Posts Tagged ‘nuclear waste’
Friday Links!
* Speaking of which! This Saturday morning! Infinite Jest at 20! Join us!
* In my mailbox: Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and the Environment. I’m a contributor; my word was “addiction.”
* CfP: The 14th Annual Tolkien Conference at University of Vermont.
* Rebekah Sheldon: Save Us.
* How did the Soviet Union imagine 2017?
* When Colleges Rely on Adjuncts, Where Does the Money Go?
* Another Big Drop in History Majors.
* Make College Football LD Again.
* A mystery player causing a stir in the world of the complex strategy game Go has been revealed as an updated version of AlphaGo, the artificial-intelligence (AI) program created by Google’s London-based AI firm, DeepMind.
* GOP legislators in Wisconsin basically want line-item approval over syllabi at this point.
* Obama Leaves the Constitution Weaker Than He Found It.
* Registered Voters Who Stayed Home Probably Cost Clinton The Election.
* James Joyce and the Jesuits.
* Republicans want to kill the mortgage interest deduction. So I’m bankrupt now, I think.
* But while cinephiles have long become used to shelling out their hard-earned wonga to watch the same movie several times over, a new interview with the editors of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story hints that Hollywood’s habit of regurgitation goes further than we imagined. It reveals the film’s initial “cut”, designed to map out the movie before any shooting took place, was cobbled together by editor Colin Goudie using footage from hundreds of other existing films.
* George Lucas Can’t Give His $1.5 Billion Museum Away.
* Princess Leia Was Going to Play a Large Role in Star Wars: Episode IX.
* Some details on the supposed twelve-movie plan for Star Wars I’d never seen before.
* Today in “virtually”: The storage chamber would be much deeper than Lake Huron and the company says there is virtually no chance of radioactive pollution reaching the lake, which is less than a mile away. This is a nice variant on the theme: Democrats to Fight Almost Any Trump Supreme Court Nominee: Schumer.
* Teaching the controversy: MIT Researchers Say 2016 Didn’t Have More Famous Deaths Than Usual. Give 2017 some exciting room to expand.
* We don’t, in fact, know what works in teaching composition. This one was more polemical, but good too I thought: The costs of social capture.
* Among other things, whiteness is a kind of solipsism. From right to left, whites consistently and successfully reroute every political discussion to their identity. The content of this identity, unsurprisingly, is left unexamined and undefined. It is the false foundation of the prototypically American model of pseudo-politics.
* The Troublesome Women of Sherlock.
* Modularity and the Seinfeld theme.
* A horrific hate crime in Chicago.
* Drugs and the spirit of the times.
* Trump vs. the CIA: whoever wins, we lose. Donald Trump’s Twitter Account Is A Security Disaster Waiting To Happen. And then there’s this.
* How in Milwaukee’s cold hell did we only get #7?
* And the Monty Hall Problem, explained.
Friday Links!
* Terrible news from UWM: The Center for 21st Century Studies (C21) is facing an unprecedented attack on its very existence.
* CFP for SLSA 2016: “Creativity.”
* The shift from a subordinate learner as a grad student to a would-be peer on the job market is one of the most predictable traumas in an academic’s life, inducing professional and emotional distress in almost everyone who encounters it. I think this is true, but I wish we would encourage graduate students not to think of themselves so much as students in the first place.
* Ursula K. Le Guin on the Game of Fibble. Played on a Scrabble board.
* Raucous confrontation at SF State over ethnic studies cuts.
* Melissa Click has been fired by the University of Missouri Board of Curators.
* Washington State Prof Charged With $8M Research Fraud.
* Sen. Charles “Bill” Carrico (R-Grayson) said that books such as “Beloved” plant the seeds of evil in the minds of young people. This country’s gone completely mad.
* A 150-Year Timeline of the Flint Water Crisis.
* Nuclear waste dumped illegally in Ky. Poverty across Wisconsin reaches highest level in 30 years. Lead Warnings Issued for Pregnant Women, Kids in Jackson, Mississippi. Iowa Lawmakers Approve Bill That Would Let Kids Have Handguns. America’s airlines are introducing a class below economy. America is pulling apart.
* A woman who was arrested at a hospital over the summer for failing to pay court fines died the next day because she was deprived of water at the Charleston County jail, her family’s attorneys said Wednesday.
* We’ve all thought about it: High School Honors Student Was Actually a Creepy Adult Pretending to Be a Kid.
* Facebook’s Five New Reaction Buttons: Data, Data, Data, Data, and Data.
* This goes with another point: drones are a signal departure from the impersonal destruction that typifies modern technologically advanced warfare, in which the attacker rarely perceives his individual victims. The drone pilot, in contrast, even though he is thousands of miles away, spends many hours closely observing his victim and those near him, waiting for the right opportunity to strike. The stories are about both the killers and the killed.
* A presidential run by Michael Bloomberg could plunge the country into a constitutional crisis. Counterpoint: A presidential run by Michael Bloomberg could plunge the country into a constitutional crisis.
* The Mirror Universe: A Historical Analysis.
* How To Tell If You’re In a Flannery O’Connor Story.
* “Asteroid Will Pass Agonizingly Close To Earth.”
* In this article Huntington’s disease becomes the core of the case for editing genes, against even blindness on the other side. I wrote about it!
* Wild gorillas compose happy songs that they hum during meals.
* “I felt nothing,” she told me, smiling. “He was a dog thief, after all.”
* Finally we find that 38% of Florida voters think it’s possible that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer. 10% say he for sure is, and another 28% say that they are just not sure. Cruz is exonerated from being a toddler serial killer by 62% of the Sunshine State populace.
So Many Wednesday Links It Is Guaranteed to Make You Sick
* Brian Thill on academia, labor, and the prestige economy.
* Freddie de Boer on the unbearable wretchedness of higher education journalism.
* The only situation in which one would treat free speech as an end would be one in which there were no fundamental problems: no iniquities, immiseration, exploitation. No need for free speech as means. So we might say Dirks is speaking from the position of campus-as-utopia, a campus of nothing but speech, where the sun always shines and all other issues have been resolved happily for all. A campus wherein there was no privatized public education, no massive debt- and labor-loads for students, no shitty working conditions for campus workers, no cops being called in to beat or pepper-spray students and faculty into the hospital. No struggle over BDS, no systematic racism, no burying of rape statistics and accompanying leniency for perpetrators — struggles in which the administration is an aggressive antagonist, a side.
* Remember the other day when I linked to that piece about colleges recruiting lacrosse players as a proxy for wealth? Totally and absolutely unrelatedly, colleges are now giving out athletic video game scholarships.
* Steven Salaita has now spoken publicly at UIUC about his firing by UIUC.
* The New Inquiry 32: Back to School.
School is the alibi for class society. Passage through it is supposed to be what makes the unequal distribution of violence and luxury in the bourgeois world a fair outcome, what makes the bodies it disposes of earn their disposal. It is also the house of knowledge and so a powerful node of induction into the mysteries of this bloody society. Those who want to approach the knowledge held there must also internalize its mechanisms. Some go on to help it reproduce itself, as teachers. Unexpected success in this self-transformation is sometimes called class mobility, but to celebrate those who are capable of moving admits that the majority are fixed in place.
* How long will we have to wait for the poll finding that most Americans “regret” having supported this new war in Iraq and Syria and view it as a “mistake”, as they prepare, in a frenzy of manufactured fear, to support the next proposed war? Even the liberal Kevin Drum hopes Obama can stop Obama before Obama invades Iraq.
* Against TFA: “I am, I am asking you to quit.”
* Crisis for the crisis in the humanities. The full report is here.
* Scalia wept: Death penalty fans reel as one of their go-to examples for the necessity of capital punishment turns out to involve two innocent men.
* Just 13, and Working Risky 12-Hour Shifts in the Tobacco Fields.
* From the archives: Almost everything in Dr. Strangelove was true. Capitalism Whack-a-Mole.
* Almost All the Books People Say Influenced Them Were Written for Children.
* Steve Almond on quitting football.
* Segregation forever: Share of white kids attending majority white schools. More links after the map.
* UC Berkeley police have obtained more than a dozen M16 rifles via the 1033 program, as of June 2014. That’s outrageous. I can’t imagine them needing more than four or five tops.
* The Economist Has a Slavery Problem. Reagan reviews Roots, 1977.
* A new portrait of the founding father challenges the long-held perception of Thomas Jefferson as a benevolent slaveholder. No! No! I simply won’t believe it!
* Logistics, Capitalist Circulation, Chokepoints.
* Cuomo (and de Blasio) after Teachout.
* Where MacArthur fellows were born and where they lived at the time of the award.
* How Much Carbon Dioxide Is in the Atmosphere? A Massive Increase in 2013 Sets a Record. “We are running out of time.”
* Milwaukee wept: Meteorologists Predict Record-Shattering Snowfall Coming Soon.
* Almost Half Of North American Bird Species Are Threatened By Climate Change.
* Amazon Indian Warriors Beat and Strip Illegal Loggers in Battle for Jungle’s Future.
* Louisiana doesn’t look like Louisiana anymore.
* The oceans are acidifying at the fastest rate in 300 million years.
* Fracking May Be Worse Than Burning Coal. People Who Live Near Fracking More Likely To Become Sick, Study Finds.
* Twilight for alumni donations. As someone remarked on Twitter, this piece seriously undercounts the rise of student debt and twentysomething un- and underemployment as factors here.
* Dystopia now: Airlines have never been better at making certain your flight is full.
* Forty Percent of Police Families Experience Domestic Violence.
* Peacekeepers Sexually Exploited And Abused Women And Girls In Somalia.
* Video Shows NYPD Officers Taking Turns Beating Man After He Asked Why He Was Being Searched.
* Cops Are Sorry They Keep Losing Cool Guns That the Military Gives Them.
* “Driving while black” is, indeed, a measurable phenomenon. Look, if we’re going to make this about facts…
* BREAKING NEWS: Gambling is terrible city planning.
* License to kill: CBP Requests Federal Court Keep Identity of Border Patrol Agent Who Killed Teen Secret.
* Court rules Yelp has no obligation to publish positive reviews.
* For years, nothing seemed capable of turning around New Dorp High School’s dismal performance—not firing bad teachers, not flashy education technology, not after-school programs. Turns out you actually have to teach the kids to get results. Crazy.
* And on the complete other end of the positivity spectrum: Teacher Allegedly Locked Kids in Closet to Teach Them “How to Survive.”
* Millennials aren’t using credit cards, and it might come back to haunt them.
* Now that I’m a parent, it’s hard for me to understand how roller coasters are allowed to exist.
* Silicon Valley’s Cult of Male Ego.
* The service, which launches September 16 in New York City, Long Island, and Westchester, works with a fleet of women drivers and will only be available to female passengers. Drivers are hailed with an iOS app—like Uber or Lyft—and arrive wearing “hot pink pashmina scarves,”according to the New York Times.
* Marriage counseling before feminism.
* Today in the voter fraud fraud.
Striking down Pennsylvania’s voter ID law in January, its state court found “no evidence of the existence of in-person voter fraud in the state.” Plus, the state failed to establish any connection between photo identity cards and the integrity of elections. Courts in Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas ruled similarly.
Wisconsin federal district court Judge Lynn Adelman in Aprilstruck down that state’s voter ID law for violating the Fourteenth Amendment and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Adelman found about 9 percent of registered voters – about 300,000 – lacked the government-issued ID required for casting a ballot under the Wisconsin law, enough to change election results.
* ‘Unprecedented’ Outbreak Of Rare Virus Strikes Hundreds Of Children In The Midwest.
* The Leaky Nuclear Waste Dump and the Town That Loves It Anyway.
* The kids are all right: LEGO Is Now the Biggest Toymaker on the Planet.
* 8 Things We Can Do Now to Build a Space Colony This Century.
* And Harvard has received a record $350 million donation. So glad those guys will be able to keep the lights on.
Tuesday!
* Great research opportunity for any PhD student studying science fiction, fantasy, horror, and/or utopia: the R.D. Mullen Fellowship. I loved the time I spent in that archive.
* CFP: The cultural impact of Dr. Who, at DePaul University. Saturday, May 4.
* Sarah Jaffe on emotional labor and gendered employment.
* On Getting a Ph.D. This is stirring, but all the same my unhappy advice hasn’t really changed since the last time a rebuttal to the just-don’t-go doomsayers was making the rounds.
* Now CUNY is pushing for a five-year Ph.D. I still feel the same way about this, too!
* “Skilled, Cheap, and Desperate”: Non-tenure-track Faculty and the Delusion of Meritocracy.
* …But the most unfortunate part is that not one of the expert-amateurs seems to have given much thought to what MOOCs imply: that teachers are unnecessary. MOOCs don’t use teachers; they have curriculum designers and they have video presenters. Actors are the best for that latter role, seriously.
* The latest on Pat McCrory’s war with UNC.
“If you want to take gender studies that’s fine. Go to a private school, and take it,” McCrory said. “But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.”
Again, I’d personally be very surprised if those gender studies classes weren’t paying for themselves and more.
* College majors, median earnings, and unemployment.
* Yale Suing Former Students Shows Crisis in Loans to Poor.
* Where Girls Do Better Than Boys in Science.
* The wisdom of the market, in all its glorious efficiency: Confessions of a corporate spy.
* We’re a tour group from the future.
* California’s coming war over fracking.
* Over the last three months wind farms produced more electricity than any other power source in Spain for the first time ever, an industry group has said. To steal a line from Twitter: oh, if only we had wind!
* Six media giants control 90% of popular culture.
* Veterans, Ron D. Moore, and Battlestar Galactica: 1, 2. A representative, evocative question:
ES: There’s a particular quote that I’ve seen as signatures in military forums or quoted, and for some reason military members identify it. That’s Tigh’s New Caprica silioquoy: “Which side are we on? We’re on the side of the demons, chief. We’re evil men in the gardens of paradise, sent by the forces of death to spread devastation and destruction wherever we go. I’m surprised you didn’t know that.” Why do you think that quote resonates with veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq in particular?
Parts 3 and 4 coming soon.
* The latest from Randall Munroe’s “What If?”: Will the Internet ever surpass FedEx’s bandwidth? What would happen if you tried to fly a normal Earth airplane above different Solar System bodies? What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool?
* Special pleading watch: nearly all of the 600 recess appointments since the Reagan presidency would have been nullified if the hyperformalist interpretation applied to Barack Obama were applied universally.
* We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor. Sold!
* Some local pride! Milwaukee in top ten list for best urban forests.
* And congrats to our friend Allison Seay for a great review of her new collection To See the Queen. Some excerpts.
Map of the Day
Mother Jones on where the bombs are.
This is a map of highways 18-wheelers use to cart atomic warheads and nuclear waste around the country.
Gerry Canavan 