Posts Tagged ‘climate change’
Saturday Night!
* Stand-up Comedy and Mental Illness: A Conversation with Maria Bamford.
* Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak.
* “Budget Cuts Hurt a State’s Response to Whooping Cough.”
* Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath?
* A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College. Those Humanities Ph.D.’s! Colleges as Merchants of Debt. Could Your Student Loans Make You Unemployable?
* Profiles in courage: Mitt Romney’s Support Of Same-Sex Adoption Lasts One Day.
* And then Canada destroyed the climate. Enjoy your weekend!
Wednesday
* Kicking and screaming, Obama does something I actually like: “I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married,”
* An Inside Look at the Surprisingly Violent Quidditch World Cup.
* Reality is a hoax: U.S. completes warmest 12-month period in 117 years.
* Leaked DHS memo: the pornoscanners don’t even work.
* Just how Catholic are Catholic universities, anyway?
* “It isn’t guilt that we want you to feel,” he says. “Just understand what our opposition comes from.” The Curse of Chief Wahoo.
* And Iain M. Banks, Civilization addict. Supposedly Civilization helped inspire his notion of the Outside Context Problem…
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
“Nobody wants it, but nobody wants to put high doses of poisonous chemicals into their body, either. That is what chemotherapy is, though, and for people suffering from cancer those poisons are often their only hope. Every day, tens of thousands of people take them willingly—because they are very sick or dying. This is how I prefer to look at the possibility of engineering the climate. It isn’t a cure for anything. But it could very well turn out to be the least bad option we are going to have.”
Tons of Weekend Links
* “Austerity is not inevitable”: France falls to the Red Menace.
* Podcast of the weekend: Global science fiction on WorldCanvass, with Brooks Landon, Rob Latham, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, and others.
* Charlie Stross prophesies the death of science fiction.
But anyway, to summarize: my point is that our genre sits uneasily within boundaries delineated by the machinery of sales. And that creaking steam-age machinery is currently in the process of being swapped out for some kind of irridescent, gleaming post-modern intrusion from the planet internet. New marketing strategies become possible, indeed, become essential. And the utility of the old signifiers—the rocket ship logo on the spine of the paperback—diminish in the face of the new (tagging, reader recommendations, “if you liked X you’ll love Y” cross-product correlations by sales engines, custom genre-specific cover illustrations, and so on).
* Tom Hayden remembers the Port Huron Statement (or at least the compromise second draft).
* Joe Biden endorses marriage equality for about fifteen minutes.
* Black Studies Hitpiece Leads to Chronicle of Higher Ed Twitter Trainwreck. Why Is the Chronicle of Higher Education Publishing A Racist Hack? Grad Students Respond to Riley Post on African-American Studies. The Inferiority of Blackness as a Subject. Anti-intellectualism, déjà vu.
* When copyright term-extension meets infinite life-extension.
* A tribute to Disneyland’s secret restroom.
* Connecticut continues its recent spate of being decent its citizens, legalizes medical medicine.
* Stand for your ground: A Florida woman faces prison after firing a warning shot to scare off an abusive husband.
* Nerds assemble! Joss Whedon finally made something everybody likes. An interview. Another. Whedon on Batman. Whedon on Wonder Woman.
* The Avengers: Will superhero movies never end?
What I see in “The Avengers,” unfortunately, is a diminished film despite its huge scale, and kind of a bore. It’s a diminishment of Whedon’s talents, as he squeezes himself into an ill-fitting narrative straitjacket, and it’s a diminished form that has become formula, that depends entirely on minor technical innovations and leaves virtually no room for drama or tragedy or anything else that might make the story actually interesting. To praise the movie lavishly, as so many people have done and will continue to do, basically requires making endless allowances. It’s really good (for being a comic-book movie). It’s really good (for being almost exactly like dozens of other things). It’s really good (for being utterly inconsequential).
* Today’s single chart that explains everything.
* The football suicides. More players file concussion lawsuits against the NFL. Will the NFL still exist in 20 years?
* How the Blind Are Reinventing the iPhone.
* Save the Holocene! Why “the Anthropocene” might not be a useful construct.
* Do you remember Frank Kunkel? How about Frank Nowarczyk? John Marsh or Robert Erdman? Johann Zazka? Martin Jankowiak? Not even Michael Ruchalski? Do you remember the call “Eight hours for labor, eight hours for rest, eight hours for recreation?” The names are those of the seven of the nine people killed in 1886 in Bay View, Wisconsin for demanding eight hour work days.
* On Colorado’s policy of sending kids to adult court.
* Consider the case of Toby Groves.
* New Police Strategy in New York: Sexual Assault Against Peaceful Protesters.
* North Carolina’s Ban on Gay Marriage Appears Likely to Pass.
* Since Mexico’s legislative body passed sweeping climate change legislation on April 19, Mexico joins the UK as the only two countries in the world with legally binding emissions goals to combat climate change.
* http://thebiblein100days.tumblr.com/
* American Airlines channels Darth Vader: We are altering the deal. Pray we do not alter it further.
* And Stephen Colbert’s employment of the comedic stylings of German Ambassador Hans Beinholtz continues to be my absolute favorite thing of all time.
Friday!
* This much is for sure: Keeping the cost of borrowed money a bit lower for one more year won’t cure the rising cost of higher education. It’s not even a bandage. It’s more like giving some comforting words to a critically injured patient. It might make a few people feel better, or win some votes, but it won’t do much to help our problems.
* Today’s insane Kafkaesque nightmare: Frank Rodriguez is a registered sex offender because he slept with his high school girlfriend (now wife) fifteen years ago, when he was 19 and she was 16.
Once he was labeled a sex offender, Frank faced a slew of restrictions. “I couldn’t talk to Nikki. I couldn’t go to restaurants, public swimming pools, football games — any places where there might be kids,” he says. “I couldn’t vote. I couldn’t leave the county without permission. My probation officer told me, ‘If you even look at a woman the wrong way, you could go to prison.’”
Frank did not have to go to jail. Instead, he was required to perform 350 hours of community service — picking up trash, mowing lawns — and to attend weekly counseling courses with convicted sex offenders and pedophiles. He also had to move out of his family home, since a 12-year-old girl lived there: his own sister.
…
Despite the unusual circumstances, Nikki and Frank’s connection grew stronger. “We didn’t have anything — but we didn’t need anything,” Frank says. “We were together.” Nikki finished school, then got a job in the county courthouse, where she works today; she and Frank married two years later. The couple’s first daughter was born about two years after that. Since Frank was still on probation, it was illegal for him to live in the same home as his baby girl. So he lived there against the law, becoming withdrawn and paranoid, constantly worrying about getting arrested. “My personality changed,” he says. “I used to be the life of the party. Now I didn’t want to leave the house.” A second daughter arrived a year later.
In 2003, Frank’s probation came to an end, and he could legally live with his daughters. Still, he needed to go to the police station every year on his birthday to register as a sex offender. Nikki lobbied officials in the courthouse — judges, district attorneys — to clear Frank’s name, to no avail. Frank simply fell outside the parameters of Texas law, which stipulated that the accused had to be within three years of age of his underage sexual partner to avoid registration. Frank is three years and two months older than Nikki. A further element of the law said that the accused could avoid registration if he was under 19 years old and his partner was over 13 years old when they had sex. Nikki was 15. But Frank lost again: He was 19.
Nikki and Frank connected with activists, and traveled to the state capital to participate in a public hearing. Still, Frank remained on the Texas registry, his crime listed as “sexual assault of a child.”
Via Longform.org.
* F*ck the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.
* Sometimes Dumb Science Turns Out to be Pretty Smart.
* Rebekah Sheldon preps us for the upcoming C21 Nonhuman Turn conference with “Affect, Epistemology and the Nonhuman Turn.”
* And Amendment One opponents are trending towards a heartbreakingly narrow defeat.
Thursday, Right?
* We’re running out of visions of the future except dystopias,” Morrison says. “The superhero is Western culture’s last-gasp attempt to say there’s a future for us.” The interview’s at Playboy, if you’re at work.
* Mayor Michael Bloomberg has vetoed a City Council bill that would have raised the minimum wage in New York City to $11.50, calling the measure “a throwback to the era when government viewed the private sector as a cash cow to be milked.” I mean really.
* The headline reads, “Watch an Icelandic glacier disintegrate.”
* Scandal in Whoville! The National Post reports that a first-grade teacher at British Columbia’s Prince Rupert elementary school could face disciplinary action for displaying the following Dr. Seuss quote from Yertle the Turtle on school grounds — “I know, up on the top you are seeing great sights, but down here at the bottom we, too, should have rights.”
* And in local news: they’ve finally figured out how to ruin 9th Street.
Friday Friday Friday
* Somebody awesomely trolled the New York state assessment exam.
* Concluding that racial bias played a significant factor in the sentencing of a man to death here 18 years ago, a judge on Friday ordered that the convict’s sentence be reduced to life in prison without parole, the first such decision under North Carolina’s controversial Racial Justice Act.
* Americans Elect can’t get it together either (and thank heaven for that).
* “Special Effects” is the first great Ze Frank video of the “A Show” era.
* Things Don’t Seem Wonderful If You’ve Seen Them All Your Life.
* H.P. Lovecraft Answers Your Relationship Questions.
* Brian Wood teases The Massive.
* Abigail Nussbaum says The Cabin in the Woods wasted a perfectly good plot.
Once you know The Cabin in the Woods‘s twist it’s impossible not to think of the film like this, and to have used this rich vein of story for little more than a metafictional gag seems like a criminal waste.
* Science has finally perfected the sonic screwdriver.
* Zero-hour for high-speed rail in California.
* Mike Konczal and Aaron Bady talk The Wire at bloggingheads.tv.
* And there are struggles deeper than the struggle with God: The Stages of Grading.
Thursday Night Links
* I just want to hear him deny it: Chris Christie Denies Falling Asleep at Springsteen Show.
* Top 10 dying industries in the United States. Top 10 fastest growing industries in the United States.
* But the preferences of developed, aging polities — first Japan, now the United States and Europe — are obvious to a dispassionate observer. Their overwhelming priority is to protect the purchasing power of incumbent creditors. That’s it. That’s everything. All other considerations are secondary.
* How killing by remote control has changed the way we fight. More here.
* I know some people who have this: Witzelsucht (the Germans just have the best words for everything, don’t they?) is a brain dysfunction that causes all sorts of compulsive silliness: bad jokes, corny puns, wacky behavior. It’s also sometimes called the “joking disease,” and as Taiwanese researchers phrased it in a 2005 report, it’s a “tendency to tell inappropriate and poor jokes.”
* Details on the coming Arrested Development revival on Netflix.
* Tumblr of the day: Context-Free Patent Art.
* Avengers vs Avengers XXX: I’ve just seen the film… the real film, the proper film. It’s quite possible that the porn parody will pass the Bechdel test, where the real film doesn’t…
* Drew Goddard talks to AICN about Cabin in the Woods.
* Back to the Future: The Pitch Meeting.
* Hey, Everyone — Stop Taking This Picture!
* Cheap theatrics, but okay, you got me: “President Barack Obama sits on the famed Rosa Parks bus at the Henry Ford Museum following an event in Dearborn, Mich., April 18, 2012.”
* Actually existing media bias. (1)
* Actually existing media bias. (2)
* http://www.yourlogicalfallacyis.com/.
* In a 2008 study, Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, now of the University of Maryland, found that young adults who practiced a stripped-down, less cartoonish version of the game also showed improvement in a fundamental cognitive ability known as “fluid” intelligence: the capacity to solve novel problems, to learn, to reason, to see connections and to get to the bottom of things. The implication was that playing the game literally makes people smarter.
* Eric Rabkin is doing an open course on fantasy and science fiction. Details at the link.
* And the strange case of Vatican v. Nuns.
The Vatican has appointed an American bishop to rein in the largest and most influential group of Catholic nuns in the United States, saying that an investigation found that the group had “serious doctrinal problems.”
The Vatican’s assessment, issued on Wednesday, said that members of the group, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, had challenged church teaching on homosexuality and the male-only priesthood, and promoted “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”
The sisters were also reprimanded for making public statements that “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” During the debate over the health care overhaul in 2010, American bishops came out in opposition to the health plan, but dozens of sisters, many of whom belong to the Leadership Conference, signed a statement supporting it — support that provided crucial cover for the Obama administration in the battle over health care.
Thursday Night
* Alison Bechdel gets a Guggenheim (along with a bunch of other people).
* Duke students are in the news, and it isn’t even for something horrible.
* The Atlantic profiles Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid.
* The evidence is in. Humans have failed. It’s time to give forests back to the robots.
* Upcoming energy collapse got you down? The Army is ready.
* Wisconsin’s Marathon Campaign Season Takes Toll.
* Inside the mind of the octopus.
* We are all legal realists now.
* And Republicans and Democrats finally agree! Gallup: Mitt Romney least popular Republican nominee in modern history within own party.
Weekend Links
* It used to be that families first signed up for education loans when their child enrolled in college, but a growing number of parents are seeking tuition assistance as soon as kindergarten. Though data is scarce, private school experts and the small number of lenders who provide loans for kindergarten through 12th grade say pre-college loans are becoming more popular.
* As for what may have driven her to do it, the prosecutor argued in her opening statement that whatever horrors Harris had endured at the hands of her father should have little bearing on the crime itself. A Daughter’s Revenge. Not for the faint of heart.
* More nightmares: Aleksander Hemon records the death of his young daughter.
* To conclude, a projection from 1981 for rising temperatures in a major science journal, at a time that the temperature rise was not yet obvious in the observations, has been found to agree well with the observations since then, underestimating the observed trend by about 30%, and easily beating naive predictions of no-change or a linear continuation of trends.
* A study concludes the recent earthquake spike in the U.S. is almost certainly manmade.
* Corporations Hoard Cash Overseas In Anticipation Of Congress Giving Them A Huge Tax Break. It’s like they can see the future!
* Olson noted that the IRS relied on computers to audit all but the highest-income brackets. “We’re getting to a situation where the only people who will get face-to-face audits are the 1 Percent,” she said. “For the majority of taxpayers, the IRS has become faceless, nameless, with no accountability and no liability.”
* Moorhead, MN, police steal $12,000 tip from waitress.
* Learning literally nothing from history: The Obama Administration has approved the expansion of a pilot program that allows poultry producers to hire their own regulators. Via LGM.
* And I may have done this one before, but why not again? The Collective Snapshot.
Thursday Links
* The Committee on Climate Change report, with the hairy-sounding title “Statutory Advice on Inclusion of International Aviation and Shipping,” says that in 2050, the UK’s emissions reductions across the whole economy will cost 1-2 percent of the total GDP. THE PRICE IS TOO HIGH LET THE PLANET BURN
* It’s come to this: raising taxes and cutting defense spending are so unthinkable that they literally don’t even count as policy proposals.
* This op-ed on the difficulty of a career in academia honestly only scratches the surface of how bad it can get. In the U.S. academy, for instance, the heteronormative perspective that is usually taken up as exemplary deeply obscures the costs of the job search on gay and lesbian academics, for whom movement between states and between institutions can mean radical shifts in their basic rights.
Kathleen Lynch, professor of equality studies at University College Dublin, has argued that the idealised academic has no ties or responsibilities to limit their capacity to work. “To be a successful academic is to be unencumbered by caring,” she says.
It’s a terrible way to force people to live.
* Lukas Neville, a doctoral student at Queen’s University in Ontario, reports in the latest issue of Psychological Science that there’s more evidence of academic dishonesty in U.S. states with bigger gaps between the rich and the poor. Those gaps, he speculates, erode trust among people—something that’s been found by other researchers—and less trust means more cheating.
* Some lovely anti-education agitprop in the Atlantic that, as is typical, bears absolutely no relationship to how the academic job market actually works:
After finishing their dissertations, PhDs are hired by a college, based on publication records, the reputations of their references, and the name of their graduate programs. If they happen to have picked up a little classroom experience through a temporary position, it is rarely considered by hiring committees.
Right, that’s totally how it goes.
* Detroit photography beyond ruin porn: Dennis Maitland.
* From the archives: Vice Visits the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Via Longform.org.
* 15 writers’ bedrooms. They’re just like us!
* And 45 to go: Connecticut may be latest state to repeal death penalty.
Crimes Against the Future
Researchers from the University of New South Wales in Australia and Purdue University in the US said global warming will not stop after 2100, the point where most previous projections have ended.
In fact temperatures may rise by up to 12C (21.6F) within just three centuries making many countries into deserts.
Tuesday Night
* Following up on today’s diappointing Supreme Court news: Obamacare’s Supreme Court Disaster. Well, That Could Have Gone Better. Brian Beutler says it wasn’t as bad as it looked. So does Ian Millhiser. The battle over a limiting principle. Medicaid as sleeper issue. Kennedy, Roberts Likely To Determine Fate Of Mandate. Lyle Denniston says it’s all Kennedy. Klein reads Roberts. Kerr reads Kennedy. Even more at MeFi.
* Rachel Maddow: 4,000 days of war in Afghanistan?
* An interview with the creator of You Can’t Do That on Television. Via MeFi.
* The headline reads, “Global Warming Close to Becoming Irreversible.”
* Look on the bright side: The speaker of the North Carolina House says the state’s coming anti-gay Amendment One will probably be struck down in a mere twenty years.
* More Scott Pilgrim? Maybe someday.
* Life in the Retreat at Twin Lakes after the Trayvon Martin shooting.
* And are these the rules of Roadrunner and Coyote? I choose to believe.
1. The Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going “meep, meep.”
2. No outside force can harm the Coyote — only his own ineptitude or the failure of Acme products. Trains and trucks were the exception from time to time.
3. The Coyote could stop anytime — if he were not a fanatic.
4. No dialogue ever, except “meep, meep” and yowling in pain.
5. The Road Runner must stay on the road — for no other reason than that he’s a roadrunner.
6. All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters — the southwest American desert.
7. All tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation.
8. Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote’s greatest enemy.
9. The Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.
10. The audience’s sympathy must remain with the Coyote.
11. The Coyote is not allowed to catch or eat the Road Runner.
Big Monday Links
(some links stolen from the great zunguzungu)
* It’s bad enough that I’ll never be asked to reboot Back to the Future—but it’d be utterly intolerable if the gig goes to two guys I went to high school with. Jon says it’s all a big misunderstanding but you know he’s just trying to throw me off the scent.
* There is no fresh start: The Return of Mad Men and the End of TV’s Golden Age. A metafictional reading of the series. And for fun: The Foreign Language of Mad Men: Do the characters really talk like people from the ’60s?
* Let us start with the obvious: in the entire decade or so of airport security since the attacks on America on September 11th 2001, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has not foiled a single terrorist plot or caught a single terrorist.
* Arundhati Roy: “Capitalism: A Ghost Story.”
* In his novel “2066: Red Star Over America,” Han, China’s premier science-fiction writer, depicts a disturbing future. It is the year 2066. China rules the world while the U.S. festers in financial decline and civil war. A team has been sent to America to disseminate civilization through the traditional Chinese board game Go. But during the critical Go match held at the World Trade Center, terrorists strike. The seas around New York rise, the Twin Towers crumble and the U.S. is plunged into pandemonium. You had me at “Go.” Via io9.
* Do professors get paid too much for too little work? Obviously. More here.
* Related: “College Professors Demand Right to Be Mean.”
* Facebook asserts trademark on word “Book.” Can’t see that being controversial.
* It must be an election year, because suddenly the Obama administration is talking about the environment.
* Extreme weather events over the past decade have increased and were “very likely” caused by manmade global warming, a study in the journal Nature Climate Change said on Sunday. “Scientists at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Research used physics, statistical analysis and computer simulations to link extreme rainfall and heat waves to global warming,” Reuters reports. “It is very likely that several of the unprecedented extremes of the past decade would not have occurred without anthropogenic global warming,” said the study. Why didn’t anybody warn us!
* Government spending is good in a recession? Why didn’t anyone tell us!
* Why is horseracing even allowed? Via MeFi.
* Rules: This is a very specific contest. Don’t tell us why you like meat, why organic trumps local or why your food is yours to choose. Just tell us why it’s ethical to eat meat.
* If They Directed It: The Hunger Games. I don’t think anything I’ve written on Twitter has gotten as many retweets as my brief reading of series as a utopia.
* Imagining The Wire Season Six.
* On not calling Rich Santorum “crazy.”
* Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes up his visit to the wonderful conference I was at last weekend, ICFA 2012.
A highlight of ICFA was China Miéville’s talk “On Monsters.” I am a fan of Miéville’s work; The City and the City is one of my favorite books. His narratives are always beautifully written as well as philosophically challenging. Besides possessing an astonishing vocabulary (he sends me to the dictionary, and makes me wonder how they ever gave me a PhD), he is a writer widely read in theory — though his books never turn into allegories for lit crit. They always trace problems, and stay away from anything easy. Miéville brought up Quentin Meillassoux and speculative realism, for example, during his paper (dismissively: he is not a fan of SR or object oriented philosophy, which surprised me). China’s presentation started off as straightforward account of how the uncanny might be broken into various subcategories: the ab-canny, the sur-canny, the sub-canny, the post-canny, the para-canny, and onwards. His account began seriously but spiralled into a proliferative joke. His point was that classification is not analysis, and that such a “taxonomic frenzy” (as he called it) mortifies: “the drive to translate useful constructs into foundations for analysis is deadly,” because it violently takes away the potency and possibility of the terms it organizes. What was interesting to me, though, is that China’s talk performed something, um, para-canny (right beside itself, there but unseen) that I’ve also learned from studying medieval encyclopedists: taxonomic frenzy might produce a desiccated system of emplacement in which everything gets filed into a cabinet and drained of its vitality. Or it might actually be so creative in its proliferative energy and so limned by the necessity of its own failure that it undermines its own rigidity in the very process of articulation, becoming an envitalizing and innovative act — an act of writing — rather than a system of deadening inscription. China’s multiplication of canniness had a power that he walked away from, I think: why abandon your monster like that?
* Honoring the 20th anniversary of Apollo 18 the only possible way: interactive fiction.
* This American Life: What kind of ideology?
* “He Was a Crook”: Longform.org remembers Hunter S. Thompson’s obituary for Richard Nixon.
* Haiti: Where did the money go?
* Support for Afghan War falls. Support for NC anti-gay amendment rises.
A recent Elon University poll found that 58 percent of North Carolinians oppose the amendment, with 38 in favor of it. That poll surveys adults statewide, while the WRAL News poll includes the results only of likely voters.
Despite the broad amendment support in the WRAL News poll, only 37 percent of voters said same-sex couples deserve no legal recognition in North Carolina, according to the poll.
So you have no idea what you’re voting for and won’t bother to find out. Got it.
* Because the 2012 campaign hasn’t been tedious enough: 2016.
* Trayvon Martin and the history of lynching. The Corporations Behind the Law That May Let Trayvon Martin’s Killer Go Free. On Trayvon Martin as innocent victim.
* Why Obama’s Healthcare Law Is Constitutional. Absolutely everything you need to know about health reform’s Supreme Court debut. What the Supreme Court Could Do About Obamacare, Explained. Legal experts: Court won’t strike down ‘Obamacare.’
* If I didn’t know better I’d say this little video has some sort of message.
* MLA Job Information List data back to 1965.
* Infographic of the night: Doomsday Predictions Debunked.
* The headline reads, “UC review backs use of pepper spray on protesters.” Huh! I really thought they’d give themselves hell.
Referring to pepper spray, he wrote: “A few focused applications on the crowd that blocked the officers near the row of bushes would likely have cleared that area very quickly, with few additional baton strikes.”
You’re a university, for Christ’s sake. My god.
* What could possibly go wrong? Has Obama put us on a permanent war footing, even in peacetime?
* And what could possibly go wrong? Tacocopter could be the unmanned future of food delivery. Some should have read more Jenny Rhee.
