Posts Tagged ‘space colonies’
Weekend Links!
* I liked this brief addendum to my academic job market as “game” piece from the other day.
One thing I might add is that the game metaphor also helps us see the job market as something that could be improved. If we view the market as a system of pure luck, then there’s nothing we can do to fix it. And if we think of it as a meritocracy, then we don’t have any reason to. But if the job market is a game, structured, as Canavan says, by “a set of rules that may not make sense, much less be desirable, rational, or fair,” then those in positions of power in the academy (including people on hiring committees) could work to change the rules. In large and small ways they could work to make it a more rational and fair game.
I agree the game framing suggests change is possible in a way that neither merit nor lottery does. I’d hoped I made that point at the end (“make alliances, change the rules, overturn the table”) but perhaps I could have put more emphasis on it.
* I’ve always been really skeptical of Rolling Jubilee, so I’m a sucker for any time Naked Capitalism dumps on it.
So while it is impressive to hear of the large amounts of debt being forgiven, the fact is that the people who are finding their debts erased more than likely won’t care much because they are either no longer under any legal obligation to pay the note and have long since forgotten about it, or never intended to pay the note in the first place, and never would! So these borrowers won’t likely be gushing with praise and thanks, and frankly won’t be helped much if at all by the repurchase of the debt. I suspect that people learning of their debt being purchased and erased were, instead of relieved and grateful, were more perplexed as to why anyone would go to the trouble of clearing up debt that they themselves had forgotten about long ago! By far, the happiest participant in these transactions, are the banks/collection companies who are thrilled to get anything for the loans!
* But the elusive nomads who wander that desert say California was once a paradise.
* Courts do not give justice, because they do not try. They follow a formal procedure, at best.
* Run the university like a business, you know, have such radically lax oversight that one person can steal $700,000.
* When I was talking the other day about the similarities between my childhood plan to become a priest for the free housing and lifetime tenure and my current profession as a secular monk performing textual exegesis at a Catholic school, 1, 2, 3, 4, I guess I didn’t think you’d take it so literally.
* The Pharmacy School Bubble Is About to Burst.
* Cutinella is the third high school football player to die in less than a week.
* On the life of PhDs working outside the US and Europe.
* Capitalism in 2014: “Payment is on an unpaid basis.”
* At least they got to waste all that money first: MOOC fever has broken.
* A gender-neutral pronoun is taking over Sweden.
* Elsewhere in the-Scandinavian-kids-are-all-right: How Finland Keeps Kids Focused Through Free Play.
* Maps Of Modern Cities Drawn In The Style Of J.R.R. Tolkien. No Milwaukee, but he did do Cleveland, Boston, and DC. Many more links below the image; you’re not getting off that easy.
* I can’t figure out if Ascension is let’s-do-BSG-with-a-competent-showrunner or let’s-do-BSG-on-the-cheap. Mad Men in Space, though, so fine.
* Museum of Science Fiction Selects Design for Preview Museum.
* We Still Don’t Know If This Tribe Discovered In The ’70s Was Real.
* An Apple Store employee has written the follow-up to I Am Legend.
* Ideology watch: “Let. Her. Go.” movie supercut.
* America was founded as a white supremacist state. You’ll never believe what happened next.
* Here’s a lawsuit that seems deliberately calibrated to freak everybody out: Black sperm incorrectly delivered to white lesbian couple.
* Talking White: Black people’s disdain for “proper English” and academic achievement is a myth.
* D.C. Attorney May Use FBI Headquarters As Leverage In Statehood Lawsuit.
* People are saying Homeland might be good again, but don’t you believe it. That’s exactly what they want us to think.
* Elsewhere in ideology at its very very purest. Mad Men: Lady Cops.
* BREAKING: Startup Funding Is Given Almost Entirely To Men.
* Just imagine what England might accomplish if it ever gets a second actor.
* Right-wingers tend to be less intelligent than left-wingers, and people with low childhood intelligence tend to grow up to have racist and anti-gay views, says a controversial new study. Controversial, really? Can’t imagine why.
* Freedom’s just another word for a $1200 machine that lets anyone manufacture a gun.
* Human civilization was founded as a human supremacist state. You’ll never believe what happened next.
* Earth crosses the walrus threshold.
* Paid leave watch: Florida cop placed on leave after using taser on 62-year-old woman.
* Today, former Chicago police commander Jon Burge, who was convicted of lying about torturing over 100 African-American men at stationhouses on Chicago’s South and West Sides, will walk out of the Butner Correctional Institution, having been granted an early release to a halfway house in Tampa, Florida.
* Please be advised: Jacobin 15/16 looks especially great.
* Even baseball knows baseball is dull.
* And a UF study suggests peanut allergies could soon be a thing of the past. That’d be pretty great news for a whole lot of people I know.
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.
Commencement Weekend Links!
* Commencement speech bingo. More links below!
* Pro-tip: apparently it only counts as free speech if you’re already powerful.
* ICYMI: My guest post at SF Signal on dystopia, anti-utopia, and the end of the world.
* College is a promise the economy does not keep.
* Of Course Women Are Getting Sexually Harassed by Drones.
* CFP: Into the Pensieve: The Harry Potter Generation in Retrospect.
* Rethinking Monopoly for neofeudal capitalism.
* Thousands of Toddlers Are Medicated for A.D.H.D., Report Finds, Raising Worries. Well, yes, I’m definitely worried. That’s madness.
* “Hood disease.” My God, don’t call it that.
* It places the United States in the top spot, ahead of Sweden and Canada, which come in at No. 2 and No. 3, respectively. Yet when the scores are adjusted for national levels of income, the United States drops to 15th place, behind such developing countries as China and Serbia.
* If you want to help low-income students succeed, it’s not enough to deal with their academic and financial obstacles. You also need to address their doubts and misconceptions and fears.
* The proposed rule would cut off student aid to career-focused programs at for-profit and nonprofit colleges if the program’s student-loan default rate reached 30 percent or if half of its graduates failed two student-loan debt standards.
* Kansas and the death of academic freedom.
* The NCAA will allow Boise State to help its homeless player.
* MRA city councilman files Title IX complaint on behalf of U Oregon players arbitrarily kicked off team after DA slow-walks the process to protect their eligibility for March Madness and then declines to bring charges, thereby completing the circle of shitshow.
* According to faculty accounts, deans received an email from the administration on the evening of May 5, alerting them to a meeting the next day about staffing issues. At that meeting, deans in certain colleges were told they needed to cut a prescribed number of full-time faculty positions. Of 16 total cuts, 11 were to come from the College of Arts and Sciences, faculty members said. Deans were given two days – until Thursday – to consult with their department chairs about which faculty members to terminate. Affected instructors were notified that day.
* Kate Hayles and Mark Kruse have developed a model for humanities/STEM cooperative teaching.
* U.S. Cities Under 12 feet of Sea Level Rise.
* The best way to think of the dilemma is keeping in mind the three things Obama wants his regulations to accomplish: He wants them to effectively reduce carbon pollution, he wants them not to cost consumers too much, and he wants to be sure they can survive legal challenge. The trouble is that he can only pick two of these. And the primary question weighing on administration regulators as they make their decision will be how to read the mind of Anthony Kennedy.
* To turn the US-Mexico border into “The Border,” America had to erase its Caribbean history.
* Meanwhile the New York Times is a complete mess.
* The Rise of the Voluntariat.
The voluntariat performs skilled work that might still command a wage without compensation, allegedly for the sake of the public good, regardless of the fact that it also contributes directly and unambiguously to the profitability of a corporation. Like the proletariat, then, the voluntariat permits the extraction of surplus value through its labor.
But unlike the proletariat’s labor, the voluntariat’s has become untethered from wages. The voluntariat’s labor is every bit as alienable as the proletariat’s — Coursera’s Translator Contract leaves no doubt about that — but it must be experienced by the voluntariat as a spontaneous, non-alienated gift.
* Will roads made out of solar panels save us?
* Playing football is even worse for players’ brains than we thought.
* An Oral History of The West Wing.
* Medical nightmare of the week: Morgellons disease.
* Speculative genetic explanations for social phenomena have an old and undistinguished history, some of which Wade reviews superficially, presumably to demonstrate his skill at reviewing topics superficially. The common thread, though, is that such explanations have always been (1) put forward to establish a bio-political point, to draw imaginary limits around the social progress of certain human groups; (2) accompanied by the dissimulation that they are not political statements, but merely value-neutral science; and (3) false.
* The Bay Area author of an upcoming book shatters the image of California’s historic missions as idyllic sites where Franciscan friars and Indians lived in harmony. Speaking before about 100 people Saturday at the American Indian Resource Center at UC Santa Cruz, Elias Castillo, author of “A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California’s Indians by the Spanish Missions,” said in reality the missions were “death camps.”
* Save your research in the cloud, they said.
* Viggo vs. Lord of the Rings.
* The New York Pizza Project, Documenting New York City’s Pizza Shops in Photos and Interviews.
* He also had a theory about colonizing the solar system using nuclear bombs. We could terraform other planets, he argued, by pulverizing them and then moving them closer or further from the sun. What could possibly go wrong?
* So maybe it’s for the best that Russia’s just evicted us from space.
Meanwhile, Some Links
* Marquette has a new president, the first lay president in its history. His farewell message to UWM.
In closing, I would like to thank everyone at UWM for your efforts to make this a great university. I have been proud to serve as your leader for the last three and a half years, and I am confident that UWM will continue to make significant strides to become a top-tier research university that is a great place to learn and work. I will continue to promote UWM and spread the word about the great things being accomplished by our campus even after I am no longer Chancellor. I will also work hard to strengthen and build partnerships between UWM and Marquette, as I believe that by working together, Milwaukee’s two largest four-year academic institutions will help address many of Milwaukee’s problems, drive growth within the region and increase the prestige of both universities.
* Dia/lectics of Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
* It Seems More and More Certain That We Live in a Multiverse.
* Texas Congressman Wants National Parks Opened To Drilling. US House votes to allow dumping of coal mining waste into streams. Escape the Devastation of Future Earth on a Luxurious Space Mayflower.
* Roughly .02 Percent of Published Researchers Reject Global Warming.
* An American Utopia: Fredric Jameson in Conversation with Stanley Aronowitz. This is the army-as-utopia piece I was going on about last week, if you were curious about it.
* What Life Will Be Like for Girls’ Hannah at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
* What I’m Learning on a Simulated Mars Mission.
* Harvard University has discovered three books in its collection are bound in human hide. Come now, only three? Don’t be coy, Harvard…
* Amy Acker joins Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. because of course she is.
* Generations of political manipulation have finally turned that sense of solidarity into a scourge. Our caring has been weaponised against us. And so it is likely to remain until the left, which claims to speak for labourers, begins to think seriously and strategically about what most labour actually consists of, and what those who engage in it actually think is virtuous about it.
* Inside UFO 54-40, the Unwinnable “Choose Your Own Adventure.”
* In sum, this so-called “data-driven” website is significantly less data-driven (and less sophisticated) than Business Insider or Bloomberg View or The Atlantic. It consists nearly entirely of hedgehoggy posts supporting simplistic theories with sparse data and zero statistical analysis, making no quantitative predictions whatsoever. It has no relationship whatsoever to the sophisticated analysis of rich data sets for which Nate Silver himself has become famous. The problem with the new FiveThirtyEight is not one of data vs. theory. It is one of “data” the buzzword vs. data the actual thing. Nate Silver is a hero of mine, but this site is not living up to its billing at all.
* Why was Charlotte’s absurdly corrupt mayor doing the bag drops himself? Amateur hour. He’s going to be so mad when he finally gets around to seeing American Hustle.
* Clickbait publication says stop talking so much about clickbait.
* Garfield Minus Garfield Minus Jon Plus Jon Osterman AKA Dr. Manhattan.
* And nothing gold can stay: Bradley Cooper is rumored to take over Indiana Jones.
Wednesday Night Links
* The craziest thing you’ll see today: public opposition to a statue in Charleston, SC, honoring black abolitionist Denmark Vesey, on grounds that are frankly baffling.
* An Oral History of Ghostbusters.
* To test the dispersal of those weapons, they found a US city that resembled those cities in the USSR, and gassed it.
* Young scholars are compelled to transform themselves into academic entrepreneurs, creating a brand that they promote through their blogs, tweets, and online profiles.
* The college of about 600 undergraduates announced last month it will eliminate 22 of its 52 faculty positions; it has cut 23 staff members and 16 of its 31 academic programs. How Much Can Be Cut?
* Suggestions on a More Humane Academic Job Market.
* From the archives: The Digital Humanities Postdoc.
* Late Pay: One CUNY Horror Story.
* Gasp! U.S. Lags Behind World in Temp Worker Protections.
* MFA vs NYC: Whoever Wins, We Lose.
* After L.A., Chicago, and NYC, the U.S. prison system has the largest population in America. The American Prison Writing Archive.
* Throughout human history, people have done these ridiculously difficult one-way voyages for one reason: because where they lived was so awful they were willing to get on a little wooden vessel that might sink and go across an ocean to some unknown place that they would probably never return from because it was so crummy where they were. Maybe we’ll do that for ourselves. We’ll make the world so miserable that living in some harsh environment on Mars might seem attractive.
* Here’s Your State’s Favorite Band.
* I don’t understand (1) why this is legal (2) why a governor would be supervising hiring and firing at such a low level.
* Researcher doing her master’s thesis at Halifax’s Saint Mary’s University on missing and murdered aboriginal women found murdered. What a horrible story.
* Publishers Withdraw More Than 120 Fake, Computer-Generated Papers.
* Why are they sending paratroopers against Godzilla? Also, must admit I’m taking Godzilla’s side here.
* Despite Harold Ramis’ death, Ghostbusters 3 is still moving forward. Is there a single person alive or dead who wants this movie to be made? Besides Dan Akyroyd.
* The sad truth about power is that its sidewalks are littered with PhDs.
* New head canon: Andy’s Mom and Toy Story.
* And Daleks have now been invented. What could possibly go wrong?
‘As a Species of Megalomania, This Is Hard to Top’
But never mind the logistics. If we live long enough as a species, we might overcome them, or at least some of them: energy from fusion (which always seems to be about 50 years away) and so forth. Think about what life in a space colony would be like: a hermetically sealed, climate-controlled little nothing of a place. Refrigerated air, synthetic materials, and no exit. It would be like living in an airport. An airport in Antarctica. Forever. When I hear someone talking about space colonies, I think, that’s a person who has never studied the humanities. That’s a person who has never stopped to think about what it feels like to go through an average day—what life is about, what makes it worth living, what makes it endurable. A person blessed with a technological imagination and the absence of any other kind.
And yet: Mars!
Gerry Canavan 