April 28, 2019
Australia's war on feral cats
Feral felines are driving the country’s native species to extinction. Now a massive culling is underway to preserve what’s left of the wild. [CW: painful animal death, hunting] [more inside]
Finding more than 419 National Parks
Tongue Drum Music
An hypnotic loop of 8 year old playing the tongue drum endlessly.
Musician Tyrone Douglas plays 'Water drops'.
And there are instructional Youtube vids of how to build and make them.
Musician Tyrone Douglas plays 'Water drops'.
And there are instructional Youtube vids of how to build and make them.
Spoiler Alert!: It's about spoilers
"Why are the movies and TV shows we most worry will be spoiled for us always the most predictable ones?" [more inside]
Ancient Skies, Ancient Trees, Diamond Nights
See the world’s oldest trees by starlight. "Beth Moon slept under ancient baobabs and waited out the clouds to photograph Earth’s arboreal beauty at night." Catherine Zuckerman (@CatherineZDC) writes about the photography of Beth Moon (previously) for National Geographic.
A Monument to Shirley Chisholm
The She Built NYC public arts program (part of the women.nyc initiative, and funded by the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs), launched in 2018 “to honor women who have shaped New York City while addressing the absence of female statues in our public spaces,” has chosen “Our Destiny, Our Democracy,” the design from artists Amanda Williams and Olalekan Jeyifous, to honor trailblazing congresswoman Shirley "Unbought and Unbossed" Chisholm. [more inside]
Before the internet grew up, there were pay-per-minute 1-900 numbers
In 1987, AT&T turned the premium rate telephone numbers (Wikipedia) in the 1-900 series into an interactive, proto-internet of sorts, when they allowed the content providers to get a cut of the pay-per-call and per-minute charges, leading to an overnight boom in businesses, from dating and personals and pyschics (2x archived directories), to messages from celebrities like The Coreys and Warrant, plus sports news and video game tips, and a range of oddities and mysteries (YT x5), only $2.00 for the first minute and $0.99 for every additional minute. In 1993, there were more than 10,000 900 numbers in operation. But then the FTC cracked down (FTC.gov) and the internet grew up. This is the rise and fall of the 1-900 numbers (Priceonomics). [more inside]
The atmosphere in raisin town became tense.
“I don’t think you guys are understanding the supply and demand dynamics here,” the Sun-Maid chief thought. So, on October 22, he pulled Sun-Maid out of the Raisin Bargaining Association. The death threats started that month. [SLNYT]
Wikipedia's ongoing diversity problem
Wikipedia’s Refusal to Profile a Black Female Scientist Shows Its Diversity Problem You’ve probably never heard of Clarice Phelps. If you were curious, you might enter her name into Google. And, if you had done so anytime between September of last year and February of this year, you would likely have found her Wikipedia entry. The nuclear scientist is thought to be the first black woman to help discover a chemical element; she was part of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory team that purified the radioactive sample of berkelium-249 from which the new element, tennessine, was created. But on Feb. 11, in the middle of Black History Month and on the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, Phelps’ page was deleted. The optics, as they say, weren’t good. [more inside]
Sunday Listening: Easy & Affirming Edition
Power to the tiddies
Anatomically correct diagram of muscle on chest wall takes internet by storm. Internet is simultaneously awed and, disappointingly but unsurprisingly, disgusted. Other good reflections below the fold. [more inside]
Lunachicks on the “girl-band” quota
Members of the band Lunachicks, formed in NYC in 1987, speak out about the sexism they encountered during their 1990s heyday.
Venues, music publications, radio stations, and record labels would pit them against other all-women or mostly-women bands of the era like L7, Hole, and Babes In Toyland.
A civilization that sacrifices ancient peoples and cultures is an amoral
European and North American Companies Support Soy, Cattle, and Timber Companies Responsible for Recent Surge in Amazon Deforestation. Full report (pdf).
Members of more than 300 indigenous groups marched for land rights and protested against the right-wing government of Jair Bolsonaro. As on the same day the Supreme Court rejected an injunction challenging as unconstitutional a Bolsonaro administration provisional measure that transferred the authority over the demarcation of indigenous lands to the Ministry of Agriculture. [more inside]
Members of more than 300 indigenous groups marched for land rights and protested against the right-wing government of Jair Bolsonaro. As on the same day the Supreme Court rejected an injunction challenging as unconstitutional a Bolsonaro administration provisional measure that transferred the authority over the demarcation of indigenous lands to the Ministry of Agriculture. [more inside]
That's strange, sir. I don't have any recollection of that at all.
Everywhere at the End of Time is an "upsetting" and "almost irrationally ambitious" six-part album by The Caretaker AKA Leyland Kirby, musically interpreting the progressive dementia of that character from The Shining. The full album on YouTube, Bandcamp.
From the Fluid Radio review of volume 6: "For The Caretaker, the end is inevitable. Permanent. The ballroom glows. Submerged, decomposing melodies grow in volume." (CW: mental health) [more inside]
Controlling the tanks is kinda cumbersome, but they are tanks, after all
“When playing our game, for the first 5-10 minutes many players don’t understand that it is not fictional. They message us saying: ‘You have cool texture, you have good graphics, your designer is good, well done. You have a cool operating system.’ People then reply: ‘It is not an operating system, it is real,’ and the player can’t believe it is real.” Chernobyl comes back to life in Ukrainian computer game, Isotopium: Chernobyl.
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