Epicene Cyborg

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January 16, 2019

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Takes the Democrats Back to the Future: An Interview with the Historian Rick Perlstein.

The U.S. Military Once Had Nukes That Could Fit in a Backpack. Soldiers trained to carry “special atomic demolition munitions” thought they were readying for suicide missions.

Extreme opponents of genetically modified foods know the least but think they know the most.

Polygenic scores and tea drinking.

Rise of the Golden Jackal. This is not about Trump.

Potatoes Have a Form of ‘Depression,’ but Scientists Have an Idea to Cure Them.

Is Western Civilization Uniquely Bad?

New analysis suggests Democrats are wrong to fear Medicare for All.

When Report Cards Go Out on Fridays, Child Abuse Increases on Saturdays, Study Finds.

Capricious foes, Big Sister & high-carbon plutocrats: irreverent musings from Katowice’s COP24.

Habitable planets around red dwarf stars might not get enough photons to support plant life. The fact that low-mass stars are much more prone to high-rad flares is likely more determinative than this.

When Broadway Became Broadway.

January 15, 2019

The Utility of the RussiaGate Conspiracy.

(Ideo)Logical Reasoning: Ideology Impairs Sound Reasoning.

Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics.

Americans see themselves in debt forever, even as they continue to borrow.

The complex relation between receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit and political ideology.

Antarctica is losing ice six times faster than in 1980s.

Windows 7 enters its final year of free support. Still better than any Microsoft OS that came after.

Is Sunscreen the New Margarine?

Our culture has two types of forgetting.

January 14, 2019

The State of Web Browsers.

Gentrification is simply the visible urban face of rampant income inequality.

The First Victims of Climate Deniers Are Their Own Kids.

Progressive Ideas Matter to Voters. So Why Do Democrats Fixate on Identity?

Grass-fed Beef — The Most Vegan Item In The Supermarket. Needs an editor (badly), but not wrong.

Adorable snowshoe hares found to routinely feast on their own dead: study. The University of Alberta study adds to a growing scientific realization that herbivores actually love meat, they’re just bad at finding it. Chickens will eat anything they can get hold of, too.

The Death of the Sick Day.

A Flower for Your Thoughts.

Global warming will happen faster than we think.

January 13, 2019

Memo to ‘Green New Deal’ critics: The original New Deal worked.

It seems that history often adopts a “modern” point of view to explain past events. In this narrative, we were always heading to exactly where we are: globalized free-market corporate monopoly capitalism. This is done to depict our present circumstances not as deliberately engineered, or contingent on any historical circumstances, or political choices, but rather as something “natural” and just an expression of unchanging human nature.

I work with kids. Here’s why they’re consumed with anxiety.

Someone’s finally going to jail over the Panama Papers: a Turkish journalist who reported true facts from them.

Does Your Box of “Ugly” Produce Really Help the Planet? Or Hurt it?

It is popular to demand that Facebook better police content, but no amount of vigilance against “fake news” or banned neo-Nazis will ameliorate the function it serves for Boomers as a place to feed off of one another’s bottomless rage. This article blames too much on Facebook (ignores or minimizes the contribution of Fox News and AM radio) but is not wrong.

‘Extremists’ like Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are actually closer to what most Americans want.

The Poor Can’t Afford Not to Wear Nice Clothes.

What if Cities Are No Longer the Land of Opportunity for Low-Skilled Workers?

The Era Of Easy Recycling May Be Coming To An End.

Misunderstanding Dunning-Kruger.

January 12, 2019

Nearly Half Of US Workers Earn Less Than $30,000.

Who Foots the Bill? Families Fight Over College Debt. As tuition increases outpace household incomes and parents face a battery of other financial pressures, conflict over college debt is intensifying among American families.

Windows 10 will chew up another 7GB of disk space to make sure it can update. What a coprolitic OS.

The Millions Was the Last Great Indie Book Blog.. The internet that was worth a damn is dying, and nearly dead.

Oceans are warming even faster than previously thought.

The Exaggerated Promise of So-Called Unbiased Data Mining. Ya’ll need some philosophy and epistemology studyin’.

The Internet Is A Privacy Disaster. But We Still Don’t Know How To Talk About It. As a result of extensive corporate propaganda.

Belly fat has long been thought to be particularly bad for your heart, but now, a new study adds more evidence to the idea that it may also be bad for your brain.

Advertising as a Major Source of Human Dissatisfaction: Cross-National Evidence on One Million Europeans.

Healthcare industry spends $30B on marketing—most of it goes to doctors.

A New Narrative Control Firm Works To Destroy Alternative Media.

New Poll: US Military Occupations Supported By Far More Democrats Than Republicans.

‘Could you make these guys essential?’: Mortgage industry gets shutdown relief after appeal to senior Treasury officials.

The Real Split. I agree that no one, not even AOC, is engaging with capitalism as it is, and as it has changed.

Boojum (superfluidity).

January 11, 2019

People Older Than 65 Share the Most Fake News, Study Find. Shocking no one; it’s the Fox crowd.

Underclocking a baseband chip creates a stealth wifi channel.

If voting changed anything they’d abolish it.

Brown’s case, even her clemency, reminds us of who gets to stand their ground — and who does not.

Millions of College Students Are Going Hungry. A new government report highlights just how pervasive the problem is.

Middle-aged women dying at alarming rate from overdoses, CDC finds.

Software patents poised to make a comeback under new patent office rules.

Puritan Tiger Beetles, ‘Vicious Predators,’ May Soon Hunt Again.

Deleting Facebook Won’t Fix the Problem. When we tell people to get off the platform, we recast a political issue as a willpower issue.

January 10, 2019

How Cities Make Money by Fining the Poor. In many parts of America, like Corinth, Miss., judges are locking up defendants who can’t pay — sometimes for months at a time.

Cory Booker, Kamala Harris talk to Wall Street about possible 2020 campaign. The people who really decide who wins are being consulted.

Facebook is the new crapware.

The Enduring Teen Legacy of ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail.’ Quoting the movie was pre-meme meme culture. Had a friend in high school who basically spoke in Monty Python quotes. He was a bit annoying.

Wall Street Investors Intensify Affordable Housing Crisis. Research shows that corporate landlords are contributing to a rise in housing prices.

The molecule that helps exercise protect the brain from Alzheimer’s. Gives the phrase “muscle memory” a whole new meaning.

How Beauty Is Making Scientists Rethink Evolution. This is not new, but sexual selection became rejected because some scientists did not want to apply it to humans. (It does.)

A medieval woman’s work left blue pigment on her teeth. The skeleton reveals the hidden role of women in producing medieval manuscripts.

Astronomers discover first direct evidence of white dwarf stars solidifying into crystals.

The blind spot of science is the neglect of lived experience. It’s tempting to think science gives a God’s-eye view of reality. But we forget the place of human experience at our peril.

January 9, 2019

The New War on Marijuana Will Be Extremely Dumb. How did Malcolm Gladwell manage to screw this up so badly? Because it’s Malcolm Gladwell. It’s what he does.

Non-martial legislation passed during The Civil War.

Saving Florida’s Friendliest Native Bird Matters.

Unprovability comes to machine learning.

U.S. Health Care Spending Highest Among Developed Countries. Americans on average continue to spend much more for health care—while getting less care—than people in other developed countries. But according to prominent economists, we are secretly super-rich, and want to spend double our money for nothing! Sure, makes total sense.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is A Perfect Foil For The Pro-Trump Media. Indeed. She’s the only one who seems to understand how the tools of discourse have changed.

Those who claim that censorship can only be enacted by the state are making arguments that are over 20 years out of date.

Birds munching.

U.S. greenhouse gas emissions spiked in 2018 — and it couldn’t happen at a worse time.

Windows 10 Is Only Making Windows Fragmentation Worse.

This Is How America Is Failing Its Young Opioid Generation.

Captivating algorithms: Recommender systems as traps.

SpaceX Hid a Second, Hidden Payload Aboard Falcon Heavy. How does one read this data? If the reader doesn’t also last a few billion years, it’s pointless.

Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me.

I Gave a Bounty Hunter $300. Then He Located Our Phone. T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to their customers’ location data, and that data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters and others not authorized to possess it, letting them track most phones in the country.

Loudly trumpeted paper, claiming that “low-quality information” (e.g., fake news) is as likely to go viral as good one, is retracted because of low-quality information.

Flowers respond to pollinator sound within minutes by increasing nectar sugar concentration.

This age of semiotics is breaking us. The tribalisation of signs has become our chief political diagnostic. The signifier more important than the signified is never a good, uh, sign.

Watch Trucks Tow a Really Big Thing That’s Heavier Than the Statue of Liberty.

Why the U.S. Spends So Much More Than Other Nations on Health Care. Turns out, shockingly, that it isn’t just that we like to pay more.

January 8, 2019

The Overloaded Soldier: Why U.S. Infantry Now Carry More Weight Than Ever.

Let’s Remember Media PCs and Their Path to Nowhere. Far superior to the surveillance garbage of today.

Why the housing and mortgage crisis is far from over.

Incompleteness Ex Machina.

Memo to conservatives: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez understands federal taxes better than you do. And better than 95% of Dems, if not more.

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