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ZOOZVE
It’s not a moon, but it’s also not not a moon. A strange label on his child’s bedroom poster leads Latif Nasser on an exploration of the solar system. Via Thread Reader and Radiolab.
Defunding liberal arts is dangerous for health care
While liberal arts have been declining on college campuses, medical education is moving in the opposite direction, using the arts and humanities as teaching modalities within the traditional basic and applied sciences coursework that dominates medical school curricula. Through literature, poetry, theater, and visual arts, students acquire important professional capacities, such as tolerance of ambiguity, skillful clinical communication, and sensitivity in listening to and learning from patient stories.
In my 20s they said I was brutal
Today on the 150th birthday of W. "Willie" Somerset Maugham, prolific author of plays, novels and short stories, he sums up his life in letters [1m50s].
Nothings which are made Great and dignified by an ardent pursuit
Keats had no particular regard for consistency, and what he says in his letters about poetry and the imagination constitutes no systematic defence. Poetry was essential to his existence; for others, he knew, its value might be less. Nevertheless, even in playful musings on the unreal and the unvalued he is thinking about the power of address, of recognition, to bring into being what might not otherwise exist. from Hooted from the Stage [LRB; ungated]
"You can think of it sort of like a idiots version of Slack"
"Current Boeing employee here – I will save you waiting two years for the NTSB report to come out and give it to you for free: the reason the door blew off is stated in black and white in Boeings own records." In two comments on an aviation blog, someone claiming to be a Boeing employee details the exact steps leading to door plug bolts not being installed on an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9. The Seattle Times investigated and called the account convincing.
Movie: Close-Up
The true story of Hossain Sabzian, a cinephile who impersonated the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf to convince a family they would star in his so-called new film.
A Legal Terrorist
Michael Kruse, writing in Politico, ‘This to Him Is the Grand Finale’: Donald Trump’s 50-Year Mission to Discredit the Justice System, is a VERY long read that begins with the Trumps being sued for racist rental properties in the early Seventies and being defended by Roy Cohn, and moves forward decade by decade and provides a LOT of really interesting and necessary context for what we will be seeing happen this year in various courts around the country.
As if words could make a difference
What a concatenation of memories, then, strung itself together when I read Ken’s name in Raritan! The individual links in the chain are surprisingly vivid, but put them together and the result is as jumbled as a dream. As one gets older, dreams and memories become increasingly indistinguishable anyway. The occasions mashed together or juxtaposed; the different roles I was playing; the varied fields of knowledge, each with its distinct vocabulary and bibliography, each impinging on my life from a different direction, each with its own kind of urgency: had this congeries been in abeyance for the decade that had elapsed from 2006 to 2016? from The Trembling Web and the Storage Facility by Rachel Hadas
Worldcon does it again
WorldCon 2023 is long over and the Hugo Winners were announced back in October, after a controversy involving boycotts from some creators in protest of the Uighur minority persecuted by China, and the invitation of Sergey Lukyanenko as a guest of honor. When the list of award nominees came out, there were some curious absences, specifically R. F. Kuang’s Babel, previously considered a front runner. There were suspicions that some works had been removed from contention for political reasons. The nomination statistics for the awards have been released (this is required by the Worldcon charter if I understand correctly) and they are not just curious, they are super hinky and the math literally doesn’t add up. Blockbuster analysis with links to additional commentary here by Cora Buhlert.
The Blazing World
Margaret Cavendish's multiverse science fiction from 1666 predates Mary Shelly, Jules Verne and Marvel by more than a century. She also published books of poetry under her own name, discussed her science research at the Royal Society, and designed gender neutral clothing that she wore at Queen Mary's court. Samuel Pepy's mentioned her a few times, although he was not a fan.
Trolley Problem Solution
"Got tired of having [the trolley problem] conversation over and over again so I just spent way too much time making this." [SLMastoImageLink, via your friends in IWW IU 520, Railroad Workers.)
This is a fictional account of how the facts began to wobble
There was something else, too, harder to explain. I often felt as though I’d made contact with a deeper order. I would have been ashamed to describe it, this sense that—whatever any editor’s conscious agenda—we might all be making edits to a vast, intricate work whose meaning we could not perceive. from The Hofmann Wobble by Ben Lerner [Harper's; ungated]
Miles Davis's Disappearing Act
"As an artist, he dissolved into his work: not quite absenting himself, or not only that, but diffusing himself throughout. He moved in the direction of creating, let's say, systems that would self-generate music, or that he could switch on and switch off, with which he could engage and disengage. Once the system was in place, his job was to assemble its players and feed it bits of input. 'All I did,' he said in his autobiography regarding Bitches Brew (1970) and Live-Evil (1971), 'was get everyone together and write a few things.'" Ben Ratliff on the electric music of Miles Davis (NYRB; ungated).
It came from the grass roots
How Trump went from disgraced insurrectionist to Iowa caucus winner
- "By most accounts, the Republican old guard has no great fondness for the man who executed a hostile takeover of their party, saddled them with daily political headaches during his time in office, and then instigated an insurrection that nearly got some GOP leaders pummeled, if not killed. Yet McConnell and his allies have proven incapable of steering their party in another direction." (via)
Win, Place or Drone
In professional horse racing, it takes a fraction of a second for a race to change course entirely, so if a bettor can spot that a horse in second place is making a late charge before anyone else, they can place a bet on it winning when the odds are more favourable. from The Horse, the Drone and the Epic Fight for Gambling Success [Wired; ungated]
I can't accept drum 'n' bass, we need jungle I'm afraid.
Brainy quiz show University Challenge gets pedantic over the difference between drum 'n' bass and jungle, and Nathan Filer calls for remixes of Amol Rajan's insistence that "We need jungle I'm afraid!!" The internet responds. My favourites: One Two Three Four. Amol explains his delight at going viral.
A River Runs To It
These entrancing maps capture where the world’s rivers go.
When Hungarian cartographer Robert Szucs looked online for a map of the world’s rivers based on their ocean destination, he found nothing on a global scale with high resolution. “It’s like, how does this thing not exist? So, I just instantly put it on my to-do list."
Surprisingly It's Not Muscular Fan Struggles With Water Bottle
Baseball And The Algorithm:
The MLB YouTube channel has posted 291,289 videos. If you had to guess what happens in the video with the very most views, what would you say?
How to support trans girl scouts
Did you know that for a long time, Girl Scouts has openly included transgender and nonbinary individuals in its membership? I first learned of this three years ago while searching for a source for my annual Girl Scout cookie purchase. At that time, a wave of anti-trans sentiment was intensifying, prompting me to seek out transgender Girl Scouts from whom to order. One major benefit of their online ordering system is that it allows for trans girl scouts to sell their cookies with relative privacy and no contact between the scout and the purchaser when it comes to online orders. ... the kids are under attack this year more than ever, so let's give them some joy. Erin Reed on where to get your cookies.
Mouse secretly filmed tidying man’s shed every night.
No lie.
This Guardian story has a link to his footage.
Minimum Wage Clock
This began as a quick-and-dirty experiment to visualize the UK National Minimum Wage in real-time, inspired by Blake Fall-Conroy’s Minimum Wage Machine.
Then I added the US Federal Minimum Wage, since a sizeable proportion of this blog’s readership are US-based. Did you know the US also has a Youth Minimum Wage? I didn’t.
Then I got curious, and added some CEO salaries for comparison. The vast disparity is nothing new to me, but seeing it like this...
It’s fucking sobering.
Firm develops jet fuel made entirely from human poo
A new aviation company has developed a type of jet fuel made entirely from human sewage.
Chemists at a lab in Gloucestershire have turned the waste into kerosene.
James Hygate, Firefly Green Fuels CEO, said: "We wanted to find a really low-value feedstock that was highly abundant. And of course poo is abundant."
Independent tests by international aviation regulators found it was nearly identical to standard fossil jet fuel.
Firefly's team worked with Cranfield University to examine the fuel's life cycle carbon impact. It concluded that Firefly's fuel has a 90% lower carbon footprint than standard jet fuel.
Pour One Out for John Pilger
John Pilger has died at age 84.
One of the most strident critics of US and UK foreign policy, Australian journalist John Pilger has died of pulmonary fibrosis.
Newport medieval ship's timber dated to within months
Newport medieval ship's timber dated to within months using oxygen isotope dendrochronology - an advanced study of tree-ring data.
Experts used oxygen isotope dendrochronology to estimate when the timbers were harvested which has been called a revolutionary development in dating wood, like the advent of DNA technology in criminology.
"This process is only five to 10 years old and allows us to find answers today that we couldn't get before," said Prof Nigel Nayling, University of Wales Trinity St David's chair of archaeology.
Twenty Interesting charts for 2023
Kevin Drum is still blogging.
Kevin Drum began blogging in the 2002–2003 era when the practice really took off.
Kevin has a knack for finding, presenting, and trusting the numbers for issues, regardless of his partisan political leanings.
Here are 20 charts from the last year that may surprise you.
This is the good news story you needed on the last day of the year.
The Washington Post Revisits Stories from This Year to See Where They Are Now
In January, I posted this thread about Devon Henry, a Black Virginia contractor who was hired to take down a Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery when no one else would. In doing so, Henry took on significant risk with workers walking off site, being told his business would be ruined, and having to wear a bullet-proof vest to work every day. An update is the 5th story at the gift link above.
I'm really not sure you can actually script this
In so funny and cute🤣!The kitten took the rooster on an outdoor trip.The happiest rooster in the world [8m11s], a cat takes a rooster on a walk down to a lakeside. I don't think you can engineer this happening. It's a cat. Once they get there, the cat begins tasting the rooster but does not horribly eat them. They seem to be friends. It's a happy video.
The Atlantic's "81 Things That Blew Our Minds in 2023"
Where The Atlantic’s Science, Technology, and Health reporters found wonder this year. (The archive for article and all of its links in The Atlantic)
The King and the Kickboxer
"Five years ago, an unusual image appeared on Instagram. It showed Mohammed VI, the 54-year-old king of Morocco, sitting on a sofa next to a muscular man in sportswear. The two men were pressed up next to each other with matching grins like a pair of kids at summer camp. Moroccans were more accustomed to seeing their king alone on a gilded throne. The story behind the picture was even stranger. Abu Azaitar, the 32-year-old man sitting next to the king, is a veteran of the German prison system as well as a mixed-martial-arts (mma) champion." From April of this year, The Economist's 1843 Magazine, "The mystery of Morocco’s missing king."
An evil vanquished so completely it has been all but forgotten
Cretinism and goitre were among the great medical mysteries of 19th-century Europe. The overlap of the conditions was a source of fascination, as was their geographical specificity. Scientists, medics and armchair experts flocked to the Alps, seeming to discount nothing in their investigations: landscape, elevation, atmospheric electricity, snow melt, sunlight (too much and too little), ‘miasma’, bad beer, stagnant air, incest and ‘moral failure’. ... In 1876, a list of the most promising theories was published; it featured forty different hypotheses. from A National Evil [LRB; ungated]
I'm okay with my tax dollars paying for this
The website fatherhood.gov maintains a database of Dad Jokes.
Weird Trumps
This belief in tarot as a revealer of hidden truths is not the survival of some ancient tradition. It’s a modern idea grafted on to something that was originally intended as a bit of fun. Tarot was a card game played in a fairly recognisable way, with the players laying down a card to compete for the highest value in a series of tricks – but with 20 or so ornate picture cards, depending on the set, to complicate the scoring. These were so beautifully crafted, so visually splendid, that their designs now obsess and befuddle people centuries after it was first played by Renaissance courtiers. But tarot is no more mysterious in its origins than Happy Families. from Dr Terror deals the Death card: how tarot was turned into an occult obsession [Grauniad; ungated]
Critical Hominin Theory
"The units of paleontology, and of biology more generally, are different from the units of paleoanthropology, in that the latter are units in a story of our ancestors, and the ancestors are invariably sacred". A reconsideration of pre-human ancestors from biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks.
A little more of what vulgar people call stuffing
While Gabriel and Miss Daly exchanged plates of goose and plates of ham and spiced beef Lily went from guest to guest with a dish of hot floury potatoes wrapped in a white napkin.
截金
"The only artist in the world to embed gold leaves in glass, Kirikane."
Yamamoto Akane: 'Making Beauty'.
(slyt) [via The British museum]
The Black Book
The Nigerian Hit Movie That Broke Netflix
- "Government corruption, police brutality and the often futile struggle of ordinary Nigerians for justice form the backdrop for Effiong's impressive action sequences. 'Authenticity was key for us, showing Nigeria as it is, in a way that Nigerian people would recognize,' says [director Editi] Effiong. 'Not a Hollywood version of Lagos, but Lagos as we Nigerians see it.' The film's success has raised the bar for Nigerian movies, which have proven a driving force for Netflix and other streaming services as they look to expand across Africa and to export African cinema worldwide."
Un projecte col·lectiu d’il·lustració que ret homenatge a la New Yorker
THE BARCELONIAN is a collective illustration project that pays homage to the legendary THE NEW YORKER through the covers of a nonexistent magazine. More than 100 artists illustrate their relationship with the lived city, with the city of their loves and hates, to show us corners, scenes, anecdotes and episodes from the multiple perspectives of their unique view.
Icahn seen clearly now the gains have gone
Also: Consultants Consult, 'Sad' Goat, God-given Middle Finger, Orca Moms & more in The 2023 Headline of the Year Nominees [X, nitter]
The harshest judgments came from strangers
Age-gap discourse, which is aimed primarily at older men dating younger women, grew out of that movement’s concern with power differentials and with coercion and consent. But it also sits at odds with Me Too’s core ethos — “Believe women” — by raising an outcry on behalf of women who, by all available public accounts, have no complaints about their relationships. Even if they say they are happy, the age-gap critics don’t believe them. from They say they’re happy. Why is it so hard to believe them? [The Cut; ungated]
"She’s a shepherdess now"
A runner near Puy de Dôme, France inadvertently became a shepherd when a flock of sheep began following her through the woods; artist Eleanor Scholz captured the sheep's fun run and provided a brief update.