutrients from deep waters as they dive and resurface,” suggests Geerat Vermeij, a paleobiologist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the work."



To be honest, never thought about this question before opening this article, and I probably won't think about it again, but I'm enjoying this moment of curiosity and satisfaction.

Wednesday, July 11, 2018

"Have you ever wondered how much energy you put in to avoid being assaulted? It may shock you"



"What was most surprising was how all 50 of the women I interviewed significantly underestimated the amount of work they were putting in to avoid intrusions by men in the street, and the impact this had on them.
They recognised that they were making certain decisions about routes home, or where to sit on public transport. They spoke about using sunglasses or headphones in order to create a shield – a way to give the impression that they didn’t hear that man making a sexual comment, or didn’t see that other man touching himself as he walked behind them... 

It’s not just the overt approaches from men making comments about what they’re wearing and asking where they are going or what they’re doing. It’s that women are routinely pulled out of their own thoughts in order to evaluate their environment. They are less free to think about the things they want to think about because of the extra effort they have to put in to feel safe... 

The vast majority of this work is preemptive. It’s the subconscious attempt to evaluate what one of my participants called “the right amount of panic” – never quite knowing if a behaviour is an overreaction of if that reaction is actually the reason they avoided an encounter.
The trouble is, women are only ever able to count the times when such strategies don’t work – when they are harassed by a man, or assaulted. The work put into the successes – the number of times women’s actions prevent men from intruding – go unnoticed.
All this in turn keeps us underestimating the scale of the problems women face in everyday life."

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

"It Would Be, It Would Be So Nice"



"You need to be able to take small breaks from work before you’ll be able to take long breaks from work, Funt said. “Before you can go to the Bahamas for a week, don’t you first need to learn how to tolerate an entire elevator ride without checking your email?” she asked. Funt’s consulting firm teaches corporate clients how to incorporate “white space”—a less new-agey way to say mindfulness—into their busy workdays. She suggested taking 10 seconds of “white space” after you turn off your ignition in the company parking lot, or whenever you get an email that throws you off your game. I don’t doubt that stopping, breathing, and focusing on the present moment is helpful, even rejuvenating, in the middle of the workday. But if a 10-second pause counts as a break, aren’t we redefining break in the wrong direction? After all, if finding small pockets of “white space” throughout our workdays raises our productivity and prevents burnout, what incentive do our bosses have to let us take vacations?"



Where are we right now, as humans?

Monday, July 9, 2018

"A Race to Save the Orange by Altering Its DNA"



"Oranges are not the only crop that might benefit from genetically engineered resistance to diseases for which standard treatments have proven elusive. And advocates of the technology say it could also help provide food for a fast-growing population on a warming planet by endowing crops with more nutrients, or the ability to thrive in drought, or to resist pests. Leading scientific organizations have concluded that shuttling DNA between species carries no intrinsic risk to human health or the environment, and that such alterations can be reliably tested...

An emerging scientific consensus held that genetic engineering would be required to defeat citrus greening. “People are either going to drink transgenic orange juice or they’re going to drink apple juice,” one University of Florida scientist told Mr. Kress.

And if the presence of a new gene in citrus trees prevented juice from becoming scarcer and more expensive, Mr. Kress believed, the American public would embrace it. “The consumer will support us if it’s the only way,” Mr. Kress assured his boss...

There also appeared to be an abiding belief that a plant would take on the identity of the species from which its new DNA was drawn, like the scientist in the movie “The Fly” who sprouted insect parts after a DNA-mixing mistake with a house fly.

Asked if tomatoes containing a gene from a fish would “taste fishy” in a question on a 2004 poll conducted by the Food Policy Institute at Rutgers University that referred to one company’s efforts to forge a frost-resistant tomato with a gene from the winter flounder, fewer than half correctly answered “no.”...

Mr. Irey tried to console him with good news: the data on the honeybees and mice had come back. The highest dose of the protein the E.P.A. wanted tested had produced no ill effect.

But the magnitude of the opposition had never hit Mr. Kress so hard. “Will they believe us?” he asked himself for the first time. “Will they believe we’re doing this to eliminate chemicals and we’re making sure it’s safe? Or will they look at us and say, ‘That’s what they all say?’ ”"


Sunday, July 8, 2018

"ANYTHING MEN CAN DO I CAN DO BLEEDING"



"Now, you’re probably thinking that all this bleeding must be detrimental to my work. After all, humans need their blood to make spreadsheets and eat salads and attend internal debriefings. Well, you would be wrong. Dead wrong. You know what isn’t dead though? Me after bleeding constantly for seven days.

Remember that meeting yesterday? The one where you talked over me repeatedly, so that I was forced to yell over you? It was so fun, both of us yelling like that. Weren’t you pumped? I was so pumped, but I was also pumping blood out of my uterus. That’s right, my life force was being pumped out of my body and into my pants — my fashionable, androgynous, business pants. Sure, that meeting was high stakes for you, but just one sneeze and it would’ve been all over for me. Seriously, it would’ve been all over my very expensive pants."


Menstruation is often the worst, but I'm gonna be real honest, I don't know what I would do if every once in a while some floppy tissue between my thighs could become an uncomfortable stick.

Aaah that's so weird

FB: It's all true "So what if you negotiated the big deal and signed the huge contract? Did you sign your huge contract in blood? No, you didn’t because you’re not a blood machine like me. Everyone knows that a contract is never more legally binding than when it’s been sealed with a bodily fluid. What fluids do you have on hand? Only clear ones? How embarrassing for you."

Saturday, July 7, 2018

"WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU STARE AT THE SUN?"



"The gaze, as psychoanalytical and feminist theory has long documented, is objectifying, and in certain circumstances pitiless. Anyone who remains under an unbroken gaze is reduced to an object of consciousness, something to be scrutinized as carelessly as if it were inanimate. It’s rude to stare. For the powerful, this is unacceptable: Power tends to position itself as a kind of universal subject. Tribes and states and corporations are the ones that think and do things, and while they engineer various spectacles, they’re not zoo animals to be passively observed...

When you look into the sun, it changes you; you carry a piece of it with you now; you have become a solar being, capable of conjuring up an 864,000 mile-wide burning star at will. No wonder the practice is so popular with cranks...

In the Platonist system, the sun is a metaphor for the Good, a principle of reason, justice, and understanding, the center of an ordered universe. In the same way that the light of the sun allows us to see the world of everyday physical objects, the light of the Good allows for (in Plato’s phrase) “the intelligibility of the objects of knowledge.” Bataille’s parodic sun is a direct challenge to that world; it’s what happens when solar reason is turned against itself, when instead of allowing its illumination to reveal a serene, peaceful world, we stare directly at its mad and burning source. It’s the sun Van Gogh painted, one of “radiation, explosion, flame, and himself, lost in ecstasy.”...

What Bataille advocates isn’t necessarily a collapse into pure unreason but an attempt to subject the highest powers to their own standards, to stare in the face of kings and monsters, and ask “why must you rule?”"


It was weird how compelling this was, how succesfully the abstraction wrapped up in the end (I wanted to quote the last line, but I also really want you to get there by yourself...) and it's freaking me out to stare at anything bright right now.

FB: An unreasonably compelling essay on staring at the sun. Like, click if only for the perfect merging of the site design with the tone of the writing
"Since we can’t eat the sun, Breatharians are content with looking at it. Over a terrifying array of websites, they detail the practice: For the first few months, you should only look at the sun for 10 seconds at a time, but as your eyes adjust, you can go for longer and longer periods. “If you can watch TV for three hours,” one author notes, “surely you can see the sun for that long.” The first effects are psychological: You will be cured of your depression, for instance. “You will become a compassionate person. This is a great contribution to world peace.” You will no longer fear death. After extended sungazing, all bodily illnesses will vanish. Finally, once you’ve learned to spend hours at a time disobeying your parents, you will be able to live without food, see across time and space, and fly under your own power, including into outer space. You will become a god."

(or)

" Reason comes from the sun, and so does the king, and if there’s only one sun, neither can disagree with the other. Kant’s reason allows for only one right answer, and it happens to agree with political power. As he puts it: “Argue as much as you like, and about what you like — but obey!”


What Bataille advocates isn’t necessarily a collapse into pure unreason but an attempt to subject the highest powers to their own standards, to stare in the face of kings and monsters, and ask “why must you rule?” If you use reason to interrogate reason itself, it’s revealed as being utterly arbitrary."

Friday, July 6, 2018

"World's languages traced back to single African mother tongue"



"New research, published in the journal Science, suggests this single ancient language resulted in human civilization — a Diaspora — as well as advances in art and hunting tool technology, and laid the groundwork for all the world's cultures.

The research, by Quentin Atkinson from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, also found that speech evolved far earlier than previously thought. And the findings implied, though did not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of controversy among linguists, according to the New York Times... 

Atkinson also hypothesized that languages with the most sounds would be the oldest, while those spoken by smaller breakaway groups would utilize fewer sounds as variation and complexity diminished."


I dunno, this seems slightly too flashy to be accurate, but it's cool as a thought... 

Thursday, July 5, 2018

"Mike Pence and the temptresses"



"Suppose at a champagne reception, Pence reached for a cocktail shrimp at the same moment as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and their fingers were to brush. Could we reasonably expect this poor man to do anything but seize that siren temptress in his arms and do what our cave ancestors did? Reasonably, we should break off all diplomacy with Germany — that is, if President Trump has not already done so.

I hope that when the CEO of Campbell Soup came for a White House meeting they warned her not to let a single can of soup peer seductively from her purse, lest it give Pence the idea that they were eating a meal together and he were to fling himself bodily upon her."



FB: "What will happen when he must see the face of Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill every day? This may snap the frail thread of his remaining self-control."

Wednesday, July 4, 2018

"The NFL’s plan to protect America from witches"




"Grandpa’s pompous Lord Tywin Lannister response encapsulates exactly what’s wrong with NFL management: They insist on being the self-appointed guardians of America’s mythological vision of itself. Malt shops on every corner, Pat Boone crooning on the jukebox, and modestly dressed virgins sitting around with knees clamped together waiting to be asked to prom. This 1950s, Father Knows Best soundstage fantasy doesn’t stop with paternalistic and puritanical gender stereotypes, but also promotes simplistic notions about race and patriotism. The NFL’s anachronistic fancies aren’t just a misguided attempt to pander to what they think their traditionalist fans want, but also projects the hard-core conservative values of the mostly rich, white one-percenters who own the teams. We must live in their Disneyland – or else... 

These highly trained and skilled women are being told that the NFL just wants to protect them from sexual predators, particularly NFL players. Like the grumpy grandpa in human resources who wouldn’t “allow” his granddaughters to post photos he doesn’t approve of, the NFL wants to be their (creepy? pimpy?) daddy. These are adult women who should be permitted to make their own decisions about who they contact and who they don’t, especially since the players have no such restrictions. A cheerleader poses in modest lingerie and she’s fired; a player knocks out his wife on video and is suspended for two games. Boys will be boys, but girls must be what the NFL tells them to be."

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/apr/06/the-nfls-plan-to-protect-america-from-witches

FB: "the NFL doesn’t mind exploiting the sensual attributes of these women for financial gain. Because nothing says wholesome family entertainment than lithe young women in skimpy shorts and plunging tops doing the splits. I’m sure 13-year-old Jimmy and his leering father are watching their energetic performance thinking only the purest of thoughts. So, this moral umbrage over an Instagram photo is the height of hypocrisy"

"Respect Your Cat (Not That It Cares)"



"Real respect requires something much more than babying; it requires overhauling our whole perspective on cat kind. It’s time to open our eyes — like really, really wide, the way my sister’s cat does when it spies the vacuum cleaner — and see this animal for what it really is: not a helpless furball to be patronized and mollycoddled, but an entity both fearsome and sublime, commanding respect in the manner of a mafia don, or the ocean."