Links for May

Sun, Apr 28, 2019

Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.

–Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

• Who fucked up the most in human history? Dr. Thomas Midgley. “He was an ambitious scientist who had the idea to put lead in fuel before we knew how bad it was. Then he created CFCs for refrigerators that we later learned are responsible for eating through the ozone layer. Then, when he was old an bed ridden, he designed a contraption to make walking and standing etc easier. His contraption failed and killed him.“
• Inkjet printers continue to be a strong candidate for Worst Technology Ever: the “ink evaporates out of the cartridge if you don’t use it. In about a year a full cartridge will be empty just from evaporation.”
• “‘Uncleftish Beholding” (1989)’ is a short text written by Poul Anderson. It is written using almost exclusively words of Germanic origin (Anglish), and was intended to illustrate what the English language might look like if it had not received its considerable number of loanwords from other languages, particularly Latin, Greek and French.” Opening paragraph: “For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.”

Sex

• Tired of tfw no gf? Try robbing a bank. “Convicted criminal offenders had more children than individuals never convicted of a criminal offense. Criminal offenders also had more reproductive partners, were less often married, more likely to get remarried if ever married, and had more often contracted a sexually transmitted disease than non-offenders. Importantly, the increased reproductive success of criminals was explained by a fertility increase from having children with several different partners” Bonus: “You’ve Just Been Added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, How Long Will You Survive?”
• Related: “the prevalence of depression and anxiety symptoms among economics Ph.D. students is comparable to the prevalence found in incarcerated populations.”
• “In 2011 Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz won the Ig Nobel Prize for their research on the male jewel beetle’s proclivity to attempt copulation with littered Australian beer stubbies. They found that these discarded bottles greatly attracted the male jewel beetle because their size, coloring, and dimpled design were similar to the male jewel beetle’s female counterpart. In fact, according to Gwynne, the male beetle found the beer bottle so attractive that they ignored the females and their ‘attempts to copulate with stubby beer bottles continue until they are killed by the hot desert sun or by foraging ants.‘”

Politics

• Contrary many popular memes about cops, “Even in 2015, at the height of Black Lives Matter protests, Gallup noted that 38% of blacks wanted a larger police presence in their area, compared to just 18% of whites” and “confidence in the police as an institution has hardly changed in 25 years.“
• Related: “We find that police departments in cities that collect a greater share of their revenue from fees solve violent and property crimes at significantly lower rates.“
• Urbanization makes nations wealthy and people miserable: “For the most part, the 60 cities in the U.S. with populations larger than 300,000 are the least happy cities in the country”–if they don’t drive you mad first, anyway. Image: Ted Kacyinzski smugly whispering “I told you so” from the comfort of ADX Florence.
• Related: “Guns Don’t Kill People, School Psychologists Do” Medium has banned the author, Kantbot, over this piece and scrubbed the article from their platform. One Redditor’s take, “Part of what makes the dissident right compelling to me is that the immune response of the system they question – even mildly – isn’t a mild fever and sniffles, but full on vomiting and a hacking cough.” Given that Delueze and Guattari, actual Marxists, were making these same arguments in the 70s, perhaps right really is the new left.
• First, we elected reality TV star Donald Trump as President of the United States. Now, Ukraine has elected actor Volodymyr Zelensky as President of Ukraine. Among his credentials: playing the President of Ukraine on television. Baudillard’s hyperreality, “an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies” continues to be prescient. (via SSC)
• “the American Society of Interior Designers has waged a 30-year campaign in state legislatures seeking greater regulation of its industry, including occupational licensure. The cornerstone of its argument is the alleged threat to public health and safety from unlicensed interior design”
• “We find that post office density is a strong, consistent, and negative predictor of dueling behavior.“
• “Deep roots: which European ethnicity settled each area of the United States centuries ago determines how much inequality it has today, with the level of inequality in the American region corresponding to the level in the European home country. Appears to be a cultural rather than purely genetic effect since it holds for black people in each area as well. See the study and the article describing it.”(via SSC)
• “the average rent in NYC went from 15% of average income in 1950 to 65% today.” (via SSC)
• “Almost no grants go to younger scientists. When it’s scientists under age 40 that make {…} of the most big discoveries, 2% of NIH grants go to scientists under age 40.“

Drugs

• I’ve written before about the benefits of creatine, the popular bodybuilding supplement, like enhancing vegetarian IQ. If that wasn’t enough, now I’ve learned supplementing the stuff likely makes you money: “those with higher levels of creatine (proxied by urine creatinine) prior the labour market entry spend more time in the labour market in the subsequent two decades and earn more.” (via gwern) This is what I take.
• Speaking of chemical assistance, got writer’s block? Try cocaine. It worked for Freud, anyway: “For a young Freud, cocaine was a miracle drug. Before developing psychoanalysis and the theories for which he is now famous – the unconscious mind, psychosexual development and the Oedipus complex, the interpretation of dreams – Freud was a coke addict. As his racy love letters to his fiancée Martha Bernays prove, he used cocaine for pleasure and relief, to relax and to concentrate; he took it at glamorous parties in Paris; he used it to treat his illnesses and nasal irritations; he prescribed it to his patients, friends, and Martha herself. He wrote extensively on it, and he even attempted to use it as a springboard to medical fame.“
• “I honestly thought this study had been done a long time ago, but I guess it hadn’t been, and now it is: e-cigarettes are definitely more helpful for smoking cessation than normal nicotine replacement.” (via SSC)
• “For a subset of 22 countries with more full data, the number of life-years gained in 2013 from drugs launched after 1981 was 148.7 million.“

Brains

• More “I” pronouns among the depressed.
• “Consciously focusing on the running movement moves runners away from their optimised running pattern and leads to detriments in economy. “
• “This blog on brain size (warning: some racist language elsewhere on the blog) has a weird obsession with the size of Oprah’s head, and claims she is probably the largest-headed woman in the world.” (via SSC)
• “Surprisingly, low cognitive demand tasks yielded a stronger incubation effect than did rest during an incubation period when solving linguistic insight problems.”