Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘scale’

Wednesday Morning!

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021814-nu-union-150* Man tragically unable to remember saying Barack Obama would make a great president says Hillary Clinton will make a great president. Meanwhile, the rest of us are reduced to talking about Obama’s secret achievements.

* Faculty on Strike at UIC.

* Solitary Confinement May Dramatically Alter Brain Shape In Just Days, Neuroscientist Says.

* Last Night on Jeopardy No One Wanted to Answer Qs About Black History.

* Noose Found Around The Neck Of Statue Honoring Civil Rights Icon At Ole Miss.

* On Teaching While Black.

* What Does it Mean that Most Children’s Books Are Still About White Boys?

* The J.R.R. Tolkien Manuscripts: Public Showings in 2014.

* Here are the hoops a college football team has to jump through to be allowed to form a union.

* 84-Year Old Nun Sentenced To Prison For Weapons Plant Break-In.

* Academic freedom with violence.

* Has humanity produced enough paint to cover the entire land area of the Earth? The dream remains alive.

* Whistle-blower fired from Hanford nuclear site.

“We do not agree with her assertions that she suffered retaliation or was otherwise treated unfairly,” URS said, adding Busche was fired for reasons unrelated to the safety concerns. “Ms. Busche’s allegations will not withstand scrutiny.”
…
Busche is the second Hanford whistle-blower to be fired by URS in recent months. Walter Tamosaitis, who also raised safety concerns about the plant, was fired in October after 44 years of employment.

* A new China Miéville short story collection, scheduled for November 2014.

* A world of horrors: There is no such thing as a child prostitute.

* In the same way that certain styles of dance simulate sex, the Winter Olympics simulates scraping one’s February-chapped nostrils against the surface of a Kleenex whose aloe content is useless and reaching out for the warm escape of death. It’s an art of failed suicide attempts.

* A preliminary sketch of the data reveals, of course, that by 2050 films will be reviewing us.

* “First, why would we even think about letting it go through?”

* “This whole thing is totally and completely bonkers.”

* Grace Kerr sometimes jokes with her family that “Amanda was not that great. Zach is awesome.” What she means is that her son is finally happy, and is helping others.

* Diseased and unsound meat: Hot Pockets®!

* In Act Of Protest, Ai Weiwei Vase Is Destroyed At Miami Museum.

* News You Can Use: Why It’s Nearly Impossible to Castrate a Hippo.

* A portrait of Steve Jobs made entirely out of e-waste.

* The Ice Caves of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.

* Candy Crush: Addictive Game, Incredible Business, Horrible Investment.

* How the north ended up on top of the map.

* Inside Kappa Beta Phi, the Wall Street Fraternity.

* And our long national nightmare is over: Obama apologizes for disparaging art historians.

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Written by gerrycanavan

February 19, 2014 at 7:43 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with academia, academic freedom, American Studies, animals, Apple, archives, art, art history, Barack Obama, BDS, big pictures, black history, books, Candy Crush, castration, Chicago, children, China Miéville, class struggle, college football, college sports, Comcast, cultural preservation, Daily Kos, death drive, destruction, eating meat, Facebook, Florida, flowcharts, general election 2016, Her, Hillary Clinton, hippos, history, horror, Hot Pockets, How the University Works, ice caves, integration, Israel, Jeopardy, Kappa Beta Phi, kids today, Krugman, labor, Lake Superior, male privilege, maps, Marquette, Miami, Mississippi, monopolies, NCAA, neuroscience, New Weird, Northern Lights, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, nuns, Olympics, paint, Palestine, pedagogy, politics, pollution, poverty, prison-industrial complex, prisons, prostitution, race, racism, radiation, Ray Kurzweil, rules are rules, scale, science fiction, short stories, solitary confinement, Steve Jobs, strikes, suicide, the courts, the Internet, the law, the rich are different from you and me, the Singularity, threats, Time Warner, Tolkien, transgender issues, trash, UIC, unions, violence, Wall Street, waste, weird fiction, what if, whistleblowing, white privilege, winter, Winter Olympics, xkcd

All the Midweek Links

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* CFP: The Problem of Contingency in Higher Education. CFP: Anthropocene Feminism at the Center for 21st Century Studies.

* By now my students were getting a bit restless. The confidence with which they had gone into this testing situation was beginning to dispel. Just a bit. There were still 102 questions left to answer.

* Exclusive Gyms For Members Of Congress Deemed ‘Essential,’ Remain Open During Shutdown. Amtrak Is in Trouble, But Congress Won’t Care. Government shutdown ends North Carolina WIC benefits. Social Security Warns Benefits Could Get Cut. DC Can’t Spend. Here’s how it’ll mess up higher ed (including freezing student loans). Secession by other means. Back Door Secession. Avenging the surrender of the South.

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* The horror: New faculty positions versus new PhDs.

* Former Graduate Student Collects Placement Data He Wishes He’d Had.

* (Another) Intern Couldn’t Sue For Sexual Harassment In New York Because She Wasn’t Paid.

* A recent report shows that graduate students generate nearly a third of all education debt.

* Pay It Forward is a bad idea that doesn’t seem to make sense even in its own terms.

* “Exploitation should not be a rite of passage.”

* Using survey data collected from PhD students in five academic disciplines across eight public U.S. universities, the authors compare represented and non-represented graduate student employees in terms of faculty–student relations, academic freedom, and pay. Unionization does not have the presumed negative effect on student outcomes, and in some cases has a positive effect. Union-represented graduate student employees report higher levels of personal and professional support, unionized graduate student employees fare better on pay, and unionized and nonunionized students report similar perceptions of academic freedom. These findings suggest that potential harm to faculty–student relationships and academic freedom should not continue to serve as bases for the denial of collective bargaining rights to graduate student employees.

* How to Kill a Zombie: Strategizing the End of Neoliberalism.

* How Investors Lose 89 Percent of Gains from Futures Funds.

High fees and black boxes are just part of the story. Some funds also allow their managers to make undisclosed side bets by trading ahead of or opposite to the fund’s trades.

Chicago-based Grant Park Futures Fund LP, which is marketed by Zurich-based UBS AG (UBSN), says on page 90 of a 180-page, April 2013 prospectus that David Kavanagh, president of the $660.9 million fund’s general partner, may place such personal trades. “Mr. Kavanagh may even be the other party to a trade entered into by Grant Park,” it says.

* Adam Kotsko’s Contribution to the Critique of White Dudes.

* Rebecca Solnit, The Age of Inhuman Scale.

* Cropped Out: Environmental History Through a Car Window.

* Joseph Stalin, Editor.

* Vulture has an excerpt from Matt Zoller Seitz’s The Wes Anderson Collection.

* Sports Illustrated has an excerpt from League of Denial, on the NFL’s concussion denialism. You can also watch the Frontline documentary here.

* Soviet board-games, 1920-1938.

* In the days of the Soviet Union, the country boasted that all its citizens shared the wealth equally, but a new report has found that a mere 20 years after the end of Communism, wealth disparity has soared with 35% of the country’s entire wealth now in the hands of just 110 people.

* The rise of the portmanbro.

* Within 35 years, even a cold year will be warmer than the hottest year on record, according to research published in Nature on Wednesday. The L.A. Times will no longer publish letters from climate cranks.

* But the kids are all right: Arin Andrews and Katie Hill, Transgender Teenage Couple, Transition Together.

Written by gerrycanavan

October 9, 2013 at 2:40 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with academia, academic jobs, actually existing journalism, adjuncts, Amtrak, bros, capitalism, cars, CFPs, charts, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, class struggle, climate change, concussions, Confederacy, conferences, contingency, denialism, ecology, editors, environmentalism, feminism, film, football, government shutdowns, grad student nightmares, graduate student life, hedge funds, How the University Works, hyperobjects, income inequality, interns, kids today, labor, male privilege, neoliberalism, NFL, North Carolina, Oregon, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Pay It Forward, pedagogy, politics, Russias, scale, scams, secession, sexual harassment, Society Security, Soviet Union, Stalin, standardized testing, student debt, superexploitation, teaching, the Anthropocene, the kids are all right, transgender issues, tuition, unions, war on education, Washington DC, Wes Anderson, white privilege, WIC, words, zombies

22 Million Years of Continuous Scrolling

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The BBC has the last space infographic you’ll ever need.

Written by gerrycanavan

July 16, 2012 at 10:38 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with charts, maps, outer space, scale, the cosmos

Some More Links

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* Smart presidents making stupid arguments:

For instance, the FDA has long considered saccharin, the artificial sweetener, safe for people to consume. Yet for years, the EPA made companies treat saccharin like other dangerous chemicals. Well, if it goes in your coffee, it is not hazardous waste.

They call it poison. We call it life.

* From the don’t-know-if-this-is-crazy-or-awesome file: Though stem cell therapies are still in the early stages of development, some families are having their children’s baby teeth extracted and saved in anticipation of treatments that could be around by the time the child reaches adulthood, the Miami Herald reports.

* When Left-Wing Editors Fight Unions.

* When Famous Directors Lose Their Minds.

* Being Roger Ailes.

* Bomb Planted Along MLK Day Parade Route In Spokane.

* David Simon v. Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III. Discussion at MeFi.

* Last Stand 4 Children is devoted to providing all children with a quality education in spite of their teachers. See also: Billionaires for Educational Reform. (Via @mrtalbot.)

* Almost none of these “literal New Yorker cartoons” are actually “literal,” though a few are amusing nonetheless.

* Uplifting Duke/Durham story of the day: The Secret Game.

The North Carolina College Eagles were coming off their most successful season ever at that time. McLendon had just led his team to a 26-1 season. Aubrey Stanley, Henry (Big Dog) Thomas, Floyd (Cootie) Brown and James (Boogie-Woogie) Hardy were the stars on a team that ran McLendon’s fast break with great discipline.

That team was not eligible for participation in the National Invitational Tournament or the NCAA tournaments simply because they were African-Americans, but many — including the Hall of Famer McLendon — felt like the Eagles could’ve beaten anyone.

Meanwhile, Burgess and others regularly attended meetings at the local Y in Durham, as students from both sides of the tracks met secretly to discuss ways to overcome racism in the local area. During one of those meetings, the conversation turned to basketball and a bold challenge was issued: What about a secret game between the Eagles and the Duke Medical School team?

* And your couch is trying to kill you. Don’t let it!

Written by gerrycanavan

January 18, 2011 at 8:40 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with 2012, Baltimore, Barack Obama, basketball, bomb threats, carbon, cartoons, charter schools, couches, David Simon, Duke, Durham, education, EPA, everything is trying to kill you, exercise, Fox News, George Lucas, Harper's, hypocrisy so brazen you just have to admire it, integration, lies and lying liars, medicine, MLK, New Yorker, politics, pollution, Roger Ailes, saccharin, scale, segregation, stem cells, The Wire, unions, Won't somebody think of the children?

Powers of Ten

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Short video on the magic of scale once made for IBM. Here’s the Simpsons version. Still more scale games here.

Written by gerrycanavan

January 31, 2010 at 6:45 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with scale, the cosmos, The Simpsons

Closing Some Tabs

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Closing some tabs.

* Terrible news, everyone: International Science Fiction Reshelving Day has been canceled.

* Still mad at SIGG for lying about the BPA content in its canteens? Don’t worry; there’s BPA in everything.

* Having solved all the world’s ills, the Catholic Church paid $500,000 to see marriage equality go down in Maine.

* I was hoping Ned Lamont would make another run against Joe Lieberman. Too bad.

* And Neil sends in a fun Flash application about scale.

Written by gerrycanavan

November 5, 2009 at 3:42 am

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged with BPA, Catholicism, chemicals, Joe Lieberman, Maine, marriage equality, Ned Lamont, plastic, scale, science fiction, SIGG

Neuoscientist as Novelist

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Neuoscientist as novelist, at MSNBC, via 3QD.

“In some sense, I use my literary fiction as a channel to explore ideas that I come up with during the day,” he told me.

For example, consider how the data in your brain determines your identity. “For a long time, there’s been this open question of what it would be like to be someone else – or to be something else,” he said. “Once you’re John Malkovich, you wouldn’t remember what it’s like not to be John Malkovich.”

That spawned Eagleman’s little story about cross-species reincarnation, titled “Descent of Species”: Suppose you admired the strength and beauty of horses, and you got the chance to become a horse in your next life. Once you become a horse, would you have enough wits to appreciate that life, or even enough wits to choose the life after that? And if that’s the case, what unwitting demigods might we humans have been in our past lives?

Other stories play off the fact that existential meaning doesn’t scale well. “What would happen if we showed Shakespeare to a dog or a bacterium?” Eagleman asked. “It’s pointless, because what’s meaningful to you changes by spatial scale.”

For example, a microbial God might reserve the afterlife strictly for microbes, with humans merely serving as part of the scenery. Or the universe might be ruled by a cosmic Giantess who is as indifferent to our fate as we are to the fate of an amoeba.

Written by gerrycanavan

September 11, 2009 at 1:27 pm

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged with afterlife, Being John Malkovich, neuroscience, novels, possibilianism, scale, writing


Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction

 

The Cambridge History of Science Fiction



Modern Masters of Science Fiction: Octavia E. Butler

Octavia E. Butler Archives – Resources


Extrapolation 58.2-3: Guilty Pleasures: Late Capitalism and Mere Genre



Paradoxa 28: Global Weirding


Metamorphoses of Science Fiction


The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction


Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction


American Literature 83.2: Speculative Fictions


Polygraph 22: Ecology and Ideology

Editor at Science Fiction Film and Television

Editor at Extrapolation

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