The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces
The Weird Times: Issue 62, July 18 2021 (V2 #10)
Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry. —Jack Kerouac
The dividing line will not be Masons and Dixons, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other. —Ulysses S. Grant
July 18 birth dates: Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Hunter S. Thompson, Nathalie Sarraute, Jessamyn West, Clifford Odets, Tristan Corbiere.
Danger Ahead, Danger All Around
Iconic Yellowstone Park Faces Startling Climate Threats: A new report details global warming’s effect on the national park and its surroundings, including everything from its forests to the Old Faithful geyser, Adam Popescu, Wired, 7/10/21
The climate assessment says that temperatures in the park are now as high as or higher than in any period in the last 20,000 years—and are very likely the warmest in the past 800,000 years. Since 1950, Yellowstone has experienced an average temperature increase of 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit, with the most pronounced warming taking place at elevations above 5,000 feet.
Today, the report says, Yellowstone’s spring thaw starts several weeks sooner, and peak annual stream runoff is eight days earlier than in 1950. The region’s agricultural growing season is nearly two weeks longer than it was 70 years ago. Since 1950, snowfall has declined in the Greater Yellowstone Area in January and March by 53 percent and 43 percent respectively, and snowfall in September has virtually disappeared, dropping by 96 percent. Annual snowfall has declined by nearly 2 feet since 1950.
Wildfire smoke may be even more toxic than previously thought: During a wildfire, hospital admissions for respiratory illnesses in Southern California increase, according to a recent study,YCC Team, Yale Climate Connections, 7/14/21
Wildfires are dangerous. And some of the threats come not from the flames themselves but from inhaling the tiny toxic particles in wildfire smoke.
“They are small enough that they can penetrate deep into the respiratory system, so they can get to the lungs, and then from there to the bloodstream, and affect other organs,” says Rosana Aguilera, a post-doctoral scholar at the University of California, San Diego.
1 billion sea creatures cooked to death in Pacific Northwest: Shoreline temperatures have rocketed above 120 degrees Fahrenheit (49 degrees Celsius), Ben Turner, LiveScience, 7/13/21
The shores of Kitsilano Beach in Vancouver, Canada, have been littered with tens of thousands of cooked and putrefying marine animals — including clams, mussels, sea stars and snails — after temperatures across British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest smashed records in late June, reaching a recorded high of 121.3 degrees Fahrenheit (49.6 degrees Celsius) roughly 96 miles (155 kilometers) northeast of Vancouver in the village of Lytton, British Columbia on June 29, according to Canada’s weather service, Environment Canada.
Climate change also has a mental health toll: Mental health effects for those dealing with climate change are pronounced,Cristina Coruja, ABC News, 7/11/21
"Climate change can affect mental health by just increasing people's stress and worry about the issue, the more they hear about it," said Dr. Susan Clayton, a professor in psychology and environmental studies in The College of Wooster, in Ohio.
Our climate change turning point is right here, right now: People are dying. Aquatic animals are baking in their shells. Fruit is being cooked on the tree. It’s time to act, Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian, 7/11/21
Summarizing the leaked contents of a forthcoming IPCC report, the Agence France-Presse reports: “Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions […] Species extinction, more widespread disease, unliveable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas – these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30. The choices societies make now will determine whether our species thrives or simply survives as the 21st century unfolds…”
The phrase “the choices societies make” is a clear demand for a turning point, a turning away from fossil fuel and toward protection of the ecosystems that protect us.
Planes Sampling Air Above the Amazon Find the Rainforest is Releasing More Carbon than it Stores: The study, which found greater depletion of carbon storage in the heavily deforested eastern Amazon, confirmed previous research that used satellites or hands-on measuring techniques, Georgina Gustin, Inside Climate News, 7/14/21
Over the last several years researchers have said that the Amazon is on the verge of transforming from a crucial storehouse for heat-trapping gasses to a source of them, a dangerous shift that could destabilize the atmosphere of the planet.
Now, after years of painstaking and inventive research, they have definitively measured that shift.
Bans on critical race theory could have a chilling effect on how educators teach about racism, Nicholas Ensley Mitchell, The Conversation, 7/13/21
Now, such a teacher must figure out how to tell students what the Founding Fathers really meant when they wrote “We the people” in the U.S. Constitution, without saying the Founding Fathers were racist for excluding Black people from the meaning of that phrase.
Teachers may be torn between whether they should follow these new laws and policies or follow their professional code of ethics, which says teachers “shall not deliberately suppress or distort subject matter relevant to the student’s progress.”
The Biggest Threat to Democracy Is the GOP Stealing the Next Election: Unless and until the Republican Party recommits itself to playing by democratic rules of the game, American democracy will remain at risk, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, The Atlantic, 7/9/21
The greatest threat to American democracy today is not a repeat of January 6, but the possibility of a stolen presidential election. Contemporary democracies that die meet their end at the ballot box, through measures that are nominally constitutional. The looming danger is not that the mob will return; it’s that mainstream Republicans will “legally” overturn an election.
As someone who spent 15 years in a cult, I found, in Amanda Montell’s new book Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, a way to understand something about cults that all my soul-crushing time there didn’t give me. I’ve long known that cults are a way of controlling people; Amanda Montell is interested in the larger topic of cultish behavior and the ways that those communities ask us to buy into a system—her book is about how cultish influence is all around us, in the form of language, and none of us are completely immune to it.
There’s a new tactic for exposing you to radical content online: the ‘slow red-pill:’ The far right is trying to funnel people on Instagram to extreme content with a few simple tricks. Here’s how they do it, Joshua Citarella, The Guardian, 7/15/21
A red-pill – the name is taken from the famous scene in the Matrix – is something that opens your eyes to a hidden political “truth”. Once you’ve been red-pilled, you want other people to take the red-pill, too. Today, an essential part of online radicalization is the desire to spread this new knowledge to a larger audience.
American Airlines, other companies resume donations to Republicans who objected to election results: The flow of money is a sign that corporate America’s promises were temporary, especially in light of razor-thin Democratic majorities, Isaac Stanley-Becker, Washington Post, 7/15/21
That method of spending, said Bruce Freed, president of the nonprofit Center for Political Accountability, is among the “indications that these companies are going back to business as usual.”
“They were responding to the moment without recognizing that there are real long-term consequences, including consumer anger, which means people change their buying,” Freed said.
Some companies have been responsive to that anger. Facing an outcry last week over its support for Republican objectors, Toyota changed course, saying it would stop donating to lawmakers who contested the election results.
(Ed. Note: boycotts and letter writing do work….let’s use them to defend democracy.)
Birdland
Why Local Legends about Birds Matter: The stories of enigmatic birds told in indigenous folklore aren't just fascinating tales, they may be a way to preserve languages and cultures at risk of extinction, Jim Robbins, BBC, 7/14/21
In the farthest reach of the southern cone of South America, along the wind-and-rain-whipped coast of Tierra Del Fuego, the Yaghan people have a story about the Magellanic woodpecker, a big showy bird they call lana.
A boy and his sister were picking red berries away from their village. Attracted to each other, they finally gave in to their desires.
The moment they did they were turned into a male and female woodpecker.
That story was told by Christina Calderon, a 94-year-old woman who is one of 1,600 Yaghan people, but is also the last person for whom Yaghan is their first language.
Smell proves powerful sense for birds, Elizabeth Pennisi, Science, 7/9/21
Almost 200 years ago, the renowned U.S. naturalist John James Audubon hid a decaying pig carcass under a pile of brush to test vultures' sense of smell. When the birds overlooked the pig—while one flocked to a nearly odorless stuffed deer skin— he took it as proof that they rely on vision, not smell, to find their food. His experiment cemented a commonly held idea. Despite later evidence that vultures and a few specialized avian hunters use odors after all, the dogma that most birds aren't attuned to smell endured. Now, that dogma is being eroded by new findings about birds' behavior and their molecular hardware. One study showed that storks home in on the smell of freshly mown grass; another documented scores of functional olfactory receptors, in multiple bird species. Olfaction in birds is more widespread than most people have realized.
In Florida, Bipartisan Bill Provides For Wildlife Corridors, Gustave Axelson, All About Birds, 6/25/21
“We know conserving connectivity is important for nature from the scale of a small pollinating bug to a bird, to a bear. The emerging, broader vision of the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act is that society also depends on protecting connectivity to support the essential green infrastructure upon which the future of all Floridians depends.”
Ready Set Future
In this summer of covid freedom, disease experts warn: ‘The world needs a reality check,’ Joel Achenbach, Wall Street Journal, 7/17/21
Maria Van Kerkhove, a World Health Organization epidemiologist, was in her Geneva office last weekend preparing for a keynote address when a simple phrase came to mind. She had been pondering the dismaying rise in coronavirus infections globally during the previous three weeks, a reversal of promising trends in late spring. The surge came as people across much of the Northern Hemisphere were moving around again in a suddenly freewheeling summer — as if the pandemic were over.
She wrote in her notebook: “The world needs a reality check.”
The Novel Material That’s Shrinking Phone Chargers, Powering Up Electric Cars, and Making 5G Possible: Gallium, once an industrial-waste product, is transforming our increasingly electrified world, Christopher Mims, Wall Street Journal, 7/17/21
A byproduct of extracting aluminum from rock, gallium has such a low melting temperature that it turns into a runny, silvery-white liquid when you hold it in your hand. On its own, it isn’t terribly useful. Combine it with nitrogen, to make gallium nitride, and it becomes a hard crystal with valuable properties. It shows up in laser sensors used in many self-driving cars, antennas that enable today’s fast cellular wireless networks, and, increasingly, in electronics critical to making renewable-energy harvesting more efficient.
With 319 Tb/s, Japan Absolutely Smashes World Record For Data Transmission Speed, Michelle Starr, Science Alert, 7/16/21
New technology developed by Japanese engineers has walloped the heck out of the previous data transmission speed record.
Along an optical cable more than 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) long, the team achieved a data transmission speed of 319 terabits per second (Tb/s).
This not only smashes the previous record of an already jaw-dropping 178 Tb/s, the technology is compatible with existing infrastructure, which means that it could be upgraded relatively easily.
World's first 3D-printed steel bridge opens in Amsterdam, Matthew Sparkes, New Scientist, 7/15/21
The first ever 3D-printed steel bridge has opened in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. It was created by robotic arms using welding torches to deposit the structure of the bridge layer by layer, and is made of 4500 kilograms of stainless steel.
The 12-metre-long MX3D Bridge was built by four commercially available industrial robots and took six months to print. The structure was transported to its location over the Oudezijds Achterburgwal canal in central Amsterdam last week and is now open to pedestrians and cyclists.
Pete Myers: Toward deep structural reform of pesticides: A new book sheds light on the human and environmental impacts from widely used herbicides, offering a potential antidote to the industry playbook downplaying their harm, Pete Myers, Environmental Health News, 7/16/21
It's about time a comprehensive, scholarly book like Herbicides: Chemistry, Efficacy, Toxicology and Environmental Impacts is being published, written by trusted scientific experts without problematic conflicts of interest and taking an unvarnished, deep look at herbicides. I wish it had been available decades ago.
Why is this book needed? Scientists working in this field need to understand all dimensions of the playing field. One dimension is the science. But researchers also need to be aware of the corruption that has plagued herbicide science. They need to develop a nose for what's real and what's not. They need to be prepared to detect and counteract "manufactured doubt," the phenomenon that the chemical and herbicide industries employ to undermine scientific evidence of harm. This book is not manufactured doubt. Instead, it's distilled reality.
This tiny, $6,800 car runs on solar power: The two-seater car can go 12 miles on a charge, with a top speed of 28 mph—perfect for short city errands, Adele Peters, Wired, 7/15/21
The Squad, a new urban car from an Amsterdam-based startup, is barely bigger than a bicycle: Parked sideways, up to four of the vehicles can fit in a standard parking spot. The electric two-seater’s tiny size is one reason that it doesn’t use much energy—and in a typical day of city driving, it can run entirely on power from a solar panel on its own roof. A swappable battery provides extra power when needed.
The car is slated to begin production in late 2022, and will be priced at around $6,800.
This ‘super antibody’ for COVID fights off multiple coronaviruses: A newly identified immune molecule raises hopes for a vaccine against a range of viruses related to SARS-CoV-2, Diana Kwon, Nature, 7/14/21
Scientists have uncovered an antibody that can fight off not only a wide range of SARS-CoV-2 variants, but also closely related coronaviruses. The discovery could aid the quest to develop broad-ranging treatments and vaccines.
SMART researchers develop a method for rapid, accurate virus detection: Four times faster than conventional PCR methods, new RADICA approach is highly specific, sensitive, and resistant to inhibitors, Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, MIT News, 7/7/21
Researchers from Critical Analytics for Manufacturing Personalized-Medicine (CAMP), an interdisciplinary research group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, have developed a new method for rapid and accurate detection of viral nucleic acids — a breakthrough that can be easily adapted to detect different DNA/RNA targets in viruses like the coronavirus.
Cowessess unveils new solar project, aiming to become greenest First Nation in Canada: Project helps preserve First Nation's culture and leaves legacy for its children, chief says, Mickey Djuric, CBC News, 7/14/21
The solar arrays are part of the Community Building Solar Project, which has been years in the making and was mostly funded by the federal government. It's also a step toward the Cowessess's goal of becoming the greenest First Nation in Canada.
Some
Proposed
Additions
To The
Everyday
A ribbon
of river
running
through
the
supermarket
A celestial
map
at the
bus stop
The corpse
of war
itself
buried
without
mourners
—Beau Beausoleil
Miscellania
“Like a lot of people, I fundamentally believed that we were on a gradual ascent towards solving the problems that we have had all along, having to do with inclusion and opportunity and justice. I thought that things were getting better. Evidently, I was wrong. We can’t pretend any more than we don’t have the same divisions in this country that we’ve had since the civil war.” – Jackson Browne (new album: Downhill from Everywhere)
On Tokens and Tokenism: From George Washington to Jill Biden, Black literature has long been plagued by ignorant white patrons, who arbitrarily anoint a few writers as symbols of the Black experience, Ishmael Reed, Tablet Magazine, 7/7/21
Tokens are the bane of Black literature, and for that matter, Latinx, Native American, and Asian American literature. They are often selected arbitrarily as symbols by those who know little about Black literary traditions or literature in general, and their work overshadows the production of writers who might write as well or better.
Trey Mancini’s Remarkable Return: The Orioles first baseman and Home Run Derby invitee is the most magical story of the 2021 season -- just by being part of it at all, Kevin Van Valkenberg, ESPN, 7/12/21
"A lot of people can be a little wary of talking about colon cancer," Mancini says. "Some people still see it as being like a taboo. I don't at all. I want to raise awareness. It's a very common cancer, the No. 3 most fatal cancer. I've got a platform and I feel like I've got a job to do, which is to educate everybody."
"We don't feel sorry he had cancer," Perlman says. "He plays professional baseball and without it, he might've not caught cancer because most males do not get physicals once a year or every six months and test their iron and have the best doctors at hand. So now, it's our duty to make sure we raise awareness that people can get colonoscopies, they can get regular blood work."
A bee: in its dying moments its mouth opens and closes, kissing the ground: Its favourite thing to do is to crawl inside a flower, where petals turn light pink, yellow or red, Helen Sullivan, The Guardian, 7/15/21
A bee also has a heart, but it cannot have a heart attack. It makes bee “bread” – fermented pollen – and honey, and to complete its breakfast, it sometimes drinks nectar from caffeinated plants. When it does this, its memory improves. The bee’s favourite thing to do is to crawl inside a flower, where petals turn the light pink or yellow or red.
Their wings are clear, their feelers ever-waving. Their back legs, when dressed in fluffy pollen trousers: heartbreaking.
A conversation with environmentalist drag queen Pattie Gonia, Sarak Kennedy, Yale Climate Connections, 7/16/21
Pattie Gonia is an environmentalist drag queen on a mission to build a more inclusive climate movement. Pattie has more than 300,000 followers on Instagram, where she shares photos and videos of herself hiking and camping, both in and out of drag. She’s posed next to an oil rig to push for fossil fuel divestment and created a gown made of actual trash to raise awareness about plastic pollution.
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”—Hunter S. Thompson
I may be hungry but I sure ain’t weird —Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet)
Leaves obliterate
my heart,
we touch each other
far apart…
Let us count
into
the Darkness
—Jonathan Williams, from "Symphony No. 3, In D Minor"
I do not care what Barack Obama is reading this summer. I do care to find out from any of you who wish to tell me, what books do you recommend?
Keep in touch. Be careful. It might soon be time for us to wear masks again. Take care all!