• • • to set a mood • • •
• • • some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •
The “Kodanago” was an evil spirit who supposedly inhabited public telephones and wreaked conversational havoc by saying terrible things in both participants’ voices.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 29, 2019
Australia’s Platypuses Are Invisible Victims of the Bushfires
After years of drought and habitat loss, “It’s one more nail in their coffin.”
Platypuses face an uncertain future.
THE PLATYPUS—FURRY-SAUSAGE BODY, DUCK BILL, beaver tail, venomous heel spurs—lives what might be considered a cryptid’s lifestyle. The semiaquatic, egg-laying mammals are notoriously hard to spot, skulking around in Australian streams at night. They’re predictably hard to catch, and escape easily from the conservationists trying to track them, including Josh Griffiths, an ecologist with Cesar Australia, an environmental consulting firm, who has studied the creatures for 12 years. On a typical survey night near Melbourne, which lasts anywhere from 14 to 16 hours, Griffiths might catch two or three of the strange, slippery creatures.
The recent Australian bushfires, which have burnt tens of millions of acres* and killed approximately a billion animals, have spotlighted the plights of certain species, from koalas to the lesser-known Kangaroo Island dunnart (a mouse-size marsupial). But there has been little news about how the platypus has been faring, in part because their status is still largely a mystery to science. After all, they’re incredibly hard to spot even when there aren’t raging bushfires. “The short answer is that we simply don’t know,” Griffiths says. “The scale of the fire we’ve got at the moment is unprecedented.” All the sites he usually monitors for platypuses have been declared emergency zones and are inaccessible. “It’s one more nail in their coffin,” he adds.
In 2008, after bushfires and floods swept through Victoria, the Australian Platypus Conservancy conducted a survey of the creatures, according to Geoff Williams, a conservancy biologist. At the time, they found little relationship between platypus populations and local bushfires. Temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit can be lethal to platypuses, so they retreat to underground burrows when things get too hot. These may have provided a critical refuge—one that more terrestrial or arboreal animals such as koalas often desperately need—according to Tom Grant, a biologist who has spent nearly 50 years studying the platypus. (Grant wrote the definitive book on them, and Griffiths calls him “the Godfather of platypuses.”) And in times of drought, platypuses move into the refuge pools that persist in many dried-out streams. These strategy are how platypuses have survived for as long as a million years, Williams says.
The semi-aquatic mammals have lost a great deal of their habitat.
But those studies focused on smaller, localized fires. “These most recent catastrophic fires present a different situation, where the vegetation consolidating the banks, in which they dig their resting and nesting burrows, has been devastated,” Grant writes in an email. He predicts that when rain does finally fall in these areas, the banks will erode, degrading water quality and stifling the small, bottom-dwelling invertebrates that platypuses depend on. …
The archebolt was a medieval weapon designed to hurl rotting carcasses at enemies
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 29, 2018
Facebook’s New Privacy Tool Is a Data Landfill
Assume that every website you visit tattles on you to the social-media behemoth.
Of the 1,081 apps and websites that have been sharing my “activity” with Facebook, Tinder is the chattiest.
In the past 180 days, it has reported 685 of my “interactions” with its app to Facebook, according to Facebook’s new Off-Facebook Activity tool, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a company blog post this morning. The tool lets any Facebook user go into her settings and see a list of apps and websites that have shared her information with Facebook, organized by the most recent time they shared data, and paired with a number indicating how many “interactions” have been shared. The interactions aren’t specified, but examples of what they could be are provided within the tool: “Opened an app; logged in to app with Facebook; visited a website; searched for an item; added an item to a wishlist; added an item to a cart; made a purchase; made a donation.”
The Off-Facebook Activity tool is the culmination of a promise the company made shortly after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in the late winter of 2018. Originally called Clear History, it is only now accessible to all of Facebook’s roughly 2.5 billion global users, including 220 million in the United States. “One of our main goals for the next decade is to build much stronger privacy protections for everyone on Facebook,” Zuckerberg wrote in this morning’s announcement. “You should be able to easily understand and manage your information, which is why strengthening your privacy controls is so important.”
“Easily understand” is an interesting choice of phrase. It implies that the personal information Facebook has about each of its users can be presented to those users in a way that they can readily process and comprehend. It implies a data set that is, at a minimum, literally fathomable—from a company that has only ever been motivated to be unfathomably large, and know unfathomably much. But the amount of information Facebook has about each of its users undercuts the goal to present it in a way that could be useful. …
6 Stories That Prove Job Interviews Are Pointless Nonsense
Companies use two methods when hiring. Both are terrible. First they feed thousands of resumes to a computer, which rejects most of them instantly. You will never know the reason, because computers use secret algorithms. Next some applicants are invited for an interview, and most of them are also rejected. You will never know these reasons either, because interviewers use secret shenanigans.
But sometimes interviewers find themselves being interviewed, whereupon they share these secret hiring criteria. They’re very proud of the tricks they use, and as you’ll see, they absolutely shouldn’t be.
6. Business Insider Won’t Hire You If You Fail To Send A Thank You Note
No, I don’t mean a handwritten letter with Elven calligraphy. The interviewer isn’t completely crazy. But Insider Inc. does require (without asking for it) a thank you email, in which you repeat that you want the job, remind them what makes you so qualified, and of course thank them for interviewing you. Lots of other companies look for this as well, and now that I look around online, tons of websites offer letter templates so you can write your thoughtful note of gratitude without putting too much thought into it.
How The Company Sees It:
According to BI’s executive manager, Jessica Liebman, plenty of people who join companies eventually flake out or leave. They never wanted the job in the first place. But if you’re one of those candidates who sends a thank you note, she’ll know you truly want the job. Plus it shows you’re organized and well mannered. “At Insider, Inc. we look to hire ‘good eggs,'” she says, distinguishing her company from all the ones who look to hire bad eggs. “The thank you email is a mark for the ‘good egg’ column.”
But Really:
Let me reassure hiring managers everywhere: If I come in for a job interview, I want the job. Maybe someone, somewhere, doesn’t really want to work and goes job hunting only because their dad makes them, but in general, assume that if I’ve chased the position this far, it’s because I want it. Sending a follow-up email isn’t some significant extra effort from the best among us. It’s extremely easy to do (once I know I should). Dragging myself all the way to your office for the interview was the hard part. …
A Totally New Type of Aurora Has Been Documented in The Northern Sky
A collaboration between physicists and amateur stargazers has yielded the discovery of what researchers say is a previously unknown kind of aurora phenomenon.
Called ‘the dunes’, this stunning apparition of luminous, rippling wave patterns does not appear to fit within any established categories of aurora – and it’s only been documented now because of a rapport between hobbyist space photographers (aka ‘citizen scientists’) and professional astronomers in Finland.
If this sounds familiar, you might be thinking of Steve – the brilliantly named ribbon-like phenomenon first identified in 2017.
Despite excitement over the discovery, subsequent investigations indicated Steve was not an aurora, technically speaking, but rather a similar kind of atmospheric glow produced by charged particles flowing through Earth’s ionosphere.
…
Hearing The 3,000-Year-Old Mummy Was Disappointing
Nesyamun was an Egyptian priest, from the era of Pharaoh Ramses XI, who had a single request before he died. He wanted his voice to carry on long after his death. Everyone in the room looked around and used only their eyes to silently ask each other “Do you know how to do that?” They gave a weakened Nesyamun a reassuring “uh, yeah, sure thing, bud …” allowing him to die happy, knowing that his very good close friends, who would never lie to him, were definitely going to fulfill his dying wish. They didn’t. But a team of researchers from England has made his wish come true about 3,000 years later.
The mummification process preserved Nesyamun’s larynx enough that the researchers were able to make digital models and, eventually, 3D printed replicas of his vocal tract. They attached the replica to a special fancy speaker thing that passed a burst of sound through the fake vocal cords to, hopefully, re-create a voice from the distant past so that it may share its secrets with us. You can hear the sound it made in the video below from Live Science, whose choice of putting 29 seconds of ominous dramatic music before they drop the sound then rapid-fire it over and over might be one of the funniest moments in the history of scientific reporting.
What the researchers have done here is undoubtedly cool despite how much of a letdown the sound is. When I saw the headline in the New York Times that dramatically claimed “The Mummy Speaks!“, with exclamation point and all, I got psyched hoping that he would speak for the first time in three millennia to reveal the location of a grand treasure or, at the very least, unleash a horrible plague that consumes the world. Instead, we got Stephen Hawking expressing his displeasure after his ice cream cone fell to the ground. …
They got their dream job away from it all – but what happened next?
Caretaker on a remote Irish island is the latest viral posting to attract thousands of applicants. But what’s it like to bag a job in a million?
Lucky them: Mari Huws and Emyr Glyn Owen, wardens of Ynys Enlli, Wales.
As another year of environmental turmoil and political upheaval loomed at the start of 2020, thousands of people – from Alaska to South Africa – turned their sights to the peace and tranquility of Great Blasket, a remote island a mile off the west coast of Ireland. There are no other residents, no electricity, wifi or hot water, but droves of would-be-caretakers were charmed by the idea of looking after a cafe and three cottages there.
The posting, which has so far received more than 23,000 applications, is the latest “dream job” opportunity to go viral, following vacancies for a barefoot bookseller in the Maldives and a cat sanctuary manager on the Greek island of Syros. But do these dream jobs ever live up to expectations? And what of the one-of-a-kind jobs that never hit the headlines?
We asked some lucky candidates to find out.
Mari Huws and Emyr Glyn Owen, wardens of Ynys Enlli, Wales, UK
Mari Huws and Emyr Glyn Owen.
It’s somewhat serendipitous that Mari Huws and Emyr Glyn Owen became the new wardens of Ynys Enlli. The couple met on the island on “a perfect summer afternoon” two years ago, so when they spotted the vacancy to run the place on Facebook, “we shared one of those looks between us – the looks that speak louder than words. We had to go for it,” says Huws. “Many people assume that people who want to live on an island are escaping from something, but for us it was more about realising a dream.”
The pair quit their jobs, packed up their homes in north Wales and have hit the ground running since arriving in September 2019.
“We are responsible for the upkeep of 10 listed buildings that are let out to holidaymakers. There’s always a wall to paint or a ceiling to plaster [and] we’re also responsible for the gardens, paths, orchard, visitors and volunteers,” says Huws. “I’ve had to get my head around things I’ve never had to consider before, like how the water system works and the language of volts and amps and solar panels.” …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
On average, three women in the United States are killed each day by a current or former partner. With firearms greatly increasing the odds of homicide inside homes with reports of domestic violence, some states are making efforts to seize firearms from those with orders of protection against them. Meanwhile, other states have passed legislation making it easier for those who file protection orders to carry a weapon without a license.
We sent Gianna Toboni to meet the women working to fix the shortcomings of a legal system that often fails to protect women.
THANKS to HBO and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
U.S. Senators presiding over Donald Trump’s impeachment trial are increasingly under pressure to allow witnesses after leaks from John Bolton’s upcoming book contradict the defense presented by the President’s lawyers.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
There’s one day left to win Full Frontal’$ Totally Unrigged Primary. Donate here to help your candidate win. There will be no ties, especially if you’re Andrew Yang.
THANKS to TBS3 and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee for making this program available on YouTube.
袖の中で寛ぐまる。Maru relaxes in the sleeve.
Edwina Hatch devised a semaphore system constructed entirely from eating utensils
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 29, 2018
FINALLY . . .
The Monumental Undertaking of Moving Into an Old Masonic Temple
The 20,000-square-foot house requires endless renovations, but the ceiling is high enough to fly a drone inside.
Home sweet home!
AN ICONIC EMBLEM GREETS VISITORS to Theresa Cannizzaro’s home: a brass ‘G,’ flanked by a square and compasses, that is inlaid into the floor. The previous tenants, who were Freemasons, left it behind. Cannizzaro lives with her husband, Atom, and their three children in an old Masonic temple.
The temple in Huntington, Indiana, wasn’t the house the couple had in mind when they decided to move east from San Diego, where they’d grown up and started their family. Atom was into aquaponic gardening, a pursuit that can take up a lot of land, and land costs a lot less in the Midwest. But a few years ago, while visiting family, they happened across the sprawling, stately building and noticed that it was on the market.
Masonic symbols are still scattered throughout the structure, from the carpet to the doorknobs.
After closing on the building in the fall of 2016, the family had to figure out how to turn a 20,000-square-foot space, built in 1926, into a home for a family of five. Renovations kicked off in spring 2017, starting with a bathroom—there were six restrooms in the building, but no showers. Then came a new kitchen: There’s a big, commercial cooking space in the basement, Cannizzaro says, but hauling food up and down the stairs “got old really fast.” The family built a smaller kitchen up on the second floor, the part of the house they use as their living space. They also winterized 71 windows. They keep the thermostat around 65 or 63 degrees, and a little lower at night. “We tell people to wear a sweatshirt when they come over,” Cannizzaro says. Last winter, the highest monthly heating bill was $350. …
This abandoned Arkansas post office once hosted secret negotiations between Angela Merkel, Marilyn Manson, and the Pope
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 15, 2018
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Not? Maybe tomorrow, maybe Friday. Maybe.
Heartbreaking: The Jim Henson Company Has Revealed That Jim Henson Was Only Dead For 10 Minutes Before Kermit The Frog Started Eating Him https://t.co/QIeFEOP5nU pic.twitter.com/t06utQcULB
— ClickHole (@ClickHole) January 29, 2020