Posts Tagged ‘doomsday vaults’
Monday Morning Links
In the seven years since the Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened, hundreds of thousands of seed samples have gone into its icy tombs. And not one has come out—until now.
* Huge, if true: High Rise director Ben Wheatley: societal collapse is imminent.
* Huge, if true: Bernie Sanders can’t save America.
* Countless gynecologists failed to diagnose my rare condition – until Planned Parenthood rescued me.
* Endometriosis: the hidden suffering of millions of women revealed.
* Comic Crit reads Aurora and Seveneves.
* “Our society needs a massive reset in terms of its priorities [regarding autism],” Silberman said. “One of the main problems facing families now is their children aging out of services. Yet almost all of the funding into research goes into investigating causes.” […] “Many things are being ignored by going after the cause of the alleged epidemic that may not even be one,” said Silberman. “It is amazing to me, after all this arguing about whether or not vaccines cause autism that we still haven’t done a basic prevalence study of autism among adults.”
* The problem is, you can tear down an institution in a year. It takes 25 — if you’re the best — to build it back up again. But it’s too late now. By breaking the rules of the search, Harreld helped violate the trust of the community and the values of the university. Iowa’s tradition has been sullied. If Harreld remains and wants to be a serious university president, his job is not going to be “going from good to great,” but rather repairing the damage that the Board of Regents, the governor and he, himself have done.
* Cities bear rising cost of keeping water safe to drink. It’s always worse than you think.
* We Lost Our Daughter to a Mass Shooter and Now Owe $203,000 to His Ammo Dealer.
* What could possibly go wrong? You Can Now Rent H.P. Lovecraft’s Old Apartment.
* Inside every dishwasher, refrigerator, and washing machine is a little valve that directs the flow of water. For decades, most of these valves have come from a factory in the northwestern corner of Illinois, but not after today.
* Somebody get me Samuel L. Jackson.
* The nonprofit-Coca-Cola-industrial complex.
* Fun fact: There have been 4,286 Robins.
* Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
* If They Build It, Will We Come? Meet The Tech Entrepreneurs Trying To Take Back The Porn Industry.
Thurs.
* If you were offered a true statistic about an alien civilization, but only one, what would it be? MR, true to form, wants information about “the real rate of return on capital.” I’d want a measure of the class inequality in their society; “infant mortality rate” is suggested in the comments, but of course we don’t know what their lifecycle is like so that answer might not tell us anything. “How many other civilizations have you exterminated?”, also from the MR comments, seems a good choice too…
* David Foster Wallace, Viking Poet.
* All six hours of The Staircase, a true-crime documentary set right here in Durham, is now available on Google Video. Jaimee and I watched this a few years ago and quite enjoyed it. The discussion in the MetaFilter thread is preoccupied with the documentary’s veracity, but this aspect doesn’t really trouble me; I don’t think the film presents itself as an objective or dispassionate approach to “the facts,” which is not something I think documentaries are really capable of achieving in the first place. The film is very engaging and not deceptive, which is good enough for me.
* This Indexed fantasy league is incredibly flawed. There’s no way a single zombie could defeat a werewolf, a vampire, an elf, and a ghost to win the championship; I believe the word you’re looking for is zombies.
* Anarchism and science fiction: a reading list. Via MeFi.
* Two more Civ V previews from Gamespot and IGN.
* And please be advised your doomsday seed vault is functioning perfectly.
Gerry Canavan 