Posts Tagged ‘black holes’
Saturday Morning Links!
* SFRA 329 is out! And it includes my candidacy for the SFRA presidency.
* Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings ‘cannot use much of Tolkien’s plot. Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Isn’t Allowed to Make These Changes to Canon. The Tolkien estate can veto pretty much anything in Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings.
* “The Lord of the Rings” as Lodestone: On Dome Karukoski’s “Tolkien.”
* The New School has cleared a professor of charges of racial discrimination for quoting literary icon James Baldwin during a classroom discussion. The university reversed course late Wednesday after the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education intervened on behalf of professor Laurie Sheck’s academic freedom rights.
* Academic job watch: Histories of Slavery, Emancipation, and the Afterlives of Slavery.
* Critically Acclaimed Horror Film of the 2010s, or Your PhD Program?
* When your field is their hobby.
I’ve been talking about this with respect to science fiction studies too for a long time. Widely seen as a field with no history, that anyone can just invent ex nihilo whenever they randomly get interested in it. https://t.co/58glEA9CFv
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 9, 2019
* The Legacy of Toni Morrison.
* The inhumanity of academic freedom.
* Inside the Sudden, Brutal Death of Pacific Standard.
* America’s Most Socialist Generation Is Also Its Most Misanthropic.
* The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is the Best Place on the Internet.
* Art Spiegelman, the legendary graphic novelist behind Maus, has claimed that he was asked to remove criticism of Donald Trump from his introduction to a forthcoming Marvel book, because the comics publisher – whose chairman has donated to Trump’s campaign – is trying to stay “apolitical”.
* No shit, video games are political. They’re conservative.
* One giant leap for Indian cinema: how Bollywood embraced sci-fi.
* The one almost-good thing Truman did with the bomb.
* The Arrogance of the Anthropocene.
Until we prove ourselves capable of an Anthropocene worthy of the name, perhaps we should more humbly refer to this provisional moment of Earth history that we’re living through as we do the many other disruptive spasms in Earth history. Though dreadfully less catchy, perhaps we could call it the “Mid-Pleistocene Thermal Maximum.” After all, though the mammoths are gone, their Ice Age is only on hold, delayed as it is for a few tens of thousands of years by the coming greenhouse fever. Or perhaps we’re living through the “Pleistocene Carbon Isotope Excursion,” as we call many of the mysterious global paroxysms from the earliest era of animal life, the Paleozoic. Or maybe we’re even at the dawning of the “Quaternary Anoxic Event” or, God forbid, the “End-Pleistocene Mass Extinction” if shit really hits the fan in the next few centuries. But please, not the Anthropocene. You wouldn’t stand next to a T. rex being vaporized 66 million years ago and be tempted to announce to the dawning of the hour-long Asteroidocene. You would at least wait for the dust to settle before declaring the dawn of the age of mammals.
* Extreme climate change has arrived in America. Here are America’s fastest warming places.
* Yes, climate change can be beaten by 2050. Here’s how.
Well sure we could stop burning the world, but then how would we create Jobs, the things we all hate that make us want to die
— Christopher M (@mammothfactory) August 11, 2019
A big reason conspiracy theories are so believable is that most of them start from the fundamental idea that there’s a lawless class of sociopaths running our society, which is demonstrably true
— Erik Hane (@erikhane) August 10, 2019
* U.S. Significantly Weakens Endangered Species Act. Alaska’s hottest month portends transformation into ‘unfrozen state.’ These are the places in the world that have no water access. In the future, only the rich will be able to escape the unbearable heat from climate change. In Iraq, it’s already happening. The North Atlantic ocean current, which warms northern Europe, may be slowing. Plastic trash discovered in ‘pristine’ Arctic snow. How One Billionaire Could Keep Three Countries Hooked on Coal for Decades. Climate Change Threatens the World’s Food Supply, United Nations Warns. How to understand the new IPCC report. Hurricane Maria’s legacy: how the rise of nationalism creates climate victims. Eco-socialism or eco-fascism. ABC News spent more time on royal baby in one week than on climate crisis in one year.
Climate TBD.https://t.co/XsNHwwr4ar pic.twitter.com/mWzfqIlbe2
— Rosemary Mosco (@RosemaryMosco) August 12, 2019
* Onward to Greenland! How much would it cost?
* Coal miners in KY have stopped a train carrying the coal they mined until they get paid $5 mill in backpay owed to them. Dept of Labor backs them up using a provision that can halt movement of goods for which workers haven’t been paid. In Teen Vogue.
* Eating meat will be considered unthinkable to many 50 years from now.
* A truck drove into ICE protesters outside a private prison. A guard was at the wheel. Moments after the truck incident, several other prison guards approached the protesters and pepper-sprayed them. The Business of Cruelty. Trump nominates advocate of ‘ethnonationalism’ for judgeship. “I need my dad.”
* The World That Made the El Paso Mass Shooter.
* First Graders Picked Up Gun Intended to Protect Ohio School.
* It’s not the “newspaper of record.” It’s a rag for the East Coast rich.
* Alaska’s governor and officials of the University of Alaska system announced an agreement Tuesdaythat will blunt — but not avert — a budget crisis that had in recent weeks become a national symbol of the defunding of public higher education.
* From the nice work if you can get it file: Presidential Tenures Are Getting Shorter. Why Are the Payouts So Large?
* If the Tuition Doesn’t Get You, the Cost of Student Housing Will.
* The Long Road to the Student Debt Crisis. At This Rate, It Will Take 100 Years to Pay Off America’s Student Debt. More Private Colleges Are Cutting Tuition, but Don’t Expect to Pay Less.
* Jane Austen’s income: insights from the Bank of England archives.
* The National Popular Vote interstate compact is a doomed strategy that is just never going to work.
* That’ll solve it: Biden allies float scaling back events to limit gaffes. You don’t have to do this, Joe.
* The sad fact is that this sort of thing will always make blanket debt forgiveness impossible. It doesn’t matter if it’s good policy or it makes sense — there’s too much bitterness and moralism and regret to help those who need help.
* Epstein corner! Jeffrey Epstein Conspiracies and the Mysterious Deaths of the Rich and Ruined. Jeffrey Epstein’s death and America’s jail suicide problem. American flags on Jeffrey Epstein’s private islands lowered to half-staff. Epstein’s Broken Hyoid Bone Doesn’t Tell Us Much. Jeffrey Epstein’s Death Was On 4Chan Before Officials Announced It — And Authorities Had To Look Into It. Epstein’s Death Has a Simpler Explanation. Why are so many people dying in US prisons and jails? Thirty-Two Short Stories About Death in Prison. Epstein’s scientist “friends” should have known better than to associate with a crackpot transhumanist. The Real Jeffrey Epstein Scandal Has Unfolded In Front of an Indifferent Public For Decades. Just read the whole MetaFilter thread for every twist and turn.
Excitement aside I think the facts really do point to a prison system so monstrously incompetent and corrupt it couldn’t keep Epstein alive even when they knew everyone was watching. https://t.co/p4I7Y8otl3
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 12, 2019
People want to see this as a conspiracy but imo the real story here is just that our criminal justice system destroys people's mental health and the mitigants against that damage are laughable. https://t.co/v0yAgmGcUM
— 🇧🇧🇹🇹🇺🇸👨👩👧👦🐕🌉 (@eparillon) August 14, 2019
* Even fixing Wisconsin’s Foxconn deal won’t fix it, says state-requested report.
* How YouTube Radicalized Brazil.
* Understanding the escape room.
* A heck of an act, what do you call it? The Hunt’s cancellation and Hollywood’s history of self-censorship, explained.
* The Uber delusion (forever and ever amen). Uber and Lyft finally admit they’re making traffic congestion worse in cities. And some bonus delusion: Self-Driving Cars Are Still Years Away. That’s Probably A Good Thing.
* Loot Crate goes bust owing $20 million to customers.
* Boundaries of Taste: Perfection, performance, and the allure of the kids’ menu.
* Bond markets are sending one big global recession warning. Danish bank offers mortgages with negative 0.5% interest rates—here’s why that’s not necessarily a good thing.
* Insurance Companies Are Paying Cops To Investigate Their Own Customers.
* Won’t you be my neighbor? An anti-hate pop culture syllabus.
* Towards a Cruelty-Free Syllabus.
* Fact-Check the Physics of Captain America Hammering Thanos.
* Elsinore smartly imagines Hamlet with Ophelia as the hero.
* It’s true: The House of X series is doing some pretty interesting things with the X-Men.
* Plunging Into the 1970s’ Altered States of Awareness.
* Newly discovered organ may be lurking under your skin.
* N.Y.P.D. Detectives Gave a Boy, 12, a Soda. He Landed in a DNA Database.
* Judge Calls NYPD’s Handling Of Precarious Civil Forfeiture Database ‘Insane.’
* Students with a $20 lunch debt won’t get a school lunch, N.J. district proposes.
* A California school district agreed to desegregate its schools on Friday, after an investigation found that the district had “knowingly and intentionally maintained and exacerbated” racial segregation and even established an intentionally segregated school.
* This is so maddening: Drinking bleach will not cure cancer or autism, FDA warns.
* A tiny Alaskan island faces a threat as deadly as an oil spill—rats.
* Why Amazon’s Twitter Ambassadors Are So Sad.
* “Amazon’s Rekognition software can now spot fear.”
* Smart ovens have been turning on overnight and preheating to 400 degrees.
* Hands-free phone ban for drivers ‘should be considered.’
* Will Wisconsin Let Milwaukee Save Itself?
* Major breach found in biometrics system used by banks, UK police and defence firms.
* Miracles and wonders: Ebola is now curable.
* Women who love ‘Star Trek’ are the reason that modern fandom exists.
This is a hilarious idea for a history of Batman from his initial publication onward. "Year by year, what movie was it that the ten-year old Bruce Wayne likely saw?" https://t.co/gEl3QLYtqU
— Timothy Burke (@swarthmoreburke) August 9, 2019
* Our Galaxy’s Black Hole Suddenly Lit Up and Nobody Knows Why.
* ‘Dicey Dungeons’ Will Help You Understand the Best New Genre in Games.
* Nearly half of you are utterly inscrutable to me.
* Google. Don’t let the Gen Xers run the world. Know your Flat Earths. Neophilosophy.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 17, 2019 at 9:50 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, actually existing media bias, Adam Duritz, administration blight, Alaska, Amazon, America, animals, apocalypse, Art Spiegelman, austerity, autism, Avengers, Batman, Bernie Sanders, biometrics, biopics, black holes, Bollywood, Brazil, business majors, California, canon, Captain America, CBP, Charlie Brown, cities, civil asset forfeiture, class struggle, climate change, coal, college majors, conspiracy theory, Cops, cosmology, Counting Crows, cruelty, debt forgiveness, democracy, deportation, DNA, driving, drugs, dungeons, eating meat, Ebola, ecofascism, El Paso, elections, Elizabeth Warren, Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Endangered Species Act, Endgame, escape rooms, ethnonationalism, Europe, facial recognition, fandom, fascism, Flat Earth, food, Foxconn, fraud, futurity, games, Generation X, good grief, Google, graduate student nightmares, Greenland, Gulf Stream, guns, Hamlet, Harry Truman, hate, Hiroshima, horror, House of X, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, Hurricane Maria, hurricanes, ice, insurance companies, IPCC, James Baldwin, Jane Austen, Jaws, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Biden, kids today, kids' menu, Loot Crate, Lord of the Rings, lunch debt, Lyft, maps, Marvel, mass shootings, Maus, Mid-Pleistocene Thermal Maximum, Milwaukee, miracles and wonders, misanthropy, misogyny, my scholarly empire, Nagasaki, National Popular Vote Compact, neoliberalism, New Jersey, New School, New York Times, nice work if you can get it, nuclearity, NYPD, Ophelia, organs, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Pacific Standard, Peanuts, pedagogy, philosophy, phones, physics, politics, prison-industrial complex, prisons, private colleges, race, racial slurs, racism, radicalization, rats, recession, Red Skull, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, segregation, self-driving cars, sexism, SFRA, smart houses, socialism, Star Trek, strikes, student debt, surveillance society, syllabi, teaching, Thanos, the 1970s, the Anthropocene, the Constitution, the economy, The Hunt, the rent is too damn high, Tolkien, Toni Morrison, true crime, tuition, Twitter, Uber, underwear, University of Alaska, war on education, white supremacy, Wisconsin, worst financial crisis since the last one, X-Men, YouTube
Take a Long Lunch on Me with these Monday Afternoon Links
* CFP: Paradoxa 32, Comics and/or Graphic Novels.
* CFP: Energy Pasts and Futures in American Studies.
* A City on Mars Could Descend Into Cabin Fever and Nationalism. Just because that’s what happened on Earth doesn’t mean it would happen on Mars!
* Philip K. Dick’s Unfinished Novel Was a Faustian Fever Dream.
* Some timely content for my games class: can colonialism and slavery ever be game mechanics?
* Reading ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ in Baghdad: What Vonnegut taught me about what comes after war.
One of his legacies is a famous passage in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” It’s about planes flying in reverse, where shrapnel flies out of people, back into the bombs and the planes take off backward from their runways, and so on, until everyone is just a baby again.
Vonnegut is saying it would be nice if the wisdom learned from a war could be used to reverse engineer the entire thing and keep it from happening at all. That is a nice thought.
* The bargaining phase of climate crisis: why don’t you just move to Duluth?
* This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out.
* Matthew Dean Hindman is reporting from the neoliberal gutting of the University of Tulsa.
We hear about liberal students & faculty. But oversight boards (trustees, regents) tend to be far more conservative & more inclined to treat the university as a business. Sometimes they are politically appointed, sometimes not, but rarely a diverse bunch. Here is #utulsa's pic.twitter.com/e6pxEXU1lO
— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) April 14, 2019
* Faculty, students and community members rally for unionization at Marquette. More from Wisconsin Public Radio.
* How College Professors Turned Into Uber Drivers.
* A new study confirms that fraternity men and athletes are committing more sexual assaults than are those in the general student population — and that repeat offenders are a major problem.
* I have a hunch, which is that professors are considerably less good at teaching than they think they are. And the hunch is based on the fact that we don’t train teaching assistants to teach, that we select and hire professors without any regard to their ability or potential as teachers, and that we don’t then give them further training or professional development. A hunch you say.
* Georgetown Students Agree to Create Reparations Fund.
* Faced with an unprecedented moral emergency in the Trump presidency, the Democrats have wisely decided to… play chicken with their base.
It is truly amazing that we are only able to discuss how the country wound up run by a sunsetting racist authoritarian as long as there’s never any indication that a Democrat ever made a single mistake
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2019
In the last 24 hours we've seen a distinction emerge between candidates who believe their path to the presidency lies in accommodation to GOP rhetoric and those whose strategy is to run straight at the beast swinging a sword.
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) April 13, 2019
* Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile.
(1) seen by (2) many (3) as apparently (4) increasing (5) the use of tactics (6) usually employed.
That's SIX caveats standing in the way of "Trump is an autocratic president." Six. https://t.co/QWmF785rKW
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) April 14, 2019
* ‘Fox News brain’: meet the families torn apart by toxic cable news.
* Yemeni bodegas boycott New York Post over attacks on Ilhan Omar.
* Inside One Woman’s Fight to Rewrite the Law on Marital Rape.
* David Perry talks about antidepressant withdrawal.
* Anti-beardism: the last acceptable prejudice?
* LARB considers Born in the USA.
* Can we build non-sexist and non-racist cities?
* Bird scooters last less then a month and each one costs the company an average of $300.
* Played as anything but a goof, Quidditch is incredibly dangerous.
* The Dunbar number is probably wrong.
* Today in dialectics: Are Plastic Bag Bans Garbage?
* Today in 21st century news: How to Scan Your Airbnb for Hidden Cameras.
* How Do Hospitals Stop the Spread of Drug-Resistant Superbugs Like C. Auris?
By ripping out floor tiles, reconfiguring pipes, and maybe deploying a hydrogen peroxide–spraying robot. Plus, a lot of bleach.
* Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take the first picture of a black hole. And you’ll never guess why!
* YouTube and racism, part a million.
* Hmm, weird, but I’m sure it’s fine.
* “Fewer clearer examples of Mark Fisher’s assertion that capitalism now only exists to block the emergence of common wealth than the fact that Google have apparently digitised every book in the world, and made them accessible to everyone, only with half the pages missing.”
* How ‘Game of Thrones’ linguist David J. Peterson became Hollywood’s go-to language guy.
Eight seasons of buildup was worth it just for this moment! pic.twitter.com/3uEonceVVs
— pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) April 15, 2019
big weekend for our most popular incest-themed fantasy franchises
— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) April 15, 2019
game of zzzzzz am I right
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2019
* Now that’s commitment to a bit.
* And I have a bad feeling about this.
Wow Star Wars is having the best media day in history nothing could possibly go wrong, let's go check Twitter and. . . . pic.twitter.com/jwbu1r9MSy
— Jordan Hoffman (@jhoffman) April 12, 2019
Personally, I can't wait for
X: God Emperor Skywalker
XI: Heretics of Skywalker
XII: Chapterhouse Skywalker— Mark Bould (@MarkBould3) April 14, 2019
(2) But the reintroduction of Palpatine and claim that it was always the plan to bring him back for IX makes me think there’s a decent chance they are going to throw a curveball and have Kylo *always* have been good after all, acting dark to get close enough to Palps to kill him.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 14, 2019
(2 cont) This has been speculated since TFA came out and there’s def stuff in the films that can support it (“I will finish what you started,” the Han death scene, but also the Rashomon stuff around the destruction of Luke’s academy in TLJ). The best chance left for a true twist.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 14, 2019
(and so on)
Of course the other problem is that episode nine has to be the end of something literally no person on the planet believes will ever be allowed to end.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 12, 2019
Disney will accomplish what George Lucas himself attempted but could not achieve: running STAR WARS into the ground and forcing fans to give up on it
— Gavin Mueller (@gavinmuellerphd) April 13, 2019
what a doofus, it's episode ix https://t.co/q4yA3GQuID
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2019
Written by gerrycanavan
April 15, 2019 at 11:03 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, adjuncts, advertising, Airbnb, American Studies, anti-beardism, antibiotic resistant bacteria, antidepressants, apocalypse, austerity, authoritarianism, bargaining, beards, Beto O' Rourke, black holes, bodegas, books, Born in the USA, boycotts, Brown, CBP, CFPs, cities, class struggle, climate change, college sports, college textbooks, colonialism, comics, commitment to a bit, dark side of the digital, Democrats, deportation, disruption, Donald Trump, Duluth, Dunbar number, Dune, empire, endings, energy, Episode 9, fascism, Fox News, fraternities, Game of Thrones, games, George Lucas, Georgetown, germs, Google, Google Books, graduate student movements, graphic narrative, How the University Works, human extinction, ice, Ilhan Omar, immigration, incest, invented languages, IQ, Kylo Ren, Latin America, Mark Fisher, Marquette, Mars, martial rape, misogyny, Nancy Pelosi, NCAA, neoliberalism, New York Post, obituary, oil, outer space, Paradoxa, pedagogy, Pepsi, Philip K. Dick, plastic bags, plot twists, politics, pornography, post-antibiotic bacteria, psychopharmacology, Quidditch, racism, rape, rape culture, reparations, science fiction, scooters, sexism, Slaughterhouse Five, slavery, sports, Springsteen, standup comedy, Star Wars, stochastic terrorism, superbugs, surveillance society, teaching, tenure, the courts, the law, The Owl in Daylight, The Rise of Skywalker, the university in ruins, trolls, trustees, Uber, unions, University of Tulsa, VALIS, VAPs, Vonnegut, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, YouTube
Behold! Links!
* CFP: Forming the Future.
* CFP: The Senses of Science Fiction: Visions, Sounds, Spaces (Warsaw, December 2019).
* CFP: Decolonizing the Undead.
* CFP: Adaptation and Nostalgia.
* In Urging Faculty Not to Unionize, Marquette Cites Catholic Identity. Better doublecheck that citation.
* I went on a little tear about Slaughterhouse Five some people seemed to like.
* Nike and Boeing Are Paying Sci-Fi Writers to Predict Their Futures.
* Science fiction and the path back.
* What Western Media Got Wrong About China’s Blockbuster ‘The Wandering Earth.’
* My point in observing that atmospheric carbon levels have gone up about about 14% while Game of Thrones has been a thing is that geological time is now faster than pop-cultural time. This has only ever been true before of earthquakes and volcanoes.
* Counterpoint: Climate change should be the subject of every DNC debate.
* There were just too many millionaires and billionaires here for a disaster on a great scale to be allowed to take place. Heaven or High Water: Selling Miami’s last 50 years. Louisiana’s disappearing coast. Housing policy is climate policy. Striking at the End of the World. Climate Change Drove Neanderthals to Cannibalism, New Research Suggests. Fascism and ecology. Fascism, ecology, and misogyny. Neoliberal catastrophism. The road to civilizational collapse. Sounds like a lovely place for the last 10,000 people alive to hold up. Now do I have your attention?
* It’s only going to get worse: Trump Just Purged DHS Because Its Leaders Weren’t Breaking the Law Enough. Trump told border agents to break U.S. law and defy judicial orders.They all belong in jail.
the cruelty is the point, yes, but it is also a means to an end: normalizing and legitimizing ever-greater cruelty as a sober and patriotic response to accelerated conditions of suffering which they and we all know are coming. it's a pedagogy in brutishness
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) April 5, 2019
I love how we're all just going about our 9-5 jobs and normal habits while the fact that–short of immediate, transformative action–a near-term mass die-off alongside the collapse of civilization is the most plausible scenario.
— syd🌹🌱 (@SydneyAzari) March 25, 2019
once this deleuzian I knew shared a reading of The Matrix about how "resistance" was an electrical engineering pun that also described how the movie's human body batteries functioned to power the system that enslaved them and I'd be lying if I said I didn't think of this often
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) October 15, 2018
* Trump Homeland Security Official Suggested Antifascists Were ‘The Actual Threats.’
* Hess told me that some people think there’s one kind of education within the purview of everyone willing to work to get it, the “embarrassing” kind, and then there’s another kind that is luxury goods, strictly for “elites” from “elite” institutions—however corrupt the latter may be—served tableside by an underpaid servant class.
* Huge, if true: Assessment Is an Enormous Waste of Time.
* Exciting new horizons in making student evaluations even worse.
* Teaching in the time of Campus Reform.
* ‘I started dreading going to class’: Women speak out about sexual harassment experiences at Duke. Elsewhere on the Duke beat: Duke to Pay $112.5M Over Allegations of Falsified Research. Duke’s Nursing School Failed Them. They Say Their Race Played a Role.
On James B. Duke whose "true “innovation” came not in the 1880s, when the cigarette machine transformed the production process" but in the expansion of corporate power, partially through the manipulation of the 14th Amendment to protect corporate interests https://t.co/Sug2Vl8scf
— corinne blalock (@corinneblalock) April 5, 2019
* The death of an adjunct. This is how you kill a profession. How to talk to NTT faculty. There’s a lot of pain in academia today. So many workers/scholars are feeling left behind in the job market. If you are, too, you’re not alone. I talk to 8 working-class scholars who have been pushed out of the academy in this special Working episode.
* Academic travel culture is not only bad for the planet, it is also bad for the diversity and equity of research. Reimagining the Annual Meeting for an Era of Radical Climate Change.
* How America’s College-Closure Crisis Leaves Families Devastated. What happens to faculty after a college closes?
* A Jesuit University Without History or Philosophy?
* The Militarization of Johns Hopkins Exposes a Nationwide Trend.
* I tell my students, “Look, we’re here to discuss the meaning of life.” The meaning of life is that I’m alive for the time being. I’m in a world which is making contradictory demands upon me. What do I do?
niche tweet: I re-wrote the opening of Never Let Me Go for VAPs pic.twitter.com/Fzx9M4J55y
— Jacquelyn Ardam (@jaxwendy) April 4, 2019
* Amazing coincidences happen every day.
* The digital humanities debacle.
* Unsilencing the writing workshop: creative writing heresy from Beth Nguyen.
* Chinese schools are using facial recognition on students. But should they? I say teach the controversy.
* Start school later! This is the lowest hanging fruit for educational improvement there is.
* A Note From Your Colleagues With Hearing Loss: Just Use a Microphone Already.
* Love to live in an apartheid state: “GOP leaders criticize Gov. Tony Evers’ lead pipe replacement plan, raising concerns that too much money would go to Milwaukee.” And a flashback to October: As the tax dollars paid to the state rose 19% between 2009 and 2015, an increase of more than $400 million, the amount of revenue the state shared with the county did not grow, according to county officials.
Every urban area in America gets looted three times: first by city officials redirecting resources to wealthy white residents, then by county officials outflowing money to the white suburbs, then by state officials outflowing money to other, whiter regions of the state.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 10, 2019
…which doesn’t even factor in the way the federal payments system loots densely populated Democratic regions for the benefit of tiny populated Republican regions.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 10, 2019
* Buzzfeed returns to Baraboo, Wisconsin, site of the infamous Nazi prom photo.
* ‘Disgusted by it:’ Whitefish Bay High School students accused of using racist language.
* Make Milwaukee Socialist Again.
* Abigail Nussbaum’s Us link roundup.
* In the history of gaming there are just 14 playable black female characters.
* Real Native history in a video game: An Indigenous take on The Oregon Trail.
* The Suprising History of the Ball Pit.
* All the absolute worst people in the world, working together and on the same page.
* Bidenwatch: when the cool uncle becomes the creepy uncle.
the real stakes of the Democratic primary are not about policy or about winning the election but about which group of crooks, scammers, and amoral hangers-on get cushy jobs with a tremendous amount of power and influence for the next decade, so you can see why people care so much
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 2, 2019
* The Senate having another extremely normal one.
actual quote from the Senate floor today: "You'll notice … important features here: First of all, the rocket launcher strapped to Pres. Reagan's back & then the stirring, unmistakeable patriotism of the velociraptor holding up a tattered American flag." https://t.co/mv4h6oSKd0
— Rex Santus (@rexsantus) March 26, 2019
* Give the Nobel Prize in Literature to dril. Give it to Bill Watterson, too!
* Teen boys rated their female classmates based on looks. The girls fought back. ‘Think of the mothers of sons’: Notre Dame mom begs female students to stop wearing leggings, sparking protests. Sports-Bra Outrage.
* “New bills would ban pelvic exams without consent.” You mean they aren’t already — what?
on the sand, half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown
and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
tell that its sculptor well those passions read
which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things
the hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed- pic.twitter.com/rbYadoG4Dn— matt lubchansky (@Lubchansky) March 29, 2019
* The US government is holding Chelsea Manning in solitary confinement again. It’s a vindictive, unconscionable attack on a brave truth teller.
* The changing face of homelessness in America in 2019.
* The Actuality of Marx’s Immiseration Thesis in the 21st Century.
* Minimum wage increases are associated with reduced numbers of suicide deaths.
* Using Chosen Names Reduces Odds of Depression and Suicide in Transgender Youths.
* 13% of the world’s companies are ‘zombies.’ That’s not healthy.
* Today in the richest society in human history: Why I Am Stockpiling Insulin in My Fridge. The absurdly high cost of insulin, explained.
* Epilepsy patient refuses to leave Vancouver hospital until her health needs are met.
we write "Millenials Are Killing The [X] Industry" because when you write "Unsustainable Profit-Driven Systems Are Crumbling Around A Wage-Suppressed Global Populace Serving Roughly 2000 Aging Billionaires" people get too depressed to click through & watch our hair cream ads
— regular gem (@Choplogik) April 5, 2019
* The keeper of the secret: one man’s devotion to uncovering the details of a single lynching case from the 1920s.
* A majority of bitcoin trading is a hoax, new study finds.
* They tried to warn us: Microsoft announces it will shut down ebook program and confiscate its customers’ libraries.
* The Joker trailer legitimately seems like an SNL digital short about trying to make a prestige, Oscar-bait comic book movie. I can’t believe it’s real.
* The Deep Space Nine Anniversary Documentary Is Hitting Theaters for One Day Only.
* Fossil found from the day the dinosaurs died? Seems hard to believe, but wow.
* Click this link if you dare, but remember that some things that are learned cannot be unlearned.
* Conspiracy Theories Can’t Be Stopped.
* It’s Rupert Murdoch’s world, we’re just all going to die in it. I hate what they’ve done to almost everyone in my family.
* The rent is still too damn high.
* Columbine Survivors Talk About the Wounds That Won’t Heal. This week in Hell World.
Nearly 20 years after the mass shooting at Columbine High School, students there are putting stickers on their ID & cellphones to indicate their desire for images of their bodies to be publicized & shared if they are killed by gun violence.https://t.co/Ynvy1oA0ml via @CNN
— Sarah Boxer (@Sarah_Boxer) April 1, 2019
* First photo of a black hole. An informative Twitter thread.
* How Animators Created the Spider-Verse.
* That’s me in the corner. Atheism and democracy.
* How IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care.
* A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy.
* Depressing, yes, but also sort of comforting.
* Just going to go ahead and green-light this Goodfellas sequel.
* I assume this is already a CBS procedural.
* Putting academic knowledge to real world use: Experts Determine Whether Tyrion And Sansa Are Still Married On ‘Game Of Thrones.’
In the 1960s a woman lived in a house with a dolphin, tried to teach him English, and jerked him off daily. The experiment failed because the lead scientist was obsessed with giving the dolphins LSD. The experiment shut down and the dolphin killed himself https://t.co/VgikyScg4c
— Jason Koebler (@jason_koebler) April 4, 2019
* About ten years too late, it’s a start: How Good Are FiveThirtyEight Forecasts?
* The Avengers: Endgame theory that Ant-Man kills Thanos by expanding inside his butt, explained.
* Miracles and wonders: Unless I’m mistaken this is the first time gene therapy for Huntington’s disease has ever gone to human trials.
* It is amusing the Dungeons and Dragons- a game for small children- has a more accurate model of intelligence than the Quilette people do: it’s a minor bonus to an extremely noisy stochastic process that is easily swamped by situational advantage modifiers.
* Meet Leigh Cordner, Medieval Times’ creative director.
* Revolutionary War hero Casimir Pulaski might have been a woman or intersex.
* The unexpected philosophical depths of the clicker game Universal Paperclips.
* Just kidding! There’s no plan for either problem.
* Great news from the elite world of comics podcasting.
* Coming Spring 2026: Fatigue: A Star Wars Story.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 10, 2019 at 12:24 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adaptation, adjunctification, adjuncts, Alien, Alien: The Musical, Amazon, America, animals, animation, Ant-Man, antibiotic resistant bacteria, antifa, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, assessment, astronomy, bankruptcy, Bitcoin, black holes, Boeing, books, bosses, California, Campus Reform, Canda, cannibalism, Captain Marvel, Catholic social teaching, Catholicism, CBP, CFPs, Chelsea Manning, China, class struggle, climate change, college admissions, Columbine, comics, conferences, conspiracy theories, creative writing, deafness, debt, Deep Space Nine, Democratic primary 2020, deportation, diabetes, digital humanities, dinosaurs, DMCA, documentary, dolphins, Donald Trump, Dril, Duke, Dungeons and Dragons, Endgame, English departments, epilepsy, facial recognition, fascism, FiveThirtyEight, fossils, Fox News, Game of Thrones, games, Garfield, geologic time, Gollum, Goodfellas, grading, guns, Harvard, Hayden White, health care, homelessness, How the University Works, Hugo awards, Huntington's disease, IBM, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, immiseration, indigenous peoples, insulin, intelligence, Into the Spider-verse, Jesuits, Joe Biden, Johns Hopkins, Jordan Peele, Kazuo Ishiguro, kids today, labor, lacrosse, Langston Hughes, lead poisoning, libraries, literature, LSD, lynching, Marquette, Marx, Marxism, mass shootings, MCU, Miami, Mike Gravel, Miles Morales, millennials, Milwaukee, minimum wage, misogyny, musicals, Nazis, Neanderthals, neoliberalism, Never Let Me Go, New Jersey, Nike, Nobel Prize, nostalgia, Octavia Butler, oral history, Oregon Trail, Ozymandias, paperclip maximizer, paradise, parenting, Pete Buttigieg, play, podcasts, Poland, politics, post-antibiotic bacteria, race, Rachel Maddow, racism, rape, rape culture, religion, Revolutionary War, road trips, Robert Mueller, Rupert Murdoch, science fiction, science fiction studies, sea level rise, sexism, sexual harassment, Skrulls, Slaughterhouse Five, SNL, socialism, solitary confinement, Star Trek, student evaluations, Subway, suicide, the humanities, The Joker, The Marix, the meaning of life, The Onion, the rent is too damn high, the Senate, the Singularity, the university in ruins, The Wandering Earth, Tolkien, transgender issues, travel, underwear, ungrading, unions, Universal Paperclips, Us, VAPs, Vonda McIntyre, Vonnegut, war on education, water, Waterworld, Watson, Whitefish Bay, Wild Seed, wildfires, Wisconsin, wizards, Working, workshops, writing, zombies, Zora Neale Hurston
March 1 Links! March 1 Only and Then They’re Gone!
* Contemporary African literature as taught in today’s classrooms is pathetically 20th century. The keepers of those gates overwhelmingly think of contemporary African literature as the three A’s: Achebe, Adichie, Abani. When pressed, they add Habila. It is pathetic, really. The bulk of our literature is on the Internet and ancient professors are still photocopying what Achebe wrote in 1958.
* We are possibly witnessing the implosion of American capitalism (i.e., neoliberalism) and hopefully its empire as well. Liberals, those who are protesting today, did not protest the mass incarceration and forceful expulsion of individuals who had been in this country for decades, did not protest the drone wars and illegal killings and fomenting of civil wars and mass displacement under our auspices ever since 9/11. The Obama presidency is destined to go down in history as a footnote; we are simply picking up fascist steam now from where we left off in 2003, before the Iraq War started going awry. The world war that began on 9/11 has resumed. We never left it in the intervening years, because we never sought accountability. The case for moral disengagement from politics in the age of Trump. I found this a brutal, sobering read. Obviously we have to fight in whatever ways we can fight — but I’m sorry to say the predictions laid out here seem much more likely to me than any notion of heroic #Resistance on the part of institutional Democrats or liberals more generally.
* The basic critique of Bruenig et al is right: The leadership of the Democratic Party, nationally and in most states, has resisted acknowledging the failures of the Obama years.
* Now seems like a fine time to listen to Kurt Vonnegut’s sermon on nuclear annihilation.
* Keep America weird: Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge wins UFO Researcher Of The Year award.
* The Hunt for the Perfect Sugar.
* Why You Can’t Ever Call an Enslaved Woman a “Mistress.”
* Some investigative details on the horrifying wave of bomb threats targeting Jewish centers.
* If you’re really asking: yes.
* And it’s not all bad news: Black Holes Devour Stars a Lot More Frequently Than We Thought.
"What it feels like to be a college professor in 2017" shelfie pic.twitter.com/3jUUs5Q1EY
— Andrew Pilsch (@oncomouse) February 28, 2017
Written by gerrycanavan
March 1, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #TheResistance, academia, actually existing media bias, Africa, African literature, America, apocalypse, Are we living in a simulation?, artificial sweeteners, autocracy, Barack Obama, beautiful-soulism, black holes, Blink-182, C-3PO, capitalism, Captain America, Chinua Achebe, class struggle, collapse, defeatism, Democrats, disengagement, empire, fascism, futurity, How the University Works, it's not all bad news, liberals, literature, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, outer space, pessimism, politics, postcoloniality, protest, protocol droids, quietism, rape, rape culture, resistance, retreat, Sally Hemings, science, sermons, slavery, Star Wars, stars, sugar, Super Bowl, the media, the Oscars, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, this is fine, Thomas Jefferson, totalitarianism, UFOs, Vonnegut
Quittin’ Time Links
* Canamania 2016: Just another reminder that Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (out now!) and Octavia E. Butler (out this November!) appear this year.
* And speaking of Octavia: a previously lost interview from 1995 has resurfaced.
* Call for Papers: Disability and Superheroes.
* A landmark special issue of Extrapolation (if I do say so myself) on Indigenous Futurisms, ed. by Grace Dillon, Michael Levy, and John Rieder.
* The Managerial University: A Failed Experiment.
* How Janelle Monáe turned Harriet Tubman’s legacy into an Afrofuturist sci-fi epic.
* “Culturally and geographically, EMU football will simply never succeed from an attendance and financial standpoint,” faculty member Howard Bunsis, who helped prepare the report, said in a presentation to the Board of Regents on Friday. “It is a losing proposition – always has been, and always will be. We hardly raise any money for football, and our attendance is the lowest in the country. Some of you believe that we are close to succeeding, if we just throw more money at the situation. This proposition is insane.“
* Eleven Theses for the Bernie Sanders Generation.
* Wrongthink watch: The Tools of Campus Activists Are Being Turned Against Them. When Slogans Replace Arguments.
* “Literature about medicine may be all that can save us.”
* …but marketplace feminism has simply embraced a mediagenic vision of leadership, most notoriously in the new women’s conference industry, where, Zeisler writes, attendees can “access and sell a certain kind of female power at a comfortable distance from the less individualistic and far less glamorous reality of the majority of women.” These conferences come with a hefty price tag to hear inspiring celebrities and CEOs’ tales about bootstrapping their way to the top and kicking sexism in the rear in stiletto heels. It’s a vision that, she notes, “erases the presence of anyone who isn’t empowered in the most crucial sense of the word—financially…” Feminism, Inc. is big business.
* Global warming has made the weather better for most in U.S. — but don’t get used to it, study says. But it’s not all bad news: Chicago is better poised to survive climate change than New York or LA .
* Living Near A Highway Is Terrible For Your Health. 1 In 10 Americans Do It.
* Too good to check: Tabloid says it has proof: Ted Cruz’s father is mystery man in Lee Harvey Oswald photo.
* Suicide Rates Are Up, But the Most Obvious Explanations Are Probably All Wrong.
* The Arctic Suicides: It’s Not The Dark That Kills You. Milwaukee suicide rates lower than rest of US.
* Study of exceptionally healthy old people fails to trace their well-being to specific genes.
* The Rise of Pirate Libraries.
* A Scientific Guide to the Fantastical Predators in Game of Thrones.
* Abolish Neil deGrasse Tyson. But he’s got the right idea here.
* Is there God after Prince? The rejected Simpsons script Conan O’Brien wrote for Prince. Musician’s secret vault reportedly contains ‘thousands’ of unreleased songs. Prince and Springsteen duet, one night only. Springsteen covers “Purple Rain.”
Love this! "They should put Prince on the $20 bill and call it $19.99. It's "The bill formerly known as a twenty." pic.twitter.com/BdCFjg3ozR
— Ty Francis (@tyfrancis) April 24, 2016
* Companies are becoming adept at identifying wealthy customers and marketing to them, creating a money-based caste system. No! It can’t be! That’s impossible!
* EVE Online Could Become a Television Show. I’d watch at least a few!
* How does a porn parody get made? And elsewhere on the porn beat: Child Porn Is Being Hidden in Legal Porn Sites and It Could Land You in Trouble.
* The new Doctor Who companion has been announced and I’m already annoyed because [felled by assassin’s bullet]
* You Should All Be Reading These Criminally Underrated Comics Right Now.
* Twilight of the New York Times.
* Clean, safe, and too cheap to meter.
* Chernobyl as an Event: Thirty Years After.
* I never should have agreed to appear on the cover of American Legion Magazine.
* Will America’s Worst Wildfire Disaster Happen in New Jersey?
* Kurt Vonnegut, Our Reluctant, Agnostic, Hippy Guru. I taught Galápagos for the first time in years this month and fell in love with it all over again — and I’m presenting on it at a meeting of the Vonnegut Society at ALA in May.
* I’ve been saying it for years: Oxford Scientist Confirms Starting Work, School before 10 AM is Torture.
* Kids Play in Backyard While Mom Does Dishes. An Investigation Ensues.
* Marijuana is kosher for Passover, leading rabbi rules.
* Snitchr.
* Definitely evidence of galactic civilization watch: A Dozen Black Holes Are Mysteriously Spewing Energy In the Same Direction.
* But maybe everything dies someday comes back: Ecto Cooler returns.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 25, 2016 at 5:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academia freedom, activism, administrative blight, Afrofuturism, ALA, animals, apocalypse, Bernie Sanders, black holes, books, capitalism, cars, CEOs, Chernobyl, Chicago, class struggle, climate change, college football, college sports, comics, communism, cryptozoology, disability, Division I, Doctor Who, dolphins, ecology, Ecto Cooler, EVE Online, Extrapolation, feminism, football, galactic empires, Galápagos, Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin, Google Reader, Harriet Tubman, HBO, How the University Works, indigenous futurism, Janelle Monae, JFK, Judaism, kids today, kosher, language, Lee Harvey Oswald, libraries, literature, longevity, managerialism, marijuana, maybe everything that dies someday comes back, medical humanities, Melissa Click, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, millennials, Milwaukee, moral panics, music, my media empire, NCAA, Neil deGrasse Tyson, neoliberalism, New Jersey, New York Times, nuclear energy, nuclear power, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, old people, parenting, pedagogy, pirate libraries, police, police state, politics, porn, porn parodies, Prince, public health, reality, reality is a hoax, science, science fiction, Simpsons, sleep, Springsteen, stop snitchin', student movements, suicide, superheroes, Superman, survivalism, teaching, Ted Cruz, television, tenure, the Arctic, the courts, the kids are all right, the law, The Lives of Animals, torture, Uber, Vonnegut, what it is I think I'm doing, wildfires, winter, Won't somebody think of the children?, wrongthink, you don't exist
Weekend Links!
* We have decades of research in child development and neuroscience that tell us that young children learn actively — they have to move, use their senses, get their hands on things, interact with other kids and teachers, create, invent. But in this twisted time, young children starting public pre-K at the age of 4 are expected to learn through “rigorous instruction.”
* Yet in spite of these lofty commitments and goals, not everyone is impressed with the proposed solutions that are surfacing ahead of the Paris talks. This includes the leading climate scientist James Hansen, who published an editorial on Friday in which he derided an Obama-led climate initiative as “unadulterated 100% pure bullshit.”
* The Wampanoag Side of the First Thanksgiving Story. What Really Happened at the First Thanksgiving? The Wampanoag Side of the Tale. The Secret History of the Pilgrims and Beer.
* My Favorite African Science Fiction and Fantasy (AfroSFF) Short Fiction of 2015. I liked both “Discovering Time Travel” and “Last Wave” a lot.
* The story of the first Black Friday.
* 40 maps and charts that explain sports in America.
* Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining company, applauds President Obama who signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (H.R. 2262) into law. This law recognizes the right of U.S. citizens to own asteroid resources they obtain and encourages the commercial exploration and utilization of resources from asteroids.
* How The House Of Representatives Voted To Make Refugee Resettlement Impossible.
* Assassinating Terrorists Does Not Work.
* Dinosaurs in Science Fiction.
* “Bad News For The Planet,” Says The World Meteorological Organization.
* The circle of life at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
* For a thousand years, the societies of the Western world transmitted and preserved much of their written cultures on and between the skins of beasts. Cows and calves, rams, ewes, and lambs, camels, deer, and fauns, goats, gazelles, and horses, seals and walruses, perhaps cats and dogs on occasion were rendered into scrolls and codices, bindings and booklets, charters and mezuzot. A large part of our written inheritance survives as a great mass of animal remains.
* Scientists just caught a black hole swallowing a star — and burping a bit back out.
* Jessica Jones: shattering exploration of rape, addiction and control.
* “false testimony occurred in hundreds of trials, incl. 32 death penalty.”
* Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World.
* How Did Doctor Who Manage To Waste a Companion Like Clara Oswald Actress Like Jenna Coleman? However they did it, they certainly did…
* I’ve seen this movie. Though this one is intriguing: We Still Don’t Know Why the Heck There Are So Many Blue Tarantulas.
* It’s Time to Change Your Amazon Password.
* The case for letting children vote.
* Star Wars as its own genre. The Heartwarming Story Behind R2-KT, And How She Joined Star Wars Canon.
* A Unified Theory of the Rocky Movies.
* And now they tell me: Childless adults are generally just as happy as parents.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 29, 2015 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Afrofuturism, alcohol, aliens, Amazon, America, animals, apocalypse, asteroids, Barack Obama, beer, Black Friday, black holes, bullshit, cancer, charts, circle of life, climate change, dinosaurs, Doctor Who, Donald Trump, early childhood education, ecology, FBI, film, Hawaii, James Hansen, Jessica Jones, kids today, labor, maps, Marvel, Medical College of Wisconsin, murder, Native American issues, outer space, parenting, passwords, pedagogy, Pilgrims, police, property rights, R2-KT, rape, rape culture, refugees, robots, Rocky, Rojava, science, science fiction, short stories, spiders, sports, Star Wars, Supreme Court, tarantulas, teaching, terrorism, Thanksgiving, the courts, the law, time travel, true crime, unions, Utopia, Wampanoag, war on terror, Won't somebody think of the children?
Thursday Links!
* Some seriously great news for my particular demographic: Kim Stanley Robinson’s acclaimed Mars Trilogy is colonizing TV.
* Flooding risk from climate change, country by country. Meanwhile: World’s Cities All Becoming Teeming Hellscapes.
* A brief history of mana: How an Austronesian Concept Became a Video Game Mechanic.
* A History of The Lord of the Rings in Video Games.
* LARoB considers the criminally underrated Chronicles of Pyrdain and the night genre was born.
* Age discrimination and adjuncts. I still think this is a seriously underreported story considering how dramatically it would change the landscape of hiring in higher education if it were to prevail.
* How For-Profit Universities Make a Killing By Exploiting College Dreams.
* Udacity has moved on to a new scam: nanodegrees.
* Angry Letters to the One Member of Congress Who Voted Against the War on Terror.
* “Reluctant Warrior Bombs Yet Another Country.”
* FSU chooses a politician as its new president despite major opposition from faculty and students. From the archives: FSU to phase out academic operations.
* Head’s up, math geeks: big discovery about prime numbers.
* Chimpanzees Raised by Humans Have Social Difficulties With Other Chimps.
* Listen, it’s about yardage: FiveThirtyEight provides the cheat sheet necessary for me to interact with other Wisconsinites.
* 15.4% growth of Harvard’s endowment brings the total to a cool $36 billion, assuring Harvard’s continued existence for another year. And thank goodness.
* I think I’ve discovered a way to precrastinate my procrastination, which means I’m always so late I never bother to get off the couch.
* Science proves no one is allowed to have any fun: Researcher shows that black holes do not exist.
* Fraternities finally look in the mirror and confront the enemy within: drunk female guests. Should we ban frats?
* What it’s like to be struck by lightning. What it’s like to lose your memory at 22.
* Please don’t ever drive and text.
* And if you want a vision of the future, imagine Mitt Romney running for president, forever.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 25, 2014 at 1:48 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, adjuncts, Afghanistan, age discrimination, alcohol, animals, Barack Obama, Barbara Lee, Bill Simmons, black holes, books, chimpanzees, Chronicles of Pyrdain, cities, class struggle, climate change, Dan Harmon, driving, ecology, endowments, epistemology, fantasy, football, for-profit schools, Frankenstein, fraternities, FSU, games, general election 2016, genre, Green Bay Packers, Harvard, How the University Works, if you want a vision of the future, Iraq, ISIS, Kim Stanley Robinson, lightning, Lloyd Alexander, Lord of the Rings, magic, mana, Mars trilogy, Mary Shelley, math, memory, Milwaukee, Mitt Romney, my life as a fraud, nanodegrees, NFL, our brains work in interesting ways, overpopulation, physics, politics, precrastination, prime numbers, procrastination, rape culture, Red Mars, science, science fiction, STEM, television, texting, the humanities, Tolkien, Udacity, war on terror, Wisconsin, yardage
Sunday Afternoon
* This is, I think, literally the first time I have ever heard of university budget cuts impacting administration. Meanwhile.
* Meanwhile meanwhile, Congress talks adjuncts and adjunctification. I’m sure they’ll come up with a good solution soon.
* Tressie McMillan Cottom on race and adjunctification.
* Yo novel so staid and conventional, it’s taught at over 50 MFA programs.
* Submitted for your approval: An OCR of the MLA JIL list, 1965-2012.
* Bérubé’s last post on MLA 2014.
* Harvard, MIT Online Courses Dropped by 95% of Registrants.
* Inside a for-profit college nightmare.
* Inside the “longform backlash.”
* How Student Activists at Duke Transformed a $6 Billion Endowment.
* “Income inequality” has proved a very successful framing for Democrats discussing a massive social problem, so of course the Obama White House is rolling out a much worse one.
* Pope Francis Is Drafting An Encyclical On The Environment.
* Demographics is destiny: Latinos overwhelmingly want action on climate change.
* How nonviolent was the civil rights movement?
* It’s 1968, and Esquire is interviewing James Baldwin.
* Chris Christie says no to dashboard cameras.
* The coming Common Core meltdown.
* Highly Educated, Highly Indebted: The Lives of Today’s 27-Year-Olds, In Charts.
* America’s nuclear corps are a mess. Dr. Strangelove was a documentary.
* A journey to the end of the world (of Minecraft).
* Science has finally proved that sex reverses cognitive decline in rats.
* This World Map Shows The Enormity Of America’s Prison Problem.
* The New York Times has the tragic story of a man with a million dollars in his retirement account struggling to scrape by on just $31,500 a month. Truly, there but for the grace of God go we.
* Bucking trend, Wisconsin union membership grows.
* Fox to strand reality show contestants on an island for an entire year.
* Woody Guthrie’s daughter wants to preserve Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital.
* The “okay, fine, let’s abolish all marriages” response to marriage equality is so strange to me. I know things like this happened during the civil rights movement — and one might argue that precisely the same thing has been happening in slow-motion to public education over the last few decades — but it still seems like such a strange, uniquely twenty-first-century temper tantrum.
* Behold, the 90s! The Most Impressive Costumes from Star Trek: TNG’s First 3 Seasons.
* Life as a Nonviolent Psychopath.
* We Didn’t Eat the Marshmallow. The Marshmallow Ate Us.
* And Stephen Hawking wants to destroy all your silly, silly dreams.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 26, 2014 at 3:41 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, administrative blight, aging, America, assessment, assistant vice-underprovost for bee-watching-watching, bankruptcy, Barack Obama, black holes, Catholicism, CEOs, Chris Christie, civil rights movement, class struggle, climate change, cognitive science, common core, Congress, dementia, demographics, Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?, Don't Think of an Elephant, Dr. Seuss, Dr. Strangelove, Duke, ecology, endowments, fifty-foot naked Buddhas, flexible online degrees, for-profit schools, Fox, framing, games, gay rights, Greystone Park, Harvard, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, income inequality, James Baldwin, kids today, ladders for opportunity, Latinos, maps, Marc Bousquet, marriage, marriage equality, marshmallows, metrics, MFAs, Michael Bérubé, Minecraft, MIT, MLA, MOOCs, nonviolence, novels, nuclear war, nuclearity, online education, online writing, police brutality, police state, politics, precarity, prison, prison-industrial complex, psychopaths, race, rats, reality TV, rhetoric and composition, senility, sex, Star Trek, Stephen Hawking, student debt, student movements, tenure, the dozens, the environment, the Pope, TNG, unions, University of Michigan, war on education, Wisconsin, Woody Guthrie, writing, xkcd
Tuesday Night Links!
* The 1998 Dystopian Novel That’s Eerily Relevant to 2013 Detroit. Related, via Twitter, the 8 Mile Wall.
* A comprehensive search has revealed a total of ten voter impersonation cases since 2000. Shouldn’t we tattoo people’s voter registration ID numbers on their faces, just to be safe?
* You had one job! Air Force Unit Responsible For Guarding Nuclear Missiles Fails Safety And Security Inspection.
* Until Last Week, The Official Policy Of One Virginia City Was To Assume All Rape Victims Were Lying.
* CIA Finally Admits to Spying on Noam Chomsky.
* Red, White & Food, A Map of the Biggest Chain Restaurants From Each State.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 13, 2013 at 8:39 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Air Force, America, black holes, brands, Brown Girl in the Right, CIA, Detroit, Doctor Who, dystopia, fast food, Google Maps, maps, military-industrial complex, Nalo Hopkinson, Noam Chomsky, nuclearity, physics, police corruption, rape, rape culture, science fiction, the law, voter fraud, voter suppression, voting
Three for Tuesday
* New York Magazine profiles my nemesis, James Franco. I’m sorry, but the idea that one could be meaningfully enrolled in four graduate programs simultaneously is just… Forget it. Via MetaFilter.
* Black holes may contain mini-universes, and our own universe may reside inside a black hole somewhere. But I still think we’re all just shadow-like projections on the walls of Leonardo DiCaprio’s dreams.
* What should medicine do when it can’t save your life? From the New Yorker, with more at MetaFilter. I firmly hope suicide pills are legal and freely available on that far off day I need them; as with so many things, I can’t fathom why there isn’t already universal agreement on this point.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 27, 2010 at 4:04 am
Hastily Composed Monday Night Links
* Imagine BP’s Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil disaster happening every single year, with little or no public outcry, no media coverage, and all but silence from government and the companies involved. Welcome to Nigeria.
* Environmentalism can’t succeed until it confronts the destructive nature of modern work.
* The fifty most queried words at nytimes.com. Via Steve, and MeFi.
* Reenactments of the Robert Green “Hand of Clod” goal from the England-U.S. game.
* Tales of Future Past is your retrofuture warehouse. Via Gravity Lens.
* How to destroy a black hole. Also via Gravity Lens.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 14, 2010 at 11:11 pm
Friday Night Roundup
* Why would they send Obama to Copenhagen if there was any chance it might not work? Really poor showing from the White House on this one.
* Best thing on the Internet today: Liu Bolin’s extreme camouflage photography. Warning: May blow your mind.
* The Sesame Street Mad Men parody. Warning: probably will not.
* Scenes from the A-Team movie.
* Bill Simmon is rapidly losing patience with Flashforward. I agree—but as I wrote in the comments over at his place, we have to remember that Lost‘s first great episode was episode four, and that the show was by and large pretty terrible until at least the second half of season three. So there’s still hope. It’s doing well enough in the ratings that the producers should have time and leeway to develop the story however they want.
* Related: What caused the flashforwards?
* Jaimee has a review in the Indy this week.
* Presenting the gas mask bra.
* And some bad news: Supermassive Black Holes Bringing Universe Closer to Death.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 2, 2009 at 8:37 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with A-Team, art, Barack Obama, black holes, bras, entropy, Flashforward, Jaimee, Mad Men, Olympics, poetry, Sesame Street, time travel, urban camouflage
A Few More
A few more missing links from the last few days.
* What sort of game are Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld playing? First the pilot for Curb Your Enthusiasm is a preemptive parody of Comedian, several years before the fact—now Jerry Seinfeld has signed with NBC to do a reality TV show that sounds like nothing so much as Curb Your Enthusiasm.
* Supermen of Pre-Golden-Age SF.
* How they made The Godfather.
* Is Switzerland the next Iceland?
* The Milky Way Transit Authority.
* Simulation of a black hole destroying a star.
* And is the FiveThirtyEight.com brand ruined?
Written by gerrycanavan
February 26, 2009 at 10:22 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with black holes, comics, crime, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Electoral College, film, Iceland, Larry David, Milky Way, Nate Silver, outer space, reality TV, science fiction, Seinfeld, subway maps, Switzerland, television, The Godfather, the Mafia
Facts Are Stupid Things
* Black holes, baby universes, and loop quantum gravity.
* Creeping environmental stress fueled by volcanic eruptions and global warming was the likely cause of the Great Dying, or Permian-Triassic Extinction, 250 million years ago. (Both science links via Gravity Lens.)
* Ezra Klein takes a look at the way agricultural subsidies determine what we eat.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 2, 2007 at 4:22 pm
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged with baby universes, Big Agri, black holes, catastrophe, ecology, loop quantum gravity, science