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Everyone who joins the US military, seeks a security clearance, or applies for some government jobs must, as part of the background check process, fill out Standard Form 86. Questions on this form require applicants to disclose if they're members of organizations that seek to overthrow the US government or deprive people of their civil rights. Lying on this form is a felony, a serious crime that can result in months in prison, but indictments involving lying on this form are quite rare. Molly Conger, host of the Cool Zone Media podcast Weird Little Guys, looks into why this is, and the history of its use, in the episode titled Liar, Liar (57 minutes).
comment posted at 5:10 PM on Sep-18-24

Some of James Earl Jones best delivered lines, on news of his passing at 93.
comment posted at 3:48 PM on Sep-9-24

Who's the Greatest Actor in Movie History? A Statistical Analysis
comment posted at 10:13 AM on Sep-8-24

“You know, stranger things have happened than Bigfoot.” (slTheParisReview)
comment posted at 3:07 PM on Aug-2-24

"To be sure, the worry is not that the AMOC is on the verge of a complete stop. The fear is that it will cross a pivotal threshold, and then begin a decline that is unstoppable. ... It follows, then, that you’d wonder how close we humans are to that threshold. Perhaps you’d heard about the AMOC’s frailty; the shutdown threat; maybe even the decades of fighting among scientists as they try to fathom this gigantic, interconnected, barely understood current. But it was only rather recently that someone dared to go right to the core and ask: How much time do we have left before the AMOC breaks?" How Soon Might The Atlantic Ocean Break, in Wired (archive), on the work of Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen to understand the timing of what's happening to the AMOC.
comment posted at 3:56 PM on Jul-27-24

Cat-Scan.com is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their scanners, or why.
comment posted at 4:01 PM on Jul-14-24

This is an excellent, readable summary of why we won't see a fusion reactor in our lifetime or falling temperatures (unfortunately, the two are linked). Also worth noting is how private investment always jumps on the bandwagon once public funds have built the locomotive.
comment posted at 11:00 AM on Jul-8-24

"We can totally win this election, pass game-changing legislation, and build a Progressive Decade. We can still do that." The Movement Voter Project team spells out their strategy for a 2024 win and a New Progressive Era, featuring Black organizing, the Sun Belt, the Working Families Party, emotional intelligence, and Vision 2035. What if we could sustain a long-term Democratic trifecta at the federal level, win 28 state trifectas, and appoint a majority on the Supreme Court?
comment posted at 4:25 PM on Jul-5-24

Amazon Web Services is reportedly making a deal for electricity from a nuclear power plant [quartz]
comment posted at 10:27 AM on Jul-2-24

The UK's second-biggest city is so broke they can no longer keep the lights on. Birmingham was once a powerhouse industrial city but now the UK's second city is a shell of its former self as rubbish lines the streets, the lights stay out and children grow up below the poverty line.
comment posted at 5:04 AM on Jun-25-24

Political scientist Stephen Teles is a self-described "liberal institutionalist" who argues that "the university should be institutionally neutral" so that academia may pursue its "distinct competence: subjecting society's orthodoxies to empirical and theoretical scrutiny."
comment posted at 5:44 PM on Jun-21-24

United Ireland Should Be Political Objective, Former PM Says [ungated] - "'What I hope we'll see happen in the next government, no matter which parties are in it, is that that we'll see what is a long standing political aspiration toward unification become a political objective,' [former Prime Minister Leo] Varadkar said at an event in Belfast on Saturday."
comment posted at 5:15 PM on Jun-18-24

In a flip-flop for the ages, New York Governor Kathy Hochul suddenly decided to place NYC's massive congestion pricing program (that she championed) on "indefinite pause" less than a month prior to launch. The program, set to go in effect later this month, would have charged drivers coming into Manhattan's central business district $15 during peak hours. Those funds were set to deliver $1 billion dollars a year, providing much needed infrastructure and accessibility updates to the city's century-old subway system. Was this all a cynical election year ploy? Where will the money come from now? And is this even legal?
comment posted at 2:25 PM on Jun-12-24

Nineteen percent of cotton on the U.S. market still sources back to the forced labor heartlands of East Turkestan (Xinjiang), according to a new analysis from Applied DNA of 822 cotton-containing products sampled from February 2023 to March 2024.... More info on enforcing the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which prohibits the importation of goods produced wholly or in part from the so-called Xinjiang Autonomous Uyghur Region unless it can be proven that they are not the fruits of coerced labor.
comment posted at 11:19 AM on Jun-4-24

States that passed unilateral divorce laws saw total female suicide decline by around 20 percent in the long run. Study.
comment posted at 1:46 PM on Jun-1-24

One of those tools, the “Problematic Paper Screener,” run by Guillaume Cabanac, a computer-science researcher who studies scholarly publishing at the Université Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier in France, scans the breadth of the published literature, some 130 million papers, looking for a range of red flags including “tortured phrases.” Cabanac and his colleagues realized that researchers who wanted to avoid plagiarism detectors had swapped out key scientific terms for synonyms from automatic text generators, leading to comically misfit phrases. “Breast cancer” became “bosom peril”; “fluid dynamics” became “gooey stream”; “artificial intelligence” became “counterfeit consciousness.” from Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures [WSJ; ungated]
comment posted at 2:51 AM on May-29-24

This post started as a single video of veteran musicmaker Leonard Solomon performing Skrillex's "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" on a homemade "Squijeeblion." That led to discovering his YouTube channel @Bellowphone, full of similarly whimsical covers on a collection of bespoke instruments hand-built in his Wimmelbildian workshop, from the Emphatic Chromatic Callioforte to the Oomphalapompatronium to the original Majestic Bellowphone. Searching for more videos led to his performance in the Lonesome Pine One-Man Band Extravaganza special from 1991, where he co-starred with whizbang vaudevillians like Hokum W. Jeebs and Professor Gizmo. But what was Lonesome Pine? Just an extraordinary, award-winning concert series by the Kentucky Center for the Arts that ran for 16 years on public radio and television -- an "all things considered" showcase for "new artists, underappreciated veterans and those with unique new voices" featuring such luminaries as Buddy Guy, Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett, k.d. lang, Koko Taylor, and hundreds more. You can get a broad overview of this televisual marvel from this excellent half-hour retrospective, see a supercut of director Clark Santee's favorite moments, browse the program directory from the Smithsonian exhibit, or watch select shows in their entirety: Lonesome Pine Blues - All-star Bluegrass Band - Nashville All-stars - Bass Instincts - Zydeco Rockers - Walter "Wolfman" Washington - Mark O'Connor - Alison Krauss & Union Station - Sam Bush & John Cowan - Maura O'Connell - Nanci Griffith - A Musical Visit from Africa
comment posted at 9:24 AM on May-29-24

Unless you knew modern Chinese history well, you probably have no idea what I am talking about. Most people only knew that "after Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalists, or KMT, was defeated by Mao Tse-tung Communists, Chiang took his army to Taiwan and settled there and turned it into an economic powerhouse..." What most people do not know is that a portion of the KMT Eight Army, under General Li Mi, comprised of KMT 26th and 93rd Divisions, actually remained in Yunnan after after Chiang's retreat, and in order to grow their support, they, with permission from Chiang, allied themselves with the the Karen National Defense Organization and tried to help them take over Myanmar / Burma. Those of you who watched Rambo (2008) may recognize "Karen", as in the Karen Rebels. Yes, it's the same people, still fighting the Myanmar government decades later. And there are a lot more involvement of the Lost Army...
comment posted at 3:15 AM on May-26-24

The Tennessee Attorney General is investigating the mysterious investment company that attempted to have Graceland, the late Elvis Presley's mansion that is one of America's most successful tourist attractions, sold at a foreclosure sale.
comment posted at 6:15 AM on May-25-24

Guardian: World’s top climate scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5C target. “Hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F) above preindustrial levels this century, blasting past internationally agreed targets and causing catastrophic consequences for humanity and the planet, an exclusive Guardian survey has revealed. Almost 80% of the respondents, all from the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), foresee at least 2.5C of global heating, while almost half anticipate at least 3C (5.4F). Only 6% thought the internationally agreed 1.5C (2.7F) limit would be met.” [Daily sea surface temperature]
comment posted at 8:16 AM on May-8-24

Ralph Nader is loyal to one pen: the Papermate Flair. But Nader claims that the pens are drying out quicker then they used to. He reached out to Wirecutter (a NYT property) and they investigated. Archive.is link: https://archive.is/54jtw
comment posted at 2:47 AM on May-5-24

Jerry Seinfeld is a Lazy Hack Out of Touch with the Real World - and Who Can Blame Him? Paste Magazine's brief riposte to the New Yorker's Jerry Seinfeld interview in which Mr. It's About Nothing feels that comedy has been killed by "the extreme left" and "P.C. crap."
comment posted at 2:39 AM on May-1-24

Brutalist Churches.
comment posted at 2:36 AM on Apr-27-24

The NLRB announced tonight that UAW won a historic union election at Volkswagen in Chattanooga Tennessee. The union won by a margin of more than 70% as votes [continued] to be counted. With labor shortages throughout the manufacturing sector, many of the workers hired by Volkswagen were much younger and more diverse. Some had even moved from more pro-union parts of the country to work there. “It’s a totally different ball game,” [Renee Berry] said. “The atmosphere is different. You see more pro-union than anti-union [workers]. A whole lot of people who were anti-union in the past have switched.”
comment posted at 2:41 AM on Apr-20-24

"The writers are losing out. The middle layer of craftsmen are losing out. The top end of the talent are making more money than they ever have, but the nuts-and-bolts people who make the industry go round are losing out dramatically.” (slHarper's)
comment posted at 10:46 AM on Apr-19-24

As further argued by the authors in a forthcoming Berggruen Press volume, “the Planetary as a scientific concept focuses on the Earth as an intricate web of ecosystems, with myriad layers of integration between various biogeochemical systems and living beings — both human and non-human. Drawing on earth system science and systems biology, this holistic understanding is being enabled by new planetary-scale technologies of perception – a rapidly maturing technosphere of sensors, networks, and supercomputers that collectively are rendering the planetary system increasingly visible, comprehensible and foreseeable. This recently-evolved smart exoskeleton — in essence a distributed sensory organ and cognitive layer — is fostering an unprecedented form of planetary sapience.” The open question is how, and if, human governance in the late-stage Anthropocene can align with the knowledge we are now attaining. from The Third Great Decentering [Noema]
comment posted at 3:38 AM on Apr-14-24

How Meta Nuked A Climate Story, And What It Means For Democracy, David Vetter, Forbes, April 11 2024
comment posted at 3:59 AM on Apr-14-24

A post-pandemic fight about racism, the respectful treatment of trans kids, and the role of teachers’ unions has divided Amherst, Massachusetts. [The New Yorker]
comment posted at 4:50 AM on Apr-10-24

Invisible - Workers from Eastern Europe Eastern Europeans migrating west in the hope of better salaries are often exploited and underpaid. Czech journalist Sasa Uhlová goes undercover to find out what conditions are like for these invisible workers in Germany, France and Great Britain. (Documentary, available with English subtitles until 17th of April)
comment posted at 3:06 AM on Apr-4-24

Virtually every role draws on a self-possession you get from growing up in a place like Mart. It’s why some of our most celebrated Texas actors—Barry Corbin, Tommy Lee Jones, Matthew McConaughey, Sissy Spacek—all hail from small Texas towns. There is something innate, a soulfulness it instills that never leaves you, no matter how far away you might move, how glamorous your surroundings become. It’s inside everything Plemons does, imbuing even his tiniest on-screen role with uncommon depth. [Texas Monthly]
comment posted at 12:04 PM on Mar-19-24

Ewe might not expect 8000 year old technology to undergo a revolution, but in the 1990s Australian scientists invented BioClip, a way for sheep to practically shear themselves (tiktok).
comment posted at 12:07 PM on Mar-19-24

Disinformation has one goal: To change the perception of reality of every American....[F]ake news ... [is] actually an old term used by the Soviet Union as a reference to disinformation campaigns that the Soviets and now the Russians have long used to destabilize the West.... The Kremlin’s messaging has an extraordinary reach: In the first year of the Ukraine war alone, posts by Kremlin-linked accounts were viewed at least 16 billion times by Westerners."Bots, trolls, targeted ad campaigns, fake news organizations, and doppelganger accounts of real Western politicians and pundits spread stories concocted in Moscow." The purpose of the propaganda is to further Putin's policy goals: to recolonize Ukraine, to destabilize the West and to power the rise of fascist-friendly governments. How does Putin expect to achieve that? Through conventional warfare, indoctrination, and covert anti-semitic and anti-migrant propaganda.

comment posted at 1:16 PM on Mar-19-24

"A while ago my wife introduced me to Stand In Pride, where queer people can find stand-in family members for support and indeed often for big life events — when their biological families don’t show up. And so it came to pass that a couple of weeks ago I had the singular honour of walking Taylor down the aisle to marry Ruth. Family is what you make it. Love endures." (via @chrisphin on Mastodon, with their permission and featuring lovely pictures of the wedding.)
comment posted at 12:45 PM on Mar-16-24

In a speech on the Senate floor, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the U.S.’s highest ranking politician of Jewish descent, offered the greatest departure from support of Israel’s Netanyahu government to date. Full speech (DoubleLYT).
comment posted at 4:17 AM on Mar-15-24

Ken Block, a data expert hired by the Trump campaign in 2020, writes that he shot down false claim after false claim in an election that was not stolen. Block's account, “Disproven,” will be released Tuesday, and Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (recipient, along with his family, of death threats in the months following the election) provided the foreword.
comment posted at 2:57 AM on Mar-11-24

A series of copyright takedown requests against Wordle clones and variations in which it asserts ownership over its “5x6 grid” and “green tiles to indicate correct guesses.”
comment posted at 4:06 AM on Mar-8-24

How We Fix Wealth Inequality (Gary's Economics, Piped/YouTube, 13m37s)
comment posted at 3:29 PM on Mar-3-24

The top thinkers of 1974 were gathered together in the pages of “Saturday Review,” for a special issue celebrating that magazine’s 50th anniversary. In a series of essays, each one tried to imagine their world 50 more years into the future, in the far-away year of 2024 ... The future they’d hoped for — or feared for — is detailed and debated, offering readers of today a surprisingly clear picture of the future they’d expected in 1974. from 50 Years Later: Remembering How the Future Looked in 1974 [The New Stack]
comment posted at 2:14 AM on Feb-27-24

"While no one place can definitively claim to be the birthplace of the Coney dog, Michigan, by sheer volume and duration of its Coney restaurants, makes a strong bid. Detroit’s famous Coney dog restaurants, American Coney Island and Lafayette Coney Island, followed Todoroff’s Original Coney Island in Jackson, Michigan, which dates its beginning to 1914." 'The Cult of the Detroit Coney Dog, Explained.'
comment posted at 2:36 AM on Feb-27-24

The causes of populism are at the heart of the most significant political and social science debates. One narrative contends that economic globalization resulted in real suffering among less-educated working-class voters, catalyzing populism. Another narrative contends that populism is an adverse reaction to cultural progressivism and that economic factors are not relevant or only relevant symbolically through perceptions of loss of cultural status. Even though the evidence suggests that the generational change argument suggested by the canonical book of Norris and Inglehart does not hold empirically, the cultural narrative nevertheless seems to be particularly influential. from The Populist Backlash Against Globalization: A Meta-Analysis of the Causal Evidence [Cambridge University]
comment posted at 3:01 AM on Feb-26-24

The wealthy have different houses, different cars, different lifestyles from the rest of us. These days, they also want to breathe different air.
comment posted at 4:20 AM on Feb-24-24

A stingray that hasn't shared a tank with another stingray for at least eight years is pregnant. First link. Second link. It is likely caused by parthenogenesis, which is a type of asexual reproduction. The mostly rare phenomenon can occur in some insects, fish, amphibians, birds and reptiles, but not mammals. Other kinds of sharks, skates and rays — a trio of animals often grouped together — have had these kinds of pregnancies in human care. To be clear, Dr Lyons said, these animals were not cloning themselves. Instead, a female's egg fuses with another cell, triggers cell division and leads to the creation of an embryo. The cell that fuses with the egg is known as a polar body. They are produced when a female is creating an egg but these usually aren't used.
comment posted at 2:44 AM on Feb-17-24

These fierce, tiny marsupials drop dead after lengthy sex fests – and sometimes become cannibals. "Antechinuses are perhaps best known for exhibiting semelparity, or “suicidal reproduction”. This is death after reproducing in a single breeding period. The phenomenon is known in a range of plants, invertebrates and vertebrates, but it is rare in mammals. Each year, all antechinus males drop dead at the end of a one to three week breeding season, poisoned by their own raging hormones. This is because the stress hormone cortisol rises during the breeding period. At the same time, surging testosterone from the super-sized testes in males causes a failure in the biological mechanism that mops up the cortisol. The flood of unbound cortisol results in systemic organ failure and the inevitable, gruesome death of every male. Mercifully, death occurs only after the males have unloaded their precious cargo of sperm, mating with as many promiscuous females as possible in marathon, energy-sapping sessions lasting up to 14 hours. The pregnant females are then responsible for ensuring the survival of the species."
comment posted at 5:28 AM on Feb-10-24

The problem is using a one-size-fits-all system to gatekeep a profession that needs diverse people to fill a huge array of roles. Pharris, who grew up in Appalachia and saw the need for greater access to care there, wants a credentialing system that provides an array of pathways into counseling that match the array of needs. People suffering domestic violence should have access to care from domestic violence specialists. Recent immigrants might need to talk with someone who understands their particular traumas.
comment posted at 4:31 AM on Feb-8-24

These games are critical to the Times’ business strategy in trying to reach users—and ideally, future paying subscribers—beyond its core news product. Of course, the Times is still competing for White House scoops with its traditional print and digital rivals and dispatching correspondents to war zones. But the company is also vying for people’s attention against every app on their home screen. So it’s developed products in recent years to satisfy the lifestyle needs of its audience: cooking, shopping (via what is now known as Wirecutter, acquired in a 2016 deal worth more than $30 million), sports (via The Athletic, the site it acquired in 2022 for $550 million), and audio, building on the success of The Daily with a slew of podcasts ... The products and the journalism coexist under what the Times calls “the bundle,” an offering that has turbocharged the company’s ambitious growth strategy. from Inside The New York Times’ Big Bet on Games [Vanity Fair; ungated]
comment posted at 5:42 AM on Feb-4-24

The upshot: Readers in America, where prior restraint is forbidden and where courts won’t enforce foreign rulings that violate the First Amendment, are blocked from reading a story based on a legal complaint that would be tossed out of most American courts. That’s not the only way the case is resonating in the U.S. from How a Judge in India Prevented Americans From Seeing a Blockbuster Report
comment posted at 4:04 AM on Jan-31-24

The 50 Worst Decisions in the Past 50 Years of American Politics "...when politicians make dumb decisions, the results are quite a bit more serious. If the political ruling class had just a little more sense, we might live in a world where Al Gore was president, Sarah Palin never became a national figure, and Donald Trump remained nothing more than a crooked real estate developer and reality-show host."
comment posted at 4:42 AM on Jan-31-24

We require leaders who recognize before disaster strikes that mass panic is largely a myth, not after they have mismanaged it. This is a hard thing to ask of a governing class. One reason this myth has persisted despite decades of evidence to the contrary is that narratives of panic are a useful crutch for leaders under pressure. By projecting their own insecurities onto the masses they lead, elites find a ready scapegoat for their own failings. A leader who does not measure up to the demands of disaster will find it easier to blame the crowd for panic than accept the crowd’s harsh judgments on his own performance. from The Myth of Panic [Palladium; from 2021]
comment posted at 4:21 AM on Jan-29-24

"Some honeybees in Italy regularly steal pollen off the backs of bumblebees... Pollen stealing has been seen before, in the United States. But now, researchers in Italy have also observed honeybees snatching pollen off the backs of bumblebees. The observations, published December 21 in Apidologie, are among the most extensive documentation of bee-on-bee larceny to date." previously
comment posted at 4:25 AM on Jan-29-24

So, I bought the DVD set for Soundies: A Musical History by Michael Feinstein and decided subsequently, via individual YouTube videos, to recreate it as a Christmas present for you all starting with...

Duke Ellington -- Hot Chocolate (Cottontail)

Cab Calloway -- Blowtop Blues

Louie Jordan & his Tympany Five -- Jumpin' at the Jubilee

Nat King Cole Trio -- Frim Fram Sauce

among others....
comment posted at 6:08 AM on Jan-9-24