~ Jean Paul Richter
Amphibians are able to glow in the dark — but scientists had no idea until now CBS
“Many shall go to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.”Travel and wisdom have long been connected. They are still Wisdom
Interesting research on "megasites", ancient sprawling cities that were some of the earliest known urban areas and that were less politically centralized and more spread out than other ancient cities
Why Has A Cookbook About ‘Rage Baking’ Enraged The Social Justice Twitterverse?
“When Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Fury, and Women’s Voices dropped earlier this month, it was poised to become an instant hit. The anthology, a mix of recipes and essays about baking as an outlet for women’s political rage, is the latest in a series of books that address the organizing power of female anger, including Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad and Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her. However, Rage Baking is now on the receiving end of women’s anger over a controversy about who owns — and profits from — the concept of ‘rage baking.’ Here’s what you need to know.” – Slate
Even Great Journalism Isn’t Enough To Fully Understand #MeToo. We Need Fiction.
“It’s a truism to say our society doesn’t do well when faced with competing stories about what happened; that’s what ‘he said/she said’ has become a shorthand for. … To overcome that reflex, … we need to practice on something with lower stakes than the literal lives of accusers and accused. We need Me Too fiction and metatexts that help us understand this problem outside of a news cycle. And recently, we’ve been getting them.” – Slate
Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears is the film fans have been pining for
Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations Inside of Switzerland’s Official Maps
For Decades, Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations Inside of Switzerland’s Official Maps – They’ve eluded one of the most rigorous map-making institutions in the world to do so: “The first three dimensions—length, height, and depth—are included on all topographical maps. The “fourth dimension,” or time, is also available on the website of the Swiss Federal Office of Topography (Swisstopo). In the “Journey Through Time,” a timeline displays 175 years of the country’s cartographic history, advancing in increments of 5-10 years. Over the course of two minutes, Switzerland is drawn and redrawn with increasing precision: inky shapes take on hard edges, blues and browns appear after the turn of the century, and in 2016, the letters drop their serifs. Watching a single place evolve over time reveals small histories and granular inconsistencies. Train stations and airports are built, a gunpowder factory disappears for the length of the Cold War. But on certain maps, in Switzerland’s more remote regions, there is also, curiously, a spider, a man’s face, a naked woman, a hiker, a fish, and a marmot. These barely-perceptible apparitions aren’t mistakes, but rather illustrations hidden by the official cartographers at Swisstopo in defiance of their mandate “to reconstitute reality.” Maps published by Swisstopo undergo a rigorous proofreading process, so to find an illicit drawing means that the cartographer has outsmarted his colleagues. ..”
How To Keep On Writing (Or Making Other Art) When It Feels Like The Planet Is Coming Apart
Which Language Is Most Difficult To Lipread?
“This last question, though seemingly simple, resists every attempt to answer it. Every theory runs into brick walls of evidence, the research is limited, and even the basic understanding of what lipreading is, how effective it is, and how it works is laden with conflicting points of view.” – Atlas Obscura
So Far California’s New Gig Economy Law Is A Disaster For Theatres And Actors
No one is arguing that theatre artists don’t deserve to be paid or shouldn’t be treated well. As Susie Medak, managing director at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, pointed out, there’s simply a fundamental disconnect between the law and the creative process of theatre. “What concerns me the most is that this law doesn’t take into consideration at all the way creative artists work. It has a desire to codify everyone’s work. The impulse behind AB 5, in making everyone an employee, is that everyone will work according to standard work conditions.” – American Theatre
For more than 10 years now, André Smits has been traveling the world taking photos of artists (from behind) in their studios and out in the world. Earlier this year, Smits explained how the project got started:
He laughs, “I realized it was an alibi for getting in their studios, because most artists keep their doors shut and otherwise I would not get to come in. That was the beginning of the project, really. Then artists from other buildings in Rotterdam asked me to come to their place, it was like a snowball, it just started happening,” he recalls.After Rotterdam, he visited Amsterdam and Antwerp, realizing the strength of the concept could take him all over the world. “So, I sold my house, quit my job, and now I am traveling everywhere, the project was developing in all different directions.”
It’s fun to get a glimpse into so many studios of working artists — they’re all very similar and yet different in the details. (via Noah Kalina, who Smits photographedin 2015)
'Perforated by Light from Another Sphere'
Good writers tend to elicit good writing after their deaths. The eulogistic impulse is elemental. It’s also deeply selfish, at least at first. We begin with a sense of loss and the unfairness of things and turn them into an expression of gratitude. A productive life well lived reminds us that we can always do better, work harder, be less selfish and more generous. The dead go on teaching us, as do the living. TakeMark Dooley writing about his friend Sir Roger Scruton, who died Jan. 12 at age seventy-five:
“In everything he wrote, his principal aim was to show that through love and art, religion, music, hunting and wine, we see and experience something which science can’t explain, but which is no less real for all of that. Think, for example, of a smiling child. Science explains the smile in a purely mechanical sense, whereas we understand it as something quite different. It is a revelation of innocence, beauty and love – a revelation of the free person that is mingled with her flesh.”
When Speakers Are All Ears
When Speakers Are All Ears – Understanding when smart speakers mistakenly record conversations. Daniel
J. Dubois (Northeastern University), Roman Kolcun (Imperial College
London), Anna Maria Mandalari (Imperial College London), Muhammad Talha
Paracha (Northeastern University), David Choffnes (Northeastern
University), Hamed Haddadi (Imperial College London) Last updated: 02/14/2020
Summary – Voice assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, OK Google, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana are becoming increasingly pervasive in our homes, offices, and public spaces. While convenient, these systems also raise important privacy concerns—namely, what exactly are these systems recording from their surroundings, and does that include sensitive and personal conversations that were never meant to be shared with companies or their contractors? These aren’t just hypothetical concerns from paranoid users: there have been a slew of recent reports about devices constantly recording audio and cloud providers outsourcing to contractors transcription of audio recordings of private and intimate interactions. Anyone who has used voice assistants knows that they accidentally wake up and record when the “wake word” isn’t spoken—for example, “Seriously” sounds like the wake word “Siri” and often causes Apple’s Siri-enabled devices to start listening. There are many other anecdotal reports of everyday words in normal conversation being mistaken for wake words. For the past six months, our team has been conducting research to go beyond anecdotes through the use of repeatable, controlled experiments that shed light on what causes voice assistants to mistakenly wake up and record. Below, we provide a brief summary of our approach, findings so far, and their implications. This is ongoing research, and we will update this page as we learn more…”
Summary – Voice assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, OK Google, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana are becoming increasingly pervasive in our homes, offices, and public spaces. While convenient, these systems also raise important privacy concerns—namely, what exactly are these systems recording from their surroundings, and does that include sensitive and personal conversations that were never meant to be shared with companies or their contractors? These aren’t just hypothetical concerns from paranoid users: there have been a slew of recent reports about devices constantly recording audio and cloud providers outsourcing to contractors transcription of audio recordings of private and intimate interactions. Anyone who has used voice assistants knows that they accidentally wake up and record when the “wake word” isn’t spoken—for example, “Seriously” sounds like the wake word “Siri” and often causes Apple’s Siri-enabled devices to start listening. There are many other anecdotal reports of everyday words in normal conversation being mistaken for wake words. For the past six months, our team has been conducting research to go beyond anecdotes through the use of repeatable, controlled experiments that shed light on what causes voice assistants to mistakenly wake up and record. Below, we provide a brief summary of our approach, findings so far, and their implications. This is ongoing research, and we will update this page as we learn more…”
See also Goldenberg, S.Z., Wittemyer, G. Elephant behavior toward the dead: A review and insights from field observations.Primates 61, 119–128 (2020). “Many nonhuman animals have been documented to take an interest in their dead. A few socially complex and cognitively advanced taxa—primates, cetaceans, and proboscideans—stand out for the range and duration of behaviors that they display at conspecific carcasses. Here, we review the literature on field observations of elephants at carcasses to identify patterns in behaviors exhibited. We add to this literature by describing elephant responses to dead elephants in the Samburu National Reserve, northern Kenya.
The literature review indicated that behavior of elephants at carcasses most often included approaches, touching, and investigative responses, and these occurred at varying stages of decay, from fresh carcasses to scattered and sun-bleached bones. During our own observations, we also witnessed elephants visiting and revisiting carcasses during which they engaged in extensive investigative behavior, stationary behavior, self-directed behavior, temporal gland streaming, and heightened social interactions with other elephants in the vicinity of a carcass. Elephants show broad interest in their dead regardless of the strength of former relationships with the dead individual. Such behaviors may allow them to update information regarding their social context in this highly fluid fission–fusion society. The apparent emotionality and widely reported inter-individual differences involved in elephant responses to the dead deserve further study. Our research contributes to the growing discipline of comparative thanatology to illuminate the cognition and context of nonhuman animal response to death, particularly among socially complex species.”
Elephants with Headlights, by Bem Le Hunte