Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘Kodak

Saturday Night Links! Apologies to Anyone Who Actually Tries to Read This Post!

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* CFP: “New Worlds of Speculation.” CFP: Star Trek Novel Worlds. CFP: Slowness. CFP: SFRA News associate editors. And in case you missed it: SFFTV is finally looking for book, DVD, and video game reviewers again.

* Speaking of SFRA: The 2020 conference will be held at Indiana University from July 8-11, 2020.

* Tenure-track job: Assistant Professor, Disability Studies Program.

* As If: Alternative Histories from Then to Now.

* Syllabus: Philosophy of Middle-Earth. Microsyllabus: Animal Studies.

* Collateral Journal has a special issue on the weird, mostly focused on Vandermeer.

* For my “Jesuits in Space!” syllabus: Why do Catholic priests keep popping up in sci-fi? Science Fiction and Catholicism: The Rise and Fall of the Robot Papacy.

* What South Asian SF can tell us about our world.

* What will Palestine be like in 2048? Writers turn to sci-fi for the answer.

* From Black Panther to Tade Thompson: why Afrofuturism is taking over sci-fi.

* ‘Guilty’ Pleasures? No Such Thing.

* Brexit vs. Roko’s basilisk.

* Let’s talk about peeing in space.

* Utopia for realists: The case for a universal basic income, open borders, and a 15-hour workweek.

* Another starry-eyed young writer discovers that Columbia School of the Arts is a scam. Still angry after all these years!

* College and the future of work. The Humanities as We Know Them Are Doomed. Now What? ‘Dire Financial Straits’: A Portrait of a Desperate University That Made All the Wrong Bets. ‘Better, Not Bigger’: As Private Colleges Hunger for Students, One University Slims Down.

* This historic map of 6 million syllabi reveals how college is changing.

* Chaos theory as career counseling. And on a more down to Earth level: 8 Tips to Improve Your CV.

How Should Professors Cite Their Transgender Colleagues’ Work Produced Under Past Identities? Academe Is Trying to Figure It Out.

All Along the Ivory Tower.

Generous Worlds: Rethinking the Fate of the American University.

Securing a better future almost certainly means working outside established institutional and administrative power channels. That means labor unions and persistent collective action by the people who actually allow the university to function day to day, and by the publics that surround it. Fitzpatrick has little to say about such action, aside from some late, quick references to the recent wave of K–12 teachers strikes. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would entail a fundamental restructuring of schools, running them like truly democratic, far less hierarchical collectives, and that runs counter to their institutional history. Undoing our present system would be a massive undertaking in both material and conceptual terms, and I fail to see how anything less than union action would make it possible. There is reason for hope, though, as unionization is beginning to win victories for adjunct faculty across the United States.

‘Everybody Is Panicking’: Thousands of Alaska Students Scramble With Scholarship Money in Jeopardy. Alaska Lawmakers Fail to Avert Sweeping Cuts to the University System. Here’s What Happens Next. Facing unprecedented state cuts, faculty members at one branch of the University of Alaska system assert that another campus should absorb most of the financial pain. Its peers aren’t pleased. Despair, rage.

* UC Berkeley Removed From US News College Rankings For Misreporting Statistics.

But how did we get to the point where the idea of education as a human right and a public good is back on the table, and where free college and debt cancellation on a mass scale are being advanced by members of Congress, including a top presidential candidate? One answer is grass-roots organizing by people who have been fighting on this front for years, including members of an organization that I helped to co-found, the Debt Collective.

* The Alaska village where every cop has been convicted of domestic violence.

* Part two of the great ESPN expose on kids sports: Under the knife: Exposing America’s youth basketball crisis.

* America is warming fast. See how your city’s weather will be different in just one generation. This Year’s Wild, Wet Spring Is Feeding Massive Blobs of Toxic Algae. ‘Toxic Stew’ Stirred Up by Disasters Poses Long-Term Danger, New Findings Show. We Were Already Over 350 ppm When I Was Born. All-time temperature records tumble again as heatwave sears Europe. Climate Change Is a Humanitarian Crisis. Climate change and hurricanes. California’s Wildfires Are 500 Percent Larger Due to Climate Change. Huge swathes of the Arctic on fire, ‘unprecedented’ satellite images show. Beautiful, isn’t it. 3M admits to releasing toxic chemicals into the Tennessee River for over a decade. How Can You Tell When a Glacier Is Dead? Who needs food, anyway? Every movie is a climate change movie. Climate change is making people suicidal. Open Borders Must Be Part of Any Response to the Climate Crisis. “I spend my billions on space because we’re destroying Earth.”

To take one step back: the climate already is hotter than ever before in our species’ history. The entire history of human evolution (the development of agriculture, of civilization, of everything we take as familiar facts of our social interactions, our political systems, our cultural inheritance, our biological processes) all developed under climate conditions that no longer pertain. It’s now as if we’ve collectively landed on a different planet, and we need to figure out how many things that we’ve brought with us can survive in this new world, and how many of them will have to be remodeled or remade. Now add on top of that the fact that so far we only have reached 1.1 degrees of warming. We should expect to see at least two (probably three, and maybe four) times as much warming still this century. So our lives will get dramatically different even from where we find them right now. Everything we still take for granted actually will come up for question.

Cybergothic Acid Communism Now.

* Mr. Rogers and radical theology.

* How America Got to ‘Zero Tolerance’ on Immigration: The Inside Story. Six officials at nonprofit Southwest Key, which runs migrant child shelters, earned more than $1 million in 2017. Trump’s Border Patrol Chief Was In Secret, Racist Facebook Group. Autopsy Offers Jarring New Details About the Death of a 16-Year-Old Guatemalan Boy. A Border Kept Him From His Daughter. He Came Only in Time to Say Goodbye. The Man Killed In An Attack On An ICE Jail Said He Was Fighting “Against The Forces Of Evil.” A Border Patrol Agent Reveals What It’s Really Like to Guard Migrant Children. Migrants Shout “No Shower!” as Pence Tours Overcrowded, Foul-Smelling Detention Center. Video. More video. AOC in impassioned testimony: Children were separated from parents ‘in front of American flags.’ Thousands of unaccompanied migrant children could be detained indefinitely. What separation from parents does to children: ‘The effect is catastrophic.’ More. 3-Year-Old Asked To Pick Parent In Attempted Family Separation, Her Parents Say. On her first day in office Elizabeth Warren pledges to start a commission to investigate “crimes committed by the United States against immigrants.” Immigration Judges Are Railing Against A Plan To Replace Court Interpreters With Videos. Trump Seeking to Effectively Outsource Asylum Seekers to Guatemala. U.S. consulates around the world are “blatantly abusing their discretion” to stop legal immigration, lawyers say. A Dallas-born citizen picked up by the Border Patrol has been detained for three weeks, his lawyer says. Held in a cramped space with 60 men, he’d lost 26 pounds and been denied showers. ICE dragged a man out of his car after breaking the window and threatened to shoot a nearby witness who asked for their warrant. Border agent in Clint accused of harassing mother of 12-year-old migrant who was in custody. Expedited removal to be expanded to apply everywhere within the U.S. (not just 100-mile border zone) and to anyone not in the U.S. more than two years. ‘Never again means close the camps’: Jews protest ICE across the country. More on this one. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s decision to speak out against Holocaust analogies is a moral threat. 70 Catholics arrested in D.C. protest over Trump immigration policies. Bishops back Catholics arrested at Capitol for protesting treatment of immigrant children. Ahead of ICE raids, Miami advocacy groups set up secret shelters for immigrants in fear. ICE agents back down in Nashville after neighbors, activists link arms to help man, boy avoid feds. ICE has taken 35 of 2,000 people they were trying to deport into custody. They are blaming community defense efforts for their lack of success. Keep it up y’all. Autopsy report for a sixteen year old who died in a CBP shelter. Now that’s what I call the Anthropocene™.

https://twitter.com/saladinahmed/status/1149375043182505985

* Cops can do anything. Really, anything. St. Louis police union asks officers to post Punisher logo in solidarity with cops under investigation.

Penguins ignore police, return to sushi shop.

Democrats Continue Search For The Smoking Gun They Already Have. On The Mueller Report, Vol. 1: How they got away with it. Nancy Pelosi Has Lost Control.

It’s funny when people say the Democrats have no spines. You guys, they are a bunch of millionaires whose campaigns are financed by other millionaires. They have spines, it’s just that their job isn’t to stand up to the Republicans, it is to stand up to you.

 

* The world’s saddest, most pathetic losers.

What Jane Mayer Gets Wrong About Al Franken. Al Franken Really Wants You to Know How Clumsy He Is. Al Franken did the right thing by resigning.

* Trump’s Electoral College Edge Could Grow in 2020, Rewarding Polarizing Campaign.

How 13 Rejected States Would Have Changed The Electoral College.

* How a fractured family may have changed the course of American politics.

For those interested in the extreme rightward drift in the GOP, this podcast is a must. It delves into the activities of WA-GOP state representative Matt Shea. If the party will tolerate this guy, it’ll tolerate pretty much anything.

* The future of Trumpism is more erudite — and just as frightening.

* ‘If others have rifles, we’ll have rifles’: why US leftist groups are taking up arms.

Trump claims the Constitution allows him to do whatever he wants. He’s not wrong!

* The end of the Supreme Court.

* If the South didn’t exist, the North would have to invent it. How segregation keeps poor students of color out of whiter, richer nearby districts.

* Teenage pricks.

The Socialist Network: Inside DSA’s struggle to move into the political mainstream. Sanders and Warren voters have astonishingly little in common. The Billionaires Are Against Bernie — and the Rest of Us. Why Did Millennials Turn Left?

* 76 billion opioid pills: Newly released federal data unmasks the epidemic. A remote Virginia valley has been flooded by prescription opioids. Louvre Removes Sackler Family Name From Its Walls.

* The Epstein files: Jeffrey Epstein paid $350K to ‘influence’ possible co-conspirators: prosecutors. Jeffrey Epstein’s High Society Contacts. How Jeffrey Epstein Used the Billionaire Behind Victoria’s Secret for Wealth and Women. Jeffrey Epstein found nearly unconscious in NYC jail cell after possible suicide attempt. Jeffrey Epstein Taught at Dalton. His Behavior Was Noticed. How a Predator Operated in Plain Sight.

In this way, pedophile conspiracies act as a sort of propaganda of the counterrevolution, a fun-house reflection of the real threats to the social order. This is what connects QAnon and Pizzagate to McMartin to the witch hunts of the Middle Ages to the dawn of major religions. The demons may take different forms, but the conspiracy is basically the same: Our house is under attack.

* Today in the staggering efficiency of capitalism.

* MLMs are cults that prey on moms, Mormons and the military.

* Twilight of Netflix. Perhaps we won’t miss it.

Netflix’s metrics-driven approach shows up in other ways. For instance, it now routinely ends shows after their second season, even when they’re still popular. Netflix has learned that the first two seasons of a show are key to bringing in subscribers—but the third and later seasons don’t do much to retain or win new subscribers. Ending a show after the second season saves money, because showrunners who oversee production tend to negotiate a boost in pay after two years.

* Nothing gold can stay dead.

* Peak America: “Emmett Till memorial in photo of gun-toting Mississippi students will be made bulletproof.”

* Unless it’s this one: a school district refusing donations to double-down on its threat to take people’s children over unpaid lunch debt.

* Look, there’s a lot of Peak America to go around.

MAGA Bomber’s Lawyers Blame Trump, Sean Hannity for His Radicalization.

* Colorado abuse hotline emails went unchecked for 4 years.

Turning 26 Is A Potential Death Sentence For People With Type 1 Diabetes In America.

Trump Administration Moves to End Food Stamps for 3 Million People.

* My Frantic Life as a Cab-Dodging, Tip-Chasing, Food App Deliveryman. DoorDash Is Proof of How Easy It Is to Exploit Workers When Their Boss Is an Algorithm.

* Apple contractors ‘regularly hear confidential details’ on Siri recordings.

Inside the Wildly Popular Forum Where Landlords Plot to Screw You Over.

* “A high school gave 336 students fake AP exams when the district didn’t have funding to pay for the real ones. Students didn’t find out until real scores were posted online.”

* “Farmers’ Markets Have New Unwelcome Guests: Fascists.”

The lesson from the ruins of Notre Dame: don’t rely on billionaires.

* When the Soviet Union Paid Pepsi in Warships.

Remains of 9,000-year-old Neolithic settlement unearthed outside Jerusalem.

* Using salt circle motor runes to trap car AI.

* Kodak and the cold war.

* Ending period ‘taboo’ gave USA marginal gain at World Cup.

* Meth-gators in Alabama!

* And elsewhere on the gator beat. More gators! More!

* You say “brain-eating amoeba” like it’s not a big deal!

* Conspiracy corner: House orders Pentagon to say if it weaponized ticks and released them.

* Hacking the insulin pump.

* Dystopia now: Instacart Hounds Workers to Take Jobs That Aren’t Worth It.

* How the retweet ruined the Internet.

Archaeology of the 99%.

* The Millennial nuns.

* Marvel got Natalie Portman to come back! Dr. Strange 2 sounds bonkers! Star Trek: Picard sounds… good? Call no movie woke till you’ve actually seen it. I’m not ready to predict anything about Watchmen either.

* Giving Tawny Newsome both Lower Decks and the official Star Trek podcast is a truly shameless bid for my attention.

* Stranger and stranger: Quentin Tarantino just might go out on a Star Trek movie. I’m now fully convinced it will rule. I haven’t been able to see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood yet (that’s Monday night), but I have been enjoying Quentin Tarantino’s Feature Presentation.

A Different Handmaid’s Tale: On Joanne Ramos’s “The Farm.”

* How Japanese RPGs Inspired A New Generation Of Fantasy Authors.

How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband.

* Duncan Jones talks Moon, ten years on.

* When the Sims was(n’t) queer.

* Sexism and the car crash dummy.

Away Day: Star Trek and the Utopia of Merit.

* There is only one professor of future crime, and that is I, DOCTOR CRIME!

It’s interesting to imagine a world where humanity never invented the transistor and therefore never had a digital revolution. In that world, the obvious interpretation of economic history would be that the discovery of fossil fuels gave humanity a one-time growth spurt. More on the return of Malthus.

Opening Day at Disneyland: Photos From 1955.

* “I was owed more than $5,000 from late-paying publications.”

I was a fast-food worker. Let me tell you about burnout.

The Ultra-Rich Are Ultra-Conservative.

* He did.

* And the good news is: We can’t lose!

Written by gerrycanavan

July 27, 2019 at 4:55 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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So, So, So Many Wednesday Links!

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* Just in time for my next trip to Liverpool, the research from my last trip to Liverpool five years ago is finally published! “‘A Dread Mystery, Compelling Adoration’: Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker, and Totality.”

* Social Text interviews Fredric Jameson: “Revisiting Postmodernism.”

Is this sympathy for these arts of the past why in your recent work you returned to questions of modernism and realism?

The series you are alluding to [The Poetics of Social Forms] was always planned that way. I mean, I started with utopias, that is, science fiction and the future; then I went to postmodernism, which is the present, and so I’m making my way back into a certain past—to realism and then on to allegory and to epic and finally to narrative itself, which has always been my primary interest. Maybe indeed I have less to say about contemporary works than about even the recent past; or let’s say I have built up a certain capital of reading but am not making any new and exciting investments any longer. It’s a problem: you can either read or write, but time intervenes, and you have to choose between them. Still, I feel that I always discover new things about the present when working on these moments of the past. Allegory, for example, is both antiquated and surprisingly actual, and the work on museum pieces suddenly proves to make you aware of present-day processes that you weren’t aware of.

* George Saunders has finally written a novel, and I’d bet it’s not what you were expecting.

* Marquette will pilot a J-term.

* Earth First, Then Mars: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.

* Relatedly: Would it be immoral to send out a generation starship?

The Tuskegee Experiment Kept Killing Black People Decades After It Ended.

* A Brief History of Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses. Nabokov’s Hand-Drawn Map of Ulysses.

ClcQJJfWQAA_kon* Donald Trump Far Behind Hillary Clinton in Campaign Cash. More. More. More! The only credible answer is that it is difficult or perhaps even impossible for him to produce these comparatively small sums. If that’s true, his claim to be worth billions of dollars must either be a pure sham and a fraud or some artful concoction of extreme leverage and accounting gimmickry, which makes it impossible to come up with actual cash. Even the conservative NRO! Unraveling Con. The United States of Trump. Will Trump Swallow the GOP Whole? This number in Donald Trump’s very bad fundraising report will really worry GOP donors. The Weird Mad Men Connection. There is “Incredibly Strong Evidence” Donald Trump Has Committed Tax Fraud. And these had already happened before the FEC report: Ryan Instructs Republicans to Follow Their ‘Conscience’ on Trump. Scott Walker agrees! Top GOP Consultant Unleashes Epic #NeverTrump Tweetstorm. Donald Trump Agreed to Call 24 Donors, Made It Through Three Before Giving Up. And the polls, my god, the polls. There Is No Trump Campaign. If things go on this way, can the Democrats retake the House? Endgame for the grift, just as Alyssa Rosenberg tried to warn us. How to Trump.

But this one is still my favorite:

* Meanwhile, the DNC’s oppo file on Trump seems surprisingly thin. This Is the Only Good Oppo Research the DNC Has on Trump.

In a Chicago Tribune article from 1989 (which Buzzfeed actually discovered just under a week ago), Donald Trump reveals that he “doesn’t believe in reincarnation, heaven, or hell.” As far as the DNC is concerned, though, it’s Trump’s apparent lack of faith in God’s eternal kingdom, specifically, that’s damning enough for use as ammo.

* Read Sonia Sotomayor’s Atomic Bomb of a Dissent Slamming Racial Profiling and Mass Imprisonment.

* Cognitive dissonance watch: Could Congress Have Stopped Omar Mateen From Getting His Guns? Gun control’s racist reality: The liberal argument against giving police more power. How I Bought an AR-15 in a Five Guys Parking Lot.

Anti-Brexit British MP Assassinated on the Street.

Venezuelans Ransack Stores as Hunger Grips the Nation.

The TSA Is Bad Because We Demand That It Be Bad. One Woman’s Case Proves: It’s Basically Impossible to Get Off the ‘No-Fly List.’

* The hack that could take down New York City.

* Rethinking teaching evaluations.

* Study Finds 1 out of 10 Cal State Students is Homeless.

What Are College Governing Boards Getting From Their Search Firms?

Saying victims are to blame, at least in part, for their sexual assaults is a legal tactic used by many colleges accused of negligence.

How Not to Write About College Students and Free Speech.

* Once they killed a president with a diet of beef bouillon, egg yolks, milk, whiskey and drops of opium, delivered rectally.

* A map of North America, in Tolkien’s style. Keep scrolling! There’s many more links below.

AorakiMaps-tolkein

On Thursday, Philadelphia became the first major US city to adopt a tax on carbonated and sugary drinks. I’d rather see an outright ban than an attempt to turn it into a permanent revenue stream. New “soda tax” measures show just how narrow the liberal vision has become.

* Missing Barnes and Noble.

It’s not the right question to ask “how do I get 200 students with laptops in a lecture hall to learn my course material?” Why are they in a lecture hall for 50 minutes, three days a week for 15 weeks or whatever the schedule is? Why do they need to learn the material in your course?

* The illusion of progress: Ditching the headphone jack on phones makes them worse.

* The mind behind UnREAL.

* We’re All Forum Writers Now.

Space Travel Has ‘Permanent Effects,’ Astronaut Scott Kelly Says.

* Sherryl Vint on China Miéville’s The Census-Taker, a book that wasn’t especially well-received by the other critics I’ve read.

At the moment, Netflix has a negative cash flow of almost $1 billion; it regularly needs to go to the debt market to replenish its coffers. Its $6.8 billion in revenue last year pales in comparison to the $28 billion or so at media giants like Time Warner and 21st Century Fox. And for all the original shows Netflix has underwritten, it remains dependent on the very networks that fear its potential to destroy their longtime business model in the way that internet competitors undermined the newspaper and music industries. Now that so many entertainment companies see it as an existential threat, the question is whether Netflix can continue to thrive in the new TV universe that it has brought into being.

* Waukegan group offers tours to raise awareness for proposed Ray Bradbury museum.

* What’s happening in Oakland is incredible.

* #TheWakandaSyllabus. Trump 101. A response to the Trump Syllabus.

* Secrets of my blogging: Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting.

Homeless in Seattle: five essays.

* Jay Edidin on How to Be a Guy: After Orlando.

* Cunning Sansa, or Dim Sansa? Game of Thrones’ bungled Arya plot explains why George R.R. Martin’s taking so long to finish the books.

* Presenting the world’s ugliest color.

The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife. I want to believe!

* “People believe that a plane is less likely to crash if a famous person is among the passengers.”

* Death of a startup.

* Such a sad story: Alligator Drags Off 2-Year-Old at Disney Resort in Orlando. My son turns two today, which is almost too much to bear in juxtaposition with this headline.

* The Pixar Theory of Labor.

* The boys are back in town. It’s too late for you. It’s too late for all of us now.

Now new research helps explain the parental happiness gap, suggesting it’s less about the children and more about family support in the country where you live.

The Microsoft founder and philanthropist recently said he would donate 100,000 hens to countries with high poverty levels, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa but including Bolivia. Bolivia produces 197m chickens annually and has the capacity to export 36m, the local poultry producing association said.

* “Why Chris Pine says you can’t make Star Trek cerebral in 2016.” Respectfully disagree. Meanwhile, sad news in advance of next month’s release of Star Trek Beyond.

That Scrapped Star Wars TV Show Would’ve Starred a Sympathetic, Heartbroken Emperor. Sounds like they were aiming at a version of Daredevil‘s Kingpin plot.

* Laying down my marker now that Flashpoint won’t save The Flash from its downward spiral. Meanwhile, DC seems utterly spooked by the failure of Batman v. Superman and has opened the set of Justice League to reporters to try to spin a new narrative. Lynda Carter is your new POTUS on CW’s Supergirl. Syfy’s Krypton Show Already Sounds Goofy as Shit.

There really was a creepy fifth housemate lurking in cult British TV show The Young Ones.

* In praise of She-Ra.

* Two thousand miles away from the U.S. A-bomb tests in 1945, something weird was happening to Kodak’s film.

Why NASA sent 3 defenseless Legos to die on Jupiter. Earth’s New ‘Quasi’ Moon Will Stick Around for Centuries. Astronomers say there could be at least 2 more mystery planets in our Solar System.

Proportional Pie Chart of the World’s Most Spoken Languages.

* True stories from my childhood having purchased the wrong video game system: 10 of the best Sega Genesis games that deserve a comeback.

* Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

* And Quantum Leap is back, baby! I have five spec scripts in my desk ready to go.

proportional-pie-chart-of-the-worlds-most-spoken-languages-2

Written by gerrycanavan

June 22, 2016 at 9:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Weekend Links, Omnibus Edition (Only $19.99/Month for the First Six Months at the Canavan Pro Tier)

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* 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!

* Nalo Hopkinson has created the Lemonade Award, which will be awarded to five people or groups who “perform small and large actions of kindness” in the SFF field.

Capybaras break out of Toronto zoo, on the lam for 3 weeks.

* Behold: Pigoons.

* The economics of Hamilton.

* 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.

Spomenik_01Abandoned 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.

* The Future of War.

* People who value time over money are happier.

Instead of flipping through photo albums to reminisce, guest contributor Janine Hawkins loads up her late mother’s saved games.

* 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.

* Reckoning with OJ.

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.

As far as legal experts are aware, the Oregon court decision is the first time a court in the U.S. has ruled that nonbinary is a legal gender.

* 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 the gas station.

* The end of non-digital film.

Bryce Masters was 17 years old when a police officer tased him for 23 seconds. His heart stopped for almost eight minutes. His life will never be the same.

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 am awaiting some sign from Twitter that it cares whether its platform is becoming a cesspit of hate.

* 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.

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Written by gerrycanavan

June 11, 2016 at 10:22 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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