July 30, 2015
physicist, physician, egyptologist
The Last True Know-It-All reviews Andrew Smith's biography of Thomas Young - "The Last Man Who Knew Everything (including hieroglyphs). Was Young The Smartest Person Ever? [more inside]
Stars in His Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Science Fiction grandmaster Samuel R. Delaney interviewed by SF Signal, with a very long answer in part 2, and by The New Yorker where he talks about race, recent Hugo controversies being nothing new, and the past and future of science fiction.
Not exactly Nas vs Jay-Z...
Meek Mills has finally responded to Drake in their week long feud. Reaction has not generally been kind. Drake's Instagram speaks for itself. Chuck D was not impressed. Toronto Councilor Norm Kelly poured more salt in the wound (after fanning the flames last week). And of course brands are getting in on the action. Other Twitter highlights: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Previously on Clerks [missing footage]
Lost TV Pilot of Clerks has emerged (SLYT). In 1995, Disney (Miramax parent company) under the Touchstone Television brand tried to turn the indie hit of the previous year into a PG-Rated sitcom. The results are exactly what you'd expect. (via AV Club) [more inside]
Black American Motherhood
“I love you so much, I want to carry you around all day in my pocket”. Emily Bernard writes about being the mother of brown-skinned daughters after Ferguson. [more inside]
Jerusalem Pride Mass Stabbing by Haredi Repeat Suspect
Six people have been stabbed at Jerusalem's Pride Parade following threats from both a Haredi man just released from prison for a similar knife attack at the 2005 Jersusalem Pride parade, and from Lehava, a right-wing Jewish supremacy organization that also held a protest away from the LGBTQ parade route. These knife attacks are unfortunately not the first time LGBTQ Jews have been killed by other Jews; there was a gun attack on the Tel Aviv LGBTQ youth center in 2009 (previously). [more inside]
Greenpeace vs. Shell Oil: the Portland edition
A standoff between Greenpeace and Shell Oil is happening right now high above the Willamette River in Portland, Ore. Yesterday, using mountaineering equipment, thirteen protestors lowered themselves down from the magestically large St. Johns Bridge in a bid to prevent the passage of Shell's icebreaking ship MSV Fennica, which had been undergoing repairs in Portland and was scheduled to depart to assist Shell's oil drilling activities in the Arctic. The protesters have supplies to stay awhile. For now, the ship has turned around and a judge has ruled that Greenpeace will be charged $2500 for every hour the protest continues.
“The Germans were not there; the Lithuanians did it themselves.”
Double Genocide: Lithuania wants to erase its ugly history of Nazi collaboration - by accusing Jewish partisans who fought the Germans of war crimes.
"After Lithuanians got independence,” he told me, “we hoped that Lithuania would give us help.” But it was not to be. In one of its very first independent actions, before even fully breaking free of Moscow, Lithuania’s parliament formally exonerated several Lithuanian nationalists who had collaborated in the Holocaust and had been convicted by Soviet military courts after the war. The right-wing paramilitaries who had carried out the mass murder of Lithuania’s Jews were now hailed as national heroes on account of their anti-Soviet bona fides.
1,000 rockers just sent the Foo Fighters a message they can't refuse
Cesena is a small town up in northern Italy, that until yesterday was pretty-well unknown to the world. That changed this morning when a guy called Fabio Zaffagini presented to the Internet his year long-project of getting one thousand musicians to gather in a field and play Foo Fighter's Learn To Fly, with the sole objective of convincing the band to go and do a show in their town. You have to watch it.
Beautiful storms.
IN YOUR FACE, CHICAGO
And the most important person in the world is...
Who is the greatest person who has ever lived? Those ranking by deaths prevented have put forth Norman Borlaug (over 1 billion), Viktor Zhdanov (300 million), Haber and Bosch (2.7 billion, but then there's the war crimes thing), and, of course, Stanislav Petrov (everyone). Lists of the most important people are often decided by popular vote, with Gutenberg, Einstein, and Darwin generally doing well, but don't count yourself out. More recently, as Cass Sunstein entertainingly covers, there have also been quantitative attempts to measure the most important person., including, most recently, a detailed algorithm by a computer science professor and a Google engineer that tells us that the most important people are, in order: Jesus, Napoleon, Shakespeare, and Muhammed. Smithsonian magazine commissioned them to come up with a special list of the most important Americans. You can also play a historical importance version of the who's hotter game using their algorithm.
“Writing is healing. Writing is art. Writing is learning.”
The Role of Writers in a STEM Obsessed Society
“As writers, it’s easy to think of how we matter to literature classrooms, but what the appointment of writers-in-residence in hospitals, history classrooms, foreign language learning spaces, and cooking schools reminds us is that we are relevant wherever there is humanity—which is to say, wherever humans are with their stories. Writing is healing. Writing is art. Writing is learning. As such, writing across the disciplines matters. Many models of artist residencies depend upon the retreat model, wherein the artist sequesters herself away with a small community of other artists. While these models have value, especially when considering how solitude relates to the creative process, it’s heartening to me to see more models catch on that value the place of the writer in society, rather than hidden away from it.”
Breed-Solomon
Since it folds in three dimensions, we could store all of the world’s current data—everyone’s photos, every Facebook status update, all of Wikipedia, everything—using less than an ounce of DNA. And, with its propensity to replicate given the right conditions, millions of copies of DNA can be made in the lab in just a few hours. Such favorable traits make DNA an ideal candidate for storing lots of informations, for a long time, in a small space.But how stable is DNA? The Reed-Solomon method, long used to error-check data transmission and duplication, is now being explored as an adjunct to the long-term archiving of information encoded in DNA. A post by Alex Riley at the PBS Science blog NOVA/NEXT.
Why You Should Never Say: ‘Beauty Lies in the Eye of the Beholder’
"When we use the phrase, what we seem to be trying to say is that there should be a lot of room for intelligent disagreement around aesthetics – and that we don’t feel comfortable about asserting the superiority of any one style or approach over any other. It implies an acute sensitivity to conflict and a fear of being rude or mean to others. However, by resorting to the phrase, what we actually do is unleash a stranger and more reckless situation: what we’re in effect stating is that nothing is ever really more beautiful – or uglier – than anything else. This suggestion then has a way of implying that the whole subject is essentially trivial. After all, we’d never say that truths about the economy or justice were in the eyes of beholders only. We know that big things are at stake here – and over time, we’ve come to positions about the right and wrong way of approaching these topics, and are ready to discuss and defend our ideas. We wouldn’t ever say that ‘the treatment of the poor is just a subject best left entirely to the eyes of beholders’ or ‘the best way to raise children is in the eyes of beholders,’ or ‘the future of the environment is in the eyes of beholders.’ We accept that there are dangers to arguing in aggressive and unfruitful ways; but we are confident that there are sensible and polite ways to advance through these tricky yet vital debates. The same should feel true around beauty."
“Eve you wicked woman, you done put your curse on me!”
Jessica Gentile has compiled a brief-but-interesting listicle for Pitchfork: “Songs about PMS and Periods”
The Value of People with Down Syndrome
Karen Gaffney (TEDxPortland) speaks on history and present state of the value of people with Down syndrome. Gaffney (previously 1, 2), is the first living person with Down syndrome to receive an honory PhD and the president of an eponymous foundation dedicated to inclusion and advocacy. [more inside]
Mapping the United Swears of America
Hell, damn and bitch are especially popular in the south and southeast. Douche is relatively common in northern states. Bastard is beloved in Maine and New Hampshire, and those states – together with a band across southern Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas – are the areas of particular motherfucker favour. Crap is more popular inland, fuck along the coasts. Fuckboy – a rising star* – is also mainly a coastal thing, so far. from Strong Language via Kottke [NSFW language, natch]
My envy: it is boundless. Life on a houseboat (or in this case, a ketch)
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