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Sunday, January 31, 2021

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction

 40 Times Designers Forgot Things Need To Be Cleaned When Creating Them, As Shared On This Facebook Group Bored Panda


As WHO mission into Covid origin begins in China, bereaved son seeks answers NBC (furzy). I am such a moron. The reason for China’s resistance may be that that big official dinner in Wuhah as the disease was starting to get going, and was widely publicized/criticized outside China, may have been kept well under wraps. Any investigation is likely to expose earlier evidence of the disease; the question then becomes whether there were warnings or calls for follow-up that were ignored.


Mary Lou Retton could never. On the heels of her jaw-dropping gymnastics floor routine set to Beyonce that broke the internet last year, UCLA gymnast Nia Dennis has done it again. Dennis' performance infuses gymnastics with odes to Black culture, including a soundtrack by Kendrick Lamar, Dr. Dre, and Missy Elliot, working in a power fist, the Superman, and the woah, between triple flips and the splits. If this video does not fill you with glee, you may be dead inside.


This is what #blackexcellence looks like. @DennisNia does it again!
🔥
📹
@Pac12Network



What happens to the brain on sudden impact? Egg yolks could hold the answer Ars Technica


US technological leadership is fragile Asia Times


Tech is having a reckoning. Tech investors? Not so much. MIT Technology Review


Dry January is moist for some at the rocky start of 2021 AP



Bureaucratic politics is a politics of privilege.  By 1956, the wages of the highest-ranking party and government personnel were set at 36.4 times those of the lowest rank.  (By way of comparison, the highest wage in the “corrupt” Nationalist government in1946 was 14.5 times that of the lowest wage.)

That is from the new and important The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, by Yang Jisheng, who himself participated in the Cultural Revolution


“Welcome to the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. This work-in-progress is a comprehensive quotation-based dictionary of the language of science fiction. The HD/SF is an offshoot of a project begun by the Oxford English Dictionary (though it is no longer formally affiliated with it). It is edited by Jesse Sheidlower. Please explore the menu links to learn more.”


Is there a philosophy of neuroscience and if so, what is it? — there will be several posts about this at the Brains blog this week


“If I believed the election was stolen, and if I had satisfied myself that my belief was well founded, then I would believe that resisting the outcome, even with force, would be reasonable” — Alec Walen (Rutgers) on the philosophical issues involved in blaming and punishing Trump’s insurrectionists


“‘Call me a slut’ could mean ‘Remind me that I am merely human, trapped in a body and subject to its animal cravings.’” — Kim Kierkegaardashian on the ethics of dirty tallk


Why does scientific fraud happen and what can we do about it? — Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) looks at the problems and a possible solution from W.E.B. Du Bois


“Saying ‘hello’ to strangers is a moral matter, and we cannot breezily disregard the pull to be social as mere etiquette: to ignore a stranger would be to do something wrong” — so argues Kimberlee Brownlee (UBC)


Improving philosophy class with discussion cards — Kaija Mortensen (Randolph College) explains


“Perpetrators of this fraud commit to something so disturbing that it becomes necessary to hide it even from themselves” — Luvell Anderson (Syracuse) on the varieties of racial