June 16, 2019 in 2,088 words

_{to set a mood • • •}

_{some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •}

50 million people lose electricity in South American blackout

_{CHECK THE FUSE BOX}

_{Heavy rains in Buenos Aires may be to blame for a massive blackout.}

A massive power outage has left swaths of South America at a standstill today (June 16) while tens of millions of people await the restoration of electricity.

Lost electricity has been reported in all of Argentina and Uruguay, and parts of Paraguay, Chile, and Southern Brazil.

Argentina’s power system “collapsed” this morning around 7 am local time, according to a statement by the Argentine Secretariat of Energy, reported by the New York Times (paywall). The grid failure in Argentina affected power in all of Uruguay as well. Meanwhile, social media users in Paraguay, Chile, and Brazil reported that they too were experiencing a blackout.

There is still no explanation as yet about how the massive blackout happened. Heavy rains in and around Buenos Aires may be to blame for the failure. What’s certain, however, is that a failure of such epic proportions highlights the vulnerability of the interconnected South American power grid. …

AI-AIDED VIDEO SURVEILLANCE WILL WATCH AND SILENTLY JUDGE US

Gone are the days when a store’s security cameras only mattered to shoplifters.

Now, with the rising prevalence of surveillance systems constantly monitored by artificial intelligence, ubiquitous security systems can watch, learn about, and discriminate against shoppers more than ever before.

That’s the gist of a new ACLU report titled “The Dawn of Robot Surveillance,” about how emerging AI technology enables security companies to constantly monitor and collect data about people — opening new possibilities in which power is abused or underserved communities are overpoliced.

The report, first covered by Motherboard, breaks down how AI-driven surveillance systems could soon begin to impact our lives.

Instead of just keeping track of who’s in a store, surveillance systems could use facial recognition to determine peoples’ identities and gathering even more information about them. That data would then be out there, with no opportunity to opt out. …

The inescapable social media crisis is about expectations, not addiction

_{WORDS MATTER}

_{It has become common for media outlets to talk about this dark side of technology using the language of addiction.}

One afternoon last April, at a coffee shop deep in suburban Philadelphia, I overheard a curious conversation between what looked to be a teenager and her grandfather. They were discussing the impacts of social media, and the girl bemoaned how depressed it made her feel. As an iPhone ironically buzzed in her palm, she explained that she couldn’t get off social media “because all of my friends are there.”

The girl’s conflicted relationship with her phone may actually be quite typical among modern-day teens. In a 2017 article in The Atlantic, psychologist Jean Twenge describes post-millennial teens as a generation nearly destroyed by smartphones. She writes that, in the age of Snapchat and Instagram, chat apps and social media have all but displaced young people’s real-life social interactions. Teens hang out with their friends less often than millennials did, they go on dates less frequently, and they are having less sex. They are statistically more likely to feel left out, lonely, and depressed—though these are, admittedly, correlations that don’t necessarily demonstrate causation.

It has become commonplace for media outlets to talk about this dark side of technology using the language of addiction. In a Washington Post op-ed earlier this year, for instance, psychologist Doreen Dodgen-Magee called on mental health professionals to recognize the bleak reality of “tech addiction.” In his New York Times column, Kevin Roose wrote about his “phone problem,” and how it had broken his brain. Parents and teens often signal their unhappiness with the amount of time spent online by framing the issue as smartphone addiction.

But to me, the confession from the girl in the Philadelphia coffee shop did not sound like that of a social media addict. Rather, it was a telltale sign of a powerful social norm in action. The distinction is critical: Whereas addiction is something people experience mostly as individuals, social norms are shared mental states shaped by the views and beliefs of other members of the society and by our subjective perceptions of those beliefs. And I believe that with appropriate interventions, social norms can be swiftly and completely overturned. …

Weird, Real Advice From Your Weird, Real Dad

If it weren’t for our dads, we wouldn’t be here. We also wouldn’t be as confused. Well-intended as they may be, fathers have a way of dispensing steaming advice nuggets that are at best baffling and at worst dangerous.

Here are some of the least helpful pieces of advice your actual dads actually gave you. With thanks to burritomouth, whose suggestion for this contest was good advice.

27. Entry by Chan Teik Onn

26. Entry by sonoftime

25. Entry by AmyanBridi

…

Hyped-up science is a problem. One clever Twitter account is pushing back.

_{How a simple nudge can improve health and nutrition reporting.}

“Researchers test vaccine they hope could stem Alzheimer’s.”

“Do fatty foods decrease serotonin levels?”

“Researchers claim McDonald’s fries can cure baldness.”

What do these three headlines, and many others like them, have in common? They were stories about studies conducted on mice.

Now, there’s nothing particularly unusual about research that’s conducted on mice and not on humans. It’s safer and less expensive — a core part of the scientific process. And while for animal welfare reasons it’ll be great news when we find a better way to do invasive experiments, many of these experiments aren’t even hard on the mice.

But overhyping preliminary results is a real problem in science reporting. In drug development, it’s a very long road from a promising mouse study to clinical trials in humans. In health and nutrition reporting, there’s still a lot of uncertainty about how much mouse findings are applicable to humans.

Yet articles often lead with an exciting finding — a new chemical that treats cancer, a new diet that extends life spans — and mention only after many paragraphs that the study was conducted on mice, not on people. …

Rainbow wormhole in the Tar Pits: London’s trippy pavilion moves to LA

_{Second Home, a co-working space company, has transplanted the ‘Instagrammer’s paradise’ for a summer of cultural events.}

_{José Selgas and Lucía Cano designed the Serpentine Pavilion in London. Now their trippy masterpiece is moving to Los Angeles.}

When José Selgas and Lucía Cano unveiled their striking translucent wavy tunnel pavilion at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 2015, it was variously described as a psychedelic pupa, a trippy womb, a rainbow wormhole and – perhaps key to its runaway success – an Instagrammer’s paradise.

Now it has gone trippy in a whole new sense, because it is being moved across the ocean to Los Angeles, where it is being reconstructed piece by piece for a summer of cultural happenings and intense community conversations.

Even trippier, perhaps, is the fact that its landing spot is a public park next to the La Brea Tar Pits, where mammoths, sabre-toothed cats and other fearsome prehistoric creatures once roamed, only to sink for posterity into a black, goopy swamp and leave their fossilized bones for scientists to dig up and pore over.

_{Serpentine Pavilion in London.}

It promises, in short, to set up an unforgettable encounter between 50,000 BC and the 21st century, in which the prehistoric creatures’ unfortunate fate will provide the backdrop for a discussion of the continuing, fraught relationship between the human inhabitants of modern Los Angeles and their disaster-prone natural surroundings. Oh, and David Lynch, perhaps the trippiest of modern film directors, will be on hand with some transcendental meditation. …

Video Goodnesses
_{and not-so-goodnesses}

Bill recaps the top stories of the week, including increased tensions with Iran and a shocking admission from President Trump.

_{THANKS to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher for making this program available on YouTube.}

In a special Father’s Day New Rule, Bill argues that Republicans have abandoned their responsibilities and left Democrats to run the household.

Stanford’s sailing coach gets off easy in the college admissions scandal, fears about deepfakes grow prior to the 2020 election, Sarah Huckabee Sanders quits, and archeologists find weed that’s 2,500 years old.

_{THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.}

Ronny Chieng takes a look at some of the expensive and unnecessary things pet owners are buying for their dogs, including spa days, gourmet meals and lavish houses.

CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.

Here’s me critical analysis of Russian sport. Competitive country ay.

まるは割と涙が出やすいので涙はたまたまだと思うのですが、あまりのタイミングに…。はなは元々ブラッシングがそんなに好きではないので、本当に何も気にしていなそう。Surely, Maru’s tear is accidental…As Hana does not like brushing very much, she does not surely mind it at all.

The Stone Temple of Parcora, in Peru, is the only religious edifice to own and operate an airline, comprised of a single 737. Its pilot union recently served this San Diego rock band with a trademark infringement notice.

— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 18, 2019

FINALLY . . .

To Make a Field Guide to Life on Mars, First Head to the Deep Sea

_{Some scientists believe this is how we’ll know what to look for.
An artist’s rendering of the Mars 2020 rover.}

IN 2021, A NASA ROVER will touch down on Mars in search of signs of life, past or present. It will investigate the surface of the red planet and collect samples from areas that seem particularly promising. But traces of life on Mars—if they exist—aren’t going to be apparent to the naked eye: Obviously there’s no remains of mammoths or goldfish or snails. Any record of life on Mars would likely take the form of organic compounds, which have already been identified up there but aren’t definitive, or actual fossils of microorganisms. Such fossils exist here on Earth, but they’re very tricky to spot—even in places we know they’ll be. The best strategy for finding these miniscule traces, according to a group of Scandinavian scientists, is to study the denizens of the deep sea. This team now plans to create an atlas of fossilized microbes from Earth’s oceans—an extraterrestrial field guide of sorts—to help the rover and its human partners identify definitive proof of life on Mars, according to their recent article in Frontiers in Earth Science.

From his lab in Stockholm, Magnus Ivarsson, a paleobiologist at the University of Southern Denmark and the Swedish Museum of Natural History, studies fossilized microbes locked in deep-sea volcanic rock. It’s a specialized area of study with little fanfare. “We’d been working on these type of fossils for 15 years but had never really thought of them as being interesting beyond Earth,” he says. But after attending a conference with researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Ivarsson realized the space agency had a glaring lack of knowledge about fossils found in volcanic rock—the exact things they ought to be looking for off-world. “That’s when I started to realize how important our fossils are for the exploration of potential life on Mars,” he says.

On Earth, most fossils that scientists study are immortalized in sedimentary rock, which forms by the accumulation of small particles over time and encompasses 75 percent of the planet’s surface. Sedimentary rock is almost casual, with none of the heat and pressure that form metamorphic or igneous rocks, which is one thing that makes it particularly adept at preserving fossils. But Mars is home almost exclusively to volcanic rock. “Mars is a huge volcano, so to speak,” Ivarsson says. “It’s not as complex as Earth, from a geological point of view.”

_{In Ivarsson’s Stockholm lab, there are a lot of deep-sea cores.}

Despite having once been, you know, molten, volcanic rock can indeed contain fossils. But identifying them is not as simple as spotting the whorl of a shell, the veins of a leaf, or the familiar knobs of a prehistoric bone. These rocks are porous, riddled with tiny bubbles that create a network traversable by microbial life. When seawater and other fluids sweep through these channels, they bring microbes with them, which build colonies and self-sustaining food webs around the boundaries of the rock and in open pore space. After death, the microbes can be mineralized and fossilized in place. These are the creatures that Ivarsson studies, and the ones he believes may be most analogous to what scientists could find on Mars. …

Little-known Marvel Comics crime-fighter Saltpeter met his end after regulatory boards realized that he was actually modeled after a serial killer.

— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 17, 2019

IN SOLIDARITY

_{Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?}