Posts Tagged ‘the cosmos’
Surprise Sunday Links! Watch Out!
* The route Google Maps recommends if you’re headed to Ferrum College from the west involves what may be the loneliest and most roller-coaster-like stretch of roadway ever to earn a state route number from Virginia. It’s a narrow ribbon of pavement with no center line, a twisting trail you drive imagining that if you go over the edge, weeks could pass before anyone found the wreckage. Only at the other end do you spot a yellow sign that reads, “GPS Routing Not Advised.” Small, Rural Colleges Grapple With Their Geography.
* A friend recommended the short Cuban SF novel Super Extra Grande to me, which I liked a lot. Some profiles on the author: 1, 2.
* Horrific terror attack at historic Orlando gay night club leaves 20 dead.
* Scientists think they’ve figured out the Antikythera Mechanism.
* In search of Cervantes’s grave.
* Old and busted: AI. New hotness: IA.
* Landscaping in the Anthropocene.
* As an added experiment, the researchers applied their model to the current distribution of human populations on Earth. They found that, under all the same assumptions, 12.5 percent of the global population would be forced to migrate at least 1,000 kilometers, and up to a third of the population would have to move more than 500 kilometers.
* In a paper published in the May issue of the journal Astrobiology, the astronomer Woodruff Sullivan and I show that while we do not know if any advanced extraterrestrial civilizations currently exist in our galaxy, we now have enough information to conclude that they almost certainly existed at some point in cosmic history.
…what our calculation revealed is that even if this probability is assumed to be extremely low, the odds that we are not the first technological civilization are actually high. Specifically, unless the probability for evolving a civilization on a habitable-zone planet is less than one in 10 billion trillion, then we are not the first.
* Twitter must fix this. Its brand is increasingly defined by excessive harassment.
* More on The 7-1/2-Hour O.J. Simpson Doc Everyone Will Be Talking About This Summer.
* Because poetry is considered so small, so irrelevant, it’s tempting for poetry critics to look for the BIG themes in poems to demonstrate that poetry matters. I continue to learn from critics who take on this labor. However, because ALL African literary criticism is assumed to matter the more it focuses on the BIG SOCIOPOLITICOECONOMICDISASTERTHATISAFRICA, I am inclined to turn to quieter moments—spaces for the intimate, the friendly, the quiet, the loving, the depressed, the depressing, grief, and melancholy. I’m drawn to the register that is not the shout, and never the headline. I linger at the quotidian to insist that the African imagination considers livability and shareability.
* For everyone, he claims, is shortchanged when the guiding principle and “key driver” of the institution is no longer thought, but money (ix). Faculty are silenced, yes, by the drive to conformity and homogeneity. But students are also cheated when they are treated simply as “human capital”: “When the university is reduced to the function of preparation for jobs and not for life, life itself gets lost under the jobs” (85). Most broadly and seriously of all, society as a whole suffers as the university abandons its traditional role as “that institution that has a responsibility to counter the incipient violence of natural force” (40). The fate of the university is bound up with the fate of democracy and citizenship at large. If society is to change, and injustice and inequality challenged, we need now more than ever an institution whose role is to be “’critical’ of the existing world state of affairs, dissident with respect to it” (6).
* I sometimes wish tenure were what its enemies believe it is.
* White supremacist PACs and Trump. The stain of Trump. “A GOP senator might vote for Hillary Clinton. Here’s how rare that is.” Trump has underperformed the real estate market by a mere 57% since 1976. Alas, Mitt.
* I’m calling it: Trump will drop out of the race by July 5 at the latest. He will blame the unfair media and political correctness, allude to some wack-ass conspiracy involving Black Lives Matter and/or Hezbollah, and go to his grave telling everyone he knows that if he had stayed in the race, he would’ve beaten Clinton.
* You may be done with your quasi-legal homebrew server, but your quasi-legal homebrew server is not done with you: The FBI has been conducting a criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information for months.
* We narrowed Clinton’s vice-presidential possibilities to 27. Now you pick one. For a long time I’ve thought it definitely be one of the Castro brothers, probably Julian, but Elizabeth Warren has made such a push lately I’ve started to think it could actually be her. Of course you can pick Trump’s too, from such a weak field it includes his own daughter.
* Let me close with a broad statement. In the news you will see some rather hysterical statements about how all bets are off this year. That is true to an extent: on the Republican side, the national party’s positions and their rank-and-file voters’ preferences are far out of whack. In a deep sense, their decision process in 2016 became broken. But that does not mean that opinion is unmeasurable. Far from it. In the aggregate, pollsters still do a good job reaching voters. And voters are still people whose opinions move at a certain speed. To my thinking, polls may be the best remaining way to assess what is happening.
* But just in case: I Spent the 90s Fighting Fascists on the Streets of Warsaw.
* If you’re not sick of these yet: What Hamilton Forgets About Hamilton.
* The gentrification of Sesame Street.
* Review: Warcraft Is The Battlefield Earth Of The 21st Century. Warcraft, Hollywood, And The Growing Importance Of China’s Box Office.
* Because you demanded it! Kevin Smith Says That His Mallrats Sequel Will Be a 10-Part TV Series.
* Same joke but for The Passion of the Christ 2.
* Sixty Million Car Bombs: Inside Takata’s Air Bag Crisis: How the company’s failures led to lethal products and the biggest auto recall in history.
* The case for Lady Stoneheart showing up in season six of Game of Thrones. Let me say I have my doubts.
* What to do if you find a goose than lays golden eggs. Machine Learning: A Flowchart. If you read Kafka’s stories backwards, they all make great kids’ movies.
* And the moral cowards at Wikipedia have moved to suppress my work again.
Elite Saturday Links Enter CANAVAN at Checkout for 20% Off
* A version of this xkcd has been running continually in my brain for two years.
* February 26-27 at Duke University: Pleasure and Suspicion: An Interdisciplinary Conference.
* Open access SFFTV! A special issue on The X-Files from 2013.
* Louisiana universities are facing the largest midyear cut in state history, Governor John Bel Edwards said in a televised speech last Thursday. Even if the Legislature can find additional revenue, higher education will need to cut $42 million this year. Louisiana’s total higher education budget is $769 million, and if the Legislature cannot raise more revenue, higher education could face a $200 million cut.
* RIP, Umberto Eco. What Is Harper Lee’s Legacy After Go Set a Watchman?
* The New Inquiry reviews The Witness.
* The Slow Violence of Climate Change.
* At LARoB: How should we periodize comics?
* I’d been talking just yesterday to a student from my Lives of Animals class about the urban legends involving pigs and pig corpses and the war on terror. I said something like “No politician who wanted a national reputation would talk this way, though. Well, maybe Trump.” And lo, it came to pass.
* Steve Martin Performed Stand-Up Last Night for the First Time in 35 Years.
* Chinese travel blogger likes Chicago but loves Milwaukee. Endorsed!
* ‘Black Sludge’ Pours Out Of Texas Town’s Faucets Days After FBI Arrests Nearly Every City Official.
* The Shocking Truth of the Notorious Milgram Obedience Experiments.
The trouble was that this zombie-like, slavish obedience that Milgram described wasn’t what he’d observed.
* Hero K is the Highly Anticipated New Novel by Don DeLillo. I’m in.
* Half The World Will Be Short-Sighted By 2050? Half of America will be freelancers by 2020?
* In an email to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shortly after the U.N. Security Council in March 2011 authorized military intervention in Libya, a former senior State Department official praised her achievement in “turning POTUS around on this.” Meanwhile, America Is Now Fighting a Proxy War with Itself in Syria. So that means we can’t lose, right?
* And elsewhere in smart battles wisely chosen: St. Louis Archbishop Urges Priests To Cut Ties With The Girl Scouts.
* In her new book, Elaine Frantz Parsons re-traces the origins of the 19th-century KKK, which began as a social club before swiftly moving to murder.
* Proposals for new chess pieces.
* Reds in Space: Socialist Science Fiction.
* Beloved: The Best Horror Novel the Horror Genre Has Never Claimed. That’s something I talk about a lot when I teach the novel.
* Seems like a lowball: Husbands create 7 hours of extra housework a week.
* The weirdest, best photos I found in an old Bernie Sanders archive. Arrest photo of young activist Bernie Sanders emerges from Tribune archives. Footage Shows 21-Year-Old Bad Boy Bernie Sanders Being Arrested at a Protest.
* Clay Shirky: social media turned Dems, GOP into host organisms for third party candidates.
* Bloomberg yes! Bloomberg no!
* Also at Boing Boing: Forced arbitration clauses are a form of wealth transfer to the rich.
* The Guardian reports on an accusation by a former Muskegon County, Michigan health official claiming that a Catholic healthcare provider forced five women between August 2009 and December 2010 to undergo dangerous miscarriages by giving them no other option.
* The Singularity’s all right: A 19-year-old made a free robot lawyer that has appealed $3 million in parking tickets.
* We already knew Doc Brown was a monster, but how deep does the rabbit hole go?
* Financialization and the end of journalism.
* “on a scale of luke skywalker to jaime lannister…”
* The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once.
* Elsewhere on the deep time beat: What sparked the Cambrian explosion?
* The Warriors’ Odds Of Going 73-9. Written before last night’s loss.
* This one misses me, but it may help some of you feel better: Coffee May Reduce The Damage Alcohol Does To Your Liver.
* This one’s a real emotional roller coaster: Chimp Abandoned On Island Welcomes Rescuers With Open Arms.
* From the SMBC archives: Lucy, the football, and existential dread.
* And they said my work was useless.
Week-Old Links at Two-Weeks-Old-Link Prices
* The San Bernardino mystery. Disband MSNBC. The story of the first mass murder in U.S. history. From the archives: The Making of a Rampage Murderer: What the Brutal Life of Oakland Shooter One L. Goh Says About America. So There’s Just Been a Mass Shooting. The Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook. Your tweets are not helping.
* The story, called “The Princess Steel,” was discovered by scholars Adrienne Brown and Britt Rusert, who write about it in the new issue of the Modern Language Association journal. We May Have Just Found W.E.B. Du Bois’ Earliest Science Fiction Story.
* Crank watch: What No One Is Telling You About Mark Zuckerberg Donating 99% Of His Fortune To “Charity.” The Philanthropy Hustle.
* Tickets go on sale Friday, Dec. 11.
* Elsewhere on the local beat: The Transformation of the Milwaukee Art Museum.
* I teach practical, marketable skills that will serve my students their entire lives.
* Four tough things universities should do to rein in costs. Four tough things columnists should do before writing about universities.
* Are most academic papers really worthless? Don’t trust this worthless statistic.
* College athletic departments are paying themselves to lose money.
* The future is a nightmare, and Purdue is ready.
* Self-driving cars will be the worst. Hopefully this particular problem is mostly solved by the elimination of private car ownership altogether.
* Catholic University Declares 1st Amendment Right To Ignore Catholicism.
* Sports Corner: Stephen Curry Is The Revolution.
* Meanwhile it is stunning to have my prejudices confirmed so wholly: New Study Finds ‘Surprising’ Correlation Between Degenerative Brain Disease And Amateur Athletics.
* Cruel Optimism and the NFL, or, Life in the Factory of Sadness.
* Let us be precise: Donald Trump Is Not a Liar.
* Leaked Documents Show Alabama Police Department Planted Drugs On Black Men For Years. Meanwhile, in Chicago. UPDATE: There may be less to that Alabama story than meets the eye.
* Spoiler Alerts: Three Books on Trash.
* The 24 Most Embarrassing Dungeons & Dragons Character Classes.
* Assuming a round figure of two and a half billion years of beak-sharpening, and assuming (a BIG assumption, to be sure) about three days per iteration of the Doctor, you can figure, based on a solar year of 365.25 days, that there have been approximately three hundred and four billion, three hundred and seventy-five million and twelve Doctors.
* And speaking of the Doctor: I’m not even sure who #2 would be.
* Behold the Jessica Jones backlash.
* Study suggests Type 2 diabetes can be cured by weight loss — specifically the loss of half a gram of fat from the pancreas.
* What they give with one hand they take with the other: Research Points To Mental Health Risks Associated With Meatless Diet.
* This is neat: The Third Amendment to the Constitution — the one that bans the quartering of soldiers in homes without the owner’s consent — is sort of the Pete Best of the early American legislative experiment. While the other amendments have had all sorts of play at the highest levels of legal rulings, there has never been a Supreme Court decision primarily based on the Third Amendment. Clearly the Founders had a goal, wrote it down, and we haven’t had too many questions about the matter since. Nice work, Founders. Anyway, there’s an idea bubbling among legal theorists to use the Third Amendment to counteract domestic spying from the NSA — a branch of the Department of Defense — and while it may not be 100 percent there, it’s interesting.
* Our bad: U.S. Holds Yemeni Man at Guantanamo Bay for 13 Years in Case of Mistaken Identity.
* Starting work before 10am isn’t just soul crushing, this scientist says it’s equivalent to torture.
* Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty.
* Of One and the Other: Humans and Animals.
* Know your branches of economics.
* State sues prisoners to pay for their room, board.
* “This is the best declining mall review I’ve ever read.”
* Teach the controversy: Will Our Descendants Survive the Destruction of the Universe?
* Magnifique! In Photos: Anarchists Clash With Riot Police During Climate Summit Protest in Paris.
* When the Onion goes dark, there’s still no one better: Frustrated Gunman Can’t Believe How Far He Has To Drive To Find Nearest Planned Parenthood Clinic.
* Female-Authors-Only Philosophy of Science Syllabus.
* There’s no such thing as a male or female brain, study finds.
* Florida Woman’s Car Turned Her in for a Hit-and-Run.
* Mom Who Overslept While Son Walked to School Could Get 10 Years in Prison.
* General election watch: Democrats are fiercely committed to the proposition of nominating a perhaps fatally compromised candidate whom basically no one likes. And from Amber A’Lee Frost: My Kind of Misogyny. Wheeeeeeeeee!
* Philosophy Corner: Is there a principled difference between having a gun and just having a button that when pressed kills the person standing in front of you?
* Was Star Wars’ Empire on the brink of financial ruin?
* This company believes it can resurrect humans in the next 30 years.
* Kill the Santa Claus in your head.
* From Climate Crisis to Solar Communism. World’s Most Vulnerable Islands Are Hoping Paris Will Bring an Impossible Climate Miracle. India Holds the Planet’s Fate in Its Hands. That’s Great News.
* Def Sec Carter To Open All Combat Jobs To Women In Historic Change.
* How to Be an Anticapitalist Today.
* Soviet erotic alphabet picture book, 1931.
* There but for the grace of God go we: Man arrested with 51 turtles in his pants.
* And of course you had me at Rare 40-Year-Old Star Trek Comics Are Finally Being Released In the U.S.
All the Weekend Links (100%)
* Jaimee has one of her phobia poems up at Drunken Boat’s “funny” issue: “Derrida Eats a Dorito.”
* CFPs: ICFA 36: The Scientific Imagination. Joss Whedon’s Comics. Assemble! The Making and Re-Making of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Human-Animal Boundary: Exploring the Line in Philosophy and Fiction.
* MLA Subcon is trying to raise some money for its operations at indiegogo.
* New Study Links Polar Vortex to Climate Change. Speaking for all of Wisconsin: this does not bode well.
* I have to say I really like what Freddie says about privilege and merit here.
Instead, the point should be to ask people to see the ways in which all of our lives are conditioned by vast forces we cannot control, that these forces in general work to the benefit and hindrance of certain broad groups of people in a way that conflicts with our conceptions of justice, and that we can build a more just, more equitable world if we acknowledge that no one’s life is the product only of their work ethic and intelligence.
The long-term project of those who decry the role of unearned advantage in human society should not be to try and parse who is most and least privileged. The project should be to deny the salience of “merit” as a moral arbiter of material security and comfort. The very notion of just deserts– the notion that some people have legitimate accomplishments that we must celebrate because they represent “merit,” whatever that is, distinct from their privileges– is what has to die. There is no space where privilege ends and legitimate accomplishment begins. There is, instead, a world of such multivariate complexity that we can never know whose accomplishments are earned and whose aren’t. Instead, we should recognize the folly of tying material security and comfort to our flawed perceptions of other people’s value, and instead institute an economic system based on the absolute right of all people to food, shelter, clothing, health care, and education.
* Kazuo Ishiguro to publish first novel since Never Let Me Go. I am on board. More links below the photo!
* And on the other side of the spectrum: Margaret Atwood’s new work will remain unseen for a century.
* Shock, horror: Most college classes cost more online than on campus.
* The Classroom of the Future.
* Q. How did you make the transition from professor to president? A. Maybe some of our problems in education today stem from the fact that someone like me is considered an unconventional choice. Maybe academic institutions should be run by academics, the way they used to be.
* Wisconsin inches closer to dubious obesity milestone.
* On Christopher Tolkien protecting The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales from New Line. I hadn’t realized that Peter Jackson was prohibited from making reference to those works in his films; that’s fascinating…
* If Pearson were trying to strike back against a researcher who told legislators that they were paying $100 million a year for tests that mostly measure test-taking ability, it would look an awful lot like what is happening to Walter Stroup.
* The New York Times pans a novel for being insufficiently pro-conquistador. The Economist wrings its hands over whether maybe we’re not being fair to slaveowners.
* The Justice Department will investigate the entire Ferguson police force. How municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty. Twitter Headquarters Has Painted #Ferguson On Its Office Wall.
* Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson lied when he said he had received “many” specific requests for the videotape that allegedly shows Michael Brown robbing a convenience store, according to a new report.
* Feisal G. Mohamed and Cary Nelson debate the Salaita firing. Salaita and the Accreditors.
* This Is What It’s Like To Sit Through An Anti-Union Meeting At Work.
* Gaming doesn’t have a problem; capitalism has a problem. Rather than seeing them simply as immoral assholes or deluded consumerists, we should take gaming’s advanced wing of hateful trolls seriously as representatives of the reactionary shock troops that will have to be defeated in order to build a more egalitarian society in the games industry or anywhere else.
* Five myths about California’s drought. The news is not good, friends.
* Here’s Who Really Controls California’s Water.
* Staff at an Arizona gun range reportedly told investigators that the release forms signed by the family of a 9-year-old girl who accidentally killed her instructor with an Uzi last week were unavailable because they had been “blown away by the wind.” I’ve head less convincing excuses, I guess.
* Biden’s warning to ISIS militants: ‘We will follow them to the gates of hell.’ 200 U.S. troops headed to Ukraine for ‘peace-keeping exercise’ as Obama condemns Russian aggression.
* Brave Teen Refuses to Attend Middle School, Chooses Jail Instead.
* Today in the rule of law: Missouri May Have Lied Under Oath About What Drugs It Used To Kill People And When.
* But don’t worry: The system works. Antonin Scalia’s Favorite Murderer Is Innocent.
* Death Row Guard Has Always Had Soft Spot For The Innocent Ones.
* L.A. Times Reporter Basically Let the CIA Edit His Stories on the CIA.
* NYPD Pays $33K to Settle Suit After Mistaking Jolly Ranchers for Meth.
* Police telling victims to solve crimes by themselves.
* In New York, a human rights lawyer has filed a lawsuit against the NYPD after she was arrested for blocking the sidewalk while waiting for her husband and kids to use the bathroom at a Times Square restaurant.
* The call to demilitarize police overlooks the longstanding link between policing and empire.
* The Worst Airbnb in the Universe: 22 Beds in One Apartment. Imagine this being your home. Imagine this being your neighbor.
* The fight for the Senate is getting weird y’all.
* For Parents Of Young Black Men With Autism, Extra Fear About Police.
* A horrifying new study says one in five women have been raped.
* “After the football season ended.”
* Vox says your revolution is over, the bums lost.
* Our congresswoman was arrested today at a fast food workers’ strike.
* For the first time ever, neuroscientists have demonstrated the viability of direct — and completely non-invasive — brain-to-brain communication in humans. Remarkably, the experiment allowed subjects to exchange mentally-conjured words despite being 5,000 miles apart.
* Science fiction classics in the news: Syfy Greenlights Six-Hour Miniseries Childhood’s End.
* BP May Be Fined Up to $18 Billion for Spill in Gulf. Almost 18 days revenue, less than a year’s profit…
* Workers At Coal Waste Landfill Told That Coal Ash Is ‘Safe Enough To Eat,’ Lawsuit Says.
* Joan Rivers Always Knew She Was Funny. Joan Rivers and today’s comediennes.
* Downloaded Games Have A Larger Carbon Footprint Than Blu-Ray Discs. There’s some really questionable assumptions in here, but the argument that theres’s some point where this is true is an important one.
* A Child Helps Your Career, If You’re a Man.
Ms. Budig found that on average, men’s earnings increased more than 6 percent when they had children (if they lived with them), while women’s decreased 4 percent for each child they had. Her study was based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth from 1979 to 2006, which tracked people’s labor market activities over time. Childless, unmarried women earn 96 cents for every dollar a man earns, while married mothers earn 76 cents, widening the gap.
* Here’s why CVS stopped selling cigarettes.
* Here’s why Twitter shouldn’t algorithmize users’ feeds.
* This is the most detailed map yet of our place in the universe.
* Bold new directions: Shazam will differ from other DC movies by being fun.
* Every popular text eventually gets an “it was all just a hallucination” rewrite. Today it’s Harry Potter’s turn.
* New Girl at School Had to Wear “Shame Suit” After Dress Code Violation.
* Werner Herzog will guest star on Parks And Recreation.
* Nothing good will happen anymore: Actually, HBO didn’t commission more Flight Of The Conchords.
* Here’s something I should probably waste all my money on.
* New Miracleman Comics Stories (Including One by Grant Morrison) Coming Soon.
* This Map Shows How Hunting Wiped Out Whales In Less Than A Century.
* And FiveThirtyEight is there with a hot take: If Tony Survived The ‘Sopranos’ Finale, He’s Probably Alive Today.
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.
Weekend Links
* By allying us with its protagonist, Gravity universalizes its image of exploited female labor, sells it back to its entire audience, men and women alike. Gravity shows a contemporary ideal of femininity still more sinister than the pinup. It presents woman as an intricate machine, strapped to dozens of wires, working her ass off with the goal of appearing weightless.
* We were born too late: …in the early universe, as Loeb speculates in a paper published in Astrobiology late last year, everything would have been a habitable zone.
* Terry Gilliam thinks he could have screwed up Watchmen waaaaaaay worse than Zack Snyder.
* Another day, another Title IX class action against a major university.
* Students Joke About Raping Student Union President, Then Threaten to Sue Her.
* Objectification, Humiliation and the Liberal Arts.
* Surprising minimum wage jobs.
* Wisconsin income gap widening faster than nation as a whole.
* New Study Confirms It: Breast-Feeding Benefits Have Been Drastically Overstated.
* Man Wakes Up In Body Bag At Funeral Home. Wow.
* Chomsky on academic labor. Life off the tenure track at Boise State.
* Polynesian seafarers discovered America long before Europeans, says DNA study.
* Watch Six Colorado Senate Candidates Deny Climate Change Exists In 18 Seconds.
* Man, the rich are different.
* “While the entire U.S. population has increased about one-third over the last 30 years, the Federal prison population has increased at a staggering rate of 800 percent, currently totaling nearly 216,000 inmates and currently operates at a 33 percent overcapacity. One-half of those Federal prison populations are drug offenses. While some of them are truly dangerous persons, as Deputy Attorney General Cole said, many of them are first-timers, and by possession only, wound up under Federal laws, the crack cocaine laws, in the Federal system”, she said.
* Researchers Find CTE In A Soccer Player For The First Time.
* This Is What Discrimination Against Pregnant Workers Looks Like.
* Twelve Fixed, Eternal Commandments for Academic Job Candidates.
* The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from: Wachowskis prepping new Matrix prequel trilogy.
* And I think we should all just agree this is the true ending to Harry Potter now.
Monday Morning Links
* The cosmic sublime: Here Is Today.
* Self-Sabotage in the Academic Career. I love @ncecire‘s alternative headline for this: “Here are fifteen ways it’s probably your fault.”
* Adjuncts’ Advocates Call for Fair Treatment on Work-Hour Calculations.
* Why Some Colleges Are Saying No to MOOC Deals, at Least for Now.
* One of the most important conclusions I’ve drawn from the experience is this: If you are an untenured faculty member, you really shouldn’t attempt a MOOC. The planning process alone is overwhelming. Because I have a grant and because research about writing instruction is part of my accepted research portfolio, I will submit all MOOC-related work as part of my future tenure case. I am very fortunate that Georgia Tech values this kind of inquiry. However, for faculty members in many other disciplines, I doubt that a MOOC would count as anything more than a line item in a teaching portfolio.
…
Will you be able to publicly express your concerns if something about your MOOC seems pedagogically unsound? If your university doesn’t have the technological capacity to support you, will you have to solve the problems yourself? Who will pay your video-production costs? (Our MOOC has spent $32,000 on production so far.) Will you be able to challenge administrators who want to control your content? Will you be forced to submit to evaluation schemes that would allow your course to carry credit?
* Long Hours Are Pushing Mothers Out Of Male-Dominated Jobs.
* are we just going to ignore the fact that the king of sweden is fucking hilarious
