• • • an aural noise • • •
word salad: DUHKHA is commonly explained according to three different categories:
- The obvious physical and mental suffering associated with birth, growing old, illness and dying.
- The anxiety or stress of trying to hold onto things that are constantly changing.
- A basic unsatisfactoriness pervading all forms of existence, because all forms of life are changing, impermanent and without any inner core or substance.
• • • some of the things I read antisocial isolation • • •
How to Kill a Zombie Fire
Underground peat fires are bedeviling: They refuse to die, even when flooded with water. Could this new weapon put them down for good?
Crews worked to defeat a peat fire outside Moscow in 2010. Embiggenable.
HUMANITY’S GOT A FULL-TILT ZOMBIE outbreak on its hands. As the world warms and certain regions—particularly the Arctic—dry, so does the super fuel known as peat. It’s basically concentrated carbon from dead plants, and it burns not at all like your typical Californian or Australian wildfire. Instead of sending towering flames upward, a peat fire burns in the opposite direction, smoldering deep in the soil. Firefighters often soak the ground with water and declare victory, only for the soil to reignite a surface fire months later. The land might even snow over while the smoldering persists undetected. That’s why scientists dub these menaces “zombie fires.”
Peat fires can release 100 times the carbon that a wildfire does. That’s terrible for both the planet and human health: In Indonesia, which has massive stores of peat that regularly burn uncontrolled, the smoke creates public health crises. Since peat fire spreads down into the soil and across the landscape, they also threaten nearby farmlands and people.
Yet researchers have found a weapon that could help put down a zombie fire for good—the equivalent of destroying its brain instead of just mangling its body. “Smoldering is the most persistent type of combustion on earth, because it’s really easy to start and very difficult to stop,” says Imperial College London engineer Guillermo Rein, co-author of a new paper describing the work in the International Journal of Wildland Fire. “They call them zombie fires, but the equivalent would be like an army of zombies. They are very, very difficult to suppress.”
Just ask the firefighters who battled North Carolina’s Evans Road Fire in 2008, which simmered through swampy peatland. Engineers ended up pumping 7.5 billion liters of water from lakes to flood the area. It took seven months to drown the fire. …
PODCAST: Podcast: The 49th Parallel
Join us for a daily celebration of the world’s most wondrous, unexpected, even strange places.
IN THIS EPISODE OF THE ATLAS OBSCURA PODCAST, a listener takes us to a border town like no other, a fishing village in between Washington and Canada. …
RELATED: Flores, Uruguay: Grutas del Palacio
This wonderful rock formation constitutes the first geopark in Uruguay.
Grutas del Palacio. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
THE GRUTA DEL PALACIO (“PALACE CAVE”) IS an ancient rock formation located in Central Uruguay, near the small town of Trinidad.
This wonderful geological feature is composed of sandstone and sedimentary rock. The natural wonder formed around 70 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous period, later solidifying into its current appearance during the Paleocene.
The peculiar cave is formed by an upper shell of sandstone sustained by multiple 6.5 feet (2-meters) tall natural columns that create a structure that resembles the porticoes of palaces, hence the name. These features create a large labyrinth of caves, of which only a small portion is accessible to the public.
It has been suggested that the caves could have been inhabited by the indigenous population of the region during prehistoric times. Some local legends are linked to this rock formation, but no definitive proof of ancient human presence has been found. …
Ex-Trump adviser mocked for claiming Biden pushing ‘plant-based beer’
Larry Kudlow grumbles that Biden’s climate policies would force Americans to drink ‘plant-based beer’ – instead of meat-based?
Larry Kudlow in the White House Rose Garden with Trump last year.
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has joined a flood of social media users gleefully trolling Larry Kudlow after the former economic adviser to Donald Trump complained that Joe Biden wanted Americans to drink “plant-based beer”.
Kudlow made the indignant claim on his Fox Business show on Friday, saying Biden’s climate policies and attempt to slash emissions would force Americans to “stop eating meat, stop eating poultry and fish, seafood, eggs, dairy and animal-based fats”.
“OK, got that? No burgers on 4 July. No steaks on the barbecue … So get ready. You can throw back a plant-based beer with your grilled Brussels sprouts and wave your American flag.”
Beer is typically made from grains, hops and yeast – not steak, sausages or chops. …
Google Argentina’s domain name bought by man for £2
Google Argentina’s domain name was bought by a web designer while the site was out of action for two hours in the country last Wednesday.
Nicolas Kurona, aged 30, said he managed to buy Google.com.ar through a normal, legal process.
“I never imagined that it was going to allow me to buy it,” he told the BBC.
Google Argentina told the BBC: “For a short term, the domain was acquired by someone else.” It added it had regained control of the domain very quickly.
The story started when Nicolas was at his desk on the outskirts of Buenos Aires on Wednesday night, designing a website for a client.
He started getting messages on WhatsApp that Google was down.
“I entered www.google.com.ar into my browser and it didn’t work,” he said. “I thought something strange was happening.”
He decided to go on to the Network Information Center Argentina (NIC) – the organisation responsible for operating the .ar country code domains. He searched for Google – and up popped Argentina’s Google domain available for purchase. …
Children’s Science Website Clearly Struggling To Come Up With 10 Facts About Slugs https://t.co/toArnG5haA pic.twitter.com/db3P76i00R
— The Onion (@TheOnion) April 25, 2021
5 Brilliant Creators Who Got Their Start Making Ordinary Ads
Like it or not, advertising is the grease in the wheels of the internet. It’s been a long time since “selling out” was seen as the ultimate sin, but you still hear complaints when people start taking sponsorships and marketing deals, even though that’s frequently the only way to make money doing something you love. Some people have the opposite trajectory, though – that is, starting in ads and then getting famous, such as …
5. Jim Henson
To talk about this, we have to strike a little bargain with you first: To most clearly tell you how this all went down, we’re not going to act like the Muppets are actual people, and in return you won’t get pissy about it. We’re not judging, whether or not you want to keep up the whole kayfabe thing, but just give us some time, deal? And you can deal — you’re strong, you can spend a few minutes in the world where Kermit the Frog isn’t a real individual before you go back.
that may be.
Now that we’re here, we can say that Jim Henson and all his many creations wouldn’t have gotten very far if he hadn’t used them in commercials. When a local TV station visited his high school’s puppet club, he was hired on the spot to join a kids show, then laid off three weeks later when the show was cancelled for violating child labor laws. While we’re making agreements here, can we agree that was a situation where cancel culture was not out of control?
Henson found more work quick, and spent the next few years refining his puppeteering on other, less child-endangering kids shows. He had big dreams of making puppets something people of all ages could enjoy, and that’s why he jumped at his chance when he was offered a gig making commercials for Wilkins Coffee. Coffee doesn’t advertise to kids (though they’ll probably put the Starbucks mermaid in Fortnite one of these days), and so Henson had free rein to make his prototype Muppets as violent and murderous as a big piece of felt with some googly eyes could be. As you can see, that kinda Kermit-ish one didn’t come to play:
Wilkins took a chance on Henson because they were a small company, but their ads ended up becoming a huge hit. Henson got plenty of advertising work thanks to the nationwide success of the coffee commercials, and he was able to turn that success into The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, and all the other beloved memories that we’ll let you go back to now. …
Man Reminds Self Woman On Chiquita Banana Sticker Only Smiling At Him Because That’s Her Job https://t.co/CmiT2Kk014 pic.twitter.com/NNxI2On407
— The Onion (@TheOnion) April 26, 2021
RELATED: Keanu Reeves’ ‘Speed’ Only Exists Because An Old Man Got Two Movies Mixed-Up
By our rough estimation, about half of ‘90s action movies were basically “Die Hard on” like Passenger 57 (Die Hard on a plane), Cliffhanger (Die Hard on a mountain), or The Matrix (Die Hard on LSD). The best one of them all was arguably Speed, aka Die Hard on a bus, the energy of which is ALL over the latest trailer for Marvel’s Shang-Chi.
Speed (1994) starred Keanu Reeves (this time willingly) as a SWAT bomb disposal specialist stuck on a bus that cannot drop its speed – ooooh, now we get it – below 50mph or else a bomb planted on it will explode. It had some great action scenes, including that kick-ass bridge jump …
… and some solid performances by Dennis Hopper and Sandra Bullock, and Reeves … uh … eventually did John Wick, so it’s all good. All in all, it was a ton of fun and a runaway success with critics, audiences, and internet writers who love puns. And it might not have existed if the father of Speed’s screenwriter hadn’t confused two movies.
The movie was written by Graham Yost who in 1990 was told by his father about a cool Jon Voight movie written by THE Akira Kurosawa about a train with a bomb on it that couldn’t stop: the unimaginatively titled Runaway Train (1985). Yost went to see it and apparently “thought it was pretty good” but he had one problem with it. There was no bomb anywhere in the story. His dad had gotten that detail wrong. Still, it got Yost thinking. What if there had been a bomb on a runaway type of public transport. That would make for a cool story. He eventually settled on a bus and a 50mph speed limit and like that Speed was born.
But, wait, where did Yost’s dad get the idea that there was a bomb in Runaway Train in the first place? …
Squirrel Who Really Chunked Out Unable To Look Neighborhood Residents In Eye https://t.co/GiEXpj7JfX pic.twitter.com/GCHeyX1e3m
— The Onion (@TheOnion) April 25, 2021
Fish Sticks Make No Sense
How a weird 1950s finger food made it big.
Embiggenable.
There are many curious facts about fish sticks. The invention of this frozen food warranted a U.S. patent number, for instance: US2724651A. The record number of them stacked into a tower is 74. And, every year, a factory in Germany reportedly produces enough fish sticks to circle Earth four times.
But the most peculiar thing about fish sticks may be their mere existence. They debuted on October 2, 1953, when General Foods released them under the Birds Eye label. The breaded curiosities were part of a lineup of newly introduced rectangular foods, which included chicken sticks, ham sticks, veal sticks, eggplant sticks, and dried-lima-bean sticks. Only the fish stick survived. More than that, it thrived. In a world in which many people are wary of seafood, the fish stick spread even behind the Cold War’s Iron Curtain.
Beloved by some, merely tolerated by others, the fish stick became ubiquitous—as much an inevitable food rite of passage for kids as a Western cultural icon. There’s an entire South Park episode devoted to riffing off the term fish stick, and the artist Banksy featured the food in a 2008 exhibit. When Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her 90th birthday, in 2016, Birds Eye presented her with a sandwich that included blanched asparagus, saffron mayonnaise, edible flowers, caviar, and—most prominently—gold-leaf-encrusted fish sticks.
Paul Josephson, the self-described “Mr. Fish Stick,” is probably best at explaining why the fish stick became successful. Josephson teaches Russian and Soviet history at Colby College, in Maine, but his research interests are wide ranging (think sports bras, aluminum cans, and speed bumps). In 2008, he wrote what is the defining scholarly paper on fish sticks. The research for it required him to get information from seafood companies, which proved unexpectedly challenging. “In some ways, it was easier to get into Soviet archives having to do with nuclear bombs,” he recalls.
Josephson dislikes fish sticks. Even as a kid, he didn’t understand why they were so popular. “I found them dry,” he says. Putting aside personal preference, Josephson insists that the world didn’t ask for fish sticks. “No one ever demanded them.” …
RELATED: Internet Outage in Canada Blamed on Beavers Gnawing Through Fiber Cables
Embiggenable. Explore at home.
Rascally beavers took down internet service for about 900 customers in a remote Canadian community this weekend after gnawing through crucial fiber cables, the Candian Broadcasting Corporation reported Sunday. The outage, which has since been resolved, also affected 60 cable TV customers and disrupted local cell phone service, according to a statement from the area’s provider, Telus.
Tumbler Ridge, a tiny municipality in northeastern British Columbia with a population of about 2,000 people, lost service for roughly 36 hours in what Telus described as a “uniquely Canadian disruption!”
“Beavers have chewed through our fibre cable at multiple points, causing extensive damage,” said Telus spokesperson Liz Sauvé in an email to Gizmodo. “Our team located a nearby dam, and it appears the beavers dug underground alongside the creek to reach our cable, which is buried about three feet underground and protected by a 4.5-inch thick conduit. The beavers first chewed through the conduit before chewing through the cable in multiple locations.”
After going down early Saturday morning, service was restored just before 6:30 p.m. ET on Sunday, Sauvé confirmed. In its statement, the company said crews worked “around the clock” to address the issue and determine how far the damage continued up the cable line. Telus brought in additional equipment and technicians to tackle “challenging conditions” due to the fact that the ground above the cable is partially frozen this time of year. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
President Biden announced US troops will be pulling out of Afghanistan by September 11, 2021. But the Taliban is still as strong as ever and the Afghans on the front lines are now going to have to face the fight alone.
THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
John Oliver shares some of his favorite graphics that never made it to air.
THANKS to HBO and Last Week Tonight for making this program available on YouTube.
豪華肉まん共演。こんな肉まん見たらポチらずにいられない！This is a co-starring video of meat buns.
FINALLY . . .
Censoring Social Media the Right Way
The only way to understand personal differences is to talk about them.
Everybody condemns censorship. The Founding Fathers prohibited the government from doing it. But, censorship of social media is a different story. It’s not covered by the First Amendment. The Constitution applies only to government.
Comprehensive Generic Censorship
Censoring social media is an issue for private companies. They’re caught in a dilemma — if they censor an inflammatory post, that’s intrusive; if they don’t censor such a post; they’re condoning the content. Companies are just there for the profit. They didn’t sign up for being socially responsible.
Private companies can do whatever they want (so long as it is legal), they just have to decide if their customers will accept their decision. What one customer might think is offensive or harmful to the community, another may not. But private companies also censor posts that they believe are detrimental to their business. Should they be allowed to restrict fair competition? Should Facebook be allowed to censor any mention of LinkedIn, WordPress, Nextdoor, or Medium? They can, and do. It’s not illegal.
But social media companies need to take some action that addresses the real problem. Their customers demand it (just so long as it isn’t them being censored). If the companies don’t take any action, eventually the government will step in and enact laws and promulge regulations. Then the companies will have to deal with the offensive content, AND the laws and regulations, AND the continual government monitoring of what they’re doing.
So most social media companies take a strict, authoritarian approach. They unilaterally decide what to censor, create rules to apply their decisions to all users, and employ moderators to enforce the rules. One size fits all. Sometimes they explain their decisions but usually they just post a notice of their decree. They can do that, it’s their company. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
ONE MORE THING:
There is no past.
There is no future.
There is only this moment.
And you've wasted it reading this.— God (@TheTweetOfGod) April 25, 2021
