Good Reads

[Laurel]

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These are stimulating times for anyone interested in questions of animal consciousness. On what seems like a monthly basis, scientific teams announce the results of new experiments, adding to a preponderance of evidence that we’ve been underestimating animal minds, even those of us who have rated them fairly highly. New animal behaviors and capacities are observed in the wild, often involving tool use—or at least object manipulation—the very kinds of activity that led the distinguished zoologist Donald R. Griffin to found the field of cognitive ethology (animal thinking) in 1978: octopuses piling stones in front of their hideyholes, to name one recent example; or dolphins fitting marine sponges to their beaks in order to dig for food on the seabed; or wasps using small stones to smooth the sand around their egg chambers, concealing them from predators. At the same time neurobiologists have been finding that the physical structures in our own brains most commonly held responsible for consciousness are not as rare in the animal kingdom as had been assumed. Indeed they are common.

All of this work and discovery appeared to reach a kind of crescendo last summer, when an international group of prominent neuroscientists meeting at the University of Cambridge issued “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals,” a document stating that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.” It goes further to conclude that numerous documented animal behaviors must be considered “consistent with experienced feeling states.”
...
That is technical language, but it speaks to a riddle age-old and instinctive. These thoughts begin, for most of us, typically, in childhood, when we are making eye contact with a pet or wild animal. I go back to our first family dog, a preternaturally intelligent-seeming Labrador mix, the kind of dog who herds playing children away from the street at birthday parties, an animal who could sense if you were down and would nuzzle against you for hours, as if actually sharing your pain. I can still hear people, guests and relatives, talking about how smart she was. “Smarter than some people I know!” But when you looked into her eyes—mahogany discs set back in the grizzled black of her face—what was there? I remember the question forming in my mind: can she think? The way my own brain felt to me, the sensation of existing inside a consciousness, was it like that in there?​

- read the full article One of Us (from Lapham's Quarterly)​

 

[Laurel]

The Lyme-disease infection rate is growing. So is the battle over how to treat it.

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Kaleigh Ahern was twelve years old when a tick bit her. She noticed it “perched” on her shoulder when she was taking a shower one morning. “I thought it was your average, everyday bug,” Ahern told me recently. But, when she tried to brush it off, the tick wouldn’t budge. “The legs wiggled but it was embedded in my skin. I freaked out and started screaming.” Kaleigh’s mother, Holly Ahern, came running and removed it. “I took the kid and the tick to the doctor,” she said. “I told him, Here is my kid, here is the tick, and there is the place where it was attached to her.” That was in 2002. The Aherns live near Saratoga Springs, New York, where Lyme disease has been endemic for years. The infection is transmitted by tick bites, so Ahern assumed that the doctor would prescribe a prophylactic dose of antibiotics. But he said that he wasn’t going to treat it. “If a rash develops or she starts to have flulike symptoms, bring her back,” he told her. At the time, Ahern, an associate professor of microbiology at SUNY Adirondack, didn’t know much about tick-borne illnesses. She took Kaleigh home and watched for the signature symptom of Lyme disease: a rash that begins with a bright-red bull’s-eye around the tick bite.​

- read the full article The Lyme Wars (from The New Yorker)​

 

[Laurel]

What really happened to Russia's missing cosmonauts? An incredible tale of space hacking, espionage and death in the lonely reaches of space.

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There are those who believe that somewhere in the vast blackness of space, about nine billion miles from the Sun, the first human is about to cross the boundary of our Solar System into interstellar space. His body, perfectly preserved, is frozen at –270 degrees C (–454ºF); his tiny capsule has been silently sailing away from the Earth at 18,000 mph (29,000km/h) for the last 45 years. He is the original lost cosmonaut, whose rocket went up and, instead of coming back down, just kept on going.

It is the ultimate in Cold War legends: that at the dawn of the Space Age, in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, the Soviet Union had two space programmes, one a public programme, the other a ‘black’ one, in which far more daring and sometimes downright suicidal missions were attempted. It was assumed that Russia’s Black Ops, if they existed at all, would remain secret forever.

The ‘Lost Cosmonauts’ debate has been reawakened thanks to a new investigation into the efforts of two ingenious, radio-mad young Italian brothers who, starting in 1957, hacked into both Russia’s and NASA’s space programmes – so effectively that the Russians, it seems, may have wanted them dead.​

- read the full article Lost in Space (from Fortean Times)​

 

[Laurel]

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Tech Trends looks at the new Samsung Apex, a wearable computing device that streams videos into one eye, the internet into the other, and sucks your cock all at the same time.​

- watch the full report New Wearable Computer Also Sucks Your Dick (from The Onion)​

 

[pete]

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Tech Trends looks at the new Samsung Apex, a wearable computing device that streams videos into one eye, the internet into the other, and sucks your cock all at the same time.​

- watch the full report New Wearable Computer Also Sucks Your Dick (from The Onion)​

nice

does it come in an "asian" option?

 

[Laurel]

It's Samsung, so that's probably the default.

 

[Laurel]

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CAN you remember the last time you were in a public space in America and didn’t notice that half the people around you were bent over a digital screen, thumbing a connection to somewhere else?

Most of us are well aware of the convenience that instant electronic access provides. Less has been said about the costs. Research that my colleagues and I have just completed, to be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, suggests that one measurable toll may be on our biological capacity to connect with other people.​

- read the full article Your Phone vs. Your Heart (from The New York Times)​

 

[Saint Peter]

"...and a little finger that tickles your asshole..."

 

[glynndah]

"...and a little finger that tickles your asshole..."

They gotta put the antenna someplace.

 

[Laurel]

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That’s the punch line: the case that affirmed the right of gay couples to have consensual sex in private spaces seems to have involved two men who were neither a couple nor having sex. In order to appeal to the conservative Justices on the high court, the story of a booze-soaked quarrel was repackaged as a love story. Nobody had to know that the gay-rights case of the century was actually about three or four men getting drunk in front of a television in a Harris County apartment decorated with bad James Dean erotica.​

- read the full article Extreme Makeover (from The New Yorker)​

 

[Laurel]

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IT IS not difficult to understand why South Africa’s restless youth in the 1980s may have been drawn to punk music. A young, liberal generation, looking to rebel against apartheid, was empowered by the anti-establishment lyrics and up-tempo, aggressive rhythms of the popular British and American punk groups, and inspired to start their own bands.

A new documentary film, “Punk in Africa", explores the beginnings of this multiracial South African punk scene that exploded in cities like Durban, Cape Town, and Pretoria, and spread to neighbouring Mozambique and Zimbabwe throughout the 1980s.
...
Following a recent screening at the Noise Pop festival in San Francisco, Mr Brown elaborated on the situation for these bands. He said they were under constant surveillance and they claim that authorities would walk into their homes unannounced and rifle through their personal items. Apartheid laws restricted how blacks and whites could mix in public spaces, and media, including song lyrics, could be censored. Briefly in the film, authorities give a member of the multiracial punk band National Wake a citation for blacks and whites mingling and playing a show together. "The job of the police was to make their life difficult," Mr Brown says. "There was constant harassment, and people were arrested." As a result of the political climate many musicians left the country, adds Mr Jones.​

- read the full article Against all authority (from The Economist)​

 

[Laurel]

Henry Markram wants €1 billion to model the entire human brain. Sceptics don't think he should get it.

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It wasn't quite the lynching that Henry Markram had expected. But the barrage of sceptical comments from his fellow neuroscientists — “It's crap,” said one — definitely made the day feel like a tribunal.

Officially, the Swiss Academy of Sciences meeting in Bern on 20 January was an overview of large-scale computer modelling in neuroscience. Unofficially, it was neuroscientists' first real chance to get answers about Markram's controversial proposal for the Human Brain Project (HBP) — an effort to build a supercomputer simulation that integrates everything known about the human brain, from the structures of ion channels in neural cell membranes up to mechanisms behind conscious decision-making.​

- read the full article Computer modelling: Brain in a box (from Nature)​

 

[Saint Peter]

do da do
da do do do do
do da do
da do do do do

if I only had a brain

 

[Laurel]

They'll come in boxes someday, apparently. If that guy has his way.

[insert joke about guy coming in brain boxes here]

You're welcome.

 

[Laurel]

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Vincent Jacobs, now 80, battled racism as a rodeo rider in the 1950s

Quentin Tarantino's Oscar-winning Western, Django Unchained, is one of relatively few Hollywood films depicting a black cowboy. In reality there were many, some of whose stories were borrowed for films starring white actors.

The most common image of the cowboy is a gun-toting, boot-wearing, white man - like John Wayne, or Clint Eastwood.

But the Hollywood portrayal of the Wild West is a whitewashed version of the reality. It is thought that about a quarter of all cowboys were black.

Like many people, Jim Austin - a college-educated, 45-year-old businessman - hadn't heard about the black presence in the Old West.

The discovery inspired him and his wife Gloria to set up the National Multicultural Western Heritage Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. It pays tribute to some of the forgotten black cowboys - men like Bill Pickett, a champion rodeo rider who invented bulldogging, a technique where he would jump from a horse on to a steer and take the animal down by biting on its lip.​

- read the full article America's forgotten black cowboys (from The BBC)​

 

[Laurel]

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Q: Last weekend I was in the locker room of my D.C. fitness club, watching a football game while getting dressed after a workout, when a man I consider to be a war criminal, responsible for horrible foreign-policy decisions and the deaths of American soldiers, ambled up beside me, naked, to ask what the score of the game was. What’s the etiquette here? Am I obligated by my conscience to berate him? Or compelled, by the rules of the locker room or by our nudity, to refrain?

—D.T.
Washington, D.C.

Dear D.T.,

You could easily have avoided this situation by doing what I do: never work out and never be naked. Since it’s too late for that, the most graceful way for you to satisfy the demands of your conscience and of locker-room decorum is to politely tell him the wrong score and then walk away. (After first glancing disdainfully at his private parts with shock and a distinct lack of awe.)​

- read the full article What's Your Problem? Column: There's a War Criminal at My Gym (from The Atlantic)​

 

[Laurel]

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In the new Steve Carell comedy The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, there's a moment when Jane (Olivia Wilde), Burt's reluctant onstage assistant, transforms Burt's dollar bill into a butterfly.

It's a charming scene, showing one more adorable step toward Burt and Jane's inevitable rom-com happy ending. Plus turning money into a tiny fluttering monarch is just generally pretty cool. Yet it also got me thinking: Why is this the first time I have ever seen a woman do a magic trick?

This past week, I talked to performers, producers, lecturers, and teachers in the magic industry about the state of the female magician today—and it turns out that although more and more talented women break into the business all the time, female magician really are rare overall. There's little existing research on the topic, but their estimates of the percentage of women in professional magic ranged from "three percent" to "one out of a dozen" to "six to eight percent." A 2010 story in Pacific Standard reported that figure to be around five percent; one magician simply told me that at magic conventions, there's never a line for the women's restroom.​

- read the full article Why Are There So Few Female Magicians? (from The Atlantic)​

 

[Laurel]

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Mike Merrill was thinking of pumping up his workout regimen with mixed-martial-arts classes and boxing lessons. The scheme would involve seven and a half hours a week at various gyms—a big commitment. So he put the matter before his 160 shareholders. They, after all, had previously determined that he would not get a vasectomy, that he would register as a Republican, and that he and the woman he’d been dating could enter into a three-month “Relationship Agreement.”

From microfinance to crowd-funding, tools that rely on the support of large groups have grown familiar, bordering on overexposed. Merrill’s approach to harvesting the power of the marketplace, however, is singular: he has essentially sold shares in his own life. Which raises two questions: Why on Earth would somebody offer others the right to vote on his basic life decisions? And, even more inexplicably, why would anybody pay for that right?

Let’s start with the sell-side analysis. Merrill, who is 35, works for a software company in Portland, Oregon, and describes himself as a “nights-and-weekends artist.” He’s long dabbled in creative side projects—a blog network called Urban Honking, an online video series called Ultimate Blogger, various real-world stunts with names like Guerrilla Happy Hour and Whiskey Friends. But he insists that making a market of himself isn’t merely another of his performances. His investors, he says, really are making him “better at being me.”​

- read the full article How One Man Turned Himself Into a Publicly Owned Company (from The Atlantic)​

 

[Laurel]

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Taylor Wilson moved to suburban Reno with his parents, Kenneth and Tiffany, and his brother Joey to attend Davidson Academy, a school for gifted students.

“Propulsion,” the nine-year-old says as he leads his dad through the gates of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “I just want to see the propulsion stuff.”

A young woman guides their group toward a full-scale replica of the massive Saturn V rocket that brought America to the moon. As they duck under the exhaust nozzles, Kenneth Wilson glances at his awestruck boy and feels his burden beginning to lighten. For a few minutes, at least, someone else will feed his son’s boundless appetite for knowledge.

Then Taylor raises his hand, not with a question but an answer. He knows what makes this thing, the biggest rocket ever launched, go up. And he wants—no, he obviously needs—to tell everyone about it, about how speed relates to exhaust velocity and dynamic mass, about payload ratios, about the pros and cons of liquid versus solid fuel. The tour guide takes a step back, yielding the floor to this slender kid with a deep-Arkansas drawl, pouring out a torrent of Ph.D.-level concepts as if there might not be enough seconds in the day to blurt it all out. The other adults take a step back too, perhaps jolted off balance by the incongruities of age and audacity, intelligence and exuberance.

As the guide runs off to fetch the center’s director—You gotta see this kid!—Kenneth feels the weight coming down on him again. What he doesn’t understand just yet is that he will come to look back on these days as the uncomplicated ones, when his scary-smart son was into simple things, like rocket science.

This is before Taylor would transform the family’s garage into a mysterious, glow-in-the-dark cache of rocks and metals and liquids with unimaginable powers. Before he would conceive, in a series of unlikely epiphanies, new ways to use neutrons to confront some of the biggest challenges of our time: cancer and nuclear terrorism. Before he would build a reactor that could hurl atoms together in a 500-million-degree plasma core—becoming, at 14, the youngest individual on Earth to achieve nuclear fusion.​

- read the full article The Boy Who Played With Fusion (from PopSci)​

 

[Laurel]

An unfinished autobiography and a 1980s biopic turned Frances Farmer, one of the great golden-era stars, into a lobotomized zombie. The main trouble: Frances Farmer wasn’t lobotomized. An investigation to set one of Hollywood’s most convoluted stories straight.

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Frances Farmer was an actress in the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood’s golden era. A goddess among other goddesses, a beautiful woman with a lower-register speaking voice (close your eyes, hear the plangent tones of a French horn). No less a goddess, either, for the relative brevity of her Hollywood career. Frances made only 15 feature films from 1935 to 1942—and a 16th, albeit trashy one, in 1957—appearing in the best of these with such luminaries as Cary Grant (The Toast of New York), Bing Crosby (Rhythm on the Range), Edward Arnold (Come and Get It and The Toast of New York), and Tyrone Power (Son of Fury).

But she was not just a figure of the ’30s and ’40s; she was one of the ’90s and ’00s, too. “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” is the fifth song on Nirvana’s In Utero; particularly arresting is the line, “She’ll come back as fire and burn all the liars, leave a blanket of ash on the ground.” Full-bore vengeance on untold millions of Seattle innocents. That’s dramatic enough to make you wonder: What the hell happened to Frances Farmer?​

- read the full article Burn All The Liars (from The Morning News)​

 

[Laurel]

Novelist David Mitchell looks back on the heartbreak – and joy – of learning that his son had autism. Plus, below, an extract from the book by a young Japanese boy that helped him

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Things get challenging. Your sleep is broken and stays that way. Kids with autism don't really do bedtime – they keep going, Duracell bunny-style, until unconsciousness sets in, often after midnight: 3am "parties" are common, where your child wakes up refreshed and jumps on the bed for an hour, laughing and crying. After one rough night you take your kid out for a spin in the car to give your partner a rest – 45 minutes of nonstop screaming later you give up and come home. Worst is the headbanging – against the hard floor, up to a dozen times a day. Your kid's bruises are earning you dodgy looks at the supermarket checkout. It is suggested that you keep a self-harm diary to identify the triggers, but these seem numerous and obvious: hunger; tiredness; frustration at dead batteries in a toy; a scratched Pingu DVD; not being allowed to play with kitchen knives.

You're warned against stopping the headbanging by force, in case this reinforces the self-harm by teaching your kid that headbanging = attention + a hug, but you're also afraid of brain injury and concussion. A wise therapist suggests placing your foot between head and floor, so that the impact is softened. As your feet get tenderised, you recall an influential American psychologist who preached that autism is caused by "refrigerator mothers" not loving their children properly. You hope that Lord Satan has something special planned for that learned gentleman. You envy acquaintances who have hands-on family members living nearby, able and willing to roll up their sleeves and help: like many others, you and your partner are on your own. Self-pity, however, makes you feel wretched and is a rudeness to single parents coping with a child with autism while being forced by the bedroom tax to search for one-bedroom flats.​

- read the full article David Mitchell: learning to live with my son's autism (from The Guardian)​

 

[Laurel]

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A group of killer whales once thought to be genetic anomalies may in fact be a species all their own, according to a recent study in the journal Polar Biology.

The rarely-seen "type D" orcas—which live in the Southern Ocean—are one of four varieties of killer whale. Researchers recently sequenced type D's genome using material collected from a museum skeleton from 1955.

Scientists first spotted type D killer whales in 1955, when a pod of them washed ashore on a New Zealand beach. The stranding stood out as unusual because of the whales' strange appearance. While typical killer whales—types A, B, and C—have streamlined bodies and large, white eye-patches, type D whales have tiny eye markings and large, bulbous heads.​

- read the full article Rare Breed of Killer Whale May Be New Species (from National Geographic)​

 

[Laurel]

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His boss, the famed neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, couldn’t have been more discouraging. “I told Karim he was wasting his time,” LeDoux says. “I didn’t think the experiment would work.” To LeDoux, the reason was obvious: Even if Nader blocked protein synthesis during recall, the original circuitry would still be intact, so the memory should be too. If Nader could induce amnesia, it would be temporary. Once the block was removed, the recall would return as strong as ever. And so LeDoux and Nader made a bet: If Nader failed to permanently erase a set of fear memories in four lab animals, he had to buy LeDoux a bottle of tequila. If it worked, drinks were on LeDoux. “I honestly assumed I’d be spending a bunch of money on alcohol,” Nader says. “Everyone else knew a lot more about the neuroscience of memory. And they all told me it would never work.”

He taught several dozen rats to associate a loud noise with a mild but painful electric shock. It terrified them—whenever the sound played, the rats froze in fear, anticipating the shock. After reinforcing this memory for several weeks, Nader hit the rats with the noise once again, but this time he then injected their brains with a chemical that inhibited protein synthesis. Then he played the sound again. “I couldn’t believe what happened,” Nader says. “The fear memory was gone. The rats had forgotten everything.” The absence of fear persisted even after the injection wore off.

The secret was the timing: If new proteins couldn’t be created during the act of remembering, then the original memory ceased to exist. The erasure was also exceedingly specific. The rats could still learn new associations, and they remained scared of other sounds associated with a shock but that hadn’t been played during the protein block. They forgot only what they’d been forced to remember while under the influence of the protein inhibitor.​

- read the full article The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever (from Wired)​

 

[Laurel]

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In July 1989, Jason Everman was a member of Nirvana.

He had three drill sergeants, two of whom were sadists. Thank God it was the easygoing one who saw it. He was reading a magazine, when he slowly looked up and stared at Everman. Then the sergeant walked over, pointing to a page in the magazine. “Is this you?” It was a photo of the biggest band in the world, Nirvana. Kurt Cobain had just killed himself, and this was a story about his suicide. Next to Cobain was the band’s onetime second guitarist. A guy with long, strawberry blond curls. “Is this you?”

Everman exhaled. “Yes, Drill Sergeant.”

And that was only half of it. Jason Everman has the unique distinction of being the guy who was kicked out of Nirvana and Soundgarden, two rock bands that would sell roughly 100 million records combined. At 26, he wasn’t just Pete Best, the guy the Beatles left behind. He was Pete Best twice.

Then again, he wasn’t remotely. What Everman did afterward put him far outside the category of rock’n’roll footnote. He became an elite member of the U.S. Army Special Forces, one of those bearded guys riding around on horseback in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban.​

- read the full article The Rock ’n’ Roll Casualty Who Became a War Hero (from The New York Times)​

 

[Laurel]

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Romance fiction is widely reckoned to be a very low form of literature. Maybe the lowest, if we're not counting the writing at Groupon, or on Splenda packets. Romance fiction: probably the worst! An addictive, absurd, unintellectual literature, literature for nonreaders, literature for stupid people—literature for women! Books Just For Her!

Low or not, romance is by far the most popular and lucrative genre in American publishing, with over $1.35 billion in revenues estimated in 2010. That is a little less than twice the size of the mystery genre, almost exactly twice that of science fiction/fantasy, and nearly three times the size of the market for classic/literary fiction, according to Simba Information data published at the Romance Writers of America website.

It would be crazy to fail to pay close attention when that many people are devoted to something.​

- read the full article Romance Novels, The Last Great Bastion Of Underground Writing (from The Awl)​