Rob Gronkowski, who will bleed Grey Goose if you cut him, had quite a year. After the Patriots won the Super Bowl, Gronk was shirtless, twerking, and shirtless while twerking. Here are all the things we’ve called the tight end while chronicling his exploits:
Chinese giant salamanders are incredible amphibious beasts that look more like monsters from a movie than something that could exist in real life on this here Earth. They are comically huge, like brown boulder-sized beings who are unaware of how big they are. This one, discovered outside a cave near Chongqing, China, is over 4 and a half feet long and weighs nearly 115 pounds. Experts believe that it may be around 200 years old.
As a part of a project helmed by HKM and Deadspin, we have retrieved and reviewed the contracts of every Division I public university head football coach. In this space, we will look at the academic incentives within these coaches’ contracts and how they were brought upon by the NCAA’s focus on the APR system and refocus on measured academic success.
At least that is the the public health take-away of a recent study analyzing the public health impacts of an increase in the alcohol tax in Maryland.
The Baltimore Sun:
Maryland recorded 7,400 cases of the bacterial infection in 2010, when alcohol, like other goods, was taxed at 6 percent. But two years later, with a 9 percent levy tacked on to booze sales, gonorrhea cases in the state dropped below 5,700, even as infection rates grew nationally.
Researchers at the University of Florida say they can only find one explanation: the alcohol tax.
“We know increasing alcohol taxes decreases alcohol consumption,” said Stephanie Staras, the lead author of the study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. “We also know that people who are using alcohol are more likely to have risky sexual behavior.”
Besides being a great opportunity to for an excellent post title, this is a good illustration of how insurance design is important but far less important to general health than general socio-enviromental factors. Maryland was looking to raise revenue and perhaps decrease drunk driving when they increased the tax. Tertiary impacts on sexually transmitted infection (STI) rates were most likely not part of the political debate.
However, if these results hold up, and logically they make sense as alcohol consumption leads to bad decision making, avoiding seventeen hundred STI cases avoids significant treatment cost and more importantly, it avoids significant pain and risk for individuals. Avoidance through changing the environmental and economic matrix is far more efficient treatment than post-infection treatment.
The post Less stupid fucking in Maryland appeared first on Balloon Juice.
I have terrible news for you, America. I know that you’ve already endured a harsh autumn of partisan politics and mass tragedies and inconsistent NFL officiating. I know you can’t handle one more goddamn piece of bad news right now. It’s too much. It may break your spirit entirely. But I have to do it. If I don’t tell you now, you may learn this from an enemy, or from Twitter, or from your rich asshole brother-in-law:
WORTH SEEING: 45 minutes of Nick Offerman sipping whiskey next to a roaring fire. I will meditate to this each morning and night.
I don't say this lightly or often. But this is one of the most important studies in years in terms of understanding the current state of American politics and society. The study is the work of two Princeton University scholars, Ann Case and Angus Deaton, who analyzed vast quantities of federal government data about mortality rates across age cohorts, racial and ethnic groups and genders. They made a startling discovery. As you would expect, every age and ethnic/racial grouping has continued to see a steady reduction of morbidity (disease) and increase in lifespans for decades. But there's one major exception: middle aged (45-54) white people. Since roughly 1998, disease and death rates for middle aged white men and women has begun to rise.
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Important reminder, happy mutants! The Elf on the Shelf, the cherubic, round-eyed toy with a faux-traditional backstory, is yet another manifestation of the surveillance state. It watches you 24/7, then reports your behavior to an old white man with unaccountable authority who judges you and manipulates you with largesse or neglect.
Laura Pinto, a technology professor:
The gaze of the elf on the child’s real world (as opposed to play world) resonates with the purpose of the panopticon, based on Jeremy Bentham’s 18th century design for a model prison… What is troubling is what The Elf on the Shelf represents and normalizes: anecdotal evidence reveals that children perform an identity that is not only for caretakers, but for an external authority (The Elf on the Shelf), similar to the dynamic between citizen and authority in the context of the surveillance state. Further to this, The Elf on the Shelf website offers teacher resources, integrating into both home and school not only the brand but also tacit acceptance of being monitored and always being on one’s best behaviour--without question.
By inviting The Elf on the Shelf simultaneously into their play-world and real lives, children are taught to accept or even seek out external observation of their actions outside of their caregivers and familial structures. Broadly speaking, The Elf on the Shelf serves functions that are aligned to the official functions of the panopticon. In doing so, it contributes to the shaping of children as governable subjects.
The Washington Post asked her if she's serious. Yes and no, obviously:
“I don’t think the elf is a conspiracy and I realize we’re talking about a toy,” Pinto told The Post. “It sounds humorous, but we argue that if a kid is okay with this bureaucratic elf spying on them in their home, it normalizes the idea of surveillance and in the future restrictions on our privacy might be more easily accepted.”
The nastiest thing about the "Elf on the Shelf" is not that it elaborates the old "Santa's watching you" thing…
… but the life-overwhelming specificity with which it does it. The Elf on the Shelf's mythos controls the parameters of play, puts the observation of play expressly beyond the child's control, and defines who gets to touch what during play and who knows about it. It is a very creepy toy.
(Whether it's worse than toys that let parents secretly spy on children old enough to have a sense of privacy, or internet-connected ones that send recorded media over the internet, is another matter)
The Teddytaur is an actual, $400 product, made from alpaca-wool, sold by high-end toymaker Steiff in its Japanese store. (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
Rebecca Solnit is a brilliant writer whose essay Men Explain Things to Me sparked the discourse about "mansplaining" and whose 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell is one of the best history books I've ever read -- so why do so many interviewers want to talk to her about the fact that she chose not to have babies? (more…)
You can randomize the terrain and tweak mutation rates, gravity and other variables. (Moon gravity is chaotic fun; Jupiter seems, for some reason, more convincingly real than the default Earth settings)
The Galapagos Islands are best known for their giant tortoises, but they’re also the site of one of the most bizarre homesteading misadventures ever, complete with proto-hippies, a polyamorous baroness, potentially poisoned boiled chicken, births in pirate caves, and unsolved deaths that look a lot like murder.
Dweezil Zappa’s dad memorably declared that a country’s legitimacy is predicated upon its having its own airline and its own beer, and maybe a football team and a nuclear arsenal for good measure. With all due respect to the groovy and departed, I’d like to suggest that in this more enlightened age, we replace “nuclear weapons,” which are perhaps the greatest man-made scourge ever visited upon the planet, with “dumplings,” which are the opposite. It’s awfully hard to respect a culture that hasn’t produced its own dumpling variety, and just as hard to justify warring with one that has.
Have you ever wondered why the riveted metal tab that holds the end hook on a tape measure has slop in it? It's not because it was manufactured by a shoddy company. Gareth Branwyn at Make explains the reason:
If you’ll notice, the inch marks on the tape actually start 1/16″ short. That’s because the thickness of the hook itself is 1/16″. So, if you take an inside measurement (pressing the hook end against the work piece you’re measuring), you will get an accurate measurement. But also, if you hook the end onto a work piece, the play in the rivets will move the hook out to compensate for hooking onto the material, creating a 1/16″ gap between the hook and the tape, allowing for an accurate measurement.
This is just one of five wonderful things about tape measures you may not know. If you already knew all five things, please crow about it in the comments and remark how surprised you are that not everyone is aware of this information.
There's even a dancing baby! It's based on a mobile installation for hire that prompts your guests to turn themselves into loops that they can then drag around on a virtual stage.
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(Another Nowa Fantaskyka remix)
Pick something you hate.
A government, maybe, or a church. Some multinational that treats its customers like shit. Any institution powerful enough to keep people under its thumb, to crush its competition (or at least fix prices with them) so you have nowhere else to go. Something you’d really like to see burned to the ground, although you know that’s never going to happen.
A good example, here in Toronto, would be a telecommunications giant called Bell Canada. (Rogers would also be a good candidate— they suck almost as hard— but I think Bell owns more media.) If you’ve ever dealt with these guys— and you probably have, if you’ve ever watched Canadian TV— the following scenario might warm you up at night:
Just before Just Desserts. (Photo Rene Johnston.)
Gustav runs a cellphone kiosk for Bell. Walking home from work one night, a passing stranger notices the perky corporate logo on his employee polo shirt— and punches Gustav in the face.
Gustav goes down. “Fucking Bell,” his assailant growls, kicking him in the ribs.
Gustav’s no dummy. He knows everyone hates Bell. He knows all about the bandwidth throttling, the extortionate overpriced contracts, the abusive telemarketing and contemptuous customer service, the routine surveillance of customers for the benefit of any government snoop with her hand out. But— “That’s not me!” he cries around a mouthful of broken teeth. “I don’t make those decisions— I just sell phones!”
“It… doesn’t…matter!” the attacker spits out, emphasizing each word with another vicious kick. “You…knew. You… chose… to… work… for… them…” Eventually he tires himself out and wanders away, leaving Gustav to bleed out on the pavement.
Just a psycho with anger-management issues, you might think if you’re a Bell CEO reading about it the next day. Nothing for you to worry about, even if you did just cut Tech Support’s budget by another 10% because you want a fatter year-end bonus. The peasants will never get to you; you’re safe up here on the 50th floor. Shame about poor ol’ Gustav, though.
But then it happens to Shirley. And then Piotr. And Mahmoud, and George. All those underpaid drones hawking your wares at the local malls are suddenly getting the shit kicked out them by random strangers. It’s the weirdest thing. None of the attackers even have criminal records.
Now no one wants to work for you. Drones quit in droves for fear of being kicked to death like dogs in the street, and not even the unprecedented promise of a decent wage can lure in replacements. Management’s safe— they don’t deal with the public— but how can the top of a pyramid stay standing when the base just up and leaves? Bell has but two choices: go broke, or stop pissing off their customers. For the rest of us, it’s win-win.
Isn’t that a wonderful little scenario? I call it “The Justice Plague”, and I fully intend to write it as soon as I can come up with an actual storyline. So far it’s all premise and no plot.
It’s a terrific premise, though. It hinges on yogurt— more precisely, on the ways gut microbes affect your behavior.
Of course, we’ve always known that your gut affects your mood. But the extent and complexity of those effects is only now coming to light— and it goes way beyond the cramps you get from salmonella, or the tryptophan drowsiness that lays you low after a turkey dinner. It’s not much of an overstatement to say that your gut bacteria are a large part of what makes you you, psychologically. Transfer gut biota from one animal to another, and you transfer personality traits as well.
Think about that. You can literally transplant personality traits via feces. To that extent, we all have shitty personalities.
Liberté indeed.
How does it work? For starters, your gut has a mind of its own: a standalone neural net with the computational complexity of a cat brain (no surprise there— cats are basically stomachs sheathed in fur anyway). Your gut microbes pull its strings by feeding it a complex cocktail of hormones and neurotransmitters; gutnet, in turn, tugs at the brain along the Vagus nerve. (Gut bacteria also have a more direct pipe into the brain via the endocrine system. Most of your brain’s neurotransmitters— half the dopamine, most of the serotonin— are actually produced in the gut.) Via such avenues, your gut bacteria influence the formation of memories, especially those with strong emotional components. They affect aggression and anxiety responses by influencing neuroinhibitors in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala (which is responsible for fear, aggression, and the intensity of one’s response to personal-space violations). You can make rats more or less aggressive by tweaking their gut biota.
You see where I’m going with this. Engineered gut bacteria— spread through shipments of spiked yogurt, perhaps— tweaked to promote violent, uncontrollable rage in their hosts. It’s barely even speculation; rabies does that much, and it’s not even engineered.
The big problem is targeting, of course— how to trigger reflexive aggression at the sight of a specific corporate logo. Corporations actually give us a lot of help here; they spend millions designing logos that are simple, striking, and immediately recognizable. So you could tweak responses in the V1 and V2 areas of the visual cortex— those pattern-matching parts of the brain that identify specific shapes and edges. If you could bend such circuits to your will, you could provoke a response in anyone who saw a given shape.
But it would be a lot simpler to let the brain do all that heavy lifting on its own, targeting instead those circuits that connect a general sense of “recognition” to the emotional response one feels at the sight of a given brand. You’d have to be familiar with that brand for this trigger to work— it keys on feelings of recognition, not the specific geometry of the stimulus— but who doesn’t recognize the logos of major corporations these days? The best part is that all those recognition/response macros are located in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and in the— wait for it—
The amygdala. Back down in the limbic system, where gut bugs already affect aggression.
Why, we might be able to pull this whole thing off without ever leaving the basement. We don’t even have to create the response; just magnify pre-existing resentment and let it off the leash. A thousand, a million disgruntled customers: turned into weapons of mass corporate destruction with a little help from the yogurt industry.
Hey, all you basement biologists. All you DIY Lifehackers.
Looking for a project?
Late-breaking Postscript, 0900 30/10/15: Well, look what came over the transom— from none other than Jesus Olmo, who actually wrote the screenplay for the original “28 Weeks Later”…
Here’s hoping 20th Century Fox doesn’t sue either of us for copyright infringement…
In my seemingly constant travel (thanks to academic stuff and a wife working in a different state, not because I am actually traveling for fun, mostly) around this great land, I look for new things to do. In the last couple of years, I have taken to visiting the graves of famous Americans. There is no real reason to do this. I just do it. My wife is thrilled by side trips to cemeteries, as you can imagine. I’ve only talked about one of these trips, my visit to the grave of Henry Clay Frick, arguably the most cartoonishly super-evil villain in American history.
So it’s time for a new series, chronicling these visits. So we’ll call Frick number 1 in that series. This will be occasional, except at first when I get through my pretty long backlog. There’s only one logical choice for the 2nd part of this series. And that’s the grave of Eng and Chang Bunker.
Eng and Chang have one of the weirdest stories in American history. They were, of course, Siamese twins. Born in 1811 outside of Bangkok, they were only connected by cartilage and were pretty independent given the circumstances. A Scottish entrepreneur saw the benefit of exploiting them and in 1829 convinced them to be shown at circuses and sideshows around the world. The brothers agreed, eventually managing themselves. In 1839, they were visiting western North Carolina and decided to stop and buy a farm there.
Now, if you are in North Carolina in 1839 and you own a farm and have a little money, what do you do? You buy slaves. So Eng and Chang became slaveowners. Taking the name “Bunker,” they then married a pair of white sisters from the area. They combined to have 21 children. Now, I don’t want to poke fun here really and I’m glad they lived relatively normal lives except for the whole slaveowning thing. But the sex? I have to say, I’m really curious about how they managed that. On top of that are the social mores of the early 19th century, with the interracial sex and the close naked intimacy such an arrangement would have caused. Of course the first can be explained away by the fact that as Chinese-Thais they were so exotic that they weren’t seen as a threat like black slaves. And the second can be explained to some extent by the fact that our stereotype of 19th century Victorian Americans as unsexed and uptight is way too simplistic. But still. There was some national outrage at the news, but they seem to have more or less accepted by their neighbors.
Both couples had a son who served in the Confederate Army. Both Chang and Eng were very pro-Confederate and were angry over the money they lost during the war, including their human property. Over time, the sisters grew to dislike each other. So they set up separate households and the brothers switched every three days. Toward the end of their lives, Chang began drinking heavily. Because their blood vessels were not connected, this did not affect Eng’s health, at least his physical health. Although they did have a fused liver, and I have trouble seeing how this could not have played a factor, but I’m not going to do the research to get this all figured out. In 1874, Chang died in his sleep. The doctors attempted an emergency separation of the two, but Eng died soon after. It’s not entirely clear why, but the obvious problem of being connected to a dead body would likely have ended his life quickly anyway.
Alex Sink, who lost the 2010 race for governor of Florida, is Chang’s great-granddaughter.
I found this grave in January 2014 when I was in North Carolina. There was a museum exhibit at the University of North Carolina on them and I realized I was heading through Mt. Airy on the way out. I mentioned this to my wife who dismissed it, probably with hope I would forget about it. But the day we went to Mt. Airy, which is of course Mayberry, we were going to go to the Andy Griffith Museum. But everything in that town was closed that day because it was 15 degrees outside. It wasn’t icy. There was no snow. It was 15 degrees. And North Carolina freaked out. So there was only thing to do. And that’s visit the grave.
Eng and Chang Bunker are buried in the White Plains Baptist Church Cemetery in White Plains, North Carolina, just outside of Mt. Airy.
Here’s U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff of California, paying up after an NLDS bet with Rep. Steve Israel from New York. Schiff had the Dodgers, you see. His punishment is this rendition of “Meet The Mets,” and Schiff makes it sound like he’d rather have his toenails pulled out.
Last night, the third trailer for the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens premiered on YouTube and ESPN. Did you shit your dick? I definitely shat my dick. I think the dick-shittingest moment, for me, was when the new Darth Vader guy was doing the Force to the other guy’s brain, but the low-altitude aerial combat was strong as hell, too.
Maggie Goldenberger and her fourth- and fifth-grade pals used to amuse themselves by dressing up in weird clothes, doing crazy stuff to their hair, and posing for polaroids holding funny objects and making weird faces. Years later, Goldenberger uploaded some of her favorites to her Myspace and Facebook accounts, which led to Jeff Davis, who she didn't know, posting it to Reddit, where a Redditor called Plantlife ganked it and captioned it with "GERSBERMS. MAH FRAVRIT BERKS" -- and a meme was born.
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Even Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the long-dead impressionist painter, cannot escape the internet's disdain for pretty things that are also smarmy. (more…)
Watched INTERSTELLAR over the weekend, and was struck once again by the emotional pitch of our popular arts at the moment. I sometimes wonder if people in the future will look back at what we’ve made over these first fifteen years of the 21st Century and ask, why is everyone crying all the time?
And then I think, maybe they’ll look at the culture surrounding this period, and perhaps will add, well, it’s no wonder everyone in their films and tv shows is crying all the time.
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