An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together … Omnium Gatherum for June 9, 2021

Here’s a variety of notable things I’ve recently found that you may also be interested in checking out:

• Crowdfunding with 21 days to go, from Thomas Negovan and Century Guild: “CALIGULA hardcover book rare set photos from the cult film. Caligula: The Mario Tursi Photos presents a rare collection of original, never-before-seen photographs from the set of the cult film.” Also, and. “A gorgeous, limited edition coffee-table book documenting the most notorious film in history, featuring unseen behind-the-scenes photos. Mountains of boxes, covered in dust, untouched for over a generation. Believed destroyed for nearly half a century, this breathtaking discovery was the long-lost Penthouse collection of original materials from which the 1980 film Caligula was created: a treasure trove of 35mm film, original camera negatives, and papers including 10,733 black-and-white photographs- the majority of which had never been seen outside of the Penthouse offices since they were taken on the set of Caligula in 1976. With a budget twice that of Star Wars, the movie contained historically accurate events from Roman texts–shocking scenes of grotesque, lurid violence– and powerhouse performances by magnificent actors flanked by orgies of unsimulated sexual acts and the first unapologetic homosexual imagery in mainstream cinema history. Forty years after its release, Caligula remains one of the most unforgettable and notorious films in cinema history. Now, in conjunction with Penthouse magazine, and in advance of a stunning new edit of the film restoring the originally envisioned narrative, deluxe art book publisher Century Guild is sharing over 200 of the most dramatic images in a book overflowing with stunning photographs taken on the set of the film by legendary Italian still photographer Mario Tursi, best known for his work with Italian directors Pier Paolo Pasolini and Luchino Visconti as well as his long collaboration with Martin Scorsese on the sets of Gangs of New York and The Last Temptation of Christ. These long-lost photos taken by an icon of historical cinematic photography provide a peek behind the scenes of a legendary cult film, and a voyeuristic gaze into big-budget 1970s filmmaking. Please note that this book contains excessive nudity and erotic content. As a result, we are only able to show a small fragment of the photographs contained inside.”
• Crowdfunding with 32 days to go: “Veritas Magia Tarot Deck. A full scale, black and silver inlaid tarot deck.”
• Ends in 2 days: “Indie bundle for Palestinian Aid. A bundle hosted by Tybawai with content from 864 creators. 1,019 items for $5.” 1/2 million raised so far. “All profit from this bundle will be donated to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. The UNRWA has provided food assistance for over one million Palestinians, and continues to do so in the territories with heavy destruction. They also provide emergency mental and physical health protection for those in the region. https://www.unrwa.org/gaza-emergency ”
• More on this: “Legends of Tomorrow’s New MacGuffin, The Fountain of Imperium Explained. Legends of Tomorrow season 6 has introduced a new mystic artifact for the team to go after: the mystic Fountain of Imperium. But what is it exactly?”—”The central plotline of the Legends of Tomorrow episode “The Satanist’s Apprentice” focused on Astra Logue and her learning the basics of magic from the spirit of Aleister Crowley; a legendary dark wizard, whom John Constantine had trapped in a painting. Astra proved an apt pupil, but Crowley was exploiting her anger at Constantine towards his own ends, first taking over Constantine’s body for himself then working to regain his lost magical power at Astra’s expense. Thankfully, Astra was able to turn the tables with a spell in her mother’s journal, which took away Crowley’s magic. Unfortunately, the same purgative spell also required Constantine lose most of his acquired magical power in the process.” Also “How ‘Legends of Tomorrow’ Pulled Off Its Latest Magic Trick.” Also “Legends of Tomorrow Season 6 Episode 6: What To Expect?”
• “Next Step Spirituality“—”I made up a new term ‘Next Step Spirituality’. It sounds pompous right? Like I am saying its the Next step in human spirituality or the next step beyond existing traditions. That’s not it at all. The idea of the “Next Step” is simply an orientation. What is your next step?”
• “Academia Trained You—but the World Needs You. Does leaving the academy mean someone failed? Or does it mean, instead, that their scholarly strengths can now be made useful to the public?”
• “Queer Anti-Capitalism.” From the introduction to Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism [Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Peter Drucker—”Recent victories for LGBT rights have gone faster than most people imagined possible. Yet the accompanying rise of gay ‘normality’ has been disconcerting for activists with radical sympathies. This book shows how the successive ‘same-sex formations’ of the past century and a half have led both to the emergence of today’s ‘homonormativity’ and ‘homonationalism’ and to ongoing queer resistance.”
• “How Legendary Physicist Richard Feynman Helped Crack the Case on the Challenger Disaster.” Excerpt from The Burning Blue: The Untold Story of Christa McAuliffe and NASA’s Challenger Disaster [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Kevin Cook—”The untold story of a national trauma―NASA’s Challenger explosion―and what really happened to America’s Teacher in Space, illuminating the tragic cost of humanity setting its sight on the stars. You’ve seen the pictures. You know what happened. Or do you? On January 28, 1986, NASA’s space shuttle Challenger exploded after blasting off from Cape Canaveral. Christa McAuliffe, America’s “Teacher in Space,” was instantly killed, along with the other six members of the mission. At least that’s what most of us remember. Kevin Cook tells us what really happened on that ill-fated, unforgettable day. He traces the pressures―leading from NASA to the White House―that triggered the fatal order to launch on an ice-cold Florida morning. Cook takes readers inside the shuttle for the agonizing minutes after the explosion, which the astronauts did indeed survive. He uncovers the errors and corner-cutting that led an overconfident space agency to launch a crew that had no chance to escape. But this is more than a corrective to a now-dimming memory. Centering on McAuliffe, a charmingly down-to-earth civilian on the cusp of history, The Burning Blue animates a colorful cast of characters: a pair of red-hot flyers at the shuttle’s controls, the second female and first Jewish astronaut, the second Black astronaut, and the first Asian American and Buddhist in space. Drawing vivid portraits of Christa and the astronauts, Cook makes readers forget the fate they’re hurtling toward. With drama, immediacy, and shocking surprises, he reveals the human price the Challenger crew and America paid for politics, capital-P Progress, and the national dream of ‘reaching for the stars.'”
• “On the Etymology and Reverberating Human History of the Color Green.” Excerpt from Green Green Green [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Gillian Osborne—”The color green is at the center of the spectrum. For earlier writers like Emily Dickinson or William Blake, the green world was a space of haunting, irreconcilable, opposites: life and death, human and vegetal, innocence and experience. In these essays, letters, repetitions, and experiments, poet and scholar Gillian Osborne adds a third, contemporary, term: the environment as both vital and ailing. This is nature writing outside of adventure or argument, ecological thinking as a space of shared homemaking: reading, writing, and living in vicinity with others.”
• “On Finding a Little Spark When Your Writing’s Lost Its Heat.” Excerpt from Our Endless and Proper Work: Starting (and Sticking to) Your Writing Practice [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Ron Hogan—”Writer and editorial consultant Ron Hogan helps readers develop an ongoing writing practice as an end in and of itself, not a means to publication. Many people pick up the guitar without eyeing a career as a professional musician, or start painting without caring if they get a gallery. But with writing the assumption seems to be that the goal must be to get published. Why? Why is it acceptable to attain technical proficiency at Stairway to Heaven or plein air watercolors as a hobby, while writing is expected to earn its keep? In Our Endless and Proper Work, the second in Belt’s series of books about writing and publishing–along with Belt founder Anne Trubek’s So You Want to Publish a Book? (2020)–Ron Hogan argues writing should be an end in itself for more people. The founder of the literary site Beatrice, and creator of the popular newsletter Destroy Your Safe and Happy Lives, Hogan offers concrete steps to help writers develop ongoing creative practice in chapters such as “Reclaiming Your Time for Writing,” “Finding Your Groove,” and “Preparing Yourself for the Long Haul.” Sprinkled throughout are adorable illustrations by “Positive Doodles” creator Emm Roy. This concise, inspirational book encourages all people to take up writing not, as so many other handbooks and resources suggest, in order to make money or become famous, but because it can help you become a happier, more whole and engaged person.”
• “I Visited A Former Plantation To Understand Why People Get Married There. All I Saw Was Pain. Where some people see a place to exchange vows, all I see is the enslavement of my ancestors. Do they not know the history, or do they simply not care?” By Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]—”Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves. It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation–turned–maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers. A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country’s most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted. Informed by scholarship and brought to life by the story of people living today, Smith’s debut work of nonfiction is a landmark of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be.”
• “The Science (and Science Fiction) of Cryonic Preservation.” Excerpt from Out Cold: A Chilling Descent into the Macabre, Controversial, Lifesaving History of Hypothermia [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Philip Jaekl—”The meaning of the word “hypothermia” has Greek origins and roughly translates to “less heat.” Its symptoms can be deadly–shivering, followed by confusion, irrationality, and even the illusion of feeling hot. But hypothermia has another side–it can be therapeutic. In Out Cold, science writer Phil Jaekl chronicles the underappreciated story of human innovation with cold, from Ancient Egypt, where it was used to treat skin irritations, to eighteenth-century London, where scientists used it in their first explorations of suspended animation. Throughout history, physicians have used cold to innovate life extension, enable distant space missions, and explore consciousness. Hypothermia may still conjure macabre images, like the bodies littering Mt. Everest and disembodied heads in cryo-freezers, but the reality is that modern science has invented numerous new life-saving cooling techniques based on what we’ve learned over the centuries. And Out Cold reveals a surprisingly warm future for this chilling state.”
• “Positive Psychology Goes to War. How the Army adopted an untested, evidence-free approach to fighting PTSD.” By Jesse Singal, author of The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]—”An investigative journalist exposes the many holes in today’s bestselling behavioral science, and argues that the trendy, TED-Talk-friendly psychological interventions that are so in vogue at the moment will never be enough to truly address social injustice and inequality. With their viral TED talks, bestselling books, and counter-intuitive remedies for complicated problems, psychologists and other social scientists have become the reigning thinkers of our time. Grit and “power posing” promised to help overcome entrenched inequalities in schools and the workplace; the Army spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a positive psychology intervention geared at preventing PTSD in its combat soldiers; and the implicit association test swept the nation on the strength of the claim that it can reveal unconscious biases and reduce racism in police departments and human resources departments. But what if much of the science underlying these blockbuster ideas is dubious or fallacious? What if Americans’ longstanding preference for simplistic self-help platitudes is exerting a pernicious influence on the way behavioral science is communicated and even funded, leading respected academics and the media astray? In The Quick Fix, Jesse Singal examines the most influential ideas of recent decades and the shaky science that supports them. He begins with the California legislator who introduced self-esteem into classrooms around the country in the 1980s and the Princeton political scientist who warned of an epidemic of youthful “superpredators” in the 1990s. In both cases, a much-touted idea had little basis in reality, but had a massive impact. Turning toward the explosive popularity of 21st-century social psychology, Singal examines the misleading appeal of entertaining lab results and critiques the idea that subtle unconscious cues shape our behavior. As he shows, today’s popular behavioral science emphasizes repairing, improving, and optimizing individuals rather than truly understanding and confronting the larger structural forces that drive social ills. Like Anand Giridharadas’s Winners Take All, The Quick Fix is a fresh and powerful indictment of the thought leaders and influencers who cut corners as they sell the public half-baked solutions to problems that deserve more serious treatment.”
• “‘How to Tell a Joke’ Review: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The Roman politician and orator Cicero used humor to charm audiences—and humiliate opponents.” About How to Tell a Joke: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Humor [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Marcus Tullius Cicero, translated with commentary by Michael Fontaine—”Timeless advice about how to use humor to win over any audience. Can jokes win a hostile room, a hopeless argument, or even an election? You bet they can, according to Cicero, and he knew what he was talking about. One of Rome’s greatest politicians, speakers, and lawyers, Cicero was also reputedly one of antiquity’s funniest people. After he was elected commander-in-chief and head of state, his enemies even started calling him “the stand-up Consul.” How to Tell a Joke provides a lively new translation of Cicero’s essential writing on humor alongside that of the later Roman orator and educator Quintilian. The result is a timeless practical guide to how a well-timed joke can win over any audience. As powerful as jokes can be, they are also hugely risky. The line between a witty joke and an offensive one isn’t always clear. Cross it and you’ll look like a clown, or worse. Here, Cicero and Quintilian explore every aspect of telling jokes—while avoiding costly mistakes. Presenting the sections on humor in Cicero’s On the Ideal Orator and Quintilian’s The Education of the Orator, complete with an enlightening introduction and the original Latin on facing pages, How to Tell a Joke examines the risks and rewards of humor and analyzes basic types that readers can use to write their own jokes. Filled with insight, wit, and examples, including more than a few lawyer jokes, How to Tell a Joke will appeal to anyone interested in humor or the art of public speaking.”
• “The Classicist Who Killed Homer. How Milman Parry proved that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not written by a lone genius.”
• “Rights and Wrongs.” About On Love and Tyranny: The Life and Politics of Hannah Arendt [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Ann Heberlein, trans. Alice Menzies—”In an utterly unique approach to biography, On Love and Tyranny traces the life and work of the iconic German Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt, whose political philosophy and understandings of evil, totalitarianism, love, and exile prove essential amid the rise of the refugee crisis and authoritarian regimes around the world. What can we learn from the iconic political thinker Hannah Arendt? Well, the short answer may be: to love the world so much that we think change is possible. The life of Hannah Arendt spans a crucial chapter in the history of the Western world, a period that witnessed the rise of the Nazi regime and the crises of the Cold War, a time when our ideas about humanity and its value, its guilt and responsibility, were formulated. Arendt’s thinking is intimately entwined with her life and the concrete experiences she drew from her encounters with evil, but also from love, exile, statelessness, and longing. This strikingly original work moves from political themes that wholly consume us today, such as the ways in which democracies can so easily become totalitarian states; to the deeply personal, in intimate recollections of Arendt’s famous lovers and friends, including Heidegger, Benjamin, de Beauvoir, and Sartre; and to wider moral deconstructions of what it means to be human and what it means to be humane. On Love and Tyranny brings to life a Hannah Arendt for our days, a timeless intellectual whose investigations into the nature of evil and of love are eerily and urgently relevant half a century later.”
• “E Pluribus Unum? Our national identity has always been hotly contested.” About American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783–1850 [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Alan Taylor—”From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, the powerful story of a fragile nation as it expands across a contested continent. In this beautifully written history of America’s formative period, a preeminent historian upends the traditional story of a young nation confidently marching to its continent-spanning destiny. The newly constituted United States actually emerged as a fragile, internally divided union of states contending still with European empires and other independent republics on the North American continent. Native peoples sought to defend their homelands from the flood of American settlers through strategic alliances with the other continental powers. The system of American slavery grew increasingly powerful and expansive, its vigorous internal trade in Black Americans separating parents and children, husbands and wives. Bitter party divisions pitted elites favoring strong government against those, like Andrew Jackson, espousing a democratic populism for white men. Violence was both routine and organized: the United States invaded Canada, Florida, Texas, and much of Mexico, and forcibly removed most of the Native peoples living east of the Mississippi. At the end of the period the United States, its conquered territory reaching the Pacific, remained internally divided, with sectional animosities over slavery growing more intense. Taylor’s elegant history of this tumultuous period offers indelible miniatures of key characters from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller. It captures the high-stakes political drama as Jackson and Adams, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster contend over slavery, the economy, Indian removal, and national expansion. A ground-level account of American industrialization conveys the everyday lives of factory workers and immigrant families. And the immersive narrative puts us on the streets of Port-au-Prince, Mexico City, Quebec, and the Cherokee capital, New Echota. Absorbing and chilling, American Republics illuminates the continuities between our own social and political divisions and the events of this formative period.”
• “These forged 17th-century music books went undetected for a century. Penn State musicologist Marica Tacconi discovered the fakes on sabbatical in Venice.”
• “Where Is Our Spotify for Books?“—”Many e-books have incredibly limited availability or are not available at all at public libraries, and library budgets are strained covering the escalating costs of e-book demand.”
• “A new water treatment technology could also help Mars explorers. A catalyst that destroys perchlorate in water could clean Martian soil.”
• “Scientists confirm discovery of Australia’s largest dinosaur, two stories tall and a basketball court long.”—”A new species of dinosaur discovered in Australia has been confirmed as the largest ever found in the country, and one of the biggest in the world. The fossilized skeleton, nicknamed ‘Cooper,’ was found in southwest Queensland in 2007, at Cooper Creek in the Eromanga Basin. But the skeleton remained a mystery for years, and has only now been scientifically described and named by paleontologists.”
• “Prehistoric Pendants as Instigators of Sound and Body Movements: A Traceological Case Study from Northeast Europe, c. 8200 cal. bp.“—”In the Late Mesolithic graves of Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov, northwest Russia, large numbers of Eurasian elk (Alces alces) incisors have been found. These teeth, for the most part fashioned into portable pendants, seem to have formed decorative sets for the garments or accessories of the deceased. This article examines both the technologies associated with these artefacts and their uses, as well as reflecting on the sensorial experiences generated by them. Osteological analysis of a sample of 100 specimens indicates that all types of incisors were used for making the pendants. Traceological analysis indicates that the teeth were modified by scraping, grooving, grinding and retouching. Traces of wear consist of general wear and distinctive pits or pecks on the perimeters of the crowns. These traces indicate that the pendants were worn before their deposition in the graves, in such a way that they were in contact with both soft and solid materials. This pattern of pits or pecks has until now been unreported in the traceological literature. In experiments, a similar pattern emerged when pendants of fresh elk incisors were hung in rows and bunches and struck against one another. These strokes created a rattling sound. Thus, the elk incisors of Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov appear to provide insight into previously unattainable sonic experiences and activities of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, as well as the early history of the instrument category of rattles.”
• “People Can Learn Echolocation in Ten Weeks. Researchers taught 12 people who are blind and 14 people with sight to use clicks to navigate their environments.”
• “Humans have ‘untapped’ ability to regenerate body parts, scientists say.”
• “Human brain and testis found to have the highest number of common proteins.”—”This finding suggests that the brain and the testicles share the highest number of genes of any organs in the body.”
• Tweet thread—”The historic drought in the West is entering a volatile phase. Here’s the story at the Oregon-California border, where salmon are dying en masse and farmers are agitating after being cut off from water they’ve received every year since 1907.” Also “Amid Historic Drought, a New Water War in the West. A drought crisis has erupted in the Klamath Basin along the California-Oregon border, with fish dying en masse and farmers infuriated that they have been cut off from their main water source.”
• “Solar farms could double as pollinator food supplies. To fight pollinator decline, 8 states put habitats alongside solar facilities.”
• This is apparently different than the claims from 2018 about resurrecting 40,000 year old things. “Un organismo ‘resucita’ tras pasar 24.000 años congelado en Siberia. El rotífero, un animal multicelular, fue capaz de reproducirse después de descongelarse.” (An organism ‘resurrects’ after spending 24,000 years frozen in Siberia. The rotifer, a multicellular animal, was able to reproduce after thawing.) Also. Also “A living bdelloid rotifer from 24,000-year-old Arctic permafrost.”—”In natural, permanently frozen habitats, some organisms may be preserved for hundreds to tens of thousands of years. For example, stems of Antarctic moss were successfully regrown from an over millennium-old sample covered by ice for about 400 years1. Likewise, whole campion plants were regenerated from seed tissue preserved in relict 32,000-year-old permafrost2, and nematodes were revived from the permafrost of two localities in northeastern Siberia, with source sediments dated over 30,000 years BP3. Bdelloid rotifers, microscopic multicellular animals, are known for their ability to survive extremely low temperatures4. Previous reports suggest survival after six to ten years when frozen between −20° to 0°C4, 5, 6. Here, we report the survival of an obligate parthenogenetic bdelloid rotifer, recovered from northeastern Siberian permafrost radiocarbon-dated to ∼24,000 years BP. This constitutes the longest reported case of rotifer survival in a frozen state.”
• “Why Peru is reviving a pre-Incan technology for water. Peru is turning to ancient indigenous techniques and natural ecosystems to keep its taps running, as climate change threatens to dry out its water supply.”
• “Organic molecules reveal clues about dying stars and outskirts of Milky Way.”—”Researchers from the University of Arizona have detected organic molecules in planetary nebulae, the aftermaths of dying stars, and in the far reaches of the Milky Way, which have been deemed too cold and too removed from the galactic center to support such chemistries.”
• “A new dimension in the quest to understand dark matter. UC Riverside dark matter research program targets assumptions about particle physics.”—”The new research, which proposes the existence of an extra dimension in space-time to search for dark matter, is part of an ongoing research program at UC Riverside led by Tanedo. According to this theory, some of the dark matter particles don’t behave like particles. In effect, invisible particles interact with even more invisible particles in such a way that the latter cease to behave like particles.”
• “Carbon Dioxide, Which Drives Climate Change, Reaches Highest Level In 4 Million Years.”
• “See the First Images NASA’s Juno Took As It Sailed by Ganymede.”—”The spacecraft flew closer to Jupiter’s largest moon than any other in more than two decades, offering dramatic glimpses of the icy orb.”
• “Ultra-high-density hard drives made with graphene store ten times more data.”—”A jump in HDDs’ data density by a factor of ten and a significant reduction in wear rate are critical to achieving more sustainable and durable magnetic data recording. Graphene based technological developments are progressing along the right track towards a more sustainable world.” Also “Ultra-high-density hard drives made with graphene store ten times more data. Graphene can be used for ultra-high density hard disk drives (HDD), with up to a tenfold jump compared to current technologies, researchers at the Cambridge Graphene Centre have shown.”
• “New Form Of Silicon Could Enable Next-Gen Electronic And Energy Devices.”—”A team led by Carnegie’s Thomas Shiell and Timothy Strobel developed a new method for synthesizing a novel crystalline form of silicon with a hexagonal structure that could potentially be used to create next-generation electronic and energy devices with enhanced properties that exceed those of the “normal” cubic form of silicon used today.”
• “FDA Approves New Drug Treatment for Chronic Weight Management, First Since 2014.”
• “Many People Have a Vivid ‘Mind’s Eye,’ While Others Have None at All. Scientists are finding new ways to probe two not-so-rare conditions to better understand the links between vision, perception and memory.”—”Based on their surveys, Dr. Zeman and his colleagues estimate that 2.6 percent of people have hyperphantasia and that 0.7 percent have aphantasia.”
• Tweet—”‘Let’s write an intriguing science headline!’ (my cartoon for last week’s @newscientist )”
• Retracted! “Fields of Watermelons Found On Mars, Police Say. Authorities say rise of fruit aliens is to blame for glut of outer space watermelons.” Also “This article was published in error.”
• “FBI sold phones to organized crime and read 27 million ‘encrypted’ messages. Messages were routed to an FBI-owned server and decrypted with master key.”
• “Teaching drones to hear screams from catastrophe victims.”—”In a disaster, time is of the essence when searching for potential victims who may be difficult to find. Unmanned aerial vehicles make the perfect platform for state-of-the-art technology allowing emergency crews to find those in need and provide situational awareness over a large area.”
• “In the Mind of an Internet Troll. Understanding the internet troll phenomenon and why it happens.”—”Ever wondered what goes on in the mind of those people you see in the internet and social media comment sections that are just so full of anger and negativity? The ones that you might hear on Twitch streams or other live videos cursing content creators in the worst way imaginable? If so, then keep reading…”
• Things like this have happened a couple of times over the years. I remember the first I experienced was back in the 90s a small company screwed up their BGP config and it propagated, causing the entire Internet to route through them … “How an Obscure Company Took Down Big Chunks of the Internet. You may not have heard of Fastly, but you felt its impact when sites didn’t load around the world Tuesday morning.”
• “Microsoft’s Kate Crawford: ‘AI is neither artificial nor intelligent’.”–”The AI researcher on how natural resources and human labour drive machine learning and the regressive stereotypes that are baked into its algorithms.” About Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Kate Crawford—”The hidden costs of artificial intelligence, from natural resources and labor to privacy, equality, and freedom. What happens when artificial intelligence saturates political life and depletes the planet? How is AI shaping our understanding of ourselves and our societies? Drawing on more than a decade of research, award-winning scholar Kate Crawford reveals how AI is a technology of extraction: from the minerals drawn from the earth, to the labor pulled from low-wage information workers, to the data taken from every action and expression. This book reveals how this planetary network is fueling a shift toward undemocratic governance and increased inequity. Rather than taking a narrow focus on code and algorithms, Crawford offers us a material and political perspective on what it takes to make AI and how it centralizes power. This is an urgent account of what is at stake as technology companies use artificial intelligence to reshape the world.”
• “Jeff Bezos is going into space. Fingers crossed he won’t come back.” Also “Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson Aims to Fly to Space Before Jeff Bezos.”
• “Want to Teach Older Workers New Skills? Ask Younger Colleagues to Train Them. Flipping the top-down approach to training can work — but be prepared for challenges.”
• “How We Serve Our Customers While Working a 4-Day Work Week.”—”As a company, Buffer has always had a high bar for customer support. We aim to provide fast, personal, and informed customer support responses 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We also assign one Advocate to every ticket so that each customer gets a sense of continuity with us. The thing about Advocacy is that even if we are working one less day per week, the incoming ticket volume remains mostly unchanged.” “We’ve tried several different setups and are quite happy with where we’ve landed. Here’s exactly the system we currently use to make a four-day work week work for our Customer Advocacy team, along with a transparent look at our team goals and metrics from the last year of working a four-day work week.” “In general, a shorter work week is a great opportunity for the Advocacy team to learn and grow in several areas: Communication … Knowledge management … Experimenting with time management … Setting individual goals”
• “For Apple and others, flexibility is the vital component to the future happiness of workers.”
• “The Tyranny Of Time. The clock is a useful social tool, but it is also deeply political. It benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of our own bodies and the world around us.”
• “‘HR Managers of the Human Soul’. On Our Own American Zhdanovshchina.”—”The abrupt ascendancy of HR as the central organizing power of society extends far beyond literature, of course. It has certainly overtaken philosophy, the academic discipline I know best. In the middle ages philosophy was said to be the “handmaiden” [ancillaris] of theology; in the modern period it became the handmaiden of science. Today philosophy is in many respects an ancillary of human resources”
• “The Cult of Busyness. A life of leisure was once the aspiration of the upper class. But now, bragging about busyness is how people indicate their status. Could a pandemic change the way busyness is glorified?”
• “The Pandemic Blew Up the American Office — For Better and Worse. Widespread working from home is here to stay, but its benefits are unevenly distributed.”
• “Major Chinese city battles Delta Covid variant first detected in India with lockdowns, mass testing. Authorities in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong are carrying out mass testing and have locked down areas to try to control a flare up in coronavirus cases in Guangzhou. More than 100 cases have been reported in Guangdong, China’s most populous province, with 96 of them in Guangzhou, the province’s capital. The Guangzhou cases are concerning because they involve the Delta strain of the coronavirus, which was first detected in India and can spread very quickly.”
• “How To Help Anxious Kids Through This Next Phase Of The Pandemic. People are going mask-free and life is opening up — and some kids are nervous. Here’s how to help.”—”The key is to help them make sense of those feelings, and find ways to adjust to our latest version of “normal” as the pandemic continues to evolve. Here’s how. 1. First, simply help kids identify when they’re feeling uncomfortable … 2. Ask specific questions about what’s making them uneasy … 3. Make it clear that you’re in charge and that you’ve done your research … 4. Model the behavior you’d like to see …”
• “The Return To Work Might Not Look As You’d Hoped. The Big Return to offices isn’t a one-size-fits-all. Here’s how to make peace with that.”—”The office is set to become a place where people go to attend important meetings or collaborate on tasks, while ticking off the rest of their to-do lists from home. The optimum time to spend in the office for both employers and employees seems to be two to three days a week.”
• “Capitol Police had intelligence indicating an armed invasion weeks before Jan. 6 riot, Senate probe finds.” Also “Schumer: Senate Report ‘Strengthened Argument’ For Jan. 6 Commission. Republicans successfully used the filibuster to block House-approved legislation to create an independent commission on the Capitol riot last month.”
• “How America Fractured Into Four Parts. People in the United States no longer agree on the nation’s purpose, values, history, or meaning. Is reconciliation possible?”
• “Joe Manchin cosponsored the voting-rights bill in 2019 that he’s now blocking on the grounds that the GOP doesn’t like it.”—”Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin opposes a sweeping voting-rights bill that his party’s trying to pass. Manchin has said he objects because no Republicans back it. With him opposing, it cannot pass. Manchin cosponsored the same bill in 2019, when it also had no GOP backers.”
• “The Secret IRS Files: Trove Of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How The Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax. ProPublica has obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing.” Also “US super-rich ‘pay almost no income tax’. Details claiming to reveal how little income tax US billionaires pay have been leaked to an news website.”
• “The Government Is Here to Help Small Businesses — Unless They’re Cooperatives. The Small Business Administration’s rules prevent it from helping most employee- and consumer-owned cooperatives, even though Congress specifically asked it to. The result? Co-ops are largely cut out of the mainstream financial system.”
• “Nevada finally bans racist ‘sundown sirens’ originally used to order nonwhite people out of town.”
• “The Mogul and The Monster: Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Decades-Long Relationship With His Biggest Client. Of the many mysteries that still surround the life and crimes of the notorious financier, the source of his wealth, and thus his power, might be the greatest. His long-standing business ties with his most prominent client, billionaire retail magnate Leslie Wexner, hold the key.”
• “The Oracle’s Daughter Sarah Green escaped her mother’s cult 22 years ago. She still thinks about those she left behind.”
• From The Innsmouth Look dept: “Industrial Designer Transforms Seaweed Into Extraordinary Textiles. Violaine Buet’s multidisciplinary materials research has yielded wonderfully surprising results.”
• “My Friends And I Are Going To Live In A ‘Golden Girls’-Style Situation After We Retire. ‘Why couldn’t we use Blanche, Rose, Dorothy and Sophia as a model to plot our own post-midlife sorority setup?'”
• “My Ridiculous Dating System Totally Works! There’s just one catch.”—”Cue the Trello board. As of today, the board has six stages and eight traits. It’s similar to the business development process of a salesperson, with each stage representing a step toward a successful deal and each trait representing a characteristic that is more likely to lead to success. The stages are: To Vet, Vetting, Vetted, Scheduling, Scheduled and Dating. Each person is represented by a Trello card — a kind of digital sticky note.” “Before the first date, I try to determine the following: Does he make me laugh via text? Does he live in L.A.? Does he like his job? Is he down to go backpacking? Will he get on the phone?” “After the first date, I ask myself: Does he like himself? Is he curious? Is he kind?” “Why didn’t it work out? I think it’s because he didn’t like me back. Well then. ‘Does he like me back?’ A ninth trait to add to the board.”
• “Variations on a Theme: How a 50 Year Old Song by a Fake Band Broke My Brain.”—”If my mind can be taken over by this haunted, treacly love song from 1970 in the year 2021, then I have hope for the things I create, the things my kids will create, the work we are all doing now, that they can bridge through to the future and reverberate on and on for generations to come. People can find joy and meaning in something we send out into the world. Like, this planet is a groovy place.”
• “Nike Wanted To Use Greek on their Latest Overpriced Child Labor Produced Shoe, And Blew It.”—”‘Piks’? Really Nike? No one there knows the difference between ΠΙΚΣ and ΝΙΚΗ????? Congrats, your designers could be Pastors.”
• The update about the Playdate handheld game device from Panic is delightfully weird, including the old macOS UI for their music app, and the kinda Macintosh look of the device on the new dock. Website updated. Watch the update. Also “Playdate, the console with a crank, gets July preorder for $179, game details. Today’s news: 24 “season one” games, optional stereo, free browser-based dev kit.”
• “El Salvador becomes first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender after passing law.”
• “There’s a new ocean now—can you name all 5? On World Oceans Day, Nat Geo cartographers say the swift current circling Antarctica keeps the waters there distinct and worthy of their own name: the Southern Ocean.”
• “No one believed in Winx Club, except for its creator. Iginio Straffi on putting up a fight for his magical girl show.”
• “Stonefly, a chill mech game, respects the environment and its creatures. It’s a beautiful, mid-century modern-inspired natural world.”
• “What if Max Payne fought werewolves in a reality-breaking hotel? Welcome to El Paso, Elsewhere.”
• “Rick and Morty might be coming to Fortnite. To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to play Fortnite.”
• “We Spoke to Tom Hiddleston About Loki, Powerpoint Presentations, and the Nature of Free Will. A brief chat with the star of Marvel’s latest streaming series.” Also “Who are the mysterious Time-Keepers? The all-powerful wizards are key to Marvel’s Loki.” Also “Loki’s Loki isn’t the Loki you know, but the Loki you knew. Now you’re just some Loki that I used to know.” Also “Loki gets his own cereal, Loki Charms. It’s a General Mills and Marvel team-up.”

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