5 Intriguing Things
1. A vigorous, fascinating attack on the anti-stuff/Apple aesthetic.
"This is fine for the cyber elite; they can live as they wish. But why is their ideology impressed on all of us through this shame-based propaganda? Why is the 'hoarder' so loathed by the Apple authorities? Because she is feared. The hoarder has 'things' after all, items like books and records that are clues to a past when things were stores of knowledge, signifiers, totems of meaning. The cyber lords want it all destroyed. The library must be cleaned of nasty old books and filled with computers. The record collector must renounce his or her albums and replace them with an iPod."
"The NRCC has created about two dozen of these new faux news sites targeting Democrats, both challengers and incumbents, and is promoting them across the country with localized Google search ads. The NRCC's single-page sites are designed to appear to be a local news portal, with logos like 'North County Update' or 'Central Valley Update.' The articles begin in the impartial voice of a political fact-checking site, hoping to lure in readers. 'We'll take a look at her record and let you decide," starts one. Then they gradually morph into more biting language. At the very bottom, in a box, is the disclaimer that the NRCC paid for the site."
3. Meet the first female Fields Medal winner, Maryam Mirzakhani.
"As a child growing up in Tehran, Mirzakhani had no intention of becoming a mathematician. Her chief goal was simply to read every book she could find. She also watched television biographies of famous women such as Marie Curie and Helen Keller, and later read Lust for Life, a novel about Vincent van Gogh. These stories instilled in her an undefined ambition to do something great with her life — become a writer, perhaps."
4. On drones, masculinity, and police militarization.
"This paper argues that the various and contradictory rationales offered for law enforcement drones are symptomatic of a ‘weapons fetish’ evident in popular culture. This fetishisation imbues military technology such as the drone with masculine fantasies of control and domination that obscure the practical limitations and ethical implications of drones for crime control and prevention. By linking the pleasures of militarism to crucial shifts in the social and economic order, the paper argues that counter-terrorism discourse functions to legitimate the militarised masculine subject positions of paramilitary policing specifically and the neoliberal state generally. In such a context, the drone features as a regressive ‘weapon-toy’ that fuses state control with technological transcendence."
5. How glowing sharks see each other deep in the ocean.
"There are species of shark that are bioluminescent and have evolved ocular structures designed to detect faint light patterns in the deep ocean produced by other bioluminescent sharks that live at depths from 600 to 3,000 feet in the mesopelagic zone where very little sunlight reaches. These eyes as expected, have visual adaptations optimized for this environment. Julien Claes, the lead authors of a new study notes that 'There are about 50 different shark species that are able to produce light.' Given that there are 50 separate bioluminescent species of shark, one might expect some visual system specializations and indeed there are."
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
chivalry &c. The pronunciation sh- instead of ch-, though based on a mistake, is now established. Of the adjs., chivalrous & chivalric, the second should be either let die as a NEEDLESS VARIANT or restricted to the merely grammatical function of representing the phrase of chivalry, as in the chivalric ages.
At the Very Bottom, in a Box