Posts Tagged ‘mass extinction events’
Wednesday Links!
* Great moments in CFPs: The Journal of Dracula Studies.
* There is nothing wrong with thinking concretely and practically about how we can free ourselves from social institutions that place such confining limits on the kind of society we are able to have. Because of one thing we can be certain: the present system will either be replaced or it will go on forever.
* CNN’s Van Jones says Keystone pipeline only creates 35 permanent jobs.
* How Colleges Flunk Mental Health.
* Tracking PhD outcomes at Penn State.
* IRS Suggests ‘Reasonable’ Ways of Calculating Adjuncts’ Hours.
* Marvel Body Mass Index Study Reveals Nearly 1/3 of Female Characters Are Underweight.
* College graduates are less likely to lose their jobs than workers with less education, but once they do they are actually a bit more likely than others to join the ranks of the long-term unemployed. And workers over 45 are especially likely to spend a long time unemployed.
* 80,000 March in North Carolina.
* NBC single-handedly pays for a fifth of all Olympic Games.
* When the CIA came to Iowa City.
* 3,863,484: The LEGO sublime.
* You don’t understand hipster post-irony, dad! But it’s true: I don’t understand what Fred Armisen is doing.
* Contact with the market can be hazardous to usability; nationalize Twitter.
* Adam Kotsko vs. the difference principle.
* NASA now accepting applications to mine the moon.
* “Americans are apparently less skeptical of astrology than they have been at any time since 1983,” proclaims the most depressing lede of all time.
* The sheep look up: The Sixth Mass Extinction Event. The Sixth Mass Extinction Event. 105 Winter Olympians Call for Climate Action. Another water disaster in West Virginia. The Fossil Fuel Industry Just Had a Really, Really Bad Day.
* Change we can believe in: Why Dragonlance should be the next fantasy film franchise.
* Duke’s Own™ Mitch Fraas in the New York Times, tracking libraries looted by Nazis.
* And rest in peace, Shirley Temple and Stuart Hall.
All the Midweek Links
* The headline reads, “37 Million Bees Found Dead In Ontario.”
* As fully intended by its authors, a federal judge has blocked Walker’s abortion bill.
* Also in that’s-the-whole-point news: Undocumented Worker Alleges Wage Theft, Ends Up In Deportation Proceedings.
* Living nightmares: I Got Raped, Then My Problems Started.
* Duke University Agrees To Expel Students Who Are Found Guilty Of Sexual Assault.
* British public wrong about nearly everything, survey shows.
* State Department Admits It Doesn’t Know Keystone XL’s Exact Route.
* The 2 Supreme Court Cases That Could Put a Dagger in Organized Labor.
* Insurers Refuse To Cover Kansas Schools Where Teachers Carry Guns Because It’s Too Risky. Maybe my plan to force gun owners to carry liability insurance would have worked after all.
* Nearly 1 in 6 Americans Receives Food Stamps.
* The cause of the crash landing of a Boeing 777 in San Francisco is still unclear. But pilots say they had been worried about conditions at the West Coast airport for a while. An important flight control system had been out of service for weeks. No One’s Talking About the Flight Attendant Heroes in the SFO Crash.
* Great moments in neoliberalism: Chris Christie’s Boondoggle.
* A University’s Offer of Credit for a MOOC Gets No Takers.
* Against Oregon’s delayed tuition scheme: 1, 2. Just putting everything else aside:
1. It is not pragmatic. The two most difficult challenges it raises are how to fund its initiation and how to collect on the money loaned. Nowhere do its proponents explain where Oregon will get the estimated $9 billion needed to start the program, or how the state will ensure that graduates repay.
* CUNY Faculty Protests Hiring of David Petraeus.
* Designer Looking For People To Do Their Job Without Pay (Anywhere).
* A hundred years before Dracula, there was Carmilla.
Meeting first in their dreams, Laura and Carmilla are bound together in the original female vampire romance. What can Laura make of an ancestral portrait that resembles her mysterious new friend or the strange dreams she experiences as she is drawn ever closer to this beauty of the night?
* Holy @#$%, Michael Jackson almost starred in a Doctor Who movie. Second choice (the legend goes) was a little-known stand-up you may have heard of, Bill Cosby.
* Other Doctor Who ideas that seemingly make no sense at all: We almost got a live Doctor Who episode.
* Disaster: Donald Glover will only appear in 5 of 13 Community episodes.
* The Ender’s Game Boycott Begins. Orson Scott Card cries out for tolerance and understanding.
* Empire watch: China builds the largest building in the world, complete with internal sea shore.
* Meanwhile: Florida may have accidentally banned access to the Internet.
* A Detroit area school district has erupted in protest over the discarding of a historic book collection that is said to contain more than 10,000 black history volumes, included films, videos, and other artifacts. The blame, according to residents of Highland Park, a small city surrounded on nearly all sides by Detroit, belongs to Emergency Manager Donald Weatherspoon, who claims the collection was thrown out by mistake but that the district cannot afford to preserve it.
* Can we stop worrying about millennials yet?
* Midwestern Dad Could Be Deported For Smoking Marijuana Fifteen Years Ago.
* How the actors relaxed on the set of The Wire.
* And an important link for my particular demographic: Twelve Colorful Words That Start with Z.
Thursday Night Links
* This may shock you, but Thomas Friedman loves MOOCs. An Ad Hominem Attack Against Thomas Friedman. MOOCs R Us. MOOCs or BOOKs?
* Mother who stole son’s education gets 12 years in prison.
* Two bad tastes that taste good together: Rand Paul filibusters drones.
* Apocalypse now: The amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the air jumped dramatically in 2012, making it very unlikely that global warming can be limited to another 2 degrees as many global leaders have hoped, new federal figures show.
* Planning for the Post-Income Economy. Fracking is starting to devour the US economy.
* Elephant Poaching Pushes Species To Brink Of Extinction.
* The entrapment defense rarely succeeds, both in terrorism cases and more quotidian (usually drug-related) prosecutions, largely because “entrapment” means something very different in a courtroom than it does in ordinary usage. For nearly a century, the federal courts have allowed a criminal defendant to dodge criminal liability by showing that the governmentinduced her to commit an unlawful act. Once the accused makes such a showing, however, the government still has the opportunity to prove that she was predisposed to commit the crime, even before government agents entered the picture. If a jury accepts the government’s characterization, other factors—the nature or size of the “bait,” the complexity of the government artifice, or the independent wherewithal of the defendant to commit the crime—basically don’t matter: the defendant is still guilty. This means that when entrapment is at issue, the personality, reputation, criminal history, and political or religious beliefs of the accused become the centerpiece of the trial. Post-9/11 juries have had little trouble concluding that the disaffected Muslims (and occasional anarchists) ensnared by the FBI have been sufficiently “predisposed” to engage in terrorism.
* Recovering Lolita. My students have been pouring over this collection of Lolita book covers thanks to @sselisker.
* #slatepitches: What SimCity Teaches Us About Real Cities of the Future.
* Ephemeral third ring of radiation makes appearance around Earth. If we lived in a comic book, I bet this story would be fifteen times as awesome.
* Detailed Floor Plan Drawings of Popular TV and Film Homes.
* See Stephen Colbert school James Franco on Tolkien mythology.
* A first look at The Grand Budapest Hotel.
* FBI Investigating Drone Near Miss with Jet at JFK.
* TPM’s papal contenders cheatsheet.
* Smile Time: Community is doing an all-puppet episode, with actual puppets.
* First Trailer for Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing.
* Consequences of Repeated Blood-Brain Barrier Disruption in Football Players.
* And the latest issue of The New Inquiry posits time is the fire in which we burn.
Tuesday!
* C21’s book on Debt is finally almost out. My essay draws on the bits of the Polygraph introduction I wrote and is about ecological debt.
* Syllabus minute: I have W.H. Auden envy.
* MOOC Completion Rates: The Data.
* How neoliberal universities build their football stadiums.
Some projections showed Athletics might not be able to make payments starting in the 2030s when the debt service balloons. The debt is structured so that for the next 20 years, Cal only needs to make interest payments on the debt. The principal kicks in in the early 2030s, resulting in payments between $24 million and $37 million per year.
Look, if it’s good enough for an idea man who settled out of court on securities fraud, it’s good enough for me.
* Kent State fires adjunct who built their journalism master’s.
* Ian Morris, psychohistorian.
* What If? on The Twitter Archive of Babel. The Twitter Archive of Babel contains the true story of your life, as well as all the stories of all the lives you didn’t lead….
* Proud Species Commits Suicide Rather Than Be Driven To Extinction By Humans.
* A People’s History of “Twist and Shout.”
* PPP: Russ Feingold Poised For Comeback, Could Top Scott Walker Next Year.
* Michael Chabon: Dreams are useless bodily effluvia. Nicholson Baker: Dreams are all we have.
* You and I are gonna live forever: 72 is the new 30.
* Settling nerd fights of the 1990s today: Is This the Smoking Gun Proving Deep Space Nine Ripped Off Babylon 5?
* The Star Wars Heresies: Star Wars and William Blake. Tim Morton’s essay in Green Planets has a similar impulse with respect to Avatar.
* And in even more insane mashup news: WWE Keeps Pressure On Glenn Beck.
‘Climate Change May Flip 40% of Earth’s Major Ecosystems This Century’
The new study by NASA and Caltech defines as ecologically sensitive hotspots – areas projected to undergo the greatest degree of species turnover – regions in the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau [as this ‘third pole’ is in fact to be considered a climatic island], eastern equatorial Africa [which has an unstable drought-sensitive climate], Madagascar, the Mediterranean region, southern South America, and North America’s Great Lakes and Great Plains areas. The largest areas of ecological sensitivity and biome changes predicted for this century are found in areas with the most dramatic climate change: in the Northern Hemisphere high latitudes, particularly along the northern and southern boundaries of taiga or boreal forests.
Thursday Night
* An asteroid buzzed us yesterday, but the real terror (as Neil de Grasse Tyson reminds us on this week’s Nerdist podcast) remains Apophis in 2036. Get me Bruce Willis!
* Some perspectives on the Keystone XL delay: We’ve been sold out! We’ve won (for now)! We’ve won!
* “We regret that, given the instruction to take down tents and prevent encampment, the police were forced to use their batons to enforce the policy.” Please, stop making us beat you!
* Occupy Oakland’s Big Challenge: The Mayhem Factor.
* Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home will be a musical.
* The next Cold War will be fought with greenhouse gas.
* Naomi Klein: Capitalism vs. the climate.
* And ladies and gentlemen, for the last time anywhere: the Western Black Rhino.
Tuesday Night Links
* With Troy Davis denied clemency despite ample doubt about his guilt, it’s worth remembering that according to Antonin Scalia even “actual innocence” isn’t sufficient to keep the state from executing you.
* “Producers said ‘It’s a nice project, a great project… where are the white heroes?'” he told the press during a stay in Paris this month for a seminar on film. Danny Glover is having trouble getting funding for a film on Haitian revolutionary hero Toussaint-Louverture.
* If global warming continues as expected, it is estimated that almost a third of all flora and fauna species worldwide could become extinct. Scientists … discovered that the proportion of actual biodiversity loss should quite clearly be revised upwards: by 2080, more than 80% of genetic diversity within species may disappear in certain groups of organisms, according to researchers in the title story of the journal Nature Climate Change. The study is the first world-wide to quantify the loss of biological diversity on the basis of genetic diversity.
* Scenes from the class struggle at Amazon.
* Peak Oil: 1979? Via Kevin Drum.
* Global Energy Use To Jump 53 Percent By 2035.
* UCSD’s Tom Murphy rediscovers Limits to Growth.
* And then there’s Germany: A mysterious “forest boy” presented himself at Berlin City Hall two weeks ago. The first words he spoke were English: “I’m alone in the world. I don’t know who I am. Please help me.” He believed to be 17, and to have spent the last five years sleeping on the ground in a forest. His identity is a mystery.
Wednesday (Nothin’ But) Links
* If my Internets are any guide, the most-linked article of the day by a mile: Jose Antonio Vargas’s “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant.”
* There is literally nothing you can say to me that will make me disbelieve the Post‘s Lady Gaga/Žižek scoop. Do not try! It’s definitely, definitely true.
* Al Gore takes on Obama’s failure to lead on climate change in the latest Rolling Stone. Great piece.
* Also in Rolling Stone: Matt Taibbi voyages into the heart of darkness Michele Bachmann.
* Also in change we can believe in: Obama will reduce U.S. troops in Afghanistan to the level they were at when he took office. Yes we can!
* More from the Mother Jones special report on work in America: Harrowing, Heartbreaking Tales of Overworked Americans.
* The headline reads, “Ocean Life on the Brink of Mass Extinctions.”
* Of course you had me at Muppet Game of Thrones.
* Life imitates the Onion: Sarah Palin has quit her bus tour halfway through.
* Behold Randall Munroe’s terrible power, and despair: 500 Still Frames of Joe Biden Eating a Sandwich.
* And Katy Perry comes out as a communist. It’s really no surprise; all her friends are red…
China and Ecology
So he stands in the village in Guangdong province, where the world’s old motherboards—yours and mine—are sent to die. There, children pick through the old computers, breaking down every reusable part as if they were the globe’s intestine. But the children grow sick with lead poisoning and develop brain damage, cancer, and kidney failure. Even when the kids get to sit in a classroom, they have to wear masks to protect them from the mountains of garbage. Watts goes to meet the environmental activists who are trying to stop this poisoning of their children, and watches as—terrified—they are carried away to prison. (Imagine if Al Gore had been imprisoned for demanding an investigation into Love Canal, and was still in solitary, and you get the idea.)
So he ventures out on a ship with an international band of scientists to save the last Yangtze dolphin—an animal that was swimming through China’s rivers 10 million years before the first human and was a common sight not long ago. But gradually Watts realizes he is too late. They are all dead. He says: “Man had wiped out its first dolphin. … The end of a species after twenty million years felt terrifyingly momentous. This was not just a piece of news. It was even more than history. It was an event on a geological timescale.”
So he watches as the globe warms and China’s deserts stretch further and deeper with each passing year. So he stands and stares as the Himalayan glaciers—where most of Asia’s great rivers begin—melt and die, with two thirds on course to vanish by 2050.
Johann Hari reviews Jonathan Watts’s book When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind—or Destroy It for Slate.
Killing Everything
A growing number of creatures could disappear from the earth, with one-fifth of all vertebrates and as many as a third of all sharks and rays now facing the threat of extinction, according to a new survey assessing nearly 26,000 species across the globe.
Wednesday Night
* The economics of the World Cup.
* The importance of the World Cup.
Life is too short to miss any games to be played this summer in South Africa. A sad fact of human existence is that an average life seldom contains more than 20 World Cups—our games are tragically numbered.
* Why did nearly all life on Earth die 250 million years ago?
* And if films retained their original casting. It’s a true shame we never got David Bowie as Captain Hook.
Apocalypse Monday
Ocean acidification is happening about ten times faster today than it did 55 million years ago, when it preceded the mass extinction of much of the planet’s marine life.
Gerry Canavan 