Posts Tagged ‘speed of light’
Thursday Night Links!
* My brilliant colleague Ainehi Edoro was chosen as one of the most 100 influential Africans.
* The Octavia Project. And elsewhere in the VanderMeers’ vast empire…
* CFP: Octavia E. Butler at ALA 2017.
* More fighting over tenure and post-tenure review at Wisconsin.
* Teaching the controversy: Listening While Feminist: In Defense of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”
* We’re gonna need a better gerrymander: If Democrats want to solve the problem of legislative maps that are biased against them they need to pursue a strategy that is more likely to produce maps that compensate for geography.
* “It is striking to see how committed they are to allowing this train wreck to occur,” he said. “And more surprisingly, how little careful attention has been given (at the top at least) to just how vulnerable—given Bush v. Gore—the current (system for counting votes in the) electoral college is.” But wait! There’s more! Why I Will Not Cast My Electoral Vote for Donald Trump.
* Trump vs. conflicts of interest: Maybe the Answer Is That He Can’t Divest.
* How Many Generals Is Too Many? I think the number is worrying, but agree with Kevin that the central issue is that he has chosen an extremely popular, recently retired general for DoD. Civilian control of the military is an important value, or it used to be.
* This is bad: Trump Launches Tweet Attack on Carrier Steel Union Boss for Fact-Checking Him. (UPDATE: This is what happens when Donald Trump attacks a private citizen on Twitter.) This is bad: Hardee’s, Carl’s Jr. CEO Tapped as Labor Secretary. This is bad: Trump Considers FDA Chief Who Says People Should Use Medicines “At Their Own Risk.” This is bad: Trump to be part-time president, keep lucrative job with Celebrity Apprentice. This is bad: Does Donald Trump Believe Nuclear War Is Inevitable?
* This one though I do approve of: Chris Christie has the lowest approval rating one pollster has ever found for a state governor.
* There are no second acts in American life, they said.
* Point/Counterpoint: How Sci-Fi and Fantasy Can Save the World. What Can Artists Do to Oppose Trump? Nothing.
* That’ll solve it! Or, if you prefer, only the super-rich can save us now.
* Worst Game of Thrones spinoff ever.
* …and the portions are too small!
* The Swing-O-Matic: Change the settings to see how shifts in party preference and turnout by different demographic groups would affect the 2016 presidential election.
* We need to admit that right-wing harrassment and conspiracy theories are baked into the business model of social media at this point. And with right-wing political hegemony for the foreseeable future, it will only get worse, because the range of “acceptable opinion” will shift even further to the right. Asking nicely and filling out all the proper paperwork will not change this underlying material reality.
* The tricky part is that many expect the expert agency’s views to change shortly after January 20th, when Trump’s O.C.R. is installed. (Dear Colleagues: Never mind, we take it back.) Come January, advocates of transgender rights, who have enthusiastically supported judicial deference to O.C.R., will have reason for an extreme pivot, given that the new O.C.R. is unlikely to view “sex” as an “internal sense of gender.” It is awkward now for Grimm’s lawyers to argue zealously for the notion that the agency knows best, when only weeks from now, and in coming years, that doctrine is more likely to harm than to help transgender students.
* Inside President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal antidrug campaign in the Philippines, our photojournalist documented 57 homicide victims over 35 days. And in case you’ve forgotten.
* Located in the city’s Girangaon (Village of the Mills) neighborhood, Trump Tower Mumbai illustrates every pathology of the neoliberal turn away from comprehensive city planning.
* What happens if someone dies on Mars?
* The arc of history is long, but New Jersey Will No Longer Seek to Collect Loans from Families of Dead Students.
* Check ignition, and may God’s love be with you.
* Harvard will not be a sanctuary campus. It’s for your own good, kids!
* Disney ought to pay this former employee for the movie rights to this AMA.
* Today in news from the mysteriiiiiiiious Orient: Japan’s sex problem is so bad that people are quitting dating and marrying their friends.
* Trump propaganda game getting real.
* Chimpanzees See Butts Like We See Faces.
* The ultimate fear isn’t of the second coming of Hitler: history never repeats itself so obviously, and a sense of shame over the Nazi past remains pervasive in all corners of German life. No, the fear is that the present antidemocratic wave may prove too strong even for Germany—the only country in the history of the world that ever learned from its mistakes. From The New Yorker‘s “The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming.”
* If Black Mirror Had a Showroom.
* This might be the worst science journalism piece I’ve seen in years.
* Scientists Think the Speed of Light Has Slowed, and They’re Trying to Prove It.
* Paradox Girl Is One of the Best Time Travel Series We’ve Read All Year. I bought these tonight on this recommendation and I can confirm it’s super fun.
* And this makes me feel worse about both extinction-level events and car crashes.
Thursday Night
* Maryland votes in gay marriage! 42 to go.
* A new study finds academic dads abusing paternity league.
* How to predict a student’s SAT score: Look at the parents’ tax return.
* Map of the night: U.S. military and CIA interventions since World War II.
* Regarding The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence.
* Two terrible tastes that taste bad together: Rick Santorum and for-profit colleges.
* Mittpocalypse: Romney Drops Below 40 Percent Against Obama in Rasmussen Tracking Poll. Not that Obama’s doing so great either.
* Ron Paul, Peter Theil, and Palantir.
* Furious backpedaling in Virginia.
* Republic Windows and Doors has been re-occupied. Elsewhere in Occupied America: Rebecca Solnit rhapsodizes—but maybe also eulogizes—Occupy Oakland, while a group affiliated with Occupy Wall Street will host a national convention in July.
“We feel that following the footsteps of our founding fathers is the right way to go,” an organizer told the AP.
I propose we rethink that.
* Why do people make false confessions?
* The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has confirmed that scientists have found errors in a physics experiment that recorded particles traveling 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light in late 2011. But now, the agency says that one of the errors means the particles could have been traveling faster than that!
* And today’s chilling vision of things to come: “Mutated Trout Raise New Concerns Near Mine Sites.” Enjoy your weekend!
Friday Night Links: Twilight, Occupy, Obsolete Sounds, Lab Mice, More
* Obligatory Twilight backlash: But when a saga popular with pre-adolescent girls peaks romantically on a night that leaves the heroine to wake up covered with bruises in the shape of her husband’s hands — and when that heroine then spends the morning explaining to her husband that she’s incredibly happy even though he injured her, and that it’s not his fault because she understands he couldn’t help it in light of the depth of his passion — that’s profoundly irresponsible. A countervailing view. Counter-countervailing. More.
* Mental Floss’s library of obsolete sounds.
* North Carolina AFL-CIO: 9 Demands of the 99%.
* Fear and Zugzwang in Zuccotti Park.
* That’s the drawback of the modern lab mouse. It’s cheap, efficient, and highly standardized—all of which qualities have made it the favorite tool of large-scale biomedical research. But as Mattson points out, there’s a danger to taking so much of our knowledge straight from the animal assembly line. The inbred, factory-farmed rodents in use today—raised by the millions in germ-free barrier rooms, overfed and understimulated and in some cases pumped through with antibiotics—may be placing unseen constraints on what we know and learn.
“This is important for scientists,” says Mattson, “but they don’t think about it at all.” Via MeFi.
* GE Filed 57,000-Page Tax Return, Paid No Taxes on $14 Billion in Profits.
* Weird science watch: Quantum theorem shakes foundations: the wavefunction is a real physical object after all, say researchers. Second experiment confirms faster-than-light particles.
* Hermain Cain asks for Secret Service protection to protect him from… reporters.
* And a big coup for Netflix: it will bring back Arrested Development.
Friday Night Links
* The absolute craziest thing I’ve ever seen: Berkeley Researchers Turn Brain Waves Into YouTube Videos.
* Even news that the laws of physics have been overturned pales in comparison. I know, I know: Bad Astronomer, xkcd.
* Louis talks to the A.V. Club about Louie: 1, 2, 3, 4.
* Paul Campos: “The law’s absurd formalism was part of its strength as ideology.” Precisely. This insight applies to many more aspects of the legal system than the revolting spectacle of our contemporary system of capital punishment, which in a case such as Davis’s — which is not in this respect was not unusual — psychologically tortures the defendant, the defendant’s family, the victim’s family, and others connected to the case for literally decades before producing what the system then has the temerity to call “justice.” (The climax of this spectacle last night involved Davis being strapped to a gurney with a needle in his arm for nearly four hours, waiting for various legal personages to respond to the question of whether, all things considered, it was finally time to stop his heart with state-administered poison).
That we tolerate this kind of thing so readily helps explain, in its own way, why it sometimes seems impossible to do much of anything about the absurdities and dysfunctions of the system of legal education that legitimates it in the first instance. Or perhaps it’s the other way around: perhaps we tolerate the absurdity of something like the 22-year “process” that resulted in the horror of Davis’s final hours because we ‘re socialized from the beginning of our careers in this system to accept all kinds of absurdity and injustice as natural, inevitable, and therefore legitimate.
Reading this I was reminded of Duncan Kennedy’s excellent article “Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy,” which Corinne linked the other day on Twitter.
* Ground Zero Mosque opens without controversy. It’s almost as if the objections to this were complete bullshit.
* I’m steadfastly not paying attention to the GOP primary, but this is pretty astounding, even by Republican standards.
* DOJ: Rick Perry’s Texas Redistricting Plan Purposefully Discriminated Against Minorities.
* Why Is TV Suddenly Overstuffed With Buxom Bunnies, Sexy Stewardesses, and Charlie’s Angels?
* How long—how long must we sing this song? Forty years, give or take.
* Speaking at a Climate Week NYC event hosted by the Maldives, the TckTckTck campaign, and the U.N., Greenpeace International President Kumi Naidoo argued that the path to a sustainable future will involve peaceful, popular civil disobedience. “The struggle for climate justice is not a popularity contest,” he argued. He said the lesson of the Arab Spring, and the history of struggles from suffrage to civil rights to the end of apartheid, is that change only comes when decent men and women are willing to risk their lives and go to jail in peaceful protest.
* The world’s rudest hand gestures.
* Great Lost Pop Culture Treasures.
* And Chris Ware on your iPad. Have a good weekend.
Gerry Canavan 