» 2018 » December Epicene Cyborg

Harvard Quietly Amasses California Vineyards—and the Water Underneath. Making a bet on climate change, the university’s $39 billion endowment has been snapping up farmland and the related water rights.

In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence. As someone who has written a 1,200 word essay consisting of a single sentence, I agree.

Ant Colonies Retain Memories That Outlast the Lifespans of Individuals.

What Straight-A Students Get Wrong. If you always succeed in school, you’re not setting yourself up for success in life. Learning to challenge my teachers (and thus getting worse grades) was one of the best things I ever did.

Equifax Breach Was Just as Infuriating and Dumb as You Thought.

Comcast rejected by small town—residents vote for municipal fiber instead.

Take It from Someone Who Has Suffered Real Physical Abuse: Words Aren’t Violence. Having been punched and beaten a lot, I agree.

This Woman Was Born With Three Fingers, But Her Brain Knew All Along What Having Five Would Feel Like. This woman’s brain knew what having five fingers felt like, even though she herself had never in her life had five fingers. But there is no human nature, right? Sure.

Some of California’s most stunning natural wonders are on the brink of oblivion.

Human time perception and its illusions. To the people who believe we perceive some sort of objective reality: LOL.

Chronostasis.

What’s eating this 400-year-old painting? A whole ecosystem of microbes.

Earth’s mysterious ‘deep biosphere’ may harbor millions of undiscovered species.

US Regulators Have Essentially Become Do-Nothing Institutions.

Last-Minute Push to Restore Net Neutrality Stymied by Democrats Flush With Telecom Cash. This is your great Blue Wave, fuckers.

Physicists Create Incredible ‘Quark Soup’ Droplets That Expand Like Little Big Bangs.

Super-solid helium state confirmed in beautiful experiment. That’s a solid experiment with real flow.

The Largest Conspiracy Theory Peddlers Are MSM And The US State Department. Conspiracy theories used to be almost solely the purview of the Right, so it’s strange to me to see that move so leftward.

Apps You Use Every Day Are Tracking Your Every Move.

It’s the Economies, Stupid. The key to understanding the 2018 midterm results — and the future of American politics — isn’t ideology or culture. It’s the different economies of red and blue America.

Police departments find several ways to keep cops afraid, and a lot of this fear is cloaked as self-defense and “remaining alert.”

More people get their news from social media than newspapers.

Without work, who do we become?

Big problem with much of health care analysis is we count redistribution wrong. The government giving a poor person $10,000 for a surgery that they let hospitals overcharge $5,000 for is not a $10,000 transfer to poor people. It is $5,000 to poor person, $5,000 to rich people.

Bernie Don’t Run.

The Income Level Of Different Age Groups In The US, Visualized.

Top Obama aides are running the health care front group aiming to kill Medicare for All.

Leptin- and Leptin Receptor-Deficient Rodent Models: Relevance for Human Type 2 Diabetes.

Why Tumblr Banning Adult Content Is a Serious Problem.

The contemporary rise of nationalism and populisms across the world is not some liberal order antithesis emerging from a vacuum, but rather a logical consequence of this liberal order, constituting an often reactionary ‘counter movement’ that cannot be tackled with prescriptions for increased market globalization. This is a very good paper.

The Housing Boom Is Already Gigantic. How Long Can It Last?

It’s hard to think when someone Hadamards your brain.

Uncomfortable privacy research.

Right to end life on Earth: Can corporations that spread climate change denialism be held liable? If a corporation’s propaganda destroys the world, doesn’t that conflict with our right to live?

When it comes to American jobs, the US could learn from its largest sex-furniture manufacturer. I did not know sex furniture was a thing. At first, I thought it was furniture you have sex with. This did not sound appealing to me.

Uber is a “bezzle,” doomed to disappoint the suckers who buy into its IPO.

Why Black Hole Interiors Grow Forever.

Men underestimate level of sexual harassment against women – survey.

Antitrust’s Most Wanted. The 10 breakups the government should be investigating — but isn’t.

How Much Longer Until the U.S. Debt Bubble Bursts? The economists who insist there is no such thing as a bubble are about get surprised…again.

The federal, state and local governments now employ a smaller share of the U.S. workforce than at any time since 1957.

Minneapolis Confronts Its History of Housing Segregation. By doing away with single-family zoning, the city takes on high rent, long commutes, and racism in real estate in one fell swoop.

The Planet Has Seen Sudden Warming Before. It Wiped Out Almost Everything. Going to happen again, and faster than anyone thinks.

We have completely turned the public sphere over to multinational corporations like Facebook, Twitter and WordPress. They are our preeminent forms of communication. They provide the main conduit for news and public discussion in our society.

What science has gotten wrong by ignoring women.

When our faves let us down through ignorance and violence we rush to remind strangers of our disapproval. But in the quest for a fairer world, we should remember that the idea of moral and political purity is a figment of the imagination. It does not exist.

Battle of the old white guys: Please, no. First wave of 2020 panic: Is Biden vs. Bernie really the best Democrats can do?.

The Last Days of Rookie. Tavi Gevinson talks authenticity, digital publishing, and the pervasive creep of the lifestyle brand. Everything good is being destroyed by corporate power.

Academics’ Mobbing of a Young Scholar Must be Denounced. Intelligence research is dangerous.

After Getting FOSTA Turned Into Law, Facebook Tells Its Users To Stop Using Naughty Words.

Further proof that millennials are the brokest generation. Fuck Kevin Drum.

The Myth of the Benevolent Postwar Corporation.

Cancer treatment may be less aggressive if you’re not part of a couple.

The partisan brain. What psychology experiments tell you about why people deny facts.

Median Household Income, Poverty Rates and Computer and Internet Use.

Millennials Didn’t Kill the Economy. The Economy Killed Millennials. The American system has thrown them into debt, depressed their wages, kept them from buying homes—and then blamed them for everything.

Why we miss the wasps. Wasps are a mirror held to our planet. When they do well, we all do well.

It has never been clear to me why in terms of discrimination, diversity, and representation so many academics can see clearly things like race, gender, or sexual orientation while class apparently just isn’t a thing.

America’s Elderly Are Losing $37 Billion a Year to Fraud. There was some study that “showed” elderly people aren’t more susceptible to scams. I believe that study was BS.

You need neither PWA nor AMP to make your website load fast. There has been a trend of new “revolutionary” techniques on the Web that basically let you do stuff possible decades ago.

The Influence of the Evolutionary Past on the Mind: An Analysis of the Preference for Landscapes in the Human Species.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Unveils The Ugly Truth About Being Poor In America.

New Documents Show That Facebook Has Never Deserved Your Trust. I said this…in 2006.

Very low calorie diets trialled by NHS to tackle diabetes. The FA crowd is going to be very angry.

How the Cashless Economy Shuts Out the Poor.

Like Nazis.

Empirical evidence on how US border wall expansion 2010-2007 reduced Mexican immigration & changed wages.

Millions of Americans Could Face Surprise Emergency Room Bills in January.

Welcome to Our Modern Hospital Where If You Want to Know a Price You Can Go Fuck Yourself.

Thread on the eve of what is being dubbed in France as “Black Saturday”.

Trump Administration Guts Office Designed to Protect Farmers from Ag Monopolies. This will matter more than about anything Trump has done, but will not attract notice because it’s not theater for the left or right.

A UC Riverside professor’s first-of-its-kind study explores the neural underpinnings of cute aggression. I have never experienced this. I have just plain aggression.

Yes, student loans really are making millennials go broke.

Luxembourg to become first country to make all public transport free.

Gustatory disgust triggering feelings of moral disgust did not replicate.

Ali’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas. A thread.

You Drive Your Kids to School Because the Neighborhood Doesn’t Feel Safe. The Neighborhood Doesn’t Feel Safe Because Everybody Drives.

Charles ‘Chuck’ Harrison, the Most Important Person You Never Heard Of, Dead at 87. Knew of him, but didn’t know he invented the Viewmaster. I think every single kid born between 1970-1980 had one of those.

The credibility of acted screams: Implications for emotional communication research. People could not tell the difference beyond chance levels.

With a Green New Deal, Here’s What the World Could Look Like for the Next Generation. Instead, it’ll look like The Road.

An Insect Flees Danger. Suddenly, It Picks Up a Tiny Hitchhiker.

Doomsday Economics: The Fundamentals Are Strong? Great bit of writing.

Why Do Hospitals Hate Sleep So Much?