October 19, 2023
My god, it’s full of chairs
Ex Astris Scientis has identified over 160 different commercially-available chairs that have appeared in Star Trek productions.
So many classic modern chairs.
(via)
It's about to become easier to die
Small Worlds Photomicrography 2023
It's another year of microscopic photographs! Please gaze upon these photos of the teeny and tiny. Enjoy your coffee with crystals of caffeine and sugar . Be amazed at this striking close-up of a match being struck. Wonder how slime molds can be so whimsical. [more inside]
"She knew who the leaders were."
How Jane McAlevey Transformed the Labor Movement Jane McAlevey has spent her career helping workers win big. Her books have been an inspiration to a new generation of workers seeking to organize, like the Amazon Workers Union, and existing unions like United Teachers Los Angeles. Now, "the renowned organizer and theorist has a terminal-cancer diagnosis. But she has long been fighting the clock." (archive link) [more inside]
These final years of the hunt are different. Quieter. Weirder.
A row of mounted portraits showed his predecessors, including the last but one, a man named Kurt Schrimm, who in the early 2000s oversaw a change of direction at this bureau, reversing a decades-long trend of passivity (letting sleeping Nazis lie) and instead challenging his fellow investigators to think about the complicity and culpability of soldiers and employees at every level of that death-dealing regime. Will was hired under Schrimm in 2003 and has kept up his former boss’s belief in catching and collaring whomever they can while they can. “The next generation will not have a chance to work judicially on this,” he said to me. “It ends in these years, now, in the 2020s. We have the last generation of perpetrators. We are prosecuting the last of the crimes.” from The Race to Catch the Last Nazis [GQ; ungated]
"Two years ago, I thought RICO was a relative of his."
Sidney Powell Pleads Guilty in Georgia Trump Case (NYT gift, WaPo gift, The Atlantic gift, AP, Reuters) [more inside]
You're not crazy, your menstrual cycle changes your brain
For The First Time, Scientists Show Structural, Brain-Wide Changes During Menstruation To address the menstruation gap in our understanding of women's health, the team took MRI scans of their subjects during three menstrual phases: menses, ovulation, and mid-luteal. At the time of each of these scans, the researchers also measured the participants' hormone levels. The results showed that, as hormones fluctuate, gray and white matter volumes change too, as does the volume of cerebrospinal fluid.
They made cigarettes addictive; why not food?
A new study suggests that tobacco companies, who were skilled at marketing cigarettes, used similar strategies to hook people on processed foods. (WaPo Gift Link)
[more inside]
No, not that kind of Python and Pandas
The Facebook algorithm thought programming instructor Reuven Lerner was advertising live animals instead of courses on Python coding and the Pandas data science library. "I didn’t quite know what to do, but there was a button marked, “Click here to appeal.” So I clicked it, assuming that someone at Meta would reach out to me, saying, “Whoops!” Nope: About 30 minutes later, I got e-mail from Meta saying that they had reviewed my case, I had definitely violated their policy, and now I was banned for life from ever advertising on a Meta platform." [more inside]
Deuteronomy 22:11 a problem no more
On the YouTube channel for the American Chemical Society, George Zaidan shows a recently published method for robustly separating out polyester from polycotton fabrics using a common solvent and on simple chemical (used in baking since the middle ages) and a toaster oven. [more inside]
American Fiction
Once upon a time Watchmen and Station Eleven writer Cord Jefferson picked up a book by Percival Everett called Erasure. Like most people who read Everett, he was deeply gripped by this bitterly funny satire. Unlike most readers, he decided to make it into a movie: Here's the trailer for the upcoming American Fiction starring Jeffrey Wright and Issa Rae.
Music video with extensive choreography about taking artistic risks
A music video, with extensive choreography, by
Tim Minchin and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, about taking artistic risks, and about the history of the Sydney Opera House. [more inside]
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