Jess

In the latest installment of his excellent series Ask A Native New Yorker, Jake Dobkin tackles the question of how to react to those people holding clipboards asking if you have a minute for the environment or gay rights or whatever. The short answer is ignore them with "EXTREME PREJUDICE".

This is because Clipboard People are grifters, who, in the name of various causes (Gay Rights, the Environment), have only a single aim: to get your credit card number authorized for recurring payments to a "charity." In fact, the majority of that money does not go to the charity, but goes to pay the salary of the Clipboarder, and the evil canvas organizations that employ them. Even worse, the Clipboarders are themselves exploited-often young idealists from less vicious places, they are brought to New York on the promise of helping a charity they believe in, only to find out they've been dragooned into a commission-based predatory marketing scheme.

Well, good because that's what I've been doing (for other reasons). Instead, give to an efficient charity listed on Charity Navigator.

Tags: charity   Jake Dobkin   NYC

A wonderful interview with Werner Herzog on soccer, his wonderful fatherless upbringing, the nature of reality, and, of course, Mel Brooks.

I told Mel, "Mel, you know what, I have seen an extraordinary film. Something you must see. You must see. It's only at midnight screenings at the Nuart Theater. And it's a film by -- I don't know his name, I think it's Lynch. And he made a film Eraserhead and you must see the film." And Mel keeps grinning and grinning and lets me talk about the movie and he says, "Yes, his name is really David Lynch, do you like to meet him?" I said, "In principle, yes." He says, "Come with me," and two doors down the corridor is David Lynch in pre-production on The Elephant Man! Which Mel Brooks produced! And the bastard sits there and lets me talk and talk and talk and grins and chuckles. And I had no idea [and kept thinking], Why does he chuckle all the time when I talk about the film? But that was how I love Mel Brooks.

Tags: interviews   Werner Herzog

A harrowing piece by novelist Helen DeWitt about being stalked by her neighbor.

E turned up next morning at six because his fire had gone out. I said I had to go for my walk. He went home. When I got back I found a pane of glass on the dresser; there was a gap in its normal home in the side door. E: 'I was cold and you weren't there. But yeah, yeah, I know that was wrong. Don't worry, I'll fix it.'

This was clearly something I could report to the police. It seemed harsh to lock someone up for social cluelessness, but I was spooked. I packed my bags and left for a motel within the hour. Then I found a room on Craigslist that was available until the end of January. I was desperate to finish a book.

E's landlord: 'You're a very attractive woman. He can't help himself. I'm sorry you can't live on your property.'

It's a big leap from 'you know I love her' to baseball bat by the bed. I read the Vermont law on trespass on 28 December 2012 and it appeared to confirm my sense of the social norm. Entering a property when forbidden to do so, or remaining on a property after being asked to leave, carries a maximum sentence of three months and/or a $500 fine. It's not a heavy sentence, but the law is beautifully genderblind: I have the same right to occupy my property undisturbed as my uncle the ex-marine. I believed I could exercise this right and attempted to do so. This was the first step on the slippery slope to the baseball bat.

Tags: crime   Helen DeWitt

Photographer David Slater wants Wikipedia to remove his photograph of a monkey taking a photo of itself but Wikipedia has refused, saying that as the monkey was the photographer, Slater has no right to the copyright to the photo.

The Gloucestershire-based photographer now claims that the decision is jeopardising his income as anyone can take the image and publish it for free, without having to pay him a royalty. He complained to Wikimedia that he owned the copyright of the image, but a recent transparency report from the group, which details all the removal requests it has received, reveals that editors decided that the monkey itself actually owned the copyright because it was the one that pressed the shutter button.

But shouldn't Wikipedia take it down anyway because they don't have the monkey's permission to release the photo into the public domain? (I mean, probably not...monkeys don't have any rights under the law, yes?) (via @capndesign)

Update: A previous version of this post stated that Wikipedia said that the monkey held the copyright. They said no such thing...that was my poor paraphrase. In the US at least, monkeys obviously can't hold copyrights. From the Compendium II of Copyright Office Practices, section 202.02(b) states:

The term "authorship" implies that, for a work to be copyrightable, it must owe its origin to a human being. Materials produced solely by nature, by plants, or by animals are not copyrightable.

Interesting phrase, "owe its origin to"...perhaps Slater has a point. (via @stvnrlly)

Tags: copyright   David Slater   legal   photography   Wikipedia

Liberating Learning Print Portfolio $60 (portfolio is normally $75. We are offering a back-to-school special price until September 30!) "Liberating Learning" is a limited edition collection of one dozen prints made by members of the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative. While pundits focus on the education crisis in America, this project honors the caring, hardworking teachers seeking to make a difference in the lives of their students every day. These unique prints also aim to inspire the current generation of students engaged within all levels of learning. “Liberating Learning” is intended to hang on the walls of classrooms and libraries where the magic of learning happens every day! Themes range from didactic to playful, highlighting history (Shaun Slifer’s “Teach History From Below”) to prison (Meredith Stern’s “Invest to Educate, Not to Incarcerate”) to libraries (Mary Tremonte’s “Free to the People”). Kevin Caplicki explores the memory-assisting power of ginkgo leaves (“Keep Growing, Keep Learning”) and Bec Young brings a cosmic fact closer to home (“My Universe is Constantly Expanding”). Colin Matthes shares “Life Skills”, and Nicolas Lampert reminds us of the recent 2012 student strikes in Quebec. Artists in this collection: Pete Railand, Mary Tremonte, Meredith Stern, Icky Alec Dunn, Josh MacPhee, Shaun Slifer, Colin Matthes, Thea Gahr, Fernando Marti, Kevin Caplicki, Nicolas Lampert, and Bec Young. Each print fits a standard frame size of 11” x 17.” They were created on a unique Risograph machine using teal, red, black, and green ink. The whole portfolio is presented in a screen-printed cover designed by Pete Railand, including a back cover index which identifies each print artist. collection of twelve 11" X 17" risograph prints inside hand-printed cover cardstock, varied Limited Edition of 100

Hi, everybody! Tim Carmody here, guest-hosting for Jason this week.

On Monday, I tried to list some reasons why OKCupid's self-acknowledged experiments on its users didn't seem to be stirring up the same outrage that Facebook's had. Here at the end of the week, I think I was largely right: fewer people are upset, the anger is more tempered, and that has a lot to do with the reasons I gave. But one reaction I didn't expect is that some people took it as saying that I wasn't upset by what OKCupid did, or that people shouldn't be as upset by it.

What OKCupid did has actually made me madder and madder as the week's gone on, but for reasons that are different from other people's. I think this is pretty important, so I'm going to try to explain why.

Let's start with the Facebook "social contagion" study. Most Facebook critics focused on the people who were the subjects of the study, for good reasons. Did these users give consent? Can terms of service count as consent for an academic study? Should they have been informed of the study afterwards? Is Facebook responsible for any harm these users might have suffered? Is an increase or decrease in engagement really a sign that users' emotions were affected? How else has Facebook attempted to influence its users, or might try in the future? These are all good questions.

But what if you flip it around? What if you weren't one of the subjects whose moods Facebook was trying to study, but one of their friends or family? What if you were one of the people whose posts were filtered because your keywords were too happy, too angry, or too sad?

It's a small thing, but I haven't seen anybody discuss the Facebook emotion study from the perspective of authors of the filtered posts.

— Tim Carmody (@tcarmody) June 29, 2014

You had good news; maybe your child was born. You had bad news; maybe a call for help. Your friends never saw it, bc of an involuntary study

— Tim Carmody (@tcarmody) June 29, 2014

The emotions study shows definitively that this opacity of what posts do or don't get delivered by Facebook is universal and without limit.

— Tim Carmody (@tcarmody) June 29, 2014

I think there's no way to know whether the Facebook study may have harmed people who weren't being studied. And even though the TOS basically says that users give Facebook permission to do whatever they want not only with the users' data, but all of their friends' too, you can't call that consent with a straight face. (This is just another reason that software terms of service are a rotten legal and ethical basis for research. They just weren't built for that reason, or to solve any of those problems.)

So Facebook didn't just mess around with some of its users' feeds, hoping to see if it might mess around with their feelings. It used some of its users' posts in order to do it. Arguably, it made them complicit.

To be clear, filtering posts, giving preference to some and not others, is how Facebook's newsfeed algorithm always works. Facebook users have been complaining about this for a long time, especially brands and news organizations and other companies who've built up their subscriber counts and complain that hardly anybody ever sees their posts unless they pay off Facebook's ad department. And Facebook makes no guarantees, anywhere, that they're going to deliver every message to every user who's subscribed to it. Readers miss posts all the time, usually just because they're just not looking at the screen or reading everything they could see. Facebook isn't certified mail. It's not even email. All this is known.

However.

We all buy in to Facebook (and Twitter, and OKCupid, and every other social media network), giving them a huge amount of personal data, free content, and discretion on how they show it to us, with the understanding that all of this will largely be driven by choices that we make. We build our own profiles, we select our favorite pictures, we make our own friends, we friend whatever brands we like, we pick the users we want to block or mute or select for special attention, and we write our own stories.

Even the filtering algorithms, we're both told and led to assume, are the product of our choices. Either we make these choices explicitly (mute this user, don't show me this again, more results like these) or implicitly (we liked the last five baby pictures, so Facebook shows us more baby pictures; we looked at sites X, Y, and Z, so we see Amazon ads for people who looked at X, Y, and Z. It's not arbitrary; it's personalized. And it's personalized for our benefit, to reflect the choices that we and the people we trust have made.

This is what makes the user-created social web great. It's the value it adds over traditional news media, traditional classified ads, traditional shopping, everything.

We keep copyright on everything we write and every image we post, giving these services a broad license to use it. And whenever the terms of service seem to be saying that these companies have the right to do things we would never want them to do, we're told that these are just the legal terms that the companies need in order to offer the ordinary, everyday service that we've asked them to do for us.

This is why it really stings whenever somebody turns around and says, "well actually, the terms you've signed give us permission to do whatever we want. Not just the thing you were afraid of, but a huge range of things you never thought of." You can't on one hand tell us to pay no attention when you change these things on us, and with the other insist that this is what we've really wanted to do all along. I mean, fuck me over, but don't tell me that I really wanted you to fuck me over all along.

Because ultimately, the reason you needed me to agree in the first place isn't just because I'm using your software, but because you're using my stuff. And the reason I'm letting you use my stuff, and spending all this time working on it, is so that you can show it to people.

I'm not just a user of your service, somebody who reads the things that you show it to me: I'm one of the reasons you have anything that you can show to anyone at all.

Now let's go back to the OKCupid experiment. Facebook didn't show some of its users posts that their friends wrote. But at least it was a binary thing: either your post was shown, just as you wrote it, or it wasn't. OKCupid actually changed the information it displayed to users.

You can pick nits and say OKC didn't change it, but rather, just selectively repressed parts of it, deleting photos on some profiles and text on others. But if you've ever created a profile on any web site, you know that it's presented as being a whole ensemble, the equivalent of a home page. The photos, the background, the description, the questions you answer: taken altogether, that's your representation of yourself to everyone else who may be interested. It's the entire reason why you are there.

Now imagine you're an OKCupid user, and you strike up a conversation with someone or someone strikes up a conversation with you. You assume that the other person has all of your information available to them if they're willing to look at it. That's the basis of every conversation you have on that site. Except they don't. The profile that OKCupid has implicitly promised they'll show to everyone who looks at it has been changed. The other person either doesn't know what you look like (and assumes you can't be bothered to post a photo) or doesn't know anything else about you (and assumes you can't be bothered to write anything about yourself.) Both of you have been deceived, so the site can see what happens.

This is why I question the conclusion that OKC users who were only shown profiles with pictures are shallow, because their conversations were almost as long as the ones who were shown full profiles. This is how I imagine those conversations going:

Rosencrantz: So what do you do?
Guildenstern: Um I work in marketing?
Rosencrantz: That's great! Where did you go to school?
Guildenstern: I went to UVA
Guildenstern: Wait a minute are you some kind of bot?
Rosencrantz: What makes you say that?
Guildenstern: You keep asking me questions that are in my profile, did you even read it
Rosencrantz: I'm looking at it right now, why didn't you answer any of the questions
Guildenstern: lol I guess you can't read nice pic though goodbye

That's a high-value interaction by the OKC researchers' standards, by the way.

This is also why I don't have much patience with the idea that "The worst thing could have happened [with the OkCupid testing] is people send a few more messages, and maybe you went on a date you didn't like." (Rey Junco told this to ReadWrite to explain why he thought Facebook's study was worse than OKCupid's, but you see versions of this all over.)

First, going on "a date you didn't like" isn't a frivolous thing. It definitely incurs more material costs than not seeing a Facebook status. And bad (or good) messages or a bad or good date can definitely have a bigger emotional impact as well.

More importantly, though, don't make this just a question about dates or feelings, about what somebody did or didn't read and what its effect on them was. I don't care if you think someone making a dating profile is a frivolous thing. Somebody made that. They thought the company hosting it could be trusted to present it honestly. They were wrong.

So this is the problem I see not just with Facebook and OKCupid's experiments, but with most of the arguments about them. They're all too quick to accept that users of these sites are readers who've agreed to let these sites show them things. They don't recognize or respect that the users are also the ones who've made almost everything that those sites show. They only treat you as a customer, never a client.

And in this respect, OKCupid's Christian Rudder and the brigade of "and this surprises you?" cynics are right: this is what everybody does. This is the way the internet works now. (Too much of it, anyway.) It doesn't matter whether your site is performing interventions on you or not, let alone publishing them. Too many of them have accepted this framework.

Still, for as long as the web does work this way, we are never only these companies' "products," but their producers, too. And to the extent that these companies show they aren't willing to live up to the basic agreement that we make these things and give them to you so you will show them to other people -- the engine that makes this whole world wide web business go -- I'm not going to have anything to do with them any more. What's more, I'll get mad enough to find a place that will show the things I write to other people and tell them they shouldn't accept it either. Because, ultimately, you ought to be ashamed to treat people and the things they make this way.

It's not A/B testing. It's just being an asshole.

Update: OKCupid's Christian Rudder (author of the "We Experiment On Human Beings" post) gave an interview to Alex Goldman and PJ Vogt for On the Media's TLDR podcast.

Rudder says some of the negative response "is my own fault, because, y'know, the blog post is sensationally written, for sure." But he doesn't back off of that tone one bit. In fact, he doubles down.

Alex Goldman: Have you thought about bringing in, say, like an ethicist to, to vet your experiments?

Christian Rudder, founder of OkCupid: To wring his hands all day for a hundred thousand dollars a year?... This is the only way to find this stuff out. If you guys have an alternative to the scientific method, I'm all ears.

I think he maybe should have just written the blog post and left it alone.

Tags: Facebook   OKCupid   the web we lost

muscles

 

Those adorable baby goats from Sunflower Farm are back, and this time they are incorporating leaps and bounds into their running routine. The original video, which has now been viewed over 2.5 million times, was a surprise hit for the farm’s owners who have since switched from portrait to landscape in this updated recording :)

For those curious, the goats are raised and sold to qualifying families (in pairs) as pets or dairy animals. Check out Sunflower Farm on Facebook for more.

 

 

What if you wanted to cut a bagel in half not for toasting or sandwich purposes, but to explore its topology and mildly astonish your friends?

If you cut a bagel along a möbius strip pattern, you end up with two separate halves that form interlocking rings, as shown below.

Geoge Hart, who cut this bagel and made this video, is an engineering professor at SUNY-Stony Brook and "mathematical sculptor. On his web site, he offers two bagel-derived math problems: What is the ratio of the surface area of this linked cut to the surface area of the usual planar bagel slice? and Modify the cut so the cutting surface is a one-twist Mobius strip.

Via @mark_e_evans and The Onion A/V Club.

Tags: bagels   mathematics   MoMath

Cornell Lab writer Pat Leonard is in Barrow, Alaska, with Snowy Owl researcher Denver Holt of the Owl Research Institute. Holt’s organization, along with explore.org, were responsible for setting up the Snowy Owl cam featured on our Bird Cams project in summer 2014. Leonard visited Holt for some fieldwork in the damp, chilly summer of far northern Alaska. 

First: a quick lesson in shifting gears on an ATV—the ubiquitous mode of transport in Barrow when there’s no snow on the ground. Then field researcher Denver Holt of the Owl Research Institute, barrels off in the lead, taking us about 10 miles out of town to nest #8. (Note to Bird Cams fans: this is not the same nest as is shown on the Snowy Owl cam, though Leonard hopes to visit that nest in a few days.)

It’s a cold day (about 35 degrees Fahrenheit) made colder by the wind and colder still by open-air transportation. Both of us are bundled to the eyes in multiple layers. Sometimes even that is not enough. But hiking provides more than a useful means of covering the terrain—it warms you up. We’re heading about a mile out from the dirt track, just specks of humanity in a vast landscape with few reference points as we circle a small freshwater lake to get to the nest.

The wide vista is sliced neatly in two:  gray overcast above, the flat tundra below in muted greens and browns. It’s spongy and soft when you walk on the drier parts; wet areas are not deep but the ridges and bumps could easily grab and twist the ankles of the inattentive.

Along the way, there’s much to see and a lot to learn in the company of a skilled guide. Holt is a walking encyclopedia when it comes to the tundra. “Those are marsh daisies and buttercups,” he says, pointing to tiny pips of color, flowers that look so fragile and yet endure in one of the harshest environments. He can explain how the mounds have built up over thousands of years due to freezing and thawing of the upper layers of the tundra and the pressure exerted by subterranean ice ridges.

As we get closer to the unnamed lake we see Yellow-billed Loons, then a cluster of oh-so-lovely Pacific Loons with their sleek gray necks. Red Phalaropes are skittering around while a Glaucous Gull floats on the wind above and seems to be chuckling at the clumsy humans trudging below. But nearby are the remains of a gull that was taken by a Snowy Owl recently, according to Holt. It seems as if he knows every move they make. But is there a chick or chicks still around nest #8?

A flash of white. There’s the big female in the distance, watching us. Then Holt hears a sound that I miss beneath the white noise of the wind. There’s the male! “He’s barking at us, that’s a good sign that there might be a chick nearby,” says Holt.

We don’t know for sure where the chick or chicks will be. Snowy Owl chicks spend their first three weeks on the nest being brooded by their mother. After that period, while they’re still downy, gray, and flightless, they split up and wander away from the nest, possibly to make them less visible to predators. They won’t be able to fly for another three or four weeks. During this time, finding them on the endless, hummocky tundra is quite a challenge, even for an experienced researcher like Holt.

Then, crouched behind the nest mound, there’s the owlet—a small gray ball of fluff with golden eyes and the beginnings of wing feathers. (We really don’t know the chick’s gender but we seem to want to refer to it as “he.”)

Holt pulls out his banding materials and the record book for this nest. It holds all the data, such as egg measurements, number of chicks, etc. He’s been spending the “balmy” summer months in Barrow to collect this data for 23 years. This nest had seven eggs to start with, and seven chicks hatched. But as far as Holt can tell, this one undersized chick is the only survivor. The eggs in all 20 nests he’s monitoring this season hatched just fine, but it seems all the nests have had several chicks die. Holt isn’t sure why. The brown lemmings that Snowy Owls feed on and seem to require to trigger breeding, have been present in so-so numbers—not a boom, but not a bust either.

Our little chick clacks his bill and peeps as Holt looks him over and claps a silver band around his leg. He’ll be monitored again soon. Holt tries to visit every nest every three days to track the chicks’ progress. He feels this chick should be farther from the nest for his age. We both hope he will make it. Mom and Dad are still nearby watching carefully but not attacking. Some pairs are more aggressive and will dive at intruders with those wicked long claws flexed to do damage.

Except for when we banded the chick, we’re always on the move. Holt says that’s the way you find most of the chicks now that they are off the nest but can’t fly yet. Keep scanning the ground for something moving in the general vicinity of a nest and hope to see a small form tottering around the tundra like a little gray gnome.

This is part of a day in the life of a Snowy Owl field biologist, where success may be defined as locating a lone speck of fluff on the vast tundra, marking it with evidence of its encounter with humans. You hope one day to find it again and in doing so unravel another small piece of the Snowy Owl puzzle: why do they do what they do, and why do they go where they go?

Pat Leonard wrote about Snowy Owls in the spring 2014 Living Bird magazine, and about Project SNOWstorm during the great winter irruption of 2013–2014.

For more about Snowy Owls, check out:

• Banding Snowy Owl Chicks With Researcher Denver Holt
• A Season of Snowy Owls, in the Spring 2014 Living Bird magazine.
• Project SNOWstorm Seizes the Moment to Take a Closer Look at Snowy Owls
• A Snowy Owl Sequel?, January 2015 blog post

(Top image: Denver Holt records data on the Alaskan tundra, by Pat Leonard.)

Hummingbirds are special—brilliant, tiny, precision-flying creatures that glitter like jewels in the sun and dazzle with their aerial acrobatics, flying fast then stopping instantly, hovering, and zipping up, down, or backwards with exquisite control.

They’re strictly a New World animal, and they fascinated the first Europeans who arrived in North America. Christopher Columbus wrote about them. Many naturalists at the time wondered if they were a cross between a bird and an insect (at one point being called “flybirds”).

More than a dozen species of hummingbirds regularly summer in the United States, including these four that are most commonly seen at backyard feeders:

Ruby-throated Hummingbirds depart for Central America in early fall, with many crossing the Gulf of Mexico in a single flight. To accomplish this incredible migratory feat, they feast on nectar and insects and double their body mass, from 3 grams to 6 grams (or from the weight of a penny to the weight of a nickel). Ruby-throated Hummingbirds have the largest breeding range of any North American hummer.

Black-chinned Hummingbirds are the most adaptable of all North American hummingbirds, found from deserts to mountain forests and from urban areas to pristine natural areas. The Black-chinned Hummingbird’s tongue has two grooves that suck up nectar like a sponge. Then the bird retracts the tongue and squeezes the nectar into its mouth.

Anna’s Hummingbirds are dazzling with iridescent emerald feathers and sparkling rose-pink throats. Nineteenth-century French naturalist René Primevère Lesson was mesmerized by “the bright sparkle of a red cap of the richest amethyst” on the male’s head and named it after the French duchess of Rivoli, Anna de Belle Masséna. These hummingbirds live along the Pacific Coast and in many areas are present year-round.

Rufous Hummingbirds are small but feisty. They chase off larger hummingbirds at flowers and feeders, and they’ve even been seen chasing away chipmunks. Rufous Hummingbirds have the northernmost breeding range of any hummingbird, yet in fall they migrate about 4,000 miles south to Mexico—in what is possibly the longest migration relative to body size of any bird.

More about hummingbirds:

• This post covers just four common species—to explore the ranges of 10 North American hummingbirds, visit our Citizen Science blog.
• Explore the hummingbirds of the U.S. and Canada in our All About Birds species guide
• Learn about the hundreds of hummingbird species south of the border at Neotropical Birds Online

 

(Image at top: Ruby-throated Hummingbird by Kevin Click via Birdshare)

Hi, everybody! Tim Carmody here, guest-hosting for Jason this week.

You probably know that Donald Glover (actor on Community, writer on 30 Rock) also has a rap career under the stage name Childish Gambino. You may not know that the name "Childish Gambino" comes from a Wu-Tang Name Generator.

That's half of the reason I'm here - I'm dead serious. Like I met RZA and he was like, "you're a cool dude, man - and your name is perfect for you! It's like that computer had a brain!" But yeah, I put my name in a Wu-Tang name generator and it spit out Childish Gambino, and for some reason I just thought that fit.

Now here's where things get a little weird. There are multiple, competing Wu-Tang name generators. (Of course there are.) Most of them seem to work the same way -- they run a script matching your name's characters with a decent-sized database of Wu-sounding words, kind of like a hash. But little differences in the scripts or in the database give you different results.

For instance, at recordstore.com, the "Original Wu Name Generator" (tagline "WE CAN WU YOU!") spits back "Erratic Assassin" (for "Timothy Carmody"), while "Tim Carmody" yields "Well-Liked Assman." These names are both awesome.

But the "Wu-Tang Name Generator" at mess.be ("Become a real Wu warrior, entah ur full name 'n smack da ol' dirty button"), which proprietor Pieter Dom says was made in 2002, is totally different. There, "Timothy Carmody" and "Tim Carmody" return "Shriekin' Wizard" and "Gentlemen Overlord," respectively. Now, while these definitely sound like Wu names, they are definitely The W to the other site's Enter the 36 Chambers.

Here's the weird part: both of these Wu-Tang name generators return the same name for "Donald Glover." It is, of course, "Childish Gambino."

Is it just a quirk that whatever difference crept in affects most names, but not Donald Glover's? Did one of the sites hard-code that result in, to boost its credibility with people who heard the Childish Gambino story? Or is Donald Glover somehow necessarily Childish Gambino, across all possible Wu-accessible worlds, in the same way that "Clifford Smith" is always and only "Method Man," even when he pretends to be an actor?

I don't think we can ever know. But just as Russell Jones was Ol' Dirty Bastard, ODB, Dirt McGirt, Big Baby Jesus, and Ason Unique as well as Osirus, I am content to be known by many names under the Wu.

(Dedicated to "Sarkastik Beggar" and "Lesbian Pimp." Via @hoverbird.)

Tags: perl   Wu-Tang Clan

Magisterial. (via @moleitau)

Tags: remix   video games   Werner Herzog

This story originally appeared on Grist and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Citizens trying to stop the piping of tar-sands oil through their community wore blue "Clear Skies" shirts at a city council meeting in South Portland, Maine, this week. But they might as well have been wearing boxing gloves. The small city struck a mighty blow against Canadian tar-sands extraction.

"It's been a long fight," said resident Andy Jones after a 6-1 city council vote on Monday to approve the Clear Skies Ordinance, which will block the loading of heavy tar-sands bitumen onto tankers at the city's port.

The measure is intended to stop ExxonMobil and partner companies from bringing Albertan tar-sands oil east through an aging pipeline network to the city's waterfront. Currently, the pipeline transports conventional oil west from Portland to Canada; the companies want to reverse its flow.

After an intensely debated, year-and-a-half battle, the South Portland City Council on Monday sided with residents like Jones who don't want their city to end up as a new "international hub" for the export of tar-sands oil.

"The message to the tar sands industry is: 'Don't be counting your chickens yet,'" said Dylan Voorhees, clean energy director for the Natural Resources Council of Maine. "There is a pattern of communities saying 'no' to the threat of tar-sands oil."
 

A clear signal

The ordinance could have global implications. The Canadian government expects the nation's oil industry to be producing 4 million to 6 million barrels of tar-sands bitumen a day within a few years, and it's pinning its hopes on somehow getting all that oil to coastal ports, said Richard Kuprewicz, president of Washington-based pipeline safety consulting firm Accufacts Inc. Indeed, a recent report from the International Energy Agency found that the industry needs export pipelines in order for its boom to continue.

South Portland's move is just the latest setback for plans to pipe the bitumen out to international markets. Another big hurdle is the long delay over the Keystone XL pipeline. And in Canada, pipeline plans have met with opposition from indigenous peoples (known as First Nations), who are taking the lead to stop projects like the Enbridge Northern Gateway tar-sands pipeline through British Columbia.

Now, there is a clear signal that communities along the U.S. East Coast will fight tar-sands expansion too.

"Do not underestimate the power of a local government," said Kuprewicz.
 

"A lot of perseverance"

In early 2013, residents formed Protect South Portland to try to stop the Portland-Montreal Pipeline reversal. They put an initiative on the November 2013 ballot to block the project, but it lost narrowly at the polls.

So the city council took up the cause. In December of last year, the council voted to impose a six-month moratorium on shipping tar-sands oil out through its port. Then a council-appointed committee crafted the Clear Skies Ordinance to permanently block tar-sands shipments, which is what the council officially approved this week. The law also changes zoning rules to block the construction of twin smokestacks that would be needed to burn off bitumen-thinning chemicals before the oil could be shipped out.

Over the past few months, concerned residents met in homes and Protect South Portland grew. Meanwhile, the group Energy Citizens, backed by the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry's largest trade group, ran ads that said "It's just oil. From Canada." The oil companies hired a number of lawyers and brought public relations firms on board.

Protect South Portland spokeswoman MJ Ferrier estimates that the grassroots group was outspent by at least 6 to 1.

So how did residents win over Big Oil? "A lot of perseverance and a lot of community engagement," Voorhees said.

After the vote, supporters of the ordinance went to a local bar, and "we raised our glasses," Jones told Grist.
 

Cautious celebration

But while local activists are celebrating this week's win, they know "this is not the end," said Jones.

South Portland Councilor Tom Blake, who's been a champion of the effort to protect the city from tar sands, said a legal challenge seems imminent, by either Portland Pipe Line Corp., a subsidiary of ExxonMobil, or by the Canadian government. Blake had this message for the oil company and Canadian officials Monday evening: "This ordinance is the will of the people," he said. "Do not spend millions of dollars and force the city of South Portland to do the same."

But the oil interests are unlikely to heed his warning.

Tom Hardison, vice president of Portland Pipe Line, told reporters that the city had made a rush decision and bowed to environmental "off-oil extremists." He added that the zoning changes amounted to a "job-killing ordinance" that prevents the city's port from adapting to meet the energy needs of North America.

Matthew Manahan, attorney for Portland Pipe Line, told the city council before the vote that its ordinance is "illegal" and "would clearly be preempted by federal and state law."

"The council is ignoring the law" and "ignoring science," the lawyer added.
 

Air and water worries

Like the process of extracting tar-sands oil, the process of transporting it takes a huge toll on the environment. Before the heavy, almost-solid bitumen can be sent through pipelines, it has to be thinned with a concoction of liquid natural gas and other hydrocarbons. And then before it can be loaded onto ships, that concoction has to be burned off. ExxonMobil currently holds permits to build two smokestacks on South Portland's waterfront that would do the burning.

Ferrier, a retired psychologist and a nun, joined Protect South Portland largely out of concern for what the oil companies' plans would do to air quality in an area that has already received a "C" for ozone pollution from the American Lung Association. The proposed smokestacks would emit volatile organic compounds (VOCs). "We know there is benzene in it, a known carcinogen," said Ferrier.

Resident Andrew Parker had similar concerns. "Tonight is about children," he said at Monday's city council meeting. "The oil company will put poison in the air, that is a fact."

For Mayor Gerard Jalbert, who also sits on the city council and voted in support of the ordinance, it came down to concerns about water quality. The risk of water contamination in the case of a spill far outweighed the nebulous claims about job creation.

"When I look at the economic benefit, which no seems to be able to detail, the risk seems to outweigh the benefit," Jalbert told Grist.

The easternmost 236-mile stretch of pipeline crosses some of the most sensitive ecosystems in Maine, including the Androscoggin River, the pristine Crooked River, and Sebago Lake, which supplies drinking water for 15 percent of the state's population.

Blake, the council member, is worried that using old pipes to transport heavy bitumen could lead to a spill like the one that happened in Mayflower, Ark., in March 2013, when an ExxonMobil pipeline built in the 1940s ruptured and spilled hundreds of thousands of gallons of tar-sands oil.

Saying "no" to tar sands is part of a bigger shift to a greener future in South Portland, Blake added. "Being a community that has been heavily dependent on petroleum, this turns a tide," the councilor said.

He pointed to a new electric-car charging station at the city's community center and potential plans to build a solar farm on an old landfill as steps toward a sustainable future. "I think we are starting to walk the talk," Blake said.

Recommended image :  Spring pastel

Bonsai! In! Spaaaaaaaace!!

This image is from Exobiotanica, a project that sent various plants about 100,000 feet into the sky.

From Mapbox, a map of places in the US where it is unsafe or illegal to fly drones. Forbidden areas include near airports and in National Parks. (via @tcarmody)

Tags: drones   maps

MIT's Franz-Josef Ulm has taken to analyzing the structure of cities as if they were molecular materials like glass or crystal.

With colleagues, Ulm began analyzing cities the way you'd analyze a material, looking at factors such as the arrangement of buildings, each building's center of mass, and how they're ordered around each other. They concluded that cities could be grouped into categories: Boston's structure, for example, looks a lot like an "amorphous liquid." Seattle is another liquid, and so is Los Angeles. Chicago, which was designed on a grid, looks like glass, he says; New York resembles a highly ordered crystal.

I love this. It's like Jane Jacobs + the materials science research I did in college.

So far, Ulm says, the work has two potential applications. First, it could help predict and mitigate urban heat island effects, the fact that cities tend to be several degrees warmer than their surrounding areas-a phenomenon that has a major impact on energy use. (His research on how this relates to structure is currently undergoing peer review.) Second, he says that cities' molecular order (or disorder) may also affect their vulnerability to the kinds of catastrophic weather events that are becoming more frequent thanks to climate change.

(via 5 intriguing things)

Tags: cities   Franz-Josef Ulm   physics   science

A couple in a kayak gets too close to a whale and then the whale raises them right out of the water. And not just for a moment either.

Tags: video

By Hugh Powell

A study of one of the world’s largest and most colorful bird families has dispelled a long-held notion, first proposed by Charles Darwin, that animals are limited in their options to evolve showiness. The study—the largest of its kind yet attempted—was published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The natural world is full of showstoppers—birds with brilliant colors, exaggerated crests and tails, intricate dance routines, or virtuosic singing. But it’s long been thought that these abilities are the result of trade-offs. For a species to excel in one area, it must give up its edge in another. For example, male Northern Cardinals are a dazzling scarlet but sing a fairly simple whistle, whereas the dull brown House Wren sings one of the most complicated songs in nature.

Compare the two songs:
Northern Cardinal:

House Wren:

Animals have limited resources, and they have to spend those in order to develop showy plumage or precision singing that help them attract mates and defend territories,” said Nick Mason, the paper’s lead author.  “So it seems to make sense that you can’t have both. But our study took a more detailed look and suggests that actually, some species can.” Mason did the research as a master’s student at San Diego State University. He is now a Ph.D. student at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Mason and his colleagues tested the idea of trade-offs by looking at a very large family of songbirds from Central and South America, the tanagers. This group consists of 371 species—nearly 10 percent of all songbirds. It includes some of the most spectacularly colorful birds in the world (such as the Paradise Tanager) as well as more drab birds (like the Black-bellied Seedeater). The group also includes both accomplished and weak songsters alike.

Compare the two songs:
Paradise Tanager:
Black-bellied Seedeater:

The research team examined museum specimens of 303 tanager species, using a spectrophotometer to measure nine aspects of plumage coloration, such as brilliance and contrast. They took a similar approach to the birds’ songs, analyzing more than 2,700 recordings to measure 20 song variables including length, bandwidth, and number of syllables. (By the end of the project, Mason had earned the distinction of being the largest-ever single user of the Cornell Lab’s Macaulay Library sound archives.) Finally, the team compared how plumage and song complexity varied at each of the branches along a recently completed evolutionary tree of the tanager family.

“If there were going to be any group of birds at all that would show this trade-off, the tanagers would be a very good candidate, because there’s all this variation in song and plumage complexity,” Mason said, noting that the group’s large size lends confidence to the statistical analysis. “But when we dive into it and do some rigorous statistics, it turns out that there is no overall trend. Tanagers can be drab and plain-sounding, or colorful and musical, or anything in between.”

Hear the song:

As a byproduct of the analyses, Mason was able to put together top-10 lists of tanagers with the most colorful plumage and the most complex songs. Those lists help illustrate the overall lack of a trade-off between singing and plumage. For example, a single genus of mountain-tanagers had members on both lists. The Lacrimose Mountain-Tanager ranked #8 among the most complex songs, while the Blue-winged Mountain-Tanager had the fourth most complex plumage of all 303 species examined.

The study puts a significant dent in the idea of evolutionary trade-offs between plumage and song. It’s still possible that trade-offs take place at the level of genus, Mason said, or that they influence species relatively fleetingly as evolutionary pressures appear and disappear. But as a broad effect on an entire family of birds, a voice–plumage trade-off doesn’t seem to exist. One possibility is that the resources needed to develop fancy plumage are different from the ones required for complex songs, freeing tanagers to invest in both forms of showiness simultaneously.

In addition to Mason, the study’s authors include Allison Shultz and Kevin Burns, both of San Diego State University. The research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society.

(Sounds via Macaulay Library: Northern Cardinal by Gerrit Vyn; House Wren by Geoffrey Keller and Thomas Sander; Paradise Tanager and Black-bellied Seedeater by Theodore Parker III, Blue-winged Mountain-Tanager by Mark Robbins. Top images via Neotropical Birds. Clockwise from upper left: Golden Tanager by Peter W. Wendelken, Swallow Tanager by Frank Shufelt, Blue-winged Mountain-Tanager by Keith Bowers, Red-necked Tanager by Vivek Tiwari, Beryl-spangled Tanager by Priscilla Burcher.)

Since 1979, Jadav Payeng has planted every single tree in a forest that covers some 1360 acres of an island in the Jorhat district of India. The forest helps prevent the erosion of the island and is now home to elephants, rhinos, tigers, and other animals. Forest Man is a short documentary film on how this forest came to be.

(via @AdmiralTwombly)

Tags: Jadav Payeng   video

Josh MacPhee DS128.4 (alternate 1) $30 This is an variation on a print I created for the Librarians and Archivists with Palestine Box Set produced with Booklyn (more info HERE). From the notes of that project:

The librarians at Birzeit University use the Library of Congress classification system even though it does not always appropriately or adequately express subjects in Palestinian history, geography, or culture—because there is no viable alternative. The librarians discussed the struggle to challenge LOC conventions when they petitioned to create a new call number, DS128.4, for the First Intifada, which would represent this period in history. In spite of their efforts, the Library of Congress in the U.S. started using a different call number than the one used at Birzeit. The background pattern is one of many MacPhee drew while on the delegation, inspired by the textures and ornamentation found across Palestine.

For a larger image, click HERE. Printed by Kevin Caplicki at Bushwick Print Lab. 2 color screenprint offwhite acid free stock signed and numbered edition of 5

By Pat Leonard

If an in-person visit to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York, is on your itinerary this summer, be sure to swivel your eyes to the right as you walk into the observatory from the main entrance. You’ll see a large graceful oval made of American walnut reclining against the wall, as if left there temporarily. But there’s more to this simple sculpture than meets the eye. The Lab’s new “Sound Ring” is a unique speaker system created by world-renowned artist Maya Lin. The Ring is the latest installment in Lin’s What Is Missing? memorial to extinct, endangered, or threatened species and habitats, designed as a gift to the Lab for its conservation efforts around the world.

“Viewers are drawn closer by the intriguing echoes of a huge singing ring,” said John W. Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “Woodcocks twitter as they fly from east to west, Common Nighthawks ‘peent’ from overhead, and Olive-sided Flycatchers ring out ‘quick, three-beers!’ from distant limbs off to the south. Haunting wails of a lonely loon carry us to a moonlit Adirondack lake. Then, hearing a chorus of clarinet-like notes overhead, we are standing beneath a family group of Indri lemurs in a Madagascar rainforest. The sounds surround us with stories of beauty, fragility, vulnerability, and loss. They cry to us for help, lest they disappear forever.”

“To me, memorials represent a stepping-off point,” said Lin during the May 30 unveiling of the Sound Ring. “We can’t do anything about what has already been lost, but can we learn enough from the past to rethink a different and better future?”

The Sound Ring joins other sculptures and videos by Maya Lin plus permanent and traveling exhibits that are part of the “What is Missing?” memorial— the last memorial Lin says she will create. Binding it all together is the What Is Missing? website which highlights loss, connects to conservation groups around the world working to protect species and habitats (including the Lab of Ornithology), and will envision how we could live sustainably with the planet. The website engages individuals to help build a global memorial to the planet. You can visit What Is Missing? to add a memory about something you have witnessed diminish or disappear from the natural world or add a story about conservation or recovery.

“As an artist, I want to get people to think outside the box and give them hope that there is something they can do as individuals,” explained Lin. “The loss of species and habitats is all about land use and resource consumption. We have to make species protection through habitat conservation a huge priority because what we’re doing right now is spending our kids’ and our grandkids’ future.”

The Lab’s Macaulay Library archive played an important role in Lin’s creation, providing the recordings used in the Sound Ring to reproduce habitat soundscapes, including the North American forest, the Indian Ocean, and an Amazon rainforest. Individual species include everything from frogs to gibbons, Humpback whales to jaguars—and of course, birds. Additional sounds and soundscapes will be added over time, controlled by an iPad in the visitor center. There’s no one “sweet spot” for visitors to stand—the sounds have a depth and range that works no matter where you’re positioned in relation to the Sound Ring. Lin says her intent was to create a “spatial acoustic experience.”

And if you can’t make it to the Cornell Lab, listen to these sample clips from the Sound Ring. Close your eyes and immerse yourself in the sounds. Then visit the What Is Missing? project website to explore how your personal actions can make a difference for endangered wildlife and threatened landscapes.

Here’s a few species included in the Sound Ring:

Common Loon

Humpback whale

Weddell seal

Indri

The Sound Ring was designed by the Maya Lin Studio and fabricated at the Walla Walla Foundry in Missouri out of sustainably harvested American walnut. Arup Associates created the sound design.

Read more about Maya Lin and her collaboration with the Cornell Lab:

• Maya Lin’s “What Is Missing?” Project Uses Lab Sound, Video
• Cornell Lab Helps Artist Maya Lin Ask “What is Missing?” on Earth Day 2012

(Photos by Jason Koski, Cornell University Photography)

According to data collected by a European satellite array, the Earth's magnetic field is shifting and weakening at a greater pace than previously thought. One of the reasons for the shift might be that the magnetic North and South poles are swapping positions.

Scientists already know that magnetic north shifts. Once every few hundred thousand years the magnetic poles flip so that a compass would point south instead of north. While changes in magnetic field strength are part of this normal flipping cycle, data from Swarm have shown the field is starting to weaken faster than in the past. Previously, researchers estimated the field was weakening about 5 percent per century, but the new data revealed the field is actually weakening at 5 percent per decade, or 10 times faster than thought. As such, rather than the full flip occurring in about 2,000 years, as was predicted, the new data suggest it could happen sooner.

You can read up on geomagnetic reversals on Wikipedia. A short sampling:

These periods [of polarity] are called chrons. The time spans of chrons are randomly distributed with most being between 0.1 and 1 million years with an average of 450,000 years. Most reversals are estimated to take between 1,000 and 10,000 years. The latest one, the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal, occurred 780,000 years ago. A brief complete reversal, known as the Laschamp event, occurred only 41,000 years ago during the last glacial period. That reversal lasted only about 440 years with the actual change of polarity lasting around 250 years. During this change the strength of the magnetic field dropped to 5% of its present strength.

Tags: Earth   physics   science