• • • google suggested • • •
WORD SALAD: “ denotes the action of life not merely as vital force, but a more fully and deeply, animating force. If the animating matrix of life is intelligent, willfull, and responsive to what it produces, it is appropriate to name it and treat it as a living creature having those attributes.”
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
Get Lost in a Corn Maze That Looks Like a Microscopic ‘Water Bear’
Here’s what it takes to transform a field of corn into a truly enormous tardigrade.
This tardigrade is amaizeingly huge. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
WHEN ANGIE TREINEN FIRST LEARNED about tardigrades a few years ago, at a family-friendly science event at the University of Wisconsin, she couldn’t believe it. She loved their squashed little faces and their wonderfully rotund bodies, which look like a puffy stack of partly melted marshmallows. “I just stood there the whole time like, ‘Are you kidding me?’” Treinen says.
Treinen studied zoology and worked as a veterinarian, but had never encountered teeny tiny tardigrades, which are variously known as moss piglets and water bears. Immediately, they captivated her. Typically less than a millimeter long, tardigrades thrive in both mundane and extreme conditions, including bone-rattling icy landscapes, oceans, and ultra-hot environments. (They’re probably flourishing near your house, too, and it’s easy to meet them.) Internet audiences love them because they’re endearingly goofy, like claymation creatures loping around on impossibly spiky claws. Researchers, meanwhile, are fascinated by their ability to stay alive: Tardigrades persist in the face of pressure changes, temperature fluctuations, and vanishing water and oxygen.
So when Treinen sat down to plan out the annual corn maze for the eponymous farm she owns with her husband in Lodi, Wisconsin, it seemed obvious. 2020, a year of disease, economic recession, and crushing ennui, would be the year of the tardigrade. Treinen talked to Atlas Obscura about designing, planting, sculpting, and welcoming visitors to the 15-acre corn maze, which is open at Treinen Farm through November 8, 2020.
Corn mazes are popular autumnal activities in the Midwest and beyond—but they’re typically not tardigrades.
What makes for a good maize maze?
We have a lot of parameters. It typically needs to be a story, or something really intriguing—we’ve done Aesop’s fables and some Greek myths, like Icarus. It has to be a recognizable figure: When the picture of the maze is online, I don’t want people to be confused, like “What is that?” But I try to do a completely different art style each year. We did a Picasso-sketch style one year, and Art Nouveau another. Sometimes it looks like stained glass; sometimes it looks like folk art. I don’t want my mazes to all look exactly the same. I’m also aware of what is challenging for visitors to navigate in the maze. I want people to get lost, and I want there to be a lot of challenge—but not so much that people are like, “I’m outta here and I’m never coming back.” …
Ed. Makes me wonder. Scampers off to Google corn maze longmont…
The cost of becoming American
New federal fee structure is the latest barrier to immigration.
On July 31, United States Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced significant fee increases for most naturalization and benefits requests. While the agency justified the increase as an effort to address budget shortfalls, immigration lawyers and advocates decry the move, arguing it will not only discourage applications for citizenship and other legal immigration benefits, but also further the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda.
“The entire tone of the Trump administration is essentially to convey that lower income people are not welcome in this country,” says Violeta Chapin, who runs the Criminal and Immigration Defense Clinic at CU-Boulder.
The new fee structure, set to take effect Oct. 2, will increase costs by a weighted average of 20%, meaning that while a few categories will actually see a cost decrease, others will increase by more than 500%.
USCIS is almost entirely funded by administrative fees, which account for 97% of its budget, and handles all immigration applications and renewals including legal permanent residency, Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals (DACA), work authorization, travel permission and asylum. The agency was created in 2003 under the newly established Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which also includes Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It was part of the post-9/11 dismantling of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which had been responsible for citizenship services and border patrol since 1933. …
How the COVID-19 pandemic and George Floyd protests could give rise to terrorism
Our modern plague could spur apocalyptic and nihilistic thinking. Deprived of normal routines and relationships, people are disoriented, disillusioned and isolated.
The U.S. response to the pandemic has further cleaved an already deeply divided society.
Armed conflicts fuel plagues: Until very recently in history, disease killed more people in wars than battle. But plagues can also fuel conflict, and COVID-19 may be no exception. The conditions facing the United States today are reminiscent of those that gave rise to the radicalism of the 1970s and could once again lead to political violence, including terrorism.
It’s not that the pandemic gives extremists or terrorists new capabilities or points them to a path they hadn’t thought of before. Instead, the pandemic creates a psychologically upsetting environment that encourages fanatics to do crazy and possibly violent things, and those actions will have greater impact on an already frightened public.
The pandemic has put the U.S. into a recession, and it’s likely to worsen. Millions are unemployed; soon, many of them could be destitute. COVID-19 and the economic distress it’s causing could change how people behave in a (seemingly) more hostile world, how they view the legitimacy of government authority and how they value life itself.
History provides some markers for how humans react when confronted with such crises. Poorly handled disasters, in particular, can erode faith in leaders, producing major upheaval such as armed rebellion. In ancient China, for instance, calamities were seen as signs that the ruler had lost the mandate of heaven to rule and needed replacement. Rebels took up arms. Dynasties fell. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: There are no vaccines for viral venom or collective madness. Deliverance, it seems, must come from our own common sense and sense of community.
I’m a Historian. I See Reason to Fear—And to Hope.
We can’t assume that all will be fine in the end, but history shows us that times of unrest are opportunities, too.
Historians don’t just study history. We construct it. We puzzle pieces into meanings. Aided by our instincts and experiences, as well as by our research, we make sense of other times, other nations, other peoples. In that sense, the writing of history is always personal.
But it’s one thing to reckon with the past and quite another to make sense of transparently historical events as we live through them. Like so many others, I’m staggered by daily bursts of upset and unknowingness, alternately depressed, anxious, angry, and distracted. There’s a whole-soul exhaustion born of living in the age of Trump.
And looking to the past provides no respite. Indeed, when it comes to decoding our current crises, American history holds some hard lessons. As a historian, I know that things don’t always return to “normal” and that recovery is painfully slow and piecemeal. I know that “good” doesn’t always prevail and that past accomplishments can be undone, past injustices reborn. I know that dangers often rise unnoticed and trigger transformative change in a rush. I know the vital importance of the institutional guardrails crumbling around us, and the dangers inherent in unbridled power. And I know—deep in my gut—that I have taken things for granted that I will never take for granted again.
Of course, this is hardly my first time living knowingly through “history.” As a historian of the nation’s founding, I’m always wide awake to modern insights. The events of 9/11, for example, gave me a new understanding of national vulnerability on the world stage. The new American republic was an infant among empires with the power to destroy it. As much as I had intellectually grasped that fact before, I now felt its consequences in a deep and cutting way. …
Fire Tornados In California Puts Us At 6/10 On The Biblical Plagues Checklist
Look, I know every other blogger and I keep hammering on how bad everything is and how the world seems on the brink of collapse. But this isn’t one of those doomsday rants, promise. Instead, this article should serve as a personal plea: To whoever keeps asking, “How could this possibly get any worse?” every week, could you please stop? Because this shit keeps happening.
image of the fire tornado in Lassen Co., CA today. divine. gorgeous. unbelievable. pic.twitter.com/jr9zj89tTh
— Morgan Fuld (@mjfuld54) August 16, 2020
On Saturday, the residence of Lassen County, California, must’ve wearily sighed as they saw giant pillars of fire piercing through obsidian clouds. The county, 25 miles northwest of Reno, had been suffering from the Loyalton wildfire burning through 20,000 acres (one of several currently raging across the West Coast). But between the massive gust of winds and extreme heat, the land was primed for the eruption of the rare “fire-based tornado” or, as overly excited meteorologists call it, a firenado.
Tornado created by the #LoyaltonFire captured by @v3katelynn as we traveled south on 395. @NWSReno @KTNV #fire #wildfire #tornado pic.twitter.com/zUPVY6Bd6s
— Jordan (@nevada_traveler) August 16, 2020
Seen from my street level. pic.twitter.com/GvlwmdHm0p
— Paulina (@heartdisney10) August 16, 2020
…
RELATED: 5 Crazy True Crimes That Got Overshadowed This Year
2020 has broken our ability to tell what’s normal. We’ll see some headline like “Cannibal Kills Prince William, Beams Away to Mothership,” and we just sort of nod, saying, “Wow, first Kobe, then COVID, now this. 2020 be crazy!” And then we move on. But we want you to slow down and realize that some of these cases of people dying over the last few months are not normal by even the twenty-twentiest of definitions. They’re strange and horrifying, and once we finish arresting everyone responsible, we have to arrest God next.
5. The CEO Found With His Head Sawn Off
People who live in a $2 million luxury condo on Manhattan’s Lower East Side probably feel thoroughly safe in their own building. But let’s dispel any feeling of security you’ll ever have by sharing with you what the cameras in one such building picked up from July 13. A resident, 33-year-old tech CEO Fahim Saleh, gets into the elevator. He’s joined by a man dressed in a black suit, latex gloves, and a black mask. Fahim uses his key fob to send the elevator directly to his own apartment, and the other guy touches a button too, but he’s just pretending. Fahim walks through the doors into his unit, and the man follows him. The last image of Fahim is the killer tasing him.
It's been two days since my uncle Fahim Saleh was killed in his apartment in New York. My father was telling me about him yesterday, with tears in his eyes. Fahim uncle's father was the person who admitted my father in a college in Dhaka, took care of him since day one. pic.twitter.com/eXTnUPujRe
— Nahiyan (@Nahiy4n) July 17, 2020
The next day, Fahim’s cousin came by, having not heard from him a bit and wanting to check in. She keyed into the apartment, and this is your last chance to scroll away from this story to something more pleasant. She saw Fahim in the apartment all right — at least, she saw his torso. His arms and legs were cut off. So was his head. These body parts were in plastic bags. An electric saw had evidently sliced them off him; it was still plugged in and bloody.
Judging from how fresh the cuts were, police surmise that the killer had been in the apartment chopping the body up when he heard the cousin arriving. So he fled through a back door, leaving her with both the most traumatic experience of her life and also a narrow escape from being murdered herself. He’d tased Fahim the previous day, stabbed him to death, then returned later to properly dispose of the body. As for who this costumed killer was, no one knew, but it sounded like a professional hit man. Maybe this had something to do with Fahim’s job. Fahim had been speaking out about the Nigerian government overregulating his company — maybe this was international revenge? …
What Happens When You Let 1,000 Teenage Boys Run a Government
A new documentary about a high-school civics experiment suggests that young Americans simply imitate the flawed electoral politics they see in their country.
Boys State is a documentary about a high-school civics experiment that doubles as a nerdier, nonlethal Lord of the Flies. Every year, more than 1,000 young men, age 16 or 17, descend upon the Texas State Capitol to participate in a mock government: They split into political parties, elect members to offices including caucus chair and Supreme Court Justice, and vie for the highest position—governor. One could come away from the film either hopeful for the future because of the impassioned young people participating, or despairing at the partisan gamesmanship and cheap tactics that so many of them deploy to come out on top.
In other words, the documentary tells the story of America’s political present. The compelling project premiered on Apple TV+ Friday—fewer than 100 days before what’s expected to be a bitterly contested election consumes the country. (Laurene Powell Jobs, the president of the Emerson Collective, which is the majority owner of The Atlantic, is one of the film’s executive producers.) Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s documentary, which debuted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, features dynamic young people whose hearts seem to be in the right place. But in just one week of action, that thrilling optimism crashes into the brutal realities of modern politics and performative teen masculinity.
Boys State (and its sister program, Girls State) is run by the American Legion in locations around the country, and famous alumni include Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, Cory Booker, and nonpoliticians such as Michael Jordan and Bruce Springsteen. Upon arriving in Austin, Texas, the students in the film are divided into two parties—the Federalists and the Nationalists—and tasked with developing political platforms and slates of candidates to run against each other. The exercise is meant to encourage compromise and consensus-building. What results is, unsurprisingly, far more complicated.
Moss and McBaine render the entire program as a gripping competition, focusing on different “star” characters. The teen cohort’s politics seem to lean rightward, perhaps reflecting Texas’s status as a red state, but the film foregrounds participants from across the political spectrum. Much more fascinating than the students’ beliefs, however, is the ways their debates echo the hard-line partisanship of contemporary politics, rather than imagining what a different future could look like. …
Political trolls adapt, create material to deceive and confuse the public
Russian-sponsored Twitter trolls, who so aggressively exploited social media to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, didn’t stop when Donald Trump was elected president.
Even after the election, they remained active and adapted their methods, including using images – among them, easy-to-digest meme images such as Hillary Clinton appearing to run away from police – to spread their views. As part of our study to understand how these trolls operate, we analyzed 1.8 million images posted on Twitter by 3,600 accounts identified by Twitter itself as being part of Russian government-sponsored disinformation campaigns, from before the 2016 election through 2018, when those accounts were shut down by Twitter.
While our study focused on those specific accounts, it’s reasonable to assume that others exist and are still active. Until they were blocked by Twitter, the accounts we studied were sharing images about events in Russia, Ukraine and the U.S. – including divisive political events like the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. The images Russian government-backed trolls posted on Twitter appeared on other social networks, including Reddit, 4chan and Gab.
Examples of memes shared online by Russian government-sponsored trolls.
Changing focus
What they posted shifted over time. We analyzed the actual images themselves, to identify the topics of the posts, and even depictions of public figures and specific locations. In 2014, most of these accounts began posting images related to Russia and Ukraine, but gradually transitioned to posting images about U.S. politics, including material about Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
This is consistent with some of our previous analysis of the text posts of these accounts, which showed they had changed their focus from Russian foreign policy to U.S. domestic issues. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Mexico is becoming one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a woman with an average of 10 killed each day.
THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
John Oliver takes a look at why people of color are routinely excluded from becoming jurors, who their absence impacts, and what we can do to create a fairer system.
THANKS to HBO and Last Week Tonight for making this program available on YouTube.
Trump makes a mess of the new relief package, Russia may have developed a vaccine, and NYC asks Apple to develop face ID that works with masks.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Here’s me commentary on personal space. Cheers!
暑い夏の夜の暑苦しい動画。Maru&Hana’s video of the hot summer night.
FINALLY . . .
Explaining Our Obsession With the Unexplained
Fringe beliefs, conspiracy theories, and the disenchanting of the world.
A still from a recently declassified Navy video from 2015 depicting … well, no one is quite sure.
JUNE 1996, AND THE UNITED STATES WAS on edge. A year after Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, the country watched anxiously as a standoff between the FBI and a militia group unfolded in Jordan, Montana. The Montana Freemen had declared themselves outside the reach of U.S. law, had stopped paying taxes, and had embarked on a scheme of counterfeiting and bank fraud. When the FBI attempted to arrest them in March, they grabbed their weapons, and the Feds, eager to avoid the bloodshed that ended similar standoffs at Ruby Ridge and Waco, settled in for a siege. During the second month, news broke that another Montanan—Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber—had been caught and charged with a series of bombings over the course of 17 years. Then, on June 14, the same day that the last of the Montana Freemen surrendered peacefully, police in Long Island, New York, arrested another group of dangerous men, revealing a plot far stranger than anything the country had yet seen.
Martin Thompson, the head of Rackets for the Suffolk County’s District Attorney’s office, had been leading an investigation into illegal gun sales when he first learned of the plan. Listening to a wiretap of two suspects, John J. Ford and Joe Mazzuchelli, he suddenly found them talking about something very different than guns.
“Once they find this stuff, on, let’s say in Tony’s car, front seat,” Ford is heard saying on the tape, only to be cut off by Mazzuchelli, who chimes in, “Nasty bastard glowing in the dark.” Ford adds, “With this isotope, he’ll start glowing in 24 hours.” Thompson and his team had stumbled on a deeply bizarre assassination plot involving stolen radium, a forest fire, and a UFO cover-up.
The U.S. Air Force’s Nevada Test and Training Range contains a facility popularly known as Area 51. The secrecy around it has attracted countless theories. Embiggenable. Explore at home (prepare to be disappointed).
In addition to stockpiling a large cache of weapons, Ford was president of the Long Island branch of the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, a collection of UFO enthusiasts who investigated sightings to prove that extraterrestrials had visited Earth. MUFON members are not, by nature, violent: Most see their job as simply gathering evidence, as objectively and dispassionately as possible.
But Ford was not a typical UFO researcher. He claimed he had been recruited by the CIA at 18, and had routinely participated in clandestine operations against the Soviet Union. The KGB, he claimed, had tried five times to kill him, and they’d given him the nickname “the Fox,” due to his wily nature. But by the mid-1990s, things had turned: Ford injured himself on the job and his mother died, an event that, friends said, affected him deeply. And then there was the forest fire. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
In your fantasies, how does it happen?
Reply below. Use your pronouns.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) July 6, 2020
