May 6, 2019
"They looked like objects in the world that were not in the world"
Every time you look at a face, a group of neurons behind your ears goes wild with excitation. For a long time, scientists have pondered what it is, exactly, that tickles the very particular fancies of these neurons. Is it a certain eyes-nose-mouth combination that triggers its frenzy? A particular arrangement of colors? What is a face, to a neuron? In a groundbreaking Cell study, scientists found out through an unusual approach: They asked the cells themselves. [more inside]
The lusty month of Meltdown May
"Meltdown May has arrived. A whole month at the height of spring when you’re guaranteed to see people lose their shit online." I did not know that this was a Thing or a Holiday now, but I guess in our world this has now become a legit thing, y'all. [more inside]
Descending Invincible
The audio isn't as good as one might hope, and Maynard's vocals are sort of lost in the mix, but on Sunday night, Tool debuted two new songs. A new album (their first in 13 years) is at the mixing phase, and might be out in just a few months. Excite isn't strong enough a word. [more inside]
Remake the brains, rebuild my name
"Ignorance is often assumed to be not-yet-knowledgeable. But what if ignorance is strategically manufactured? What if the tools of knowledge production are perverted to enable ignorance?" ... "What’s at stake right now is not simply about hate speech vs. free speech or the role of state-sponsored bots in political activity. It’s much more basic. It’s about purposefully and intentionally seeding doubt to fragment society. To fragment epistemologies." danah boyd: Agnotology and Epistemological Fragmentation
"Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh, goroo, goroo!"
'An amphibious boy in a canvas suit': Charles Dickens's monsters: "The only thing that would prevent this whole passage from appearing in a Warhammer 40,000 novel is that GW's writers could never sustain this level of prose." Joseph Manola of the Against the Wicked City fantasy adventure gaming blog writes about Charles Dicken's powers of description. [more inside]
Why do we have to live in a square house?
The town of Hillsborough has always been at war with the Flintstone house but now files suit against its owner. The Flintstone house is well-recognized by Bay Area drivers as series of terracotta lumps off of the 280 in the wealthy enclave of Hillsborough. Well known for its architecture, the tastemakers of Hillsborough have not extended their favor to the experimental stylings of William Nicholson, the architect who came up with the idea of creating a house by spraying dry concrete over a structure molded from giant aeronautical balloons, wire mesh and rebar. Hillsborough filed suit against the current owner of the "highly visible eyesore" Flintstone house in March, declaring it a "public nuisance." [more inside]
Goodbye to the last of the Lindy Hoppers
“I want to apologise.”
The subreddit r/iwanttoapologize catalogues video clips of gaming world glitches that lead to bizarre, absurd and highly amusing moments. In Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V, for instance, a protagonist invites you for a drink and then immediately rams their car into a gas station and explodes. In Bethesda's Oblivion, a sorcerer wishes you a jovial “Farewell”, before a rising floor crushes him in a spike trap. In Square Enix’s Kingdom Hearts, Donald Duck waddles to take cover from a snowstorm. “The snowstorm can’t get us here,” he says – then quack-screams as it promptly blows him away. These clips, which players either engineer or come across by chance, are bizarre, silly and gleefully illogical. [via: Wired]
"To be or not to be, ay, there's the point"
After a catastrophic performance by Bill Barr (Atlantic), the Trump team resists oversight (AP) in a remarkable state of affairs between the executive and legislative branches, unseen in recent times, as Democrats try to break through Trump’s blockade of investigations and exert congressional oversight of the administration. On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee will vote to hold Barr in contempt (NYT). This is the US Politics megathread. [more inside]
The Basketmaker
Through the practice and poetry of basketmaking, lives, cultures, and generations intertwine. [more inside]
Workers Have The World To Win
The Spliter Series On The Future Of Labor “ Her general differences with the current AFL-CIO administration are clear: More agitating, more diversity, more focus on worker power, and less dependence on elected officials in the Democratic Party. She is outspoken in her belief that much of the money that the union world has poured into political donations would be better spent on new organizing, to try to turn around the decline in union membership. “ Sara Nelson Wants to Run That Militant Line All The Way to the Highest Seat in Labor “The relationship (between Unions and Democrats) was flawed from the start, though; the New Deal coalition had a very large, vocal Southern faction that was opposed to unions, mostly on the basis that they could help build racial solidarity among black and white workers.” Labor Needs A Party “Workers, of course, shouldn’t be reduced to using online petitions for basic needs that ought to be mandatory, like paid leave and fair wages, or apps which tell them what meager rights they have.” Labor Apps Won’t Save Us “While the United States has done far less than many peer nations to support social reproduction via the welfare state, there are heartening hints that the tide may be turning” The Revolution Will Be Cooked.
Should the baby be President of the United States?
There's a new Royal Baby™ as of 5:26 this morning. Any questions? The New York Times has you (interactively) covered.
Starve yourself, it's good for your health!
While fasting (which benefits are now backed with science) seems quite manageable to incorporate to our lifestyles, nowadays, more and more influential people are going into extreme practices that just look like pure sadism, questioning the true meaning of life.
I think Satie would approve.
Quentin and his Birdbox Orchestra is destined to become your new Favorite Music Video Of All Time.
sights and sounds of a soaked city
The New York Times' Past Tense Blog put together a series of photos of vintage New York in the rain, paired with soundscapes by Craig Henighan. When a hard rain descends on New York, the whole city feels it. Traffic stands still, puddles get deceptively deep and even the most intrepid of us cowers in the wakes of passing cabs. Any object an unsuspecting pedestrian is carrying quickly becomes a makeshift umbrella, and actual umbrellas quickly become hazards themselves, catching the wind or flipping inside out. "When it rains, it’s a whole different scene. Things happen. People forget about you. If they see you, they don’t go putting on airs. They’re the way they are.”
"It made Amazon the default."
The making of Amazon Prime, the internet’s most successful and devastating membership program: An oral history of the subscription service that changed online shopping forever.
Human society under urgent threat from loss of Earth's natural life
Scientists reveal one million species at risk of extinction in damning UN report A group of scientists from all over the world have written a damning report about the state of biodiversity on our small planet. Here is a link to the media release from IPBES, the organization behind the report. The title of this post is from The Guardian. [more inside]
"I imagined what a better person might do, and I did that instead."
Ted Chiang's Exhalation reviewed by Joyce Carol Oates - "'Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully', our narrator explains. 'My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything. . . . Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.'" (previously: 1,2)
What, this isn't how YOU spend your free time?
Of all the newspaper comic strips ever created, only one is so aggressively neutral that it is endlessly parodyable in countless ways. The latest? Garfeld: The Musical, a 90-minute Garfield parody musical. (Content warning: foul language, sexual references, violence, dog se--wait, that's just sexual references again)
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