January 17, 2021 in 4,254 words

_{• • • an aural noise • • •}

_{^{• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •}}

The Microphotographic Wonders of Vermont’s ‘Snowflake Man’

_{Wilson Bentley was the first to claim that each snowflake is unique—and provided evidence.}

_{All snowflake images photographed by Wilson Alwyn Bentley. Embiggenable.}

WILSON BENTLEY CALLED SNOWFLAKES “nature’s wonder gems,” possessing “an infinity of beauty,” and wrote that when they fell, “the mysteries of the upper air are about to reveal themselves.” The self-educated meteorologist was the first person to make a successful picture—“photomicrograph”—of a snowflake in 1885, and the first to claim that no two are alike.

He provided strong evidence for this assertion by photographing more than 5,000 “snow crystals” (as he called them), and saw that each was fascinatingly distinct: some flawless in ornate and icy symmetry, others more charming for their subtle, delicate imperfections.

Bentley’s love of snowflakes started when he was given a microscope for his 15th birthday. Working on his family farm in Jericho, Vermont, where he lived his entire life (and where 95 inches of snow falls each year), he was a keen observer of the natural world. He initially sketched the snowflakes he saw through his microscope, but eventually he figured out a way to combine a camera with a compound microscope to magnify and capture every detail of the fragile structures. It was cold and difficult work. Wearing mittens during long hours in freezing New England winter, with only minutes before his subjects would melt, Bentley devised a painstaking method: He caught and transported the tiny wonders on a blackboard, placed them on microscope slides using a piece of straw plucked from a broom and a chicken feather, illuminated them with daylight to expose light-sensitive glass plates, and increased the images’ contrast by scratching out emulsion. …

RELATED: The Archaeologists Recreating the Sounds of the Stone Age
_{Researchers are working to uncover whether ancient objects in South Africa were once used to make noise or music.}

_{Archaeologists Joshua Kumbani (left) and Sarah Wurz (right) work at a site near the Klasies River in South Africa. Embiggenable. Explore at home.}

ON SOUTH AFRICA’S SOUTHERN COAST, above the mouth of the Matjes River, a natural rock shelter nestles under a cliff face. The cave is only about three meters deep, and humans have used it for more than 10,000 years.

The place has a unique soundscape: The ocean’s shushing voice winds up a narrow gap in the rocks, and the shelter’s walls throb with the exhalation of water 45 meters below. When an easterly wind blows, it transforms the cave into a pair of rasping lungs.

It is possible that some 8,000 years ago, in this acoustically resonant haven, people not only hid from passing coastal thunderstorms, but may have used this place to commune with their dead—using music. That’s a possibility hinted at in the work of archaeologist Joshua Kumbani, of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and his colleagues.

Kumbani, with his adviser, archaeologist Sarah Wurz, believes they have identified an instrument that humans once used to make sound buried within a layer rich with human remains and bone, shell, and eggshell ornaments dating from between 9,600 and 5,400 years ago. This discovery is significant on many levels. “There could be a possibility that people used it for musical purposes or these artifacts were used during funerals when they buried their dead,” Kumbani hypothesizes. …

What Lincoln Knew

_{In his second inaugural address, the 16th president had a message for a war-weary nation.}

_{Abraham Lincoln delivering his inaugural address in 1865. Embiggenable.}

When Abraham Lincoln stood on the Capitol steps in March 1865, to swear the oath of office for a second term and to deliver his second inaugural address, the crowd below the bunting—soldiers of both races, men and women who had come through the rain and now stood in the breaking sunlight—might have expected that he would celebrate the triumph of Union arms. They were, after all, within weeks of final victory, and everyone could feel the weight of the war lifting from their shoulders. But he would only say, “The progress of our arms … is well known to the public as to myself and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all.” If the mood of the crowd was for triumphant celebration, he was not going to encourage it. If the crowd wanted a call for vengeance on the beleaguered Confederate armies now fighting their last stand around Richmond, he would not indulge them. If they wanted a long speech, he would not give that to them, either. His would be short, barely seven minutes, so anticlimactic that it left those who heard it puzzled and bemused.

He sought instead to explain why the war had happened at all, why such a catastrophe had befallen North and South alike. His question was directed to history and to Providence. He had long brooded on this question himself, and now he judged that it was time to say out loud what he had been thinking for years.

Four years previously, at his first inauguration, with the Union at breaking point and armies massed for the beginning of war, he had closed his address to the crowd assembled at the Capitol with an emotion-laden plea:

I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.

Friends and enemies alike had disregarded him. The attack on Fort Sumter followed soon after and then four years of unimaginable bloodshed and industrial slaughter. Men died with bayonets at each other’s throats; freed black men who fought for the Union were massacred wholesale at Fort Pillow; the streams at Antietam ran with blood; inside the coats of the bodies littering the fields of Gettysburg the burial parties found Bibles, some with holes where they had taken bullets to protect their bearer. He was a president who lived the agony of his people. He visited the regiments. He talked to the soldiers. He kept in his heart what he had seen on their young faces, sometimes buoyant innocence, sometimes the dead-eyed look of those who have survived battle at close quarters. He knew that boys could be driven insane by the noise, the blood, and the terror. Every week, mothers’ letters reached him, pleading for sons imprisoned for desertion. Every decision to hang deserters left its mark and sometimes his desperation at not being understood is evident …

STEVE INSKEEP (related): What Lincoln Knew
_{You cannot claim to support the rule of law while also ignoring it.}

Donald Trump has a fondness for bringing up Abraham Lincoln. “Most people don’t even know he was a Republican,” the president declared at a Republican dinner in 2017. Critics mocked this—the GOP is often called “the party of Lincoln,” after all—but he might not have been wrong. Most Americans don’t study history in detail. Trump’s point was that he could use Lincoln’s partisan affiliation to troll modern-day Democrats, even though the parties were different back then. “Let’s take an ad,” he suggested.

He didn’t need an ad, as it turned out. This spring he staged a Fox News interview at the Lincoln Memorial. He referenced Lincoln again last week as he accepted the Republican nomination on the White House lawn, on the last night of the party’s convention. He used the phrase “party of Lincoln,” repeated that Lincoln was “our first Republican president,” and noted that Lincoln had looked out of the windows of the same house that Trump was using as a TV backdrop.

Lincoln came up in a more substantive way last week at the Republican National Convention, in a prime-time address by South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. She invoked a speech Lincoln gave in 1838, when he was a young Illinois state legislator. “He was alarmed by the increasing disregard for the rule of law,” Noem said.

“He was concerned for the people that had seen their property destroyed,” or even lost their lives, and were “disgusted with a government that offered them no protection. Sound familiar?” Noem referred to protests against police violence, assailing “violent mobs” in “Democrat-run cities.” Her rhetoric supported the president’s “law and order” theme. …

RELATED: We’re on the verge of breakdown: a data scientist’s take on Trump and Biden
_{Peter Turchin, an entomologist-turned-historian, offers insight into the battle between elites.}

_{Peter Turchin describes his theory as ‘a more mature version of social science’.}

Peter Turchin is not the first entomologist to cross over to human behaviour: during a lecture in 1975, famed biologist E O Wilson had a pitcher of water tipped on him for extrapolating the study of ant social structures to our own.

It’s a reaction that Turchin, an expert-on-pine-beetles-turned-data-scientist and modeller, has yet to experience. But his studies at the University of Connecticut into how human societies evolve have lately gained wider currency; in particular, an analysis that interprets worsening social unrest in the 2020s as an intra-elite battle for wealth and status.

The politically motivated rampage at the US Capitol fits squarely into Turchin’s theory. In a 2010 paper, Dynamics of political instability in the United States, 1780-2010, Turchin wrote that “labour oversupply leads to falling living standards and elite overproduction, and those, in turn, cause a wave of prolonged and intense sociopolitical instability.”

Turchin’s Cliodynamics, which he describes as “a more mature version of social science”, rests upon 10,000 years of historical data, as such there is, to establish general explanations for social patterns. He predicts that unrest is likely to get worse through this decade, just as it has in roughly 50-year cycles since 1780.

Historians don’t necessarily like the proposal, he acknowledges. “They bring general theories through the back door. Our job is to be explicit.” …

DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: Turchin explains current political warfare as a battle between an overpopulation of elites to some degree exacerbated by a decline in general living standards or immiseration, and financially overextended governments.

How US police failed to stop the rise of the far right and the Capitol attack

_{Off-duty officers, firefighters and corrections workers from agencies around the US took part in the Capitol riot.}

_{Teargas is released into a pro-Trump mob during clashes with Capitol police, 6 January 2020.}

The alleged complicity of some police officers in the attack on the US Capitol has led to fresh questions about how law enforcement and other public agencies around the US have approached a surging far-right street protest movement during the life of the Trump administration.

The presence of off-duty officers, firefighters and corrections officers from other agencies around the country in the protest crowd was a reminder of how members of a lawless movement have been able to find a place in their ranks.

Since the violent invasion of the Capitol by pro-Trump extremists seeking to overturn the election of Joe Biden, at least two Capitol police officers have been suspended, and at least 12 more are reportedly under investigation for dereliction of duty, or directly aiding the rioters.

Some officers were filmed offering apparent assistance or encouragement to the mob – whether by posing for selfies with confederate flag-waving protesters, or directing protesters around the building while sporting a Maga cap.

They did this at the same time that colleagues in the DC metropolitan police, a sister agency, say that they were maced, tasered, stripped of their badges and ammunition and beaten by the angry crowd. …

RELATED:

Never forget the heroes who bravely incited an insurrection pic.twitter.com/nH3I0ybHyb

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) January 17, 2021

5 Dumb Garbage Conspiracy Theories Spreading Right Now

The term “conspiracy theory” derives from a mythical tale in which a group of gargoyles, believing they were the (only) purveyors of all things good, descended upon a town to destroy and cleanse the townsfolk of their “evil ways.” Just kidding, we totally made that up, but we bet there are people who would gladly recite that story on their vlog ad nauseam before printing T-shirts that say, “BE THE GARGOYLE.” That’s just reality now because acquiring factual and correct information in today’s world means navigating through a barrage of false and inaccurate drivel being shot at you from all fronts.

2021 has only just begun, so let’s look at some of the drivel that’s currently trying to get you and your grandma to join the cult of the gargoyle army …

5. QAnon Claims Ashli Babbitt Didn’t Die During The Capitol Siege, Is A False Flag Crisis Actor

As protestors terrorists stormed and infiltrated the Capitol because (sigh) reasons, 35-year-old veteran Ashli Babbitt was shot and killed by a Capitol police officer when she tried to gain entrance to the Speaker’s Lobby. A collage of videos taken of the incident was published online, making it easy to determine how exactly the whole thing went down. Only, no, not according to a number of QAnon folk. While Babbitt went from voting for Obama to being radicalized by right-wing extremists online, the group she joined around four years ago has now turned against her — they’re claiming that the videos are lies and that she’s actually still alive in some major cover-up.

Before we go into these bizarre claims, it’s important to note that immediately following Babbitt’s death, civilian and celebrity alt-right pundits alike were already holding her up as a martyr and the “first victim of the second Civil War” (and probably printing shirts with her face on it already). Radio host and rejected Garbage Pail Kids doll Alex Jones was calling the shooting an “execution” even before her death was officially confirmed. Babbitt was immediately used as a propaganda and recruiting tool because male white supremacists love nothing more than to hold up dying white women and children to justify their self-imposed hierarchical importance.

But then the narrative started spiraling out of control. …

RELATED: 4 Media Musings From The End of Donald Trump’s America

After four years, three months of baseless voter fraud allegations, two impeachments, and one attack on our nation’s capitol, we’ve finally done the unthinkable — we made it to the end of Donald Trump’s Presidential reign of terror. Yet as the press has struggled to keep up with our Commander in Chief, getting wrongfully booted from briefings, working tirelessly to find new ways of sourcing information from a notoriously closed-off, media-hating administration, and, even for several public figures like Jim Acosta, becoming the story themselves — it seems the events of this presidency no longer exist in a quadrennial vacuum. The rules of engagement for the press in Trump’s America will seemingly live on, leaving behind four cautionary tales of how opportunistic politicians can beat us at our own games — and how to act before it’s too late.

From recognizing when you’re being played to learning to fearlessly wade through a flood zone of “shit,” as Steve Bannon put it, these are the four biggest takeaways as the press corps begins to grapple with the aftermath of Trump’s America.

1. Donald Trump played the media like a fiddle.

Ahh, folks, remember the 2012 election? The good ‘ol days when the year’s biggest scandal du jour stemmed from Republican challenger Mitt Romney’s comment about having “binders full of women”? Rich with headlines noting this dryness, like Rolling Stone‘s straightforward jab, asking, “Is This The Most Boring Election Ever?” America’s decision and its surrounding fanfare were relatively unpassionate, a far cry from the exciting messages of “Hope” and “Change” from Barack Obama’s legendary campaign just four years earlier. Yet as the election came and went, securing 44 a second term in office, it seems Donald Trump, fresh off a short-lived White House run in 2011, saw a golden opportunity. Through a throwaway campaign rich with controversy, he could set America’s political institutions and the media, ablaze; dominating the news cycle, the national conversation, and reportedly create the groundwork to establish his own TV news network. To manifest the second act of his already successful television career, Trump did what seemingly no politician could before — use the media establishment, and each of its then ironclad conventions, to further his own agenda.

How, exactly could he pull off this unprecedented feat? Regularly appearing in film, television, and the news since the late 1980s, the pop-culture icon that is Donald Trump had more than 40 years of experience mastering our ever-shifting media landscape. This equipped him with an arguably unparalleled ability to manipulate reporters, social platforms, and in turn, the American people. Aside from his experience hosting and producing the wildly successful reality series, The Apprentice, and making himself a pervasive presence synonymous with both wealth and New York, Donald Trump was also a relatively early adopter of Twitter, launching his now bygone page back in 2009, which he grew to two million followers in 2012. Through running this successful multimedia empire, both personally and professionally, Trump garnered an expert understanding of what exactly makes the media tick. From hosting SNL to appearing on several late-night talk shows, we grappled with how to treat Donnie’s new persona, questioning if he should be categorized with other celebrity politicians, who often ran unsuccessfully for their leadership positions, or recognize him as a serious candidate in our election. …

Why your most important relationship is with your inner voice

_{Your internal monologue shapes mental wellbeing, says psychologist Ethan Kross. He has the tools to improve your mind’s backchat}

_{How can we transform negative chatter into something more positive?}

As Ethan Kross, an American experimental psychologist and neuroscientist, will cheerfully testify, the person who doesn’t sometimes find themselves listening to an unhelpful voice in their head probably doesn’t exist. Ten years ago, Kross found himself sitting up late at night with a baseball bat in his hand, waiting for an imaginary assailant he was convinced was about to break into his house – a figure conjured by his frantic mind after he received a threatening letter from a stranger who’d seen him on TV. Kross, whose area of research is the science of introspection, knew that he was overreacting; that he had fallen victim to what he calls “chatter”. But telling himself this did no good at all. At the peak of his anxiety, his negative thoughts running wildly on a loop, he found himself, somewhat comically, Googling “bodyguards for academics”.

Kross runs the wonderfully named Emotion and Self Control Lab at Michigan University, an institution he founded and where he has devoted the greater part of his career to studying the silent conversations people have with themselves: internal dialogues that powerfully influence how they live their lives. Why, he and his colleagues want to know, do some people benefit from turning inwards to understand their feelings, while others are apt to fall apart when they engage in precisely the same behaviour? Are there right and wrong ways to communicate with yourself, and if so, are there techniques that might usefully be employed by those with inner voices that are just a little too loud?

Down the years, Kross has found answers to some, if not all, of these questions, and now he has collected these findings in a new book – a manual he hopes will improve the lives of those who read it. “We’re not going to rid the world of anxiety and depression,” he says, of Chatter: The Voice in Our Head and How to Harness It. “This is not a happy pill, and negative emotions are good in small doses. But it is possible to turn down the temperature a bit when it’s running too high, and doing this can help all of us manage our experiences more effectively.”

According to Kross, who talks to me on Zoom from his home in a snowy Ann Arbor, there now exists a robust body of research to show that when we experience distress – something MRI scans suggest has a physical component as well as an emotional one – engaging in introspection can do “significantly” more harm than good. Our thoughts, he says, don’t save us from ourselves. Rather, they give rise to something insidious: the kind of negative cycles that turn the singular capacity of human beings for introspection into a curse rather than a blessing, with potentially grave consequences both for our mental and physical health (introspection of the wrong sort can even contribute to faster ageing). …

Video Goodnesses
_{and not-so-goodnesses}

JetCoup: the only airline for insurrectionists who aren’t allowed on planes anymore.

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

みりサイズの箱にまるさんが入ると――。When Maru gets into the box which is the perfect size for a kitten.

FINALLY . . .

Caligula’s Garden of Delights, Unearthed and Restored

_{Relics from the favorite hideaway of ancient Rome’s most infamous tyrant have been recovered and put on display by archaeologists.}

_{A theatrical mask in marble dust, recovered from the Horti Lamiani, the pleasure garden of the Roman emperor Caligula. Embiggenable. Explore at home.}

THE FOURTH OF THE 12 CAESARS, — officially, Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus — was a capricious, combustible first-century populist remembered, perhaps unfairly, as the empire’s most tyrannical ruler. As reported by Suetonius, the Michael Wolff of ancient Rome, he never forgot a slight, slept only a few hours a night and married several times, lastly to a woman named Milonia.

During the four years that Caligula occupied the Roman throne, his favorite hideaway was an imperial pleasure garden called Horti Lamiani, the Mar-a-Lago of its day. The vast residential compound spread out on the Esquiline Hill, one of the seven hills on which the city was originally built, in the area around the current Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II.

There, just on the edge of the city, villas, shrines and banquet halls were set in carefully constructed “natural” landscapes. An early version of a wildlife park, the Horti Lamiani featured orchards, fountains, terraces, a bath house adorned with precious colored marble from all over the Mediterranean, and exotic animals, some of which were used, as in the Colosseum, for private circus games.

When Caligula was assassinated in his palace on the Palatine Hill in 41 A.D., his body was carried to the Horti Lamiani, where he was cremated and hastily buried before being moved to the Mausoleum of Augustus on the Campus Martius, north of the Capitoline Hill. According to Suetonius, the elite garden was haunted by Caligula’s ghost. …

_{Here’s another barely uninteresting place to explore.}

_{Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.}

ONE MORE THING (related): No one gives a shit: The 20–40–60 Rule

I GUESS WE SHOULD CUE THIS UP by defining the 20–40–60 rule. We’re going to do that via here:

Originally spoused by actress Shirley MacLaine — and adhered to by Silicon Valley legend, entrepreneur and investor Heidi Roizen — the rule goes something like this: “At 20, you are constantly worrying about what other people think of you. At 40 you wake up and say, ‘I’m not going to give a damn what other people think anymore.’ And at 60 you realize no one is thinking about you at all.” The most important piece of information there, Roizen says: “Nobody is thinking about you from the very beginning.”

Little sad, right? No doubt. She (Roizen) goes on to say “Your boss is not thinking about your, your peers are not thinking about you. You need to think about you.” This shouldn’t necessarily be true, but it is oftentimes true. (All situations are different and no generalization works for all, hence the term “generalization.”)

This is why, as the basic life path (i.e. having a standard job) has changed, we need to look at new ways of thinking about careers.

Although we haven’t necessarily done that either …

One more issue around the 20–40–60 Rule: The Temple of Busy

Look at this good article from The Atlantic about “how friends become closer.” Noble topic we should all consider, right? Most of the article is really decent research. But at the end, there’s this cop-out turd:

And you have to be realistic about your friends’ other responsibilities. Sometimes life is so busy that people may not be able to keep friendship from falling to the bottom of their priority list, much as they may desire otherwise.

In other words, busy > friendship. OK. This is why The New York Times called this “the golden age of bailing.” Tech makes it so much easier. …

_{Ed. I was almost afraid to click that busy > friendship link. All fears aside, it was barely uninteresting at all. You might consider adding it to today’s time suck (and, if you do have a spouse, significant other, children or pets, please remember to give them some of your easily wasted time).}

_{Small taste:}

Busy Busy Busy: Why are Americans so obsessed?
_{Get off the cross, as others need the wood.}

Busy busy busy.

That’s the American way — and especially around the holidays. (But, let’s be honest: it’s the American way a lot of other times too.) I’ve written about this stuff a lot. …

_{Ed. Some rabbit holes go very deep. Sometimes you can spend all day exploring them. Today I don’t have the time. I’m busy.}

ONE MORE ONE MORE THING:

Light Therapy Lamp Opts To Burn Down House Rather Than Face Depressed Man Yet Again https://t.co/fKBmaEWc27 pic.twitter.com/6wln32wHXK

— The Onion (@TheOnion) January 17, 2021