A month and a half since my last non-gif linkfest; incredible amounts of material have accumulated;
this is less than a third of what I've bookmarked.
She was born during the reign of James I, was a youngster when René
Descartes set out his rules of thought and the great fire of London
raged, saw out her adolescent years as George II ascended the throne,
reached adulthood around the time that the American revolution kicked
off, and lived through two world wars.
Living to an estimated age of nearly 400 years, a female Greenland shark has set a new record for longevity.
Remember:
bottled water companies do not produce water; they produce plastic bottles.
A beautifully-designed longread from the BBC on a
treasure trove of dinosaur fossils in Wyoming. ""There's probably enough dinosaur material here to keep a thousand palaeontologists happy for a thousand years."
Plastic recycling is a myth. ‘It’s going to be recycled in China!’ I hate to break it to everyone,
but these places are routinely dumping massive amounts of [that] plastic
and burning it on open fires.”
Eight questions to ask to jumpstart a conversation when you are getting to know a stranger.
Barack Obama's
summer reading list.
Why
bounty hunters can break into the wrong home, injure/kill someone and plead innocence.
Man who donated his mother's body to an Arizona center for Alzheimer's research discovers it was
sold on to the US Military for $6,000, strapped to a chair and blown up in 'blast test'
The
feral dog is one of the most destructive animals in the natural world.
Why you can't find
wild broccoli.
American basketball player Donell “D.J.” Cooper has been banned from the
sport for two years after his
urine test showed evidence of pregnancy.
Why
you won't get $125 from the Equifax security breach settlement.
OpEd piece in the
Los Angeles Times: "Health Insurance Companies are Useless: Get Rid of Them."
“
Health insurers have been successful at two things: making money and getting the American public to believe they’re essential.”
Climate change has left a
graveyard of abandoned ski resorts on the Italian Alps
Warshipping: Mail a snooping device to a company. When it gets to the company mailroom, "The
device scans for visible wifi networks; once it senses a network
associated with its target (indicating that it has arrived on the target
company's premises), it alerts its controllers over the cellular radio,
and then scans the local wifi for instance in which users' devices are
initiating new connections to the network. It
captures the handshake
data from these connections, transmits them over the cellular network to
its controllers, and they can then crack the password offline, send
login credentials to the warshipping device,
login to the target
network, and attack the network from within."
"The Trump administration
has reauthorized government officials to use controversial poison
devices – dubbed “
cyanide bombs” by critics – to kill coyotes, foxes and
other animals across the US."
"...lots of
election officials, including many in heavily contested
districts that have determined the outcomes of national elections (cough
Florida cough)
just leave their machines connected to the internet all
the time, while denying that this is the case, possibly because they
don't know any better."
Retail stores are closing in New York City, including Fifth Avenue: "According to recent estimates,
certain swaths of Manhattan now have vacancy rates of 25%, when 5% is considered normal. And the carnage is
getting worse, with the US forecast to lose 12,000 stores this year –
far above 2018’s record losses of more than 5,800 sites."
"The
bacteria in and on our bodies make thousands of tiny, previously unidentified proteins... The proteins belong to more than 4,000 new biological families... Because they are so small — fewer than 50 amino acids in length — it’s
likely the proteins fold into unique shapes that represent previously
unidentified biological building blocks..."
A tiger shows the
"eyespots" behind its ears while drinking water (photo at right)
There is a
difference between service animals and emotional support animals. "Nothing can stop people from lying, or exploiting others’ confusion by
using the terms “service animal” an “ESA” interchangeably. “The majority
of folks who slap a vest on their pet have already crossed that line..."
"As
canned cocktails, including ready-to-drink fizzy wine concoctions and
portable hard-liquor classics, have become more available across the
country, their sales have climbed more than 40 percent in the past year. Sales of boozy seltzers have nearly tripled in the same period... Even real-liquor cocktails such as those packaged by You & Yours
tend to keep the alcohol content pretty light, which is a selling point
that might feel counterintuitive to older, harder-drinking people.
Adults under 40 are reshaping America’s relationship with booze, and for many of them, that means seeking out low- or no-alcohol options."
The Candyland board game was
invented for polio patients.
"Contrary to President Donald Trump’s assertion that “our nation is
stronger today than it ever was before,”
the “Salute to America” looked more like a military antiques road show than a display of a 21st-century military power... The M-1A2 Abrams tanks and M-2 Bradley infantry combat vehicles parked
near the Lincoln Memorial represent a generation of
armored vehicles
that were designed in the 1970s and procured in large numbers during the
1980s. More than three decades later, they remain, albeit with
modification, the mainstay of the U.S. Army and have been used in the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan...The wars of the future may depend not so much on the kinds of things you
can put on parade, but on new technologies that reimagine warfare."
A subreddit devoted to documenting
desire paths.
"Scott Amos found the game in the attic of his childhood home in Reno
this past Mother's Day after his mom asked him to pick up a few boxes of
his childhood stuff. Among the contents was a
Nintendo game cartridge
for Kid Icarus, still in the bag from J.C. Penney's catalog department
three decades earlier." It's
expected to bring $10,000 at auction.
A cloud that sort of looks like a
farting squirrel (at left).
Incredible
Zigzag Curveball Illusion.
The
counterargument when someone says girls wearing skimpy clothes are "asking for it."
"Former
President Reagan in a newly unearthed tape disparaged “monkeys” from African countries during a phone call with then-President Nixon
while Reagan was governor of California."
"The
13-year-old boy was flown to Spokane after receiving
temporal
skull fractures in the incident that happened at the Mineral County
Fairgrounds. Witnesses tell MTN News that Curt Brockway grabbed,
picked up and
slammed the boy on the ground because he did not remove his hat during the national anthem."
"
We attached miniaturized radio transmitters (less than 300 mg) to monarch butterflies (
Danaus plexippus) and common green darner dragonflies (
Anax junius)
and tracked their autumn migratory movements through southern Ontario,
Canada and into the United States using an automated array of over 100
telemetry towers.
The farthest estimated distance a monarch travelled in
a single day was 143 km at a wind-assisted groundspeed of 31 km/h."
Redefining a "
billionaire."
"On Monday, a Iowa man's request that charges against him be denied for
burning LGBT-related library books was denied... Representing himself in court this week, Dorr filed a motion to dismiss
his case,
arguing arrest violated his First Amendment rights... "Mr. Dorr isn't being sent the message that he cannot burn books when
he disagrees with the contents of those books," Mazurek wrote in her
ruling. "
He is being sent the message that he cannot burn books that do
not belong to him."
If you don't like the government of your country, should you
leave or stay?
"The Dutch scouting tradition is known as a "dropping," in which
groups of children, generally preteenagers, are deposited in a forest and expected to find their way back to base."
The Minnesota Twins have established a new
all-time major-league record for most games (nine) in a season with five or more home runs. There are still 36 games to be played before the season ends. [update - record increased to ten times this season. Also another record: first baseball team ever to have 8 different players with 20 or more home runs.]
First human case of this
parasitic eye worm. Photo (at right) credit CDC.
A true
Cats fan won’t settle for seeing the show once, twice or even 10
times. Just ask Hector Montalvo, 62, a retired product demonstrator from
New York. “I wouldn’t call myself a legend,” he says. “Just a patron
who loves the show.” But
before Cats ended its first Broadway run in 2000, Montalvo had seen 703 performances.
Variety magazine's concise bio of the late
Rutger Hauer.
"People who can smoke a bowl and go about their day will find that when
they eat a weed candy (or two—is it even working?), they feel like their
hands are about to detach from their body. Though cannabis is safer than many other drugs,
edibles feel scary to some people because of the heightened delusional symptoms they seem to induce... Indeed, in Colorado, edibles are responsible for a disproportionate share of emergency-room visits, relative to their sales."
"What the oligarchs want is not the same as what the old corporations wanted. In the words
of their favoured theorist, Steve Bannon, they seek the “deconstruction
of the administrative state”.
Chaos is the profit multiplier for the disaster capitalism on which the new billionaires thrive. Every rupture is used to seize
more of the assets on which our lives depend. The chaos of an
undeliverable Brexit, the repeated meltdowns and shutdowns
of government under Trump: these are the kind of deconstructions Bannon
foresaw. As institutions, rules and democratic oversight implode, the
oligarchs extend their wealth and power at our expense."
Why does Ilhan Omar hate America?
How
invasive grasses are overwhelming environments (especially reed canary grass).
If you listened to the BBC's fascinating
"Death in Ice Valley" series of podcasts, you'll want to read this
followup article.
An Ohio lawmaker who routinely touted his Christian faith and anti-LGBT views has resigned after being caught having sex with a man in his office. I can't even count the number of times I've read similar reports. But someone else has
tabulated them.
A National Geographic longread about the
Canadian tar sands and their environmental impact.
Darius Brown, an awesome kid from Newark, New Jersey,
makes bow ties for shelter animals to help them get adopted.
Teens committing hate crimes on a campus didn't realize that their
cell phones autoconnected to the school's WiFi under their usernames.
A
gallery of "begpackers" - people who backpack to other countries and beg locals for funds to cover their travel expenses.
Rude zipper (image NSFW).
