Monday Morning Links

* Doomsday officially here.

In the seven years since the Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened, hundreds of thousands of seed samples have gone into its icy tombs. And not one has come out—until now.

* Huge, if true: High Rise director Ben Wheatley: societal collapse is imminent.

* Huge, if true: Bernie Sanders can’t save America.

* Countless gynecologists failed to diagnose my rare condition – until Planned Parenthood rescued me.

* Endometriosis: the hidden suffering of millions of women revealed.

* Comic Crit reads Aurora and Seveneves.

* Last year, a group of researchers at West Virginia University uncovered one of the biggest frauds in automotive history while working under a small $50,000 grant.

* “Our society needs a massive reset in terms of its priorities [regarding autism],” Silberman said. “One of the main problems facing families now is their children aging out of services. Yet almost all of the funding into research goes into investigating causes.” […] “Many things are being ignored by going after the cause of the alleged epidemic that may not even be one,” said Silberman. “It is amazing to me, after all this arguing about whether or not vaccines cause autism that we still haven’t done a basic prevalence study of autism among adults.”

* The problem is, you can tear down an institution in a year.  It takes 25 — if you’re the best — to build it back up again. But it’s too late now. By breaking the rules of the search, Harreld helped violate the trust of the community and the values of the university. Iowa’s tradition has been sullied. If Harreld remains and wants to be a serious university president, his job is not going to be “going from good to great,” but rather repairing the damage that the Board of Regents, the governor and he, himself have done.

* Cities bear rising cost of keeping water safe to drink. It’s always worse than you think.

 

* We Lost Our Daughter to a Mass Shooter and Now Owe $203,000 to His Ammo Dealer.

* What could possibly go wrong? You Can Now Rent H.P. Lovecraft’s Old Apartment.

* Inside every dishwasher, refrigerator, and washing machine is a little valve that directs the flow of water. For decades, most of these valves have come from a factory in the northwestern corner of Illinois, but not after today.

* Somebody get me Samuel L. Jackson.

* n+1 against the Patriots.

* The nonprofit-Coca-Cola-industrial complex.

* Fun fact: There have been 4,286 Robins.

* Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

* Andy Daly, prophet.

* If They Build It, Will We Come? Meet The Tech Entrepreneurs Trying To Take Back The Porn Industry.

* Being Pippi Longstocking.

* Hot desking, the worst.

 

Some Weekend Links

* In this future, if MOOCs are the route to a credential, they may initially retain some of the popularity that traditional higher education currently holds. But as people realize that the real opportunities continue to accrue to those who are able to attend whatever traditional colleges and universities that remain, they will go to even greater lengths than today to secure those spots. Meanwhile, those for whom access to this opportunity is impossible will be left even further behind.

* Tampering with powers mankind was never meant to know: The U.S. military has developed a pizza that stays edible for years.

* Socialism is not a flight from the human condition; it’s a direct and unsentimental confrontation with that condition.

* Anyway, the point is this: maybe the exhaust port wasn’t the problem.

* Faculty on Strike.

* Reclamations Special Issue: Securitization and the University.

* Can The Government Stop The Comcast/TWC Monstrosity? Comcast must be stopped. Preach.

* A Florida town is attempting to repeal its ban on homeless people using blankets and other means of shelter and comfort. That’s good, I gue–wait, you banned what?

* Not only does the state’s proposed law allow private businesses to discriminate against same-sex couples; it permits state employees to deny them basic services. WHAT?

* Another NFL cheerleader files suit against her team. This one details the copious amounts of clothing and body discipling for a job that pays $90 a game.

* Noam Chomsky, stealing my bit.

* Now playable! Sesame Street Fighter.

* Ellen Page comes out.

* Is the AA system of addiction recovery too unscientific to work?

* The Blum Center Takeover Manifesto.

* Why not cast Chiwetel Ejiofor as Doctor Strange? I’m on board.

* Because somebody had to: Debunking Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld.

The problem with the thesis is that in setting out their claim, the authors ignore the more obvious explanation for differences in group success: history. To be specific, in their quest to make it all about culture, the authors either ignore or strongly discount the particular circumstances of a group’s first arrival, and the advantages enjoyed by that first wave.

* Then he said I want you to develop a plan to invade Ir[aq]. Do it outside the normal channels. Do it creatively so we don’t have to take so much cover [?]

* But Truman’s famously crisp sentence did encapsulate a recurrent American attitude toward the fearsome weapons the United States developed: they came to us almost accidentally, inadvertently, “found” in that cornucopia which modern science and technology provided.

* Leaks benefit the government, the author argues, in many ways. They are a safety valve, a covert messaging system, a perception management tool, and more.  Even when a particular disclosure is unwelcome or damaging, it serves to validate the system as a whole.

* The Word You Are Searching for Is Rape.

* Wendy Davis Is Pretty Much Fine With the Abortion Ban She Filibustered.

* Another Day, Another Train Derails In Pennsylvania, Spilling Up To 4,000 Gallons Of Oil.

A recent analysis found that rail cars spilled more than 1.15 million gallons of oil in 2013, more than was spilled in the previous four decades combined. Still, some companies are looking to expand their oil-by-rail transport: expansion plans for oil-by-rail projects on the West Coast could mean that as many as 11 fully loaded oil trains would travel each day through Spokane, Washington. A Senate subcommittee was scheduled to hold a hearing Thursday on rail safety, but it had to be rescheduled due to bad weather that forced the closure of the federal government.

* STAMOS! Remembering The LEGO Movie Directors’ Wonderful TV Show, Clone High.

* The (almost) entire run of Gargoyles is streaming legally on YouTube.

* Say I’m the Only Bee in Your Bonnet: A People’s History of “Birdhouse in Your Soul.”

* Facebook has added fifty alternative gender options.

* Texas Appeals Court: State Must Recognize Transgender Identities In Marriage.

* And in breaking news: Internet trolls are seriously bad news. The more you know…

Thursday Links! Guaranteed* Not to Bum You Out!

* Class Action: An Activist Teacher’s Handbook.

* I would have thought this was still a few years off: “Faculty object to plan to replace humanities requirement with self-help course.”

* The Marquette Tribune has an article on adjuncts at our university today.

* Unraveling the response to this incident, and where it seemed to go wrong and why, offers a glimpse into the complexity of responding to cases of sexual assault in study abroad, the competing legal frameworks that study abroad programs exist within, and the tensions that can result when the best interests of the institution and the student are arguably not one and the same.

* The flipped classroom as MOOC waste product.

* “You go to an Ivy League school. Then you either become an investment banker or a management consultant. After two-three years, you apply to law school or b-school. And if you fall off the path for even one year, you can’t get back on.”

* Major League Baseball owners, despite earning more than $8 billion in revenue in 2013, voted in January to allow individual teams to slash or eliminate pension-plan offerings to their non-uniformed personnel.

* The Wolf of Sesame Street: Revealing the Secret Corruption Inside PBS’s News Division.

* The NSA and Climate Change Spying: What We Know So Far.

* All in all, the NEADA estimates that sequestration caused about 300,000 families to lose home energy assistance.

* Simply saying we should improve the quality and reduce the duration of work doesn’t allow us to ask whether that work needs to exist at all.

* BDS gaining steam within Israel itself.

* Even a Stationery Logo Pits Palestinians Against Israel.

* The Book of Revelation speaks of a great two-headed beast, paradoxically describing each head as providing worse cable service than the other.

* Oliver Sacks and the Mystery of Hallucinations.

* Another woman speaks out over Bill Cosby sexual abuse allegations.

* There Have Been At Least 44 School Shootings Since Newtown.

* Barbie to Be a Featured “Model” in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. Ugh.

* The Millennium Falcon Owner’s Workshop Manual.

* Is Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. actually a show about interracial family? You may have seen me going back and forth with Scott a bit this morning about how to include the romance elements of the show here; if this is supposed to be about family, it seems like we have to deal with the fact that all the siblings are in love and Big Bro is sleeping with Mom.

* Anthology alert!  Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse.

* And here’s what a Martian space elevator might actually look like. Sold.

Wednesday Links!

* Your Face and Name Will Appear in Google Ads Starting Today. Instructions on how to opt out at the link.

* The state of work in the age of anxiety.

* A Living Death: Life without Parole for Nonviolent Offenses. Such a category plainly shouldn’t exist.

* Studies in the Fermi Paradox: How Self-Replicating Spacecraft Could Take Over the Galaxy.

* After 30 Years of Silence, the Original NSA Whistleblower Looks Back.

* Rutgers University has introduced a new theology course—with Bruce Springsteen as God. At least the facts check out.

* Afrofuturism exhibit in Harlem.

* The early Obamacare enrollment numbers are a disaster. So are the Democrats’ poorly thought-out quick fixes.

* The one thing obscuring the abject awfulness of US democracy is the fact that barely any races are competitive in the first place.

* Climate Change Is Messing With Rainfall Across The Entire Planet.

* Priscilla Wald on the Slow Future of Scholarly Publishing.

* Hawaii legalizes gay marriage.

* Craig Cobb, a white supremacist trying to establish a ‘whites-only’ enclave in North Dakota, appeared on NCBU’s The Trisha Show and agreed to take a test to determine his genetic ancestry. The test results were aired at the taping. Cobb’s genetic makeup is 86% European, and 14% sub-Saharan African.

* How to win every game on The Price is Right.

* Poll watch: PPP is the worst.

* An update from Rolling Jubilee.

* Inside the Unification Church.

* And Prada presents “Castello Cavalcanti,” by Wes Anderson.

A Few More

* Sitcom Characters Still In Shock After Christmas Episode Proves Existence Of Santa Claus.

* io9 Star Treks Into All the Clues and Easter Eggs from the Star Trek Into Darkness Teaser Trailer. Furious time-traveling Picard or nothing.

* Harlan Ellison + Paul Chadwick team for major new DC sci-fi comic.

* Senate Hits New Low as Mitch McConnell Filibusters Himself.

* And 2012 in photographs: 1, 2, 3.