"To Donald Trump, the American City Will Always Be A Dystopic, ‘Eighties Movies’ New York"

"Calling this a “wave” or even a “spike” is accurate in retrospect, but it doesn’t capture the climate for those who lived through it. We call a pattern a wave because we know it will eventually crest and collapse. It is the return to normalcy that gives a trend the shape of a spike. But for people who were living through this time, there was no reason to believe that they would see the other side of the wave. If, like Donald Trump, you were 44 in 1990, crime had risen in every decade of your life. High crime would have felt like the new normal. If you really want to get an idea of what this era felt like, watch a bunch of ’80s and ’90s science fiction, fantasy, and horror movies. No, really... 

In 1984, Ghostbusters depicted a New York whose citizenry was literally haunted by evil spirits. In the trashy horror movie C.H.U.D. (Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers), homeless people live in the sewers, infected by toxic waste and sustaining on unsuspecting New Yorkers they’ve dragged underground to feed on. “A recent article in a New York newspaper reported that there were large colonies of people living under the city,” the movie’s marketing went. “The paper is incorrect. What is living under the city is not human.” The tagline warned, “They’re not staying down there, anymore.” A couple years prior, in the real-life New York of 1982, Trump was attempting to evict the tenants of a rent-controlled apartment that he owned on Central Park South, so he could tear down the building and build new luxury apartments. When a handful of tenants wouldn’t budge, Trump offered the empty apartments to the City of New York as housing for the homeless. He wasn’t being benevolent: He was trying to use the prospect of living next to the homeless to drive out the remaining tenants. The city, wisely, declined... 

This bleak vision of the two New York Cities — one wealthy and mostly white, the other poor, and mostly black and brown — reflected the anxiety of the class divide in the city. Even as crime was spiking, rents were rising. The city’s economy began to recover and white people began returning to midtown. In fact, the reason that Trump’s castle was never built is that the firm that owned the land decided it could make even more money selling it to another developer... 

But if you listen to Donald Trump, it’s the late ’80s again. “The murder rate,” Trump declared at his campaign rallies, “it’s the worst, the highest it’s been in 45 years. Nobody talks about that — nobody talks about that.” Nobody talks about this mostly because it isn’t true. In fact, it’s nearly the opposite of true. In 2015, the murder rate in NYC did increase by about 10 percent, the highest one-year increase in about 25 years. Though the numbers haven’t officially been released for 2016, crime is projected to have increased again. But the murder rate in 2015 was still near the historic lows of past years."

http://www.mtv.com/news/2996373/to-donald-trump-the-american-city-will-always-be-a-dystopic-eighties-movies-new-york/

"When Cities Went Electric"

"Electricity makes it more possible for cities to become much livelier—people could be out and about in a way that just wasn’t true if you were living in rural America. Cities became much more nocturnal places than the countryside: This entire world of nightlife was possible. The streets were lit. The interiors of buildings were lit.

For the majority of people who worked during the day, the fact that things could be lit up at night meant you had this whole additional period of leisure that you otherwise really wouldn’t have.

Electricity also meant you could have elevators and thus much taller buildings, and the density of cities begins to change."

https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/03/how-the-war-of-currents-brought-power-to-cities/519402/

"Studies Skewed By Focus On Well-Off, Educated Brains"

"when the sample reflected the U.S. population, children's brains reached several development milestones much earlier.

One of these milestones involved the total surface of the brain's cortex, which plays a key role in in memory and thought. The unweighted data showed that this surface area continued to increase until after a child's 12thbirthday. The weighted data showed a much earlier peak — before age 10... 

This study doesn't look at what those differences might mean for children's emotional and intellectual development. The key point is rather that researchers should make sure that they're looking at a representative sample when they're defining "normal."

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/10/16/558087458/studies-skewed-by-focus-on-well-off-educated-brains?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=2043

FB: "It's unrealistic to expect that every brain imaging study sample represents the full range of U.S. residents, Le Winn says. But even small studies should do a better job disclosing the characteristics of people being studied. And larger studies should consider weighting the results to more accurately represent the nation's population, she says."

"Uncommon Ancestry"

"In Canada, a federal law, the Assisted Human Reproduction Act, was passed in 2004. But it was largely preoccupied with outlawing payment for sperm, eggs, embryos and wombs—which, incidentally, it has failed to do—with much less emphasis on accountability.

It has largely been forgotten that the original Canadian law did call for the creation of a national personal health information registry. It was supposed to help identify health and safety risks that might arise through assisted reproduction, and keep tabs on ethical and human rights abuses. There was even the explicit promise that if two individuals who were created through assisted reproduction in this country wanted to know if they were genetically related, they could make a request and find out...

Also eliminated in that bill was the government agency that was supposed to administer and enforce the 2004 law. The agency, called Assisted Human Reproduction Canada, had been set up in December 2006, but it never did much of anything, let alone uphold the law. Part of its problem was that it never had any specific regulations to enforce—the government claims to be working on them now, thirteen years in—but another part appeared to be lack of political will...

Olivia Pratten, a donor-conceived woman who grew up in British Columbia, argued a few years back that people like her had the right to know about their origins the way adopted people in her province did. (Adoptees in B.C., and a few other provinces, such as Ontario, have the right to know the identity of their birth parents.) Pratten won that case in court, then lost when it was appealed. She has never found her sperm donor.

Palmer is cynical. “They don’t want people finding out they didn’t use the right donor,” she says. She thinks people created through donation should have the right to know both the fact that they were donor-conceived and who the donor is. “It messes with people’s identity,” she says. On finding out that hers was actually the doctor, she says: “I’m not happy it’s him, but I’m happy I have some sort of answer.”"

https://hazlitt.net/longreads/uncommon-ancestry

"The Living Disappeared"

"Some 500 children are thought to have disappeared during the dictatorship. Some were stolen when their parents were abducted, but most were born in Argentina’s torture centers. After women gave birth, they were considered as worthless as any other prisoner. In the Pozo de Banfield, the guards often made new mothers clean the makeshift maternity room right after delivery. Some postpartum women were dropped from planes into the Río de la Plata’s turbid waters; others were executed and dumped into mass graves or burned in the crematoriums that operated day and night. In a final erasure, the dictatorship’s operatives stripped the women’s babies of their identities — many were kept as spoils of war by people close to the regime. Others were abandoned at orphanages or sold on the black market...

Delia is 91 now and still meets with the group each week, even as their numbers dwindle. “We’re in danger of extinction,” she says. The “crazies” who once skulked around toy stores are now a renowned human rights group, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. They have lawyers and psychologists and work with geneticists and federal investigators. Billboards, radio shows, and TV programs urge people with doubts about their identities to come forward. But while the search has grown much more sophisticated, it’s still not over. If anything, it’s taken on a new urgency as the Grandmothers — and the people who killed their children and snatched their grandkids — are getting old and dying. One hundred and twenty-one children stolen during the dictatorship have been found — 57 of them since the year 2000. But more than 300 are still missing. Now adults in their late 30s and early 40s, they’re considered the living disappeared...

IF SOMEONE SPOTs a lost child at the beach in Argentina, they put the kid on their shoulders and start to do a slow, rhythmic clap. The people around them join in, and all around the child the clapping gets louder and louder. The frantic parent follows the beat to the kid until they reunite amid whistles and cheers. Virginia had watched this spectacle countless times during her summers at the beach.

In the 2000s, Virginia was even more public with her search for her brother. She started writing open letters to him and posting them on a blog. She told her family’s story in a documentary. People shared Virginia’s letters on Facebook; they invited her to present the film and sent little notes wishing her luck. They were accompanying her in her search and amplifying it. She could almost hear the sound of clapping, she wrote in one of the letters. It seemed to be growing louder."

https://story.californiasunday.com/the-living-disappeared

"Mythcommunication: It’s Not That They Don’t Understand, They Just Don’t Like The Answer"

"in conversation, “no” is disfavored, and people try to say no in ways that soften the rejection, often avoiding the word at all. People issue rejections in softened language, and people hear rejections in softened language, and the notion that anything but a clear “no” can’t be understood is just nonsense. First, the notion that rape results from miscommunication is just wrong. Rape results from a refusal to heed, rather than an inability to understand, a rejection...

explanations usually go like this: “I would love to, but I can’t …” The refuser situates the refusal in an inability, rather than an unwillingness, to accept. “I’d love to, except that I don’t want to” is a wisecrack precisely because it plays on that norm — the sentence is structured to disguise the unwillingness but ends with a twist by stating it explicitly. The authors note that “refusals are almost always accompanied by explanations or justifications”, citing literature. [p.302.]...

Reviewing the research, the authors find that people understand refusals to all kinds of offers in pauses, deflections, conditionals or even weak acceptances with certain tones and pauses."

https://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/mythcommunication-its-not-that-they-dont-understand-they-just-dont-like-the-answer/

I've been thinking a lot about how often 'no' is not heard. The post above focuses on rape, and that's obviously an incredibly important instance to highlight, but I also want to think about this more generally. It seems like there are some people who are just engage with the 'no' dynamic a lot less. There are people in my life who have been very capable of delivering semi-insensitive 'no's to other people, and also pressing back on others' more typically-phrased 'no'. And it's a really uncomfortable situation to be in, when someone is taking your polite 'no' too literally and suggesting ways out of your excuse; you have to slip fully into a lie, or you have to say 'yes', or you have to openly admit the seemingly-open secret that it was a 'no' all along.

The 'no'-unawareness isn't usually accompanied by general social disfunction; if anything, 'no'-unawareness can be a really socially adaptive skill, it can give you a special social tool that pushes people to do more things for you. It can lead to your friends developing a certain amount of cognitive dissonance, explaining to themselves that they are falling in lie with your wishes because you are such good friends and you do have good ideas about what to do and you do deserve that extra help and attention right now. 

'No'-less people can be quite toxic when they develop a sense of possessiveness around someone. 

And so I'm thinking two things: (1) we need to step up as a society and learn to be more honest with our 'no's; and (2) we need to learn to recognize when people are establishing boundaries and respect them.

"5 things that can’t be ignored about development photography"

"Showing suffering should be specific

Images used by development organisations are often devoid of context, not even providing so much as a location, nor any details about the person they’re depicting or their life. The underlying message is, then, that the consumers of these images don’t need much information to make out what’s going on: it’s probably Africa, and it’s probably awful... 

Images of pity solidify the legacy of colonialism (with which development, and photography, share a sticky history), presenting the global South as an unknown, alien other, in need of saving by benevolent passers-by in the North. If the images used by development organisations make people look subservient, submissive and in need of pity, then the unequal power dynamic between North and South continues: ‘we’ have what ‘you’ need, and (bonus!) it’ll only cost $5 a month."

http://africasacountry.com/2015/07/devpix-5-things-that-cant-be-ignored-about-development-photography/

Related: what do people in poverty want... 

FB: "This dynamic is even more problematic when the fact that a lot of development images are used to solicit funds is taken into consideration. Are the subjects models? Should they get paid? And is anyone comfortable being the ‘face’ of poverty and distress?" 

"A.I. VERSUS M.D."

"

"The two kinds of knowledge would seem to be interdependent: you might use factual knowledge to deepen your experiential knowledge, and vice versa. But Ryle warned against the temptation to think that “knowing how” could be reduced to “knowing that”—a playbook of rules couldn’t teach a child to ride a bike. Our rules, he asserted, make sense only because we know how to use them: “Rules, like birds, must live before they can be stuffed.”... 

()... 

When teaching the machine, the team had to take some care with the images. Thrun hoped that people could one day simply submit smartphone pictures of their worrisome lesions, and that meant that the system had to be undaunted by a wide range of angles and lighting conditions. But, he recalled, “In some pictures, the melanomas had been marked with yellow disks. We had to crop them out—otherwise, we might teach the computer to pick out a yellow disk as a sign of cancer.”... 

The most powerful element in these clinical encounters, I realized, was not knowing that or knowing how—not mastering the facts of the case, or perceiving the patterns they formed. It lay in yet a third realm of knowledge: knowing why."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/ai-versus-md

"In the 20th century, Japanese anthropologists and officials tried to hide the existence of the Indigenous Ainu"

"For much of the 20th century, Japanese government officials and academics tried to hide the Ainu. They were an inconvenient culture at a time when the government was steadfastly creating a national myth of homogeneity. So officials tucked the Ainu into files marked “human migration mysteries,” or “aberrant hunter-gatherers of the modern age,” or “lost Caucasoid race,” or “enigma,” or “dying race,” or even “extinct.” But in 2006, under international pressure, the government finally recognized the Ainu as an Indigenous population...

Humans first landed on Hokkaido at least 20,000 years ago, probably arriving from Siberia via a land bridge in search of a less frigid environment. By the end of the last ice age, their descendants had developed a culture of hunting, foraging, and fishing... In time, the Ainu homeland, which included Hokkaido and Rebun, as well as Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, now part of Russia, joined a large maritime trade. By the 14th century, the Ainu were successful middlemen, supplying goods to Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and later Russian merchants...

Today, science tells us that the ancestors of the ethnic Japanese came from Asia, possibly via a land bridge some 38,000 years ago. As they and their descendants spread out across the islands, their gene pool likely diversified. Then, much later, around 2,800 years ago, another great wave of people arrived from the Korean peninsula, bringing rice farming and metal tools. These newcomers mixed with the Indigenous population, and, like most farming societies, they kick-started a population boom. Armed with new technology, they expanded across the southern islands, but stalled just short of Hokkaido...

The Ainu call ethnic Japanese Wajin, a term that originated in China, or Shamo, meaning colonizer. Or, as one Ainu told a researcher: people whom one cannot trust...

The Saru valley is also where a famous Ainu leader, Shigeru Kayano, took a stand against the Japanese government. In the 19th century, a samurai took Kayano’s grandfather to work in a herring camp: the homesick boy chopped off one of his fingers, hoping his Wajin masters would send him home. Instead, they told him to stop crying. Kayano never forgot the story. In the 1980s, the Japanese government expropriated Ainu land along the Saru to build two dams: Kayano took the government to court. He fought a long legal battle and finally won a bittersweet victory. In 1997, the Japanese judiciary recognized the Ainu as an Indigenous people—a first from a state institution. But as the parties battled in the courts, dam construction went ahead. Kayano continued to fight for his people’s rights. As the case went through the courts, he ran for a seat in Japan’s parliament, becoming its first Ainu member in 1994."

https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/prejudice-pride

Related: Scandinavian indigenous group; native rap; Hawaiian mountain

FB: "Honshu is densely populated and home to the country’s largest cities, including Tokyo. Hokkaido, just north of Honshu, retains more natural wonder and open spaces; it’s a land of forests and farms and fish... On the surface, there is nothing about Hokkaido that is not Japanese. But dig down—metaphorically and physically, as Kato is doing—and you’ll find layers of another class, culture, religion, and ethnicity"

"How to be perfectly unhappy"

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/unhappy

The American definition of happiness is so odd, so restrictive, so stressful...

"How culinary propaganda from a women's magazine made Thanksgiving a thing"

"Previously, Thanksgiving celebrations had been entirely dependent on the wishes of presidents and governors who could declare a Thanksgiving whenever they felt a celebration was in order. Public holidays were in short supply in early America. There was only one, aside from the weekly Sabbath: the Fourth of July. Even Christmas was a workday in some parts of the country... 

In 1837, Hale became editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the pre-eminent women’s magazine of the 19th century, a sort of combination of Good Housekeeping, Gourmet,Architectural Digest, Vogue, and The New Yorker. She stayed at her post for more than 40 years and used her considerable power to advocate for some of her favorite causes, which included education for women, celebration of American writing, the preservation of historical monuments, and, especially, the establishment of a Thanksgiving holiday on the last Thursday of November. This, she argued, would bring Americans together: “For one day the strife of parties will be hushed, the cares of business will be put aside, and all hearts will join in common emotions of gratitude and good-will.”... 

Even after they rejoined the Union, Southerners remained hostile to Thanksgiving. Congress didn’t vote to make it an official federal holiday until 1941, so observation until then was still technically a matter of choice. Oran Milo Roberts, governor of Texas from 1879 to 1883, refused to acknowledge it. “It’s a damned Yankee institution anyway,” he said. Alabama and Louisiana had days of Thanksgiving in 1875 and 1877 to celebrate the exclusion of African-Americans from their state governments. "

https://thetakeout.com/thanksgiving-as-we-know-it-was-dreamt-up-by-a-womens-ma-1820398315?utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

"How to Tell If You're Mansplaining"

"In the interest of helping people who genuinely want to curb their own mansplaining (and of shifting the burden of recognition off their weary audiences), we talked to a few body language experts who shared tips on how to recognize when you’ve launched into mansplaining territory, even if no one is confronting you about it outright. And yes, I realize the very nature of this post can count as mansplaining, but then again, having a widely recognized definition of mansplaining has helped identify other related phenomena such as whitesplaining, gendersplaining or the occasional pantsplaining, so everyone can use a refresher on recognizing when your pedantic comments are unwanted... 

You’re not going to get called out on mansplaining each time you do it, but you have to go into every conversation aware that it exists and that you could be guilty of it. At the very least, you should try putting yourself in the shoes of the person you’re talking to, Reiman said."

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-tell-if-youre-mansplaining-1819282045

I've been trying to think of how I define mansplaining. I think it's that feeling when someone is just talking at you to make themselves feel smarter - not just smart, but smarter. 

DO NOT USE THIS ARTICLE TO MANSPLAIN WHAT MANSPLAINING IS. 

This is for you, for your growth in social awareness. If someone calls you out for mansplaining (or points out to you that someone else is doing it), sit back and examine the situation mindfully, do not pull this article out and try to prove someone wrong. (because if they were wrong, they would not be anymore) (also literally who cares, there are zero systemic stakes for someone over-diagnosing mansplaining, the world doesn't have time for you to be worried about that) 

FB: "Facial reactions in the person you are speaking to are a huge sign: Reiman said to look for things such as a clenched jaw, shifting the jaw to the side, or flaring the nostrils, which can be a sign of holding in anger. She calls moves like this “non-verbal sarcasm” because they’re a way of letting your body say you’re listening while your brain is in disbelief at what is being said to you."

(^^ Omg why does no one read body posture? Can't tell you how many open sideways looks I've given people that have not been picked up on. Realized recently that I also sometimes grab my opposite shoulder, maybe like I'm comforting myself for being in this social situation)  

"How America's Obsession With Hula Girls Almost Wrecked Hawai'i"

"In Hula, Heimann writes, “In art, printed matter and even tattoos …, it was common to confuse the imagery of South Sea island women with that of female Hawaiian hula dancers. Sailors’ accounts, as well as those of various writers and artists, described the dances of Polynesia as a series of sexually charged movements performed by topless dancers, which presumed relaxed sexual mores on the part of the native population. Thus, accounts of Hawaiian hula girls often blended with those from other South Pacific archipelagos and a muddled stereotype of the hula girl emerged... 

Cook and his men—and the merchants, whalers, artists, and writers who followed—mistook the hula’s sexually charged fertility rituals as a signal the Hawaiians’ youngest and loveliest women were both promiscuous and sexually available to anyone who set foot on their beaches. In her 2012 book Aloha America: Hula Circuits Through the U.S. Empire, historian Adria L. Imada explains how natural hospitality of “aloha” culture—the word used as a greeting that also means “love”—made Hawaiians vulnerable to outside exploitation. To Westerners, the fantasy of a hula girl willingly submitting to the sexual desires of a white man represented the convenient narrative of a people so generous they’d willing give up their land without a fight... 

Around 1879, three Portuguese men who happened to know how to play and make a four-string instrument called the machete arrived on the islands. Before long, the Hawaiians adopted the machete before creating the taro-patch fiddle and ‘ukulele. Then, in 1885, Joseph Kekuku, a musician and composer from Lā‘ie, developed the first steel guitar. As with the harmonies of the Christian hymns, Hawaiians readily integrated these new musical sounds into their hulas... 

Even as the hula was, again, on the verge of suppression in Hawaii, an American entrepreneur named Henry Foster saw an opportunity to cash in on every Westerner’s favorite fantasy: A gentle, alluring Polynesian woman who gives a welcoming smile as she shimmies her hips. According to Adria Imada in Aloha America, in 1892, just before the U.S.-supported overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii, he convinced Kini Kapahu and two other women who’d been in Hui Lei Mamo to join the first-ever touring hula ensemble."

https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/how-americas-obsession-with-hula-girls-almost-wrecked-hawaii/

FB:" “The turn-of-the-century was the beginning of the hula-girl thing,” Hale told me. “This exotic country of brown-skinned people had just been annexed into the United States. According to some scholars, there was a very self-conscious desire to make Hawai‘i comfortable and familiar. The government wanted white Americans to see Hawaiians as welcoming lovely people that the United States wanted to bring in, not as naked ‘savages’ or Indians.”"

"A weekend with the United Order of Tents, a semi-covert organization of black women"

"This is a moment that exemplifies the spirit of the Tents. It is an organization made up of dozens of chapters all over the South and Northeast, with hundreds of members currently. It was founded on the ideals of freedom, independence, and self-autonomy, but it is also firmly rooted in the practical. The Tents is a massively successful, wonderfully efficient community self-help organization that has operated without outside help for over 150 years. But because it is run by and for black women — black churchwomen — it is largely unknown and in fact was deliberately kept secret for much of its existence.

Annetta M. Lane and Harriet R. Taylor, two black women from Virginia, founded this order in 1867. Annetta was enslaved in Virginia and, according to her family's history, was a nurse on her plantation. This role meant that she moved both among the white enslavers in the main house and among the black people the family enslaved in the fields. Such a role meant she was valuable to the white slavers, and it also meant she could transmit information and care to those enslaved...

If your very self is dangerous, how do you keep it safe? For the Tents, the answer lies in secrecy. From the beginning, when they operated as an organization to help women escape slavery, they operated furtively. Later, as they worked to build wealth and economic independence in a segregated world, secrecy was again key. They incorporated under the name of two white lawyers both because it made gaining credentials easier and because those names helped shield the radical work they were doing...

Most astonishing about the Tents is the fact that about a generation out of slavery, in 1894, they established a rest home for the elderly that they ran continuously, with no outside financial help and with no bankruptcy, for over 100 years, until 2002. In addition, at a certain point in the mid-century, the Tents served as a mortgage house for black families and churches who would not have been able to apply for loans from white banks. The Tents, therefore, literally helped build the institutions and homes of their communities."

http://www.lennyletter.com/life/a1014/united-order-of-tents/

FB: "These organizations served as banks when most white-run institutions refused to trade or secure mortgages for black individuals or institutions. They served as insurance when insurance companies did the same. And almost just as important, they served as affirmation of black personhood, dignity, and independence at a time when the wider world insisted on black inferiority."

"Tapping Rural America: Craft Breweries Pour New Life Into Small Towns"

"Hernstrom is head brewer at the Bolo Beer Company. On a recent weeknight, he was pouring pints of Aquifer Ale and filling carryout growlers of Wild West Wheat. With its modern pendant lights and bar made of reclaimed wood, the newly opened taproom looks as if it would be more at home in Seattle or Denver than in rural Nebraska.

And that is no accident. After Hernstrom was recruited to town, he noticed there were a lot of recently transplanted 20- and 30-somethings — some new to town but many who returned home after being away for college or living in cities.

"They know what they like about those other places they've lived, and so they're trying to make that happen here in the small towns," he says.

http://www.npr.org/2017/10/07/555589951/tapping-rural-america-craft-breweries-pour-new-life-into-small-towns?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=202707

FB: "While it's probably too early to call it a trend, what is happening in Valentine is part of a broader cultural phenomenon in rural America. Young people who grew up in small towns and have been watching them struggle from afar are feeling this calling to come home."

"Why onions make us cry"

"He knew that LF must start off as a different molecule. That’s because it only caused a tearing of the eyes once the onion’s skin was broken. He hypothesized that a chemical reaction must take place as an onion is cut. Block thought this chemical reaction must convert a stable molecule into one that could quickly vaporize and burn the eyes...

As to why onions produce the eye-irritating chemical in the first place, Block says it probably helps the plant defend itself from predators. The chemicals that hurt human eyes might also trigger pain in other organisms. This would make the plant less appealing to wildlife, insects and even some bacteria or fungi.

“It’s an intricate reaction millions of years in the making,” Block says. “You can’t help but be in awe at the beauty of nature when you start to look at what’s happening around us on the [chemical] level.”"

https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/why-onions-make-us-cry

This website is so cool, I would have been totally into it as a young student 

FB: As you prepare to make Thanksgiving dinner, here's why it's so painful!

"Why We Miss Objects That Are Right in Front of Us"

"In particular, the first time a person examined a photo with a giant object, the object often seemed to be invisible. But it’s not a deficiency, he said: “This is a useful trick the brain does to rapidly process scenes and find what we are looking for.”

It is unlikely, in real life, that you’ll be required to find many giant objects.

But a related phenomenon may be to blame for your struggle to see your keys if they are not where you normally put them, or for your tendency to notice stains more on one colleague’s shirt than on another’s.

“What we pay attention to is largely determined by our expectations of what should be present,” said Christopher Chabris, a cognitive psychologist and co-author of The Invisible Gorilla.

Relative size is just one of many pieces of information that contribute to our expectations. Without expecting something, we’re unlikely to pay attention to it, he says, and “when we are not paying attention to something, we are surprisingly likely to not see it.”

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/06/science/why-we-miss-things-in-front-of-us.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0

"If You Want to Persuade People, Try ‘Altercasting’"

"We all altercast, for better or worse. Want your co-worker to stay late and proofread a report you wrote? Mention that she is a good writer and really knows the subject. Hope to talk your meat-and-potatoes friend into trying the new Vietnamese restaurant? Tell him you admire his adventurous spirit. Want your husband to clean the garage? Point out what a supportive husband he is and how you know he wants you to be happy.

In each case, you’re casting the other person, or alter, in a role before you make your request. Experts say this works because people typically want to rise to the occasion... 

Is this manipulation? It depends on whether you’re being deceptive—and how the person you are trying to influence perceives it. “Altercasting can be very damaging if the other person thinks he’s being manipulated,” says David Ewoldsen, a psychologist and professor in the department of media and information at Michigan State University. But if you keep the other person’s welfare in mind, altercasting can be an effective persuasive tool, he says.

It’s important to be mindful of the role you’re choosing for the other person and always make it a positive one, says Anthony Pratkanis, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and an authority on altercasting.

Too often, we don’t, and negative roles can stick, becoming harmful to the other person and your relationship. Consider the husband who tells his wife she is a nag or the wife who tells her husband he is lazy. That starts a vicious downward cycle."

http://www.wsj.com/articles/if-you-want-to-persuade-people-try-altercasting-1473096624?tesla=y&mod=e2fb

So... I totally do this, this is my technique for bringing people around on social stuff. Didn't know there was a word for it. Like, I'll say "Well, you know not to touch a black person's hair, but a lot of people don't know that and it's just a daily annoyance for some people". 

"The Coming Software Apocalypse"

"It’s been said that software is “eating the world.” More and more, critical systems that were once controlled mechanically, or by people, are coming to depend on code. This was perhaps never clearer than in the summer of 2015, when on a single day, United Airlines grounded its fleet because of a problem with its departure-management system; trading was suspended on the New York Stock Exchange after an upgrade; the front page of The Wall Street Journal’s website crashed; and Seattle’s 911 system went down again, this time because a different router failed. The simultaneous failure of so many software systems smelled at first of a coordinated cyberattack. Almost more frightening was the realization, late in the day, that it was just a coincidence...

Technological progress used to change the way the world looked—you could watch the roads getting paved; you could see the skylines rise. Today you can hardly tell when something is remade, because so often it is remade by code. When you press your foot down on your car’s accelerator, for instance, you’re no longer controlling anything directly; there’s no mechanical link from the pedal to the throttle. Instead, you’re issuing a command to a piece of software that decides how much air to give the engine. The car is a computer you can sit inside of. The steering wheel and pedals might as well be keyboard keys...

“The problem is that software engineers don’t understand the problem they’re trying to solve, and don’t care to,” says Leveson, the MIT software-safety expert. The reason is that they’re too wrapped up in getting their code to work. “Software engineers like to provide all kinds of tools and stuff for coding errors,” she says, referring to IDEs. “The serious problems that have happened with software have to do with requirements, not coding errors."...

There is an analogy to word processing. It used to be that all you could see in a program for writing documents was the text itself, and to change the layout or font or margins, you had to write special “control codes,” or commands that would tell the computer that, for instance, “this part of the text should be in italics.” The trouble was that you couldn’t see the effect of those codes until you printed the document. It was hard to predict what you were going to get. You had to imagine how the codes were going to be interpreted by the computer—that is, you had to play computer in your head.

Then WYSIWYG (pronounced “wizzywig”) came along. It stood for “What You See Is What You Get.” When you marked a passage as being in italics, the letters tilted right there on the screen. If you wanted to change the margin, you could drag a ruler at the top of the screen—and see the effect of that change. The document thereby came to feel like something real, something you could poke and prod at. Just by looking you could tell if you’d done something wrong. Control of a sophisticated system—the document’s layout and formatting engine—was made accessible to anyone who could click around on a page.

Victor’s point was that programming itself should be like that. For him, the idea that people were doing important work, like designing adaptive cruise-control systems or trying to understand cancer, by staring at a text editor, was appalling. And it was the proper job of programmers to ensure that someday they wouldn’t have to."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/saving-the-world-from-code/540393/?0he60i53ifmo

Apologies, it's the Atlantic, it's interesting and well structured for half the article and then there is another half of the article so that you finish it feeling restless and concerned. Skim the second half unless it holds particular interest.