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cvanderloo

Your genetics influence how resilient you are to cold temperatures - new research - 1 views

theconversation.com/mperatures-new-research-155975

genetics science research cold knowledge

shared by cvanderloo on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Some people just aren’t bothered by the cold, no matter how low the temperature dips. And the reason for this may be in a person’s genes. Our new research shows that a common genetic variant in the skeletal muscle gene, ACTN3, makes people more resilient to cold temperatures.
  • Our recent study, conducted alongside researchers from Lithuania, Sweden and Australia, suggests that if you’re alpha-actinin-3 deficient, then your body can maintain a higher core temperature
  • While only 30% of participants with the alpha-actinin-3 protein reached the full 120 minutes of cold exposure, 69% of those that were alpha-actinin-3 deficient completed the full cold-water exposure time.
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  • Our previous work has shown that ACTN3 variants play an important role in our muscle’s ability to generate strength. We showed that the loss of alpha-actinin-3 is detrimental to sprint performance in athletes and the general population, but may benefit muscle endurance.
  • This is because the loss of alpha-actinin-3 causes the muscle to behave more like a slower muscle fibre.
  • Our study shows that ACTN3 is more than just the “gene for speed”, but that its loss improves our muscle’s ability to generate heat and reduces the need to shiver when exposed to cold.
  • The goal of our research is to improve our understanding of how our genetics influence how our muscle works. This will allow us to develop better treatments for those who suffer from muscle diseases, like Duchenne muscular dystrophy, as well as more common conditions, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes.
katherineharron

Viking Rok runestone may allude to cold climate crisis fears - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • A huge 9th-century stone monument in Sweden may have been erected by Vikings who feared a repeat of a cold climate crisis that took place more than 300 years earlier, according to a new study.
  • A new interdisciplinary study by scholars from Swedish universities has concluded that the inscription is about anxiety triggered by a son's death and fears of a new cold climate crisis.
  • The study was based on archaeological research on a cold climate catastrophe from the years 536 to 550, which affected Scandinavia. The crisis took hold after a series of volcanic events and led to lower average temperatures, crop failures, hunger and mass extinctions. It is also estimated that the population of the Scandinavian Peninsula fell by 50% or more.
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  • "Before the Rok runestone was erected, a number of events occurred which must have seemed extremely ominous," said Bo Graslund, professor in archaeology at Uppsala University, one of the authors of the paper. "A powerful solar storm colored the sky in dramatic shades of red, crop yields suffered from an extremely cold summer, and later a solar eclipse occurred just after sunrise."
Javier E

Naomi Oreskes, a Lightning Rod in a Changing Climate - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rod-in-a-changing-climate.html

science scientific method denial climate change conservatism ideology research

shared by Javier E on 16 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Dr. Oreskes is fast becoming one of the biggest names in climate science — not as a climatologist, but as a defender who uses the tools of historical scholarship to counter what she sees as ideologically motivated attacks on the field.
  • Formally, she is a historian of science
  • She decided to do something no climate scientist had thought to do: count the published scientific papers. Pulling 928 of them, she was startled to find that not one dissented from the basic findings that warming was underway and human activity was the main reason.
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  • Her core discovery, made with a co-author, Erik M. Conway, was twofold. They reported that dubious tactics had been used over decades to cast doubt on scientific findings relating to subjects like acid rain, the ozone shield, tobacco smoke and climate change. And most surprisingly, in each case, the tactics were employed by the same group of people.
  • The central players were serious scientists who had major career triumphs during the Cold War, but in subsequent years apparently came to equate environmentalism with socialism, and government regulation with tyranny.
  • In a 2010 book, Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway called these men “Merchants of Doubt,” and this spring the book became a documentary film, by Robert Kenner. At the heart of both works is a description of methods that were honed by the tobacco industry in the 1960s and have since been employed to cast doubt on just about any science being cited to support new government regulations.
  • Dr. Oreskes, the more visible and vocal of the “Merchants” authors, has been threatened with lawsuits and vilified on conservative websites, and routinely gets hate mail calling her a communist or worse.
  • She established her career as a historian with a book-length study examining the role of dissent in the scientific method. As she put it a few months ago to an audience at Indiana University, she wanted to wrestle with this question: “How do you distinguish a maverick from a crank?”
  • Dr. Oreskes found that Wegener had been treated badly, particularly by American geologists. But he did not abandon his faith in the scientific method. He kept publishing until his death in 1930, trying to convince fellow scientists of his position, and was finally vindicated three decades later by oceanographic research conducted during the Cold War.
  • As she completed that study, Dr. Oreskes sought to understand how science was affected not only by the Cold War but by its end. In particular, she started wondering about climate science. Global warming had seemed to rise as an important issue around the time the Iron Curtain came down. Was this just a way for scientists to scare up research money that would no longer be coming their way through military channels?
  • the widespread public impression was that scientists were still divided over whether humans were primarily responsible for the warming of the planet. But how sharp was the split, she wondered?
  • Dr. Oreskes’s approach has been to dig deeply into the history of climate change denial, documenting its links to other episodes in which critics challenged a developing scientific consensus.
  • She published that finding in a short paper in the journal Science in 2004, and the reaction was electric. Advocates of climate action seized on it as proof of a level of scientific consensus that most of them had not fully perceived. Just as suddenly, Dr. Oreskes found herself under political attack.
  • Some of the voices criticizing her — scientists like Dr. Singer and groups like the George C. Marshall Institute in Washington — were barely known to her at the time, Dr. Oreskes said in an interview. Just who were they?
  • It did not take them long to document that this group, which included prominent Cold War scientists, had been attacking environmental research for decades, challenging the science of the ozone layer and acid rain, even the finding that breathing secondhand tobacco smoke was harmful. Trying to undermine climate science was simply the latest project.
  • Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway came to believe that the attacks were patterned on the strategy employed by the tobacco industry when evidence of health risks first emerged. Documents pried loose by lawyers showed that the industry had paid certain scientists to contrive dubious research, had intimidated reputable scientists, and had cherry-picked evidence to present a misleading pictur
  • The tobacco industry had used these tactics in defense of profits. But Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway wrote that the so-called merchants of doubt had adopted them for a deep ideological reason: contempt for government regulation. The insight gave climate scientists a new way of understanding the politics that had engulfed their field.
  • Following Dr. Oreskes’s cue, researchers have in recent years developed a cottage industry of counting scientific papers and polling scientists. The results typically show that about 97 percent of working climate scientists accept that global warming is happening, that humans are largely responsible, and that the situation poses long-term risks, though the severity of those risks is not entirely clear. That wave of evidence has prompted many national news organizations to stop portraying the field as split evenly between scientists who are convinced and unconvinced.
  • Dr. Oreskes’s critics have taken delight in searching out errors in her books and other writings, prompting her to post several corrections. They have generally been minor, though, like describing a pH of six as neutral, when the correct number is seven. Dr. Oreskes described that as a typographical error.
  • In the leaked emails, Dr. Singer told a group of his fellow climate change denialists that he felt that Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway had libeled him. But in an interview, when pressed for specific errors in the book that might constitute libel, he listed none. Nor did he provide such a list in response to a follow-up email request.
  • However much she might be hated by climate change denialists, Dr. Oreskes is often welcomed on college campuses these days. She usually outlines the decades of research supporting the idea that human emissions pose serious risks.
  • “One of the things that should always be asked about scientific evidence is, how old is it?” Dr. Oreskes said. “It’s like wine. If the science about climate change were only a few years old, I’d be a skeptic, too.”
  • Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway keep looking for ways to reach new audiences. Last year, they published a short work of science fiction, written as a historical essay from the distant future. “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future” argues that conservatives, by fighting sensible action to cope with the climate crisis, are essentially guaranteeing the long-term outcome they fear, a huge expansion of government.
Keiko E

How Warm Temperatures Affect Us - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...4520804576349213528554824.html

warmth perception emotion

shared by Keiko E on 01 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Could a few feet of the cold stuff really have such a fundamental effect on beliefs and behavior? Absolutely, according to recent studies on how temperature influences us at an unconscious level. Researchers affiliated with the Center for Decision Sciences at Columbia Business School measured the public's changing attitudes about climate change
  • Those who felt that the current day was warmer than usual for the time of year were more likely to believe in and worry about global warming than those who thought it was cooler outside. They were also more likely to donate the money they earned from taking the survey to a charity that did work on climate change.
  • The researchers call this bias "attribute substitution," meaning that we take a simple judgment, like noting a warm or cold day, and apply it to a larger, more complex one, like whether the planet is headed for a meltdown
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  • Physical warmth activates circuits in the brain associated with feelings of psychological warmth. The insular cortex, or insula, plays a critical role in this crossover between the outside world and our experience of it. This peach-sized region helps us to perceive whether a sensation is hot or cold, pleasurable or painful. It is activated when we crave chocolate, fall in love or get disgusted. The insula also guides us on social matters: whether to trust or feel guilty, to empathize or be embarrassed. People who meditate, according to some studies, have a thicker insula.
  • As it turns out, the insula's poetic merging of the physical and emotional helps to explain much of our unconscious behavior. People who are socially rejected—given the cold shoulder—get chills and crave warm food such as soup.
  • Warm springtime conditions are related to a better mood and expanded memory, but both take a plunge in the summer heat. Extreme temperatures make people hostile and aggressive, and violent crimes occur more often in the hotter months. Drivers honk more in heat waves. When you're hot and tired, you're more likely to interpret another person's neutral expression negatively.
  • our perception of reality still relies on sensory experience. Though we may wish for it to be otherwise, our minds cannot be separated from our bodies. And our bodies depend on the environment—what we encounter here on planet Earth
katherineharron

A cold Neptune and two super-Earths are among newly found exoplanets around nearby star... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 16 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Five exoplanets and eight planet candidates have been found around nearby stars, including a "cold Neptune" and two super-Earths that are potentially habitable, according to a new study. The two super-Earths, GJ180d and GJ229Ac, were found around small red dwarf stars that are 19 and 40 light-years away from our sun, while the cold Neptune was found around a similar star that's 29.5 light-years away.
  • Meanwhile, the other super-Earth, GJ229Ac, is the nearest temperate super-Earth in a system where the host star is also orbited by a brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs are known as failed stars that can't sustain the hydrogen fusion needed to power them
  • "GJ 433 d is the nearest, widest and coldest Neptune-like planet ever detected," said Fabo Feng, lead study author and astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science. A multitude of exoplanets, especially terrestrial planets like Earth, have been found around red dwarf stars. They're smaller and cooler than our sun, and they're the most common star in our galaxy. Exoplanets tend to orbit closer to these stars and still be within the star's habitable zone, or the perfect distance for the planet to be temperate and potentially host liquid water on their surfaces.
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  • "We eventually want to build a map of all of the planets orbiting the nearest stars to our own solar system, especially those that are potentially habitable," said Jeffrey Crane, study co-author and astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science.
Javier E

Vaccine Critics Turn Defensive Over Measles - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...rn-defensive-over-measles.html

vaccine science skepticism

shared by Javier E on 31 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • the parents at the heart of America’s anti-vaccine movement are being blamed for incubating an otherwise preventable public-health crisis.
  • officials scrambled to try to contain a wider spread of the highly contagious disease — which America declared vanquished 15 years ago, before a statistically significant number of parents started refusing to vaccinate their children.
  • The anti-vaccine movement can largely be traced to a 1998 report in a medical journal that suggested a link between vaccines and autism but was later proved fraudulent and retracted. Today, the waves of parents who shun vaccines include some who still believe in the link and some, like the Amish, who have religious objections to vaccines. Then there is a particular subculture of largely wealthy and well-educated families, many living in palmy enclaves around Los Angeles and San Francisco, who are trying to carve out “all-natural” lives for their children.
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  • “Sometimes, I feel like we’re practicing in the 1950s,” said Dr. Eric Ball, a pediatrician in southern Orange County, where some schools report that 50 to 60 percent of their kindergartners are not fully vaccinated and that 20 to 40 percent of parents have sought a personal beliefs exemption to vaccination requirements. “It’s very frustrating. It’s hard to see a kid suffer for something that’s entirely preventable.”
  • Dr. Ball said he spent many days trying to persuade parents to vaccinate their children. He tries to alleviate their concerns. He shows parents his own children’s vaccine records. But it has not worked, and lately, as worries and anger over this outbreak have spread, some families who support vaccines have said they do not want to be in the same waiting room as unvaccinated families. The clinic where Dr. Ball works has treated unvaccinated children for years, but its staff is meeting next week to discuss a ban.“Our patients are really scared,” Dr. Ball said. “Our nightmare would be for someone to show up at our door with the measles.”
  • Norm Warren, the manager of the supermarket in Kearny, Gordon’s IGA, has changed his thinking toward those who do not vaccinate their children.“Before, I thought, ‘If you think your child will become autistic, fine.’ But now they’re pushing their beliefs on everybody, and I feel differently,“ he said. “How many lives have been saved by vaccination?“
  • Tobias has endured chickenpox and whooping cough, though Ms. McMenimen said the latter seemed more like a common cold. She considered a tetanus shot after he cut himself on a wire fence but decided against it: “He has such a strong immune system.”
  • In San Geronimo, Calif., a mostly rural community of rolling hills and oak trees about 30 miles north of San Francisco, 40 percent of the students walking into Lagunitas Elementary School have not been inoculated against measles, according to the school’s figures. Twenty-five percent have not been vaccinated for polio. In all, the state says that 58 percent of Lagunitas kindergartners do not have up-to-date vaccine records.
  • “A lot of people here have personal beliefs that are faith based,” said John Carroll, the school superintendent, who sent a letter home to parents last week encouraging them to vaccinate their children. The faith, Mr. Carroll said, is not so much religious as it is a belief that “they raise their children in a natural, organic environment” and are suspicious of pharmaceutical companies and big business.
  • Some parents forgo shots altogether. Others split vaccine doses or stretch out their timeline, worried about somehow overwhelming their children’s immune system. Kelly McMenimen, a Lagunitas parent, said she “meditated on it a lot” before deciding not to vaccinate her son Tobias, 8, against even “deadly or deforming diseases.” She said she did not want “so many toxins” entering the slender body of a bright-eyed boy who loves math and geography.
  • Members of the anti-vaccine movement said the public backlash had terrified many parents. “People are now afraid they’re going to be jailed,” said Barbara Loe Fisher, the president of the National Vaccine Information Center, a clearinghouse for resisters. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing. It’s gotten so out of hand, and it’s gotten so vicious.”
  • “It’s good to explore alternatives rather than go with the panic of everyone around you,” she said. “Vaccines don’t feel right for me and my family.”
tongoscar

What scientists know so far about the effects of coronavirus on children | Jonathan Bal... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...irus-children-studies-carriers

shared by tongoscar on 24 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • These were the groups initially urged to socially distance themselves. But we’re beginning to see that coronavirus can make some younger people seriously ill.
  • Compared to other European countries, the UK was slow in closing schools – waiting until there had already been 104 deaths due to coronavirus to take action. Studies from China showed children were rarely diagnosed with novel coronavirus, and therefore presumably had little role in the spread of the disease.
  • Like many of my colleagues, I could see no obvious reason why children weren’t being infected: this was a virus spread by the respiratory route, not through a process unique to adults. If significant numbers of children were infected and suffered very minor cold-like symptoms, then their potential to spread the virus was immense.
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  • The current coronavirus is different. In more than 85% of confirmed cases symptoms can go undetected or be easily confused with the common cold of mild flu. Its biggest weapon – the thing that has, according to one study, allowed it to spread so easily – is this ability to cause mild disease in the majority of people it infects. When you can’t easily tell if someone has a cold or coronavirus, case identification and infection control are far more difficult.
  • Judging from past pandemics, school closures can be an effective way to reduce the spread of a virus – particularly when they form part of a larger programme of social distancing measures. Every school day, children congregate en masse, often in close proximity, and then return home, taking with them any new infection they’ve picked up. Intuitively, reducing this cycle should help slow the virus.
Javier E

Opinion | For the F.D.A., Cold Medicine That Doesn't Work Is Just the Tip of the Iceber... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cold-medicine-fda.html

cold medicine research science

shared by Javier E on 29 Sep 23 - No Cached
  • Congress needs to develop a way of better funding the F.D.A. review process. Perhaps a small excise tax could be levied on over-the-counter sales or fees assessed to makers of over-the-counter drugs to fund the F.D.A. review process or to fund studies into drugs that went on the market before 1962. Leaders need to suggest more options. There should also be a way to prioritize which drugs to look at first. The agency should review old drugs for which there are already many complaints about lack of effectiveness in the manner it did recently for phenylephrine.
  • Right now, Americans spend billions on drugs that contain ingredients that will not help them. That’s not just a waste of money — it could mean they are delaying appropriate treatment, which can lead to more severe illnesses. This is risky not only for health but also for trust. The American public deserves medicines that do what they are advertised to do.
Javier E

Photo of Officer Giving Boots to Barefoot Man Warms Hearts All Over Web - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-man-warms-hearts-online.html

morality exemplar police poverty

shared by Javier E on 30 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • On a cold November night in Times Square, Officer Lawrence DePrimo was working a counterterrorism post when he encountered an older, barefooted homeless man. The officer disappeared for a moment, then returned with a new pair of boots, and knelt to help the man put them on.
  • The officer, normally assigned to the Sixth Precinct in the West Village, readily recalled the encounter. “It was freezing out and you could see the blisters on the man’s feet,” he said in an interview. “I had two pairs of socks and I was still cold.” They started talking; he found out the man’s shoe size: 12.
  • As the man walked slowly down Seventh Avenue on his heels, Officer DePrimo went into a Skechers shoe store at about 9:30 p.m. “We were just kind of shocked,” said Jose Cano, 28, a manager working at the store that night. “Most of us are New Yorkers and we just kind of pass by that kind of thing. Especially in this neighborhood.”
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  • The photo was taken by Jennifer Foster, a civilian communications director for the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona. She said the moment resonated for personal reasons: She remembered as a young girl seeing her father, a 32-year veteran of the Phoenix police force, buy food for a homeless man. “He squatted down, just like this officer,” she said.
Javier E

Michael Chwe, Author, Sees Jane Austen as Game Theorist - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-austen-as-game-theorist.html

strategic thinking game theory Austen literature

shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • It’s not every day that someone stumbles upon a major new strategic thinker during family movie night. But that’s what happened to Michael Chwe, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, when he sat down with his children some eight years ago to watch “Clueless,” the 1995 romantic comedy based on Jane Austen’s “Emma.”
  • In 230 diagram-heavy pages, Mr. Chwe argues that Austen isn’t merely fodder for game-theoretical analysis, but an unacknowledged founder of the discipline itself: a kind of Empire-waisted version of the mathematician and cold war thinker John von Neumann, ruthlessly breaking down the stratagems of 18th-century social warfare.
  • Or, as Mr. Chwe puts it in the book, “Anyone interested in human behavior should read Austen because her research program has results.”
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  • Modern game theory is generally dated to 1944, with the publication of von Neumann’s “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,” which imagined human interactions as a series of moves and countermoves aimed at maximizing “payoff.” Since then the discipline has thrived, often dominating political science, economics and biology
  • But a century and a half earlier, Mr. Chwe argues, Austen was very deliberately trying to lay philosophical groundwork for a new theory of strategic action, sometimes charting territory that today’s theoreticians have themselves failed to reach.
  • Game theory, he argues, isn’t just part of “hegemonic cold war discourse,” but what the political scientist James Scott called a subversive “weapon of the weak.”
  • many situations, Mr. Chwe points out, involve parties with unequal levels of strategic thinking. Sometimes a party may simply lack ability. But sometimes a powerful party faced with a weaker one may not realize it even needs to think strategically.
  • Mr. Chwe, who identifies some 50 “strategic manipulations” in Austen
  • First among her as yet unequaled concepts is “cluelessness
  • Even some humanists who admire Mr. Chwe’s work suggest that when it comes to appreciating Austen, social scientists may be the clueless ones. Austen scholars “will not be surprised at all to see the depths of her grasp of strategic thinking and the way she anticipated a 20th-century field of inquiry,”
sissij

How to Be Excruciatingly Polite - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ow-to-be-excruciatingly-polite

new yorker psychology bias

shared by sissij on 13 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • sissij on 13 Jan 17
     
    I found this comics very interesting. I think politeness shouldn't be something that we act out and perform in the public. It should rather be something that comes right out of our heart. But it is debatable that whether we should show our politeness intentionally or naturally. Or should be train ourselves to be polite. The politeness showed in this comics looks so fake and cold and I think it go against the goal of being polite: bring warmth to the community. However, I will agree that if everyone can intentionally watch their actions, the world would be much more peaceful. I think it all depends on how we define "polite" and the kinds of society we are trying to achieve. --Sissi (1/13/2017)
sissij

Quantum Gravity Loops Back To Ancient Atomic Logic, and The Big Bang Becomes A Big Boun... - 0 views

bigthink.com/...-cutting-edge-science-problems

logic language science quantum

shared by sissij on 28 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Greeks had the “first true alphabet”: a “universal” writing system that used a few letters to encode the infinite variety of all possible utterances. Similarly, all matter is written in a "language… of atoms."
  • Mysterious “meanings” still surround 100-year-old quantum mechanics equations
  • Their meaning/function/grammar is relational and sequential and word-like. The information encoded in matching sequential text-like compositions matters (DNA—>RNA, letters—>“social cartesian” lexicon).
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  • Beyond the grammars of geometry and algebra lies a domain of not math-like but text-like compositions and meanings (of semantics beyond mathematics).
  • 17. Word and world both have grammars that don’t fit our available mathematical rules.
  • 18. Reality is relational, and not entirely objective. Subject and object aren’t separable, they’re entangled, inescapably. “Objective” is always relative to some other system/observer. 
  • sissij on 28 Feb 17
     
    I find it very interesting that the author is trying o look at the world from a different perspective than mathematics. He thinks atoms as a language that have grammar and meanings. He thinks mathematical rules cannot fully explain our world because it is too objective. He involves the idea of language to describe how the world is entangled and relational. As we learned in TOK, language is an important AOK that shows human civilization in a very complicated way. Language is flexible, emotional and relational. It gives things meaning as human likes to assign meaning and pattern to things around. The world around us are not just cold fact, we as observers give them meaning to exist. In that sense, the concept of language can better help us depict the world. --Sissi (2/27/2017)
sissij

We're More Likely to Trust Strangers Over People We Know, Study Suggests | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...y-motivates-us-to-trust-others

psychology research science brain science

shared by sissij on 11 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Social trust, the expectation that people will behave with good will and avoid harming others, is a concept that has long mystified both researchers and the general public alike.
  • evolution is about more than just rivalry, we need relationships.
  • What makes us inclined to give some people the benefit of the doubt, but occasionally cast a skeptical eye on others.
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  • Substantial research has already been conducted in the realm of social trust, however, Freitag and Bauer contend that endemic methodological shortcomings have consistently yielded inconclusive data.
  • defined personality values using psychology's "Big Five" personality traits (agreeableness, openness to experience, extraversion, conscientiousness, and neuroticism-emotional stability)
  • The study results showed that people often trust total strangers more than they trust their friends.
  • Freitag and Bauer did highlight the limitations of their research. They expressly cautioned that the role of education, our networks, and our trust in institutions, matter and cannot be underestimated.
  • sissij on 11 Apr 17
     
    I found it very interesting that social trust of human also follow the logic of revolution. "evolution is about more than just rivalry, we need relationships". As for my personal experience, sometimes I just have a natural impulse of doing some good. I feel like this impulse is completely out my control. Although many people would label me as a "kind" person, I don't think I am a kind person. I am "kind" because people seldom know me and I always keeps a distance with people. My parent obviously give a opposite comment about me. They know I am cruel and cold because we are not stranger. That's why I find keep distance with people is very convenient, such that they would never know the true side of you. --Sissi (4/11/2017)
Javier E

Our Cold Civil War Intensifies, Ctd « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...ld-civil-war-intensifies-ctd-3

polarization compromise gop democrat epistemic closure in-group exclusion politics

shared by Javier E on 25 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Taken alone, it would appear both sides share equal blame for the present political paralysis as each shifts to their ideological poles.
  • while both sides may be guilty of running to their respective corners, one is clearly more liable for putting the kibosh on negotiation deal-making.
  • one gets more liberal, the more he or she wants elected officials who compromise.
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  • only the Republicans are carrying out a primary purification to fit their no-compromise dispositions.
  • polarization per se is not the current critical crisis – it’s a refusal to compromise, to reach out from one’s ideological end of the spectrum to meet in the middle (where most of us already are), and demanding that one’s representatives refuse to negotiate to get things done and better the country.
  • A consistently liberal position is fine if you’re prepared to meet the other side halfway – and vice-versa of course. In fact, sometimes a strong position can help facilitate a real deal.
  • it’s the GOP that is the outlier, and long has been.
  • Liberals and conservatives are coming to rely on different worldviews motivated by different interpretations of what “reality” is. The Republican party has clearly decided that the only path open to them is to further embrace the resentment exhibited in rural, displaced white voters – people whose concerns have been unconscionably ignored but who have directed their anger at an entirely inappropriate target. They see Obama as the enemy but they vote for the people who are their real enemies.
  • If you think about it point by point, it becomes even less sensible. The debt? That was a result of Bush’s unfunded wars, irresponsible tax cuts and his corporatist Medicare expansion (which was itself just a subsidy for drug companies). The recession? A logical endpoint of a decades-long abandonment of responsible financial regulation. Immigration? There have been no significant changes to our immigration law since 1986, when Saint Reagan pushed through a bill that provided legal status to many who were undocumented – and the right conveniently proceeded to forget that. Ditto with gun control, since Reagan supported the Brady Bill publicly, and that clearly must be erased from the record.
  • The left, by contrast, did not throw Democrats out of office for supporting the Bush tax cuts. It did not throw Democrats out of office for opposing cap-and-trade legislation, immigration reform, or for stonewalling Obamacare until the very last minute when Scott Brown’s surprise election made inaction untenable. The left complained about these realities but never pretended that the reality was any different than what it was; we had the best we could get and that while Obama has let us down on specific issues, he has been a wholly underappreciated president – and history will very likely vindicate him
Javier E

Julian Assange on Living in a Surveillance Society - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...in-a-surveillance-society.html

Internet surveillance cybersecurity tyranny privacy technology social media

shared by Javier E on 04 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Describing the atomic bomb (which had only two months before been used to flatten Hiroshima and Nagasaki) as an “inherently tyrannical weapon,” he predicts that it will concentrate power in the hands of the “two or three monstrous super-states” that have the advanced industrial and research bases necessary to produce it. Suppose, he asks, “that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate?”
  • The likely result, he concludes, will be “an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.” Inventing the term, he predicts “a permanent state of ‘cold war,"’ a “peace that is no peace,” in which “the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.”
  • the destruction of privacy widens the existing power imbalance between the ruling factions and everyone else, leaving “the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes,” as Orwell wrote, “still more hopeless.
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  • At present even those leading the charge against the surveillance state continue to treat the issue as if it were a political scandal that can be blamed on the corrupt policies of a few bad men who must be held accountable. It is widely hoped that all our societies need to do to fix our problems is to pass a few laws.
  • The cancer is much deeper than this. We live not only in a surveillance state, but in a surveillance society. Totalitarian surveillance is not only embodied in our governments; it is embedded in our economy, in our mundane uses of technology and in our everyday interactions.
  • The very concept of the Internet — a single, global, homogenous network that enmeshes the world — is the essence of a surveillance state. The Internet was built in a surveillance-friendly way because governments and serious players in the commercial Internet wanted it that way. There were alternatives at every step of the way. They were ignored.
  • Unlike intelligence agencies, which eavesdrop on international telecommunications lines, the commercial surveillance complex lures billions of human beings with the promise of “free services.” Their business model is the industrial destruction of privacy. And yet even the more strident critics of NSA surveillance do not appear to be calling for an end to Google and Facebook
  • At their core, companies like Google and Facebook are in the same business as the U.S. government’s National Security Agency. They collect a vast amount of information about people, store it, integrate it and use it to predict individual and group behavior, which they then sell to advertisers and others. This similarity made them natural partners for the NSA
  • there is an undeniable “tyrannical” side to the Internet. But the Internet is too complex to be unequivocally categorized as a “tyrannical” or a “democratic” phenomenon.
  • It is possible for more people to communicate and trade with others in more places in a single instant than it ever has been in history. The same developments that make our civilization easier to surveil make it harder to predict. They have made it easier for the larger part of humanity to educate itself, to race to consensus, and to compete with entrenched power groups.
  • If there is a modern analogue to Orwell’s “simple” and “democratic weapon,” which “gives claws to the weak” it is cryptography, the basis for the mathematics behind Bitcoin and the best secure communications programs. It is cheap to produce: cryptographic software can be written on a home computer. It is even cheaper to spread: software can be copied in a way that physical objects cannot. But it is also insuperable — the mathematics at the heart of modern cryptography are sound, and can withstand the might of a superpower. The same technologies that allowed the Allies to encrypt their radio communications against Axis intercepts can now be downloaded over a dial-up Internet connection and deployed with a cheap laptop.
  • It is too early to say whether the “democratizing” or the “tyrannical” side of the Internet will eventually win out. But acknowledging them — and perceiving them as the field of struggle — is the first step toward acting effectively
  • Humanity cannot now reject the Internet, but clearly we cannot surrender it either. Instead, we have to fight for it. Just as the dawn of atomic weapons inaugurated the Cold War, the manifold logic of the Internet is the key to understanding the approaching war for the intellectual center of our civilization
Javier E

Enter the Age of the Outsiders - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-the-age-of-the-outsiders.html

reason anarchy institutions decentralization fringe spiritual culture meaning mission realism barbarism

shared by Javier E on 20 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • In the 1990s, the central political institutions radiated confidence, derived from an assumed vision of the post-Cold War world. History would be a slow march toward democratic capitalism. Nations would be bound in peaceful associations like the European Union. The United States would oversee a basic international order.
  • This vision was materialistic and individualistic. Nations should pursue economic growth and a decent distribution of wealth. If you give individuals access to education and opportunity, they will pursue affluence and personal happiness. They will grow more temperate and “reasonable.”
  • The uncertain Republican establishment cannot govern its own marginal members, while those on the edge burn with conviction. Jeb Bush looks wan but Donald Trump radiates confidence.
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  • the deeper problem was spiritual. Many people around the world rejected democratic capitalism’s vision of a secular life built around materialism and individual happiness. They sought more intense forms of meaning. Some of them sought meaning in the fanaticisms of sect, tribe, nation, or some stronger and more brutal ideology
  • In case after case, “reasonableness” has been trampled by behavior and creed that is stronger, darker and less temperate.
  • Since 2000, this vision of the post-Cold War world has received blow after blow. Some of these blows were self-inflicted. Democracy, especially in the United States, has grown dysfunctional. Mass stupidity and greed led to a financial collapse and deprived capitalism of its moral swagger.
  • The Democratic establishment no longer determines party positions; it is pulled along by formerly marginal players like Bernie Sanders.
  • Republicans blame Obama for hesitant and halting policies, but it’s not clear the foreign policy and defense apparatus believes anymore in its own abilities to establish order, or that the American public has any confidence in U.S. effectiveness as a global actor.
  • the primary problem is mental and spiritual. Some leader has to be able to digest the lessons of the last 15 years and offer a revised charismatic and persuasive sense of America’s historic mission.
  • This mission, both nationalist and universal, would be less individualistic than the gospel of the 1990s, and more realistic about depravity and the way barbarism can spread. It would offer a goal more profound than material comfort.
Javier E

Neither Hot Nor Cold on Climate - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...r-hot-nor-cold-on-climate.html

climate change GOP skepticism science bias

shared by Javier E on 05 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • t this is where the second objection to lukewarmism comes in
  • in actual right-wing politics no serious assessment of the science and the risks is taking place to begin with. Instead there’s just a mix of business-class and blue-collar self-interest and a trollish, “If liberals are for it, we’re against it” anti-intellectualism. So while lukewarmers may fancy ourselves serious interlocutors for liberals, we’re actually just running interference on behalf of know-nothing and do-nothingism, attacking flawed policies on behalf of a Republican Party that will never, ever advance any policies of its own.
  • This critique is … not necessarily wrong. A Republican Party that was really shaped by lukewarmism would probably still oppose the Paris deal and shrink from sweeping carbon taxes. But it would be actively debating and budgeting for the two arenas — innovation and mitigation — where the smartest skeptics of regulatory solutions tend to place their faith.
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  • This is not what the G.O.P. seems inclined to do. Instead it lets lukewarmers poke holes in liberal proposals for climate insurance policies, and then sits back satisfied that no insurance policy, no extra effort, is necessary at all.
  • the anti-Paris sentiments that moved Trump weren’t entirely reality-based either. And a clear Republican plan for how to “prepare for and adapt to whatever climate change brings” does not actually exist.
  • In its absence, lukewarmism is a critique without an affirmative agenda, a theory of the case without a party that’s prepared to ever act on it.
  • I also want to concede two problems with this approach. The first is that no less than alarmism, lukewarmism can be vulnerable to cherry-picking and selection bias
  • when you’re dealing with long-term trends, there’s a lot of evidence to choose from
  • This means that every lukewarmer, including especially those in positions of political authority, should be pressed to identify trends that would push them toward greater alarmism and a sharper focus on the issue.
  • the closer the real trend gets to the worst-case projections, the more my lukewarmism will look Pollyannish and require substantial reassessment.
cvanderloo

How British people weathered exceptionally cold winters - 0 views

theconversation.com/eptionally-cold-winters-151932

winter England Britain science history

shared by cvanderloo on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • side from depriving schoolchildren of the sheer fun of a snow day, climate change could lead the popular imaginary of British winters into uncharted territory.
  • By studying weather observations and stories carefully recorded in diaries, letters and newspapers, it’s possible to trace winter’s icy fingerprints on the human drama.
  • During the winter of 1794-1795, temperatures struggled to climb above freezing, hovering at a daily average of 0.5°C
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  • Tensions did not subside with the thaw: scarcity and high food prices contributed to bread riots across the country in the following spring. “Times are now alarming”, reported the Clipston Paris Register on May 1 1795.
  • . The Victoria Relief Fund was established and soup kitchens were set up in various parishes, foreshadowing social reforms that would confront poverty in subsequent decades.
  • But the winter of 1939-1940 was one of the coldest on record, and it arrived as the country anxiously contemplated another war in Europe.
  • As Britain’s winters become progressively milder, people may never see the like of 1940 again. But these descriptive accounts and first-hand testimonials unveil the power of climate change over human lifetimes – and hint at the role weather will continue to play in Britain’s future.
knudsenlu

A Tantalizing Signal From the Early Universe - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...554483

universe big bang research science

shared by knudsenlu on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Near the beginning, not long after the Big Bang, the universe was a cold and dark place swirling with invisible gas, mostly hydrogen and helium. Over millions of years, gravity pulled some of this primordial gas into pockets. The pockets eventually became so dense they collapsed under their own weight and ignited, flooding the darkness with ultraviolet radiation. These were the very first stars in the universe, flashing into existence like popcorn kernels unfurling in the hot oil of an empty pan.
  • Everything flowed from this cosmic dawn. The first stars illuminated the universe, collapsed into the black holes that keep galaxies together, and produced the heavy elements that would make planets and moons and the human beings that evolved to gaze upon it all.
  • This epoch in our cosmic history has long fascinated scientists. They hoped that someday, using technology that was calibrated just right, they could detect faint signals from that moment. Now, they think they’ve done it.
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  • Astronomers said Wednesday they have found, for the first time, evidence of the earliest stars.
  • The nature of this signal suggests a new estimate for when the first stars emerged: about 180 million years after the Big Bang, slightly earlier than many scientists expected, but still within the expectations of theoretical models.
  • The nature of the radio waves Bowman and his colleagues detected mostly matches theoretical predictions, but not everything lines up. When they tuned their instrument to listen to the frequency for hydrogen gas that models predicted, they didn’t hear anything. When they decided to search in a lower range, they got it. But the signal they found was stronger than expected. That meant that the hydrogen gas in the early universe was much much colder—perhaps nearly twice as cold—than previously estimated.
  • Bowman says other teams around the world have been working to build and design instruments to detect this signal from the early universe, and he expects they should be able to confirm the results in the coming months.
Javier E

The Adams Principle ❧ Current Affairs - 0 views

www.currentaffairs.org/...the-adams-principle

comic nihilism analysis business bureaucracy absurd corporation humor

shared by Javier E on 12 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • This type of glib quasi-logic works really well in comedy, especially in a format where space is restricted, and where the quick, disposable nature of the strip limits your ability to draw humor from character and plot. You take an idea, find a way to subvert or deconstruct it, and you get an absurd result.
  • while the idea of a “cubicle job” can seem to younger readers like relative bliss, they were (and are) still an emblem of boredom and absurdity, a sign that life was being slowly colonized by gray shapes and Powerpoint slides. Throughout his classic-era work, Adams hits on the feeling that the world has been made unnatural, unconducive to life; materially adequate, but spiritually exhausting. 
  • He makes constant use of something I’m going to call, for want of a better term, the sophoid: something which has the outer semblance of wisdom, but none of the substance; something that sounds weighty if you say it confidently enough, yet can be easily thrown away as “just a thought” if it won’t hold up to scrutiny.
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  • Adams did not just stick to comics: he is the author of over a dozen books (not counting the comic compendiums), which advise and analyze not only on surviving the office but also on daily life, future technology trends, romance, self-help strategy, and more. 
  • In his earlier books, you can feel the weight of the 1990s pressing down on his work, flattening and numbing its potency; this was the period that social scientist Francis Fukuyama dubbed “the end of history”, when the Cold War had ended, the West had won, 9/11 was just two numbers, and there were no grand missions left, no worlds left to conquer. While for millions of people, both in the United States and abroad, life was still chaotic and miserable, a lot of people found themselves living lives that were under no great immediate threat: without bombs or fascism or the threat of eviction to worry about, there was nothing left to do but to go to the office and enjoy fast-casual dining and Big Gulps, just as the Founding Fathers envisioned.
  • This dull but steady life produced a sense of slow-burn anxiety prominent in much of the pop culture of the time, as can be seen in movies such as Office Space, Fight Club and The Matrix, movies which cooed to their audience: there’s got to be more to life than this, right?
  • In Dilbert the Pointy-haired Boss uses this type of thinking to evil ends, in the tradition of Catch-22 and other satires of systemic brutality, but the relatable characters use it to their advantage too—by using intellectual sleight of hand with the boss to justify doing less work, or by finding clever ways to look busy when they’re not, or to avoid people who are unpleasant to be around.
  • for someone who satirizes business bullshit, Adams is a person who seems to have bought into much of it wholeheartedly; when he explains his approach to life he tends to speak in LinkedIn truisms, expounding on his “skill stacks” and “maximizing [his] personal energy”. (You can read more about this in his career advice book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big;
  • Following his non-Dilbert career more carefully, you can see that at every stage of his career, he’s actually quite heavily invested in the bullshit he makes fun of every day, or at least some aspects of it: he possesses an MBA from UC Berkeley, and has launched or otherwise been involved in a significant number of business ventures, most amusingly a health food wrap called the “Dilberito”.
  • In the past few years, Adams has gained some notoriety as a Trump supporter; having slowly moved from “vaguely all-over-the-place centrist who has some odd thoughts and thinks some aspects of Trump are impressive” to full-on MAGA guy, even writing a book called Win Bigly praising Trump’s abilities as a “master persuader”.
  • this is a guy who hates drab corporatespeak but loves the ideology behind it, a guy who describes the vast powerlessness of life but believes you can change it by writing some words on a napkin. That blend of rebellion against the symptoms of post-Cold War society and sworn allegiance to its machinations couldn’t lead anywhere else but to Trump, a man who rails against ‘elites’ while allowing them to run the country into the ground.
  • Beware: as I’m pretty sure Nietzsche said, when you gaze into Dilbert, eventually Dilbert gazes back into you.
  • I just think Adams is a guy who spent so long in the world of slick aphorisms and comic-strip logic that it eventually ate into his brain, became his entire manner of thinking
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