• • • an aural noise • • •
word salad: Tribal Steps Vol. 2 is a sequel of an ancient story which flows in us since the beginning of time. This is a story about invoking the entelechy of our ancestors for guidance so that humankind can evolve in their destined path. The soundtrack of the “archaic revival” is calling to us – perfectly balanced between organic and electronic forms of sound, channeling the ancient notion of interconnectedness with nature, as well as a contemporary psychedelic approach to dance music. Musicians from all over the world got together to express the melody which is singing in their souls, reverberating through the vast channels of collective consciousness. This is an adventurous journey through various tempos, styles, and melodies, but there is an everlasting and unifying force at the core of this release – love.
• some of the things I read while eating breakfast in antisocial isolation •
Giant Cloud Rats Hint at a Prehistoric Biodiversity Paradise
Oversized, fluffy rodents in the Philippines may have been hunted by our evolutionary cousins.
An artist’s rendering of one of the three new giant cloud rat species. Cloud rat: It’s what’s for dinner. Embiggenable. Explore at home.”
THEY ARE RODENTS OF UNUSUAL size, in an unexpected place. Fossils of three new species of giant cloud rats have researchers in the Philippines scratching their heads: The find, on the island of Luzon, hints the archipelago—one of the most species-rich places on the planet—was somehow even more biodiverse in the past. But it also raises questions about how these fluffy, pot-bellied rodents ended up in a cave, outside their usual habitat, and why they went extinct.
The giant cloud rat fossils come from Callao Cave and its immediate vicinity. The site has made headlines before, in 2019, when researchers announced the discovery there of fossils of Homo luzonensis, the newest addition to our extended human family. The oldest cloud rat fossils date to about 67,000 years ago, and were found in the same layer of excavation as H. luzonensis. The youngest rodent fossils, from two of the three species, are just a few thousand years old.
“The living fauna here is already staggering in its biodiversity, but adding these animals, in the fossil record, is amazing, even to us. I didn’t expect them,” says Janine Ochoa, an archaeologist at the University of the Philippines Diliman and lead author of the new paper. “This is the first time we’ve had information about the prehistory of this tremendous diversity of animals,” adds Larry Heaney, a coauthor and curator of mammals at Chicago’s Field Museum.
The entrance to Callao Cave, part of a larger network of caves on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. Embiggenable.
Even though the fossils are mostly teeth—those recently found at the site as well as previously unstudied specimens collected there decades earlier—there was enough variation to confirm multiple new species. “When all you have is a tooth to go on, it’s hard to identify those animals,” says Louisiana State University evolutionary biologist Jake Esselstyn, who studies small mammal evolution on archipelagos. Esselstyn edited the paper but was not directly involved in the research. “The fact that they found teeth and fragments of skulls that are different enough to clearly show that they are new species is remarkable in its own right,” he adds. …
PODCAST: The Belt and the Berm, Part 2
Join us for a daily celebration of the world’s most wondrous, unexpected, even strange places.
IN THIS EPISODE OF THE ATLAS OBSCURA PODCAST, join for us the second part of this journey that began with the world’s largest conveyor belt in the Western Sahara and ends on your dinner plate. …
RELATED: Baltimore, Maryland: Al Capone Cherry Tree
This lovely tree was a thank you gift from the man known as “Public Enemy No.1.”
Al Capone Cherry Tree and “Caponette.” Embiggenable. Explore at home.
NEAR THE EAST 33RD STREET entrance of the Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, stands a beautiful Japanese weeping cherry tree (Prunus pendula). Each spring, the tree bursts into a marvelous display of pink cherry blossoms. The cherry blossoms or sakuras represent beauty, rebirth, and mortality. Ironically, this tree was gifted to the hospital by infamous American mob boss and gangster Al Capone.
During his 11-year sentence for federal income tax evasion, Capone spent four-plus years incarcerated at Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in San Francisco. While there, he was diagnosed with syphilis of the brain. The paresis and dementia resulting from neurosyphilis worsened during his incarceration and expedited his early parole from federal custody on November 16, 1939. Upon Capone’s release, prison officials urged family members to seek medical treatment for his progressing venereal disease.
The Capone family tried to get him admitted to Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, the leading treatment center for advanced stage tertiary syphilis. Concerned about negative press because of Capone’s notoriety and criminal history, the hospital board refused to treat him. Instead, Union Memorial Hospital agreed to take him as a private patient. Immediately following his prison release, Capone lived in a two-room suite on the hospital’s fifth floor with windows overlooking the area where the cherry tree now grows. Union Memorial even permitted his entourage’s attendance, including family members, a barber, food tasters, and bodyguards. While there, he was treated by Dr. Joseph E. Moore, a renowned syphilologist. Capone spent six weeks in the hospital and several more weeks receiving outpatient treatment at a private Baltimore residence before returning home to Miami, Florida, in March 1940.
To thank Union Memorial for the compassionate care and medical attention he received, Capone gifted the hospital with two Japanese weeping cherry trees. One of the trees was removed in 1950 to make room for the construction of a new wing. The remaining tree still stands, despite a heavy snowfall in February 2010 that split the tree in half and caused the loss of a 10-foot branch. …
How to Be an Antiracist Supervisor: Start with Changing What You Call Yourself
I have long struggled with calling myself a supervisor. Maybe it activates something in me from my youth—years of hearing my working-class parents complain about their supervisors being micromanagers, always looking over their shoulder, demanding production, scheduling long workdays. My parents would complain about having to put in for vacation and wait for approval from their supervisors, as they struggled to get matching vacation time to spend with us as a family.
As an adult, my discomfort calling myself a supervisor is connected to my experiences holding various leadership positions in nonprofit organizations, including serving as chief human resources officer for a global reproductive healthcare nonprofit. Sure, I participated in management training and learned about different leadership styles. I took solace in identifying my servant leadership style—one that rejects the command and control ways of supervising that date back to production lines in factories. And still, there are organizational structures and so-called human resources best practices that perpetuate a power dynamic—a dynamic that has always felt unsettling for me.
Could it be that the coach in me prefers a more equitable power share when working with junior staff? Or could it be that it is time to retire the term supervisor/manager, especially since our mission-driven work in nonprofits is more knowledge and service than industrial and factory work?
Indeed, I attributed my distaste for the term supervisor to the history of oppressive management systems dating back to the Industrial Revolution. I was taught that modern management practices began in England with the creation of factories, and in industrialized North America with the cotton gin.
The Brutal Origins of The Supervisor Role
European management thinkers are credited for identifying the function of supervisors into five roles: to plan, organize, coordinate, command, and control. This mechanization of labor and unrelenting drive for production led to long work hours, unsafe working conditions, low wages, and exploitative child labor. …
RELATED PODCAST: What Makes a Murderer?
A widely criticized legal principle disproportionately puts youth of color and women behind bars. But is it the only way to hold police accountable when they kill?
Anissa Jordan’s boyfriend made her feel butterflies, but because of a legal rule called felony murder, she almost spent life in jail for a crime he committed.
One night in the spring of 2005, Anissa Jordan was sitting in a car in San Francisco while her boyfriend attempted to rob a young man nearby. Shortly after, police arrested both Anissa and her boyfriend. Anissa was detained and dressed in an orange jumpsuit before she learned that the young man had been shot and killed that night and that she and her boyfriend would both be held responsible. The charge: felony murder.
The felony-murder rule, which exists in more than 40 states, allows prosecutors to charge accomplices to certain crimes, such as conspiracy to commit robbery, with murder, even if they didn’t intend to kill—and even if they weren’t present for the murder. It does so by removing intent to kill from the calculus of what makes a murderer. Critics say the rule has disproportionately led to the incarceration of youth of color and women, such as Anissa, but some prosecutors say the felony-murder rule is the key to holding police officers responsible in the killings of civilians.
“By propping up this terrible rule, however we do it, we have to understand this rule is primarily used against Black people and people of color,” says Kate Chatfield, a director at the Justice Collaborative. …
Ranch becomes haven for queer people in rural Colorado.
Two sets of headlights headed straight for the geodesic dome house that serves as the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch’s headquarters.
Outside in the deep dark of Colorado’s Wet Mountain Valley, the people who live at the ranch prepared to defend their home.
For weeks, they had received threats online and warnings from others in the area that the rhetoric against the leftist, anarchist alpaca ranch commune for queer people had intensified. The day before, March 4, someone aggressively tailed the ranchers’ truck down the washboard county dirt road as they drove home. The ranchers thought the headlights could be those people coming to harm them. They grabbed their guns.
Then the headlights swerved away. It was the neighbors coming home down their dirt drive, which follows the alpaca ranch’s fence line for a bit.
The Tenacious Unicorn Ranch stood down, relieved.
“I think that moment proved that this is home,” said Penny Logue, one of the ranch’s founders. “We were ready to defend it.”
For about a year, the Tenacious Unicorn ranchers have called home a 40-acre plot of hardscrabble land about 20 minutes south of Westcliffe, the seat of rural Custer County, population 4,700. About nine people live on the ranch at any given time, though that number changes as people come and go from the property.
Logue and her business partner, Bonnie Nelson, created the ranch as a place where queer people can live and work safely and without fear. Along with the human occupants, the property is home to about 180 alpaca, a few dozen ducks and chickens, a herd of gigantic Great Pyrenees dogs, a flock of sheep, a few goats and a handful of cats. …
Experts Warn Beef Could Act As Gateway Meat To Human Flesh https://t.co/2JmZOMFzKw pic.twitter.com/Nt7QpXfrEk
— The Onion (@TheOnion) April 28, 2021
Elon Musk Calls Himself ‘The Dogefather,’ Sends Crypto Skyrocketing, Perhaps Peeving the SEC
On today’s installment of Tesla CEO Elon Musk once again trolling the SEC, it seems the SNL host-to-be has once again sent Dogecoin, his apparent cryptocurrency of choice, skyrocketing with a single tweet.
Late last night, Musk took to his social media platform with an important message for his roughly 52 million followers – he is the “Dogefather,” a notion that apparently “very wow-ed” investors so much, that the cryptocurrency’s value quickly skyrocketed with Musk’s digital stamp of approval, according to CNBC.
The Dogefather
SNL May 8— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 28, 2021
Ed. Won’t be watching.
With the outlet also citing Shark Tank star, Mark Cuban’s recent posts on Dogecoin as another potential reason behind this surge, the business publication noted that the cryptocurrency had shot up by 20 percent throughout the previous day to a value of 32 cents per unit. As of publication, the currency is currently worth roughly 30 cents a share, according to Coindesk.
Far from the first time Musk has tweeted in favor of the meme-y crypto, the entrepreneur’s outspokenness surrounding Dogecoin has been heralded by its founders, who say they appreciate the businessman’s support. “I think having an ally like Elon Musk is pretty incredible, honestly,” Billy Markus, one of the currency’s co-founders, told Newsweek of their famous fan. “I think it would be really cool if he does literally send dogecoin to the moon on one of his rockets,” he added, a callback to the Reddit-popularized phrase of sending stocks to the moon, or increasing their value. …
CDC Eases Outdoor Mask Guidelines #WhatDoYouThink? https://t.co/n8HCcRUPf6 pic.twitter.com/FSW7lmESID
— The Onion (@TheOnion) April 29, 2021
RELATED: 12 Baffling Bits Of News From Communities Around The World
You might have thought you’re really into Mario Kart, but have you ever tried to race karts on an actual road? No? Well, there’s a couple of British guys doing it. Here are the full details on that and 11 other totally weird things happening right now:
12
Source: AP News
11
Source: Kyodo News
10
Source: EFE
9
Source: The Guardian
8
…
Man Opposes Taxing Rich Because He Knows One Day He Could Find $20 Bill On Ground https://t.co/j4rX34tpR0 pic.twitter.com/izwIykGCCh
— The Onion (@TheOnion) April 28, 2021
Iceland’s Eruption and the Northern Lights Captured in One Photo
Embiggenable.
A photographer captured an extremely rare moment that shows the Northern Lights above the recent volcanic eruption in Iceland in just a single exposure.
The recent volcanic activity in Geldingadalir, Iceland, has provided not just photographers and filmmakers with spectacular imagery and videos but has also given local nature enthusiasts an opportunity to access and experience this wonder of nature up-close and personal, which was documented in a short film, “Volcano for the People” recently.
The eruption has been closely documented from many angles at this point, however, photographer Jeroen Van Nieuwenhove has still managed to create something extraordinary by capturing the aurora borealis, more commonly known as Northern Lights, as it appeared over the site.
The Northern Lights are a natural phenomenon that is born out of disturbances in the magnetosphere and is caused by the solar wind, resulting in a light spectacle of varying colors with, generally, a predominantly green glow.
Van Nieuwenhove wasn’t sure if the opportunity for photographing Northern Lights would arise, especially because of the expansive cloud coverage that has dominated the sky during the last several weeks of the eruption. At this point in the spring, each day continues to get longer and Van Nieuwenhove was concerned that the opportunity to photograph the Northern Lights was evaporating due to the lack of darkness. …
Why Are There No Horse-Sized Rabbits? We Finally Know The Evolutionary Answer
If you’ve ever wondered why rabbits and hares never evolved to be the size of horses, scientists have now got the answer.
It might sound like a flippant question, but it gets to an important part of evolutionary science: What is it that causes some animal taxonomies to have such a wide variation in size, while with others it’s very small?
For example, lagomorphs – which include rabbits and hares – don’t vary much in size, whereas the closely related rodents can go all the way from the tiny pygmy mouse to the chunky capybaras with hundreds of times as much mass.
“The largest living wild lagomorphs weigh only about 5 kg (11 lbs) on average, a tenth of the largest living rodent, the capybara,” says vertebrate paleontologist Susumu Tomiya from Kyoto University in Japan.
“But some breeds of domestic rabbits and other extinct species can weigh up to 8 kg. We were surprised by this and so began to investigate what sort of external forces keep wild lagomorphs across the world from evolving larger body sizes.” …
Ed. Feed them an Mmerican diet of McDonald’s, Taco Bell and Mountain Dew and they’re sure to develop a larger body size.
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Fox News stirs outrage about President Biden threatening American’s red meat consumption and Vice President Kamala Harris’s children’s book being handed out at the border, and Biden wears a mask while on a Zoom call.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
The Tooning Out The News Special Coverage super-panel breaks down President Biden’s remarks on COVID-19, infrastructure, police reform, immigration, gun control, and more with Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Stephen Colbert Presents Tooning Out The News is Now Streaming, only on Paramount+.
Screaming about a “border crisis” is a beloved Republican pastime that has continued into the Biden administration. And while it’s okay to tune out this racist fear-mongering, what we need is for President Biden to reverse Trump-era border policies and fix this shit!
THANKS to TBS and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee for making this program available on YouTube.
Seth takes a closer look at one of the signature scams of the Trump era falling apart and revealing the GOP’s brand of pro-worker populism is a giant fraud.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
スポンジ猫さんを盗んだのは誰だ！？Who stole the sponge cat?
FINALLY . . .
Stop Spending Time on Things You Hate
Your time on Earth is precious and limited. Here’s how to waste it.
“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.
THE OTHER AFTERNOON, in an effort to avoid doing my work, I picked up Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. It turned out to be a fitting choice, as Thoreau has quite a bit to say about wasting time. “The cost of a thing,” he wrote in Walden, “is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
Thoreau’s point is not that we should be all work and no play—he was one of history’s most prominent critics of that way of living. Rather, he argued that we waste too much of our lives on things we don’t value. Without thinking about it, we are spectacularly failing some cosmic cost-benefit test, as measured not in money but in what matters most: time.
This argument is hard to refute. Many of the pastimes on which we while away huge portions of our lives feel good in the moment but bring us anxiety and regret when we manage to tear ourselves away. The average American spent three hours and 43 minutes every day watching live TV in the first quarter of 2020, according to Nielsen. That’s a lot, but still less time than the three hours and 46 minutes people spent staring at their smartphones.
I am not arguing that non-work activities are necessarily a waste of time; quite the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that time spent daydreaming and enjoying non-work pursuits can lead to not just happiness but also better work performance and higher creativity. There are really only two ways that time can be truly “wasted”: when you engage in something that crowds out more productive or edifying activities, and when you deliberately engage in something that, on balance, you don’t actually even like. These instances of wasted time can be a source of anxiety and regret, but in reality, they are a valuable resource: If we train ourselves to avoid wasting our minutes, we will have discovered a new reservoir of time that we can use in joyful and productive ways. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
ONE MORE THING:
FUN FACT: For some GOP members of Congress, this is their first time back in the Capitol since those tours they gave to their friends on January 5th. #JointAddress
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) April 29, 2021
