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Nestled between two national parks, Sequoia and Death Valley, there is a ghost town for sale. For a little under a million dollars, you could own a piece of the American West: an abandoned silver mining town founded in 1867 called Cerro Gordo.

Mental Floss reports:

Located in Owens Valley near the town of Lone Pine, the $925,000 property comes with over 300 acres of land, mineral rights, and no shortage of peace and quiet. There are 22 structures on site, including a historic hotel, bunkhouse, saloon, chapel, and museum—plus all of the artifacts that come with it.

“The site has been extremely well protected from diggers, artifact looters, and Mother Nature herself,” reads the listing, posted on a website specially created for the property that's aptly named ghosttownforsale.com. “Restoration has been undertaken on most of the buildings, and the rest are in a state of protected arrested decay.”

From its listing:

Held by the same family for decades and only available for purchase now. The site has been extremely well protected from diggers. artifact looters and Mother Nature herself. Restoration has been undertaken on most of the buildings. and the rest are in a state of protected arrested decay.

The site is historic as the first major mining camp south of the Sierra Nevada. Cerro Gordo is a privately-owned Mining Town located in the Owens Valley near Lone Pine, California. The town was the silver thread to Los Angeles, being partially responsible for its growth and economic development.

Too rich for your blood? Try taking a walking tour of Cerro Gordo before it gets sold instead.

A Historic Ghost Town in California Is Up for Sale

(digg)

Thanks to the always-excellent Instagram feed of intrepid musicologists Dust To Digital for introducing me to guitarist Hannes Coetzee of South Africa's Karoo region. His spoon-in-mouth slide guitar technique is called "optel and knyp," Afrikaans for "picking up and pinching."

Coetzee was featured in David Kramer's 2004 documentary Karoo Kitaar Blues about the history of folk music traditions across South Africa.

Hannes Coetzee, from the Karoo region of South Africa, is the inventor of teaspoon guitar playing. Here he is performing a song called “De Kip, de Haan en de Boer.” Video shot by @bokete7

A post shared by Dust-to-Digital (@dusttodigital) on Jun 6, 2018 at 8:21am PDT

There’s a tendency these days to disregard the idea of “storytelling.” Like so many terms it’s been overused, its meaning stretched to within an inch of its life. We watch a lot of Netflix and obsess over some stories in the news but we don’t read as many books and we don’t gather around the fire to tell stories so much. But they have been part of our lives forever. In Our fiction addiction: Why humans need stories, the author takes us through some of the oldest stories we tell and why evolutionary theorists are studying them.

One common idea is that storytelling is a form of cognitive play that hones our minds, allowing us to simulate the world around us and imagine different strategies, particularly in social situations. “It teaches us about other people and it’s a practice in empathy and theory of mind,” says Joseph Carroll at the University of Missouri-St Louis. […]

Providing some evidence for this theory, brain scans have shown that reading or hearing stories activates various areas of the cortex that are known to be involved in social and emotional processing, and the more people read fiction, the easier they find it to empathise with other people. […]

Crucially, this then appeared to translate to their real-life behaviour; the groups that appeared to invest the most in storytelling also proved to be the most cooperative during various experimental tasks - exactly as the evolutionary theory would suggest. […]

By mapping the spread of oral folktales across different cultural groups in Europe and Asia, some anthropologists have also estimated that certain folktales - such as the Faustian story of The Smith and the Devil - may have arrived with the first Indo-European settlers more than 6,000 years ago, who then spread out and conquered the continent, bringing their fiction with them.

The author also says this; “Although we have no firm evidence of storytelling before the advent of writing.” He then goes on to write about the paintings in Lascaux which seem to be telling stories, so he’s aware of some examples. Randomly today I also happened on this about Australia’s ancient language shaped by sharks which talks about the beautiful history of the Yanyuwa people and their relationship with the tiger shark. They’ve been “dreaming,” telling stories, for 40,000-years!

This forms one of the oldest stories in the world, the tiger shark dreaming. The ‘dreaming’ is what Aboriginal people call their more than 40,000-year-old history and mythology; in this case, the dreaming describes how the Gulf of Carpentaria and rivers were created by the tiger shark.

And then there’s this incredible aspect of their culture:

What’s especially unusual about Yanyuwa is that it’s one of the few languages in the world where men and women speak different dialects. Only three women speak the women’s dialect fluently now, and Friday is one of few males who still speaks the men’s. Aboriginal people in previous decades were forced to speak English, and now there are only a few elderly people left who remember the language.

Tags: history

Andy W writes, "An artist/illustrator friend of mine just put an illustration of hers up on RedBubble — two iconic science-fiction television characters sharing a tender moment on the couch."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIxuxfsSGNI&feature=youtu.be

The Bayou Vista Wal Mart put up a new pole in its parking lot and vehicles struck it ten times in a week. The pole was given the nickname "Patrick" and is now protected by an honor guard of shopping carts. There are no plans to relocate it.

On May 29, 2018, Starbucks stores in the United States closed for part of the day to deliver “implicit bias training” for all of its employees. Canadian Starbucks employees were to get similar training on June 11.

Whether you have heard of implicit or unconscious biases through Starbucks’ recent controversy or as a topic in the 2016 U.S. presidential debates, the topic of implicit bias seems like it is everywhere.

We are all familiar with the concept of explicit biases. These include attitudes and behaviours regarding certain groups with the intent to harm or exclude. Explicit biases can be obvious, such as racism or believing one ethnic group is superior to another. They can also be subtler, like favouring someone we know.

These explicit biases are conscious, intentional, and deliberate.

In contrast, implicit biases are stereotypes that form through our experiences and that work outside of our awareness. Even though we are not aware of them, implicit biases lead to discriminatory behaviours and biased decisions.

Implicit biases can also include nonverbal behaviours or avoidance. By their very nature, implicit biases are automatic beliefs or associated behaviours that influence us without our knowledge and despite our best intentions.

Implicit bias is harmful

Starbucks’ baristas are not the only workers who demonstrate implicit bias.

When individuals with “black-sounding names” applied for jobs compared with individuals with “white-sounding names,” the people with white names received 50% more callbacks. In another study, psychologists who were applying for jobs found that out of two identical CVs, one would be rated more positively if it was attached to the name Brian compared with the name Karen.

Research on implicit bias in health care has demonstrated how health professionals can make biased clinical decisions, even when their intentions are to treat all groups fairly.

For example, an important study by doctor Alexander Green and his colleagues in 2007 found that despite explicitly denying a preference for white versus black patients, doctors implicitly saw black patients as less cooperative regarding medical procedures. Those doctors who demonstrated increased levels of implicit biases were more likely to treat their white patients over treating black patients for their heart attacks.

Similar research has found that implicit biases contribute to racial disparities in pain treatment and adversely influence several patient populations.

We also know that implicit biases lead to behaviour that undermines trust. Groups that experience discrimination experience a profound negative effect that leads to self-reinforcing cycles of distancing and disconnection.

Individuals who encounter implicit biases can gradually internalize them, and this leads members of certain marginalized groups to begin to conform to negative biases about themselves.

Bias training for all?

Should we all follow Starbucks’ lead and implement implicit bias training in our organizations?

While implicit bias is a problem that erodes equity and perpetuates discrimination, research on implicit bias training highlights mixed results and suggests that implicit bias training alone will not solve the problem.

My research on implicit bias in health professions sought to understand how this training works. Early in our journey, we learned that simply making individuals aware of their implicit biases was not enough. When our participants became aware of their biases through an online metric of implicit bias called the implicit association test (IAT), developed by researchers at Harvard, it led to significant emotional distress and a defensive reaction.

A hard look in the mirror can hurt

We were surprised to find that when we provided people with feedback about their implicit biases, this information was inconsistent with an idealized version of themselves that was simply impossible to achieve.

Societal pressures and stigma against being prejudiced led to individuals feeling like they are not allowed to have any bias despite the fact that we all have biases, and not all biases can be eliminated. In fact, some biases may be helpful to keep us safe.

Implicit bias training is therefore unique from other forms of diversity training because a conversation on implicit bias must start with a hard look in the mirror. The conversation can only begin once we humble ourselves by recognizing that we are all deeply flawed and imperfect human beings.

Training can be most effective when there is a balance between psychological safety and motivation to change behaviour.

Knowing and reflecting

Simply knowing about our biases is not enough. Once we become aware of our own biases, we must reflect on how these biases impact ourselves and others.

Discussion and dialogue are both important to reflect on how certain biases may be negative or positive and useful or counterproductive, depending on context. Then, we must begin to set and practise tangible changes in our explicit behaviours.

For example, our research found that physicians and nurses often have implicit biases towards individuals with mental illness who come into emergency departments because these health professionals label such patients as “unfixable” and implicitly avoid them because they do not feel like they can offer their patients any assistance.

The patients, however, perceived this implicit avoidance as prejudice and discrimination. Our initial training highlighted these biases for doctors and nurses but also promoted explicitly and intentionally engaging with such patients to counter the tendency to avoid them.

We also learned that accomplishing change requires dialogue to reconcile our biases, and open conversations with our peers can help motivate us to change behaviour.

Learning together

Interventions to reduce the adverse impact of bias are most effective when people who work together learn together and when teams feel comfortable being open about their biases with one another.

Our training was most effective when it was accompanied by constant discussion and dialogue among people who work together. Individuals who participated in the training began questioning biased practices and demonstrating new behaviours that provided a model for others in the workplace to emulate.

Another challenge with implementing bias training is that biases and inequities often become embedded in workplace structures and policies over time. In our most recently published paper, we followed participants for 12 months after they participated in implicit bias training.

Initially, these participants told us that they enjoyed learning about their biases and wanted to change, but any change they promoted went up against a workplace culture that was a barrier to change.

As we followed them over time, participants began reflecting on their biases and engaging in explicit behavioural changes that influenced the perception of structural changes within the learning environment itself. Together, our participants began co-constructing social change.

This finding is important because addressing implicit bias cannot be achieved by individuals alone. Explicit structural and organizational changes are also required to promote change.

If we encourage individuals to question biased norms within their workplace but then they speak up and face retribution for doing so, we are creating more problems than we are solving. If any company wants implicit bias training to be successful, the company itself must survey its policies and processes and be prepared to change them.

If your company decides to implement implicit bias training, make sure you ask them what else they plan on doing to promote equity and reduce discrimination. Shutting stores or implementing mandatory training will simply not be enough.

I’m a big fan of Estelle Caswell’s Earworm series for Vox, and this most recent one might be my favorite. It’s about the “orchestra hit” sound that became super popular in the 80s…but which has its origins in an unauthorized sample of Igor Stravinsky included with an influential digital audio workstation invented in the late 70s.

If you listen to the first few seconds of Bruno Mars’ “Finesse” (hint: listen to the Cardi B remix) you’ll hear a sound that immediately creates a sense of 80s hip-hop nostalgia. Yes, Cardi B’s flow is very Roxanne Shante, but the sound that drives that nostalgia home isn’t actually from the 1980s.

Robert Fink and the inventor of the Fairlight CMI, Peter Vogel, help me tell the story of the orchestra hit — a sound that was first heard in 1910 at the Paris Opera where the famed 20th century Russian composer Stravinsky debuted his first hit, The Firebird.

Here’s the isolated sound from the original sample:

I love that all these musicians in the 80s got excited about a bit of classical music composed for a 1910 ballet, to the point where it became perhaps the signature sound of the decade.

The popularity of the orchestra hit is also a good reminder about the power of default settings. The musicians and producers who used the Fairlight CMI could record and sample any sound in the world but they ended up using this one included with the machine. Even the heavyweights — Herbie Hancock, Afrika Bambaataa, etc. — went with a default sample.

Caswell made a playlist of songs that feature the orchestra hit, with songs from Keith Sweat, Britney Spears, Janet Jackson, U2, and The Smiths. Not included is the song it was sampled from…you can listen to that here.

Tags: Estelle Caswell   Igor Stravinsky   music   remix   video

Saturation divers are specialized workers doing construction or demolition hundreds of feet below the water's surface. This detailed report gives a sense of what it's like to have a grueling routine where a tiny mistake could mean a quick and painful death. (more…)

Dan Nosowitz doesn't know how to waste time on the internet anymore. Same.

EPA head Scott Pruitt has gone on a multi-million dollar luxury item spending spree at taxpayers' expense. With his soundproof booth, bulletproof limousines, and chartered private jets, he seems to think people care who he is and are out to get him, when in truth he's just one of the indistinguishable swamp creatures appointed by Trump to dismantle the federal government's regulatory agencies.

His expensive form of ego gratification has become so flagrant that various organizations in the federal government are finally doing something about it. “Scott Pruitt Is now being investigated by the House of Representatives, Senate, White House, Office of Management and Budget, Government Accountability Office, and EPA Inspector General,” tweeted Rep. Don Beyer (Dem, VA).

Scott Pruitt Is now being investigated by the House of Representatives, Senate, White House, Office of Management and Budget, Government Accountability Office, and EPA Inspector Generalhttps://t.co/NDMMt8njHe

— Rep. Don Beyer (@RepDonBeyer) April 18, 2018

From Beyer's press release:

This week the number of investigations into embattled EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s ethics lapses and wasteful spending grew substantially, and more may be announced in coming weeks.

The latest wave of investigations came as the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report saying that Pruitt had broken laws when he ordered the installation of a $43,000 “secure privacy booth” without informing Congress:

• The General Accountability Office has already determined that Pruitt broke laws when he installed a privacy booth at exorbitant expense; the nonpartisan investigator has also been asked to look into the raises Pruitt gave to staff using an obscure legal loophole and his purges of the EPA’s advisory boards.
• The House Oversight Committee asked Pruitt for a series of documents and witness interviews spanning many of his scandals.
• The House Energy and Commerce Committee is now “seeking information on a flood of ethics questions and lavish spending” by Pruitt.
• The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is investigating Pruitt’s use of multiple emails, and whether he evaded FOIA requests.
• The White House said it would probe Pruitt’s relationship with an energy lobbyist who gave him a special deal on his condo rent.
• The Office of Management and Budget will investigate Pruitt’s wasteful spending of $43,000 on a privacy booth.
• The EPA Office of the Inspector General is currently conducting investigations into Pruitt over (1) his possible violation of anti-lobbying laws (2) his spending on security (3) his expensive privacy booth, and (4A) his travel, a probe which it subsequently (4B) expanded (4C) twice.

The EPA Office of the Inspector General is also weighing requests by Reps. Don Beyer and Ted Lieu and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse to determine whether Pruitt violated any laws or regulations with his condo arrangement.

The Office of Government Ethics is not empowered to investigate or punish ethics lapses at the EPA, but its acting head still sent a letter outlining a series of concerns about Pruitt’s potential ethics lapses to EPA ethics officials.

While Pruitt remains in office, additional investigations of his many wasteful and unethical activities are likely to follow.

If you would like to help get Pruitt fired, Re:act recommends using this "NRDC tool to ask your senators to publicly call on Pruitt to be fired."

Scott Pruitt is hurting the environment and living in luxury on taxpayer dime — it’s time for him to go pic.twitter.com/FNyKq7krWg

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) April 17, 2018

Image: By Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America - Scott Pruitt, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

Author and historian Studs Terkel's long-running radio show The Studs Terkel Program will now be available in a public archive online.

(more…)

Ever since American Sign Language interpreter Amber Galloway Gallego went viral after signing Kendrick Lamar’s Lollapalooza set in 2013, more attention has been paid to ASL interpreters at festivals. But Brooke Chambers, the ASL program manager for C3 Presents (the promoter behind Lollapalooza and the Austin City Limits Music Festival), asserts, "Really, we’ve been there … More »

In the summer of 1978, eight NY Times staff photographers, who had some time on their hands because of a newspaper strike, set out to document people using NYC’s parks. They took almost 3000 photos, which were recently rediscovered in a pair of cardboard boxes, forgotten and unseen for decades.

The infamous wretched New York of the 1970s and 1980s can be glimpsed here, true to the pages of outlaw history.

But that version has never been truth enough.

The photos speak a commanding, unwritten narrative of escape and discovery.

“You see that people were not going to the parks just to get away from it all, but also to find other people,” said Jonathan Kuhn, the director of art and antiquities for the department.

The NY Times has a selection of the photos and there’s an exhibition featuring the photos on view at The Arsenal Gallery in Central Park until June 14.

Tags: NYC   photography

Over the weekend, Childish Gambino (aka Donald Glover) released a video for his new song, This is America. If you watch it — and you should if you haven’t, even though it isn’t the most Monday morning thing in the world — please know there’s some upsetting scenes…which is the whole point. There’s a lot going on in the video (here’s one thread by LK that explains some of the imagery), but the aspect that jumped out to me is white America’s exuberant acceptance (and co-option) of African American culture and entertainment — hip hop, rap, NBA, movies, TV (like Glover’s own Atlanta), social media memetics — while turning a blind eye to racial injustice and violence inflicted upon black America. As Jon Spence succinctly noted on Twitter:

The fact that Childish Gambino’s “This is America” tackles police brutality, gun violence, media misdirection, and the use of African Americans as a brand shield, all while dancing in Jim Crow-style caricature, shows a transcendence of mere performance and demands attention.

Update: Nereyda wrote a short thread about why they didn’t like the video.

As someone very into Diasporic dance, which literally saved my life, Glover’s video misses its mark completely for me. Graphic images of mass Black murder layered over by Black dance as a minstrel distraction? That’s what y’all are getting from this? Issa no for me dawg.

(via @tsell89/status/993609185223938048)

Update: From Spencer Kornhaber’s take on This is America (italics mine):

The defining of a nation is the essential task of politics, and Glover’s definition has now been made clear. America is a place where black people are chased and gunned down, and it is a place where black people dance and sing to distract — themselves, maybe, but also the country at large — from that carnage. America is a room in which violence and celebration happen together, and the question of which one draws the eye is one of framing, and of what the viewer wants to see.

Tags: Childish Gambino   Donald Glover   music   video

"Have you ever been to Baden-Baden or Walla Walla? Have you worn a tutu or a lava-lava? Have you eaten a bonbon or suffered from (let's hope not!) beriberi?" Reduplication.

Wesley Morris unsurprisingly has written a very good essay about Bill Cosby — specifically, the ways in which Cosby created and blended his own persona along with that of his signature character Cliff Huxtable. He did this to root himself in America’s psychological life, and to make himself indispensable in the entertainment industry, both of which shielded him for many years from the consequences of his crimes. It was, as Morris says, Cosby’s “sickest joke.”

Bill Cosby was good at his job. That sums up why the guilty verdict Thursday is depressing — depressing not for its shock but for the work the verdict now requires me to do. The discarding and condemning and reconsidering — of the shows, the albums, the movies. But I don’t need to watch them anymore. It’s too late. I’ve seen them. I’ve absorbed them. I’ve lived them. I’m a black man, so I am them.

There’s a strange connection between serial abusers and auteurism. People take advantage of power in lots of different ways, and one of them is to assume credit for other people’s work — if not outright, than by insinuation. Cosby and Woody Allen are the two most extreme types: they worked to make themselves inseparable from the art they associated themselves with, in a way that both attracted talented collaborators and sponged credit away from them.

If I could exorcize Cosby from The Cosby Show and retain Phylicia Rashad’s performances forever, or Woody Allen from Annie Hall and do the same for Gordon Willis’s photography, I would. Part of the sick joke is that you can’t. At the same time, I don’t want to give them up. I don’t want to lose Joan Rivers’s amazing turn on Louie just because that scene (where Louis CK ends up trying to force a kiss on Joan) seems extra gross now. It’s already been ingested; it can’t easily be carved out.

This is why I sometimes say: burn the monster, and steal their jokes. This is the punishment for their years of abuse, of lies, of intimidation, of fraud: the work they made is forfeit. Cosby loses all credit for making The Cosby Show; Allen all credit for his films; it is as if they were written/produced/directed by ghosts. All credit goes to the geniuses they reeled in as unwitting collaborators, without whom they would have always been sad, useless men.

It doesn’t completely work. It doesn’t stop money flowing into their pockets, as a boycott might. It doesn’t stop you from getting angry when you see their stupid faces, as avoiding their work might. But in the handful of cases where the art is so constitutive that you can’t avoid it, it’s a fiction that helps preserve some fraction of the joy it used to. At any rate, it’s the bargain I’ve struck.

Tags: Bill Cosby   Woody Allen

As I said recently in the newsletter and in my media diet post for March, I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace’s 2005 collection of nonfiction. Each story I listen to is somehow been better than the last, and Wallace’s piece on John McCain’s failed run for the Republican nomination in 2000 was no exception. You can the as-published article in Rolling Stone, but it’s worth seeking out the much longer unabridged version in Consider the Lobster or stand-alone in McCain’s Promise.

While the piece is a time capsule of circa 2000 Republican politics — which politics seem totally quaint by today’s standards; for instance, Wallace describes McCain as one of the most right-wing members of Congress — what makes it so great and relevant is the timelessness of Wallace’s conclusions about politics, why politicians run, why people vote (and don’t vote), and why anyone should care about all of this in the first place.

There are many elements of the McCain2000 campaign — naming the bus “Straight Talk,” the timely publication of Faith of My Fathers, the much-hyped “openness” and “spontaneity” of the Express’s media salon, the message-disciplined way McCain thumps “Always. Tell you. The truth” — that indicate that some very shrewd, clever marketers are trying to market this candidate’s rejection of shrewd, clever marketing. Is this bad? Or just confusing? Suppose, let’s say, you’ve got a candidate who says polls are bullshit and totally refuses to tailor his campaign style to polls, and suppose then that new polls start showing that people really like this candidate’s polls-are-bullshit stance and are thinking about voting for him because of it, and suppose the candidate reads these polls (who wouldn’t?) and then starts saying even more loudly and often that polls are bullshit and that he won’t use them to decide what to say, maybe turning “Polls are bullshit” into a campaign line and repeating it in every speech and even painting Polls Are Bullshit on the side of his bus….Is he a hypocrite? Is it hypocritical that one of McCain’s ads’ lines South Carolina is “Telling the truth even when it hurts him politically,” which of course since it’s an ad means that McCain is trying to get political benefit out of his indifference to political benefits? What’s the difference between hypocrisy and paradox?

That’s just one of the many passages that reminded me of the 2016 election and the appeal to voters of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders (and also of a certain Barack Obama in 2008 & 2012) but also makes you think deeply about how and why millions of people decide to put their support and faith and trust into a single person to represent their interests and identity in our national government.

See also Why’s This So (Damn) Good (and Topical)? David Foster Wallace and “McCain’s Promise”.

Tags: books   Consider the Lobster   David Foster Wallace   John McCain   politics

For a Britain's Got Talent audition, stand-up comedian Lost Voice Guy (aka Lee Ridley) performed a brilliant set without speaking a word. The voiceless 37-year-old British comic used a synthetic voice machine to deliver his jokes which had the audience and judges in stitches.

He writes:

I also have Cerebral Palsy. I have no speech (I use a small machine called a Lightwriter to speak) and I walk with a limp. Don't worry though, you can't catch it from me. It just means that you better not get stuck behind me on the stairs if there's a fire.

More of his comedy sets can be viewed on his website.

In this short film, animator and director Ainslie Henderson talks about how he designs puppets for his stop motion animations, creating a charming little stop motion music video in the process.

Puppet-making often begins by just gathering stuff, like materials that I find attractive. Wood and sticks and wire and leaves and flowers and petals and bits of broken electronics…things that have already had a life are lovely to have in puppets.

Tags: Ainslie Henderson   stop motion   video

Just Brutal.

See the tiny dot in the center of the photo above? That's a single strontium atom, visible to the naked eye. University of Oxford quantum physicist David Nadlinger's photo (full image below) won this year's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council's scientific photography competition.

“The idea of being able to see a single atom with the naked eye had struck me as a wonderfully direct and visceral bridge between the miniscule quantum world and our macroscopic reality," Nadlinger says. "A back-of-the-envelope calculation showed the numbers to be on my side, and when I set off to the lab with camera and tripods one quiet Sunday afternoon, I was rewarded with this particular picture of a small, pale blue dot.”

From the EPSRC:

'Single Atom in an Ion Trap’, by David Nadlinger, from the University of Oxford, shows the atom held by the fields emanating from the metal electrodes surrounding it. The distance between the small needle tips is about two millimetres.

When illuminated by a laser of the right blue-violet colour the atom absorbs and re-emits light particles sufficiently quickly for an ordinary camera to capture it in a long exposure photograph. The winning picture was taken through a window of the ultra-high vacuum chamber that houses the ion trap.

Laser-cooled atomic ions provide a pristine platform for exploring and harnessing the unique properties of quantum physics. They can serve as extremely accurate clocks and sensors or, as explored by the UK Networked Quantum Information Technologies Hub, as building blocks for future quantum computers, which could tackle problems that stymie even today’s largest supercomputers.

See all of the stunning prize winners here: "Single Trapped Atom Captures Science Photography Competition's top prize" (EPSRC)

Clue the movie sported an amazing cast who were clearly having a ball with the film. Clue the board game was never very much fun.

Riffing on the board game finale of declaring the murderer, location and weapon, the movie came with three alternate endings. Different theaters got different versions.

The game never ended fast enough.

Senator for Illinois Tammy Duckworth didn't take kindly to Trump's claim that anyone who doesn't clap for him like a trained chimp is guilty of treason, a crime punishable by death. She tweeted, "We don't live in a dictatorship or a monarchy. I swore an oath — in the military and in the Senate — to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, not to mindlessly cater to the whims of Cadet Bone Spurs and clap when he demands I clap."

We don't live in a dictatorship or a monarchy. I swore an oath—in the military and in the Senate—to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, not to mindlessly cater to the whims of Cadet Bone Spurs and clap when he demands I clap https://t.co/99gW1yalDl

— Tammy Duckworth (@SenDuckworth) February 6, 2018

Bone spur image by James Heilman, MD - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Trump hair image by Michael Vadon, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

In The Guardian, Oliver Burkeman writes about the benefits of time-shifting your news reading.

One excellent way to stay calm but well-informed, I’ve found, is to consume the news a day or three later than everyone else. Print is one way to do this. But it works online, too: more and more, I find myself promiscuously cruising the web, saving umpteen articles in a “read later” app (in my case Evernote, though you could use your browser’s bookmarks). By the time I read them, the time filter has worked its magic: a small proportion of them stand out as truly compelling.

A new car loses about 10% of its value as soon as you drive it off the lot; most news depreciates a lot faster than that. Humans are curious, hard-wired to seek out new information on a continuous basis. But not everything we haven’t seen before is worth our attention. As Burkeman says, a great way to determine if something is intrinsically interesting or worthwhile apart from its novelty is to set it aside for awhile.

My process for gathering links and information for kottke.org is pretty much what Burkeman outlines in the article: when I see something that looks interesting, I file it away and revisit it later. I don’t even leave it that long sometimes…even a few hours works wonders. Most of the links I throw out, some because they weren’t as interesting as I’d hoped from reading a headline or pull quote but more often because they won’t be interesting after a day or two passes. I’m proud that you can go back weeks, months, years, and (more rarely) decades into the kottke.org archives and still find things worth your time.

Tags: kottke.org   Oliver Burkeman

Indra Nooyi, the CEO of PepsiCo, which owns Doritos, was interviewed on the Freakonomics podcast recently. She said her company is making a less crunchy version of Doritos because "woman don’t lick their fingers generously and they don’t like to pour the little broken pieces and the flavor into their mouth," at least not in public.

NOOYI: When you eat out of a flex bag — one of our single-serve bags — especially as you watch a lot of the young guys eat the chips, they love their Doritos, and they lick their fingers with great glee, and when they reach the bottom of the bag they pour the little broken pieces into their mouth, because they don’t want to lose that taste of the flavor, and the broken chips in the bottom. Women would love to do the same, but they don’t. They don’t like to crunch too loudly in public. And they don’t lick their fingers generously and they don’t like to pour the little broken pieces and the flavor into their mouth.

DUBNER: So is there a male and female version of chips that you’re playing with, or no?

NOOYI: It’s not a male and female as much as “are there snacks for women that can be designed and packaged differently?” And yes, we are looking at it, and we’re getting ready to launch a bunch of them soon. For women, low-crunch, the full taste profile, not have so much of the flavor stick on the fingers, and how can you put it in a purse? Because women love to carry a snack in their purse. The whole design capability we built in PepsiCo was to allow design to work with innovation. Not just on packaging colors, but to go through the entire cycle, and say, “All the way to the product in the pantry, or how it’s being carried around, or how they eat it in the car, or drink it in the car, what should be the design of the product, the package, the experience, so that we can influence the entire chain?”

The New York Times reported that PepsiCo has been furiously backpedaling since the interview ran:

“The reporting on a specific Doritos product for female consumers is inaccurate,” the company said in a statement released on Monday night. “We already have Doritos for women — they’re called Doritos, and they’re enjoyed by millions of people every day. At the same time, we know needs and preferences continue to evolve, and we’re always looking for new ways to engage and delight our consumers.”

Asked what Ms. Nooyi meant by “snacks for women that can be designed and packaged differently,” a spokeswoman declined to elaborate.

“I can’t yet give any more details beyond what Indra relayed in the podcast,” the spokeswoman said. “However, I will be able to in a few months.”

Image by kundl - Comida ChatarraUploaded by JohnnyMrNinja, CC BY 2.0, Link

We've certainly heard plenty of reporters and cable news talking heads marble-mouthing their way through "Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School" over the past week. It definitely doesn't want to roll off of the tongue. But who exactly is the school's namesake, Marjory Stoneman Douglas?

Turns out, Marjory Douglas was a bit of a badass in her own right, a writer of some repute who became a relentless advocate for preserving the Florida everglades. She was also an outspoken suffragist and civil rights advocate. She died in 1998 at the age of 108.

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Arena is a video created by Páraic & Pearse McGloughlin constructed from different structural forms (roads, stadiums, center-pivot irrigation circles) in satellite images of the Earth animated together into a kind of music video. (It’s hard to describe it. Just watch and you’ll see what I mean.) The first part of the video, with the roads, reminded me of the screensaver on a computer or DVD player where a ball or logo bounces around the screen.

McGloughlin did an interview with Director’s Notes about how the video was produced.

I put a lot of focus on imagery containing flat lines, symmetry and grids as they are so different to the patterns/shapes made by nature, and hoped in turn that this would be most effective. It wasn’t until I started messing with some images that I thought to allocate the idea of the game of life — “Arena” to the theme as it fit perfectly in my opinion. I wanted to create a retro-like video game effect out of the images and I knew I wanted to start with flat roads ‘bouncing’ off the sides of the screen with an element of growth, a focus on the abundance of life on earth as well as some kind of evolution idea.

(via bb)

Tags: music   Paraic McGloughlin   Pearse McGloughlin   video

RSS was a revelation for blogging and online media; we got our first RSS feed in 2001 and I have relied heavily on RSS feeds to write this site (and stay informed) for nearly two decades now; in 2005, Google bet heavily on RSS with its Google Reader product, which quickly eclipsed every other reader, so that by the time they killed it in 2013, there wasn't anything sophisticated, robust and well-maintained to switch to. (more…)