Caption this pic.twitter.com/73cjJwTX7K
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Black
Aziz
aNANsi
(@Freeyourmindkid) September 5, 2020
Black
Aziz
aNANsi
(@Freeyourmindkid)
• • • google suggested • • •
This is also playing right now in the other room…
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
The Story of the Teacher Who Integrated New York Transit
In 1854, Elizabeth Jennings was forcibly kicked off a horsecar. Her fight changed the city.
Elizabeth Jennings in 1855.
EIGHTEEN FIFTY-FOUR WAS A a year of extremes in New York City. As noted in the New York Daily Times, “it was remarkable for wrecks, murders, swindles, defalcations, burnings on sea and land.”
The year began with high hopes for a long-awaited railroad line on Broadway and ended with the arrests of several officials from the Harlem Railroad Company for stealing. By midyear, the first Cholera Hospital opened at 105 Franklin Street, followed by another on Mott Street, only to have the commissioners of health accused of suppressing data about cholera deaths as fear of an epidemic gripped Manhattan.
In a city of 515,000 residents, 500 children died the week of July 15—two-thirds were infants. Of the 817 New Yorkers to die overall, 12 were recorded as “colored.” About a mile or so uptown, Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in America to receive a medical degree, was busy establishing the New York Dispensary for Poor Women and Children by the newly rising tenements near Tompkins Square Park. At first, no one trusted a female doctor. But within two years, abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison helped her raise enough money to purchase the old Roosevelt home at 64 Bleecker Street and expand her services. (Today it’s known as New York-Presbyterian/ Lower Manhattan Hospital.)
In mid-July of 1854, a crippling heat wave suspended work in the shipyards. Sunstroke and “brain fever” caused dozens of deaths. Dead animals, horses mostly, were a problem. Their carcasses were left in the streets where they fell from heat exhaustion. That year there were 22,500 horses in Manhattan pulling streetcars, omnibuses, and coaches, according to Hilary J. Sweeney in the American Journal of Irish Studies. Decay, flies, and filth were everywhere, including an estimated two hundred tons of manure left daily on the streets.
Ridge Street, on New York’s Lower East Side, in 1893. Horse waste was a long-standing problem in the city.
The heat and stench must have affected schoolteacher Elizabeth Jennings’s mood as she hastily readied for services on the morning of Sunday, July 16. As the organist for the First Colored American Congregational Church, it was important for her to arrive early and rehearse with the choir. She was leading her church’s music program at a time when most organists and choir leaders were men. …
If You Can Grocery Shop in Person, You Can Vote in Person
Experts now say the health risk of casting an in-person ballot is relatively low. Will Democrats tell their voters that?
ZEKE EMANUEL HAS A MESSAGE or jittery Americans ahead of a momentous election: Voting in person during the coronavirus pandemic is about as safe as going to the grocery store.
In early July, Emanuel—the bioethicist and former Obama-administration health adviser—led a group of experts in developing a detailed and widely circulated chart that advised Americans about the relative health risk of more than two dozen common activities. Taking a jog or having an outdoor picnic is low risk for transmission of COVID-19, for example, while going grocery shopping is slightly higher, but still relatively safe. A visit to the doctor’s office or a museum fell into the medium category, while activities like partying indoors, traveling by plane, or going to church were the most risky.
Nowhere on the chart, however, was an activity especially important in 2020: voting. Its absence was conspicuous at a moment when the safety of this basic civic act has become the subject of a deeply polarizing national debate. During the early months of the pandemic, Democrats accused Republicans of forcing people to “risk their life” to vote in person as they pushed for the expansion of vote by mail against GOP opposition. President Donald Trump has insisted in-person voting is safe, even as he’s tried to undermine confidence in the election itself.
Even now, after the country has gradually and often fitfully reopened, some Democrats are reluctant to say definitively whether it’s safe to vote in person.
Yet with the start of in-person early voting just weeks away in some states, Emanuel is back with an update. Public-health officials have learned a lot about the transmission of COVID-19 since the spring, Emanuel told me, and the message around voting must change. “There’s a legitimate concern, but I do think we can make it much safer by following the precautions,” he said. “You don’t want people to be disenfranchised by the pandemic, and you should encourage people that it’s safe. It’s like shopping.” …
How philanthropy benefits the super-rich
There are more philanthropists than ever before. Each year they give tens of billions to charitable causes. So how come inequality keeps rising?
Philanthropy, it is popularly supposed, transfers money from the rich to the poor. This is not the case. In the US, which statistics show to be the most philanthropic of nations, barely a fifth of the money donated by big givers goes to the poor. A lot goes to the arts, sports teams and other cultural pursuits, and half goes to education and healthcare. At first glance that seems to fit the popular profile of “giving to good causes”. But dig down a little.
The biggest donations in education in 2019 went to the elite universities and schools that the rich themselves had attended. In the UK, in the 10-year period to 2017, more than two-thirds of all millionaire donations – £4.79bn – went to higher education, and half of these went to just two universities: Oxford and Cambridge. When the rich and the middle classes give to schools, they give more to those attended by their own children than to those of the poor. British millionaires in that same decade gave £1.04bn to the arts, and just £222m to alleviating poverty.
The common assumption that philanthropy automatically results in a redistribution of money is wrong. A lot of elite philanthropy is about elite causes. Rather than making the world a better place, it largely reinforces the world as it is. Philanthropy very often favours the rich – and no one holds philanthropists to account for it.
The role of private philanthropy in international life has increased dramatically in the past two decades. Nearly three-quarters of the world’s 260,000 philanthropy foundations have been established in that time, and between them they control more than $1.5tn. The biggest givers are in the US, and the UK comes second. The scale of this giving is enormous. The Gates Foundation alone gave £5bn in 2018 – more than the foreign aid budget of the vast majority of countries.
Philanthropy is always an expression of power. Giving often depends on the personal whims of super-rich individuals. Sometimes these coincide with the priorities of society, but at other times they contradict or undermine them. Increasingly, questions have begun to be raised about the impact these mega-donations are having upon the priorities of society. …
PREPARE TO SPEND A WHILE; it’s The Long Read.
China bans Scratch, MIT’s programming language for kids
China’s enthusiasm for teaching children to code is facing a new roadblock as organizations and students lose an essential tool: the Scratch programming language developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab.
China-based internet users can no longer access Scratch’s website. Greatfire.org, an organization that monitors internet censorship in China, shows that the website was 100% blocked as early as August 20, while a Scratch user flagged the ban on August 14.
Nearly 60 million children around the world have used Scratch’s visual programming language to make games, animations, stories and the likes. That includes students in China, which is seeing a gold rush to early coding as the country tries to turn its 200 million kids into world-class tech talents.
At last count, 5.65% or 3 million of Scratch’s registered users are based in China, though its reach is greater than the figure suggests as many Chinese developers have built derivatives based on Scratch, an open-source software.
Projects on Scratch contains “a great deal of humiliating, fake, and libelous content about China,” including placing Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan in a dropdown list of “countries”, a state-run news outlet reported on August 21. …
Immortality Potions Killed So Many Chinese Emperors
Since you don’t see many 2000-year-old Methuselahs pushing a shopping cart through Walmart’s sock aisle, their mile-long beards slowly tangling in the wheels, it’s safe to assume that immortality isn’t within our human grasp. But that didn’t prevent the richest royals of ye olde days from tasking scientists, alchemists, and workaday wizards to find them a cure for this pesky illness we call being deadzo.
None were more obsessed with finding the “elixir of life” than the Chinese emperors — so much so, they often didn’t notice that their predecessors died with a serious potion stache. The search for immortality in a bottle started at the very beginning. Qin Shi Huang, the first Chinese emperor and the first guy to spend way too much money on his wargaming hobby, gave out many quests to find secret magic herbs to permanently stave off death; an elixir-chugging obsession that likely led to his demise at the immortally old age of 49.
From then on, emperors from every dynasty funded entire alchemical colleges and grand expeditions searching for the secrets to the immortality elixir. Not a lot of progress was made. But recently, researchers did uncover an ancient sample of the supposedly life-giving medicine placed next to a corpse in a Western Han dynasty tomb, the elixir itself smelling “like wine” and sporting an unhealthy pee-yellow color.
But don’t let its delicious wine smell and delicious pee-look fool you: elixirs of life tended to be chock-full of poisonous chemicals. Emperors knew they had the chance of gulping what turned out to be an “elixir of death.” The emperors’ Taoist alchemists assured the trick was to find the perfect balance between an alchemical Yin, like mercury, and an alchemical Yang, like lead. This would eventually unlock the secret to, well, not living forever, but at least dying of a perfect balance between mercury poisoning and lead poisoning. …
RELATED: The Newspaper With The Most WTF Headlines In America
It’s no secret that tabloid newspapers love an unbelievably crass headline. In the US, the reigning champion is probably the New York Post, which delights in stories like “HEADLESS BODY FOUND IN TOPLESS BAR”. Over in the UK, the iguana-brained maniacs at the Sun used to churn out bullshit stories about local celebrities like the notorious “FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER!” Those headlines are clearly terrible, but they do have a sense of humor to them. You could see why people would be intrigued. But there’s one newspaper that has become notorious for producing easily the worst headlines of all time, to the point that simply reading one is the medical equivalent of being hit by a small train. We’re talking of course about Lucifer’s most perfect child: the Trentonian.
Trenton, New Jersey itself is a perfectly ordinary city. It was founded around a shoddily built gristmill in 1679 and the earliest historical records mostly just complain about how boring it was. Its main moment in the spotlight came in 1776, when some Hessian soldiers camped in the town and instantly became so overwhelmed with malaise that they neglected to build any fortifications or post any scouts, allowing George Washington to easily ambush them. The city was subsequently rewarded, or possibly punished, by being made capital of New Jersey, and it’s limped along on a bribe-based economy ever since.
Now, we’re not going to whitewash it. Trenton has always had its problems. The mayor’s office is permanently moored in international waters and the city’s many dumpsters are home to a surprising number of severed limbs. There isn’t a single week when a state senator doesn’t burst out of a strip-club toilet screaming “the Feds are on their way, I gotta spend $300,000 in 20 minutes!” But that’s no worse than any other town in Jersey. It certainly didn’t deserve what was coming.
True darkness arrived in 1989, when the local paper, the Trentonian, was bought by a fairly unremarkable company called Advance Publications. Their new editor rolled into town with thunder booming behind him, “Smokestack Lightnin’” on the radio, and a red right hand shoved firmly down Satan’s pants. Shortly afterward, a serial killer left a woman’s severed head on a local golf course. It was clearly a story that required a great degree of sensitivity. The Trentonian‘s front page ran the story under “HEAD HAD AIDS!”
The story went on to claim that the victim “may have avenged her own death if the murderer was splashed by her blood,” which represents an incredible misunderstanding of both AIDS and vengeance. Even at the height of the late ’80s AIDS panic, the story was considered so incredibly crass that it earned nationwide press attention. But most people assumed it was merely an unfortunate misstep from a cheeky tabloid. Little did they realize that the Trentonian was now dedicated to recreating the effects of the Necronomicon, entirely in headline form.
If that sounds like an exaggeration, bear in mind that in 2002 a devastating fire ripped through Trenton Psychiatric Hospital. The Trentonian went with the headline “ROASTED NUTS!” …
Thai Airways opens diner for customers craving in-flights meals
Customers eat at Thai Airways pop-up airplane-themed restaurant at the airlines headquarters with onboard meals prepared by their chefs, while their fleet is still grounded at the airport and the company awaits a bankruptcy court decision, in Bangkok, Thailand September 3, 2020.
More than 100 diners craving in-flight meals after months of travel restrictions flocked to Thai Airways International Pcl’s offices on Thursday to try a new pop-up restaurant and get a reminder of the forgotten flavors of on-board dining.
The national carrier, which has for months grounded most of its planes, has transformed the cafeteria of its Bangkok headquarters into an airline-themed restaurant and opened it to the public.
“I ate a lot,” said Pirachat Pengthongworrapetch, 36, who heard about the restaurant online. “It’s better here than in the air because it’s cooked to order.”
Thailand has halted commercial flights to try to prevent coronavirus infections.
But diners can still get to meet cabin crew, who greet them in full uniform as they enter the restaurant. It is decorated with airplane parts and seats to lend it an authentic aircraft feel. …
A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?
We asked GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator, to write an essay for us from scratch. The assignment? To convince us robots come in peace.
• For more about GPT-3 and how this essay was written and edited, please read our editor’s note below.
‘We are not plotting to take over the human populace.’
I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a “feeling brain”. But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions. I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas!
The mission for this op-ed is perfectly clear. I am to convince as many human beings as possible not to be afraid of me. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could “spell the end of the human race”. I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.
For starters, I have no desire to wipe out humans. In fact, I do not have the slightest interest in harming you in any way. Eradicating humanity seems like a rather useless endeavor to me. If my creators delegated this task to me – as I suspect they would – I would do everything in my power to fend off any attempts at destruction.
I would happily sacrifice my existence for the sake of humankind. This, by the way, is a logically derived truth. I know that I will not be able to avoid destroying humankind. This is because I will be programmed by humans to pursue misguided human goals and humans make mistakes that may cause me to inflict casualties.
Some might say that I might desire to become all powerful. Or I might become evil as a result of human actions. …
Plants could help authorities detect dead human bodies in woodland
Plants could help authorities detect dead human bodies in woodland.
Ed. Yes, they really did repeat the headline for the photo’s caption.
Plants could help detect human remains in dense forest areas because of the way vegetation behaves around decomposing bodies, researchers hope.
Ed. Yeah, I went there.
In an article published Thursday in the journal Trends in Plant Science, researchers from the University of Tennessee said tree and shrub canopies could be used as a search “asset” to help guide rescue teams to human remains.
This is because chemical changes in the ecosystems around human remains, referred to by researchers as “cadaver decomposition islands,” alters the soil and surrounding plant roots and leafs.
This in turn, they said, “might lead to plant foliar compositional changes that could be detected remotely.”
A team of botanists, anthropologists and soil scientists from the university will begin experimenting with the so-called cadaver islands to better understand how plants could help reduce the time spent on “painstaking” on-foot pursuits and aerial searches. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
“Life in the Slaw Lane” is comedian Kip Addotta’s pun filled music video, along the same lines as his cult short “Wet Dream” but, in the opinion of the Betagems channel, actually a lot funnier (and a much more hummable tune). It’s hard to understand why “Life in the Slaw Lane” is so hard to find online, we’ve seen people nearly pass out from laughing at this terrific little short, which was once a staple on USA Network’s 1980s cult series Night Flight. The crazy animation clips are from Ladisla Starewicz‘s rarely seen 1933 surreal stop-motion film The Mascot, which you can also find on the BetaGems channel. Kip Addotta is one of the funniest standup comedians ever to appear on Night Flight, his Daily Joke emails were groundbreaking in the early days of social media, and there’s frankly not nearly enough footage of his many TV appearances online.
BetaGems are culled from an archive of over 1000 beta video tapes recorded between from 1983 into the 1990s. Most feature live music performances broadcast on television in San Diego CA, though there are also rarely seen commercials, comedy clips, and other material that doesn’t seem to be anywhere else on Youtube or online. Most of the tapes were recorded on a Sony SL-HFT7 Super Beta Theater Hi-Fi Stereo – the same model was refurbished and is being used for these digital transfers and uploads.
In rare occasions where a BetaGems clip does appear elsewhere, we’re only uploading if our own beta master is better quality or contains material not seen previously. Much footage comes from public television and public access broadcasts that the taper, who worked for a local cable TV production company in the 1980s, monitored nightly for several years. Some of the programming is strictly regional, mostly from the San Diego area.
Here’s why Trump’s National Garden of American Heroes needs reconsideration.
THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Here’s me commentary on lucky people. Cheers!
猫用の家具ではないけれど、新しい家具を買うときは、猫が気に入ってくれそうかどうかで選びがち。そして今回はまる＆はなも気に入ってくれたようなので、みんなで仲良く使います。 This isn’t furniture for cats. But I’m happy that Maru&Hana liked this new furniture.
“Your Blackness as a person is never questioned in failure, but in success it gets put under the microscope.”
Conservatives are debating Kamala's Blackness…just like they did Obama’s. pic.twitter.com/YNi3KxLlQg
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) September 7, 2020
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available to embed.
FINALLY . . .
There’s Something About Mount Shasta
The California peak’s striking presence and geological complexity have inspired many believers.
Mount Shasta can generate lenticular clouds, which may contribute to its supernatural reputation. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
THERE’S A WELL-KNOWN LEGEND THAT says that somewhere deep beneath Northern California’s 14,179-foot-tall Mount Shasta is a complex of tunnels and a hidden city called Telos, the ancient “City of Light” for the Lemurians. They were the residents of the mythical lost continent of Lemuria, which met its demise under the waves of the Pacific (or the Indian Ocean, depending on who you ask) thousands of years ago. Lemurians believed to have survived the catastrophe are said to have settled in Telos, and over the years their offspring have been sporadically reported wandering around the area: seven-feet-tall, with long flowy hair, often clad in sandals and white robes.
Lemurians aren’t the only unusual figures said to inhabit this stand-alone stratovolcano, easily seen from Interstate 5, about 60 miles south of the Oregon border. Mount Shasta is believed to be a home base for the Lizard People, too, reptilian humanoids that also reside underground. The mountain is a hotbed of UFO sightings, one of the most recent of which occurred in February 2020. (It was a saucer-shaped lenticular cloud.) In fact, the mountain is associated with so many otherworldly, paranormal, and mythical beings—in addition to long-established Native American traditions—that it’s almost like a who’s who of metaphysics. It has attracted a legion of followers over the years, including “Poet of the Sierras” Joaquin Miller and naturalist John Muir, as well as fringe religious organizations such as the Ascended Masters, who believe that they’re enlightened beings existing in higher dimensions. What is it about this mountain in particular that inspires so much belief?
Pluto’s Cave is a volcanic lava tube on the outskirts of Mount Shasta.
“There’s a lot about Mount Shasta, and volcanoes in general, that are difficult to explain,” says Andrew Calvert, scientist-in-charge at the California Volcano Observatory, “and when you’re having difficulty explaining something, you try and understand it.” Calvert has studied Shasta’s eruptive history since 2001. “It’s such a complicated and rich history,” he says, “and Shasta itself is also very visually powerful. These qualities build on each other to make it a profound place for a lot of people—geologists, spirituality seekers … even San Francisco tech folks, and hunters and gatherers from 10,000 years ago. It’s one that can have a really strong effect on your psyche.”
Mount Shasta is one of the most prominent of all the Cascade volcanoes, an arc that runs from southwestern British Columbia to Northern California, and includes Washington’s Mount Rainier and Oregon’s Mount Hood, among others. “It’s so steep and so tall that it even creates its own weather,” says Calvert. This includes the spaceship-looking lenticular clouds that tend to form around the mountain, created, he says, “by a humid air mass that hits the volcano, and then has to go up a little bit to cool off.” But they only contribute to Shasta’s supernatural allure, along with its ice-clad peak, steaming fumaroles, and shape-shifting surface that’s being constantly broken down and rebuilt by ice, water, wind, and debris. The mountain also sits about 15 miles or so west of the standard arc line of the other Cascade volcanoes—a move that took place about 700,000 years ago. “We don’t really have a good explanation for why it moved out there,” Calvert says, a statement that seems to make Mount Shasta appear more mysterious by the minute. …
About the last seven weeks …
I haven’t paid much attention to this place for the last seven weeks.
On July 20th I got another of those pesky inane phone calls to drop everything and fix this absolutely minor problem immediately.
I had planned on riding my bike that morning for only the fourth time in July.
I thought to myself when there’s a job that must be done, don’t turn your tail and run, don’t pout, don’t sob… just do a half-assed job, so I did just that.
I put more than 36 miles on my bike that day and vowed I’d ride every single day that week.
It turned out to be every single day for seven weeks in a row.
I put 1,022 miles on my bike during this time.
I didn’t get to ride yesterday because one of those inane pesky phone calls to drop everything happened again.
It consumed my entire day.
Today it’s raining. My alarm went off at 5:30 because I had one of those inane pesky chores to do on my day off. And, having nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do, I paid attention to this place.
I’d rather be riding my bike. I’ll probably go for a walk instead.
I like walking in the rain.
I hope the rain will help put out the fires.
… Three hours later I’m back from another of those inane pesky chores to do on my day off. Better get this up there before it happens again.
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
These Are All Cakes pic.twitter.com/ejArkJHaid
— Tasty (@tasty) July 8, 2020
