Links of Interest and other things...
Oct. 23rd, 2019 09:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. I need to stop talking to my mother about the impeachment hearings. (They watch CNN, CNN is sort of the liberal version of FoxNews, in that it excels in hyperbole. This is the problem with a station that is all news, all the time, after a while you have to make up stuff or just editorialize the hell out of it to keep people's interest. They also watch PBS news, which analyzes everything to death.) At any rate, she finds new and creative ways to send my blood pressure through the roof.
ME: The impeachment hearings aren't happening until December now -
Mother: They are having hearings -
Me: The public hearings. They are having private hearings or what is normally known as depositions. It's not a trial yet. It's deposing witnesses to see if there is enough information to take it to trial. Sort of like a Grand Jury hearing.
Mother: "Today the Republicans tried to force their way into the hearings. And claimed they shouldn't be kept out. And claimed it shouldn't be happening -- when they did the same thing with Benghazi and were running those hearings.
Me: Yes, the Republicans are dangerously close to being outed as hypocrites.
Mother: They are hypocrites.
Me: I know. Hypocritic assholes -- (and see this is why I need to stop having these conversations. I want to go strangle the Republicans now.)
What's interesting is so much of this is focused on our foreign policy with the Ukraine. What enrages me is that 13,000 people may have died as a result of it. I knew Ukrainians. There was a lovely woman that I worked with at the Video Game Developer Company, who I adored. They aren't Russian. They are separate from Russia. They fought hard for their independence.
I know, I know, I should look away...but I can't. It's like a horror film -- you know it will give you nightmares, but you watch it anyway...because you have to see what happens next and if the heroes prevail.
Anyhow, because of this -- I really can't watch anti-hero series featuring white men or angry white men. Particularly old angry white men. Succession, Billions, Better Call Saul, El Camino, Deadwood, etc -- are out for the time being. I just can't watch them without wanting to throw things at the television set.
Now, maybe after 2028, or the Doofus is dead -- preferably of a painful disease. (In a sci-fi book I was writing, I had him mutated into a monster by an alleged miracle drug given to him by aliens. The Aliens kill him. I thought it was clever.)
Right now? I watch relationship dramas (with nice people), soap operas, superhero shows, fantasy/science fiction, sitcoms, historicals, and read comic books and romance novels.
2. How Can A Star Be Older Than the Universe
This article broke my brain or is skim proof. So good luck. (I couldn't access the videos, but maybe you can?)
For more than 100 years, astronomers have been observing a curious star located some 190 light years away from Earth in the constellation Libra. It rapidly journeys across the sky at 800,000 mph (1.3 million kilometers per hour). But more interesting than that, HD 140283 — or Methuselah as it's commonly known — is also one of the universe's oldest known stars.
In 2000, scientists sought to date the star using observations via the European Space Agency's (ESA) Hipparcos satellite, which estimated an age of 16 billion years old. Such a figure was rather mind-blowing and also pretty baffling. As astronomer Howard Bond of Pennsylvania State University pointed out, the age of the universe — determined from observations of the cosmic microwave background — is 13.8 billion years old. "It was a serious discrepancy," he said.
Taken at face value, the star's predicted age raised a major problem. How could a star be older than the universe? Or, conversely, how could the universe be younger? It was certainly clear that Methuselah — named in reference to a biblical patriarch who is said to have died aged 969, making him the longest lived of all the figures in the Bible — was old, since the metal-poor subgiant is predominantly made of hydrogen and helium and contains very little iron. It's composition meant the star must have come into being before iron became commonplace.
3. How to Catch a Bomb Maker
This is a story of a little known FBI forensics lab and how it changed the war on terror.
The insurgent began with a cordless phone—one of the knockoffs of a Chinese-built Senao so popular in northern Iraq. Hunched over a worktable somewhere near the refinery town of Baiji, about 150 miles north of Baghdad, he methodically worked through a series of steps by now both familiar and frighteningly simple.
Loosen the screws on the base station. Remove the plastic casing, rip out the power cord, and replace it with a battery. Rewire the phone’s page function to an external relay switch, then connect the relay to a battery and any mix of violent chemistry—plastic jugs full of diesel and fertilizer, a pressure cooker packed with homemade explosives, one of the many artillery shells available in post-invasion Iraq. When complete, pressing the page button on the phone’s handset—even from miles away—will flip the relay and trigger the bomb.
During the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) became the single deadliest weapons on the battlefield. In Iraq alone they accounted for between half and two-thirds of all U.S. wartime casualties and killed tens of thousands of civilians. They have now become a staple of insurgencies worldwide. But back in 2005—when the bombmaker sat poring over his Senao—the U.S. military was only beginning to understand the threat they posed.
"Fighting insurgencies is more like fighting organized crime. It's a conspiracy."
In the waning days of August that year, insurgents concealed the modified Senao in a gravel heap south of Baiji. They then wired it to three artillery shells buried in a road several feet away. The bomb was presumably meant for one of the patrols that frequented the route, but on Sept. 1, 2005, U.S. forces discovered it before it detonated. A bomb-disposal team neutralized the explosives and then packed the Senao into a crate destined for a little-known FBI forensics lab operating out of a parking garage in northern Virginia. No one knew at the time that the IED was anything more than just another in a flood of roadside bombs. Instead it would end up unmasking a terrorist and helping FBI analysts pioneer techniques that have foiled criminal plots around the globe.
4. 100 Greatest Singers of All Time According To Rolling Stone Magazine [Note this is a 2008 list, so doesn't include anyone after 2008]
Hmmm. So far I kind of agree? But I only looked through half of them...also, I'd have put Tina Turner before Bob Dylan.
1. Aretha Franklin (no arguments here)
2. Ray Charles (also no arguments)
3. Elvis Presley
4. Sam Cook
5. John Lennon (hmmm...beat out McCartney, on the fence on that one)
6. Marvin Gaye
7. Bob Dylan (I don't know how great a singer he is...honestly I hate his voice, I can barely hear the lyrics, but song-writer? Definitely)
8. Otis Redding
9. Stevie Wonder (don't like his voice either.)
10. James Brown
11. Paul McCartney
12. Little Richard
13. Roy Orbison
14. Al Green
15. Robert Plant (really? I'd have put some other people here first)
16. Mick Jaggar (definitely before Plant, and David Bowie before both of them)
17. Tina Turner (before before Lennon...this is very male centric list, just saying)
18. Freddie Mercury (way before Stevie Wonder)
19. Bob Marley (I'm admittedly not a fan of Marley, the appeal is lost on me for some reason, and yes I have a lot of friends who adore him...)
20. Smokey Robinson..
21. Johnny Cash (I'd have put him earlier...)
22. Etta James..
23. David Bowie
24. Van Morrison
25. Michael Jackson
Janis Joplin came in at 28, Nina Simone at 29 and Prince at 30..Willie Nelsen was 88 and Don Henley 87, Tom Waits 82...Iggy Pop 75, and James Taylor at 74, Dolly Parton got 73, Bjork was 60, Brian Wilson 52, Gladys Knight 51, Jim Morrison 47, and Patsy Cline at 46. Joni Mitchell at 42 and Chuck Berry at 41, Elton John at 38 and Neil Young at 37.
You can check out the rest for yourselves. This is a highly subjective list.
Been listening to a lot of country and Americana music lately. Today got bored and hit Country Wide -- which is country music globally. Apparently it is not just regulated to the Americas. Good to know.
5. How to get a world class education for Free on the Internet (I would however be careful to check sources.)
6. How Scientists Are Bringing People to a Near State of Death to Heal Them
Bringing people back from the "dead" is not science fiction anymore. Typically, after just minutes without a heartbeat, brain cells start dying, and an irreversible and lethal process is set in motion. But when a person becomes severely cold before his heart quits, his metabolism slows. The body sips so little oxygen that it can remain in a suspended state for up to seven hours without permanent cell damage. Thanks to improvements in technology (like the cardiac bypass machine that saved Dwyer's life) and medical understanding, the odds are getting better for coming back from the edge. They are so good, in fact, that some doctors and scientists are testing a bold new hypothesis: What if you could induce a near-death state in order to save lives? If it can be done, it could be a game changer for saving some of the nearly 200,000 Americans who die each year due to trauma injuries. By essentially pressing "pause," doctors might be able to buy precious time that could mean the difference between life and death. Suspended animation is no longer the stuff of Star Wars or Avatar.
A handful of scientists and medical experts across the country is now looking for ways to suspend life in order to perform surgeries without the threat of a trauma patient bleeding to death, or to prevent tissue damage during the treatment of cardiac events. Some aim to pump ice-cold saline solution into patients’ veins. Others are searching for a suspended-animation drug. The Department of Defense too is heavily involved, with the hope that thousands of servicemen and servicewomen could benefit as well: Ninety percent of war casualties result from bleeding out on the battlefield. In 2010, it launched a $34 million initiative called Biochronicity—an interdisciplinary research project to figure out how to manipulate the human clock.
“The goal is to examine the way our bodies know that time is progressing,” explains Col. Matthew Martin, a 48-year-old active-duty trauma surgeon whose research is funded through Biochronicity. The battlefield application would be the slowing down or the stopping of time, making a wounded soldier able to survive longer—or even survive indefinitely—“so that we can get somewhere to treat the injury,” says Martin, “and then reverse that suspended state.”
7. Online - No One Knows You are Poor
We had only $85 and no way to charge anything on a credit card. Luckily, we were expecting a $6,000 check from a freelance gig, but it had been delayed. Still, we were like most Americans – living paycheck to paycheck (almost eight out of 10 Americans, according to reputable studies) and unable to pay for an unexpected bill of more than $500 (nearly six out of 10 Americans). We were struggling. And we were terrified. I realized that the mindset of worrying that we might go broke was damaging us.
I was no longer interested in following my bliss. I wanted to pay my bills.
Several artist friends recommended I find a manual labor job, one that would require none of my mind. I had never worked a job that merely asked me to show up. I found out that working part‑time at the grocery store – three days a week – would give me health insurance for the entire family. And maybe putting premade pies on a display table would give me some time to think. So the next time I took a case of our gluten‑free flour mix into our grocery store, I delivered an invoice and a job application. They hired me that week.
They put me in the bakery. Since I have celiac, I can’t eat even a bit of gluten. But the bakery section in the grocery store is almost all packages, and I’m not allergic to plastic. It was a bit of a shock, at first, not being able to stop what I was doing to work on an essay or take photographs. Or check Twitter. After years of being a freelancer, I couldn’t believe how wild my mind was when asked to do a task and then check back with my supervisor (a former student of mine) to ask what task she wanted me to complete next. I noticed that my mind balked. I kept working. And after a few weeks of shelving bags of croutons and cleaning out the cake case, I started to enjoy the wildness of my mind. At the store, I had to show up on time, do my work, then leave it all behind. I didn’t know work could be that easy.
Friends came into the store and we would talk in three‑minute bursts as I stocked frozen pizzas. Customers asked me questions about where we kept that one brand of whole‑wheat bread, since it was the only one their kids would eat. I answered dozens of little questions a day. I realized that I liked feeling useful.
And all day long, I saw people, in tiny bantering interactions and questions. I developed a daily routine with fellow employees: a check‑in at the cheese counter, a quick conversation about politics in produce. I would never have met any of these people I came to like, any other way. I started to feel like part of the community of my town.
On my lunch hours, I sat at the front of the store, taking notes. On the backs of papers that read “Grain‑free flatbread, $6.49 each”, I started writing lists. I look back at them now and realize I was clearing my mind of how I had lived. I wrote lists of what I wanted to accomplish in our house, our medical appointments, our taxes. I jotted down ideas for how to let go of my blog, Gluten‑Free Girl. And I started taking notes on what I noticed about customers who had less money than most.
I noticed that the people who lived on the day‑old breads looked around furtively to make sure no one saw when they reached into the discount bin. I led one woman to the back of the store to find the package of day‑old rolls I had put in there, the gravy packets on sale, and some croutons for stuffing. “Thank you!” she said before she put her arms around me. “I’m going to have Thanksgiving because of you.”
I found out that 22% of all students in our community’s schools qualified for free or reduced lunches. That didn’t account for the 10% of families who were above the official poverty line but still scrambling, or the single people or couples who did not have enough. That meant that nearly one out of three people who came into the store struggled to make ends meet.
Each day, at about two, I walked to the back freezer with a laminated list and a tall cart. I pulled boxes down from the top of the back freezer. Methodically, with plastic gloves on, I pulled the doughnuts – raspberry-filled, Bavarian cream, chocolate glazed – and put them on black trays in a specified pattern. I was in the freezer by myself, pulling the doughnuts, humming a little. And then I wheeled the cart to the cooler, ready for the morning crew to bake them the next day.
Years before, I would have disdained these doughnuts: full of sugar, premade months before in a factory.
In the second year of my blog, I wrote a silly little piece about how Danny and I stood in line at the store and wondered at the crap in other people’s carts. I received emails telling me I was being a food snob. At first defensive – come on, America eats lousy food! – I came to understand how wrong I had been. A woman shared with me how little she makes on her teaching salary in Oklahoma, how she visits the food bank to make it, and how a trip to the grocery store for cheap cake is an experience only reserved for once in a while when she can’t stand the shame any more. I was chastened and changed. And now I try to do better. How do I know that the woman buying the 99‑cent doughnuts at our store isn’t giving her two kids the only treat she can afford that week? And who am I to say that they shouldn’t eat those doughnuts?
One day, I had a long conversation with the store’s owner. At 89 years old, he had owned the store for 53 years. His grandson had taken over managing the store, but the owner still clocked in 20 hours a week. Mostly, he spent that time in the city, at a store in a low‑income neighborhood. He consulted a list of the 20 top‑selling foods at our store. If the price in the city was lower, he called his grandson and told him to lower the price on ours. I stopped him one day to thank him for all that he did for our community. He told me: “It befuddles me that people put their focus on what is happening across the country and the world. There is enough to do here.”
8. Made in America --
How four dishes with roots in other lands tell a story of immigration and transformation
Impossible to put an excerpt. Combination of video and text.
So an abstract instead:
Gumbo. Chile con queso. California roll. Spaghetti and meatballs.
The names are as familiar as household brands. Yet how much do you know about these dishes? Based on the names alone, with their roots in other languages and other cultures, each dish sounds like an import. In some ways, they are. But each dish also morphed and adapted to its new environment, transforming into something uniquely American.
Some transformed through industrialization. Another required the ingenuity of chefs willing to break from tradition. One adapted, and continues to adapt, to the dizzying constellation of cultures that is New Orleans. Allow us to explain – and to show you.
9. Cold Hard Truths About the Workplace That I Learned the Hard Way
Yep. People are difficult to work with. And unfortunately, never quite make it past a high school mentality.
10. The Outrageous Deeply Sexist History of the Pantsuit
For centuries, the suit has been a symbol of male power, and the original reason many women adopted it was to blend into male-dominated spaces. But fashion historian Cassidy Zachary believes that the suit has been so widely adopted by women over the last few decades that it has become gender-neutral.
“Suits have been one of the most gendered garments in history,” she says. “But they have lost some of that symbolic power because they have been universally adopted across the spectrum. We’re at a point now where women are no longer wearing suits to project male power, but rather the power and autonomy inherent in themselves.”
The fraught past of political fashion reveals that the simple act of dressing as a woman in office has always been complex. And now, more than ever, fashion plays a role in shaping the public’s perception of political women.
The first “severely-gowned woman” in Congress
To understand the place of the women’s suit in politics today, it’s worth looking at why female politicians of the past adopted the pantsuit in the first place.
Jeannette Rankin [Photo: Bain News Service/Adam Cuerden (restoration)/Wiki Commons]
Jeannette Rankin was the first woman to be elected to Congress, in 1917, and from the moment she was sworn in, people seemed concerned about how a woman in power “should” dress. Her election spurred conversations in the media, with some expressing concern that Rankin may dress in a way that was overly serious and masculine, threatening gender norms of the era. A Washington Post article from the time was focused on dispelling the rumors that Rankin was “a severely-gowned woman, with spectacles, straight-combed hair, stiff white collars and spats.” Instead, the reporter pointed out that she wore soft, body-hugging gowns, and was “a woman who is thoroughly feminine—from her charmingly coiffed swirl of chestnut hair to the small, high and distinctively French heels.”
For the next 75 years, the social mores around gender and clothing changed dramatically in the United States, as women began wearing jeans and trousers. Fashion historian Heather Vaughan Lee says that starting in the 1970s, the “woman’s power suit” came into vogue, spurred by the large number of women entering the workforce. It was characterized by masculine-style broad shoulders and exaggerated shoulder pads. High-profile designers including Valentino, Yves Saint Laurent, and Giorgio Armani created their own versions of the power suit. “Fashion designers recognized [women’s] need for appropriate professional, yet stylish, attire that displayed their economic power and status,” says Lee.
And yet the convention in Congress remained: Women wore skirts, rather than trousers. In 1993, newly elected senator Carol Moseley Braun showed up to work in an Armani pantsuit, not knowing about this unspoken rule, eliciting audible gasps from her colleagues. But this also spurred the first major tectonic fashion change among women in politics. When Braun’s pantsuit became the subject of discussion, other female senators decided to wear suits in an effort to break the stigma of women wearing suits on Capitol Hill.
Pantsuits offered women in public office some new freedoms, like being able to walk and sit more comfortably than they could in skirts. But ultimately, the reason for women in power to wear suits, Lee says, is that it is a signaling mechanism. As I’ve reported time and again, suits have historically been associated with male power, and when women first began wearing suits, they were taking on and projecting some of this power. “Power suits developed in order to convey women’s economic and professional power, and to put them on more equal footing with men in the workplace,” says Lee.
However, something has changed over the last few decades. As Zachary points out, trousers and suits have been worn by women for such a long time now that they are no longer necessarily just a symbol of male power. “Women have by now successfully co-opted the pantsuit, and with that comes the ability to build on its foundation,” Zachary says. “It is still a symbol of power, but it’s not male power they are channeling, but rather their own power and autonomy. Women in politics today can take advantage of that as a way to express themselves and their beliefs.”
ME: The impeachment hearings aren't happening until December now -
Mother: They are having hearings -
Me: The public hearings. They are having private hearings or what is normally known as depositions. It's not a trial yet. It's deposing witnesses to see if there is enough information to take it to trial. Sort of like a Grand Jury hearing.
Mother: "Today the Republicans tried to force their way into the hearings. And claimed they shouldn't be kept out. And claimed it shouldn't be happening -- when they did the same thing with Benghazi and were running those hearings.
Me: Yes, the Republicans are dangerously close to being outed as hypocrites.
Mother: They are hypocrites.
Me: I know. Hypocritic assholes -- (and see this is why I need to stop having these conversations. I want to go strangle the Republicans now.)
What's interesting is so much of this is focused on our foreign policy with the Ukraine. What enrages me is that 13,000 people may have died as a result of it. I knew Ukrainians. There was a lovely woman that I worked with at the Video Game Developer Company, who I adored. They aren't Russian. They are separate from Russia. They fought hard for their independence.
I know, I know, I should look away...but I can't. It's like a horror film -- you know it will give you nightmares, but you watch it anyway...because you have to see what happens next and if the heroes prevail.
Anyhow, because of this -- I really can't watch anti-hero series featuring white men or angry white men. Particularly old angry white men. Succession, Billions, Better Call Saul, El Camino, Deadwood, etc -- are out for the time being. I just can't watch them without wanting to throw things at the television set.
Now, maybe after 2028, or the Doofus is dead -- preferably of a painful disease. (In a sci-fi book I was writing, I had him mutated into a monster by an alleged miracle drug given to him by aliens. The Aliens kill him. I thought it was clever.)
Right now? I watch relationship dramas (with nice people), soap operas, superhero shows, fantasy/science fiction, sitcoms, historicals, and read comic books and romance novels.
2. How Can A Star Be Older Than the Universe
This article broke my brain or is skim proof. So good luck. (I couldn't access the videos, but maybe you can?)
For more than 100 years, astronomers have been observing a curious star located some 190 light years away from Earth in the constellation Libra. It rapidly journeys across the sky at 800,000 mph (1.3 million kilometers per hour). But more interesting than that, HD 140283 — or Methuselah as it's commonly known — is also one of the universe's oldest known stars.
In 2000, scientists sought to date the star using observations via the European Space Agency's (ESA) Hipparcos satellite, which estimated an age of 16 billion years old. Such a figure was rather mind-blowing and also pretty baffling. As astronomer Howard Bond of Pennsylvania State University pointed out, the age of the universe — determined from observations of the cosmic microwave background — is 13.8 billion years old. "It was a serious discrepancy," he said.
Taken at face value, the star's predicted age raised a major problem. How could a star be older than the universe? Or, conversely, how could the universe be younger? It was certainly clear that Methuselah — named in reference to a biblical patriarch who is said to have died aged 969, making him the longest lived of all the figures in the Bible — was old, since the metal-poor subgiant is predominantly made of hydrogen and helium and contains very little iron. It's composition meant the star must have come into being before iron became commonplace.
3. How to Catch a Bomb Maker
This is a story of a little known FBI forensics lab and how it changed the war on terror.
The insurgent began with a cordless phone—one of the knockoffs of a Chinese-built Senao so popular in northern Iraq. Hunched over a worktable somewhere near the refinery town of Baiji, about 150 miles north of Baghdad, he methodically worked through a series of steps by now both familiar and frighteningly simple.
Loosen the screws on the base station. Remove the plastic casing, rip out the power cord, and replace it with a battery. Rewire the phone’s page function to an external relay switch, then connect the relay to a battery and any mix of violent chemistry—plastic jugs full of diesel and fertilizer, a pressure cooker packed with homemade explosives, one of the many artillery shells available in post-invasion Iraq. When complete, pressing the page button on the phone’s handset—even from miles away—will flip the relay and trigger the bomb.
During the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) became the single deadliest weapons on the battlefield. In Iraq alone they accounted for between half and two-thirds of all U.S. wartime casualties and killed tens of thousands of civilians. They have now become a staple of insurgencies worldwide. But back in 2005—when the bombmaker sat poring over his Senao—the U.S. military was only beginning to understand the threat they posed.
"Fighting insurgencies is more like fighting organized crime. It's a conspiracy."
In the waning days of August that year, insurgents concealed the modified Senao in a gravel heap south of Baiji. They then wired it to three artillery shells buried in a road several feet away. The bomb was presumably meant for one of the patrols that frequented the route, but on Sept. 1, 2005, U.S. forces discovered it before it detonated. A bomb-disposal team neutralized the explosives and then packed the Senao into a crate destined for a little-known FBI forensics lab operating out of a parking garage in northern Virginia. No one knew at the time that the IED was anything more than just another in a flood of roadside bombs. Instead it would end up unmasking a terrorist and helping FBI analysts pioneer techniques that have foiled criminal plots around the globe.
4. 100 Greatest Singers of All Time According To Rolling Stone Magazine [Note this is a 2008 list, so doesn't include anyone after 2008]
Hmmm. So far I kind of agree? But I only looked through half of them...also, I'd have put Tina Turner before Bob Dylan.
1. Aretha Franklin (no arguments here)
2. Ray Charles (also no arguments)
3. Elvis Presley
4. Sam Cook
5. John Lennon (hmmm...beat out McCartney, on the fence on that one)
6. Marvin Gaye
7. Bob Dylan (I don't know how great a singer he is...honestly I hate his voice, I can barely hear the lyrics, but song-writer? Definitely)
8. Otis Redding
9. Stevie Wonder (don't like his voice either.)
10. James Brown
11. Paul McCartney
12. Little Richard
13. Roy Orbison
14. Al Green
15. Robert Plant (really? I'd have put some other people here first)
16. Mick Jaggar (definitely before Plant, and David Bowie before both of them)
17. Tina Turner (before before Lennon...this is very male centric list, just saying)
18. Freddie Mercury (way before Stevie Wonder)
19. Bob Marley (I'm admittedly not a fan of Marley, the appeal is lost on me for some reason, and yes I have a lot of friends who adore him...)
20. Smokey Robinson..
21. Johnny Cash (I'd have put him earlier...)
22. Etta James..
23. David Bowie
24. Van Morrison
25. Michael Jackson
Janis Joplin came in at 28, Nina Simone at 29 and Prince at 30..Willie Nelsen was 88 and Don Henley 87, Tom Waits 82...Iggy Pop 75, and James Taylor at 74, Dolly Parton got 73, Bjork was 60, Brian Wilson 52, Gladys Knight 51, Jim Morrison 47, and Patsy Cline at 46. Joni Mitchell at 42 and Chuck Berry at 41, Elton John at 38 and Neil Young at 37.
You can check out the rest for yourselves. This is a highly subjective list.
Been listening to a lot of country and Americana music lately. Today got bored and hit Country Wide -- which is country music globally. Apparently it is not just regulated to the Americas. Good to know.
5. How to get a world class education for Free on the Internet (I would however be careful to check sources.)
6. How Scientists Are Bringing People to a Near State of Death to Heal Them
Bringing people back from the "dead" is not science fiction anymore. Typically, after just minutes without a heartbeat, brain cells start dying, and an irreversible and lethal process is set in motion. But when a person becomes severely cold before his heart quits, his metabolism slows. The body sips so little oxygen that it can remain in a suspended state for up to seven hours without permanent cell damage. Thanks to improvements in technology (like the cardiac bypass machine that saved Dwyer's life) and medical understanding, the odds are getting better for coming back from the edge. They are so good, in fact, that some doctors and scientists are testing a bold new hypothesis: What if you could induce a near-death state in order to save lives? If it can be done, it could be a game changer for saving some of the nearly 200,000 Americans who die each year due to trauma injuries. By essentially pressing "pause," doctors might be able to buy precious time that could mean the difference between life and death. Suspended animation is no longer the stuff of Star Wars or Avatar.
A handful of scientists and medical experts across the country is now looking for ways to suspend life in order to perform surgeries without the threat of a trauma patient bleeding to death, or to prevent tissue damage during the treatment of cardiac events. Some aim to pump ice-cold saline solution into patients’ veins. Others are searching for a suspended-animation drug. The Department of Defense too is heavily involved, with the hope that thousands of servicemen and servicewomen could benefit as well: Ninety percent of war casualties result from bleeding out on the battlefield. In 2010, it launched a $34 million initiative called Biochronicity—an interdisciplinary research project to figure out how to manipulate the human clock.
“The goal is to examine the way our bodies know that time is progressing,” explains Col. Matthew Martin, a 48-year-old active-duty trauma surgeon whose research is funded through Biochronicity. The battlefield application would be the slowing down or the stopping of time, making a wounded soldier able to survive longer—or even survive indefinitely—“so that we can get somewhere to treat the injury,” says Martin, “and then reverse that suspended state.”
7. Online - No One Knows You are Poor
We had only $85 and no way to charge anything on a credit card. Luckily, we were expecting a $6,000 check from a freelance gig, but it had been delayed. Still, we were like most Americans – living paycheck to paycheck (almost eight out of 10 Americans, according to reputable studies) and unable to pay for an unexpected bill of more than $500 (nearly six out of 10 Americans). We were struggling. And we were terrified. I realized that the mindset of worrying that we might go broke was damaging us.
I was no longer interested in following my bliss. I wanted to pay my bills.
Several artist friends recommended I find a manual labor job, one that would require none of my mind. I had never worked a job that merely asked me to show up. I found out that working part‑time at the grocery store – three days a week – would give me health insurance for the entire family. And maybe putting premade pies on a display table would give me some time to think. So the next time I took a case of our gluten‑free flour mix into our grocery store, I delivered an invoice and a job application. They hired me that week.
They put me in the bakery. Since I have celiac, I can’t eat even a bit of gluten. But the bakery section in the grocery store is almost all packages, and I’m not allergic to plastic. It was a bit of a shock, at first, not being able to stop what I was doing to work on an essay or take photographs. Or check Twitter. After years of being a freelancer, I couldn’t believe how wild my mind was when asked to do a task and then check back with my supervisor (a former student of mine) to ask what task she wanted me to complete next. I noticed that my mind balked. I kept working. And after a few weeks of shelving bags of croutons and cleaning out the cake case, I started to enjoy the wildness of my mind. At the store, I had to show up on time, do my work, then leave it all behind. I didn’t know work could be that easy.
Friends came into the store and we would talk in three‑minute bursts as I stocked frozen pizzas. Customers asked me questions about where we kept that one brand of whole‑wheat bread, since it was the only one their kids would eat. I answered dozens of little questions a day. I realized that I liked feeling useful.
And all day long, I saw people, in tiny bantering interactions and questions. I developed a daily routine with fellow employees: a check‑in at the cheese counter, a quick conversation about politics in produce. I would never have met any of these people I came to like, any other way. I started to feel like part of the community of my town.
On my lunch hours, I sat at the front of the store, taking notes. On the backs of papers that read “Grain‑free flatbread, $6.49 each”, I started writing lists. I look back at them now and realize I was clearing my mind of how I had lived. I wrote lists of what I wanted to accomplish in our house, our medical appointments, our taxes. I jotted down ideas for how to let go of my blog, Gluten‑Free Girl. And I started taking notes on what I noticed about customers who had less money than most.
I noticed that the people who lived on the day‑old breads looked around furtively to make sure no one saw when they reached into the discount bin. I led one woman to the back of the store to find the package of day‑old rolls I had put in there, the gravy packets on sale, and some croutons for stuffing. “Thank you!” she said before she put her arms around me. “I’m going to have Thanksgiving because of you.”
I found out that 22% of all students in our community’s schools qualified for free or reduced lunches. That didn’t account for the 10% of families who were above the official poverty line but still scrambling, or the single people or couples who did not have enough. That meant that nearly one out of three people who came into the store struggled to make ends meet.
Each day, at about two, I walked to the back freezer with a laminated list and a tall cart. I pulled boxes down from the top of the back freezer. Methodically, with plastic gloves on, I pulled the doughnuts – raspberry-filled, Bavarian cream, chocolate glazed – and put them on black trays in a specified pattern. I was in the freezer by myself, pulling the doughnuts, humming a little. And then I wheeled the cart to the cooler, ready for the morning crew to bake them the next day.
Years before, I would have disdained these doughnuts: full of sugar, premade months before in a factory.
In the second year of my blog, I wrote a silly little piece about how Danny and I stood in line at the store and wondered at the crap in other people’s carts. I received emails telling me I was being a food snob. At first defensive – come on, America eats lousy food! – I came to understand how wrong I had been. A woman shared with me how little she makes on her teaching salary in Oklahoma, how she visits the food bank to make it, and how a trip to the grocery store for cheap cake is an experience only reserved for once in a while when she can’t stand the shame any more. I was chastened and changed. And now I try to do better. How do I know that the woman buying the 99‑cent doughnuts at our store isn’t giving her two kids the only treat she can afford that week? And who am I to say that they shouldn’t eat those doughnuts?
One day, I had a long conversation with the store’s owner. At 89 years old, he had owned the store for 53 years. His grandson had taken over managing the store, but the owner still clocked in 20 hours a week. Mostly, he spent that time in the city, at a store in a low‑income neighborhood. He consulted a list of the 20 top‑selling foods at our store. If the price in the city was lower, he called his grandson and told him to lower the price on ours. I stopped him one day to thank him for all that he did for our community. He told me: “It befuddles me that people put their focus on what is happening across the country and the world. There is enough to do here.”
8. Made in America --
How four dishes with roots in other lands tell a story of immigration and transformation
Impossible to put an excerpt. Combination of video and text.
So an abstract instead:
Gumbo. Chile con queso. California roll. Spaghetti and meatballs.
The names are as familiar as household brands. Yet how much do you know about these dishes? Based on the names alone, with their roots in other languages and other cultures, each dish sounds like an import. In some ways, they are. But each dish also morphed and adapted to its new environment, transforming into something uniquely American.
Some transformed through industrialization. Another required the ingenuity of chefs willing to break from tradition. One adapted, and continues to adapt, to the dizzying constellation of cultures that is New Orleans. Allow us to explain – and to show you.
9. Cold Hard Truths About the Workplace That I Learned the Hard Way
Yep. People are difficult to work with. And unfortunately, never quite make it past a high school mentality.
10. The Outrageous Deeply Sexist History of the Pantsuit
For centuries, the suit has been a symbol of male power, and the original reason many women adopted it was to blend into male-dominated spaces. But fashion historian Cassidy Zachary believes that the suit has been so widely adopted by women over the last few decades that it has become gender-neutral.
“Suits have been one of the most gendered garments in history,” she says. “But they have lost some of that symbolic power because they have been universally adopted across the spectrum. We’re at a point now where women are no longer wearing suits to project male power, but rather the power and autonomy inherent in themselves.”
The fraught past of political fashion reveals that the simple act of dressing as a woman in office has always been complex. And now, more than ever, fashion plays a role in shaping the public’s perception of political women.
The first “severely-gowned woman” in Congress
To understand the place of the women’s suit in politics today, it’s worth looking at why female politicians of the past adopted the pantsuit in the first place.
Jeannette Rankin [Photo: Bain News Service/Adam Cuerden (restoration)/Wiki Commons]
Jeannette Rankin was the first woman to be elected to Congress, in 1917, and from the moment she was sworn in, people seemed concerned about how a woman in power “should” dress. Her election spurred conversations in the media, with some expressing concern that Rankin may dress in a way that was overly serious and masculine, threatening gender norms of the era. A Washington Post article from the time was focused on dispelling the rumors that Rankin was “a severely-gowned woman, with spectacles, straight-combed hair, stiff white collars and spats.” Instead, the reporter pointed out that she wore soft, body-hugging gowns, and was “a woman who is thoroughly feminine—from her charmingly coiffed swirl of chestnut hair to the small, high and distinctively French heels.”
For the next 75 years, the social mores around gender and clothing changed dramatically in the United States, as women began wearing jeans and trousers. Fashion historian Heather Vaughan Lee says that starting in the 1970s, the “woman’s power suit” came into vogue, spurred by the large number of women entering the workforce. It was characterized by masculine-style broad shoulders and exaggerated shoulder pads. High-profile designers including Valentino, Yves Saint Laurent, and Giorgio Armani created their own versions of the power suit. “Fashion designers recognized [women’s] need for appropriate professional, yet stylish, attire that displayed their economic power and status,” says Lee.
And yet the convention in Congress remained: Women wore skirts, rather than trousers. In 1993, newly elected senator Carol Moseley Braun showed up to work in an Armani pantsuit, not knowing about this unspoken rule, eliciting audible gasps from her colleagues. But this also spurred the first major tectonic fashion change among women in politics. When Braun’s pantsuit became the subject of discussion, other female senators decided to wear suits in an effort to break the stigma of women wearing suits on Capitol Hill.
Pantsuits offered women in public office some new freedoms, like being able to walk and sit more comfortably than they could in skirts. But ultimately, the reason for women in power to wear suits, Lee says, is that it is a signaling mechanism. As I’ve reported time and again, suits have historically been associated with male power, and when women first began wearing suits, they were taking on and projecting some of this power. “Power suits developed in order to convey women’s economic and professional power, and to put them on more equal footing with men in the workplace,” says Lee.
However, something has changed over the last few decades. As Zachary points out, trousers and suits have been worn by women for such a long time now that they are no longer necessarily just a symbol of male power. “Women have by now successfully co-opted the pantsuit, and with that comes the ability to build on its foundation,” Zachary says. “It is still a symbol of power, but it’s not male power they are channeling, but rather their own power and autonomy. Women in politics today can take advantage of that as a way to express themselves and their beliefs.”
no subject
Date: 2019-10-24 07:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2019-10-24 02:09 pm (UTC)How can a star be older than the Universe? Easy, if your model of the universe was known to be flawed from the beginning. A long time ago I said to somebody at ATPo that 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' were kluges that the leading astrophysicists were using because they finally realized Einstein's idea of the universe could not work as is. Too many people got their PhDs playing along with a theory that doesn't work and now refuse to admit it, so we are going to see things like this 'anomaly' for a long time. (Hint: The simple truth in this case is that there is no reason the speed of this star zipping by very close to us on a galactic scale has anything to do with its age! Astronomers don't need to be told this. They already know. Even bringing it up, people are not so subtly questioning the use of red-shift of light as the only measure of the age of distant bodies.)
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2019-10-27 11:43 pm (UTC)