Posts Tagged ‘bacteria’
Saturday Morning Links!
* CFP: (Un)Ethical Futures: Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction.
* It gets wetter: Dissent on KSR’s New York 2140.
* Apocalypse Now: Science fiction writers on the end of the world on On the Media.
* Not Just Pussy Hats on the Climate March: Feminist Encounters with the Anthropocene.
* “I shared my toddler’s hospital bill on Twitter. First came supporters — then death threats.”
* Austerity refugees: “Why I Won’t Raise My Son in Illinois.”
* Billion-Dollar Lawsuit Claims Florida Broke Requirement to Match Donations to Colleges.
* Instead, the low income mobility in the United States and Britain is almost entirely due to the part of the parent-son association that is not mediated by educational attainment. In the United States and especially Britain, parental income is far more important for earnings at a given level of education than in Sweden, a result that holds also when controlling for cognitive ability. This goes against widespread ideas of the United States as a country where the role of ascription is limited and meritocratic stratification prevails.
Pac Man is too real: Running from the ghosts of the past while eating everything thing in front of you.
— Vee (@Lovestained555) July 7, 2017
[wheel of fortune]
me: id like to buy a vowel
pat: arent u a millenial
me: [sigh] id like to rent a vowel— duumb (@duumb) July 7, 2017
my Bond Girl Name is Modest Honorarium.
— Laura Braunstein (@laurabrarian) July 7, 2017
* Kobach runs a matching program that appears to have its own high rate of errors. A recent study by political scientists at Stanford University found that Kobach’s Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program had 200 false positives for every actual double registration. The Kansas secretary of state’s office did not immediately return a call for comment on the program.
* Untreatable gonorrhoea ‘superbug’ spreading around world, WHO warns.
* What could possibly go wrong? Scientists recreate an extinct virus.
* The Happiest Place on Earth.
* A Look Inside Calexit, the Comic That Imagines California’s Secession From a Fascist US.
* Baltimore Sun plans to close City Paper.
* This seems normal and fine: Ivanka Trump takes her father’s seat at world leaders’ table during a G-20 meeting.
* Utah Ag-Gag Law Declared Unconstitutional.
* Grandma’s coming to live with you.
* What is best in life, Neoliberal Genghis Khan? American Holocaust (artist Andrew Spear, 2015). “At the Oxymoron Museum” was always my favorite Borges story. Ended after just one issue, I reckon. And this guy knows almost nothing about trucks.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 8, 2017 at 8:43 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with actually existing media bias, ag-gag, agriculture, America, apocalypse, austerity, austerity refugees, bacteria, Baltimore, Borges, Calexit, California, CFPs, City Paper, class mobility, class struggle, climate change, comics, death threats, Disney, Donald Trump, dystopia, ecology, fascism, feminism, Florida, free speech, G20, Genghis Khan, gonorrhoea, health care, homelessness, How the University Works, Illinois, Ivanka Trump, James Bond, Jurassic Park, Kim Stanley Robinson, Medicaid, millennials, Nazis, neoliberalism, New York 2140, nuclear war, Pac-Man, politics, science, science fiction, science fiction futurity, social media, Spider-Man, Steve Ditko, superbugs, the Anthropocene, the Confederacy, the Constitution, the Moon, trucks, Twitter, United Kingdom, Utah, Utopia, viruses, voter suppression, voting
Monday Morning
* In local news: Dangerous Levels of ‘Erin Brockovich’ Chemical Found in Local Drinking Water.
* Great little Wisconsin story about the hotel NFL teams stay at when they play the Packers.
* To understand Charlotte’s rage, you have to understand its roads. A Homegirl Reflecting on Charlotte Uprising.
* Homeless and in graduate school.
* The survey that Williams was part of, the Milwaukee Area Renters Study (MARS), may be the first rigorous, detailed look at eviction in a major city. Interviewers like Williams spoke to about 1,100 Milwaukee-area tenants between 2009 and 2011, asking them a battery of questions on their housing history. The survey has already fundamentally changed researchers’ understanding of eviction, revealing the problem to be far larger than previously understood.
* The rise and rise of tabletop gaming.
* Here’s Everything Donald Trump Has Promised to Do on His First Day as President. Seven Days of Donald Trump’s Lies. Scope of Trump’s falsehoods unprecedented for a modern presidential candidate. Donald Trump’s Week of Misrepresentations, Exaggerations and Half-Truths. The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally. Bruce vs. Trump. Trump’s jet vs. the taxpayers. Intel Officials Investigating Trump Advisor’s Ties To Putin Allies. Virtual media blackout on emerging Trump campaign scandal with Russia. Pregaming the debate. And again. And again. And again.
“Trump looked like a president tonight” will be the media’s mantra tomorrow night barring anything short of a stroke on stage.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 26, 2016
* Obama legacy project, take one.
* From the right: “Against democracy.”
* Democrats don’t actually want to win, exhibit 37,000.
* If you want a vision of the future:
The Democrats have become the party, not of some specific ideological agenda, but of the traditional system as such. One of Obama’s major goals has been to rehabilitate the Republicans and force them to act as a worthy opponent rather than an implacable foe. This approach was naive and in many ways dangerous, as shown most vividly when Obama tried to “leverage” the Republicans’ unprecedented brinksmanship on the debt ceiling to engineer a “grand bargain” on the deficit, but it fits with the view that the system only works if there are two worthy opponents locked in an eternal struggle with no final victories. We can see something similar in Clinton’s controversial decision to treat Trump as an outlier rather than letting him tar the Republican brand as such. It works to her political disadvantage — showing that her centrist opportunism is weirdly principled in its own way — but from within her worldview, the most important thing is to restore the traditional balance of forces.
The situation we are in shows the intrinsic instability of party democracy. An eternal struggle between worthy opponents is not possible in practice. Eventually, one of the two teams is going to decide that they want to win in the strong sense, to defeat the opponent once and for all. And if that desire cannot be achieved immediately, it will inevitably lead to a long period where the old enemy is treated as a foe — as intrinsically evil and illegitimate. Within the American system, with its baroque structure of constraints and veto points, that will lead to a period where government is barely functional, because the natural tendency will be for the radicalized party to refuse to go along with the system until they have full control over it.
* This would be a better story if they were going to dive in to how creepy this would be: Geordi La Forge Has a Ship Full of Datas in This First Look at Star Trek: Waypoint.
* Tonight in Jungeland: Chris Christie’s Chances For Impeachment Just Went Way Up.
* On the Popular Acceptance of Inequality Due to Brute Luck.
* Scientists have found a better version of the Dyson Sphere. Meet the Dyson Swarm, a vast mega-structure comprised of a plethora of solar panels.
* A walking tour of New York’s surveillance network.
* The Stolen War: How corruption and fraud created a failed state in Iraq—and led directly to the rise of ISIS.
* The Fallacies Of Neoliberal Protest.
* Please be true, please be true: Arrival Is a Scifi Masterpiece You Won’t Stop Thinking About.
* “The Battle of Algiers” at 50: From 1960s Radicalism to the Classrooms of West Point.
* Professor Donald W. Schaffner, a food microbiologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said a two-year study he led concluded that no matter how fast you pick up food that falls on the floor, you will pick up bacteria with it. Challenge accepted.
* Cats sailed with Vikings to conquer the world, genetic study reveals. Trade between China and Rome in the ancient world, as tokened by a pair of corpses found in a London cemetery. (On that second one others say not so fast.)
* “…Adding to the tragedy, is that this disaster went almost completely unnoticed by the public as later that day another, more “newsworthy” tragedy would befall the nation when beloved President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated. The Staten Island Ferry Disaster Museum hopes to correct this oversight by preserving the memory of those lost in this tragedy and educating the public about the truth behind the only known giant octopus-ferry attack in the tri-state area.”
* Breaking Bad at a Bronx charter.
* The Three-Body Problem in, well, China.
* A Law Professor Explains Why You Should Never Talk to Police.
* A History of Native Americans Protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline.
* The book in question is The Total Rush – or, to use its superior English title, Blitzed – which reveals the astonishing and hitherto largely untold story of the Third Reich’s relationship with drugs, including cocaine, heroin, morphine and, above all, methamphetamines (aka crystal meth), and of their effect not only on Hitler’s final days – the Führer, by Ohler’s account, was an absolute junkie with ruined veins by the time he retreated to the last of his bunkers – but on the Wehrmacht’s successful invasion of France in 1940. Published in Germany last year, where it became a bestseller, it has since been translated into 18 languages, a fact that delights Ohler, but also amazes him.
* A brief history of gang violence in Chicago.
* Colin Kaepernick’s silent protest is a start, but what if pro athletes refused to play? Students Are Pulling a Kaepernick All Over America — and Being Threatened for It.
* And if you want a vision of the future: They’re gonna be submerging this dude in water and taking photos every 5 years until he dies.
They're gonna be submerging this dude in water and taking photos every 5 years until he dies https://t.co/Ms9H5T61Te
— Eric Harvey (@ericdharvey) September 24, 2016
Written by gerrycanavan
September 26, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with actually existing media bias, America, apocalypse, Arrival, bacteria, Barack Obama, Battle of Algiers, board games, Breaking Bad, cats, Charlotte, charter schools, Chicago, China, Chris Christie, class struggle, Colin Kaepernick, collapse, comics, computers, Dakota Access Pipeline, data, debates, democracy, Democrats, don't talk to the cops, Donald Trump, drugs, Dyson Sphere, Dyson Swarm, Electoral College, epistocracy, Erin Brockovich, eviction, ferries, film, five-second rule, food, football, futurity, games, gangs, general election 2016, Geordi LaForge, giant octopuses, graft, graveyards, guns, Hillary Clinton, history, Hitler, I grow old, inequality, lies and lying liars, luck, Mars, Milwaukee, NASA, Native Americans, Nazis, Nevermind, New Jersey, NFL, Nirvana, North Carolina, outer space, Packers, police, police brutality, policy, politics, polls, pollution, protest, Putin, race, racism, Republicans, rich people, riots, Rome, Russia, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science fiction, SETI, sports, Springsteen, Star Trek, Story of Your Life, Ted Chiang, Tetris, the Bronx, the circle of life, the courts, the law, The Three-Body Problem, TNG, total system failure, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Viking, violence, voting, water, white people, Wisconsin, word processing, worthy opponents
Monday Night Links!
* I had two short pieces come out this weekend: a review essay on Star Trek: Beyond at LARB and a flash review of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child right here at WordPress.
* CFP: Vector Special Issue: Science Fiction and Music. The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy.
* Point: Earwolf has a new Hamilton podcast, seemingly along the lines of The Incomparable’s but with higher profile guests. Counterpoint: You Should Be Terrified That People Who Enjoy “Hamilton” Run Our Country.
* To Learn About ‘Hamilton’ Ticket Bots, We Wrote Our Own Bot.
* “So Below”: A Comic about Understanding Land.
* Peak Thinkpiece? “Centuries ago, explorers like Columbus and Vasco da Gama played a real-life version of Pokémon Go.” When colonialism is a game. Pokémon Go: Who owns the virtual space around your home? Werner Herzog: Would You Die for the Pokémons? Would You Kill?
* A new genre of leftist literature arose between the wars, urging the young to build a brave new world. In the first of two articles, a forgotten dream is remembered. Here’s part two.
* The Huntington has put up some of Butler’s notes on writing Kindred.
* Antiblack Racism in Speculative Fiction.
* The Cosby Next Time: Former Fox News Booker Says She Was Sexually Harassed and ‘Psychologically Tortured’ by Roger Ailes for More Than 20 Years.
* Teasing Arrested Development season five, and the long-rumored recut of season four, at TCA.
* The good news is, we’re all going to live. Here’s the bad news.
* 6 Human Activities That Pose The Biggest Threat To The World’s Drinking Water. America Has Never Seen a Hot Weather Outlook Like This. And an upcoming conference at Marquette: Public Policy and American Drinking Water.
* Early Animals Could’ve Caused Earth’s First Mass Extinction Simply By Existing.
* How One Colorado Man Disappeared While Hunting For Hidden Treasure.
* What Are Young Non-Working Men Doing?
* Is Rolling Stone about to get throttled in court over UVA rape report?
* Ableism, Mass Murder, and Silence.
* Race and dermatology. Space and cardiology.
* The Stranger Guest: The Literature of Pregnancy and New Motherhood.
* Zombie bacteria that awaken from old corpses might sound like the stuff of an “X-Files” episode. The premise is far from a complete fiction, however.
* Metaphors too on the nose: rise of the corpse flowers.
* Elsewhere on the zombie beat: The Walking Dead Comic Nearly Ended a Lot Sooner Than Anyone Expected. That’s sort of amazing, honestly.
* Apps like Seamless and Yelp listen in on our adult lives, then speak to us like children.
* J.K. Rowling Says Harry Potter is Done After Cursed Child.
* The Lobster: Debt, Referenda, and False Choices.
* Trans* identity will be reclassified by the WHO.
* Black Art Matters: A Roundtable on the Black Radical Imagination.
* News you can use: How to land a passenger jet without any flight controls.
* Hell Is A Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement. How Prisons Overtook Schools as the Foremost American Institutions. Why Preschool Teachers Struggle To Make Ends Meet.
* This Rick and Morty clip reading from an actual trial transcript shows what how weirdly perfect the two voices work as a comedic duo, independently of any narrative context.
* I say the teach the controversy.
* The Syllabus as a Contract: How do you deal with clever students who find loopholes you didn’t intend?
* College learning takes 2.76 hours/day.
* I grew up thinking journalism was just for rich white people. I was mostly right.
* Ghostbusters and liberal feminism. The Spiritualist Origins of Ghostbusters.
* This time the nostalgia industry is trained on my heart like a laser.
* Self-identified Jedi and political atheism, yes really.
* Automation and the end of liberal democracy.
* They told me capital was a vampire, and man, they nailed it.
* As an artist, what can I consider if I want to de-objectify and add power to female characters?
* Politics roundup! State roll calls: What RNC and DNC delegates want you to know. Electoral Map Gives Donald Trump Few Places to Go. Trump’s Likeliest Path to Victory May Be an Electoral College Tie. Bounce! Disability Rights at the DNC. Seven Minutes. The GOP’s Dilemma: How Low Can He Go? Why does it matter that Donald Trump is not a novelty? All the same, a pretty incredible chart. From the archives: Norman Mailer Goes to the RNC. How And Why Trump Will Try to Ditch the Debates. Donald Trump as a One Man Constitutional Crisis. An Anti-Trump Electoral Strategy That Isn’t Pro-Clinton. Revenge of the Ghostwriters. A Historic Dud. Obscene Media Spectacle. American Horror Story. Is Donald Trump OK? “Hegel remarks somewhere,” Marx wrote, “that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” We are the 5%. And we’re still allowed to vote.
* And the kids are all right: Trump, Clinton more disliked by millennials than Voldemort.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 1, 2016 at 3:35 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with ableism, academia, animals, apps, Arrested Development, art, atheism, austerity, Australia, automation, bacteria, Bill Cosby, Bill O'Reilly, blood, books, bouncy castles, bulldogs, cancer, capital, capitalism, CFPs, children's literature, class struggle, climate change, cockroaches, colonialism, Colorado, comedy, comics, conventions, corpse flowers, Dazzler, debt, democracy, Democratic National Convention, Democrats, dermatology, disability, disability studies, Donald Trump, drawing, ecology, Electoral College, epistemology, extinction, first as tragedy then as farce, Flint, Fox News, futurity, games, general election 2016, Ghostbusters, gold star families, Hamilton, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, heart attacks, Hegel, Hillary Clinton, history, How the University Works, J.K. Rowling, Jedi, journalism, kids today, Kindred, knowledge, land, lead, lead poisoning, leftism, level, liberal feminism, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Marquette, Marx, mass extinction, mass murder, medicine, men, milk, misogyny, Mitch Horwitz, motherhood, music, my media empire, Netflix, Norman Mailer, nostalgia, Octavia Butler, outer space, parenting, pedagogy, Peter Thiel, Philip K. Dick, planes, podcasts, Pokémon, Pokémon Go, politics, polls, pregnancy, prison, prison-industrial complex, private property, privilege, queerness, race, racism, rape, rape culture, religion, Republican National Convention, Republicans, Rick and Morty, Robert Kirkman, robots, Roger Ailes, Rolling Stone, schools, science fiction, sex, sex research, sexism, Siberia, slavery, solitary confinement, spiritualism, Star Trek, Star Trek Beyond, superheroes, syllabi, teaching, television, the Anthropocene, the Constitution, the Huntington, the Kahns, the law, The Lobster, The Man in the High Castle, the Moon, The Rocketeer, The Walking Dead, trans* issues, treasure, underearners anonymous, unschooling, Utopia, UVA, vampires, Venezuela, Voldemort, water, Werner Herzog, Wikileaks, work, writing, X-Men, zombies, zoos
Weekend Links, Omnibus Edition (Only $19.99/Month for the First Six Months at the Canavan Pro Tier)
* I watched The Stanford Prison Experiment (from 2015) yesterday, so of course I spent the rest of the day reading up on it. Some bonus Milgram!
* Capybaras break out of Toronto zoo, on the lam for 3 weeks.
* Behold: Pigoons.
* The fuzzy math of drone war.
* PTSD and embodied consciousness, or, modern warfare destroys the brain.
* “The board of trustees voted to cut African-American studies, philosophy, religious studies and women’s studies.” Clearly Bruce Rauner wants to weaken unions. But I suspect that his ambition goes further: the mantra of “flexibility” now in play in Wisconsin would seem to be a strategy to diminish or eliminate whole fields of academic endeavor: African-American studies, art history, classical studies, cultural studies, foreign languages, literature, philosophy, queer studies, women’s studies, whatever might be deemed impractical, unprofitable, unacceptable.
* Liberal-Arts Majors Have Plenty of Job Prospects, if They Have Some Specific Skills, Too.
* 25 Words Your Kindergartener Must Know Before First Grade.
* Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that’s not entirely what it seems. It’s about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it’s the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to “go to the skull” before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn’t the product of Hollywood hacks—it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that’s what we’d call it. The AI named itself Benjamin.
* This paper seems like a B- at best: The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies” American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34–51. The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed. Thus, where we indicated that higher scores in Table 1 (page 40) reflect a more conservative response, they actually reflect a more liberal response. Specifically, in the original manuscript, the descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysenck’s psychoticism are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal; and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism and social desirability are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative.
* “Shut up and don’t talk to me again, okay?” the flight attendant says in the video. “If you talk to me again, I tell the cops, and you get arrested in Miami.”
* There is a Dalek in the BBC that could actually help save your life.
* Department of precrime, parenting edition.
* 2 Valedictorians in Texas Declare Undocumented Status, and Outrage Ensues.
* Interesting times: Mitch McConnell Won’t Rule Out Rescinding His Endorsement of Donald Trump. Romney says Trump will change America with ‘trickle-down racism.’ #NeverTrump 2.0. Hundreds Say Donald Trump Has a Problem Paying His Bills. How Donald Trump Bankrupted His Atlantic City Casinos, but Still Earned Millions. The Next Two Weeks: Either Trump Or Unexpected Redemption Led by Wisconsin.
* Gawker Files for Bankruptcy After Losing Hulk Hogan Privacy Case.
* On crafting a victim-impact statement.
* Abandoned Yugoslavian Monuments.
* This sense of helplessness in the face of such entrenched segregation is what makes so alluring the notion, embraced by liberals and conservatives, that we can address school inequality not with integration but by giving poor, segregated schools more resources and demanding of them more accountability. True integration, true equality, requires a surrendering of advantage, and when it comes to our own children, that can feel almost unnatural.
* Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie.
* Last year, inmates served 79,726 dead days at a cost of $143 per person per day in 2015. In other words, people spent 218 years’ worth of unnecessary time in jail at a cost of $11 million to taxpayers.
* People who value time over money are happier.
* Headcanon watch: Han Solo was an untrained Force user. Stan Lee Is Playing the Watcher in Every Marvel Film.
* What Game of Thrones Changed About Its Big Antiwar Speech, and Why It Matters.
* Dan Harmon & Justin Roiland on Their Original Rick & Morty Season 2 Finale Plan, Season 3.
* How to Stage a Broadway Musical With Deaf Actors.
* Elon Musk and the Pentagon may be working on a real-life Iron Man suit.
* Enter the Wild, Disturbing, Alien-Busting World of the Astralnauts.
* Study: Most antidepressants don’t work for young patients.
* “I Was 20 Weeks Pregnant When They Told Me My Baby Might Never Be Able to Walk.” Gut-wrenching story. Serious trigger warning for miscarriage and for type-one diabetes.
* When I later asked him whether the “Mr. Nobody” moniker ever bothered him he said “No, why should it have? There are two things about me. First, I am a very happy person, though I’ve lived an unhappy life. And second, I’m happy until I have to say my name, which carries a great deal of negativity for me. What troubles most people is that I want to be anonymous, without an identity. To them, this idea seems absolutely dangerous.”
* Aphantasia: How It Feels To Be Blind In Your Mind.
* Welcome to Larry Page’s Secret Flying-Car Factories.
* The end of non-digital film.
* What’s the most “normal” place in the US?
* How the Police Identify Threats on Social Media. How Colleges Train for Active Shooters on Campus.
* Miracles and wonders: Man lives 555 days without a heart.
* I want to believe! Sorry But Medieval Armies Probably Didn’t Use Fire Arrows.
* Understanding time travel in Game of Thrones. Distills down the leading Bran theories for your lunchtime consumption.
* I think I’ve done this one before, but: Class Struggle: The Board Game.
* It sounds like Larry David is thinking about Curb Your Enthusiasm again.
* Rolling Jubilee v. John Oliver in The Baffler.
* Creative Ways To Fix Your Broken Phone Screen.
* Let William Shatner Sell You a Commodore VIC-20.
* Animal liberation now! Harry Potter play to stop using live owls.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 11, 2016 at 10:22 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #Lemonade, academia, active shooters, African American Studies, air travel, airplanes, amnesia, animal liberation, animals, anti-anti-imperialism, anti-Semitism, antibiotics, antidepressants, aphantasia, art, artificial intelligence, Astralnauts, Atlantic City, authoritarianism, averages, bacteria, Bernie Sanders, Beyoncé, Big Pharma, Broadway, Bruce Rauner, bullies, cabybaras, capybaras, cars, Chicago, class struggle, college majors, Commodore VIC-20, computers, con men, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Dan Harmon, deaf culture, deafness, death, Democrats, depression, diabetes, Doctor Who, Donald Trump, drone war, education, fandom, film, fire arrows, flexibility, flight attendants, flying cars, futurity, Game of Thrones, games, gas stations, Gawker, Google, guns, Hamilton, Han Solo, Harry Potter, hate, helplessness, hoaxes, How the University Works, Hulk Hogan, Illinois, immigration, iPhones, John Oliver, junk science, kids today, Kodachrome, Kodak, Larry David, Larry Page, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Margaret Atwood, medicine, medieval times, medievalism, Milgram experiment, miracles and wonders, miscarriage, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, money, monuments, mourning, musical theaters, musicals, Nalo Hopkinson, neoliberalism, normality, O.J. Simpson, obituary, Oryx and Crake, our brains work in interesting ways, owls, parenting, Peter Thiel, Philip Zimbaro, philosophy, pigoons, police violence, politics, precrime, prison-industrial complex, privilege, psychology, psychopharmacology, PTSD, rape, rape culture, religious studies, Rick and Morty, Rolling Jubilee, scams, science fiction, science is magic, Scott Walker, segregation, social media, Stan Lee, Stanford, Stanford Prison Experiment, Star Wars, statistics, Sunspring, tasers, Texas, the 1980s, the 1990s, the Force, the humanities, threats, time, time travel, Toronto, torture, Twitter, Uatu the Watcher, undocumented students, valedictorians, victim-impact statements, violence, war, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, Western Illinois University, William Shatner, Wisconsin, women's studies, words, Yugoslavia, zoos
Junior Associate Dean of Closing All My Tabs Links
* The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction is “temporarily out of stock,” but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t place your order! Cyborg Lincoln commands it!
* #SnomgIcanteven2015. Good luck, East Coast!
* The Day the Purpose of College Changed. Great piece. I’ve added it to Wednesday’s reading in the Cultural Preservation course, alongside readings from Bérubé and Bousquet that I added to the syllabus this year.
* The idea behind it is simple: Get donations, and give them to contingent faculty members in need.
* Scott Walker can’t afford to let Bobby Jindal be the only candidate in the race who destroyed education in his state. And while we’re on the subject: Dropkick Murphys Order Scott Walker To Stop Using Their Music: ‘We Literally Hate You!’
* I’m going to have to differ with former president Clinton and possible future president Bush. To me, Arizona State looks like a dystopia, rather than a model for the future. ASU is pretty clearly set up as a factory of credentialing, and any lip-service to educational excellence, particularly in the undergraduate sphere, is exactly that.
* What provosts think. The crucial takeaway: Say Nothing if you Want a Job. Elsewhere in academic freedom: Fox News Raises Alarm Over College Course About Race. Other universities could stand to learn something from ASU’s statement on the subject:
The university, however, issued a statement Friday after the segment, reading:
This course uses literature and rhetoric to look at how stories shape people’s understandings and experiences of race. It encourages students to examine how people talk about — or avoid talking about — race in the contemporary United States. This is an interdisciplinary course, so students will draw on history, literature, speeches and cultural changes — from scholarly texts to humor. The class is designed to empower students to confront the difficult and often thorny issues that surround us today and reach thoughtful conclusions rather than display gut reactions. A university is an academic environment where we discuss and debate a wide array of viewpoints.
* Of course, in addition to everything else ASU is also the school that’s trying to force its composition adjuncts into a 5/5 workload with minimal salary increase, so I’m not going to lose my mind defending it or anything.
* Part everyman tale, as far as English departments go, and part lesson in unintended consequences, Maryland English’s story looks something like this. Between 1996 and 2011, the number of majors actually grew, from 641 to 850 students. Then the university rolled out a new, faculty-backed general education program. Unlike the old general education program, which centered on the liberal arts and required a literature course, the new one offers students much more flexibility in how to fulfill their various requirements. So students who aren’t interested in the liberal arts can much more easily avoid them. Part of the idea was to take some of the burden off departments, such as English, that fulfilled requirements for many students under the old system. Faculty members generally supported the idea.
But then the numbers got funny. In the spring of 2012, the English department lost 88 majors. The following year, it lost 79 – then 128 more majors 12 months later. Between spring and fall 2014, 66 more majors fell from the rolls. Over all, the department lost 363 majors — about 40 percent — and the numbers continue to fall. I basically get called out personally as the article goes on:
One of the more controversial departmental reform topics is how to change the English program itself, including by creating more recruitment-oriented, lower-level courses. Cartwright said there’s a demonstrated interest in updated versions of Great Books courses, but also in what he said some have called “zombie courses” – pejoratively, not descriptively. Those include courses on such popular genres as science fiction, fantasy literature, J.R.R. Tolkein, regional literature or children’s literature.
Cartwright said there’s some feeling among his colleagues that such offerings equate to “dumbing down” the curriculum. But he said others feel there’s value in meeting students “where they are.” And of course there are professors whose areas of expertise are in those fields and vouch for their importance.
* Rise of the medical humanities.
* Associate Dean of Eureka Moments. Now accepting applications.
* The children of the rich and powerful are increasingly well suited to earning wealth and power themselves. That’s a problem. A Hereditary Meritocracy.
* Greek Conservative Spokesman Concedes Defeat to Anti-Austerity Left. Greece: Phase One. I guess I’ll take the “Eeyore” side of the bet:
@BigMeanInternet sabotaged by crooks elsewhere in Europe, leftist project discredited, etc
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 25, 2015
* Audio edition of Pacific Edge, the most uplifting novel in my library. KSR!
* How Amazon series misreads The Man in the High Castle. I’m glad someone got to this thinkypiece before I did; I’m crossing it off my list.
* The State department wants Frozen PSAs to finally convince the powerful children’s voting bloc to support climate change legislation.
* A new wave of videogames offers lessons in powerlessness, scarcity and inevitable failure. What makes them so compelling? And from the archives: Desert Bus: The Very Worst Video Game Ever Created.
* Free speech, and other things that cost $91,000,000.00.
* Massive open online sexual harassment.
* Why it’s a problem that writers never talk about where their money comes from.
* The bacteria at USC depend on energy, too, but they obtain it in a fundamentally different fashion. They don’t breathe in the sense that you and I do. In the most extreme cases, they don’t consume any conventional food, either. Instead, they power themselves in the most elemental way: by eating and breathing electricity. You were supposed to find us bacteria that eat garbage and shit electricity. I swear to god, I don’t know what you scientists are even doing sometimes.
* American Sniper is a racist, militaristic movie. But it has much to teach us if we want to build a successful antiwar movement. Learning from American Sniper.
* Why they throw subway cars away in the ocean.
* Great video bringing a kid’s imagination to life.
* Andrew Cuomo rips teacher unions as selfish ‘industry’ more interested in members’ rights than student needs. #ReadyforCuomo
* When the Boss Says, ‘Don’t Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Get Paid.’
* Gasp: Rationale for anti-ACA case continues to unravel.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 15: Wellness.
* “No king, no king, lalalala” in three dozen languages. Apropos of nothing, of course.
* Ninth Circuit Panel Suggests Perjury Prosecution For Lying Prosecutors. You mean that’s not the rule already?
* The age of miracles: Near-Impossible Super Mario World Glitch Done For First Time on SNES.
* The murderers of Charlie Hebdo prove that Puritan thugs (broadly defined) do in fact exist. However, this does not mean (contra McKinney and his supporters, educated and otherwise) that all those speaking out against Puritan thugs are beyond reproach. Nor does it place a seal forever upon the righteousness of comics creators or comics scholars. Is comics scholarship an academic field devoted to the understanding and discussion of comics, bringing a wide range of knowledge and approaches to a complicated, sometimes beautiful, sometimes flawed, sometimes undervalued, and perhaps sometimes overvalued medium? Or is comics scholarship to be devoted to boosterism, advocacy, and sacralization?If Charlie Hebdo’s accomplishment was to fight against all priesthoods, then surely it does them little honor to try to set up a priesthood in their name, handing down stern pronouncements about how their work must be read and understood.
* Wikipedia Purged a Group of Feminist Editors Because of Gamergate.
* Great moments in he said/she said: Maybe Drunk, Sleeping Woman Wanted to Be Set on Fire.
* Within two seconds of the car’s arrival, Officer Loehmann shot Tamir in the abdomen from point-blank range, raising doubts that he could have warned the boy three times to raise his hands, as the police later claimed.
* Within two seconds of the car’s arrival, Officer Loehmann shot Tamir in the abdomen from point-blank range, raising doubts that he could have warned the boy three times to raise his hands, as the police later claimed.
The phrase “raising doubts” should get hazard pay for its role in this article. http://t.co/nGvVWQ2emm
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 25, 2015
Could the officer have done something transparently impossible, or did the police lie? I leave that question to the philosophers.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 25, 2015
* Deflategate by the numbers: Data Show The Patriots Have Fumbled The Ball Far Less Than Any Other NFL Team.
* How to write like J.K. Rowling.
* The headline reads, “Pope Uses Balloons As Peace Symbols After Dove Debacle.”
* Pope Francis Wants To Cross The U.S.-Mexico Border As A ‘Beautiful Gesture Of Brotherhood.’
* The New Measles: One of the most infectious viruses on the planet is making a comeback in the United States, and many doctors have never even seen it. How Anti-Vaxxers Ruined Disneyland For Themselves (And Everyone Else.) Measles is horrible.
* The idea that a major problem with climate change is “sunburn” is just so incredibly, blisteringly stupid I doubt I’ll ever sleep again.
* More bad news: Negative tweets mean you’re probably going to die of a heart attack, study says.
* I’ve let so many tabs pile up since my last link post I have no choice but to do a “nightmare headlines” lightning round: Burglar gets 30 years in prison for raping 101-year-old woman in home. Father of ailing twins can only donate his liver to one of them. Vanderbilt Woman Didn’t Think She’d Been Raped Until She Saw Video Of It. Nearly two dozen cats seized from a Md. home, then euthanized touches off a furor. Prison Visitor Says Guards Made Her Prove She Was Menstruating By Letting Them Inspect Her Vagina. Ocean Warming Now Off The Charts. Here’s A Spider So Awful You’ll Wish It Would Only Bite You To Death.
* Mamas, don’t let your cities grow up to be gambling metropolises.
* Weird op-ed (linking to Serial) that seems to argue that extreme prosecutorial coercion through overcharging and oversentencing is a feature, rather than a bug. That said, I’d thought the podcast itself had explicitly explained why strangulation is associated with “premeditation,” though perhaps that’s only something I saw on Reddit.
* #serialseason2: Who killed Padmé Amidala? I actually like this theory fan rewrite a lot.
* George Lucas said Disney killed all his ideas for New Star Wars movies. Okay, so they did one thing right.
* The precession of simulacra: Car Manufacturers Have Been Faking Our Engine Noises.
* Peak Vox, but I actually found it interesting: Here are 9 surprising facts about feces you may not know.
* Flight Logs Put Clinton, Dershowitz on Pedophile Billionaire’s Sex Jet.
* Median weekly earnings by educational attainment in 2014.
* Federal Prison Sentence Begins for Anti-Drone Activist.
* The Princess Bride, the new film from Francois Truffaut.
* The Star Wars tipping point.
* How to tell if you are in a High Fantasy novel.
* Would Crashing Through a Wall Actually Kill the Kool-Aid Man?
* My current favorite video: Marquette in the 1980s.
* And here they all are, together forever. All 1,547 Star Trek lens flares.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 26, 2015 at 8:40 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with "Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?", academia, academic freedom, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, America, American Sniper, Andrew Cuomo, anxiety, ASU, audiobooks, austerity, bacteria, Barack Obama, Big Data, Bobby Jindal, Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction, class struggle, climate change, college, composition, coral reefs, credentialism, cultural preservation, Desert Bus, East Coast, ecology, English departments, eureka moments, fantasy, Fox News, free speech, Frozen, games, ghosts, Google, Greece, health care, hereditary office, How the University Works, imagination, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Marc Bousquet, meritocracy, Michael Bérubé, MOOCs, my media empire, my scholarly empire, Native American issues, Nazis, New York, Pacific Edge, pedagogy, Penn and Teller, Philip K. Dick, politics, race, racism, Reagan, salary confidentiality, science, science fiction, Scott Walker, sex, sexual harassment, snow, teaching, the Left, The Man in the High Castle, the power is yours, Tolkien, Twilight of the Elites, University of Wisconsin, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, wellness, what it is I think I'm doing, white privilege, whiteness, Wisconsin, words, writing, zombies
Happening Now: Thursday Links!
* CFP: Resistance and Dissent in America.
* Another piece on Octavia Butler’s Unexpected Stories at LARoB: Noah Berlatsky on Octavia Butler’s “Unexpected Stories” and Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind.”
* Like a delinquent sibling, Mars is all we’ve got.
* An oral history of Galaxy Quest.
* Comedians in Cars Getting Cocaine.
* Rutgers Athletics: Robbing Academics to Fund Big Sports. Libraries Receive Shrinking Share of University Expenditures. Historically Black Colleges and Universities Face Uncertain Future. Predictors of depression, stress, and anxiety among non-tenure track faculty.
* The Tech Utopia Nobody Wants. The Banality of Dystopia. Soak the Rich: An exchange on capital, debt, and the future. Ancient Apocalypse films use the past to project a reactionary present into the future.
* ThinkProgress on the latest bad-faith nonsense ruling against Obamacare. Don’t worry, the ruling against heath care subsidies is going to be reversed. What the D.C. Circuit Got Wrong About Obamacare.
* BREAKING: Pay It Forward Plans Make Everything Worse.
* BREAKING: The death penalty is an obscene horror show.
* The way we live now: One out of every 21 New Yorkers is a millionaire.
* We turned the border into a war zone. Arizona’s Checkpoint Rebellion.
* Change we can believe in: The World Health Organization Wants to Legalize Sex Work and Drugs.
* Three Out of Four Newark Police Stops Are Unconstitutional. Prosecutors Are Reading Emails From Inmates to Lawyers.
* Emotional labor and the third machine age.
* Water is a human right, but who is considered a human being?
* What could possibly go wrong? DARPA Wants Wants to Fund Research into “Predatory” Bacteria.
* Parker Lewis Can’t Lose: Women And People Of Color Get Punished For Hiring To Increase Diversity, White Men Get Rewarded.
* They say time is the fire in which we burn: The Queen aging over time on bank-notes.
* The time the United States blew up a passenger plane—and tried to cover it up.
* ‘I withdraw’: A talk with climate defeatist Paul Kingsnorth. And it’s not all downside: Climate Change Could Threaten The Future Of Hockey.
* Wrapping up all the loose ends: Aliens Will Go To Hell So Let’s Stop Looking For Them.
* And someone in Congress edited the ‘Lizard People’ Wikipedia article. I knew. I always knew.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 24, 2014 at 8:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with "Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?", academia, adjunctification, adjuncts, air travel, airplanes, aliens, altac, America, ancient apocalypse, antibiotic resistant bacteria, apocalypse, Arizona, Arrested Development, austerity, bacteria, bad faith, Barack Obama, care work, CFPs, Christianity, climate change, college sports, Comedians in Cars Getting Cocaine, comedy, community, Congress, David Graeber, death penalty, debt, defeatism, depression, Detroit, dissent, diversity, drugs, Durham, dystopia, ecology, emotional labor, futurity, Galaxy Quest, Gone with the Wind, Hell, historically black colleges, hockey, horror, How the University Works, hydrofracking, immigration, Joel McHale, libraries, lizard people, Mars, medicine, military-industrial complex, millionaires, NCAA, neoliberalism, New York, New Yorker, Newark, NHL, Noah, nonsense, North Carolina, Octavia Butler, Oregon, Pay It Forward, police state, prison, prison-industrial complex, prostitution, public health, race, religion, resistance, robots, Rutgers, science, science fiction, sex work, Star Trek, Supreme Court, surveillance society, the Constitution, the courts, the law, the rich are different from you and me, they say time is the fire in which we burn, Thomas Piketty, Tony Hale, tuition, Unexpected Stories, Utopia, Veep, water, We're screwed
I Saw This Movie
The headline reads, “42 States Have ‘Nightmare Bacteria.'”
Written by gerrycanavan
March 8, 2013 at 6:18 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with antibiotic resistant bacteria, bacteria, maps, medicine, science
Four for Tuesday Night
* 15 classic science fiction and fantasy novels that publishers rejected. Really surprising list.
* Terry Tempest Williams visits the Gulf.
* In a series of recent findings, researchers describe bacteria that communicate in sophisticated ways, take concerted action, influence human physiology, alter human thinking and work together to bioengineer the environment.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 19, 2010 at 11:10 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, bacteria, BP, California, Deepwater Horizon, ecology, Gulf of Mexico, How the University Works, life, neoliberalism, oil, politics, science, science fiction, Stanley Fish