Posts Tagged ‘Wyoming’
Sunday Morning Links!
* Good year for children’s studies academic jobs: Bryn Mawr and York.
* But some researchers want to dig deeper. They want to know why quantum mechanics has the form it does, and they are engaged in an ambitious program to find out. It is called quantum reconstruction, and it amounts to trying to rebuild the theory from scratch based on a few simple principles. The simulation crashes at very large speeds and very small scales. We solved this years ago!
* These Women Entrepreneurs Created A Fake Male Cofounder To Dodge Startup Sexism.
* Study: a universal basic income would grow the economy.
* College football gives conservatives their own safe space on campus.
* Well-off “helicopter” parents are super annoying, but they didn’t create economic inequality.
* Evidence of Russian Election-Data Tampering Mounts as Urgency to Investigate It Does Not.
* Trump Looks Likely to End Protections for Dreamers. Here’s What Would Happen Next. Trump’s next big play on immigration could be much worse than you think.
* ‘Willful blindness’: Deportees becoming easy prey for gangs along the U.S.-Mexico border.
* Hurricane Harvey Floods Toxic Waste Sites, With The EPA Missing In Action. Houston officials were warned they had a problem — they didn’t listen.
* Evacuations ordered in ‘largest ever’ Los Angeles wildfire. 185,000 acre Battle Complex fire burning across Eastern Montana, Northern Wyoming.
* The Incarcerated Women Who Fight California’s Wildfires.
* Donald Trump Jr. to be paid $100,000 for UNT Kuehne Series speech. Bail money?
* Months later, DOJ confirms Trump was lying when he said Obama wiretapped Trump Tower.
* Quick, someone option this Twitter feed. I see at least three films.
* “Virtual Reality Settlers of Catan” seems like a joke, and yet.
* And Texas goes Full Dark Tower.
Open-carrying swords and machetes
Blades more than 5.5 inches in length are being permitted for open-carry in public places. The law, though, prohibits swords and machetes in most bars, schools, colleges, sporting events, polling places, race parks, correctional facilities, hospitals, amusement parks and places of worship.
This Is Just From Today
Melting Ice Makes The Arctic A Much Worse Heat-Magnet Than Scientists Feared. Coal Ash Piles Up As High As 5 Feet In North Carolina River, Endangering Aquatic Life. Ohio Agency Tasked With Limiting Fracking On Public Lands Was Actually Planning To Promote It. Texas Knows ‘Almost Nothing’ About Pollution From One Of The Country’s Most Active Drilling Sites. Wyoming’s Leading Paper Argues Coal Is ‘Relatively Good’ For The Environment. Chevron apologizes for fracking well explosion with coupons for free pizza.
Thursday!
* First we must understand that though the humanities in general and literary studies in particular are poor and struggling, we are not naturally poor and struggling. We are not on a permanent austerity budget because we don’t have the intrinsic earning power of the science and engineering fields and aren’t fit enough to survive in the modern university. I suggest, on the basis of a case study, that the humanities fields are poor and struggling because they are being milked like cash cows by their university administrations. The money that departments generate through teaching enrollments that the humanists do not spend on their almost completely unfunded research is routinely skimmed and sent elsewhere in the university. As the current university funding model continues to unravel, the humanities’ survival as national fields will depend on changing it. Via MLA.
* No one could have predicted: Citing disappointing student outcomes, San Jose State pauses work with Udacity.
* Tomrorow’s outrageous acquittals today: Here’s Florida’s Next Trayvon Martin Case.
* Possible Homeland Security pick tainted by racial profiling accusations. It would be terrible if racial politics were somehow allowed to corrupt the mission of Homeland Security.
* Eric Holder: I Had To Tell My Son How To Protect Himself From The Police Because He Is Black.
* Wyoming is a place with two escalators; it probably shouldn’t get two senators.
* As western water leaders converged on Las Vegas in December 2001, Southern California’s inability to contain its voracious appetite seemed finally to be bumping up against reality – there is only so much water in the Colorado River.
* My friend Fran McDonald has a piece in the Atlantic about laughter without humor.
The glitch aesthetic of the GIF emphasizes the uncanny quality of laughter. At each moment of re-looping, Portman performs a miniature convulsion that registers as an inhuman twitch. If humor makes us human — an assumed correlation that is so deeply written into our culture that the two share a basic etymological root — then laughter without humor appears to render us mechanical, terrifying, monstrous. It is not a coincidence that laughter without humor has become the great cinematic signifier of madness: think of Colin Clive’s maniacal “it’s alive!” hysterics in the famous 1931 film version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the crazed cackle of The Joker in the Batman comics.
* Today, surrogacies in the U.S. are managed by profitable “voluntary” clinic-agencies speaking the language of the “gift.” The labor (no pun intended) that commercial surrogates perform in the U.S. is not legally recognized as work but as volunteerism, though surrogacies cost at least four times the 1986 sum—whether they be traditional, in which the surrogate is impregnated with a client’s sperm, or, as is increasingly the case, gestational, in which an in-vitro-fertilized embryo is transferred to the surrogate’s womb. Strict means-testing is used to assess a surrogate’s independent wealth, purporting to check for authentic “voluntariness.” This effectively bars working-class American women from entering surrogacy agreements. The U.S. surrogacy industry prefers to cast surrogacy as akin to basket-weaving or amateur pottery, not assembly-line factory work.
In India, the reverse is true. There are upwards of 3,500 so-called womb farms in the country, in which conscripted women offer the vital force of black flesh considered untouchable at home to incubate white children destined to be shipped back to Denmark, Israel, or the U.S. It’s a “purely economic arrangement” with a “mere vessel,” explains Dominic and Octavia Orchard of Oxfordshire, UK, a commissioning couple featured in the Daily Mail in 2012. To couples like these, surrogates are presented as transnational reproductive-service workers, their job description posted online and accompanied by detailed terms of service.
* And a Dan Harmon profile with more information on his firing and rehiring and plans for season five, for anyone who still hasn’t lost patience with either the series or him personally…
Thursday Night! Drones, The Swedish Chef, Cross-Dressing Dads, and More
* Texas and Florida get told they can’t suppress the vote.
* Swedes think the Swedish Chef sounds Norwegian.
* Dad sports skirt to support cross-dressing son.
* Getting Rid of the College Loan Repo Man.
* Jonathan Chait: The Legendary Paul Ryan.
* A Brazilian judge has recognized a three-way marriage.
* And from monkey utopia to monkey hell: Chimps don’t care if someone else gets robbed.
Stat of the Day, Insane Wyoming Legislative Survivalists Edition
Population of Wyoming: 568,158.
Crew of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier:
Ship’s company: 3,200
Air wing: 2,480
568,158 / 5,680 = one out of every 100 Wyoming citizens will serve aboard its aircraft carrier.
‘Jericho’ Was Right!
State representatives on Friday advanced legislation to launch a study into what Wyoming should do in the event of a complete economic or political collapse in the United States. Via @mikemccaffrey.
The task force would look at the feasibility of Wyoming issuing its own alternative currency, if needed. And House members approved an amendment Friday by state Rep. Kermit Brown, R-Laramie, to have the task force also examine conditions under which Wyoming would need to implement its own military draft, raise a standing army, and acquire strike aircraft and an aircraft carrier.
Um.
