• • • an aural noise • • •
word garnish: Introspectives echoes incoming waves into pitch and sound and chillz comes into the sense, whose heart is beating for deep and atmospheric chill sounds.
• some of the things I read while eating breakfast in antisocial isolation •
This 1905 Motorcar is the Only Automobile Manufactured in Alaska
The Sheldon is a one-of-a-kind testament to the ingenuity—and unrequited love—of its creator.
Built in 1905 from random porter cart parts, barstools, and a marine engine, The Sheldon was the first and only automobile manufactured in Alaska. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
BOBBY SHELDON’S VEHICLE IS LIKE the Mona Lisa. Just like the famous painting, the car sits in a room with grand masterpieces that are larger in scale, but arguably far less historically significant. The 116-year-old runabout is the first and only car manufactured in Alaska.
Known simply as The Sheldon, the automobile is currently on display at the Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum in Fairbanks, thanks to a long-term loan from the University of Alaska’s Museum of the North. It’s one of more than a hundred ultra-rare vehicles in the auto museum’s collection. Compared with other motorcars on display, such as a 1899 Hertel Runabout and a 1921 Heine-Velox Victoria—both of which have been meticulously maintained and are parked gleaming under showroom lights—The Sheldon doesn’t look like much.
Fountainhead museum curator Willy Vinton describes The Sheldon, built in 1905, as “a really green car,” adding, “It was basically built from whatever he could scrounge up, so everything was repurposed.”
The Sheldon is currently on display at the Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum in Fairbanks.
The axles, metal wheels, springs, and chassis started their lives as parts of porter carts that carried goods back and forth on the docks in Skagway, a Gold Rush-era port town 700 miles southeast of Fairbanks. The seats had previously been bar stools. The hood was crafted from scraps of tin, the lever used to steer was a gas pipe, and two carbide mining lamps were installed as headlights. The engine? It was a single-cylinder marine engine that Sheldon had taken from a sunken boat in the harbor. …
Tiergarten, Berlin, Germany: Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism
A memorial in the Tiergarten is a reminder of the suffering inflicted on homosexuals by the Nazi regime.
Embiggenable. Explore at home.
JUST ACROSS THE STREET FROM the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, this austere grey cuboid that sits in a quiet corner of Berlin’s Tiergarten was commissioned to pay tribute to the long-ignored thousands of homosexual individuals who were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered in the Holocaust.
Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi regime carried out a campaign against male homosexuality. They harassed Germany’s gay communities and arrested thousands of gay men under Paragraph 175, the statute of the German criminal code that banned sexual relations between men. More than 50,000 men were convicted of the “offense” of homosexuality, and between 5,000 and 15,000 were sent to concentration camps.
After World War II, the homosexual victims of Nazi Germany were not officially recognized. It wasn’t until the early 1970s that Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code was reformed. It was finally abolished in 1994. …
Why America Should Suddenly Prepare For A Billion-Dollar ‘Internet Apocalypse’ Caused By The Sun
The Sun is entering a more active part of its 11-year solar cycle.
Our Sun is waking up—and it could have devastating consequences for the Internet, particularly in North America, if a “black swan event” like a solar superstorm occurs.
As reported by SpaceWeather.com, a “solar tsunami” occurred on the surface of the Sun last Thursday. A mass of charged solar particles hurtled towards us and were expected to arrive at Earth on Monday. It could be joined on Tuesday and Wednesday by the leftovers of a solar flare on Saturday to produce a G1-class geomagnetic storm.
We know the Sun is getting more active as it enters a new Solar Cycle with some predicting it could be the strongest since records began.
Earth will cope this time—but what about the 1.6% to 12% chance that a huge solar superstorm occurs? And we—and our internet—prepared for such an event?”
Like the coronavirus pandemic, apparently not.
It’s the subject of a new research published this week and presented at the SIGCOMM 2021 data communication conference. It doesn’t make for easy reading. …
RELATED: The American plan for the end of the World finally revealed
The CIA has recently declassified files. Some of them refer to a contingency plan developed by the United States in the event of an apocalypse caused by nuclear war. It is instructive.
Disaster films work so well not only because of their special effects. They remind us that nothing lasts forever and that our own society is not a given. In fact, it seems to be much more fragile than we think. At least according to an old MIT study.
While there are many cataclysms that could lead to the demise of our society, there is one in particular that has long terrified heads of state: nuclear holocaust.
The United States was not prepared for the end of the world
Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States who held the office between 1977 and 1981, feared that friction between the nuclear-armed powers would lead to the collapse of the world.
He and his team therefore worked on a plan to help his country recover in the event of the end of the world. A plan that became public knowledge following the declassification of certain CIA files.
This plan is known as Presidential Directive 58, a directive taken in the last months of his term. …
God Admits Humans Not Most Impressive Creation https://t.co/sGTM0eHl4J pic.twitter.com/nLW7qEwU2a
— The Onion (@TheOnion) September 4, 2021
RELATED: Genghis Khan Cooled the Planet (Via Mass Murder)
Everyone knows Genghis Khan. He was one of the world’s most famous conquerors, and he banged so much there’s a .5% chance that you’re his direct descendant. Yes, you. He killed his way across the continent, conquering and culling so much at one point, the land he possessed was roughly the size of Africa.
But one part that gets glossed over is that he was one of the world’s first (unintentional) green leaders. Before the ’70s and hippie culture, before even industrialization, Genghis Khan cut down on carbon emissions … by ruthlessly slaughtering people everywhere he went.
Like a cleansing fire or Thanos, Genghis Khan killed so many people that the world began to heal. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a direct one-to-one between him cutting down mouth breathers and Mother Earth sighing in relief. Part of it was that after he cut through a people, deforested areas became greener, leading to carbon in the air going down by 700 million tons. To put that number into perspective, it’s about a year’s worth of carbon emissions today. The Black Death didn’t have as much of an impact as Genghis Khan did.
Part of the reason it worked so well when he did it was because his reign was about 20 years, which was enough time for some change to start to come about. See, back then, we were still screwing the planet over by killing its lungs — you know those pollen and fruit producers? Our agriculture efforts were already messing up the planet like a microwave does a burrito. But then came Genghis Khan. He killed 40 million people, which was apparently the exact right number to bring the earth back into a little bit of a nicer shape.
…
Study: People Far Away From You Not Actually Smaller https://t.co/3krvPZ7gUV pic.twitter.com/nX29brx61L
— The Onion (@TheOnion) September 4, 2021
RELATED: The Doomsday Cult Leader (Who Got Booted From His Cult Town)
Back in the late ‘60s, people thought the world was soon going to end, just like they do today. To be fair, it’s always been pretty damn difficult to look around you without seeing how extremely unsustainable things are. Entropy, what a concept. But while some people will look at the world and ask themselves what they can do to better it, even just a little, others will believe that they’re the reincarnation of some ancient Pharaoh put here on Earth to save humanity from impending doom.
That up there is former Chicago engineer Richard Kieninger, who wrote a third-person autobiographical book in 1963 called The Ultimate Frontier. In it, he claimed that, as a child, he was visited by someone from the “Brotherhood” who gave him ice cream and told him that he was once everyone from Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten to King David. It sounds like if the plot of Hereditary was even more disturbing.
According to Kieninger, this “Dr. White” character then told him to construct some kind of Noah’s Ark based on self-reliant principles and the Golden Rule because the world was going to end on May 5, 2000, thanks to major tectonic shifts caused by some solar planetary configuration that will bring everything from floods to erupting volcanoes to Cthulhu rising from the ocean. Okay, he didn’t say that last part, but that’s definitely how the movie should go. …
Planet Fitness Offering New Lights-Off Hour So No One Can Watch You Work Out https://t.co/pYNxdit743 pic.twitter.com/slWi28fADI
— The Onion (@TheOnion) September 5, 2021
RELATED: Scientists Figured Out How And When Our Sun Will Die, And It’s Going to Be Epic
What will our Sun look like after it dies? Scientists have made predictions about what the end will look like for our Solar System, and when that will happen. And humans won’t be around to see the final act.
Previously, astronomers thought it would turn into a planetary nebula – a luminous bubble of gas and dust – until evidence suggested it would have to be a fair bit more massive.
An international team of astronomers flipped it again in 2018 and found that a planetary nebula is indeed the most likely Solar corpse.
The Sun is about 4.6 billion years old – gauged on the age of other objects in the Solar System that formed around the same time. Based on observations of other stars, astronomers predict it will reach the end of its life in about another 10 billion years.
There are other things that will happen along the way, of course. In about 5 billion years, the Sun is due to turn into a red giant. The core of the star will shrink, but its outer layers will expand out to the orbit of Mars, engulfing our planet in the process. If it’s even still there. …
Ed. Will we care when this happens?
OFF-TOPIC: Sometimes Mindlessness Is Better Than Mindfulness
In some situations, don’t pay so much attention.
Mindless activity or excuse to get drunk following morning exercise.
“Be present.” This is the mantra of mindfulness meditation and a supposed key to self-awareness and acceptance. In one type of mindfulness exercise, the goal is to perform routine activities with a heightened sense of attention. “Try to take the time to experience your environment with all of your senses—touch, sound, sight, smell and taste. For example, when you eat a favorite food, take the time to smell, taste and truly enjoy it,” recommends one Mayo Clinic article.
Mindfulness may indeed have psychological benefits. Earlier this year, a synthesis of randomized controlled trials revealed that mindfulness-based interventions had small to moderate benefits for a number of health outcomes, including stress, anxiety and depression. That said, the effects of mindfulness were smaller and less consistent when compared with those of other therapies, and some effects appeared to fade months after the intervention. Taken together, the results suggest that mindfulness-based interventions may be better than nothing for some outcomes but that more research is needed to compare mindfulness with other therapies.
One thing the mindfulness-based interventions had in common is that they all attempted to cultivate focus on the present moment via multiple sessions of meditation practice.
Although mindfulness has its merits, psychological research has also revealed that in some circumstances it’s important to be mindless. That is, as we develop skill in complex tasks, we can perform them with increasing facility until attention seems to be unnecessary. Everyday examples range from riding a bike to chopping cucumbers to brushing your teeth.
Underlying this state of “automaticity” (as cognitive psychologists call it) are mental processes that can be executed without paying attention to them. These processes run off without conscious awareness—a chain reaction of mental events. We don’t perform all tasks automatically, but many can be performed this way once they are well practiced. …
Ed. Mindlessly folding kids’ menus by the hundreds, even when the restaurant is busy. I tell you this is the best of times.
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
The day Worthing sea-front was invaded by infinite teddy-bears.
No teddy bears were harmed in the making of this video.
まるは雨でも外に行きたがるので、久しぶりにカッパを着て行きました。Maru wants to go out even if it rains. So he wore a raincoat and took a walk for the first time in a while.
FINALLY . . .
People I Won’t Be Friends With
Embiggenable. Explore at home.
I DRAW A LINE IN MY LIFE. It had a lot to do with Trump being elected, the Flat Earth Movement, anti-vaxxers, and MAGA.
I realized being stupid is not innocent. It hurts people. It kills people. It causes people to derail their minds and lives and become a burden.
So, I have become strict. Here is my list of people I will not hang with.
1. The Woo Crew.
Anyone who believes in anything supernatural. This includes healing energies, Jesus, and four-leaf clovers. You don’t need a full list, but here are some more: psychics, people who even glance at their horoscopes, those who think stretching your muscles makes you spiritual (yoga is great for your body but does not make you one with anything but your spandex), anyone who claims to have seen a ghost, and anyone who thinks you can “jinx” something.
2. The Amygdala Army.
The amygdalae are the seats of fear in the brain. When they hyper fire, the rational prefrontal cortex sometimes can’t stop them. That’s because it gets flooded with cortisol in response to fear, and cortisol retards rational functioning. In short, anyone whose emotions rule their thoughts is outta here. Like those who scream about my liberalism instead of explaining to me why you would need fake ballots if you had a machine that could just switch the votes.
3. Mindreaders.
…
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
Ed., etc. I didn’t have time to do this today.
