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"People who are struggling with depression or other difficulties often assume that sharing their story with friends imposes a burden on them. In fact, the opposite is usually true: From a true friend’s perspective, being entrusted with the cares and burdens of another is a privilege. It’s an opportunity to dispense generosity, and a sign and symbol of trust. And when both people share with each other more of their inner worlds, more of their sorrow and suffering, the friendship is strengthened. In the words of the proverb, friendship doubles our joy and divides our grief."
comment posted at 1:06 PM on Mar-4-19

From this twitter thread (“Mine used to say if you ate too much popcorn your poo would float”) comes a memory by @gailsey: “My dad told me I was allergic to strawberries as a child. I’m now 47 and have spent most of my life avoiding them, checking labels and giving hospitals allergy alerts - he’s just told me it was a lie as he ‘wanted to eat them’”, while @EggmanLes remembers “Pretending to talk to the police on the phone about me not tidying my room: ‘They will be here soon’”, @sophiefwv recalls “The ice cream man only played the chimes when he had run out of ice cream.” and @DisorderlyHouse admits “I must have been 4 or 5 when my dad told me men had nipples to detect ghosts. I didn't think to question it till I was an adult.”
comment posted at 1:46 PM on Mar-4-19

Apis mellifera (honey bees) and its subspecies worker bees are incredibly hygienic both in terms of their removal of disease in the colony and their keeping up with general housekeeping.
comment posted at 6:49 PM on Mar-1-19

For two days, an estimated 150-200 million workers went on a strike against the Narendra Modi government in India, shutting down schools and public transport.(Quartz India) “Modi’s government is eager to amend the trade unions laws. Tapan Sen, the leader of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), said that the new trade union laws would essentially lead to the enslavement of Indian workers. These are strong words. But they are not unbelievable.” (Common Dreams) “At Jadavpur in south Kolkata, senior Communist Party India (Marxist) leader Sujan Chakraborty along with several other strike supporters were detained by the police. Protestors squatted on tracks in some places to stop trains and burnt tyres on the roads.” Bharat Bandh Highlights: As many as 10 Central Trade Unions with at least 20 crore (ten million) workers affiliated to them have joined the strike.(NDTV) Photos and news of the Bharat Bandh (Economic Times India)
comment posted at 12:37 PM on Jan-14-19

Campesinos are driving the evolution of maize in North America
comment posted at 6:48 PM on Nov-27-18

How the media should respond to Trump’s lies: a linguist explains how Trump uses lies to divert attention from the “big truths.” "George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics and cognitive science at UC Berkeley ... recently published an article laying out the media’s dilemma. Trump’s 'big lie' strategy, he argues, is to 'exploit journalistic convention by providing rapid-fire news events for reporters to chase.' According to Lakoff, the president uses lies to divert attention from the 'big truths,' or the things he doesn’t want the media to cover. This allows Trump to create the controversies he wants and capitalize on the outrage and confusion they generate, while simultaneously stoking his base and forcing the press into the role of 'opposition party.'" [ViA]
comment posted at 6:08 PM on Nov-24-18

“One way of being anti-anti-utopian is to be utopian. It’s crucial to keep imagining that things could get better, and furthermore to imagine how they might get better. Here no doubt one has to avoid Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” which is perhaps thinking and saying that things will get better without doing the work of imagining how. In avoiding that, it may be best to recall the Romain Rolland quote so often attributed to Gramsci, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Or maybe we should just give up entirely on optimism or pessimism—we have to do this work no matter how we feel about it. So by force of will or the sheer default of emergency we make ourselves have utopian thoughts and ideas. This is the necessary next step following the dystopian moment, without which dystopia is stuck at a level of political quietism that can make it just another tool of control and of things-as-they-are.” Dystopias Now, Kim Stanley Robinson (Commune Magazine)
comment posted at 1:22 PM on Nov-2-18

Ancient Romans say it's Pork O'Clock. Chaucer says it's Pryme of Day. Pyrenean shepherds say it's time to take the sheep home. Maybe it's time for you to make your own.
comment posted at 1:28 PM on Nov-2-18

"I’m not transphobic, but…”: A feminist case against the feminist case against trans inclusivity This Friday, the 19th October, the [British] Government's consultation on a proposed reform of the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) will close. The process has become a focal point for a heated and often toxic debate over what we as a society owe to trans people, and how the claims of the trans community - and of trans women in particular - relate to the characteristic commitments and concerns of feminism. [Content note - this article discusses transphobia extensively, as do the links below]
comment posted at 4:07 AM on Oct-19-18

From Ed Yong: "TFW your genitals are full of sexually transmitted worms, and that's great news for your kids" (and you're a dung beetle).
comment posted at 12:18 PM on Oct-2-18

Earlier this year, the Aquarium in Bergen, Norway hosted "Fish To Mars," a "metal science opera" with story by [MeFi's Own] Peter Watts, score by Arild Brakstad, and libretto by Karin Pittman. Much more at the Fish To Mars website.
comment posted at 2:34 PM on Aug-31-18

As Beyonce takes over Vogue Magazine, she has some stuff to say. Beyoncé In Her Own Words. (SL Vogue)
comment posted at 12:42 PM on Aug-10-18

"I think you’re racist. I think I am, too." (full talk) Dr. Robin DiAngelo coined the term "white fragility" to describe "a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable." She has just published a book on the subject and in this talk for the KUOW Speakers Forum she has particularly pointed words for the fragility of white progressives.
comment posted at 4:27 PM on Jul-21-18

Conversation is impossible if one side refuses to acknowledge the basic premise that facts are facts. This is why engaging deniers in such an effort means having already lost. And it is why AskHistorians, where I am one of the volunteer moderators, takes a strict stance on Holocaust denial: We ban it immediately.
comment posted at 6:59 AM on Jul-21-18

I stopped in my local bike shop (lbs) today, and noticed that all of the bikes were starting to converge on the same set of features: disc brakes, dropped handlebars, somewhat aggressive position: gravel bikes, adventure bikes, cyclocross bikes, all-road bikes.... what happened? What The Hell Is A Gravel Bike?
comment posted at 5:15 PM on Jul-1-18

"There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself," Australian comic Hannah Gadsby says in her new Netflix special. Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette Will Change The Way You Think About Comedy, says Anna Silman in The Cut, which has MANY SPOILERS. (CW for sexual abuse, rape, assault in Netflix special.) "...Perhaps the power of her performance will open the door for a richer and more humane kind of stand-up – one that sets an example for future young women deciding how they want to tell their stories to the world."
comment posted at 7:00 PM on Jun-22-18

Give Everyone Government Bank Accounts - "A new report co-authored by two Treasury Department veterans, 'Central Banking for All: A Public Option for Bank Accounts', argues that Americans should have an account at the Federal Reserve, just as banks do. They believe this would solve a vast array of problems at once, ensuring that everyone is included in the financial system, driving down retail costs for businesses and consumers, and even making recessions less likely."
comment posted at 6:22 AM on Jun-21-18

Smokey Mtns. native, tracker of lost people, especially childen, knower of the woods The kind of knowledge this man has is precious and there doesn't seem to be any school or program that is learning from him, which is sad for us all.
comment posted at 5:23 AM on May-5-18

Ain't no smilin' faces / Lying to the races..."
comment posted at 7:34 PM on Apr-29-18

In 1937, Maurice Hilleman had a job lined up as the assistant manager of the J. C. Penney in Miles City. In Depression-era Montana, Penney’s was top-notch employment, especially to a senior at Custer County High who grew up raising chickens on the outskirts of town. But Hilleman’s older brother pointed out there was that college in Bozeman and suggested Maurice should at least try to get a scholarship. He did, finished first in his class and went on to a graduate program in microbiology at the University of Chicago. Of the 14 standard recommended vaccines — including those for measles, mumps, meningitis, pneumonia and both hepatitis A and B — Hilleman developed eight of them. In a century soaked in genocide, his work saved millions of lives, including, potentially, yours and mine. J. C. Penney’s loss was humanity’s gain.
comment posted at 6:30 AM on Feb-16-18

A Prescription for Reducing Wasted Health Care Spending. "It’s been estimated that the U.S. health care system wastes about $765 billion a year — about a quarter of what’s spent. We’ve identified ways that tens of billions of dollars are being wasted, some of them overlooked even by many experts and academics studying this problem." A ProPublica article series.
comment posted at 6:29 AM on Dec-24-17

There is a technical term for the kind of instrument it is, a wonderful word: idiophone. An idiophone is something that you hit to make a distinctive sound. That’s all there is to it. No strings, no flute-holes, just an object that you strike. A triangle would be the most obvious example. The root “idio” here means singularity or itself-ness or sole, as in, “alone.” Think idiosyncratic—not in sync with others, obeying its own rhythm. Or idiom—an expression that makes sense only in the language to which it belongs.

In the African-influenced musics of Latin America one often hears a uniquely electrifying percussion instrument known as la quijada, the jawbone.
comment posted at 6:38 AM on Dec-24-17

New Theory Cracks Open the Black Box of Deep Learning - "A new idea called the 'information bottleneck' is helping to explain the puzzling success of today's artificial-intelligence algorithms — and might also explain how human brains learn."
comment posted at 5:11 AM on Oct-7-17

One-hit-wonder Norma Tanega is known only for “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog,” her soulful, folky quasi-novelty song of 1966 that reached #22 in the pop charts early that year. The whimsical song’s easy-going charm, catchy chorus and vocal harmonies are irresistible, but Tanega, who has recorded several albums worth of worthy material since, was never able to follow it up with another hit record. During the late 1960s Tanega had a romantic relationship with singer Dusty Springfield, during which time she wrote and recorded her "lost" album, I Don’t Think It Will Hurt If You Smile.
comment posted at 1:38 PM on Jul-31-17

Armstrong, E. (2017) A Neural Networks Approach to Predicting How Things Might Have Turned Out Had I Mustered the Nerve to Ask Barry Cottonfield to the Junior Prom Back in 1997, arxiv:1703.10449 [q-bio.NC]
comment posted at 5:39 AM on Apr-1-17

"How B.J. Miller, a doctor and triple amputee, used his own experience to pioneer a new model of palliative care at a small, quirky hospice in San Francisco."[NYTimes] Once an outlier, Zen Hospice has come to embody a growing nationwide effort to reclaim the end of life as a human experience instead of primarily a medical one. The goal, as Miller likes to put it, is to “de-pathologize death.”
comment posted at 5:04 PM on Jan-7-17

The Surprisingly Recent Story of How Shrimp and Grits Won Over the South. This isn't a new article, but damn did it make me want some shrimp and grits.
comment posted at 5:31 PM on Dec-29-16

The Government Finally Has A Realistic Estimate Of Killings By Police
comment posted at 9:38 AM on Dec-16-16

There are about 60 remaining Futuro ("Flying Saucer") houses left in the world. Sometimes helicoptered into place, and with a groovy interior, these 1960s prefab homes were originally built for skiing (apparently you can still rent one in the Russian Caucus) and vacations. Now, some are abandoned, though one was recently restored and put on display.
comment posted at 6:57 PM on Sep-15-16

Dr Ralph Stanley has passed at age 89

A 2002 Grammy winner and perpetrator of the high lonesome sound he was the oldest living member of the Grand Ole Opry.

O Death YT

comment posted at 3:56 PM on Jun-24-16

Slate discusses one of the most pernicious extant threats to our electrical grid, one that costs the US millions annually in power outages...Squirrels. (SLSlate)
comment posted at 7:00 PM on Jun-18-16

Merle Haggard 1937-2016
comment posted at 4:23 PM on Apr-6-16

42 black science fiction works that are important to your understanding of its history. Nisi Shawl has assembled a rich syllabus of novels and story collections, from 1859 to 2015. Some fantasy and horror along with the strictly science fictional.
comment posted at 5:19 AM on Mar-10-16

Memphis Burning
To understand racial inequality in America, start with housing. Here, in the nation’s poorest major city, the segregationist roots go deep.
This is the first article in an ongoing series, “The Inequality Chronicles.”
comment posted at 5:22 AM on Mar-10-16

Nathan Sexton finished his first half marathon this past weekend in Chattanooga, Tennessee, finishing at a 7:44-mile pace for 13.1 miles. Last summer, Sexton was diagnosed with stage 4 glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer that brings an average life expectancy of 15 months.
comment posted at 2:50 PM on Mar-8-16

Ray Tomlinson, email inventor and selector of @ symbol, dies aged 74 Thank you. RIP.
comment posted at 4:45 AM on Mar-7-16

Two decades ago, the world wide web was relatively young and quiet. Now it's not a bad idea to buy up domains to prevent others from mis-using them, but back then that sort of online prank was unknown. Brooks Talley and Mark Pace were among the first to register such joke domains, setting up buchanan96.org (now cyber-squatted and blocked from displaying by robots.txt) clinton96.org and dole96.org, not to be confused with dolekemp96.org (previously). 4president.us has more screenshots of the official '96 pages, if you want to peak back at how presidential candidates presented themselves online twenty years ago.
comment posted at 4:50 PM on Mar-2-16

Many cities have either thinking about or have been upping their minimum wages as their residents have struggled to keep up with the inflated cost of living that living near large urban centers. Birmingham, AL was the latest city to plan to up its minimum wage to $10.10 last week.

The Alabama state legislature immediately stripped away the ability for Alabama cities to set their own minimum wages.
comment posted at 7:19 PM on Feb-28-16

Rent-A-Minority is a revolutionary new service designed for those oh-shit moments where you've realized your award show, corporate brochure, conference panel is entirely composed of white men.
comment posted at 4:16 AM on Feb-22-16

In a 'sick' society, sanity is relative - "Is it good to be 'well-adjusted' to rapacious capitalism and consumerism? What defines 'mental health' (or illness) in such a culture?" Is Humanity Getting Better?[1,2] (via)
comment posted at 1:58 PM on Feb-21-16

Salon interviews music critic Jim Fusilli:

“We’re surrounded by people who, despite a narrow perspective, insist the music of their youth is superior to the sounds of any other period,” he writes. “Most people who prefer old music mean no harm and it’s often a pleasure to listen to them talk about their favorite artists of the distant past. But others are bullies who intend to harangue us into submission, as if their bluster can conceal their ignorance. They ignore what seems to me something that’s self-evident: rock and pop today is as good as it’s ever been.”

comment posted at 5:09 AM on Feb-21-16

Beverly “Guitar” Watkins is seventy-six years old. She is wearing house slippers, a hair net, and an Atlanta Hawks t-shirt on backwards. She is probably the greatest living blues guitarist that no one has ever heard of.
comment posted at 1:17 PM on Feb-15-16

New York Times Sunday Review Opinion piece "The Selfish Side of Gratitude" by Barbara Ehrenreich "Perhaps it’s no surprise that gratitude’s rise to self-help celebrity status owes a lot to the conservative-leaning John Templeton Foundation. At the start of this decade, the foundation, which promotes free-market capitalism, gave $5.6 million to Dr. Emmons, the gratitude researcher. It also funded a $3 million initiative called Expanding the Science and Practice of Gratitude through the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, which co-produced the special that aired on NPR. The foundation does not fund projects to directly improve the lives of poor individuals, but it has spent a great deal, through efforts like these, to improve their attitudes."
comment posted at 3:10 PM on Jan-4-16

Back in May, Slate published an article decrying the trend in craft beers to be overly hoppy (at least according to the tastes of the author). The next day, a rebuttal was crafted (pun intended) and posted the the Bear Flavored beer blog. The main point of contention in the counterpoint article is that more hops does not always mean more bitterness. Additionally, even if some beers were highly bitter, then why complain if some people enjoy them?
comment posted at 2:22 PM on Jan-3-16

They aren’t necessarily superconservative. They often don’t think in ideological terms at all. But they do strongly feel that life in this country used to be better for people like them—and they want that older country back. The Great Republican Revolt: from the pages of The Atlantic, David Frum explains how current state of the Republican Party, explains the different factions and movements within the GOP, and lays out four possible options for the future.
comment posted at 3:29 PM on Dec-22-15

I Was a Teenage Fruit Fucker (probably NSFW)
comment posted at 2:39 AM on Dec-19-15

Cybersecurity is an increasingly important concern. The Washington Post recently ran a great special series on the issue. The rate of major hacks is growing. The power grid is especially vulnerable, and a hack on it will be especially damaging. It's not a question of if, but when.
comment posted at 3:22 PM on Dec-9-15

Discussion of Piketty's book on Crooked Timber On December 7 Crooked Timber began posting a seminar on Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. 2 responses to the book so far with 10 more to come, followed by the author's response.
comment posted at 5:21 AM on Dec-9-15

Anthony Bourdain goes to a Waffle House.
comment posted at 4:15 PM on Nov-16-15

R2-D2, beloved blue and white astromech droid or perhaps, the biggest scumbag in Star Wars? via Geek.com.
comment posted at 2:22 PM on Nov-9-15