» 2019 » January Epicene Cyborg

The current period of relative peace could be more fragile than many have thought. Wars likely now are less frequent but far more destructive when they do occur.

What’s really disturbing about yesterday’s events is how many adults thought it was a good idea to form a huge Internet gang to bully a bunch of kids and even plot to destroy their entire futures.

Oil Paintings by Clive Head Layer.

Revisiting The Pioneering Composer Florence Price.

Woman Didn’t Know Progress On Toxic Masculinity Would Turn Boyfriend Into Such A Weepy Little Pansy. This is a real dilemma men face with most women. (Not all, but most.)

Greenland’s Melting Ice Nears a ‘Tipping Point,’ Scientists Say.

The Bailouts for the Rich Are Why America Is So Screwed Right Now. Did they prevent a full-scale collapse? Yes. Was it necessary to do it the way we did? Not at all.

Absolute rotation.

The “planetary health diet” proposes individual choices to solve a collective problem.

There are benefits to doing absolutely nothing.

B12.

Why Do People Hate Comic Sans So Much? Those were not some of the first Microsoft home computers.

Damning court docs show just how far Sacklers went to push OxyContin.

The clampdown on opioid prescriptions is hurting pain patients.

I Have Health Insurance, But I’m Still Drowning In Medical Debt.

Ekistics.

Regular says she was banned from eating at the bar at Manhattan’s scammy Nello restaurant because she might be a sex-worker.

The EU’s plan to impose mandatory copyright filters is on life-support and may die. That would’ve been the end of the internet, effectively, though that’s not saying much these days.

Of the studies that had originally reported positive results, an astonishing 65 percent failed to show statistical significance on replication, and many of the remainder showed greatly reduced effect sizes. Their findings made the news, and quickly became a club with which to bash the social sciences. But the problem isn’t just with psychology.

Remember the subprime mortgage mess? $1.2 trillion in risky corporate debt is flashing similar warning signs.

Rather than some designer’s flashy vision of the future, Windows 98 icons made the operating system feel like a place to get real work done. Yep. Not about flash, but about function; aimed at higher-IQ users.

Why the Quants Aren’t Adding Up. Black-box investing strategies supposedly based on rocket science are vulnerable to a host of inherent biases, which are now being exposed. Algos are easy to beat. I love them.

The Shutdown Shows the Weakness of the Resistance. The Resistance just wants a return to the status quo, which isn’t really worth fighting for (and even they realize this).

Over the Wall and into the Fire.

Animals across the planet are being paralyzed and dying from a Vitamin B1 deficiency and researchers are stumped. Fish and birds especially seems to be affected, as worldwide seabird populations have plummeted by 70%, while fish populations are also collapsing. The cause of the deficiency is unknown.

This is very important: stronger people live longer, no matter what the other variables might be.

Tiny animal carcasses found in buried Antarctic lake.

Climate Disaster Is Upon Us. The question is no longer whether or not we are going to fail, but how are we going to comport ourselves in the era of failure?

After 3 Decades, Privatization Has Been Proven a Failure. Let’s Bury It for Good. Handing public assets and services over to the free market has been a boon for corporate America and a disaster for the working class.

Racial Bias and In-group Bias in Judicial Decisions: Evidence from Virtual Reality Courtrooms.

Farms, More Productive Than Ever, Are Poisoning Drinking Water in Rural America. One in seven Americans drink from private wells, which are being polluted by contaminants from manure and fertilizer.

When the Muses Strike: Creative Ideas of Physicists and Writers Routinely Occur During Mind Wandering.

Once considered outlandish, the idea that plants help their relatives is taking root.

Earth was probably purple billions of years ago, says NASA.

If the Future of the Democratic Party Means Winning Elections, Count Me Out.

The myth of ‘We don’t build houses like we used to.’ The common lament misses crucial context about the style trends and building materials of the past.

Fighting refusal to accept climate change is a multi-front battle. Point not just to the lies, but who’s behind them, researchers suggest.

Cities Used to Help All Americans Find Prosperity. Not Anymore.

One month after controversial adult-content purge, far-right pages are thriving on Tumblr. White nationalist propaganda is still extremely easy to find. As predicted.

How to Find Hidden Cameras and Spy Bugs Like a Professional.

We Are Living in the Begging Economy. The government shutdown is highlighting what is already a reality for many of us: Using the internet to beg for money we need to survive.

Scientists grow perfect human blood vessels in a petri dish.

What’s Causing the Rise of Hoarding Disorder? Why are all mental disorders increasing? It’s not just increased diagnoses as far as I can tell.

Two-pager Scientific Evidence on Red Meat and Health. The EAT Lancet report seems to be corporate propaganda.

Student debt may have prevented 400,000 young adults from buying homes.

System has four stars and a planet-forming disk oriented vertically.

Inside the Strange Yet Profitable World of Retail Arbitrage.

Gillette’s Progressive Politics: ‘Corinthian Leather’ for the Progressive Soul.

Saponification.

These sneaky spiders wait inside tiny towers to attack their prey.

Facebook’s ’10 Year Challenge’ Is Just a Harmless Meme—Right? Nothing Facebook does is harmless because it’s run by a sociopath in an immoral and unjust economy.

Glaciers Are Retreating. Millions Rely on Their Water.

Are We Living Through Climate Change’s Worst-Case Scenario? “We’re a lot closer than we should be,” one Stanford scientist warned. Even the most-plausible best case is very bad indeed, it should be noted.

New study finds evidence of changing seasons, rain on Titan’s north pole. The rain is methane, by the way, not water.

27 Free Alternatives to Adobe’s Expensive App Subscriptions.

The quicksort computer sorting algorithm demonstrated with Hungarian folk dance, from Romania’s Sapientia University.

There are absolutely reasons food got so bad in the 50s through the 70s, y’know. The big one? Mechanization.

‘Zebra’ tribal bodypaint cuts fly bites 10-fold: study.

Among children and adolescents ages 2 to 19, about 1 in 6 (17.2 percent) were considered to have obesity, about 1 in 17 (6 percent) were considered to have extreme obesity. Depending on age group, 2-4x as high in children as 1980. Terrible.

The Fed can manipulate short-term yields with reasonable consistency. So when it pushes them down below the rate of inflation, it’s not an accident. It’s punishment for everyone that has money invested in short-term low-risk instruments, from T-bills to savings products. And as the chart above shows, this form of punishment has been the “normal” condition over the past two decades.

‘Easy to Pay for Something That Costs Less’: New Study Shows Medicare for All Would Save US $5.1 Trillion Over Ten Years.

Prelude to a crisis: student debt passes $1.5 trillion and 65% of borrowers have less than $1,000 in the bank.

This Science Fiction Novelist Created a Feminist Language from Scratch.

Largest dump in history: 2.7 billion records; 773 million of them unique; 140 million never seen before.

If You Can’t Deny It, Downplay It. How capitalists talk about climate change.

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.

The financial crisis was Obama’s moment of truth, and he sided with the establishment. Now, the 2020 field must contend with an uncomfortable question: was Obama a bad president? Obama was a terrible, mendacious, bankster-coddling, piece of shit president.

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.

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.

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