to set a mood • • •
Greta Thunberg nominated for Nobel peace prize
Climate strike founder put up for award ahead of global strikes planned in more than 105 countries
• Listen to Greta Thunberg on the Today in Focus podcast
Greta Thunberg, 15, holds a placard reading ‘School strike for the climate’, during a protest outside the Swedish parliament in Stockholm last November.
Greta Thunberg, the founder of the Youth Strike for Climate movement, has been nominated for the Nobel peace prize, just before the biggest day yet of global action.
Thunberg began a solo protest in Sweden in August but has since inspired students around the globe. Strikes are expected in 1,659 towns and cities in 105 countries on Friday, involving hundreds of thousands of young people.
“We have proposed Greta Thunberg because if we do nothing to halt climate change it will be the cause of wars, conflict and refugees,” said Norwegian Socialist MP Freddy André Øvstegård. “Greta Thunberg has launched a mass movement which I see as a major contribution to peace.”
“[I am] honoured and very grateful for this nomination,” said Thunberg on Twitter. Tomorrow we #schoolstrike for our future. And we will continue to do so for as long as it takes.” She has already challenged leaders in person at the UN climate summit in late 2018 and at Davos in January. “Change is coming whether they like it or not,” she said. …
Youth climate strikes to take place in more than 100 countries
Movement inspired by Greta Thunberg has snowballed, as Belgian workers join strike.
Students in Sydney demand action on climate change at the end of last year.
Hundreds of thousands of children are expected to walk out of their classrooms on Friday for a global climate strike amid growing anger at the failure of politicians to tackle the escalating ecological crisis.
Children at tens of thousands of schools in more than 100 countries are due to take part in the walkouts which began last year when one teenager – Greta Thunberg – held a solo protest outside the Swedish parliament.
Since then the climate movement has snowballed with schoolchildren on every continent except Antarctica taking part.
Friday’s strike is expected to be the biggest yet as evidence mounts of the climate emergency facing the planet. Amnesty International has warned that the failure of world governments to tackle the crisis could amount to “one of the greatest intergenerational human rights violations in history”.
Kumi Naidoo, Amnesty International’s secretary general, said: “It’s unfortunate that children have to sacrifice days of learning in school to demand that adults do the right thing. However, they know the consequences of the current shameful inaction both for themselves and future generations. This should be a moment for stark self-reflection by our political class.” …
6 Stories That Prove Instagram Influencers Are The Worst
It’s easy to make fun of the often-absurd world of Instagram influencers. But in their defense, it’s a gig with a razor-thin line between “lavished with love, praise, and money by millions” and “Three people liked the photo of your nails that you took alone in your cold, dark apartment.” It’s a real struggle to make it. And that struggle sometimes goes to strange, horrifying places.
6. Over A Thousand People Are On A Waitlist To Use An “Instagram Apartment”
Many influencers live in New York City, because even in an age of instant global communication, you need to be situated in a hub of fashion if you really want your career as BooyahBraBabe to be taken seriously. But it doesn’t matter how glamorously you’ve dressed yourself up for the cameras if your photos are obviously being taken in the dingy kitchen of your cramped studio apartment. Renting hotel rooms gets expensive, and you can only sneak photos in department stores so many times before security starts to get annoyed, so Instagram studios have started popping up around town.
That’s not inherently any weirder than running a photography studio, but an Instagrammer’s verisimilitude can be ruined in a hurry when followers notice that their lazy Sunday morning lounging is taking place on the same sofa that their bitter rival was lying on last week. Take the 2,400 square foot, $15,000 a month SoHo penthouse that’s carefully decorated to look like someone lives a luxurious life inside, even though it sits empty every night.
It’s the perfect setting to tell Instagram followers to “Live your truth” — a place that’s neither lived in nor truthful.
The owners are paid by brands to borrow the space, and they in turn invite influencers to show off their products in an environment designed solely to be photogenic. The bed’s frame was picked because it’s easy to have in the shot or out of it, and the books lying around are all what hip people say they’ve read to sound smart.
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Ancient switch to soft food gave us an overbite—and the ability to pronounce ‘f’s and ‘v’s
An ancient woman from Romania shows an edgeto-edge bite (left). A Bronze Age man from Austria had a slight overbite (right).
Don’t like the F-word? Blame farmers and soft food. When humans switched to processed foods after the spread of agriculture, they put less wear and tear on their teeth. That changed the growth of their jaws, giving adults the overbites normal in children. Within a few thousand years, those slight overbites made it easy for people in farming cultures to fire off sounds like “f” and “v,” opening a world of new words.
The newly favored consonants, known as labiodentals, helped spur the diversification of languages in Europe and Asia at least 4000 years ago; they led to such changes as the replacement of the Latin patēr to Old English faeder about 1500 years ago, according to linguist and senior author Balthasar Bickel at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. The paper shows “that a cultural shift can change our biology in such a way that it affects our language,” says evolutionary morphologist Noreen Von Cramon-Taubadel of the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York system, who was not part of the study.
Postdocs Damián Blasi and Steven Moran in Bickel’s lab set out to test an idea proposed by the late American linguist Charles Hockett. He noted in 1985 that the languages of hunter-gatherers lacked labiodentals, and conjectured that their diet was partly responsible: Chewing gritty, fibrous foods puts force on the growing jaw bone and wears down molars. In response, the lower jaw grows larger, and the molars erupt farther and drift forward on the protruding lower jaw, so that the upper and lower teeth align. That edge-to-edge bite makes it harder to push the upper jaw forward to touch the lower lip, which is required to pronounce labiodentals. But other linguists rejected the idea, and Blasi says he, Moran, and their colleagues “expected to prove Hockett wrong.”
First, the six researchers used computer modeling to show that with an overbite, producing labiodentals takes 29% less effort than with an edge-to-edge bite. Then, they scrutinized the world’s languages and found that hunter-gatherer languages have only about one-fourth as many labiodentals as languages from farming societies. Finally, they looked at the relationships among languages, and found that labiodentals can spread quickly, so that the sounds could go from being rare to common in the 8000 years since the widespread adoption of agriculture and new food processing methods such as grinding grain into flour.
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Ed. I we weren’t able to pronounce f’s and v’s in the first place, just why did we want to be able to do that? Was it just a coincidence that I read these two articles this morning, or is there something more sinister afoot?
A US court affirms your right to flip the bird to cops
CONSTITUTIONAL ETIQUETTE
Any reasonable police officer should know this gesture isn’t criminal.
It’s probably not a good idea to give any authority the middle finger. But if you’re in the US and want to express yourself crudely, your right to do so has been affirmed by a panel of three judges in a charming Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion issued on March 13 (pdf).
“Fits of rudeness or lack of gratitude may violate the Golden Rule. But that doesn’t make them illegal or for that matter punishable or for that matter grounds for a seizure,” writes judge Jeffrey Sutton in Debra Lee Cruise-Gulyas v. Matthew Wayne Minard.
The decision stems from a June 2017 traffic stop that gave rise to complex constitutional law claims. Minard is a Michigan cop who pulled over Cruise-Gulyas for speeding. He gave her a ticket for a lesser, non-moving violation, thinking he was doing her a favor. She repaid the officer by flipping him the bird after their encounter was over, while she was driving away.
Miffed by this gesture, Minard retaliated. He pulled Cruise-Gulyas over again to adjust the initial ticket and issue a speeding violation.
This time, Cruise-Gulyas did much more than give the officer the middle finger. She sued Minard for violating her constitutional rights, arguing that he unreasonably seized her in violation of the Fourth Amendment, retaliated in violation of the First Amendment guarantee to free speech, and restricted her liberty in violation of the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. …
BRAVO!
Ed. Now I get why we needed to be able to pronounce f’s and v’s… we needed to be able to say ‘fuck you.’
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Ten years after climate movie The Age of Stupid had its green-carpet, solar-powered premiere, we follow its director as she revisits people and places from the film and asks: are we still heading for the catastrophic future it depicted?
Beto O’Rourke, the U.S. congressman who gave Ted Cruz a surprising challenge in the Texas Senate race, has backtracked on his pledge not to run for president.
“I haven’t made any decisions about anything,” O’Rourke told TMZ on Tuesday.
In November — on the very day before the midterm election he narrowly lost to Cruz — O’Rourke said he would not be a candidate for the 2020 presidential election.
“I will not be a candidate for president in 2020,” O’Rourke told MSNBC. “That’s, I think, as definitive as those sentences get.”
The far right is the dominant political community on YouTube. It’s a flourishing world of men’s rights activists, libertarians, anti-feminist atheists, and white nationalists. There are whole channels dedicated to showing “social justice warriors” getting “owned” by various conservative provocateurs. And this has gone largely unanswered by the left.
Enter Natalie Wynn, who’s trying to de-radicalize this part of YouTube with an unexpected mix of philosophy and elaborate costumes. And she’s making some headway.
THANKS to HBO and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
After narrowly losing to Ted Cruz in the 2018 midterms, former Texas Democratic congressman Beto O’Rourke announces his 2020 candidacy for president, followed by a predictable response from Donald Trump.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Beto O’Rourke’s presidential announcement drew the attention of the country, the President, and the Stephen.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
A number of deeply upsetting comments from Tucker Carlson were recently unearthed, but he’s different now: before he was saying them on the radio and now he’s saying them on TV!
Democrats are quick to pose with Ilhan Omar when it looks good on a magazine cover, but when it comes to standing with her on tough issues, they vamoosed.
THANKS to TBS and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee for making this program available on YouTube.
Seth takes a closer look at Beto O’Rourke jumping in the 2020 race and President Trump immediately attacking him.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
冷蔵庫の上はお気に入りの場所。跳び乗ったり、跳び降りたり。The top of the refrigerator is Maru&Hana’s favorite place.
ストーブの上ははな専用の寛ぎスペース。The top of the stove is a relaxation place for exclusive use of Hana.
Mischa Marie
It’s uncanny how much Hana looks like Mischa, who died on March 20, 2002 at the age of about 20. The picture above was taken in 1987, when I lived in Studio City, California. Seventeen years later I still tear up thinking of her.
A barely noticeable doorway in this 600-year-old castle once led to the world’s largest self-playing didgeridoo.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 18, 2019
FINALLY . . .
New Hampshire’s Mountain-Climbing ‘Railway to the Moon’ Turns 150
The Mount Washington Cog Railway is still chugging.
Mount Washington Cog Railway locomotive No. 2 pushes a train up Jacob’s Ladder, the steepest part of the railroad, in June 2009.
IN 1852, THE ENTREPRENEUR AND inventor Sylvester Marsh got lost in a storm and nearly died on the slopes of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington. The Northeast’s tallest peak is home to some of the worst weather on earth—in 1934, observers at the summit measured a wind speed of 231 miles per hour, one of the fastest gusts ever recorded not associated with a tornado or cyclone—and over the years it has claimed dozens of lives.
After wandering the slopes for what must have felt like an eternity, Marsh stumbled through the doors of a shelter near the summit. As he recovered from his ordeal and prepared to spend a night 6,288 feet above sea level, Marsh thought to himself that there had to be a better way to reach the summit. Marsh would end up spending the next 17 years solving that problem by building the world’s first mountain-climbing cog railway, which in 2019 is celebrating its sesquicentennial.
A portrait of Mount Washington Cog Railway inventor Sylvester Marsh.
In the mid-19th century, when Marsh set out to design his new mountain-climbing contraption, railroads were still a new technology. The first railroad in the United States had only been built about 25 years earlier and generally only ran on flat ground. But if anyone could figure out how to run a train up a mountain, it was Marsh. The New Hampshire native had made his fortune in meatpacking in Chicago and held nearly a dozen patents. According to legend, Marsh even invented the first coffee percolator, although for some unknown reason he never filed a patent for that.
Marsh decided to build a railroad that used a cog-and-rack system, not unlike a bicycle chain on a sprocket, to help propel a train up hill. By 1858, he was confident enough in his design to approach the New Hampshire legislature for a charter to build a railroad up the west slope of Mount Washington. But politicians were less than impressed with his proposal and nearly laughed him out of the State House. One legislator suggested Marsh build a “railway to the moon” while he was at it. But despite their snide remarks, the state legislators granted Marsh a charter anyway. …
The town of North Tarrytown, New York (now called Sleepy Hollow), hires “Sentinels of Democracy”, complete with ceremonial musket, to guard polling places against the Headless Horseman.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 21, 2019
Ed. It’s Groundhog Day, though somewhat altered. I’m working today, just not as much. The sewer in the street serving my house is backed up. Hopefully the city will get it jetted out before I get home so I can finally use the toilet. So, instead of worrying about all the shit that simply won’t leave my house, I’ve cobbled up these errant ramblings barely uninteresting at all things. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?