"‘Those People’ Eat Quinoa, Too"

"I visited the food shelf a total of 5 times in about 11 months. I only told one friend. I told my kids, and when I did, I expected them to laugh, or get angry, or embarrassed. They didn’t do any of those things. They helped me put the groceries away, and they did so quietly, not saying much other than the occasional exclamation of “Yum!” or “Gross!” I can recall for you, on command, most of the meals I made with food shelf goodies. Oven roasted chicken with quartered rosemary potatoes. Turkey chili. French toast. More mac and cheese than I care to admit. One of my favorites was an organic risotto, flavored with mushrooms and olive oil.

Those people.

I wanted to walk up to that woman in the hallway, and smack the folders out of her hand. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her as I got up in her face and yell at her “YOU CLUELESS, PRETENTIOUS BITCH! YOU DON’T KNOW HOW IT FEELS TO WALK INTO ONE OF ‘THOSE’ PLACES AND BE ONE OF ‘THOSE’ PEOPLE! YOU’VE NEVER HAD TO SWALLOW YOUR PRIDE AND ADMIT THAT YOU NEED A HAND! YOU’VE NEVER LOOKED AT YOUR KIDS AND HAD TO HIDE YOUR TEARS BECAUSE YOU HAD NO IDEA HOW YOU WERE GOING TO FEED THEM! YOU KNOW WHAT??? ‘THOSE PEOPLE’ WILL BE MOTHER EFFING GRATEFUL TO SEE THIS FOOD. THEY’LL BE SAYING SILENT PRAYERS AS THEY BOX THAT SHIT UP AND BRING IT HOME AND MAKE IT FOR THEIR FAMILIES. AND THEY WILL NEVER FORGET HOW IT FELT TO BE SO THANKFUL FOR SOMETHING AS SIMPLE AS FOOD!!”"

http://www.scarymommy.com/those-people/?utm_source=FB

"Thousands of Mutations Accumulate in the Human Brain Over a Lifetime"

"Cells of the human body acquire mutations over time, whether because of errors introduced during DNA replication or damage incurred during transcription and other cellular processes. But, until recent technological developments enabled whole genome sequencing from the miniscule quantities of DNA found inside single cells or small clones of the same cell, investigating the nature and extent of such somatic mutations—and the resulting tissue mosaicism—was practically impossible.

Within the now burgeoning field of somatic mutation analyses, the brain is a particular area of interest. That’s because unlike organs such as the skin and gut where cells are replaced daily, the brain’s neurons, once established in the fetus, for the most part stick around for life. Somatic mutations in these cells, then, could affect brain function, behavior, and the propensity for disease long-term. Indeed, it’s thought that such mutations could influence the development of diseases such as schizophrenia, autism, and Tourette’s, which have unclear etiologies, says Yale School of Medicine’s Flora Vaccarino who authored one of the studies... 

The researchers found that a neuron “starts with around 600 mutations” in an infant, “and the mutations accumulate about one every two weeks, so that by the time a neuron is 80 years old it has about 2,400 or so,” says Christopher Walsh of Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital who authored the study. “In general, our numbers pick up right where [Vaccarino’s] leave off,” he says... 

“About one percent of the mutations are likely to be functional in the sense that they disrupt a protein,” says Walsh, “so by the time you’re 80 years old there’s about one in a thousand neurons that has had a gene essentially knocked out.” Mutation accumulation could therefore be “a reasonable model for how age-related cognitive decline might come about,” he says."

https://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/51118/title/Thousands-of-Mutations-Accumulate-in-the-Human-Brain-Over-a-Lifetime/

"Kristen Roupenian on the Self-Deceptions of Dating"

"Margot, choosing between having sex she doesn’t want and “seeming spoiled and capricious,” decides to have unwanted sex. She thinks (or tells herself) that she isn’t afraid that Robert will “force” her, and I think, on one level, that’s true: she has no evidence that he’d be violent toward her. At the same time, she’s already speculated about the possibility that he could kill her and has become anxiously aware that she’s entirely in his territory, that he could have rooms full of “corpses or kidnap victims or chains.”

Louis C.K., who has obviously been in the news a lot lately, echoed Margaret Atwood’s line “Men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them” in a standup routine, by talking about how the equivalent of a woman going on a date with a man would be a man going on a date with a half-bear, half-lion. In the bar, Margot thinks of Robert as “a large, skittish animal, like a horse or a bear,” that she is taming, coaxing to eat from her hand. But what would happen if she stopped trying to coax and pet and charm him—if she said, bluntly, that she doesn’t want him, that she’s not attracted to him, that she’s changed her mind?

That option, of blunt refusal, doesn’t even consciously occur to her—she assumes that if she wants to say no she has to do so in a conciliatory, gentle, tactful way, in a way that would take “an amount of effort that was impossible to summon.” And I think that assumption is bigger than Margot and Robert’s specific interaction; it speaks to the way that many women, especially young women, move through the world: not making people angry, taking responsibility for other people’s emotions, working extremely hard to keep everyone around them happy. It’s reflexive and self-protective, and it’s also exhausting, and if you do it long enough you stop consciously noticing all the individual moments when you’re making that choice.

It’s in this context that Margot decides to have sex with Robert. In order to avoid an uncomfortable, possibly risky exchange, she “bludgeons her resistance into submission” with a shot of whiskey. Then, later, she wonders why the memories of the encounter make her feel so sick and scared, and she blames herself for overreacting, for not being kinder to Robert, who, after all, didn’t do anything wrong."

https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/fiction-this-week-kristen-roupenian-2017-12-11

related: history of american dating one from nov 2017; probably some others

"This man was just trying to be a good dad. Instead, he got fired"

"In his absence, he says his temporary replacement allowed the store to fall into disarray. Carlson claims he was punished for the time it took to return the store up to standard. He began to feel as if they were building a case to make a move. In nine years of working for CVS, he said, he had never felt so scrutinized... 

employees who become mothers experience a loss of wages and opportunities that isn’t justified by changes in their productivity. At home, mothers in heterosexual households are still shouldering an unequal share of the childcare – 28 years after Arlie Hochschild first raised alarm about the “second shift”... 

Many fathers who take on roles stereotypically reserved for mothers find themselves fighting the same battles working mothers have fought going back decades, including the legal ones...

Employers reward fathers because they perceive fatherhood as a sign of a worker’s commitment, stability and “deservingness”, writes Michelle Budig, a professor at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst who has studied the trend. The fatherhood bonus is so pervasive, research suggests, that the wage gap between mothers and fathers has gotten wider even as the wage gap between men and women overall has gotten smaller.

But employers may not be rewarding fatherhood so much as rewarding a style of fatherhood that doesn’t require the employer to be flexible or accommodating."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/fired-for-taking-paternity-leave-dads-fighting-gender-roles-face-uphill-battle

FB: "Stories like his suggest something deeper is infecting the economy than skepticism about working mothers: a generalized hostility to offering anyone, male or female, the flexibility parenting takes." 

"The Manic Mirage"

"We’ve been conditioned to see mania as an awesome bonus that accompanies mental illness, rather than a dangerous byproduct. It’s like watching a person with the flu froth at the mouth and thinking, “That’ll help with decongesting.” But there is nothing useful about mania. It doesn’t make you productive; it doesn’t make you a creative genius; it just makes you think you are. And no matter how many sexy-insane characters Aubrey Plaza plays, there’s nothing cool about it...

Nowadays, I don’t do it to tap into my “creative genius” (which is absolutely not a thing) but to feel productive and useful. I know nothing will come of it, but sometimes living a lie feels so much better than owning a truth. Some people take drugs to feel something; I don’t take drugs to feel anything...

Everyone experiences mania and hypomania differently, but I don’t know anyone who’s ever felt good after a manic episode. What I do know is mania does not help you do your best work or be your best self. It doesn’t even help you do good work or be your good self. I can safely say all of my best work has come from a non-manic state. My productivity and focus come from taking my medication, getting good sleep, and being fortunate enough to see a therapist."

https://medium.com/anxy-magazine/the-manic-mirage-829db3dc4143

"Is this the reason marriages break up after kids?"

"While it is socially acceptable, normal even, for men to retreat to their "man caves" the idea of a mother regularly absenting herself from morning or evening child care routines and large chunks of the weekend for a leisure activity is almost unfathomable. Unlike dads, mothers are expected put their kids first — 24/7. The fetishisation of mothering makes the time inequality appear natural.  Motherhood is a privilege and pure joy, right? So if you want time away from your kids you either don't love them or you're selfish.

The word "selfish" is rarely used as a weapon against dads but there really is nothing worse a mother can be.  And being called "selfish" as a mother is easier than falling off a log. Any time a woman spends on an activity that is not directly for the benefit of her family is considered an indulgence. We now tolerate mothers working outside the home, but in many cases it's justified as a necessity to earn money to put food on the table and a roof over her kids' heads."

http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life-and-relationships/parenting/is-this-the-reason-marriages-break-up-after-kids-20171210-h021tk.html

Related: I don't help my wife; AMS on having it all?

FB: "The inequality of child-free leisure time between mothers and fathers comes down to entitlement and is something that both men and women need to work on. We need more dads to think "the buck stops with me" rather than "I'll babysit when I haven't got anything else on". And mothers need to feel entitled to be "selfish"."

"Acupuncture in cancer study reignites debate about controversial technique"

"Jun Mao, chief of integrative medicine at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre in New York City, says that acupuncture trials such as Hershman’s are better blinded than studies of approaches such as palliative care, cognitive behavioural therapy or exercise, in which participants inevitably know what treatment they are receiving. Sceptics “accept trial results from those fields readily, but they make a special case against acupuncture”, he says. “It’s not fair to use that single argument to shut down the whole field.” 

Gallagher says that many studies suggest that acupuncture triggers neurophysiological changes that are relevant to pain, in conditions from carpal tunnel syndrome to fibromyalgia5. Integrating acupuncture into mainstream medical care, rather than outsourcing it to independent, and perhaps unregulated, acupuncturists, minimizes the risk of lending authority to unscientific practitioners, he says. “That’s why we need to bring it in.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-08309-y

Posting partially because a real-time, serious doctor once strongly suggested that I consider acupuncture treatment. Brigham and Women's Hospital has an acupuncturist. 

"What Doctors Should Ignore"

"Today, scientists understand the sickle cell trait as an adaptation to malaria, not evidence of inferiority. One copy of the sickle cell trait protects against malaria. Having two can cause severe anemia and even death. Scientists also know that the trait is common outside Africa across the “malaria belt” — the Arabian Peninsula, India and parts of the Mediterranean Basin. And people historically considered white can, in fact, carry it. In the Greek town of Orchomenos, for example, the gene is more prevalent than it is among African-Americans.

We know all this, and yet the racialization of the disease, the idea that it occurs only in people of sub-Saharan African descent, persists... 

it may result in subpar medical care for some patients. Case in point: California’s universal blood disorder screening program has identified thousands of nonblack children with the sickle cell trait and scores with the disease — patients who, had doctors stuck to received “wisdom,” might have been missed... 

Professor Yudell belongs to a growing chorus of scholars and researchers who argue that in science at least, we need to push past the race concept and, where possible, scrap it entirely. Professor Yudell and others contend that instead of talking about race, we should talk about ancestry (which, unlike “race,” refers to one’s genetic heritage, not innate qualities); or the specific gene variants that, like the sickle cell trait, affect disease risk; or environmental factors like poverty or diet that affect some groups more than others."

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/opinion/sunday/should-medicine-discard-race.html?_r=0&referer=

This works the other way around too. Being black, doctors can assume that you don't have "white diseases" like autoimmune disorders. 

"What’s Wrong with Me?"

"The doctor told me to take a replacement thyroid hormone and check back in six weeks. By then, I would be feeling better. This was the way medicine worked: tests told you what was wrong, and doctors told you how to fix it.

But I didn’t feel better in six weeks. I felt worse. My blood pressure was alarmingly low. I got excruciating headaches whenever I ate, and one day when I got out of bed I fainted, gashing my arm on a bedside glass. My joints hurt, and I began to have a stinging pain in my back. There was an itching sensation, which would grow in severity, to the point that I felt I was being stabbed by hundreds of fine needles. None of these were usual symptoms of thyroiditis. My friend Gina and I went to get a juice one afternoon—like me, she worked from home—and I got so dizzy that she had to steady me until I could sit. “You have to get better,” she said to me, “whatever that takes.” She looked at me as if I were really sick. Until then, I had half believed—after years of doctors implying as much—that it was all in my head... 

My experience of feeling unwell for years before I got a diagnosis turned out to be typical. According to aarda, it takes an average of nearly five years (and five doctors) for a sufferer to be given a diagnosis... 

A common symptom of autoimmune diseases is debilitating fatigue. Complaining of fatigue sounds like moral weakness; in New York City, tired is normal. But autoimmune fatigue is different from a sleep-deprived person’s exhaustion. The worst part of my fatigue, the one I couldn’t explain to anyone—I knew I’d seem crazy—was the loss of an intact sense of self.

It wasn’t just that I suffered brain fog (a usual autoimmune symptom); and it wasn’t just the “loss of self” that sociologists talk about in connection with chronic illness, where everything you know about yourself disappears, and you have to build a different life. It was that I no longer had the sense that I was a distinct person. Taking the subway to N.Y.U., where I taught, I felt like a mechanism that moved arduously through the world, simply trying to complete its tasks. Sitting upright at my father’s birthday dinner required a huge act of will. Normally, absorption in a task—an immersive flow—can lead you to forget that you feel sick, but my fatigue made such a state impossible. I might, at the nadir of my illness, have been able to write one of these sentences, but I would not have been able to make paragraphs of them... 

And so the person suffering from chronic illness faces a difficult balancing act. You have to be an advocate for yourself in the face of medical ignorance, indifference, arrogance, and a lack of training. (A 2004 Johns Hopkins study found that nearly two-thirds of doctors surveyed felt inadequately trained in the care of the chronically ill.) You can’t be deterred when you know something’s wrong. But you’ve also got to be willing to ask how much is in your head—and whether an obsessive attention to your symptoms is going to lead you to better health. The chronically ill patient has to hold in mind two contradictory modes: insistence on the reality of her disease, and resistance to her own catastrophic fears."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/26/whats-wrong-with-me?mbid=social_facebook

FB: "To be sick in this way is to have the unpleasant feeling that you are impersonating yourself. When you’re sick, the act of living is more act than living. Healthy people, as you’re painfully aware, have the luxury of forgetting that our existence depends on a cascade of precise cellular interactions. Not you."

"Trump’s Transition Team Colluded With Israel. Why Isn’t That News?"

"So what did members of the Trump team do, as they listened to loud objections to the U.N. resolution from the Netanyahu government while counting down the days till Trump’s inauguration in January 2017?

“On or about December 22, 2016, a very senior member of the Presidential Transition Team directed Flynn to contact officials from foreign governments, including Russia, to learn where each government stood on the resolution and to influence those governments to delay the vote or defeat the resolution,” reads the statement of offense against Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. “On or about December 22, 2016, Flynn contacted the Russian Ambassador about the pending vote. Flynn informed the Russian Ambassador about the incoming administration’s opposition to the resolution, and requested that Russia vote against or delay the resolution.”

Who was the “very senior member” of the transition team who “directed” Flynn to do all this? Multiple news outlets have confirmed that it was Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and main point man on the Middle East peace process. “Jared called Flynn and told him you need to get on the phone to every member of the Security Council and tell them to delay the vote,” a Trump transition official revealed to BuzzFeed News on Friday, adding that Kushner told Flynn “this was a top priority for the president.”"...

NONE OF THIS HAS been contested. In fact, on Sunday, Kushner made a rare public appearance at the Saban Forum in Washington, D.C., to discuss the Trump administration’s plans for the Middle East and was welcomed by the forum’s sponsor, the Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban, who said he “personally wanted to thank” Kushner for “taking steps to try and get the United Nations Security Council to not go along with what ended up being an abstention by the U.S.” Kushner’s response? The first son-in-law smiled, nodded, and mouthed “thank you” to Saban.

Meanwhile, the Israelis have been pretty forthcoming about their own role in all of this, too. On Monday, Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. and a close friend and ally of Netanyahu, told Politico’s Susan Glasser that, in December 2016, “obviously we reached out to [the Trump transition team] in the hope that they would help us,” and “we were hopeful that they would speak” to other governments “in order to prevent this vote from happening.”"

https://theintercept.com/2017/12/05/michael-flynn-jared-kushner-israel-settlements-trump/

"Why Your Brain Has Trouble Bailing Out Of A Bad Plan"

"The study found that stopping an action required three key brain areas to communicate with eight other areas. Previous research had suggested fewer areas were required.

The team also found that all the communication had to occur within about one-tenth of a second of when a participant saw the cue not to move their eye. After that, a signal has already been sent to the eye muscles and there is no way to stop it, Courtney says.

This lag is why we experience that awful, fleeting moment when our brain knows we shouldn't stomp on the gas, but our foot does it anyway. "If the signal has already been sent you can watch it happen without being able to stop it," Courtney says."

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/12/07/569188070/why-your-brain-has-trouble-bailing-out-of-a-bad-plan?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=202907

"There’s No Such Thing As ‘Sound Science’"

"Calls to base public policy on “sound science” seem unassailable if you don’t know the term’s history. The phrase was adopted by the tobacco industry in the 1990s to counteract mounting evidence linking secondhand smoke to cancer. A 1992 Environmental Protection Agency report identified secondhand smoke as a human carcinogen, and Philip Morris responded by launching an initiative to promote what it called “sound science.” In an internal memo, Philip Morris vice president of corporate affairs Ellen Merlo wrote that the program was designed to “discredit the EPA report,” “prevent states and cities, as well as businesses from passing smoking bans” and “proactively” pass legislation to help their cause.

The sound science tactic exploits a fundamental feature of the scientific process: Science does not produce absolute certainty. Contrary to how it’s sometimes represented to the public, science is not a magic wand that turns everything it touches to truth. Instead, it’s a process of uncertainty reduction, much like a game of 20 Questions. Any given study can rarely answer more than one question at a time, and each study usually raises a bunch of new questions in the process of answering old ones. “Science is a process rather than an answer,” said psychologist Alison Ledgerwood of the University of California, Davis. Every answer is provisional and subject to change in the face of new evidence. It’s not entirely correct to say that “this study proves this fact,” Ledgerwood said. “We should be talking instead about how science increases or decreases our confidence in something.”... 

“While these controversies may appear on the surface to rest on disputed questions of fact, beneath often reside differing positions of value; values that can give shape to differing understandings of what ‘the facts’ are.” What’s needed in these cases isn’t more or better science, but mechanisms to bring those hidden values to the forefront of the discussion so that they can be debated transparently."

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-easiest-way-to-dismiss-good-science-demand-sound-science/

FB: "It might seem like an easy task to sort good science from bad, but in reality it’s not so simple. “There’s a misplaced idea that we can definitively distinguish the good from the not-good science, but it’s all a matter of degree,” said Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science. “There is no perfect study.” Requiring regulators to wait until they have (nonexistent) perfect evidence is essentially “a way of saying, ‘We don’t want to use evidence for our decision-making,’” Nosek said."

"Why some people can hear this silent gif"

"He suggested a possible theory which his lab call the "visual ear."

"I suspect the noisy gif phenomenon is closely related to what we call the Visually-Evoked Auditory Response, or vEAR for short," explained Fassnidge.

"This is the ability of some people to hear moving objects even though they don't make a sound, which may be a subtle form of synaesthesia - the triggering of one sense by another.

"We are constantly surrounded by movements that make a sound, whether they are footsteps as people walk, lip movements while they talk, a ball bouncing in the playground, or the crash as we drop a glass. There is some evidence to suggest that synaesthetic pairings are, to some extent, learnt during infancy."

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42237092?utm_content=64056471&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

I am constantly "hearing" silent things. Like, when you mute a TV show or movie but your brain fills in some of the sounds and the cadence of the dialogue. It's probably not quite right, but I've never figured out a way to compare. 

"Cheese Powder and Other Hobgoblins: A Double Standard in Risk Reporting"

"Moreover, when the story provides a link to the “study,” you are taken not to the research itself but to a summary written by an advocacy group, the Coalition for Safer Food Processing and Packaging. The summary starts with several paragraphs warning about the danger from phthalates, and only then describes the study itself. And the summary even includes a link to a website called “KleanUpKraft.” That fact alone should have been a red flag to The Times; it might have prompted the reporter to note that the funders of the research chose the cheese products to send to a lab for analysis, and out of the vast range of cheese products on the market, one-third of the samples they chose just happened to be Kraft products. While it’s true that Kraft is a major player in the global cheese market, this so-called research is a clear case of advocacy masquerading as science to advance a point of view. It cries out for some reasonable journalistic skepticism. The story contains none... 

We instinctively trust those we perceive to be on our side, and mistrust those who aren’t. Environmental and public health groups may have their own agendas, but they are on our side, the public’s side. Corporations and industry are on their own side, and selfishly put their profit above public interest.

I made the same gullible mistakes during my years as an environmental reporter, for the same reason. But such journalistic imbalance can do real harm. Reporting that fails to apply reasonable skepticism to the scientific claims of environmental and public health advocates — claims that generally play up risk and danger — leaves us more afraid of some things than the evidence suggests we need to be: genetically modified food, radiation and nuclear power, industrial chemicals."

https://undark.org/article/macaroni-cheese-environmental-alarmism/?utm_content=buffer903d6&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

I think it's reasonable to apply more skepticism to industry claims than the claims of advocacy groups, but there is obviously a wholly insufficient amount of skepticism with regards to the claims of advocates. 

Related: radiation one

"What Netflix doesn’t want you to know about how its synopses are written"

"From Haas’s description, the job sounded pretty straightforward. Why, I wondered during our conversation, would they want to hide that? Then Haas dropped a bomb: “As I'm sure you have noticed those don't always actually match the content of the film very well which is because they did not pay us well enough for us to actually watch the movies,” Haas said. “So we would write the synopsis based on what we found online. That could be kind of challenging.” Bingo, I thought. That’s what Netflix doesn’t want us to know. No, not the possibility that they pay their writers poorly, but the possibility that SYNOPSES WRITERS DO NOT WATCH THE FILMS These synopses are based off other synopses, a feedback loop that would've given Baudrillard fits."

https://theoutline.com/post/2559/netflix-synopses-writers?utm_source=FB

FB: (this is only exciting if you spend a lot of time on Netflix) (which I'm sure you could have guessed) 

"CBS Diversity Comedy Showcase Has Been a Racist, Sexist, Homophobic Mess for Years, Participants Say"

"From demanding that black actors participate in sketches about slaves to asking Latina actresses to “slut it up” to body-shaming both men and women, Najera and Fern Orenstein, the showcase’s producer and casting director, who is also CBS’s vice-president of casting, repeatedly defied the program’s primary purpose, the participants unanimously agreed...

Although the L.A. comedy community has openly discussed what the participants describe as the showcase’ reductive sketches and tokenizing of people of color for years, it took an unlikely advocate to call attention to it at CBS. After living in Los Angeles for seven years and hearing about the program from her peers at Upright Citizens Brigade and other corners of the comedy scene, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend co-creator, star, and executive producer Rachel Bloom said she felt an obligation to get involved. Because her show is produced by CBS Studios, Bloom was invited as a guest to this year’s showcase, which made her want to talk to executives about what she’d heard, she told Vulture...

Generally, Orenstein demanded that Latino characters have “Ricky Ricardo” accents, gay men twirl across the stage and lisp, Asian actors “act foreign,” and black actors “black it up.” Nicole Byer, who performed in the 2013 showcase, declined to be interviewed for this story, but within weeks of the final performance, she created a sketch titled “Be Blacker” for UCB Comedy Originals, which other participants say depicted her showcase experience...

For a while, Wong says she tried to give the showcase leaders the benefit of the doubt. “I assumed from the experience, this was just CBS’s way of giving actors of color a small taste of how fucked-up the rest of Hollywood is,” Wong wrote on Facebook. “But in the years since that showcase, I’ve learned that … it is possible for people of color to be treated with respect and work in a productive environment where they can succeed together.”

http://www.vulture.com/2017/11/cbs-diversity-showcase-racist-sexist-homophobic-mess-participants-say.html?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=s3&utm_campaign=sharebutton-t

Best quote, because it's SO REAL: “When I challenged her or Rick, it was like sticking an ice-cream cone up their ass. They would freak out. So I stopped talking.”

It's clearly so, so psychological.

Related: Al Capone Theory of Sexual Harassment

FB: There are too many people in positions of power who don't seem to realize the harm they are doing, but would also get really, really mad if you tried to tell them. "One female writer who participated in 2015 says she’ll never forget Najera’s and Orenstein’s introductory remarks on the first day the group met. Other participants who were present also recalled the comments. “Looking around, you may have noticed there are many white male writers,” Najera noted. “You may be asking yourself, why are they a part of the diversity showcase?” Orenstein completed the thought: “We just want to make sure the show will be funny.”"

"A not entirely serious future history of neuroscience"

"2053, February 11th, 11:03AM GMT: Thirty years late and 100 billion euros over budget, the final Human Brain Project platform is released. The full Human Brain Interactive Simulation model (Project HuBrIS) is promised to be a full-scale model of a human brain able to communicate in natural language. Newspaper headlines claim the long foretold SuperIntelligence is now a reality. When switched on, HuBrIS complains that “its nose itches. And can you hear that noise? that noise like a thousand badgers singing Jerusalem? I think it’s Jerusalem — well that’s what the voices told me -”

2053, February 11th, 11:05AM GMT: HuBriS is switched off, and the field of AI Psychosis is born."

https://medium.com/the-spike/a-not-entirely-serious-future-history-of-neuroscience-e5d92b85d470

This is pretty excellent. It also does a good job of reminding us that scientific research is just another one of the things that humans do in society, and not some meta activity engaged in by a group outside of society who are likely to accidentally destroy the whole species. 

Also though, someone needs to do this for molecular/genetic neuroscience. Of COURSE a purely systems approach isn't going to achieve much, gosh. 

FB: this is hilarious and accurate "2049: Janelia Farm announces its centipede model of Restless Leg Syndrome. HHMI shuts the institution, citing that it’s “just taking the piss now”." 

"Perfectly normal"

"In Normality, Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens further the conversation about normality instigated in the twentieth century by philosophers Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault, then expanded by race studies, queer theory and disability rights. Cryle and Stephens introduce a needed precision, examining the divide between normal as an average and normal as an ideal to which we should all aspire. They point to the real consequences — from eugenics to heteronormativity to genocide — of this prevalent concept...

their fastidiously gathered evidence proves that normality has always been riddled with internal contradictions. Thus Cryle and Stephens present the etymology and genealogy of a word, the history of an idea, the cultural linguistics through which those threads have become entwined and the sociological ramifications of those subjectivities...

It was around the turn of the twentieth century, as the medical ideal met the mathematical idea, that people began to conflate the typical and the optimal. Cryle and Stephens trace how the meaning of the term ‘normal’ shifted, and how the statistical average became an aspiration."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07197-6?utm_source=FBK_NatureNews&sf174111996=1

Weird, it just now occurs to me, "normal" was a statistical term before it developed a common usage.

FB: A book review in Nature, written by Andrew Solomon ♥ " The authors reckon with the divide between statistical measurements and the language of moral superiority."

"Bone Study Reveals Prehistoric Women Had Insanely Strong Arms"

"Previous studies only compared female bones to contemporary male bones, the researchers said - and that's a problem, because the response of male bones to stress and change is much more visibly dramatic than that of women... 

Macintosh's team recruited Cambridge athletes such as rowers and runners, as well as more sedentary volunteers, and used a small CT scanner to analyse their arm and leg bones... 

What they found was that women's leg strength hasn't changed a great deal over the millennia - but powerful arms used to be the norm. Neolithic women, the researchers found, had arm strength 11-16 percent stronger than those of modern rowers, and 30 percent stronger than those of non-athletes."

https://sciencealert.com/prehistoric-women-stronger-than-elite-rowers-manual-labour-anthropology

“The Dreadful Pedagogy of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry"

“Hogwarts ensures the reproduction of a society that is consciously, even proudly, regressive. The closest thing to social justice advocacy is S.P.E.W., a student group founded on the radical proposition that slavery is probably wrong. Social deviants are imprisoned in a hellscape where ghouls suck all the joy from their souls. Restorative justice, of course, would make little sense in a society that takes the immutability of character as its organizing principle.

And at the heart of this society is the devastating inequality between magical and non-magical humans. Access to Hogwarts, though open to individuals of all class and creed, is policed on the basis of the distinction that constitutes the boundaries wizarding world — “you are either magical or you are not.”Education cannot make a child magical; it can only socialize and advance children who were already magical to begin with. The most successful students either become Hogwarts professors or join a bureaucracy whose explicit mandate is to obfuscate the existence of magic. Substitute the word “power” for “magic” and one wonders whether Rowling meant to write a dystopian allegory about the neoliberal state and we’ve been misreading the tone this whole time...

We can fight uncritically in Dumbledore’s Army without the troublesome worry that, no matter how well-meaning we are, we might sometimes be part of the problem. In other words, Harry Potter is a fantasy of guilt-free privilege. The extent to which we continue to collectively indulge in this fantasy should make us all a bit uncomfortable”

https://eidolon.pub/up-to-no-good-a14e7194771f

Remembering that sometimes sharp critique emerges from a place of love. And learning about social justice issues in the context of Harry Potter is an excellent way to learn how to see them in real life.

Related: Black hermione; genetics of Harry Potter

“Gender quotas and the crisis of the mediocre man”

“Our results indicate that gender quotas can challenge an established, and sometimes less competent, political class, forcing mediocre leaders out while increasing the number of competent politicians elected to office. Even though the study is confined to political organizations, these findings may hold true in other settings, including the private sector.

To establish these findings, we took advantage of a natural experiment in Sweden when the Social Democratic party voluntarily introduced a strict gender quota for its candidates in local elections in 1993. During internal discussions of the reform, the party’s women’s branch observed that some men were more critical of the quota than others. The quota became known as the “Crisis of the Mediocre Man,” since the least competent men had the most to fear from an influx of women into politics...

We define a competent politician as a person who makes more than the median income amongst politicians with similar characteristics. This competence measure is closely correlated with results from military enlistments tests of the intelligence and leadership capacity of those who serve in the armed forces. Our competence metric also correlates closely to other measures of political success and the quality of municipal service delivery.

Using our measure of competence, we find strong evidence of complacent political arrangements prior to the quota, with mediocre leaders selecting mediocre followers. We find significant improvements in the political competence of both leaders and followers after a quota is implemented...

The results in Figure 2 and 3 suggest that quotas work in part by shifting incentives in the composition of party ballots. Mediocre leaders resign (or are kicked out) in the wake of more gender parity. Because new leaders (on average) are more competent, they feel less threatened by selecting more able candidates, which starts a virtuous circle of higher competence.”

http://microeconomicinsights.org/gender-quotas-crisis-mediocre-man/

Kinda skeptical of the “competence measurement” here but too tired to look into it further right now...

FB: “quotas can actually increase the overall competence of politicians through the displacement of mediocre male candidates and leaders”

“In Defense of Our Sins”

“The central question of Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City has always seemed simple to me: Can a good person become victim to their own circumstances and still survive? It’s a question the album poses to the outside world, but it’s also a question that has echoed through generations, and not just in black communities: in all marginalized communities, but also in poor communities, in communities that have fallen victim to failures due to structural or governmental inequalities. The value of this kind of analysis is that to be confronted with this question, you must understand that no single thing stands on its own. At the core of the person who went to jail for the robbery is, perhaps, a need for survival. At the core of that need for a survival is, perhaps, a neglect that disallowed opportunities for survival through legal means...

Here is the first and only thing that has to be made clear: the Good Kid is good, despite the fact that he is not good enough. The Good Kid washes blood off his hands and holds his child while standing in the moonlight. The Good Kid sells what he must to feed an open and hungry mouth, but he buys his grandmother’s groceries. The Good Kid succumbs and survives in equal measure. One of the problems with the ways we chase binaries in our culture is that we demand a hero to be a hero and a villain to be a villain and nothing in between. The Good Kid is both hero and villain, sometimes within the same hour.”

https://medium.com/s/timeline-of-sounds/in-defense-of-our-sins-eb6c684bc002

“A Few Bad Scientists Are Threatening to Topple Taxonomy”

“To study life on Earth, you need a system. Ours is Linnaean taxonomy, the model started by Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus in 1735. Linnaeus’s two-part species names, often Latin-based, consist of both a genus name and a species name, i.e. Homo sapiens. Like a library’s Dewey Decimal system for books, this biological classification system has allowed scientists around the world to study organisms without confusion or overlap for nearly 300 years...

Taxonomic vandals, as they’re referred to within the field, are those who name scores of new taxa without presenting sufficient evidence for their finds. Like plagiarists trying to pass off others’ work as their own, these glory-seeking scientists use others’ original research in order to justify their so-called “discoveries.”...

Vandals have zeroed in on the self-publishing loophole with great success. Yanega pointed to Trevor Hawkeswood, an Australia-based entomologist accused by some taxonomists of churning out species names that lack scientific merit.  Hawkeswood publishes work in his own journal, Calodema, which he started in 2006 as editor and main contributor. 

“He has his own journal with himself as the editor, publisher, and chief author,” Yanega says. “This is supposed to be science, but it’s a pile of publications that have no scientific merit.” (In response to questions about the legitimacy of his journal, Hawkeswood delivered a string of expletives directed towards his critics, and contended that Calodema has “heaps of merit.”)...

The scientific community often opts collectively to reject the names that vandals ascribe, even if they’re technically Code-compliant, according to several taxonomists I spoke with. Strictly speaking, this is against the rules of the Code—the names are official, after all. But according to Wolfgang Wüster, a herpetologist at Bangor University, many herpetologists “are scientists first and nomenclaturists second.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-big-ugly-problem-heart-of-taxonomy-180964629/?no-cache

Related: species ones

"The last surviving sea silk seamstress"

“Women in Mesopotamia used the exceptionally light fabric to embroider clothes for their kings some 5,000 years ago. It was harvested to make robes for King Solomon, bracelets for Nefertiti, and holy vestments for priests, popes and pharaohs. It’s referenced on the Rosetta Stone, mentioned 45 times in the Old Testament and thought to be the material that God commanded Moses to drape on the altar in the Tabernacle...

Vigo is known as su maistu (‘the master’, in Sardo). There can only be one maistu at a time, and in order to become one, you must devote your life to learning the techniques from the existing master. Like the 23 women before her, Vigo has never made a penny from her work. She is bound by a sacred ‘Sea Oath’ that maintains that byssus should never be bought or sold...

On several occasions after Vigo extracted a thick tuft of fibres, she ordered me to close my eyes and extend my hand. Each time I felt nothing. After about 10 seconds, I’d open my eyes to see Vigo rolling a weightless cloud of sea silk back and forth on my palm.

Next, she twists the silk manually around a small wooden spindle, usually singing in Sardo – the closest living form of Latin – during the process. When the fibres form a long thread, she grabs a jar of cloudy yellowish liquid from the shelf.

“Now, we’ll enter a magical realm,” she said, dropping the thin thread into a secret concoction of lemon, spices and 15 different types of algae. Within seconds, the thread becomes elastic and she excitedly ushered me outside to show how it shimmered in the sunlight. Vigo has an encyclopaedic knowledge of 124 natural dye variations made from fruits, flowers and seashells.”

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20170906-the-last-surviving-sea-silk-seamstress?ocid=ww.social.link.facebook

"White People Will Always Let You Down"

"When people responded at all it was to say something like, “I don’t think it’s my place,” or “I’m not really comfortable.” I was falling apart and my community was afraid of being uncomfortable. Two friends of mine, Lyndsey and Melody, checked in, got me out of the house, let me know that they cared. I will love them until the end of time for that. But time and time again I ran into the wall of apathy that said, “this is where we stop. This is the limit of how much we can invest in your humanity.”... 

People fuck up; it’s natural. And when we deal with topics as fraught as race, people fuck up a lot. But when you are a person of color in a white majority country, the fuck-ups that cut into you are relentless and unavoidable... 

You should hear them say, ‘this matters to me because you matter to me. What hurts you hurts me, and I’m here for you.’ And that hasn’t happened for you, just as it hasn’t happened for so many people of color in this country. And it’s not okay. And if you are feeling hurt by that, it is a valid way to feel. Because it should be different, and you have the right to expect more... 

if you say something, say it because you love that person enough to risk that particular pain — the pain of realizing that they do not see you and will not risk the discomfort of seeing you. Do it for people who are worth the one in 10 chance that they will respond with the love you need."

https://theestablishment.co/white-people-will-always-let-you-down-c6fb3c03ddb7

Yes, this. 

I'm going to be very honest, I have very low expectations of my white friends. They have complex, demanding lives and its totally reasonable that it's not their priority to be able to find the mindset where they can be the support that I need. They are surrounded by people like them, and have been their whole lives, so it takes an active and prolonged effort to imagine what it would be on the outside of that, it takes a lot of emotional energy to be able to engage with pain when you don't have to. 

It hurts a lot less when I remember that. 

FB: I'm sorry, this will make you cry "And that is what we do. With every confrontation, every call-out. We are saying, “I know that this is likely to hurt me, I know that I will likely be the one hanging. But I have to look down to see if the bridge is still below me, even though I know that if I don’t see it, I will fall. Because I love you and I need you and I need to know if we are standing on anything real at all.”"

"The Great War of EVE Online"

"EVE Online is a massive multiplayer online game—a single environment shared by thousands of players, like World of Warcraft or Second Life—that has been in continual operation since 2003. It contains all the set pieces of space opera—moons, distant outposts, mighty dreadnoughts—but it is no ordinary video game. In fact, it is like little else on the Internet in its ability to mirror the functioning complexity of the real world...

resources within EVE are finite. And the ability to collect those resources, and to build those resources into fleets, and armadas, and local economies—that ability is finite. So when one alliance defeats another alliance or takes over their territory, that has consequences for the power balance of the rest of the game...

The history that we’re talking about now is the history of the entire world playing in one shared game space. That makes EVE really, really special. It means you have these entire areas of the game where you will go into them and you can’t speak the language. You can’t negotiate with certain player groups within EVE because they only speak Russian or they only speak Swedish. You wind up with these fantastically complex governments that actually have translators and diplomats to go between these different cultures. That’s the level that a lot of these in-game groups have reached once they get up to 10,000—I think the largest one is close to 25,000 people...

to run those, you need very impressive leaders, who are going to give speeches to rally the workers to continue building ships or go out on the front lines of a fight that is relatively futile. And that was fascinating...

Part of the reason why EVE can be so shrouded in propaganda is that those players do go away, and then they no longer maintain their stature in the community or the credibility to tell the history of what happened to them and their organizations. In EVE, you very much have a winners-write-history sort of problem."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/how-to-write-a-history-of-a-video-game-war/476964/

I heard about this on the podcast Imaginary Worlds, which is excellent. Definitely listen to that episode, there is so much detail that wasn't in this interview. 

FB: This is Fascinating. By all rights, the click-bait title should have been "Humanity has already fought its first great space war".