• • • an aural noise • •
• some of the things I read while eating breakfast in antisocial isolation •
The Curious Case of the Deep-Sea Bone Worms and the Vanishing Underwater Gator
Scientists dropped three alligators to the bottom of the ocean. One of them was never seen again.
The gator’s red-tipped bones indicate that bone worms have come to feast. Embiggenable.
ABOUT A YEAR AGO, SCIENTISTS dumped three dead, frozen alligators into the ocean from a ship in Louisiana. They sank a little over a mile before making contact with the seafloor. Scientists have revisited the sunken reptiles several times since. One gator’s status is unknown, one gator has been slowly devoured by a new species of bone-eating worm, and one gator mysterious vanished—eaten or carried off whole by some enormous creature of the deep. “That one genuinely surprised us,” says Clifton Nunnally, a research scientist at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. “There was not a single scale or scute left of that gator.”
Nunnally and Craig McClain, the executive director of the consortium, are the engineers behind Louisiana’s great gator experiment, which involved dropping the reptiles into the deep sea to see what animals would come to feast and, ultimately, to gain a better understanding of food webs in the deep sea. Their reptilian research is a passion project, spun off from more formal research on food oases around deep-sea pieces of wood. But it has already offered valuable insights, some of which were recently published in PLOS One.
The team’s biggest revelation came from the carcass of Alligator Two, which dropped on February 20, 2019. McClain and Nunnally observed the site with a remotely operated vehicle for 16 minutes, at which point a single rattail fish came to investigate, but they soon had to leave to monitor a piece of wood. They weren’t able to return to the site until April 12, at which point the crocodile had been reduced to a sloping heap of bones, many of which were covered in a reddish hue. “We dropped down and saw a red shag carpet,” McClain says, adding that the color is a clear indication the bones were colonized by a species in the genus Osedax, or bone-eating worms. It’s the first time any Osedax species has been observed in the Gulf of Mexico.
The scientists dropped the gators over a mile down to the seafloor.
McClain’s team collected the worm-riddled bones and shipped them off to Greg Rouse, a marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. Rouse’s initial scans revealed the gator-bound worms are genetically distinct from all known species of Osedax. Rouse will describe the new species in an upcoming paper. “Describing the species is a whole new publication, which can take a considerable amount of effort,” McClain says. Rouse is probably up the task, having once described 14 species of the bone-eating worms in a paper called “An inordinate fondness for Osedax.” …
The Shotaka Glovecap, one of the world’s most dangerously hot peppers, is actually mildly radioactive.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 20, 2021
RELATED: Detroit Salt Mine
Over a thousand feet beneath the Detroit streets is a subterranean metropolis few are allowed to enter.
Embiggenable. Explore at home.
DETROIT IS KNOWN FOR MANY things: the auto industry, the failure of the auto industry, hockey, Motown, and lately as an example of a city gone to pot. But there is another part of the city far fewer people seem to be aware of, and it lies directly underneath their feet.
Some 1,200 feet beneath the streets of Detroit, under the north end of Allen Park, Dearborn’s Rouge comple, and most of Melvindale, run 100 miles of subterranean roads over an area of more than 1,500 acres. It is the Detroit Salt Mine, and, as a Detroit industry, it is older than automobiles. As a geological entity, this salt deposit is older even than the dinosaurs.
Created some 400 million years ago during the Devonian Period – a time when the first fish were beginning to grow legs and make their way onto land, and the first seed-bearing plants came into existence – it was the result of ancient oceans pouring into a huge basin, evaporating, and leaving huge amounts of salt behind in the process. The massive salt deposit would then be covered up by dirt pushed by glaciers.
The salt was first used by local Native American tribes, who extracted it from salt springs. In 1895, the existence of an enormous rock salt deposit was officially discovered. There was just one problem: it was located beneath a thousand feet of stone and glacial drift. …
Chabodrus, the sneakered and track-suited demon found in Pompeiian architectural carvings, is the only mythological creature known to favor 20th-century clothing.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 20, 2021
Trump’s useful thugs: how the Republican party offered a home to the Proud Boys
Early in Trump’s presidency, emboldened neo-Nazi and fascist groups came out into the open but were met with widespread revulsion. So the tactics of the far right changed, becoming more insidious – and much more successful.
Proud boys during a rally for Donald Trump in Washington DC in December.
In March 2018, on a cold, grey Monday afternoon in East Lansing, Michigan, about 500 militant antifascists gathered in a car park with the intention of stopping Richard Spencer, the high-profile white nationalist, from speaking at Michigan State University (MSU). Spencer had not been asked to come by any student group on campus, but had instead invited himself. After the university denied his initial request to speak a few months earlier, Spencer sued. As part of the settlement agreement, Spencer agreed to speak in the middle of spring break at the MSU Pavilion for Agriculture and Livestock Education, a venue more than a mile away from the main campus.
There in the parking lot, the antifascists kept one another warm, dancing to hardcore and hip-hop played over a wheeled-in guitar amplifier, sharing cigarettes and news from elsewhere. Some people talked about the leaked chat logs of the fascist gang Patriot Front, members of which were on their way to campus that very moment. Others discussed the arraignment of one of Spencer’s followers the night before on weapons charges after he pulled a gun on protesters. About 40 police officers in riot gear huddled at the far end of the car park. Bike cops on patrol swirled by.
Now and then, organisers affiliated with Stop Spencer at MSU – a coalition that included the MSU chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America, Redneck Revolt, and Solidarity and Defense (SnD) – addressed the crowd. “Spencer is here because the MSU administration allows him to be here,” said Bob Day, a greying local anarchist and member of SnD’s Detroit chapter. “Spencer is here because the state of Michigan pays all these fucking cops to come out and protect the fascists – the same MSU administration and the same government that’s allowing Spencer to come in here, and is allowing fascists to attack our communities, and is protecting those fascists.”
The day wore on and the light grew harsher. Rumours surged that police planned to deploy a water cannon in the freezing weather. Armoured trucks idled nearby. A caravan of cars and trucks crawled up the road, stopping at a police barricade before inching back. Minutes later, a band of about 50 fascists came marching in a tight column led by Traditionalist Worker party (TWP) chair Matthew Heimbach – his tall, heavyset figure recognisable from a distance – and Spencer’s right-hand man, Gregory Conte. They were here. There was a brief pause as the column came up against the amassed antifascists, who swarmed past the barricades to meet it. …
PREPARE TO SPEND A WHILE: It’s The Long Read.
From The Archives: QAnon Followers Frustrated After Q Calls For Respecting Election Results, Uniting Behind Biden https://t.co/N9HWUwdbWq pic.twitter.com/IXiXU4Kk3a
— The Onion (@TheOnion) January 20, 2021
A Disquieting Look at How AIs Foment Political Extremism
“Devil You Know,” a video essay by Don Edler, looks at the emergence of artificial intelligence systems in political discourse and civic life.
Still from Don Edler, “Devil You Know” (2020).
Do AIs dream of revolution? Don Edler’s Devil You Know — now screening online at Hunter Shaw Fine Art — suggests they can, although not in the way you might expect. Part video essay and performance art, the feature-length work looks at the emergence of artificial intelligence systems in political discourse and civic life, exacerbated by a media landscape that prioritizes impressions over immersion and aesthetics over substance. The disquieting reality of these AIs, despite being inadequate mimics of human behavior or social ethics, is that they may be convincing enough to foment and agitate people into dangerous political extremes.
Interspersed in the video essay are segments about deep fakes and media conspiracies from the past decade, like pro-Kremlin Russian trolls undermining 2016 US elections or the Sinclair Broadcast Group directing local news affiliates to stoke distrust of journalists and the media. These segments are narrated by Amazon Polly text-to-speech synthesis technology, although the true star of the video is the GPT-3 AI, designed by the OpenAI laboratory, that generated the film’s script based on inputs by Edler: language and discourses from radical online spaces, ostensibly across the spectrum from left to right.
GPT-3 is a deep learning-based language model designed to replicate human speech. It is, by all accounts, a capable wordsmith, but it has glaring flaws in its capacity for social and psychological reasoning as well as a propensity for non sequiturs, shortcomings that once led a medical chatbot using GPT-3’s text generation to encourage a fake patient to commit suicide. While certainly no one should take clinical advice from GPT-3, the AI script in Devil You Know begs the question of whether the same precautions should be taken with how we experience and interpret other forms of AI-generated language.
Still from Don Edler, Devil You Know (2020).
Edler directs two human actors to interpret and perform the AI’s script as familiar archetypes, making us consider how physical embodiment and emotional affect influence how we process language and speech. Actor Nikelola Balogun, who is Black, plays several variations on a character named Zoe, her first segment inflected with Valleyspeak and another scene with a West African accent. The other character, played by Joel Pelletier, presents as a professorial white man: tweed jacket, tortoise shell glasses, and prone to rambling lectures about “socio-capitalism” and the hubris of elected officials. …
5 Surreal News Stories You Might’ve Missed
It was a hell of a year, and we mean that in the biblical sense. It’s understandable if you haven’t really noticed anything going on in the world that doesn’t concern its very survival, politically or literally, but that doesn’t mean stuff hasn’t gone down that would be front-page news at any other time. Stuff like …
5. They Still Don’t Know What Caused The Sonic Attacks In Cuba
Remember when a bunch of people at the U.S. embassy in Cuba came down with an intense, unexplainable neurological illness? No? That’s okay — it happened in 2016, which was 47 years ago. Basically, dozens of diplomats experienced an incredibly specific of symptoms that have since been named “Havana syndrome,” starting with hearing weird buzzing noises followed by confusion, memory loss, dizziness, nausea, and in at least one case, permanent hearing damage. Possible rational explanations included exposure to a certain pesticide or even crickets. Then it happened to U.S. diplomats in China. Then Canadian diplomats in Cuba.
It’s the kind of thing that’s ripe for conspiracy theory, specifically about some kind of supersonic weapon being used against North America by … well, nobody was gonna say Cuba, but definitely Cuba. Congress ordered the CDC to figure it out, and they … didn’t. It’s not like they didn’t try, but at that point, it had been years since the phenomenon began. It took so long for many Havana syndrome sufferers to undergo any kind of testing that the results were next to meaningless. So the CDC just kind of sat on that information until the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine hopped on board the “supersonic weapon” train in December 2020, leaving freaking Buzzfeed News to track down the report only to find out it said nothing. So that’s where we’re at. It’s safe to say things are tense with Cuba, but it’s not like they haven’t been worse. …
RELATED: The 4 Racist Defining Moments In Gun Control History
Gun control is all the rage nowadays, and there are reasons to see why. Not only is gun violence at an all-time high in America, but we’re also pretty much one of the few places in the world where mass shootings occur at alarming regularity. It’s so bad that The Onion can use the same article about it for years, and it’ll still ring depressingly true.
But among that heated debate fiercely discussed on both sides, there’s some pretty racist history underlying the modern gun control movement that isn’t really talked about that often. For starters, much of America’s gun control today was precisely informed in response to Black activists arming themselves against white supremacists, like …
4. The Mulford Act Was Drafted And Signed In Response To The Black Panther Movement
There’s this common misconception among many people, liberals included, that all forms of gun control legislation have always been a net positive in the country, but this isn’t exactly true — or rather, it’s a more complicated story than that. You see, white people are fine when they have guns but get a little too uncomfortable when Black people around them start having them.
Back in the ’60s, the Black Panther party was getting a little too self-armed for the likes of the white people. The Black Panthers were highly educated on all matters of law and guns rights, which basically gave them a lot of free license to do things like neighborhood patrols to look out for potential abuse by cops and even helping Black people pulled over by cops by telling them their rights and making sure nothing goes awry. And if you’re familiar with American cops at all, you know screwing-shit-up is pretty much on brand.
White people, primarily politicians, didn’t like this and attempted to pass some gun control legislation to curtail it. Black Panthers responded naturally by storming the Capitol on May 2nd, 1967, fully armed, to protest these bills. As you can imagine, this went over swimmingly well with Ronald Reagan, who was governor of California at the time, who wanted to disarm Panther groups immediately and thus set in action the Mulford Act.
The Mulford Act was the signature defining policy of the gun control movement. Written by Don Mulford and signed into effect by Ronald Reagan on July 28th, 1967, the bill basically disarmed the Black Panthers completely, accomplishing both the NRA and Republicans’ goals at the time. …
Pantene Unveils New Color Shine Shampoo That Makes Hair So Radiant It Shall Blind Anyone Who Gazes Upon It https://t.co/mY8J57V3ny pic.twitter.com/op1VBsIlXs
— The Onion (@TheOnion) January 21, 2021
Ancient Saudi Arabian City of Hegra Opens To Public After 2,000 Years
During COVID?
Embiggenable. Explore at home.
If you are looking for a truly unique tourist destination, look no further than this ancient desert city. Hegra, or Mada’in Salih, is an archaeological site in AIUIa, a city in north-western Saudi Arabia. For the first time in nearly 2,000 years, this incredible city is opening for the public.
David Graf, an archaeologist of the ancient Near East and professor at the University of Miami explains what it is like to visit Hegra and shares his hopes for visitors’ experiences: “It should evoke in any good tourist with any kind of intellectual curiosity: who produced these tombs? Who are the people who created Hegra? Where did they come from? How long were they here? To have the context of Hegra is very important.” However, these questions are not so easily answered.
Embiggenable.
Nabataeans, an often-forgotten civilization, used Hegra as an important center for international trade. You may recognize the culture and architecture of Nabataeans from the more famous and long-visited tourist attracted of Petra. Archaeologist Laila Nehmé, co-director of the Hegra Archaeological Project—a French-Saudi partnership working to safely excavate the site—explains why Nabataeans remain such a mystery despite their influence. “The reason we don’t know much about them is because we don’t have books or sources written by them that tell us about the way they lived and died and worshipped their gods,” she says. “We have some sources that are external, so people who talk about them. They did not leave any large mythological texts like the ones we have for Gilgamesh and Mesopotamia. We don’t have their mythology.” These external documents that Nehmé refers to accounts from Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans who traded and interacted with Nabataeans.
To some, this lack of information adds to the mystery and excitement of exploring this relatively untouched site. What we do know is that Nabataeans were originally nomads who came to hold influence in their region in the incense and spice trade routes. We know that they were active from the 4th century BCE through the 1st century CE and that their land is currently found in Jordan, the Sinai Peninsula, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Syria. Similar to tourists in Petra, visitors to Hegra will notice that there is little trace of the bustling merchant city we imagine. Instead, the beauty is found in the 111 intricate tombs scattered across the desert city. Ornamentation and architecture is clearly influenced by Greek, Roman, and Egyptian culture with symbolism found in their mythology. …
RELATED: Scientists Have Described a Dinosaur’s Butthole in Exquisite Detail
Embiggenable.
When a dog-sized Psittacosaurus was living out its days on Earth, it was probably concerned with mating, eating, and not being killed by other dinosaurs. It would never even have crossed its mind that, 120 million or so years later, scientists would be peering intensely up its clacker.
However, that’s precisely what they have done, yielding the most detailed description yet of a non-avian dinosaur’s cloaca: the catch-all hole used for peeing, pooping, mating, and laying eggs.
This Swiss Army knife of buttholes is common throughout the animal kingdom today – all birds, amphibians, reptiles, and even a few mammals possess a cloaca. But we know little about the cloacae of dinosaurs, including their anatomy, what they looked like, and how the animals used them.
“I noticed the cloaca several years ago after we had reconstructed the colour patterns of this dinosaur using a remarkable fossil on display at the Senckenberg Museum in Germany which clearly preserves its skin and colour patterns,” explained palaeobiologist Jakob Vinther of the University of Bristol in the UK. …
RELATED: The Future Encyclopedia of Luddism
A glimpse of an alternative economic and industrial history and future, in which the Luddites were successful in their battle against alienating technology.
The Luddites did not hate technology; they only channeled their anger toward machine-breaking because it had nowhere else to go.
In common parlance, the term “Luddite” means someone who is anti-technology, or maybe, just not adept at using technology. Historically, however, the Luddite movement was a reaction born of industrial accidents and dangerous machines, poor working conditions, and the fact that there were no unions to represent worker interests during England’s initial period of industrialization. The Luddites did not hate technology; they only channeled their anger toward machine-breaking because it had nowhere else to go.
What you are about to read is an alternate history (an encyclopedia entry from circa 2500) that depends on the critical assumption that the Luddites succeeded in their industrial campaign in the 1810s. Instead of techno-determinism (that the development of technology is inevitable, and that society will alter and adjust to it) the Encyclopedia entry notes that the Luddites, in their success, formulated a different, yet productive, relationship between society and the development of technology.
ORIGINATING IN GREAT BRITAIN DURING the Industrial Revolution in the first two decades of the 19th century, Luddism was a movement arising as a response to poor working conditions in nascent textile manufacturing businesses. The Luddite movement was a precursor to the development of the economic philosophy known as Sustainomics, which promotes technological development that adheres to principles of Utilitarianism and Human Flourishing Doctrines. Sustainomics began its rise in the early part of the 20th century and has remained the dominant economic system of the Hemispheric Union for the past 600 years.
Beginning in the early 19th century, foreign wars coupled with high unemployment and food shortages caused widespread desperation among the populace. Many seeking “earned wages” went to work in rudimentary industrial factories. With no safety standards and shoddy medical care, industrial accidents were quite common.
As corn became increasingly scarce in the winter of 1810 to 1811, groups of workers who could not pay for food and shelter became even more desperate. Under the Combination Act of 1799, Parliament had outlawed unions. It was amidst these stark conditions that the Luddites began to organize in secret. The Luddite Movement was open to both women workers and child laborers. Indeed, women and children comprised roughly 40 percent of the Luddite membership.
Leadership of General Ned Ludd and Origin of the Term ‘Luddite’
Many stories and legends have grown up around the esteemed figure of General Ned Ludd, named by “Passage Zine” as one of the “Top 10 Most Influential People of the Last Thousand Years.” Hailed as a visionary even in his own time, the Luddite Councils are named in his honor. The complete story of Ludd’s life and times is told in “The Epic Saga of General Ludd.” While stylized, the Saga has largely been corroborated with the archaeological records. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Despite the pandemic, Joe Biden’s inauguration has plenty of pomp and circumstance, and Donald Trump shares a bizarre goodbye message after doling out tons of pardons on his way out the door.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
While the socially distanced crowd and the glaring absence of an outgoing president made for a most unusual Inauguration Day for Joe Biden, a sense of optimism prevailed as did the feeling that a return to ‘normal’ may be possible.
THANKS to CBS and A Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
After four years of futile attempts to stop Trump from driving our country off a cliff, Democrats are finally in the driver’s seat! We’re hoping they’ve set the GPS to “A Better Place.”
THANKS to TBS and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee for making this program available on YouTube.
Seth takes a closer look at Joe Biden being inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States, officially ending the Trump presidency.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
正しい紙袋の使い方です。How to use the correct paper bag!
FINALLY . . .
QAnon’s ‘Great Awakening’ failed to materialize. What’s next could be worse.
Believers who were stymied by Trump’s exit could turn to white nationalism and other extremist beliefs, experts say.
QAnon believers were expecting a day of reckoning on Wednesday.
SHORTLY bEFORE JOE BIDEN WAS sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, Dave Hayes – a longtime QAnon influencer who goes by the name Praying Medic – posted a photo of dark storm clouds gathering over the US Capitol on the rightwing social media platform Gab. “What a beautiful black sky,” he wrote to his 92,000 followers, appending a thunderclap emoji.
The message was clear to those well-versed in QAnon lore: “the Storm” – the day of reckoning when Donald Trump and his faithful allies in the military would declare martial law, round up all their many political enemies, and send them to Guantánamo Bay for execution by hanging – was finally here. 20 January 2021 wouldn’t mark the end of Trump’s presidency, but the beginning of “the Great Awakening”.
Instead, Trump slunk off to Florida and Biden took the oath of office under a clear blue sky. Now QAnon adherents are left to figure out how to move forward in a world that, time and time again, has proven impervious to their fevered fantasies and fascistic predictions. And while some seem to be waking up to reality, others are doubling down, raising concerns among experts that the movement is ripe for even more extreme radicalization.
“My primary concern about this moment is the Q to JQ move,” said Brian Friedberg, a senior researcher at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, referring to “the Jewish question”, a phrase that white nationalists and neo-Nazis use to discuss their antisemitic belief that Jews control the world. Friedberg said that he had seen clear signs that white nationalists and alt-right figures, who have long disliked QAnon because it focused the Maga movement’s energies away from the “white identity movement”, were preparing to take advantage. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
ONE MORE THING:
Horrified Biden Family Discovers Rotting, Months-Old Corpse Of Jeff Sessions In White House Executive Residence https://t.co/weibTa8Sh4 pic.twitter.com/PB57G8Iwzb
— The Onion (@TheOnion) January 20, 2021
