• • • to set a mood • • •
• • • some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •
Worrall’s Drain is a mysterious, 4-foot-diameter stone disk embedded in the depths of the Mariana Trench. Named for its discoverer, it is rumored to plug a hole that could drain the oceans if uncovered.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) February 15, 2019
How a Minnesota Town Fell In and Out of Love With Its Ginormous Geese
Like most human-fowl relationships, it’s complicated.
Love fades.
ELEANORE SUTHERLAND, A LABORATORY SCIENCE student, used to have to stop her car in the middle of the street to clear the geese out of the way.
“They don’t react to car honks,” she says, “so you had to get out and chase them in order to get through. I’ve been bitten for trying to not run them over.”
Many cities in the United States and Canada have a problem with Canada geese. Rochester, Minnesota, however, is a town that is uniquely proud of—and plagued by—its goose population.
Best known as the home of the world-famous Mayo Clinic, Rochester is also home to a subspecies of Canada goose that was once thought to be extinct: the giant Canada goose. These birds look just like regular Canada geese, only much, much larger. In fact, a giant Canada goose can weigh up to 24 pounds and have a wingspan of more than seven feet—twice the size of a normal goose.
Welcome to the giant Canada goose capital of America.
Normally, the narrative around extinct and endangered species is one of how mankind has made the world uninhabitable for wildlife. Rochester’s story is exactly the opposite: Its love affair with these geese was once so strong that it took a species from near extinction to omnipresent nuisance. …
In early 2004, NASA offered a brief period during which one could become ceremonially married to the Opportunity rover.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) February 15, 2019
YUVAL NOAH HARARI’S HISTORY OF EVERYONE, EVER
His blockbuster “Sapiens” predicted the possible end of humankind. Now what?
Harari, who is slim, soft-spoken, and relentless in his search for an audience, defines himself as both a historian and a philosopher.
In 2008, Yuval Noah Harari, a young historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, began to write a book derived from an undergraduate world-history class that he was teaching. Twenty lectures became twenty chapters. Harari, who had previously written about aspects of medieval and early-modern warfare—but whose intellectual appetite, since childhood, had been for all-encompassing accounts of the world—wrote in plain, short sentences that displayed no anxiety about the academic decorum of a study spanning hundreds of thousands of years. It was a history of everyone, ever. The book, published in Hebrew as “A Brief History of Humankind,” became an Israeli best-seller; then, as “Sapiens,” it became an international one. Readers were offered the vertiginous pleasure of acquiring apparent mastery of all human affairs—evolution, agriculture, economics—while watching their personal narratives, even their national narratives, shrink to a point of invisibility. President Barack Obama, speaking to CNN in 2016, compared the book to a visit he’d made to the pyramids of Giza.
“Sapiens” has sold more than twelve million copies. “Three important revolutions shaped the course of history,” the book proposes. “The Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different.” Harari’s account, though broadly chronological, is built out of assured generalization and comparison rather than dense historical detail. “Sapiens” feels like a study-guide summary of an immense, unwritten text—or, less congenially, like a ride on a tour bus that never stops for a poke around the ruins. (“As in Rome, so also in ancient China: most generals and philosophers did not think it their duty to develop new weapons.”) Harari did not invent Big History, but he updated it with hints of self-help and futurology, as well as a high-altitude, almost nihilistic composure about human suffering. He attached the time frame of aeons to the time frame of punditry—of now, and soon. His narrative of flux, of revolution after revolution, ended urgently, and perhaps conveniently, with a cliffhanger. “Sapiens,” while acknowledging that “history teaches us that what seems to be just around the corner may never materialise,” suggests that our species is on the verge of a radical redesign. Thanks to advances in computing, cyborg engineering, and biological engineering, “we may be fast approaching a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world—me, you, men, women, love and hate—will become irrelevant.”
Harari, who is slim, soft-spoken, and relentless in his search for an audience, has spent the years since the publication of “Sapiens” in conversations about this cliffhanger. His two subsequent best-sellers—“Homo Deus” (2017) and “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” (2018)—focus on the present and the near future. Harari now defines himself as both a historian and a philosopher. He dwells particularly on the possibility that biometric monitoring, coupled with advanced computing, will give corporations and governments access to more complete data about people—about their desires and liabilities—than people have about themselves. A life under such scrutiny, he said recently, is liable to become “one long, stressing job interview.”
If Harari weren’t always out in public, one might mistake him for a recluse. He is shyly oracular. He spends part of almost every appearance denying that he is a guru. But, when speaking at conferences where C.E.O.s meet public intellectuals, or visiting Mark Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto house, or the Élysée Palace, in Paris, he’ll put a long finger to his chin and quietly answer questions about Neanderthals, self-driving cars, and the series finale of “Game of Thrones.” Harari’s publishing and speaking interests now occupy a staff of twelve, who work out of a sunny office in Tel Aviv, where an employee from Peru cooks everyone vegan lunches. Here, one can learn details of a scheduled graphic novel of “Sapiens”—a cartoon version of Harari, wearing wire-framed glasses and looking a little balder than in life, pops up here and there, across time and space. There are also plans for a “Sapiens” children’s book, and a multi-season “Sapiens”-inspired TV drama, covering sixty thousand years, with a script by the co-writer of Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto.” …
What I learned at the Ayn Rand conference
In San Francisco, devotees of the US philosopher and author assembled to revere her doctrine of selfishness. But if we expand the notion of “the self”, could Rand’s ideas yet be harnessed for progressive ends?
If you’d walked past the W San Francisco in the autumn of 2018, you might have seen an unusual sight. Along with several other Marriott-owned hotels across the US, the high-end establishment in San Francisco’s South of Market district was the site of a persistent picket line – the result of a tense contract negotiation between Marriott and the labour union UNITE HERE. Even in the dead of night, striking workers and their supporters maintained the picket, drumming and chanting while carrying signs that stated “One job should be enough”.
It took two months of almost constant strikes, but the union’s campaign succeeded. On 3 December 2018, Marriott management conceded to a host of worker demands, including pay rises, increased pension contributions, and better protection against sexual harassment. Through collective action, workers were able to secure substantive gains they likely wouldn’t have been able to achieve alone.
On 25 January 2020, the W San Francisco hosted a different kind of crowd. That Saturday, the Ayn Rand Institute was holding an all-day conference on Objectivism, a school of thought developed by the eponymous US philosopher and author, which hails individual rationality and free-market capitalism. No union signs could be seen here; instead, about a hundred lanyard-wearing attendees milled around a conference room on the fourth floor. On a side table, stacks of Rand books, including The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, were being given away for free (her books have sold more than 30 million copies worldwide). In this quiet conference room, disturbed by neither drumming nor chanting, the focus was the individual, rather than the collective. The programme included talks entitled “The Virtue of Selfishness” and “How to be the Hero of Your Own Life”.
I attended primarily as a sceptic. The theme of the conference was Silicon Valley, and as I’d recently written a decidedly anti-capitalist book about the tech industry (Abolish Silicon Valley), I found the prospect of a pro-capitalist perspective dubious, but intriguing. I was perplexed by the conference website’s suggestion that Silicon Valley lacked rigorous intellectual underpinnings; I had naively imagined that the region was already a Randian paradise. In a city marked by extreme inequality – one renowned for having the world’s highest density of billionaires amid vast homelessness – it was jarring to see such a brazen celebration of capitalist ideals. Why, I wondered, would anyone feel the need to defend so-called “wealth creators”? Weren’t their wealth hoards defence enough? …
5 Historical Places We’ve Managed To Totally Trash
With nearly 8 billion people living on Earth, there are all kinds of different folks and an almost endless variety of strokes. But despite differing cultures and backgrounds, there are a few things the human race almost universally values — such as coffee, or Tom Hanks, or things that are very old. But while most people unaffiliated with ISIS have proper respect for historic places or things, there are times when someone clearly missed the memo. Like when …
5. Some Guy Destroyed Shakespeare’s House Because He Got Tired Of Tourists
Unlike many of history’s greatest artists, William Shakespeare was fortunate enough to be popular, even famous, in his lifetime. But living ye olde life of celebrity can take its toll, so he gave up the bustle of London for a house in the quiet village of Stratford-upon-Avon (because every English village has to have a name of Targaryen-title-like length). While living there, he wrote his last few plays, and liked to read in the shade of a mulberry tree he planted himself. Well, before you Willy Shakers (the preferred term for Shakespeare fans) plan a trip to visit, we’ve got a bit of bad news.
You see, except for camera phones, fans in the 1600s were a lot like fans today: loud, obnoxious, and not giving a fuck about personal space. This was a problem for Reverend Francis Gastrell, who purchased Shakespeare’s former home in 1753. Almost immediately, Gastrell became irritated by the constant stream of tourists nosing around the place and peeking into the garden. In 1756, Gastrell’s wife ordered the second-most unkindest cut of all and had the famous mulberry tree chopped down. That failed to stem the tide of visitors, so in 1759, Gastrell decided to handle things once and for all by tearing down the house.
The people of Stratford were enraged, and Gastrell became so incredibly unpopular that he got out, out of the damned spot and moved 45 miles away to Lichfield. The house was never rebuilt, but archaeologists began studying the site in 2010 and located its foundations, as well as the remains of Shakespeare’s kitchen and cellar. Today the place is a garden, with sculptures and benches featuring famous lines from his plays and poems. It also has a VR tour of the house where you can presumably tell a CGI Gastrell to go to hell. …
How ultra-processed food took over your shopping basket
It’s cheap, attractive and convenient, and we eat it every day – it’s difficult not to. But is ultra-processed food making us ill and driving the global obesity crisis?
Embiggenable
Nearly three decades ago, when I was an overweight teenager, I sometimes ate six pieces of sliced white toast in a row, each one slathered in butter or jam. I remember the spongy texture of the bread as I took it from its plastic bag. No matter how much of this supermarket toast I ate, I hardly felt sated. It was like eating without really eating. Other days, I would buy a box of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes or a tube of Pringles: sour cream and onion flavour stackable snack chips, which were an exciting novelty at the time, having only arrived in the UK in 1991. Although the carton was big enough to feed a crowd, I could demolish most of it by myself in a sitting. Each chip, with its salty and powdery sour cream coating, sent me back for another one. I loved the way the chips – curved like roof tiles – would dissolve slightly on my tongue.
After one of these binges – because that is what they were – I would speak to myself with self-loathing. “What is wrong with you?” I would say to the tear-stained face in the mirror. I blamed myself for my lack of self-control. But now, all these years later, having mostly lost my taste for sliced bread, sugary cereals and snack chips, I feel I was asking myself the wrong question. It shouldn’t have been “What is wrong with you?” but “What is wrong with this food?”
Back in the 90s, there was no word to cover all the items I used to binge on. Some of the things I over-ate – crisps or chocolate or fast-food burgers – could be classified as junk food, but others, such as bread and cereal, were more like household staples. These various foods seemed to have nothing in common except for the fact that I found them very easy to eat a lot of, especially when sad. As I ate my Pringles and my white bread, I felt like a failure for not being able to stop. I had no idea that there would one day be a technical explanation for why I found them so hard to resist. The word is “ultra-processed” and it refers to foods that tend to be low in essential nutrients, high in sugar, oil and salt and liable to be overconsumed.
Which foods qualify as ultra-processed? It’s almost easier to say which are not. I got a cup of coffee the other day at a train station cafe and the only snacks for sale that were not ultra-processed were a banana and a packet of nuts. The other options were: a panini made from ultra-processed bread, flavoured crisps, chocolate bars, long-life muffins and sweet wafer biscuits – all ultra-processed.
What characterises ultra-processed foods is that they are so altered that it can be hard to recognise the underlying ingredients. These are concoctions of concoctions, engineered from ingredients that are already highly refined, such as cheap vegetable oils, flours, whey proteins and sugars, which are then whipped up into something more appetising with the help of industrial additives such as emulsifiers. …
PREPARE TO SPEND A WHILE; it’s The Long Read.
Why SpaceX Wants a Tiny Texas Neighborhood So Badly
The residents of Boca Chica didn’t ask Elon Musk to move in, but now his company is taking over.
Mary McConnaughey was watching from her car when the rocket exploded on the beach. The steel-crunching burst sent the top of the spacecraft flying, and a cloud of vapor billowed into the sky and drifted toward the water.
McConnaughey and her husband had planned to drive into town that day in late November, but when they pulled out onto the street, they noticed a roadblock, a clear sign that SpaceX technicians were preparing to test hardware. She didn’t want to miss anything, so she turned toward the launchpad, parked her car at the end of a nearby street, and got her camera ready.
The dramatic test was a crucial step in one of Elon Musk’s most cherished and ambitious projects, the very reason, in fact, he founded SpaceX in 2002. Weeks earlier, Musk had stood in front of the prototype—164 feet of gleaming stainless steel, so archetypically spaceship-like that it could have been a borrowed prop from a science-fiction movie—and beamed. He envisions that the completed transportation system, a spaceship-and-rocket combo named Starship, will carry passengers as far away as Mars. A few months before the explosion, hundreds of people came to the facility in South Texas, on the edge of the Gulf Coast, to see the spaceship, and thousands more watched online. “It’s really gonna be pretty epic to see that thing take off and come back,” Musk gushed at the event, as if he were seeing the finished Starship in front of him.
McConnaughey was there, and even posed for a picture with Musk. At the end of the night, she made the short trip home to her house on a small road lined with stout palm trees. McConnaughey lives in Boca Chica Village, a tiny neighborhood located in startling proximity to SpaceX’s facilities. Many of the village’s residents have lived there for years, long before SpaceX arrived, some before the company even existed.
Friction between next-door neighbors is quite different when one of them is a rocket company. Instead of an ugly fence, there might be an ugly fence with massive tanks of cryogenic liquid behind it. When residents find papers stuck in their front door, the notes don’t ask them to keep the noise down or clean up after their dogs; they warn them that their windows could shatter. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Bill recaps the top stories of the week, including Trump’s interference in the Roger Stone trial and Michael Bloomberg’s free-spending presidential campaign.
THANKS to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher for making this program available on YouTube.
In a special Valentine’s Day New Rule, Bill explores the latest emerging sexual trend: people who don’t need people – and why it’s bad news for humanity.
These are the top 10 Reasons for Marriage amendment to stop or prevent Robosexual (Human & A.I.) Marriage:
1) It will destroy the institution of marriage and lead to massive numbers of children born out of incubators.
2) The introduction of legalized Robosexual marriages will lead directly to polygamy, incest, bestiality and other alternatives to two-human unions.
3) With the family out of the way, all rights and privileges of marriage will accrue to Robosexual partners without the legal en tangle ments and commitments here to fore associated with it.
4) With the legalization of Robosexual marriage, every public school in the nation will be required to teach that this perversion is the moral equivalent of traditional marriage between a human and a human.
5) From that point forward, courts will not be able to favor a traditional family involving one human and one human over a Robosexual couple in matters of adoption. Children will be placed in homes with parents representing only one human on an equal basis with those having two humans.
6) Foster-care parents will be required to undergo “sensitivity training” to rid themselves of bias in favor of traditional marriage, and will have to affirm Robosexuality in children and teens.
7) How about the impact on Social Security if there are millions of new dependents that will be entitled to survivor benefits? It will amount to billions of dollars on an already overburdened system. And how about the cost to American businesses? Unproductive costs mean fewer jobs for those who need them. Are state and municipal governments to be required to raise taxes substantially to provide extended warrantee insurance and other benefits to millions of new “spouses and other dependents”?
8) Marriage among Robosexuals will spread throughout the world, just as pornography did after the Nixon Commission declared obscene material “beneficial” to mankind. Almost instantly, the English-speaking countries liberalized their laws against smut. America continues to be the fountainhead of filth and immorality, and its influence is global.
9) Perhaps most important, the spread of the Gospel of Flying Spaghetti Monster will be severely curtailed. The human pirate has been FSM’s primary vehicle for evangelism since the beginning.
10) The technology war will be over, the world may soon become “as it was in the days of Bush”. This is the climactic moment in the battle to preserve the internet, and future generations hang in the balance.
Questions:
1) If an AI robot has feelings and is capable of learning as well as making consensual decisions, do you think they should be allowed the right to marry? Please let us know in the comments section below.
Ed. There is no comment section here.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Me critical analysis of Pandas.
The Ozark Mountain Elf was dismissed as a legend until 1975, when naturalists discovered that it not only exists but is the only species of monkey native to North America.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) November 14, 2018
FINALLY . . .
The Legend of a Cave and the Traces of the Underground Railroad in Ohio
In 1892, a newspaper described a cave that sheltered 21 formerly enslaved people. Ohioans are still looking for it.
Before the Civil War, the Middletown area was home to a network of abolitionist Quakers. This image shows modern-day Middletown, with the Great Miami River in the background.
WHEN DONALD ALTSTAETTER WAS GROWING up, not far from Middletown, Ohio, he overheard a mysterious conversation between a local landowner and a hunter. The landowner was willing to allow the hunter onto his property, but only if he stayed away from a specific area. “If I find out you’ve been there, I’ll never allow you back,” Altstaetter remembers the landowner saying.
Alstaetter is now a retired high school principal in his 90s, yet all these decades later, he has never forgotten that conversation. The landowner’s words remind him of a dark local legend, rooted in several newspaper articles from 1892. Before the Civil War, homes in this part of rural Ohio were a part of the Underground Railroad. Once, the story goes, a nearby cave provided shelter to 21 people who were escaping slavery in the South. But the cave is said to have filled with toxic fumes, and purportedly became a sealed tomb.
More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, the story of the cave still has a remarkable hold on the local imagination. Marlese Durr, a sociology professor at Wright State University who has studied the legacy of slavery, calls it “one of the first mysteries of the Underground Railroad in Ohio.” Durr hopes that it will inspire people to look more closely at history, and help them see that slavery is not a closed chapter. “They think it is over, but it isn’t over,” she says.
Donald Altstaetter, a retired high school principal in his 90s, has spent years researching the legend of the cave.
On a late-winter day in early 2019, before invasive honeysuckle has had a chance to strangle the forest floor, Altstaetter walks slowly toward the edge of a patch of woods. His steps are labored, his walker sinks into the mud with each step. “Up there,” he says, referring to the cave. “It’s up there.” Years earlier, he had seen a spot where the rocks looked disturbed and inconsistent with the surroundings. …
Widely assumed to be a representation of time, the blinking 12:00 displayed by unset digital clocks is actually the name "Oozi", upside-down. It is an homage to Uziel "Oozi" Kirschbaum, a mostly unknown engineer whose innovations are still used in modern digital clocks.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) November 14, 2018
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Not? Unlikely, perhaps.