"How the Blog Broke the Web"

"In ‘94, a college student named Justin Hall broke free from the table of contents format. He added to the top of his homepage daily, and he headlined each section with the date. He shared everything: from interesting links he found to his experiments with sex and drugs.

Justin’s Links became the first daily web diary.

That’s what they were called then… web diaries. (The name weblogcame a few years later, as some of their writers moved away from extremely personal topics.)...

When jjg compiled his list of “web logs” in early 1999, there were only 23. That’s not a typo: Twenty-three, twenty-three web logs on the internet, ah ah ah. No doubt he missed many — and a bunch had lived and died by then, including mine — but by what kind of multiplier? Five? Ten times? So there were what, maybe 230 web logs?...

Homepages had a timeless quality, an index of interesting or useful or relevant things about a topic or about a person. You didn’t reload a homepage every day in pursuit of novelty. (That’s what Netscape’s What’s Cool was for!)

Chronological content was in the minority."

https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/

I fully miss homepages. 

I miss the old weird internet where you went to a site because your friend told you about it and spelled it for you, and you looked through every section and peeked into someone's mind that way. Found weird quizzes and puzzles and flash games and stories. 

but when I really think about it, I don't actually want to go back. I think I just wish that that internet still existed for someone, for some 12-year-old waiting to be picked up from school, exploring secret silly worlds in the library with their friends

FB: "the damn reverse chronology bias — once called into creation, it hungers eternally — sought its next victim. Myspace. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Pinterest, of all things. Today these social publishing tools are beginning to buck reverse chronological sort; they’re introducing algorithm sort, to surface content not by time posted but by popularity, or expected interactions, based on individual and group history. There is even less control than ever before.

There are no more quirky homepages."

"Our Attitude Toward Aliens Proves We Still Think We’re Special"

"The strong Fermi’s paradox became even stronger, so to speak, in 2001, with the work of Charles Lineweaver and collaborators on the age distribution of terrestrial planets in the Milky Way. His calculations show that Earth-like planets in our galaxy began forming more than 9 billion years ago, and that their median age is 6.4 ± 0.9 billion years, which is significantly greater than the age of the Earth and the solar system. This means that a large majority of habitable planets are much older than Earth. If we believe that humans and the planet we live on are not particularly special compared to other civilizations on other planets, we would conclude that the stage of the biosphere and technology on other occupied planets must be, on average, older than the corresponding stages we see on Earth. If we humans are now on the cusp of colonizing our solar system, and we are not much faster than other civilizations, those civilizations should have completed this colonization long ago and spread to other parts of the galaxy... 

Many of us choose to ignore Fermi’s paradox, or even fight it, because it requires too complete an acceptance of our cosmic mediocrity. We would rather secretly believe we are special than confront the real consequences of the paradox—consequences like, for example, intelligence being a maladaptive trait, or our universe being a simulation, or us living in a cosmic zoo. "

http://m.nautil.us/issue/63/horizons/our-attitude-toward-aliens-proves-we-still-think-were-special

Related: Other one on imagining aliens

FB: "Now that we know that the Earth is a latecomer, and believe the foundations of life have the power to take hold quickly, Fermi’s paradox is more puzzling than ever. In the evocative words of physicist Adrian Kent: It’s just too damn quiet in the local universe."

"The classist vilification of the Black Friday shopper"

"This was in a Walmart with a majority black staff and clientele, and it was kind of covered in a way that the LA riots were. There were helicopter shots of throngs of black bodies; there was a lot of the same kind of discourse, the fear of a black underclass coming for Beverly Hills, coming for your stuff in your gated communities.

There were similarities in the way the coverage was racialized, footage of people ransacking goods while there’s a whole host of social problems and they’re living in a veritable police state. It looked identical if you turned the sound off; it was very striking.

So from there, I started to look at the history of the crowd and the discourse around crowds. Really from the rise of historical modernity, crowds have been associated with danger, disease, race. Today, for example, we see how Trump has mobilized mobs...

After the 9/11 attacks, [George W.] Bush told people to go out and shop, that it’s your civic duty. So blaming Black Friday shoppers for shopping sends a contradictory message. I think it’s also class shaming."

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/20/18103890/black-friday-shopping-coverage-classism-racism

It's true - there is a kind of voyeurism, a kind of sick superior glee in watching the images of hordes of people swarming big box stores, images of chaos and destruction in their wake, delivered to you on your full-price television in your warm, comfortable home while you eat copious leftovers. 

It's the new Thanksgiving Day Parade - bring your children to gawk and laugh at the undignified shopping experiences of poorer people. 

FB: "in very financially troubled times, Black Friday might be people’s only chance to have access to certain things, to buy what they need.

Also, the public is consistently told that in order to participate in our culture, they should be engaging in consumerism. It makes us feel this sense of connection, a sense of belonging to something."

"APA issues first-ever guidelines for practice with men and boys" 

"something is amiss for men as well. Men commit 90 percent of homicides in the United States and represent 77 percent of homicide victims. They’re the demographic group most at risk of being victimized by violent crime. They are 3.5 times more likely than women to die by suicide, and their life expectancy is 4.9 years shorter than women’s... 

just as this old psychology left out women and people of color and conformed to gender-role stereotypes, it also failed to take men’s gendered experiences into account. Once psychologists began studying the experiences of women through a gender lens, it became increasingly clear that the study of men needed the same gender-aware approach, says Levant.

The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful. Men socialized in this way are less likely to engage in healthy behaviors"

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/01/ce-corner.aspx?fbclid=IwAR1sXHtCpQbkxfIfkurzXAGdwubZbYFBiNmMMLYAuNDTMryzxcHj9OpyI2o

Related: myth of individualism, harm of striving, lone gunman

FB: "Thirteen years in the making, they draw on more than 40 years of research showing that traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage that echoes both inwardly and outwardly." 

"How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation"

"the more I tried to figure out my errand paralysis, the more the actual parameters of burnout began to reveal themselves. Burnout and the behaviors and weight that accompany it aren’t, in fact, something we can cure by going on vacation. It’s not limited to workers in acutely high-stress environments. And it’s not a temporary affliction: It’s the millennial condition. It’s our base temperature. It’s our background music. It’s the way things are. It’s our lives... 

Financially speaking, most of us lag far behind where our parents were when they were our age. We have far less saved, far less equity, far less stability, and far, far more student debt. The “greatest generation” had the Depression and the GI Bill; boomers had the golden age of capitalism; Gen-X had deregulation and trickle-down economics. And millennials? We’ve got venture capital, but we’ve also got the 2008 financial crisis, the decline of the middle class and the rise of the 1%, and the steady decay of unions and stable, full-time employment... 

students internalize the need to find employment that reflects well on their parents (steady, decently paying, recognizable as a “good job”) that’s also impressive to their peers (at a “cool” company) and fulfills what they’ve been told has been the end goal of all of this childhood optimization: doing work that you’re passionate about. Whether that job is as a professional sports player, a Patagonia social media manager, a programmer at a startup, or a partner at a law firm seems to matter less than checking all of those boxes... 

When we talk about millennial student debt, we’re not just talking about the payments that keep millennials from participating in American “institutions” like home ownership or purchasing diamonds. It’s also about the psychological toll of realizing that something you’d been told, and came to believe yourself, would be “worth it” — worth the loans, worth the labor, worth all that self-optimization — isn’t... 

Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst specializing in burnout, writes. “You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.”"

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work?utm_source=dynamic&utm_campaign=bfsharefacebook&utm_term=.kaJrp9ea6&ref=mobile_share&fbclid=IwAR19se6rUpqcz-6s5CWliOm7pxcaMB5yfGG6ke_D00mQTqJtpRPqJQSUL5w

FB: this is how I should introduce myself "I never thought the system was equitable. I knew it was winnable for only a small few. I just believed I could continue to optimize myself to become one of them. And it’s taken me years to understand the true ramifications of that mindset."

"Inside the Radical, Uncomfortable Movement to Reform White Supremacists"

"The deradicalization movement combines insights gleaned from social work, 12-step programs, psychology, neurochemistry, and the personal experiences of “formers” who have left extremist groups. It’s tricky work. Few extremists make clean breaks with their past. Many liken hate to an addiction—hard to quit and easy to relapse into. The process is slow and one-on-one; it doesn’t promise to defeat hate groups so much as chip away at a movement that includes more than 400 organizations with thousands of members, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center... 

Kruglanski found that psychological signposts were better predictors of radicalization. He called these factors “the three Ns”—need, narrative, and network. It doesn’t matter if they are skinheads or jihadis; everyone who gets involved in hate movements has a deep urge to participate in a greater cause. Yet that cause, Kruglanski argued, needn’t be destructive. To successfully deradicalize a neo-Nazi, a new, constructive set of Ns—which might stem from education, a job, a partner—would have to replace the old, hateful ones."

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/07/reform-white-supremacists-shane-johnson-life-after-hate/

FB: "Many became hardcore racists only after they had joined white supremacist groups. Rather than preexisting anti-Semitism or xenophobia, a cocktail of experiences such as isolation, depression, anxiety, or childhood abuse typically served as the stepping stones to extremism. This suggested that the behavioral and social rewards of participating in hate groups are perhaps more fundamental to understanding—and stopping—extremist behavior than the ideology behind it."

"What Rep. Steve King Gets Wrong About The Dark Ages -- And Western Civilization"

"His comments also raised a lot of questions and concerns among historians who have pointed out that the idea of "Western Civilization" is itself a fiction of the late 19th and early 20th century. For more perspective on this, I reached out to T.J. Tallie, an African historian at Washington & Lee University. As many historians have recognized, the concept of "Western Civilization" is itself rather new. It grew from debates of East versus West in late 19th century European intellectual circles, but did not gain traction in the U.S. until it was time to explain to soldiers going into World War I why they should fight for the survival of Europe...

After World War I and then World War II, there was growing interest in the narrative of our connection to western Europe. As University of North Carolina historian Lloyd Kramer said in an earlier interview on thisdevelopment, this narrative was part of the "modernization theory of history, popular in the late 1940s and ’50s, which described the world, as we came out of the horrors of World War I and World War II, as moving toward secular modernization.""

https://www.forbes.com/sites/drsarahbond/2016/07/23/stevekingandthedarkages/#35e438155980

"We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned"

"Coler is a soft-spoken 40-year-old with a wife and two kids. He says he got into fake news around 2013 to highlight the extremism of the white nationalist alt-right.

"The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction," Coler says.

He was amazed at how quickly fake news could spread and how easily people believe it. He wrote one fake story for NationalReport.net about how customers in Colorado marijuana shops were using food stamps to buy pot.

"What that turned into was a state representative in the House in Colorado proposing actual legislation to prevent people from using their food stamps to buy marijuana based on something that had just never happened," Coler says...

And as the stories spread, Coler makes money from the ads on his websites. He wouldn't give exact figures, but he says stories about other fake-news proprietors making between $10,000 and $30,000 a month apply to him. Coler fits into a pattern of other faux news sites that make good money, especially by targeting Trump supporters.

....Coler insists this is not about money. It's about showing how easily fake news spreads. And fake news spread wide and far before the election. When I pointed out to Coler that the money gave him a lot of incentive to keep doing it regardless of the impact, he admitted that was "correct.""

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503146770/npr-finds-the-head-of-a-covert-fake-news-operation-in-the-suburbs?fbclid=IwAR3EJKTJbC5riwJJsA-C_uSoEIsJMYt_AuwxUKxqkb6Xrb9-JuUGmalDtH8

Related: "‘Nothing on this page is real’: How lies become truth in online America"

FB: Seriously? Seriously?? ""The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction," Coler says"

"‘Nothing on this page is real’: How lies become truth in online America"

"“Nothing on this page is real,” read one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair’s site, and yet in the America of 2018 his stories had become real, reinforcing people’s biases, spreading onto Macedonian and Russian fake news sites, amassing an audience of as many 6 million visitors each month who thought his posts were factual. What Blair had first conceived of as an elaborate joke was beginning to reveal something darker. “No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how obviously fake we get, people keep coming back,” Blair once wrote, on his own personal Facebook page. “Where is the edge? Is there ever a point where people realize they’re being fed garbage and decide to return to reality?”...

Each political page published several posts each day directly into Chapian’s feed, many of which claimed to be “BREAKING NEWS.”

On her computer the attack against America was urgent and unrelenting. Liberals were restricting free speech. Immigrants were storming the border and casting illegal votes. Politicians were scheming to take away everyone’s guns. “The second you stop paying attention, there’s another travesty underway in this country,” Chapian once wrote, in her own Facebook post, so she had decided to always pay attention, sometimes scrolling and sharing for hours at a time...

Chapian didn’t believe everything she read online, but she was also distrustful of mainstream fact-checkers and reported news. It sometimes felt to her like real facts had become indiscernible — that the truth was often somewhere in between. What she trusted most was her own ability to think critically and discern the truth, and increasingly her instincts aligned with the online community where she spent most of her time...

Blair said he and his followers had gotten hundreds of people banned from Facebook and several others fired or demoted in their jobs for offensive behavior online. He had also forced Facebook to shut down 22 fake news sites for plagiarizing his content, many of which were Macedonian sites that reran his stories without labeling them as satire.

What Blair wasn’t sure he had ever done was change a single person’s mind."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/nothing-on-this-page-is-real-how-lies-become-truth-in-online-america/2018/11/17/edd44cc8-e85a-11e8-bbdb-72fdbf9d4fed_story.html?fbclid=IwAR161IoFjlX3d7liaHM2EPxe7idRIOqU_lF9G3RN8fopcGMiVVCoNS3VjkQ&noredirect=on&utm_term=.2b72d1537416&wpisrc=nl_mustreads&wpmm=1

"How Flight Attendants Organized Against Their Bosses to End 'Swinging Stewardesses' Stereotyping"

"The airline industry enforced the widely held idea that for middle-class women, a job was a short-term stint between college and marriage. They sold stewardessing as a way of acquiring the skills needed as wife and hostess, as well as a means to meet wealthy, white, marriageable businessmen...

The airlines’ ideas about sexually attractive women were also deeply racialized. In 1971, only about six percent of the nation’s nearly 35,000 flight attendants were racial minorities—and this small number marked a significant increase from previous decades. In 1966, a Civil Rights commissioner in New York found that, “for too long there has been an underlying ‘white esthetic’ in the evaluation of physical attractiveness by American industry.”...

According to Paula Kane, an activist and former flight attendant with American Airlines, “pinching and patting” by men passengers increased significantly in the wake of the “Fly Me” campaign. Likewise, after Continental launched its “we move our tails for you” campaign, stewardesses received requests from men to wiggle provocatively for them. When they complained to Continental about the impact of the campaign, management advised flight attendants to respond to customers’ requests that they “move their tail” with flirty one-liners like “Why, is it in the way?” Flight attendants who responded more assertively to customers risked being written up or suspended....

Members leafleted persistently, dragged friends to meetings, and held consciousness-raising sessions in airport employee parking lots. These actions sensitized flight attendants to shared workplace problems and helped individual flight attendants recognize that they were not alone in their anger. Within two years, the organization had grown to 1,000 members. Within four years, it had 3,000 members...

The impact of these legal actions was dramatic. As the EEOC and the courts struck down marriage, pregnancy, and age requirements, the average job tenure of a flight attendant increased from 15 months in 1965 to over six years a decade later. While not all lawsuits and complaints were successful and some cases, especially those surrounding weight requirements, dragged on for years, flight attendants remade the face of the airline industry and created new employment opportunities for women through their sustained struggle in the courts and in the press."

https://pictorial.jezebel.com/how-flight-attendants-organized-against-their-bosses-to-1830282960?utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow&fbclid=IwAR2oz8LMZgn8QPovxhQeCzKmXzccob9yxhpX9xJ02iuh8XlQNRZeZWI2Kgk

FB: "The bodies of women flight attendants have long been an integral part of the airlines’ marketing strategy. In the postwar period, government regulations ensured that fares, routes, and planes were nearly indistinguishable. To stand out, airlines marketed their flight attendants’ looks and promised an exciting or erotic in-flight experience."

"What Is Glitter? A strange journey to the glitter factory."

"The tiny, shiny, decorative particles of glitter we are familiar with today are popularly believed to have originated on a farm in New Jersey in the 1930s, when a German immigrant invented a machine to cut scrap material into extremely small pieces. (Curiously, he did not begin filing patents for machines that cut foil into what he called “slivers” until 1961.) The specific events that led to the initial dispersal of glitter are nebulous; in true glitter fashion, all of a sudden, it was simply everywhere...

The jovial Mr. Shetty told me over the phone that people have no idea of the scientific knowledge required to produce glitter, that Glitterex’s glitter-making technology is some of the most advanced in the world, that people don’t believe how complicated it is, that he would not allow me to see glitter being made, that he would not allow me to hear glitter being made, that I could not even be in the same wing of the building as the room in which glitter was being made under any circumstance, that even Glitterex’s clients are not permitted to see their glitter being made, that he would not reveal the identities of Glitterex’s clients...

I met the elder Mr. Shetty in a conference room in the front of the office, where, beneath a glittering silhouette-style wall hanging of the pre-9/11 New York City skyline, he breezed through several advanced textbooks’ worth of chemical engineering in an attempt to tell me what glitter was...

Researchers and zookeepers sometimes mix glitter with animal feed to track animals (polar bears; elephants; domestic cats) via sparkly feces. Plywood manufacturers insert hidden layers of colored glitter in their products to prevent counterfeiting. Because glitter is difficult to remove completely from an area into which it has been introduced, and because individual varieties can be distinguished under a microscope, it can serve as useful crime scene evidence; years ago the F.B.I. contacted Glitterex to catalog samples of its products."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/style/glitter-factory.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&fbclid=IwAR0wWUJRq3IX354ygALk7FjEfXJfbps7YGDj2OYCX3K3bWGEd_vJxWNKRo8

FB: This was a fun read "Most of the glitter that adorns America’s name brand products is made in one of two places: The first is in New Jersey, but the second, however, is also in New Jersey. The first, the rumored farm site of glitter’s invention, refused to answer any of my questions. “We are a very private company,” a representative said via email. The second is Glitterex."

"Martin Niemöller before the Nazis finally came for him"

"Would Niemöller’s contemporary admirers in the American public embrace the confession so enthusiastically if they knew of the pastor’s wholehearted support for Hitler during his climb to power? Indeed, the Nazis’ stigmatization and persecution of minorities did not initially trouble the nationalist pastor. Born in 1892, Niemöller grew up during the German monarchy’s struggle for world recognition and served proudly as a submarine officer in Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Imperial Navy in World War I. After the war and the socialist revolution that overthrew the Hohenzollern monarchy, Niemöller entered the seminary. Ordained a Lutheran pastor in 1924, he remained an archconservative during Germany’s short-lived liberal republic, the so-called Weimar Republic, casting his ballot for the Nazis in 1924 and again in 1933."

https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/martin-niem-ller-nazis-finally-came-him

"Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong"

"Studies have found that anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of people classified as obese are metabolically healthy. They show no signs of elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance or high cholesterol. Meanwhile, about a quarter of non-overweight people are what epidemiologists call “the lean unhealthy.” A 2016 study that followed participants for an average of 19 years found that unfit skinny people were twice as likely to get diabetes as fit fat people. Habits, no matter your size, are what really matter. Dozens of indicators, from vegetable consumption to regular exercise to grip strength, provide a better snapshot of someone’s health than looking at her from across a room...

Ask almost any fat person about her interactions with the health care system and you will hear a story, sometimes three, the same as Enneking’s: rolled eyes, skeptical questions, treatments denied or delayed or revoked. Doctors are supposed to be trusted authorities, a patient’s primary gateway to healing. But for fat people, they are a source of unique and persistent trauma. No matter what you go in for or how much you’re hurting, the first thing you will be told is that it would all get better if you could just put down the Cheetos...

Lesley Williams, a family medicine doctor in Phoenix, tells me she gets an alert from her electronic health records software every time she’s about to see a patient who is above the “overweight” threshold. The reason for this is that physicians are often required, in writing, to prove to hospital administrators and insurance providers that they have brought up their patient’s weight and formulated a plan to bring it down—regardless of whether that patient came in with arthritis or a broken arm or a bad sunburn. Failing to do that could result in poor performance reviews, low ratings from insurance companies or being denied reimbursement if they refer patients to specialized care...

in a remarkable finding, rich people of color have higher rates of cardiovascular disease than poor people of color—the opposite of what happens with white people. One explanation is that navigating increasingly white spaces, and increasingly higher stakes, exerts stress on racial minorities that, over time, makes them more susceptible to heart problems...

Many “failed” obesity interventions are, in fact, successful eat-healthier-and-exercise-more interventions. A review of 44 international studies found that school-based activity programs didn’t affect kids’ weight, but improved their athletic ability, tripled the amount of time they spent exercising and reduced their daily TV consumption by up to an hour. Another survey showed that two years of getting kids to exercise and eat better didn’t noticeably affect their size but did improve their math scores—an effect that was greater for black kids than white kids."

https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/everything-you-know-about-obesity-is-wrong/

FB: " “For something as emotional as weight, you have to listen for a long time before you give any advice. Telling someone, 'Lay off the cheeseburgers' is never going to work if you don't know what those cheeseburgers are doing for them.”...the decisive factor in obesity care was not the diet patients went on, but how much attention and support they received while they were on it. Participants who got more than 12 sessions with a dietician saw significant reductions in their rates of prediabetes and cardiovascular risk. Those who got less personalized care showed almost no improvement at all."

"To overcome decades of mistrust, a workshop aims to train Indigenous researchers to be their own genome experts"

"He kicked off his effort with a lecture at a reservation in Northern California. It was the first time he had spoken with a Native American community, despite years of studying their genetics. Expecting to gather dozens of DNA samples, "I brought a bunch of cheek swabs with me," he recalls. But at the end of his talk on DNA variation and the importance of filling in sampling gaps, the room fell uncomfortably silent. "Then one person stood up and said, ‘Why should we trust you?’" Malhi remembers. "That's a formative memory. I had not learned about anthropologists going to communities, taking samples, and just leaving."

He got no samples that day... 

SING aims to train Indigenous scientists in genomics so that they can introduce that field's tools to their communities as well as bring a sorely needed Indigenous perspective to research. Since Malhi helped found it at UI in 2011, SING has trained more than 100 graduates and has expanded to New Zealand and Canada. The program has created a strong community of Indigenous scientists and non-Indigenous allies who are raising the profile of these ethical issues and developing ways to improve a historically fraught relationship.

SING grads and professors say the experience has profoundly affected their work. At SING, "you can exist as your authentic self, as both Indigenous and as a scientist, without having to code-switch all the time. It's like coming up for air," says Savannah Martin, a Ph.D. student in biological anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and a member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians in Oregon." 

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/overcome-decades-mistrust-workshop-aims-train-indigenous-researchers-be-their-own

FB: "researchers working for the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP), a major international effort, were collecting samples from around the world to build a public database of global genetic variation. The project publicly emphasized the importance of collecting DNA from genetically isolated Indigenous populations before they "went extinct."

That rationale "was offensive to Indigenous populations worldwide," Gachupin says. "Resources for infrastructure and for the wellbeing of the community were not forthcoming, and yet now here were these millions and millions of dollars being invested to ‘save’ their DNA." The message from the scientific establishment was, she says, "We don't care about the person. We just want your DNA." Some activists dubbed the HGDP "the Vampire Project," believing the only beneficiaries would be Western scientists and people who could afford costly medical treatments."

"How Does Time Work in the Brain?"

"Once the team realized that the signals changed over time, the pieces of the puzzle came together. The brain organized time as events and memories, not merely locations and data points. Moser explained, "Time is a non-equilibrial process. It is always unique and changing. If the network was indeed coding for time, the signal would have to change with time in order to record experiences as unique memories."

https://www.labroots.com/trending/neuroscience/12613/time-brain

"Why Do We Pledge Allegiance?"

"The origins of the pledge cannot be understood apart from the “flag movement” of the 1880s, which itself cannot be understood apart from the Civil War. Just as U.S. (that is, Union) flags became more omnipresent during the war, so “loyalty tests” also spread. People suspected of disloyalty were often arrested, eligible for pardon if they submitted to an “oath of allegiance” swearing to “support, protect and defend the Constitution and Government of the United States against all enemies, whether domestic or foreign,” and to “bear true faith, allegiance and loyalty to the same.” Such oral and signed performances were thought to be rehabilitative, making real Americans out of those whose devotion was questionable or had wavered... 

The Pledge of Allegiance was written only with this specific commemoration in mind, though, and with the express goal of driving sales of the Youth’s Companion. It likely would have fallen into obscurity if not for the intense anxiety about immigrants that began to grip many native-born Americans in the 1880s. More than 2.7 million immigrants arrived in the United States in the 1870s, followed by over 5.2 million in the 1880s and another 14.5 million between 1900 and 1919. Bellamy channeled the alarm many felt when he told the NEA in 1892 that “Americanism brings a duty . . . it must be made a force strong enough to touch the immigrant population which is pouring over our country.” Naturally the use of his pledge in public schools was a key component, he contended, for the inculcation of loyalty to the United States... 

While traditions often engender controversy and resistance, probably no U.S. tradition has sparked more opposition than the pledge (and, relatedly, the U.S. motto, “In God We Trust,” adopted around the same time). Not all of this resistance has come from atheists. Indeed, as Ellis notes, “the most important and enduring sources of resistance to the flag salute and the Pledge of Allegiance were religiously based,” coming from religious minorities with objections to the wording of pledges and mottoes and sometimes to the act of saluting or pledging to a flag."

http://bostonreview.net/politics/jack-david-eller-pledge-allegiance

FB: "It likely would have fallen into obscurity if not for the intense anxiety about immigrants that began to grip many native-born Americans in the 1880s."

"Violence in pre-Columbian Panama exaggerated, new study shows"

"Lothrop's misinterpretations are likely due to the era of "Romantic archaeology," underdeveloped methods for mortuary studies and literal readings of Spanish accounts of indigenous peoples after European contact.

"We now realize that many of these Spanish chroniclers were motivated to show the indigenous populations they encountered as 'uncivilized' and in need of conquering," said Smith-Guzmán, adding that many accounts of sacrifice and cannibalism have not been confirmed by the archaeological record. "Rather than an example of violent death and careless deposition, Playa Venado presents an example of how pre-Columbian societies in the Isthmo-Colombian area showed respect and care for their kin after death."...

Evidence suggests certain people's remains were preserved for long periods of time before being buried in ritual contexts. "At Playa Venado, we see a lot of evidence of adults being buried next to urns containing children, multiple burials including one primary and one secondary burial, and disturbance of previously laid graves in order to inter another individual in association," said Smith-Guzmán.

"The uniform burial positioning and the absence of perimortem (around the time of death) trauma stands in contradiction to Lothrop's interpretation of violent death at the site," said Smith-Guzmán, who also used evidence from other archaeological sites around Panama about burial rites as part of the investigation. "There are low rates of trauma in general, and the open mouths of skeletons Lothrop noted are more easily explained by normal muscle relaxation after death and decay.""

https://m.phys.org/news/2018-09-violence-pre-columbian-panama-exaggerated.html#jCphttps://phys.org/news/2018-09-violence-pre-columbian-panama-exaggerated.html#jCp

"Addiction Doesn’t Always Last a Lifetime"

"As someone who suffered from heroin addiction myself, I’d like to introduce you to a few people who have followed diverse trajectories out of addiction. My own nearly 30-year recovery started with traditional rehab and abstinence, which I practiced for 13 years. Now, however, it includes medical use of antidepressants, exercise, strong relationships, deep commitment to my work and moderate use of some legal substances.

I believe people like me can no longer stay silent — our stories are the only antidote to a picture of addiction that fails to include recovery."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/31/opinion/addiction-recovery-survivors.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

"Meet the Anarchists Making Their Own Medicine"

"In the last decade, Four Thieves has run afoul of the Food and Drug Administration, billionaire pharma executives, doctors, and chemists at some of the United States’ most prestigious universities. Indeed, Laufer and his collaborators can’t stop pissing off powerful people because Four Thieves is living proof that effective medicines can be developed on a budget outside of institutional channels.

At the pharmacy, a pair of single use Mylan epipens can cost over $600 and the company’s generic version costs $300 per pair, but an ongoing shortage means you probably can’t find them, even if you can afford them. In response, Four Thieves published the instructions for a DIY epipen online that can be made for $30 in off-the-shelf parts and reloaded for $3... 

To date, Four Thieves has used the device to produce homemade Naloxone, a drug used to prevent opiate overdoses better known as Narcan; Daraprim, a drug that treats infections in people with HIV; Cabotegravir, a preventative HIV medicine that may only need to be taken four times per year; and mifepristone and misoprostol, two chemicals needed for pharmaceutical abortions... 

Eric Von Hippel, an economist at MIT that researches “open innovation,” is enthusiastic about the promise of DIY drug production, but only under certain conditions. He cited a pilot program in the Netherlands that is exploring the independent production of medicines that are tailor made for individual patients as a good example of safe, DIY drug production. These drugs are made in the hospital by trained experts."

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43pngb/how-to-make-your-own-medicine-four-thieves-vinegar-collective

This is the most Vice article I've ever read. I'm often intrigued, but I never know how much to believe it... 

FB: "As the group continues to experimenting with synthesizing its own cabotegravir, some Four Thieves affiliates have started purchasing a commercially available PrEP called tenofovir, compounding it with an inert buffer, and then providing it to heroin dealers who can choose to cut their product with the PrEP as a "service" for their customers. For those customers who decide to take the dealers up on their service, "their heroin has a new side effect,” Laufer said. “You don’t get HIV from it any more.”" 

"What the Mystery of the Tick-Borne Meat Allergy Could Reveal"

"meat allergy is upending longstanding assumptions about how allergies work. Its existence suggests that other allergies could be initiated by arthropod bites or unexpected exposures. It also raises the possibility that other symptoms often reported by patients that clinicians might dismiss because they don’t fit into established frameworks — gluten intolerance, for example, or mucus production after drinking milk — could, similarly, be conditions that scientists simply don’t understand yet. Mammalian-meat allergy “really has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of food allergy, because it doesn’t fall under the umbrella of our paradigm,” Dr. Maya R. Jerath, a professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine, in St. Louis, told me. “Maybe our paradigm is wrong.”... 

Another unusual aspect of meat allergy is that it can emerge after a lifetime spent eating meat without problems. In other food allergies, scientists think that children’s immune systems may never learn to tolerate the food in the first place. But in meat allergy, the tick seems to break an already established tolerance, causing the immune system to attack what it previously ignored. One way to understand how the parasite pulls this off is to consider its bite as a kind of inadvertent vaccine... 

Another unusual aspect of meat allergy is that it can emerge after a lifetime spent eating meat without problems. In other food allergies, scientists think that children’s immune systems may never learn to tolerate the food in the first place. But in meat allergy, the tick seems to break an already established tolerance, causing the immune system to attack what it previously ignored. One way to understand how the parasite pulls this off is to consider its bite as a kind of inadvertent vaccine."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/24/magazine/what-the-mystery-of-the-tick-borne-meat-allergy-could-reveal.html

"#IAmSexist"

"For example, before I got married, I insisted that my wife take my last name. After all, she was to become my wife. So, why not take my name, and become part of me? She refused. She wanted to keep her own last name, arguing that a woman taking her husband’s name was a patriarchal practice. I was not happy, especially as she had her father’s last name, which I argued contradicted her position against patriarchy. But as she argued, “This is my name and it is part of my identity.” I became stubborn and interpreted her decision as evidence of a lack of full commitment to me. Well, she brilliantly proposed that we both change our last names and take on a new name together showing our commitment to each other.

Despite the charity, challenge and reasonableness of the offer, I dropped the ball. That day I learned something about me. I didn’t respect her autonomy, her legal standing and personhood. As pathetic as this may sound, I saw her as my property, to be defined by my name and according to my legal standing. While this was not sexual assault, my insistence was a violation of her independence. I had inherited a subtle, yet still violent, form of toxic masculinity. It still raises its ugly head — I should be thanked when I clean the house, cook, sacrifice my time. These are deep and troubling expectations that are shaped by male privilege, male power and toxic masculinity."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/opinion/men-sexism-me-too.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&fbclid=IwAR21ctI4ZFvMlzq6qKM2xbDkkDkkFe_4BfRRUfXanhemf6AEXsWhEBWNKbI

FB: "As early as elementary school, the young boys would play this “game” of pushing one another into girls. The idea was to get your friend to push you into a girl that you found attractive in order to grind up against her. I was guilty: “Hurry up! Push me into her.” He pushed, and the physical grind was obvious. She would turn around, disgusted, and yell, “Stop!” Youthful? Yes. Was it sexist and wrong? Yes. This was our youthful collective education; this is what it meant for us to gain “masculine credibility” at the expense of girls."

"There’s Nothing Virtuous About Finding Common Ground"

"The middle is a point equidistant from two poles. That’s it. There is nothing inherently virtuous about being neither here nor there. Buried in this is a false equivalency of ideas, what you might call the “good people on both sides” phenomenon. When we revisit our shameful past, ask yourself, Where was the middle? Rather than chattel slavery, perhaps we could agree on a nice program of indentured servitude? Instead of subjecting Japanese-American citizens to indefinite detention during WW II, what if we had agreed to give them actual sentences and perhaps provided a receipt for them to reclaim their things when they were released? What is halfway between moral and immoral?... 

Many people understand politics as merely a matter of rhetoric and ideas. Some people will experience wars only in news snippets, while the poor and working class that make up most of our volunteer army will wage war, and still others far and not so far away will have war waged upon them. For the people directly affected, the culture war is a real war too. They know there is no safety in the in-between. The romance of the middle can exist when one’s empathy is aligned with the people expressing opinions on policy or culture rather than with those who will be affected by these policies or cultural norms. Buried in this argument, whether we realize it or not, is the fact that these policies change people’s lives."

http://time.com/5434381/tayari-jones-moral-middle-myth/?fbclid=IwAR29zx_bNXIQnhdH5Qh4k6j_evHubVT_KU40T70wsPeYQV4PGsbYptVe-yU

FB:" "The search for the middle is rooted in conflict avoidance and denial. For many Americans it is painful to understand that there are citizens of our community who are deeply racist, sexist, homophobic and xenophobic. Certainly, they reason, this current moment is somehow a complicated misunderstanding. Perhaps there is some way to look at this–a view from the middle–that would allow us to communicate and realize that our national identity is the tie that will bind us comfortably, and with a bow. The headlines that lament a “divided” America suggest that the fact that we can’t all get along is more significant than the issues over which we are sparring."

"Fibroblasts become fat to reduce scarring"

"Unexpectedly, it was recently found that hair follicle regeneration in mouse wounds could be stimulated with secreted factors of the fibroblast growth factor (FGF) and Wingless (WNT) signaling pathways (5). Plikus et al. now make the important finding that hair follicles can change the fate of myofibroblasts (a known cellular player in scarring) into adipocytes through a signaling pathway that depends on bone morphogenetic protein (BMP). Therefore, combinatorial WNT, FGF, and BMP treatment could present a biphasic strategy for scarless wound healing by first stimulating regrowth of hair follicles that would then induce differentiation of scarforming myofibroblasts into adipocytes (see the figure). Intriguingly, the authors found that myofibroblasts isolated from keloid patients also could be induced to become adipocytes by exposure to BMP."

http://science.sciencemag.org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/content/355/6326/693

"Birth canals are different all over the world, countering a long-held evolutionary theory"

"The idea that women’s pelvises have been shaped by an evolutionary compromise—also known as the “obstetrical dilemma”—has been influential in anthropology, says Jonathan Wells, an expert in human evolution at University College London who was not involved with the work. But recent studies have challenged it, and the new findings add to that research, he says. If the obstetric dilemma held true, one would expect birth canals around the world to be relatively standardized, Wells says. But that’s not what researchers found... 

Betti and Manica also found that there was less variability in birth canal shape in populations farther from Africa, such as Native Americans. That pattern has been seen in other traits, and is thought to simply reflect lower variability in genes and traits among the relatively small bands of people who moved out of Africa to populate the world. Overall, the analysis suggests a population may have ended up with a particular birth canal shape simply by chance, not because of any sort of selective pressure."

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/10/birth-canals-are-different-all-over-world-countering-long-held-evolutionary-theory?utm_source=6&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=AAAS---The-American-Association-for-the-Advancement-of-Science-%28AAAS.Science%29&utm_term=WebEd&utm_content=AAAS&fbclid=IwAR0SnUPDfLzQZhofUJPcYaQnqovXzVhp5hNOSI-pMKPm4udlgfaw8jGF4-I

HOW is this the first time this has been investigated?? So, so many health implications for pregnancy. 

Related : terrible pregnancy one(s), change to theory about birth canals and women