April 13
Religious Freedom vs. Abortion Ban
ACLU files a suit for religious exemption based on Judaism, Islam, and Paganism. ACLU: "On September 8, we filed suit to stop SB 1 on the grounds that it violates Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). Our class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of Hoosier Jews for Choice, and five women who, like many Hoosiers, have sincere religious beliefs that they must be able to obtain an abortion under circumstances prohibited by Indiana’s abortion ban. Our plaintiffs are at risk of needing an abortion in the future that are allowed by their religious beliefs." [more inside]
Six months and counting
Gaza in a Million Pieces - Arwa Damon, founder and president of the charity INARA, writes for New Lines Magazine of her observations now that she's able to enter Gaza || Le Monde: Despite promises, Israel still restricts aid to Gaza (ungated) || Washington Post: Crutches and chocolate croissants: Gaza aid items Israel has rejected (ungated) || New Yorker (Isaac Chotiner interview with Yuval Abraham): Inside Israel’s Bombing Campaign in Gaza || Haaretz: Israel Has Declared Record Amount of West Bank Land as State-owned in 2024 || Mondoweiss: ‘Come out, you animals’: how the massacre at al-Shifa Hospital happened || Sydney Morning Herald (12 April): Australian former reporter, now aid worker, shot at in Gaza [more inside]
Selbstbestimmungsgesetz
Landmark Vote for Trans Rights Law (Human Rights Watch) – "Germany’s parliament on April 12, 2024, passed a landmark law that allows transgender and non-binary people to modify their legal documents to reflect their gender identity through an administrative procedure based on self-identification …" [more inside]
Wagon breaks down
In 1971, three student teachers in Minneapolis, MN created a little computer game about westward expansion in the United States. Over 50 years later, The Oregon Trail series has sold more than 65 million copies and has been inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. But the original creators never made a penny off the game. This is a lovely, slow-placed documentary about how the game was made and spread, with background information about the state of the computer industry and education in MN at the time. [more inside]
The Shape of Scents
On mapping olfaction, neuroscientist Jason Castro writes:
Our noses may turn out to be geometers not of the world’s fixed and invariant properties, but of its evolved and Earthly processes.
The Black Sun of Democracy
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy is arguably one of the oldest continuously functioning democracies in the world, and greatly influenced the thinking of the founders of the United States. This post is about the argument over just how old it is, why that matters, and what eclipses have to do with it. [more inside]
CosPlato
Na Cailleacha, from the Irish word ‘cailleach’ meaning a witch or a divine hag, want to explore what it means to be women who are getting older and arguably becoming invisible and to devise strategies to overcome the challenges of ageing. Their latest project is the School of Hibernia: a tableau vivant of Raphael's School of Athens with all the roles modelled by women. [more inside]
Wide Awakes in America
And that Northern strength, to many, looked like the Wide Awakes. The Republicans, after all, had performed best in states where the movement was largest, among exactly the kind of young, laboring moderates the Wide Awakes mobilized. In the final assessment of the New York Tribune, the most popular Republican newspaper, the election was decided by the Democratic Party’s internal divisions and by the massive Wide Awake movement. That organization “embodied” the Republican cause, the Tribune argued, becoming a concise symbol for millions who hated the Slave Power. from The Club of Cape-Wearing Activists Who Helped Elect Lincoln—and Spark the Civil War [Smithsonian]
April 12
26-year-old researcher just helped identify 12 new dinosaurs
26-year-old researcher just helped identify 12 new dinosaurs. Samantha Beeston spent endless hours in outback Queensland scanning hundreds of dinosaur bones that had been dug up over more than 15 years.
That vast, astonishing, multiplicity of vision
“So when I started working on the story that turned into All Systems Red, I realized right away I wanted to write an AI that didn't want to be human…I was thinking a lot about what an AI would actually want, as opposed to what a human might think an AI would want…. I think it would want that connection to other systems, that vast, astonishing, multiplicity of vision.”—Martha Wells, from her keynote speech at the annual Jack Williamson Lecture at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, New Mexico.
Why do Rabbits like IPAs? Because they're hoppy!
I'm the Draft List at This Brewery, and No, You Can't Have a Light Beer
"Sure, we made a 'normal' IPA once. But then we were like, why make a beer that's enjoyable to drink when we could make a beer that's not?" [McSweeneys]
Dogs And Language
Here's a summary of various studies that look at dogs and language. A couple of videos are included, one of them is this video: Dogs understand words as we do [2m20s] which is a summary of this paper, one of several linked in the first link in this post. [more inside]
"If you're watching this now then you're procrastinating too"
Parallel Lives
Lost Tapes From Major Musicians Are Out There. These Guys Find Them.
What do we owe the dead?
Voices of Mourning by Hannah Gold. An interesting personal essay on the book About Ed by Robert Glück, exploring grief and mourning. It also raises the question - whose life is allowed to be remembered for the person they were rather than their surrounding political context?
Learning to milk wild camels is just one challenge for this dairy
Learning to milk wild camels is just one challenge for this dromedary dairy. When you think of camels, you probably imagine them in a desert. But in lush, green Hunter Valley paddocks, Michelle Phillips keeps 50 — and their milk is in high demand.
Levine mostly finds this amusing
OpenAI Training Bot Crawls 'World's Lamest Content Farm' 3 Million Times in One Day “If you were wondering what they're using to train GPT-5, well, now you know,” Levine wrote in his post.
^•ﻌ•^ฅ oh, hello ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ...
meow.camera lets you watch live feeds from hundreds (thousands?) of cozy and custom-decorated cat feeders set up throughout various cities in China. [more inside]
We had the Sex Pistols play here and you’re worse!
“I was 25,” she says. “I’d go for my mouth and nothing would come out. It started when I was pregnant with my eldest daughter, and I just put it down to the pregnancy, but it wasn’t a happy time in my life. I think my then-husband wasn’t that keen on having a baby, blah blah blah, it was a difficult time, which we got through, but I think it impacted on me a bit.”Folk legend Linda Thompson has been suffering from dysphonia since the early seventies, making it harder and harder for her to record new albums. For her latest, she got other people to sing her songs, called it Proxy Music and recreated the album cover from Roxy Music's eponymous debut. Alexis Petridis interviews her for The Guardian on the album and her personal history in folk.
Marine worm with extraordinary vision
Marine worm with extraordinary vision "The wide-eyed sea worm Vanadis has long interested the world's vision scientists. But the worm has been difficult to study because it lives in the open sea and is only active at night. Now a research team has managed to locate an Italian worm colony and can establish that the worm has a completely unique sight." [paper]
The classy, healthy, and ethical thing to do is move on
Rejection isn’t the same as heartbreak, which entails a past acceptance. A rejection implies that you don’t even warrant a try. From the reject’s perspective, the reciprocity of heartbreak looks pretty appealing. And if you’re going to suffer, it may as well be exciting. Who would choose the flat desolation of rejection over rough-and-tumble drama, especially if they end the same way? The cliché—tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all—is comforting to the heartbroken, but damning to the rejected. No matter how unpleasant or unequal, a breakup is at least something you share with someone else. Rejection makes only one reject. from The Rejection Plot by Tony Tulathimutte [The Paris Review; ungated]
April 11
In Defense of Never Learning How To Cook
Finding independence in a perfectly cooked egg I found it while walking through the home-goods section of T.J. Maxx, the American retail equivalent of the Garden of Earthly Delights, at 8:00 on a Tuesday night in 2015.... Somewhere among these novelties I spotted a carelessly abandoned gadget calling itself the Dash Rapid Egg Cooker. The cashier who rang me up did not share my enthusiasm for the cheery cockiness of its packaging, which proclaimed that it “Perfectly Cooks 6 Eggs at a Time!” Baffled, she asked me a question, the answer to which would have embarrassed anyone but me: “Don’t you know how to boil water?” [more inside]
Rare turtles are making a comeback after a virus almost wiped them out
These rare turtles are making a comeback after a virus almost wiped them out. Nearly 100 captive-bred Bellinger River snapping turtles have been released into the wild, the biggest number yet for the breeding program after a virus nearly wiped them out in 2015.
Online, we are all Girls.
blog post from molly soda. a really interesting collection of links: some abstract, some avant garde, some silly; all exploring concepts of girlhood from different angles. there's been a lot of talk online about "girls". what can that mean? maybe some of this will help! [more inside]
Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert, Found
Region 9 has thrown up a detective story for archaeologists.
Pompeii: Breathtaking new paintings found at ancient city A wide residential and commercial block, known as "Region 9", is being cleared of several metres of overlying pumice and ash thrown out by Vesuvius almost 2,000 years ago.(Pompeii previously)
Lengthy how-I-get-to-sleep notes
"Notes on sleep" by Jed Hartman: "For many years, I had various forms of insomnia, and I still occasionally have trouble falling asleep and/or wake up too early and can’t get back to sleep. This page covers some of the things that have and haven’t helped me with that." And: "2024 sleep masterpost" by Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz for short): "Occasionally people on the internet ask for the community's collected wisdom about sleep. This is what I can think of for my own sleep routines, tips, and tricks, plus what I do about various confounding factors.... I have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, primary insomnia, sleep maintenance insomnia, and ADHD." The latter has people sharing their experiences in the comments. (Disclaimer: I know both these people.)
Hey voter voter voter voter... SWING!
See how demographic swings could impact the 2024 election: 538's new Swing-O-Matic shows which states could flip under different scenarios. [ABC News]. 538's Swing-O-Matic page gets interactive under the bold headline Create your own scenario with a bunch of sliders you can push back and forth to see how minor demographic shifts might have major implications for the 2024 US Presidential election.
Columnists and Their Lives of Quiet Desperation
Most columnists are mediocre. This is not their fault. Almost no one on earth is capable of having two good ideas per week... [more inside]
OJ Simpson dead at 76
OJ Simpson dead at 76 Remember the slow white suv LA chase?
Following in her hoofsteps
Exploring the Wallowas with the modern-day "Horsewomen of the Hen Party" The descendants of Jean Birnie, founder of the Oregon Hen Party previously, follow her journeys into the Wallowas on horseback, surmounting challenges, deepening bonds, and absorbing the beauty of nature, in this documentary short from OPB.
Two tennis balls surgically removed from scrub python
Two tennis balls surgically removed from scrub python. A Far North Queensland wildlife carer says he has seen just about everything in his 20 years on the job until he was called about a surprise find in a Cooktown backyard.
Welcome the new Overlords
How Did American Capitalism Mutate Into American Corporatism
In short, this corporatism – in all its iterations including the regulatory state and the patent war chest that maintains and enforces monopoly – is the core source of all the current despotism.
In short, this corporatism – in all its iterations including the regulatory state and the patent war chest that maintains and enforces monopoly – is the core source of all the current despotism.
Akebono Tarō has left the ring
Hawai'ian born sumo legend Chadwick Haheo Rowan, better known worldwide as Akebono, the first non-Japanese-born wrestler to reach grand master / yokozuna has died of heart failure. He was 54.
The Devil Went Down to Georgia
For years, a mysterious figure preyed on gay men in Atlanta. People on the streets called him the Handcuff Man--but the police knew his real name. (CW: homophobia, violence) slTheAtavist
the philosophy of absolute extinction
Philosopher Ben Ware has been giving some thought to the politics of the end of the world, and has written a new book, On Extinction (Verso), to talk about it. But the end is coming fast and maybe you don't have time for a whole book, so let's read some essays instead! "Nothing but the End to Come" brings together Walter Benjamin, Kafka, de Sade and Extinction Rebellion to suggest that all our language about the end feeds "into a politics of passive annihilation." [more inside]
"AI-powered relationship coaching for a new generation of lonely adults"
It was clear to Nyborg that apps such as Tinder were failing their users: designed to keep them coming back, rather than to find a partner and never return. In that moment, it wasn’t fear she felt but empathy. Through letters like this one she had learnt a lot about a particular group of Tinder’s users: those who were “incredibly lonely” ... When she quit, several investors reached out to Nyborg, asking if she planned to start another dating app. Instead Nyborg took a different turn. She began researching loneliness. The new app she came up with looked very different from Tinder. from The loneliness cure [Financial Times; ungated]
Scientific American November 1986
A fascinating glimpse of what was going on in the science world 38 years ago in the November 1986 issue of Scientific American and what has changed and what has remained the same: Voyager 2's visit to Uranus cover story and how a fix had to be made from Earth • Affordable housing problems - "The Shadow Market in Housing" • Learn about the Higgs boson long before it was found (RIP Peter Higgs) • Galileo, Bruno and the Inquisition • Computer Recreations - "Star Trek emerges from the underground to a place in the home-computer arcade" • The Amateur Scientist - "... experiments on three-dimensional vision" • All the 1986 ads, including "Texas Instruments brings the practical applications of AI to your business. Now." (p 15) [more inside]
April 10
The Sun is entering its solar maximum, which excites aurora fans
The Sun is entering its solar maximum. For aurora hunters in Antarctica, there's nothing quite like it. The Sun is putting on a show for Earth, with the highest level of geomagnetic activity in six years. Mawson Station chef Justin Chambers photographed a recent aurora and explains what it's like to watch the spectacle from about as far south as you can go.
As the sun enters the solar maximum — the period of greatest solar activity during its 11-year solar cycle — Mr Chambers said he has witnessed the best aurora of his life, and managed to get it on camera.
Has Uploaded Intelligence been deleted? Or is it hiding on the web?
In September 2022, the first season of animated science fiction series Pantheon debuted on AMC+. By January of the following year, the series was cancelled and wiped from the streaming service, despite the completion of a season 2. [more inside]
Dear {Person's name}
The USPS declared April to be National Card and Letter Writing Month… 23 years ago. American Library Association has some ideas on epistolary fun within games. The Chicago Public Library has suggestions for epistolary novels. The Universal Postal Union has a letter writing competition for writers aged 9 to 15 on the theme: "Write a letter to future generations about the world you hope they inherit." The Smithsonian National Postal Museum has an epistolary fiction project which includes an extensive if not exhaustive list of novels, starting with Xenophon of Ephesus. [more inside]
The Function of Colour in Schools & Hospital
The Function of Colour in Schools & Hospitals, 1930. Just some wonderful illustrations of those things. via.
“I’m so willing to die in shein clothes.”
Super Cute Please Like is a long, fascinating essay by Nicole Lipman in N+1 about fast fashion giant SHEIN, examining its clothes, business practices and history, but touching on fashion blogs, Sinophobia, the origins of fast fashion and gamification.
He is our collective responsibility. They all are.
In this story, we'll follow hundreds of teenagers for the next 24 years, when they’ll be in their late-30s. They're among the thousands of kids who are part of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. This means researchers have followed them since their teenage years to the present day – and beyond. from this is a teenager [The Pudding] [more inside]
‘He killed my sister. Now I see his remorse’
The extraordinary stories of survivors of the Rwandan genocide who forgave their attackers (SL Guardian)
How do people overcome such trauma, especially in poor nations with minimal mental healthcare? In 2005, Dutch sociotherapist Cora Dekker developed an affordable, effective method in collaboration with the diocese of Byumba of the Anglican church. This approach, originally used by qualified staff in western clinics to treat military personnel and asylum seekers, was transformed into volunteer work involving trained therapists from local African communities. In Rwanda it is known as Mvura Nkuvure: “I heal you, you heal me.” More than 64,000 Rwandans have completed the therapy.
Justin Trudeau's Last Stand
To self-censor, he says, would mean “I start second-guessing myself and don’t trust my own instincts.” (slTheWalrus) [more inside]
50 birds, the exhibition (a custom LEGO letterpress technique)
The Eurasian Wren, the Barn Swallow, the Northern Goshawk, the Little Owl, the Great Tit. Artist Roy Scholten has created prints of 50 different birds using LEGO bricks as the printing matter. The exhibit opens April 14 at the Grafisch Atelier Hilversum in Hilversum, Netherlands.
The Day May Break
Nick Brandt is a photographer working with themes of climate apocalypse. Sink / Rise is chapter 3 of his series The Day May Break.
Bulldog Utterly Bowled Over
Videos from The Dodo are usually a bit sappy but always heartwarming. However, Bulldog Obsessed With Bowls Gets A Special Delivery [3m20s] is full of exactly the kind of WTF that leads me to post it here.
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