Epicene Cyborg

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June 2, 2020

UV-B radiation was the Devonian-Carboniferous boundary terrestrial extinction kill mechanism.

Trees are Getting Shorter and Younger.

‘Normal’ Is the Last Thing We Should Wish For.

The Police Don’t Change.

Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide.

The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part V: Ladders are Chaos.

Understanding epidemiology models.

A nationwide police riot.

Farmworkers are dying, COVID-19 cases are spiking, and the food system is in peril.

The Vast of Night review – a low-budget, high-concept sci-fi trip.

SARS-CoV-2 looks like a hybrid of viruses from two different species. Pieces of several genomes recombined to produce the pandemic-causing pathogen.

SpaceX launch footage was taken down thanks to bogus copyright claim. The public domain video was restored to the public, but this happens a lot.

June 1, 2020

Peter Jackson’s LOTR Was an Improbable Miracle, and We’re Lucky to Have It.

As studies confirm many infected people show no symptoms, contact tracing and face masks assume even greater importance.

Proportionate Response. When destroying a police precinct is a reasonable reaction.

Sci-Fi and Fantasy Build Mental Resiliency in Young Readers.

After 100,000 coronavirus cases, it’s clearer where Californians are getting infected.

Why Artificial Brains Need Sleep.

Nothing Is Certain But Death, Taxes, And Police Infiltration Of US Protests.

How Corporations Make Pandemics Deadlier.

Aerosol Scientist: COVID-19 Is Likely Airborne.

The self-conscious drama of morality in contemporary fiction.

US food prices see historic jump and are likely to stay high.

May 31, 2020

America Is a Tinderbox. Scenes from a country in free fall.

Here’s Why Men Are Pointing Loaded Guns at Their Dicks. Hell timeline.

Photostopped: Adobe Cloud evaporates in mass outage. Hope none of you are on a deadline, eh? I hate cloud-dependent software.

Whoooaaa duuuuude: Why we stretch words in tweets and texts.

Study shows 10 times more New Yorkers had Covid-19 by April than previously counted.

On George Floyd’s death, the Minneapolis riots, and delusion.

Maybe the debilitating effects of chronic overtraining syndrome are in your muscles after all, not your head or your hormones.

NOAA Warns 5G Spectrum Interference Presents Major Threat to Weather Forecasts.

Racism Is the Biggest Reason the U.S. Safety Net Is So Weak.

May 30, 2020

C.D.C. Recommends Sweeping Changes to American Offices. Temperature checks, desk shields and no public transit: The guidelines would remake office life. Some may decide it’s easier to keep employees at home. No public transit? WTF?

Why We Have So Many Problems with Our Teeth. Our choppers are crowded, crooked and riddled with cavities. It hasn’t always been this way.

How Many People Did it Take to Build the Great Pyramid?

1989 California medfly attack.

Week 10 of the U.S. Labor Market Collapse: Still Getting Worse at Gut-Wrenching Pace, But Signs of Bottom Appear.

Websites Conducting Port Scans.

Antibody Tests Point To Lower Death Rate For The Coronavirus Than First Thought.

Flawed COVID hypothesis may have saved Washington from being NYC.

April 29, 1992.

A Growing Wave of Bankruptcies Threatens U.S. Recovery.

We Tried to Interview Jeff Bezos, and Then It Was All a Blur and a Giant White Balloon Chased Us and Now We Live in Some Weird Community Prison Type Thing.

The Virus Doesn’t Care What Race You Are, but the Government Does so Some of You Are Fucked.

Planting Trees Won’t Stop Climate Change. Not only are planted trees not the carbon sinks you want, but tree planting frequently ends up doing more harm than good.

Observing the world during childhood affects the rest of life.

The Real Villain in Bankruptcies: Private Equity.

Universal Basic Income or Job Guarantee? Why Not Both?

May 29, 2020

The coronavirus infection rate is still too high. There will be a second wave.

Our Fragile Gerontocracy. Old people have never been so powerful — or, now, so vulnerable.

Roman mosaic floor found under Italian vineyard.

The heat waves that powered the Dust Bowl are now more than twice as likely to happen again.

We Need a Class War, Not a Culture War.

Protestors Criticized For Looting Businesses Without Forming Private Equity Firm First.

1985: When ‘Rambo’ Tightened His Grip on the American Psyche.

New data indicates the Mississippi Delta is on borrowed time.

As 100,000 die, the virus lays bare America’s brutal fault lines – race, gender, poverty and broken politics.

The Pandemic Is the Right Time to Defund the Police.

Yes, Millennials Really Are That Screwed.

Alternative social systems and individual wellbeing.

This Is the Saddest Picture I Have Ever Seen.

May 28, 2020

Facebook Executives Shut Down Efforts to Make the Site Less Divisive.

Blue Bee Feared to Be Extinct Is Found in Florida.

Wuhan swabs 9 million people, tests 6.5 million for COVID-19 in 10 days.

What About the Rotten Culture of the Rich?

Millions of Amy Coopers, They could be your boss or your neighbor or your teacher, if disturbed on the wrong day.

For years, the U.S. has been lagging on construction innovation and quality over countries like Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Recently, though, even China has taken massive steps on construction innovation.

The Commercial Real-Estate Market’s Impending Crash.

Losing the Narrative: The Genre Fiction of the Professional Class. Great essay.

Why we shouldn’t be calling our healthcare workers ‘heroes.’

May 27, 2020

Why the Pandemic Is Driving Conservative Intellectuals Mad.

How the Taliban Outlasted a Superpower: Tenacity and Carnage.

How mice became house mice.

Research reveals gene role in both dementia and severe Covid-19.

Every Stephen King Cameo, From It Chapter 2 To The Simpsons.

Power Exists: How Shall We Use It?

The world sacrificed its elderly in the race to protect hospitals. The result was a catastrophe in nursing homes.

Alternate Histories.

How summer could determine the pandemic’s future.

As Child Hunger Soars, Federal Aid Lags.

May 26, 2020

CDC revises its guidelines on surface contact, prompting an outbreak of misleading headlines.

Astronomers spot a strange, first-of-its-kind asteroid near Jupiter.

What Happened to the Great American Logistics Machine? Neoliberalism and vulture capitalism.

The Incredible Story of the US Army’s Earth-Shaking, Off-Road Land Trains.

Wealthiest Hospitals Got Billions in Bailout for Struggling Health Providers. Twenty large chains received more than $5 billion in federal grants even while sitting on more than $100 billion in cash. According to centrists, it couldn’t be any other way.

Astronomers see ‘cosmic ring of fire,’ 11 billion years ago.

Galactic crash may have triggered solar system formation.

May 25, 2020

Kent State and the War That Never Ended.

How Freedom Became Free-dumb in America. Why the World is Horrified by the American Idiot.

Blow Up the Restaurant Industry and Start Over. A system that relies on exploitation isn’t one that should survive the pandemic. There’s a better way to feed people and care for workers.

Why Do Diners Give You Leftover Milkshake in That Metal Container? Because it’s totally metal.

Mortgage delinquencies surge by 1.6M in April, the biggest monthly jump ever.

The Most Badass Movie Character of the Year Is a Surly Chinese Grandma.

“Imagine Hillarys” With Increasingly Fanciful Endings.

deprecates is a word that platform vendors use when they are going to break the implicit promise that the platform you’re developing on is stable.

Herd Of Fuzzy Green ‘Glacier Mice’ Baffles Scientists.

The Chiral Puzzle of Life.

May 24, 2020

Copyright bots and classical musicians are fighting online. The bots are winning. Culture getting locked up everywhere.

Out-of-Sync ‘Loners’ May Secretly Protect Orderly Swarms. So I do have a purpose!

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