October 16, 2019
Please regard this as a menu, not a college course
NPR's podcast Hidden Brain recently completed their 2019 edition of their series, You 2.0. Across six episodes, it explores ways people might be able to improve themselves and break old patterns to move into renewed progress in their lives. Episodes run from around 30 minutes to around an hour. Episode 1 is The Empathy Gym [53m] "On this episode of Hidden Brain, we talk about calibrating our empathy so we can interact with others more mindfully." [more inside]
"I was shocked that instead of a hit or a slap, she wanted to hug me."
"I don't think I need to forgive you, because I understand what happened. He and I were like two rocketships on the same trajectory, from different directions. He had been raised and trained in an environment that caused him to react exactly like you would expect a human being to react, given his training and environment. I was doing exactly the same thing, reacting exactly how I was trained. To me it was almost inevitable what had happened. I don't need to forgive him. If he wants it, if that's something that would be of value to him, I would give it." Ear Hustle, the podcast featuring inmates at San Quentin State Prison in California, talks about forgiveness. CW: graphic descriptions of violence. The Victim Offender Dialogue program as mentioned in the show.
shiny speedy ant
These Desert Ants Gallop at a Blistering 108 Body Lengths Per Second "Just how quick these iridescent arthropods can be, and how they achieve those speeds, is explained for the first time today in the Journal of Experimental Biology (paywalled). Saharan silver ants can travel at 108 body lengths a second, the researchers found. This makes them one of the fastest known running species, bested only by the California coastal mite and the Australian tiger beetle."
Yahoo Groups Is Winding Down
...and all content will be permanently removed. Users won't be able to upload new content to the site after October 21 and have until December 14 to archive their content, Yahoo said in an announcement.
Two Essays and a New Book from Andrea Long Chu
Andrea Long Chu, On Liking Women:
The truth is, I have never been able to differentiate liking women from wanting to be like them. For years, the former desire held the latter in its mouth, like a capsule too dangerous to swallow. When I trawl the seafloor of my childhood for sunken tokens of things to come, these bus rides are about the gayest thing I can find. They probably weren’t even all that gay. It is common, after all, for high school athletes to try to squash the inherent homoeroticism of same-sex sport under the heavy cleat of denial. But I’m too desperate to salvage a single genuine lesbian memory from the wreckage of the scared, straight boy whose life I will never not have lived to be choosy. The only other memory with a shot at that title is my pubescent infatuation with my best friend, a moody, low-voiced, Hot Topic–shopping girl who, it dawned on me only many years later, was doing her best impression of Shane from The L Word. One day she told me she had a secret to tell me after school; I spent the whole day queasy with hope that a declaration of her affections was forthcoming. Later, over the phone, after a pause big enough to drown in, she told me she was gay. “I thought you might say that,” I replied, weeping inside. A decade later, after long having fallen out of touch, I texted her. “A week ago, I figured out that I am trans,” I wrote. “You came out to me all those years ago. Just returning the favor.”[more inside]
We are working, we are working
On the eve of a(nother) crunch European Council on Brexit, negotiations on a possible deal are ongoing in Brussels. [more inside]
💾🕹️
2500 Classic MS-DOS Games Are Now Free To Play [Internet Archive] “The Internet Archive has been building a growing collection of old PC games over the years, with a batch of DOS games added in 2015, and Windows 3.1 games in 2016—all of them playable in your browser. This month another update has hit the collection, and now 2,500 more games (often with their manuals) have been preserved for the ages. Highlights of the latest set include Street Fighter 2, The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, Loom, The Lost Vikings, Magic Carpet Plus, Robotron 2084, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Queen of Krynn, King's Quest 1 and 2, The Lords of Midnight, The Incredible Machine and its sequel, the first three Bard's Tale games, and plenty more.” [via: PC Gamer]
The Human Alphabet
"There is arguably nothing more human than the alphabet, given that language, and particularly written language, often tops the list of qualities which distinguish our dear species most distinctly from others. To form the letters of these alphabets using the human body is then, perhaps, not so strange a leap..." (links 1 & 2 potentially NSFW). [more inside]
E/V Nautilus found a recently deceased whale
WHALEFALL! NOAA's Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary’s exploration vessel Nautilus has “just discovered a whale skeleton on the seafloor covered in bone-eating worms, cusk eels, and octopus devouring this massive deep sea meal.” You can watch live, with commentary by the Nautilus team, who are also taking questions.
Yes, in Fact We ARE the 800 Pound Gorilla!
This past Monday morning at 8:05 AM EST, the Twitter account for Disney's forthcoming Disney+ streaming service posted a tweet saying, "It. Is. Time." [more inside]
Thinking Outside the Plane
Tarski's Plank Problem1,2 asks for the least number of strips of width 1 that will cover a circular hole of diameter N. Though the strips are allowed to overlap, the configuration that will occur to most people is N parallel strips side by side, with no overlap and no gaps. But is this the best possible?
The middle strips in this configuration cover the most area, while the strips on the edge don't seem to pull their weight. Could a bunch of strips crossing the center in different directions do better? But the outer circumference also needs to be fully covered, and that's one thing "edge" strips do well. There's no obvious right way to measure each strip's contribution. It's a maddening little puzzle, whose resolution surprisingly lies in... [more inside]
Cherrypicks: The Best Place to See What Women Think About Movies
Cherrypicks is a movie review site based entirely on the reviews of female-identifying and non-binary voices. As women, we consume more than half the media in the world. And newsflash: we’ve also got opinions. That’s why we made CherryPicks, the best place to see what women think about movies and more. We create a unique score based on reviews from female-identifying and non-binary voices, so whether you’re looking for a night out, or a night on the couch, you know the opinions you trust come from women like you. The site also features race and representation-focused articles like In “Always Be My Maybe,” Asian American Men Play the Heartthrobs: Undoing the Damage of Long Duk Dong and review categories like “Moms in Horror” and “LGBTQ Coming of Age Stories”. [more inside]
"She says, ‘Tell the ambulance not to come.’ She just needs the police."
One Night at Mount Sinai: A star doctor drugs, then sexually assaults his patient. Aja Newman was dozing from the morphine. David Newman entered Room 8 and told her he was going to give her another dose. She objected. She had already been given morphine, she said, but the doctor was determined. ... “I’m like, ‘Wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is not okay.’ And I am immediately concerned. I’m going under way too fast,” she remembers. But even then, it didn’t occur to her that David had any intention of harming her.
I didn’t want to be an armchair revolutionary.
“ And the gap between the smallness of everything I could realistically do and the largeness of everything I wanted to happen was so immense. I was deeply pessimistic, intellectually. The time in which to transform the global economy in order to prevent untold death and destruction shrank daily, and the forces of reaction grew stronger just as fast. So I wanted to do something ambitious and hard: something commensurate with the monstrosity of the world, with the distance of utopia and the nearness of catastrophe. There was so much I wanted to change, so many people I wanted to move. In the daily struggle to build the union and beat the boss and the odds, I saw something I desperately wanted to learn.” Spadework : On political organizing (N+1)
For Asian-American Artists, K-Pop Is A Homecoming
A history of Americans in K-pop and K-pop in America and a video series featuring three former K-pop stars making their American debuts. [more inside]
Victoria(n) mourning: how the Widow of Windsor changed Victorian customs
Although Queen Victoria had been on the throne for over twenty years, the 14th December 1861 marked the beginning of the reign of the mourning Queen (Royal Central). After Prince Albert’s death, Queen Victoria decreed that everyone in the household had to appear in full mourning while on duty for two years and although official mourning for the Prince ended in 1863, women at court still had their wardrobes dictated by the Queen (Enough of this Tomfoolery blog), which influenced society at large and and abroad.... [more inside]
Daily
"Code’s effects can surprise everyone, including the coders."
Superman Smashes the Klan
It began as a 1940s radio serial (which is soon to be the subject of a documentary film). This week it becomes a comic book which starts its run today.
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