"Mumbling Isn’t a Sign of Laziness—It’s a Clever Data-Compression Trick"

"Far from being a symptom of linguistic indifference or moral decay, dropping or reducing sounds displays an underlying logic similar to the data-compression schemes that are used to create MP3s and JPEGs. These algorithms trim down the space needed to digitally store sounds and images by throwing out information that is redundant or doesn’t add much to our perceptual experience—for example, tossing out data at sound frequencies we can’t hear, or not bothering to encode slight gradations of color that are hard to see. The idea is to keep only the information that has the greatest impact.

Mumbling—or phonetic reduction, as language scientists prefer to call it—appears to follow a similar strategy. Not all words are equally likely to be reduced. In speech, you’re more likely to reduce common words like fine than uncommon words like tine. You’re also more likely to reduce words if they’re predictable in the context... 

it offers some insight into why languages tolerate massive amounts of ambiguity in their vocabularies: Speakers can recycle easy-to-pronounce words and phrases to take on multiple meanings, in situations where listeners can easily recover the speaker’s intent."

http://m.nautil.us/blog/-mumbling-isnt-a-sign-of-lazinessits-a-clever-data_compression-trick

"Why Photography’s B&W vs Color Debate Is No Debate At All"

"Color photography only became practical in the mid-1950s after film manufacturers had invented processes that made color pictures sufficiently easy to develop. It was another technological shift to change the medium, just as the portable camera and film before. And perhaps inevitably, photographers now assumed the role that the defenders of painting had before them: They refused to embrace the new technology...

Why would Cartier-Bresson dismiss color so forthrightly? Most likely because black and white works so differently than color does.

Subjects that look great in black and white often don’t look good in color. It’s for the same reason that vivid color pictures look boring once desaturated. Images in the photo-historical cannon were made for one palette or another. One sees and shoots in the same color or B&W of your camera film or sensors...

In the black and white years, being a photographer had meant developing your own film, cropping pictures, and making prints. Processing color photographs, in contrast, was too complicated for many professional photographers — but lent itself perfectly to amateurs, who simply had their photos developed in a lab."

https://medium.com/vantage/why-photographys-b-w-vs-color-debate-is-no-debate-at-all-c77631b398fa

"The Inherent Feminism of Restorative Justice"

"More typically, my Socratic method exchanges were as follows. My teacher would ask me whether I agreed with a court opinion. I’d answer the best I could. The professor would play opposing counsel and retort with a “But what about x, y, or z?” My instinct was always to listen, to hear their point, to say, “Oh, right, I hadn’t thought about that” (particularly because they were a fucking law professor, and I was 23).

But my instinct to compromise, I soon learned, should be suppressed if I wanted to be a lawyer. Instead of hearing the other side, I was supposed to stick with my initial position and defend it to the death. The law is inherently adversarial. Each person has a side from which he must not falter. This is how the court arrives at the “correct answer,” we were taught....

while working in family court, she noticed that her clients were all facing serious economic, social, and educational hardships but were not given a process to understand how their behavior harmed others and themselves. “They were overwhelmed with the harm they were suffering personally,” Walker told me, “and to be punished only made them feel worse.” While participants in the adversarial system often feel deeply violated, she complained, their emotions are not part of a criminal prosecution. Walker began to realize that the criminal justice system was creating harmful outcomes for the most vulnerable populations...

This January, Sara Davidson wrote for the Los Angeles Times that criminal accountability is difficult in the realm of sexual assault “because we’re dealing with the intricacies and contradictions of the heart, and with the deep and often treacherous river of sexual urges.” She believes the #MeToo movement has not sufficiently grappled with this nuance. Anne K. Ream similarly wrote for the Chicago Tribune that because 80 percent of sexual assault cases involve victims who personally know their perpetrators, it’s time to look to restorative justice to redress sex crimes. This means implementing a system that focuses on perpetrator accountability to the victim and community rather than criminal punishment."

https://medium.com/s/all-rise/the-inherent-feminism-of-restorative-justice-71eca6fa9f42

FB: "criminal justice scholar Katherine van Wormer lamented in 2009 that the adversarial system hearkens back to “primitive practices related to combat”; Australian professor and former attorney Kate Galloway called it a “performance piece.”

“Every Cell in Your Body Has the Same DNA. Except It Doesn’t.”

“over the course of decades, it has become clear that the genome doesn’t just vary from person to person. It also varies from cell to cell. The condition is not uncommon: We are all mosaics.

For some people, that can mean developing a serious disorder like a heart condition. But mosaicism also means that even healthy people are more different from one another than scientists had imagined...

It’s hard to think that a tumor might have anything in common with a pink grapefruit. Yet they are both products of the same process: lineages of cells that gain new mutations not found in the rest of the body.

Some skin diseases proved to be caused by mosaicism, too. Certain genetic mutations cause one side of the body to become entirely dark. Other mutations draw streaks across the skin.

The difference is in the timing. If a cell gains a mutation very early in development, it will produce many daughter cells that will end up spreading across much of the body. Late-arising mutations will have a more limited legacy...

Preliminary studies suggest that mosaicism underlies many other diseases. Last year, Christopher Walsh, a geneticist at Harvard University, and his colleagues published evidence that mosaic mutations may raise the risk of autism.

But scientists are also finding that mosaicism does not automatically equal disease. In fact, it’s the norm.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/science/mosaicism-dna-genome-cancer.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

FB: “Markus Grompe, a biologist at Oregon Health & Science University, and his colleagues looked at liver cells from children and adults without liver disease. Between a quarter and a half of the cells were aneuploids, typically missing one copy of one chromosome.”

"‘It’s a toxic place.’ How the online world of white nationalists distorts population genetics"

"Stormfront and similar online forums, as well as the comment sections on “alt-right” news websites and Twitter accounts, regularly host what he’s dubbed “informal journal clubs,” dedicated to dissecting population genetics papers and sorting them into those that support a white nationalist ideology and those that don’t. For more than a year, he has followed the evolution of this strange, racist trend...

People will grab figures from scientific papers and edit them in several different ways to make them look like they support the white nationalist ideology. For instance, in a 2008 Science paper, researchers published a figure with a plot inferring regional ancestry of dozens of different populations around the world. Based on the genetic compositions of hundreds of individuals, the figure divided the populations into clusters that revealed patterns in their ancestral population structure.

So [people on the forums] take this plot and add some subtle text like “The genetic reality of race,” with no context showing what the scientists were actually looking at, and ignoring the fact that there’s a continuum among the individuals...

In an argument between a logical person and illogical person, the logical person is always going to lose because the illogical person isn’t playing by the same rules."

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/it-s-toxic-place-how-online-world-white-nationalists-distorts-population-genetics?utm_content=71975287&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

FB: "They’re interested in anything that would reinforce traditional, discrete racial categories. Intelligence is probably the No. 1 topic that they gravitate toward. And anything pertaining to history of human migrations, or things that play into traditional classifications of racial phenotypes like facial morphology or skin color. There was a paper on lactose tolerance in Europeans and that turned into this weird viral YouTube trend where white nationalists were chugging bottles of milk, presumably to flaunt their European heritage."

"Why Did Sterile Salt Water Become The IV Fluid Of Choice?"

"For such a ubiquitous treatment, you'd probably expect that saline has been thoroughly studied and refined. As it turns out, that was never really the case at all. Now there's a rethinking about whether saline is really the best way to go.

Intravenous fluids were invented in England in the first decades of the 19th century to treat cholera, which even then was recognized as a disease that killed by dehydration. Early physicians knew that human blood was salty, and a Scottish doctor named Latta developed a primitive salt water solution to replace through the veins what had been lost through the bowels. The effect was "remarkable," according to The Lancet in 1832.

By the 1880s, scientists knew more about the basic chemical elements in human blood. A physiologist named Sidney Ringer created a solution containing sodium, potassium, and chloride in concentrations similar to blood. It's still in use today. We call it lactated Ringer's solution.

Ringer's solution was slow to catch on, though, and a simpler salt solution known as normal saline became the de facto IV fluid of the early 20th century. A descendent of Latta's original fluid, normal saline contains only two ingredients — water and salt...

He took another tack to illustrate the importance of the study's findings. "There are 5 million patients admitted to an ICU in the United States every year," he said. "For every 100 patients treated with balanced fluids instead of saline, 1 less patient would experience death, new dialysis, or persistent renal problems.""

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/03/31/597666140/why-did-sterile-salt-water-become-the-iv-fluid-of-choice?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20180331

FB: "Amazingly, the ascendance of normal saline as the default IV fluid seems to have been based solely on Hamburger's early experiments. "It remains a mystery how it came into general use as an intravenous fluid," a group of British physicians wrote in 2008, noting the absence of any other experimental data to support it. "Perhaps it was due to the ease, convenience, and low cost of mixing common salt with water.""

“I’m a female chef. Here’s how my restaurant dealt with harassment from customers.”

“I went home and started bawling. I couldn’t believe this was happening right under my nose. We reconvened for a problem-solving session: We knew that we had to create something that didn’t rely on men making judgment calls on women’s stories, because it was clear that system was failing all of us. 

We decided on a color-coded system in which different types of customer behavior are categorized as yellow, orange or red. Yellow refers to a creepy vibe or unsavory look. Orange means comments with sexual undertones, such as certain compliments on a worker’s appearance. Red signals overtly sexual comments or touching, or repeated incidents in the orange category after being told the comments were unwelcome.

When a staff member has a harassment problem, they report the color — “I have an orange at table five” — and the manager is required to take a specific action. If red is reported, the customer is ejected from the restaurant. Orange means the manager takes over the table. With a yellow, the manager must take over the table if the staff member chooses. In all cases, the manager’s response is automatic, no questions asked. (At the time of our meeting, all our shift managers were men, though their supervisors were women; something else we’ve achieved since then is diversifying each layer of management.) 

In the years since implementation, customer harassment has ceased to be a problem. Reds are nearly nonexistent, as most sketchy customers seem to be derailed at yellow or orange. We found that most customers test the waters before escalating and that women have a canny sixth sense for unwanted attention. When reds do occur, our employees are empowered to act decisively.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-my-restaurant-successfully-dealt-with-harassment-from-customers/2018/03/29/3d9d00b8-221a-11e8-badd-7c9f29a55815_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.5b67296dac30

This is great. I want a collection of stories about how people have solved harassment problems.

FB: “The color system is elegant because it prevents women from having to relive damaging stories and relieves managers of having to make difficult judgment calls about situations that might not seem threatening based on their own experiences. The system acknowledges the differences in the ways men and women experience the world, while creating a safe workplace.”

"Are Tote Bags Really Good for the Environment?"

"Surprisingly, the authors found that in typical patterns of use and disposal, consumers seeking to minimize pollution and carbon emissions should use plastic grocery bags and then reuse those bags at least once—as trash-can liners or for other secondary tasks. Conventional plastic bags made from high-density polyethylene (HDPE, the plastic sacks found at grocery stores) had the smallest per-use environmental impact of all those tested. Cotton tote bags, by contrast, exhibited the highest and most severe global-warming potential by far since they require more resources to produce and distribute...

Just like plastic bags, totes multiply. In a 2009 article about the bags for Design Observer, the Urban Outfitters designer Dmitri Siegel claimed to have found 23 tote bags in his house, collected from various organizations, stores, and brands. Like plastic sacks, tote bags, too, now seem essentially unending. Because of their ubiquity, tote bags that have been used very little (or not at all) can be found piled on curbs, tossed in trashcans in city parks, in dumpsters, everywhere. Their abundance encourages consumers to see them as disposable, defeating their very purpose...

Whether they're delicately handled designer goods or a promotional product dirtied by daily wear, few totes are made to last long enough to obtain the number of uses required to reach resource-expenditure parity with the plastic bags they were meant to supplant. Though they promise timelessness and sustainability, they develop holes, straps come undone, seams disintegrate. They become fouled with stains and grime."

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/to-tote-or-note-to-tote/498557/

^ this feels so true, I have tote bags of tote bags and I ask myself Why.

I made a broken one into a pillow once, stuffed with plastic bags, and felt very superior for a little bit.

"We Have Always Lived in the Woods: On Fairy Tales and the Monsters You Know"

"I’ve always taken issue with the idiom “life is no fairy tale,” as in: Life isn’t always a happy story. Not only is this a naive read of fairy tales themselves, it also ignores the fact that the most monstrous acts in these tales are not perpetrated by witches, fairies, or ghosts, but by people both familiar and familial. The threats contained in so many fairy tales are frighteningly realistic, which is precisely why they can so easily skew into the genre of horror. The wicked witch who captures Hansel and Gretel in her iconic gingerbread house is scary, sure, but compare that with the dreadful realization at the beginning of the tale that the children’s own mother proposes that she and her husband abandon the children in the woods to starve. The reason that the Brothers Grimm changed several biological mothers to stepmothers while editing their collected tales for publication is the same reason that makes the story of the Turpin household so horrifying: We don’t want to imagine that a child’s tormentors are none other than their own parents... 

In From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, Marina Warner explains why tales like “Donkeyskin” are often adapted with the incestuous father written out, or excised from the canon completely: “[The proposed marriage] is only too hard to accept precisely because it belongs to a different order of reality/fantasy from the donkeyskin disguise or the gold excrement or the other magical motifs: because it is not impossible, because it could actually happen and is known to have done so. It is when fairy tales coincide with experience that they begin to suffer from censoring.” 

https://catapult.co/stories/we-have-always-lived-in-the-woods-fairy-tales-and-the-monsters-you-know

FB: "How much stronger must you be, in every way, when the wolf is your own father, and no malicious, cannibalistic witch is as monstrous as your own mother? When home is the place you must escape, you have to be immensely strong and unfathomably brave to imagine another life and to run toward it full-tilt."

"A People in Limbo, Many Living Entirely on the Water"

"the villages’ history is long and obscure, and no one knows when the first one appeared in Cambodia...

There is also the collective memory, rarely transcribed, of the floating villagers themselves, who corroborate Mouhot’s intuition that theirs is a lifestyle honed over generations to mitigate against the bad harvests, marauding bandits and unfriendly rulers to which minority Vietnamese remain especially vulnerable. Some told me that they had owned land in the early years of independence and that they had lived on the water only seasonally until the land was taken away. Others said they had always lived on boats. Some identified strongly as Cambodian, while others found the question of national allegiance absurd. “We just live on the water, where it’s easy to catch fish,” a monk in Kampong Chhnang told me. “We lived everywhere.”

There is a tradition of rural pluralism in Cambodia that belies its recent history of racial violence. Most of the floating villages I saw were peaceful mélanges of Vietnamese, Khmer and Cham fishers, and many of the people I met, including Hoarith, were the product of mixed Khmer and Vietnamese marriages. But everyone seemed to agree that floating villages were traditionally a Vietnamese way of life, enlarged out of economic necessity to include other groups. Today the ethnic Vietnamese live on the water because they are not able to live elsewhere. Neither documented citizen nor, in most cases, immigrant, they are what the government has sometimes described as “nonimmigrant foreigners.” They cannot attend public schools or open bank accounts, get a driver’s license or a factory job or own land or property. Their children are not issued birth certificates, precipitating a generational cycle of de facto statelessness...

Conversations about the Khmer Rouge can have a dreamlike quality in Cambodia, drifting back and forth over the same gruesome territory — the crude methods of murder, the pitiful rations of rice and broth — while trading in rumors, jokes and legends. Facts are overwritten; memories change midsentence. A story is told that contradicts the one preceding it, and both are accepted as passing glimpses of a historical truth too immense to view head-on. After some cajoling, Poun admitted that Vietnamese may have been killed in the camps. “But we didn’t know,” he added. Then he seemed to change his mind. “The Vietnamese never came to the commune where we were.”...

Most ethnic Vietnamese in the country continue to feel that they are Cambodians of Vietnamese origin. They refuse to give up hope that someday their Cambodian identity will be accepted in the country they call home. Instead, with somewhere between 400,000 and one million members, according to independent scholars, and virtually no international calls for Cambodia to uphold its own nationality laws, they are arguably one of the largest and least-supported stateless populations in the world."

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/28/magazine/cambodia-persecuted-minority-water-refuge.html?smid=fb-share

"How Women See How Male Authors See Them"

"The canon is lousy with authors who yearn to be admired for their sensitivity to the full range of female personhood, be that personhood luscious, pert, or swelling coyly against a sheer camisole. These are writerly men confident that they’ve nailed women’s psyches, all because of how single-mindedly they want to nail women.

My colleague Talia Lavin has the receipts, and posted them in an invaluable Twitter feed. In “The Professor of Desire,” Philip Roth’s narrator doesn’t just pant over the object of his blazon; he must also punish her for arousing him. “I even become somewhat suspicious and critical of her serene, womanly beauty,” he says. “Or rather, of the regard in which she seems to hold her eyes, her nose, her throat, her breasts, her hips, her legs.” Another maddening hallmark of the horndog wordsmith is prose that takes conspicuous notice of a female character’s physical imperfections. This is done with an aura of self-satisfaction, as if the protagonist deserves credit simply for bestowing his descriptive prowess upon a person of less than conventional loveliness... 

We draw toward the glow of the fires that our heroes have kindled to keep us out."

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-women-see-how-male-authors-see-them?mbid=social_facebook

Ugh, since reading this I keep noticing this problem in books. Like, I found some characters annoying before, they made me slightly uncomfortable but it didn't rise all the way to consciousness, now I can't take them seriously.

Like, the descriptions of women in the Goldfinch? His Dad's girlfriend?

FB: "Lavin’s thread distilled the ridiculousness that ensues when bookish men perform interest in women’s inner lives out of a misbegotten sense of nobility. No one is fooled. No one thinks that Jonathan Franzen has tapped into some deep well of humanist perception when his twentysomething creation declares herself “the little squirrel that loves to fuck.” John Updike, you do not actually empathize with expectant mothers! The compressed brilliance of Lydia Kiesling’s phrase “the quick compensatory mind” contains seventy years of bowing to male sexual appetite as the de-facto measure of all things."

"Phoenicia: an imaginary friend to nations in need of ancestors"

"In 1919... These ‘Lebanists’ emphasised the natural symbiosis between the mountain and the coast: for them, the proposed new country was already a coherent whole; it just needed a distinctive history to justify its political autonomy.

The nation-state might have been new in the Middle East, but the Lebanists knew that nationalist movements needed historical legitimation, a common past on which to build a common polity. A local candidate presented itself: the Phoenicians, the ancient traders who had founded the coastal cities, sailed the length of the Mediterranean and beyond, and invented the alphabet that we still use today. Portraying the Phoenicians as champions of free enterprise, much like themselves, the Lebanists argued that these ancient Phoenician roots gave the Lebanese a Western, Mediterranean-focused identity, very different from the Muslim culture of the broader Syrian region, which they saw as distasteful and uncivilised. It was central to their ideology that they were not Arabs: ‘There are no camels in Lebanon’ as the slogan still goes... 

All of this, including Smith’s claim, would have surprised the ancient Phoenicians, a disparate set of neighbouring and often warring city-states, cut off from each other for the most part by deep river valleys. They did not see themselves as a single ethnic group or people, the kind that could provide the ‘groundwork’ for a nation. There is no known instance of a Phoenician ever calling themselves a Phoenician, or any other collective term. In their inscriptions, they describe themselves in terms of their individual families and cities. They don’t seem to have had a common culture, either: their dialects fall on a continuum that linked city states across Phoenicia, Syria and Palestine, and the individual ports developed separate civic and artistic cultures, drawing on different foreign examples and relationships... 

Dismissing Geoffrey of Monmouth’s ridiculous story of Trojan origins, Foche declares that Albion, the son of the god Neptune, first settled Britain, then founded a race of cave-dwelling Giants in the land to which he gave his own name, Albion. More recently, however, the first foreigners to reach this island were the Phoenicians, attracted by Cornish metals. His evidence for this claim includes the ‘Punic dress’ still worn by some women in Wales, as well as that region’s ‘Punic huts’; furthermore, the Abbot explains, the famous British custom of body-painting with woad was clearly an attempt by the Phoenicians to regain some of the colour they had lost over many generations out of the sun. The idea of descent from Phoenicians was ingenious: by dismissing the old Trojan hypothesis, Twyne provided a new national history for the new Tudor dynasty, one that he was careful to associate in particular with Tudor Wales, and one that gave Britain more civilised and heroic ancestors than descent from what he has Foche call ‘an unknown and obscure refugee’."

https://aeon.co/essays/phoenicia-an-imaginary-friend-to-nations-in-need-of-ancestors

FB: "although he emphasises the complementary origins of the British kingdoms, Sammes strongly distinguishes Britain from other European nations. In particular, he is decidedly against Britain’s arch-rival France and the French. Already for Sammes and his contemporaries, the French were closely associated with the Romans, a land-based, territorial state. Britons’ supposed descent from Rome’s traditional enemy, the maritime trading power of Phoenician Carthage, emphasised the differences between the two modern nations, and accounted for Britain’s superiority on the sea"

"WHO’S TO BLAME FOR A GENERATION OF ANGRY WHITE MEN?"

"In his taped confession before he blew himself up, Mark Conditt described himself as a “psychopath” who felt no remorse for the killings. So why are investigators and the media going to such great lengths to say that Mark Conditt was not motivated by terrorism or race hate? Why are they scratching their heads trying to gain clarity about his motives? His friends and family, according to them, have described him as “quiet,” “normal,” “nerdy,” and “kind”—qualities, together with “Christian” and “lone wolf” and other similar descriptors appear the textbook recipe for a lyncher and a mass murderer... 

Rollo adds that the media tends to focus on the early adult years of these killers, skipping over their childhoods in what are almost always labeled “‘normal families.’ So, the media will observe that the perpetrator abused his girlfriend, or dabbled in white supremacy online, or abused drugs,” Rollo says. “But they never investigate the coercion and violence they internalized in the home. If we’re serious about understanding why young white men can become so violent, why wouldn’t we study how they are raised?”... 

What Rollo means by “mastery” is the desire for strict control that children internalize when being raised by coercive parents. White male children are typical in that their bodies are controlled by adults in almost every respect, often under threat of corporal punishment at home and in schools. Once they become young men, however, they are driven to assert authority over their own bodies, to have mastery over their own lives, in order to possess control that was denied to them as children. But life is uncontrollable, and so they fail and in their desperation they seek mastery over other people’s bodies, sometimes resorting to coercion and violence. It is not uncommon for us to learn that these young men’s girlfriends and wives are their first victims—in fact, it’s become the status quo"

https://www.damemagazine.com/2018/03/27/whos-to-blame-for-a-generation-of-angry-white-men/

FB: “Parenting is often designated as a private, personal realm. The distribution of that privacy, however, is affected by race and class,” says Bernstein. She also says that the parenting practices of Black adults are routinely publicly criticized. But the parenting practices of white, middle-class adults is often assumed to be a matter of choice for individual families. “The media have not criticized white parents as white parents in the way that the media have, for decades, criticized black parents as black parents.”...

There was a brief moment after WWII, when the Jews who escaped the Holocaust said, Wait a second, it’s the draconian way that Germans were raised that made them into racist abominations. They set up a program of study at the Frankfurt School which found that white boyhood was central to understanding Nazism and violence and they identified political racism and violence as resulting from authoritarian parenting."

"How humans (maybe) domesticated themselves"

"Tameness, says evolutionary biologist and primatologist Richard Wrangham of Harvard University, may boil down to a reduction in reactive aggression — the fly-off-the-handle temperament that makes an animal bare its teeth at the slightest challenge. In this sense, he says, humans are fairly tame. We might show great capacity for premeditated aggression, but we don’t attack every stranger we encounter.

Sometime in the last 200,000 years, humans began weeding out people with an overdose of reactive aggression, Wrangham suggests. Increasingly complex social skills would have allowed early humans to gang up against bullies, he proposes, pointing out that hunter-gatherers today have been known to do the same. Those who got along, got ahead."

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/how-humans-maybe-domesticated-themselves

"The Problem With ‘Cancer Miracles’"

"It’s a grave offense to be fatalistic in the face of cancer. When you get sick, the trite messages found on embroidered pillows, pastel Instagram graphics, and t-shirt slogans become directives for how to approach your illness the right way. You are somehow supposed to “expect miracles,” while watching fellow patients waste away, drop dead, and orphan their children. You notice that sympathy is reserved for the most upbeat survivors, and that fear, anger, and especially candid resignation make other people deeply uncomfortable. Although patients already have enough on our plate, we are also tasked with the labor of managing other people’s emotions about our own disease. I discovered early on that presenting as cheerful and hopeful yielded more support from strangers, acquaintances, and caregivers, while being honest about my fears left others unsure of how to react, or eager to dismiss my feelings as too “morbid.”... 

it means facing some distressing truths about death, disease, and our sense of justice. First: the fact that humans are mortal, and sometimes we die too young, for no good reason, and by no fault of our own. (This clashes with several adages about God working in mysterious ways, never making mistakes or giving us more than we can handle. It also contradicts the widespread belief that we all ultimately get what we “deserve.”) Second: cancer remains a death sentence for millions of people, even during a time of impressive, awe-inspiring technological and medical progress."

https://theestablishment.co/the-problem-with-cancer-miracles-268266250649

Related: honest card company 

FB: "I have to confront it, to stare it in the face. The problem is, because of social taboos, I am left to do this daunting work on my own, tossing and turning in the dark each night imagining the assortment of painful ways my body will one day shut down. It’s a very lonely reckoning. The silencing of “negativity” is a recipe for patient isolation."

"How a Young Woman Lost Her Identity"

"One of the psychiatrists on Columbia’s psychiatric unit, Aaron Krasner, now a professor of clinical psychiatry at Yale, described the comments in the news as “very condemning and discrediting. I think this speaks to the rage that dissociative conditions incur in certain people. There is an ineffable quality to dissociative cases. They challenge a conventional understanding of reality.” He told me that he was troubled by the narrowness of medical literature on these states; there are no medications that specifically target the problem. “Dissociative fugue is the rare bird of dissociation, but dissociation as a phenomenon is very common,” he said. “I think as a field we have not done our due diligence, in part because the phenomenon is so frightening. It’s terrifying to think that we are all vulnerable to a lapse in selfhood.”... 

Cases of dissociation had a whiff of the mystical, and doctors tended to stay away from them. Dozens of articles from the turn of the twentieth century, published in the Times, recount miraculous, inexplicable transformations: a Minnesota reverend, missing for a month, realized that he had travelled across the county and enlisted in the Navy, “though never before in his life had he even gazed on the ocean”; a professor thought to have drowned was discovered, three years later, using a new name and working as a dishwasher; a deacon in New Jersey woke up and “realized the room he has occupied for more than a year was strange to him” and his Bible was marked with someone else’s name. He had been missing for four years... 

in the decades after Bourne’s disappearance, the study of dissociation largely vanished. The prevailing schools in psychology and psychiatry—behaviorism and psychoanalysis—adopted models of the mind that were incompatible with the concept. Then, in the nineteen-eighties, several thousand people claimed that, having been abused as children, they had developed multiple selves. The public responded to these stories much as it had to the surge of dissociative cases at the turn of the century: this sort of mental experience was considered too eerie and counterintuitive to believe."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/02/how-a-young-woman-lost-her-identity?mbid=social_facebook

FB: "Hannah rarely spoke about her fugue, but Barbara was touched by what she felt was an allusion to the experience. Demeter searches the earth for her daughter, Persephone, who has been taken into the underworld. “I remember reading that Persephone falls into an abyss, and that just hit something close to my heart,” Barbara said. Even when Persephone is saved, Hades requires that she return to the underworld for a portion of each year. With each fugue, Barbara found more solace in what she described as “the primal archetype of the daughter descending and the mother seeking her, whatever that takes.”"

"What is white culture, exactly? Here's what the stats say"

"You don’t notice normalcy; you see the deviations from it. So the word “white” could always be hopped over as an adjective.

Now, “white” still feels like an absence: an absence of color, an absence of food that is “different” and an absence of a mum who pronounces your name differently from the way your friends do. But if my friend can use “white” as an adjective, then what exactly are they describing? What is white culture, exactly?

I decided to find out by asking the questions that I and many other non-white people have been asked over and over again. I looked for answers in data... 

Q: What do white people drink?

A: Alcohol.

Almost a third of non-Hispanic whites had at least one heavy drinking day in the past year, according to the CDC. Only 16% of black Americans and 24% of Hispanic Americans said the same."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/26/white-culture-statistics-vegetables-alcohol?CMP=share_btn_fb

"White Coat Waste Takes Aim at Animal Research — From the Right"

"In the past 12 months, White Coat Waste has focused particular attention on research conducted under the auspices of the Department of Veterans Affairs, shuttering one project in California, triggering internal investigations of a VA lab in Virginia, and helping to get an amendment through the House eliminating funding for VA dog research. (That amendment has not received Senate approval, but Bellotti’s handiwork was enough to provoke a stern response from VA Secretary David Shulkin.) The Food and Drug Administration has also been a Bellotti target, and after more than a year of pressure from White Coat Waste, FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb shut down an agency research project on nicotine addiction last month, over concerns about its treatment of squirrel monkey subjects... 

Bellotti explicitly frames White Coat Waste as a taxpayer rights outfit, not an animal rights organization, and he promises never to target private animal research. “It’s about your liberty to be forced to pay for something that you don’t like, don’t want, and don’t need,” Bellotti said.

The approach has pulled in people who might not otherwise show much interest in animal rights issues. Trump advisor Roger Stone, for example, hosted Bellotti on his Infowars show last month. And Pursuit (formerly known as Restore Accountability), a government-spending watchdog group aimed at millennials and founded by Tom Coburn, the former Republican Senator from Oklahoma, partnered with Bellotti on a recent report... 

To be sure, the debate over federal funding for research in general, and about the use of animal models in particular, was roiling long before Bellotti and his allies came onto the scene. Critics of animal research, after all, have long argued that medical researchers rely too heavily on animal models, which often fail to produce results that apply to human beings. And there are robust debates over the current government model of basic research funding. The problem is that Bellotti’s conviction that scientists are burning through billions of dollars on cruel and senseless research is, by almost any fair assessment, a woefully distorted caricature — one that fails to capture both the nuances of these longstanding debates, and the very real ethical challenges that go into making decisions about when animal research is justified."

https://undark.org/article/bellotti-animal-research-white-coat-waste/?utm_content=buffer50eb5&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

"YOU’RE NOT ADDICTED TO YOUR SMARTPHONE — YOU JUST REALLY LIKE PEOPLE"

"Veissière’s analysis of existing research on the dysfunctional use of mobile technology through an evolutionary lens was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology in February. It recognizes that the conventional wisdom — people are addicted to smartphones — does not explain why people are so drawn to that platform.

“If there is addiction to smartphones, it is first and foremost a behavioral addiction rather than an addiction to the devices themselves,” Veissière says. “It is rooted in human evolution and, in particular, in the need to connect with others, to compare ourselves to others, to compete with others and to learn from others.”... 

Veissière notes that other researchers disagree with his social interpretation of solo smartphone functions and look for other explanations to understand these aspects of mobile tech. Some experts, such as Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist, attribute the allure of smartphones to aspects of their tech design that are purposefully made to keep audiences engaged for as long and as often as possible. Though still rooted in a person’s desire for social interaction, a smartphone’s features tap into the human reward system, leaving people craving another push notification."

https://www.ozy.com/acumen/youre-not-addicted-to-your-smartphone-you-just-really-like-people/85737

FB: "He found that the human desire to connect with other people was underlying the most addictive behaviors, a trend he attributed to the evolutionary tendency of the brain to search for the easiest path for accomplishing goals. In this case, that means satisfying a need for social interaction through texting over talking."

"There's No Effective Emergency Mental Health System in America"

"When you or someone you love, or just someone you are vaguely concerned about, experiences a mental health crisis, your options pretty much begin and end with calling 911. There are resources like Crisis Text Line, which can be very helpful. If you need somewhere to go, however, you can opt for hospitalization, but there can be wait times for a bed. That brings us to 911. If you have a mental illness, you’re already 16 times more likely than the general public to be killed during a police encounter. As a white woman, my own prospects in these kinds of situations are exponentially better than they are for people of color, especially black men. In resorting to law enforcement during a mental health crisis, I risk being laughed at and dismissed; black men risk being killed... 

If you’re fortunate to get past the law enforcement stage without incident, a big fire truck may come to collect you and bring you not to any kind of psychiatric facility, but to a regular ER where you’ll be pawned off on regular ER doctors. When I went through this process my senior year of college — about a month after the Sandy Hook massacre — an overnight stay in the hospital involved no psychiatric treatment or services of any kind. Nurses took some blood samples, presumably just to test whether I was high, and in the morning I was told I was free to go. At no point had it occurred to me I was not free to go, probably because no one really spoke to me, but the truly wild part was that when I said I’d thought I was still waiting for treatment I was told I’d already received it. Every few hours someone had stopped by my gurney to read some questions off a clipboard; apparently one of them had been a social worker, which qualified as my having been seen by a mental health care professional."

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/theres-no-effective-emergency-mental-health-system-in-america?mbid=social_facebook

FB: "anyone wrongly reframing mass shootings as the responsibility of emergency psychiatric treatment is calling upon a system that does not exist."

"Indigenous Land Acknowledgement, Explained"

"In Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, it’s harder and harder to not be aware. That’s because school days and meetings — and even hockey games — often begin with a “land acknowledgment,” a formal statement that pays tribute to the original inhabitants of the land. Indigenous peoples have acknowledged one another’s lands for centuries, but in the past decade, some Western governments have begun to promote the practice. An acknowledgment might be short: “This event is taking place on traditional Chickasaw land.” Or it might be longer and more specific: “We are gathered today on the occupied territory of the Musqueam people, who have stewarded this land for generations.”... 

Not a real government agency but a “people-powered department,” the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture offers a resource called “Honor Native Land: A Guide and Call to Acknowledgment," created in consultation with more than a dozen Natives from various nations who recognized that while acknowledgment is common in indigenous spaces, it may be a new practice for non-Natives.

In addition to customizable “You Are On _______ Land” posters, an organizational pledge, and the hashtag #HonorNativeLand, the USDAC offers a step-by-step guide to acknowledgment"

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/indigenous-land-acknowledgement-explained?mbid=social_facebook

FB: "Contrary to the way it’s framed in textbooks, colonization is an ongoing process. Indigenous people are still here, and their lands are still occupied. In learning to acknowledge this, we can take a first step on the long road toward reconciliation."

"‘Diversity of Thought’ Is Just a Euphemism for ‘White Supremacy’"

"Professors who teach contrived versions of history by saying that the Civil War was about states’ rights and not slavery or white supremacy are not diverse thinkers. They are either liars or uneducated on the facts, either off which renders them unqualified to serve as a teacher of the subject.

The same goes for anyone who, like Shapiro, claims that homosexuality is a mental illness....

When Damore said that Google should “stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races” because it is “unfair and divisive,” his premise conveniently leaves out the fact that Google’s workforce is 2 percent black, 4 percent Hispanic and 31 percent female... 

In their contrived version of reality, they’re discriminated against—not because they are unqualified propagandists who either misunderstand or misconstrue the facts, but because they are victims of the liberal agenda. They don’t view their racism, sexism and homophobia as wrong because they “diversify thought” by playing the role of an intellectual devil’s advocate."

https://www.theroot.com/diversity-of-thought-is-just-a-euphemism-for-white-supr-1825191839?utm_source=theroot_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

FB: "Like most conservatives and libertarians (who are essentially conservatives with beards), diversity of thought is the only kind of diversity for which Damore and his ilk are willing to advocate." 

"TOO MANY MEN"

"Out of China’s population of 1.4 billion, there are nearly 34 million more males than females — the equivalent of almost the entire population of California, or Poland, who will never find wives and only rarely have sex. China’s official one-child policy, in effect from 1979 to 2015, was a huge factor in creating this imbalance, as millions of couples were determined that their child should be a son.

India, a country that has a deeply held preference for sons and male heirs, has an excess of 37 million males, according to its most recent census. The number of newborn female babies compared with males has continued to plummet, even as the country grows more developed and prosperous...

Housing prices and savings rates. Bachelors are furiously building houses in China to attract wives, and prices are soaring. But otherwise they are not spending, and that in turn fuels China’s huge trade surplus. In India, there is the opposite effect: Because brides are scarce, families are under less pressure to save for expensive dowries...

Adult sons live with their mothers — in some cases, their grandmothers. Indian and Chinese women who showed a marked preference for sons are growing old. They are still burdened with cooking and cleaning for their adult sons, and the stress affects their health...

Tens of thousands of foreign women are flocking to China for marriage, pushed by poverty at home and sucked in by China’s shortage of women. Chinese men surf websites that offer foreign brides, and may wind up paying upwards of $8,000 for marriage tours to find a wife. For the brides, it’s a huge gamble: They are lured with promises of work, and some are effectively trapped and trafficked into marriage. In their new families, daughters-in-law often occupy the lowest status...

Russian women, some of whom used to look to the West for husbands, are increasingly seeking marriage in China, says Elena Barabantseva at Britain’s University of Manchester, who has been leading an international project on marriage migration into China."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/world/too-many-men/?utm_term=.df69c4dd233c#scrollone

"People Find Articles About Education More Convincing When They Contain Extraneous Neuroscience"

"The participants found the articles more credible when they contained the most extreme form of extraneous neuroscience – a textual neuroscience reference plus a brain scan image. This seductive allure of neuroscience effect (SANE) was greater among participants with more familiarity with educational topics and among participants with more prior knowledge of neuroscience (although their knowledge was modest)... 

Unfortunately the study features several methodological shortcomings that make it difficult to interpret the findings as showing a true SANE effect. As the researchers partly acknowledged, the addition of extraneous neuroscience information was confounded with article length and image richness. Perhaps participants simply rated longer, more graphic articles as more credible."

http://neurosciencenews.com/extraneous-neuroscience-8856

Related: why it's so hard to convince people 

FB: "experts have warned about the dangers of neuro-jargon lending a confusing veneer of credibility to educational practices that lack an evidence base (one prominent example would be Brain Gym which has been widely criticised by neuroscientists and psychologists)."

"Circadian clock circuit may control daily rhythms of aggression"

“We examined the biological clock’s brain circuitry and found a connection to a population of neurons known to cause violent attacks when stimulated in male mice. We wanted to know if this represented a propensity for violence at certain times of day,” he said. 

Saper and colleagues observed aggressive interactions between male mice. They observed the resident mice defending territory against intruders introduced to residents’ cages at different times throughout the day. Counting the intensity and frequency of residents’ attacks on intruders revealed for the first time that aggression in male mice exhibits a daily rhythm...

“Our results in mice mimic the patterns of increased aggression during the early resting phase seen in patients during sundowning,” said first author William Todd, HMS instructor in neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess."

https://hms.harvard.edu/news/evening-sun-0?utm_source=Silverpop&utm_medium=email&utm_term=s2&utm_content=4.16.18.HMS

"Trillions Upon Trillions of Viruses Fall From the Sky Each Day"

"Generally it’s assumed these viruses originate on the planet and are swept upward, but some researchers theorize that viruses actually may originate in the atmosphere. (There is a small group of researchers who believe viruses may even have come here from outer space, an idea known as panspermia.)

Whatever the case, viruses are the most abundant entities on the planet by far. While Dr. Suttle’s team found hundreds of millions of viruses in a square meter, they counted tens of millions of bacteria in the same space.

Mostly thought of as infectious agents, viruses are much more than that. It’s hard to overstate the central role that viruses play in the world: They’re essential to everything from our immune system to our gut microbiome, to the ecosystems on land and sea, to climate regulation and the evolution of all species. Viruses contain a vast diverse array of unknown genes — and spread them to other species...

Researchers recently identified an ancient virus that inserted its DNA into the genomes of four-limbed animals that were human ancestors. That snippet of genetic code, called ARC, is part of the nervous system of modern humans and plays a role in human consciousness — nerve communication, memory formation and higher-order thinking. Between 40 percent and 80 percent of the human genome may be linked to ancient viral invasions... 

One study estimated that viruses in the ocean cause a trillion trillion infections every second, destroying some 20 percent of all bacterial cells in the sea daily.

Viruses help keep ecosystems in balance by changing the composition of microbial communities. As toxic algae blooms spread in the ocean, for example, they are brought to heel by a virus that attacks the algae and causes it to explode and die, ending the outbreak in as little as a day."

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/science/virosphere-evolution.html

FB: a bunch of great, mind-blowing virus facts in here 

"The town that’s found a potent cure for illness – community"

"What this provisional data appears to show is that when isolated people who have health problems are supported by community groups and volunteers, the number of emergency admissions to hospital falls spectacularly. While across the whole of Somerset emergency hospital admissions rose by 29% during the three years of the study, in Frome they fell by 17%. Julian Abel, a consultant physician in palliative care and lead author of the draft paper, remarks: “No other interventions on record have reduced emergency admissions across a population.”... 

The Compassionate Frome project was launched in 2013 by Helen Kingston, a GP there. She kept encountering patients who seemed defeated by the medicalisation of their lives: treated as if they were a cluster of symptoms rather than a human being who happened to have health problems. Staff at her practice were stressed and dejected by what she calls “silo working”.

Remarkable as Frome’s initial results appear to be, they shouldn’t be surprising. A famous paper published in PLOS Medicine in 2010 reviewed 148 studies, involving 300,000 people, and discovered that those with strong social relationships had a 50% lower chance of death across the average study period (7.5 years) than those with weak connections."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/21/town-cure-illness-community-frome-somerset-isolation?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email

FB: "Sometimes this meant handling debt or housing problems, sometimes joining choirs or lunch clubs or exercise groups or writing workshops or men’s sheds (where men make and mend things together). The point was to break a familiar cycle of misery: illness reduces people’s ability to socialise, which leads in turn to isolation and loneliness, which then exacerbates illness."

"YouTube & Chill: A Glimpse Into The World Of Lo-fi Hip-Hop"

"Some channels are 24/7 streams, some operate as sporadic pop-ups who stream for a few hours. But all stations find ways to cater to the lean-back listener, someone looking for endless hours of background music as they clean their house, study for an exam, or just want to chill.

“The whole idea [of lo-fi hip-hop] is sonic nostalgia, but not in an overly aggressive or ironic way like vaporwave or retrowave,” said YouTuber Ryan Celsius, whose lo-fi channel boasts 250,000 subscribers. “It’s usually beat production that can sound undermixed, containing intended or unintended imperfections with a heavy focus on creative sample use and authentic sounding drums kits. It’s usually a tape hiss or some analog distortion set against a simple set of drum loops and an incredible sample selection.”

https://genius.com/a/youtube-chill-a-glimpse-into-the-world-of-lo-fi-hip-hop

Related: sound of spaceships

"Frederick Douglass’s Fight Against Scientific Racism"

"That statement was part of a lecture in which he attacked one of the most prominent scientific fields of the antebellum era: ethnology, or what was sometimes called “the science of race.” Though often dismissed today as pseudoscience, at the time Douglass was writing, it was considered legitimate. The most accomplished scientists engaged in it, and the public eagerly consumed it.

Ethnology was not embraced just by Southerners who supported slavery. Its most important theorists lived in the North: one, Louis Agassiz, taught at Harvard; the other, Samuel George Morton, was president of one of the nation’s leading scientific societies, in Philadelphia...

he argued that racial descriptors were not mentioned in the Bible because, at that historical moment, race did not exist. It was, as we now say, a social construct, something better understood as a product of history rather than of science.

When Morton assumed that the ancient Israelites, who he believed were white, would have never married ancient Egyptians if they were black, he failed to realize that racial prejudice was a “genuine American feeling,” Douglass wrote. “It assumes that a black skin in the East excites the same prejudice which we see here in the West.” Douglass was saying that we learn racism — we are not born with it.

But even as Douglass refused to allow racist scientific theories to go unchallenged, he always understood that science was not the antidote to white people’s racism. There were only so many facts you could give to prove black people’s humanity."

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/opinion/frederick-douglasss-scientific-racism.html?referer