The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete

The scientific paper—the actual form of it—was one of the enabling inventions of modernity. Before it was developed in the 1600s, results were communicated privately in letters, ephemerally in lectures, or all at once in books. There was no public forum for incremental advances. By making room for reports of single experiments or minor technical advances, journals made the chaos of science accretive. Scientists from that point forward became like the social insects: They made their progress steadily, as a buzzing mass.

The earliest papers were in some ways more readable than papers are today. They were less specialized, more direct, shorter, and far less formal. Calculus had only just been invented. Entire data sets could fit in a table on a single page. What little “computation” contributed to the results was done by hand and could be verified in the same way.

The more sophisticated science becomes, the harder it is to communicate results. Papers today are longer than ever and full of jargon and symbols. They depend on chains of computer programs that generate data, and clean up data, and plot data, and run statistical models on data. These programs tend to be both so sloppily written and so central to the results that it’s contributed to a replication crisis, or put another way, a failure of the paper to perform its most basic task: to report what you’ve actually discovered, clearly enough that someone else can discover it for themselves.

Perhaps the paper itself is to blame. Scientific methods evolve now at the speed of software; the skill most in demand among physicists, biologists, chemists, geologists, even anthropologists and research psychologists, is facility with programming languages and “data science” packages. And yet the basic means of communicating scientific results hasn’t changed for 400 years. Papers may be posted online, but they’re still text and pictures on a page.

What would you get if you designed the scientific paper from scratch today? A little while ago I spoke to Bret Victor, a researcher who worked at Apple on early user-interface prototypes for the iPad and now runs his own lab in Oakland, California, that studies the future of computing. Victor has long been convinced that scientists haven’t yet taken full advantage of the computer. “It’s not that different than looking at the printing press, and the evolution of the book,” he said. After Gutenberg, the printing press was mostly used to mimic the calligraphy in bibles. It took nearly 100 years of technical and conceptual improvements to invent the modern book. “There was this entire period where they had the new technology of printing, but they were just using it to emulate the old media.”

Victor gestured at what might be possible when he redesigned a journal article by Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz, “Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks.” He chose it both because it’s one of the most highly cited papers in all of science and because it’s a model of clear exposition. (Strogatz is best known for writing the beloved “Elements of Math” column for The New York Times.)

The Watts-Strogatz paper described its key findings the way most papers do, with text, pictures, and mathematical symbols. And like most papers, these findings were still hard to swallow, despite the lucid prose. The hardest parts were the ones that described procedures or algorithms, because these required the reader to “play computer” in their head, as Victor put it, that is, to strain to maintain a fragile mental picture of what was happening with each step of the algorithm.

Victor’s redesign interleaved the explanatory text with little interactive diagrams that illustrated each step. In his version, you could see the algorithm at work on an example. You could even control it yourself.

Strogatz admired Victor’s design. He later told me that it was a shame that in mathematics it’s been a tradition for hundreds of years to make papers as formal and austere as possible, often suppressing the very visual aids that mathematicians use to make their discoveries.

Strogatz studies nonlinear dynamics and chaos, systems that get into sync or self-organize: fireflies flashing, metronomes ticking, heart cells firing electrical impulses. The key is that these systems go through cycles, which Strogatz visualizes as dots running around circles: When a dot comes back to the place where it started—that’s a firefly flashing or a heart cell firing. “For about 25 years now I’ve been making little computer animations of dots running around circles, with colors indicating their frequency,” he said. “The red are the slow guys, the purple are the fast guys ... I have these colored dots swirling around on my computer. I do this all day long,” he said. “I can see patterns much more readily in colored dots running, moving on the screen than I can in looking at 500 simultaneous time series. I don’t see stuff very well like that. Because it’s not what it really looks like ... What I’m studying is something dynamic. So the representation should be dynamic.”

Software is a dynamic medium; paper isn’t. When you think in those terms it does seem strange that research like Strogatz’s, the study of dynamical systems, is so often being shared on paper, without the benefit of his little swirling dots—because it’s the swirling dots that helped him to see what he saw, and that might help the reader see it too.

This is, of course, the whole problem of scientific communication in a nutshell: Scientific results today are as often as not found with the help of computers. That’s because the ideas are complex, dynamic, hard to grab ahold of in your mind’s eye. And yet by far the most popular tool we have for communicating these results is the PDF—literally a simulation of a piece of paper.

by James Somers, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Bret Victor

Ahhh...
via:

67 Environmental Rules on the Way Out

Since taking office last year, President Trump has made eliminating federal regulations a priority. His administration — with help from Republicans in Congress — has often targeted environmental rules it sees as overly burdensome to the fossil fuel industry, including major Obama-era policies aimed at fighting climate change.

To date, the Trump administration has sought to reverse more than 60 environmental rules, according to a New York Times analysis, based on research from Harvard Law School’s Environmental Regulation Rollback Tracker, Columbia Law School’s Climate Tracker and other sources. (...)

The process of rolling back the regulations has not been smooth, in part because the administration has tried to bypass the formal rulemaking process in some cases. On more than one occasion, the administration has tried to roll back a rule by announcing its intent but skipping steps such as notifying the public and asking for comment. This has led to a new kind of legal challenge, according to Joseph Goffman, executive director of Harvard’s environmental law program. Courts are now being asked to intervene to get agencies to follow the process.

Regulations have often been reversed as a direct response to petitions from oil, coal and gas companies and other industry groups, which have enjoyed a much closer relationship with key figures in the Trump administration than under President Barack Obama.

Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has frequently met with industry executives and lobbyists. (As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Mr. Pruitt sued the agency he now oversees more than a dozen times to try to block Obama-era rules.) The E.P.A. has been involved in nearly one-third of the policy reversals identified by The Times.

Here are the details for each policy targeted by the administration so far — including who lobbied to get the regulations changed.

1. Revoked Obama-era flood standards for federal infrastructure projects

This Obama-era rule, revoked by Mr. Trump last August, required that federal agencies protect new infrastructure projects by building to higher flood standards. Building trade groups and many Republican lawmakers opposed it as costly and burdensome.

2. Rejected a proposed ban on a potentially harmful pesticide

Dow AgroSciences, which sells the pesticide chlorpyrifos, opposed a risk analysis by the Obama-era E.P.A. that found the compound posed a risk to fetal brain and nervous system development. Mr. Pruitt rejected the E.P.A. analysis, reversing the Obama-era efforts to ban the compound, arguing that it needed further study. In December of 2017 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a biological opinion that chlorpyrifos — along with two other pesticides, Diazinon and Malathion — are harmful to endangered salmon.

3. Lifted a freeze on new coal leases on public lands

Coal companies weren't thrilled about the Obama administration's three-year freeze pending an environmental review. Mr. Zinke, the interior secretary, revoked the freeze and review in March of 2017. He appointed members to a new advisory committee on coal royalties in September.

4. Canceled a requirement for oil and gas companies to report methane emissions

In March of 2017, Republican officials from 11 states wrote a letter to Mr. Pruitt, saying the rule added costs and paperwork for oil and gas companies. The next day, Mr. Pruitt revoked the rule.

5. Revoked a rule that prevented coal companies from dumping mining debris into local streams

The coal industry said the rule was overly burdensome, calling it part of a “war on coal.” In February last year, Congress passed a bill revoking the rule, which Mr. Trump signed into law.

by Nadja Popovich, Livia Albeck-Ripka and Kendra Pierre-Louis, NY Times |  Read more:
[ed. See also: Scott Pruitt is Too Corrupt to be Corrupted and EPA Chief Spent Millions on Security and Travel.]

Isao Takahata (October, 1935 – April, 2018)

The Oscar-nominated Japanese anime director Isao Takahata, who co-founded Studio Ghibli and was best known for his masterpiece Grave of the Fireflies, has died aged 82.

[ed. Although Spirited Away was written and directed by Mr. Takahata's long time partner, Hayao Miyazaki, this scene is a particularly good example of the art they produced at Studio Ghibli (both beautiful and haunting).]

God Save Austin

To my astonishment, Austin is now the second-most popular tourist destination in the country, behind Las Vegas, which puzzles me. One can already sniff the artifice and inauthenticity that transforms previously charming environments into amusement parks for conventioneers. The very places that made Austin so hip are being demolished to make room for the hotels and office spaces needed to accommodate the flood of tourists and newcomers who have come to enjoy what no longer exists. Forbes magazine just determined that Austin is the best place to live in America, which will only take it further from the manageable town it was to the megacity it is destined to become. Another indication of Austin’s growing international reputation is that Kim Jong Un placed the city on North Korea’s mainland nuclear strike list, right after New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. My band has a regular gig at a fabulous dive in East Austin, called the Skylark Lounge, which is tucked away behind an auto-body shop and not even visible from the street. If you sneezed, the whole place might turn a somersault. Recently Yelp labeled it the best music venue in the nation, heralding its inevitable demise by the developers, if Kim Jong Un doesn’t get it first.

Austin is divided, north and south, by the Colorado River, which is dammed to make Lady Bird Lake. The riverbanks are lined with towering cypress trees, which fill up with cormorants and egrets in the winter months, my favorite time to run. There’s a rusty train trestle spanning the water, covered with oddball graffiti, such as "i’ve got ninja style kungfugrip." I always feel an aesthetic release when the Southern Pacific freight train rumbles overhead while the rowing crews, like racing centipedes, pass underneath, and runners circle the path—a pleasing convergence of opposing motions. I’m reminded of Thomas Eakins’ paintings of the oarsmen on the Schuylkill River, in Philadelphia, with the clouds mirrored in the rippled water like rumpled sheets.

The Colorado serves the same purpose as the Seine in Paris, as a cultural divide. On the north bank are downtown, the state capitol, and the University of Texas—anchors of a city historically made up of teachers and bureaucrats. The south bank has Tex-Mex restaurants and dance halls. Austin is on the tail end of the dance belt, which starts in Louisiana with New Orleans R&B, and runs through Cajun zydeco, enters conjunto territory in South Texas, and then encounters the Czech waltzes and German polkas of Central Texas. The medium that the dance music travels through is Catholicism. In North Texas, the Southern Baptists and the Church of Christ hold sway. There’s an old joke that the reason Baptists won’t screw standing up is that somebody might think they were dancing. (...)

Austin currently has one of the highest rates of start-up companies of any metro area in the country. From watching Austin transform itself into the city it is now, I’ve developed a very Texas theory of how cultures evolve. Mike Levy began Texas Monthly in 1973, and it became the seedbed for the literary community. Bill Wittliff, the screenwriter for the epic television series Lonesome Dove and a number of successful movies, decided not to move to Hollywood, and his intransigence made it plausible for filmmakers to stay in Austin. Now Richard Linklater, Robert Rodriguez, and many others have turned the city into a film capital of international stature. In the fall of 1980, John Mackey started what would become the first certified organic grocery store in the United States. It was not much larger than a 7-Eleven. On Memorial Day 1981, we had the worst flood in 70 years, and the store was practically destroyed. Mackey had no insurance, but neighbors and customers helped clean it up and restock the shelves, courtesy of kindhearted creditors and vendors. By 2005, it had become a Fortune 500 company, called Whole Foods. In 1983, Michael Dell, a freshman pre-med student at UT, started assembling computers in his dorm room. The following year he incorporated the Dell Computer Corporation, capitalizing the venture with a thousand dollars. What started as “three guys with screwdrivers” now employs 138,000 people. There are more than 5,000 high-tech companies in Austin, and they all hark back to that freshman in room 2713 of the Dobie Center dormitory. (...)

The evolution of the Austin music scene is more organic and harder to explain. On the East Side, there was Victory Grill, part of the Southern “Chitlin’ Circuit,” where Billie Holiday and Big Mama Thornton would perform. In the early 1950s, Bobby “Blue” Bland, then a soldier stationed at Fort Hood, would drive down to sing on amateur night. Rock ‘n’ roll arrived, bringing Chuck Berry and James Brown and Ike and Tina Turner. On the south side of town was the headquarters for country music, the Broken Spoke, where Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, and Tex Ritter would play. There was a gas station on the north side, owned by Kenneth Threadgill, a country yodeler who also secured the first license to sell beer in Travis County. In the 1960s he began inviting hippies and folksingers to join his Wednesday night sing-alongs. Janis Joplin would sing duets with him while she was studying art at UT. Clifford Antone, son of Lebanese immigrants in East Texas, came to the university in 1968, but he dropped out after his arrest for smuggling pot. The blues club he started, Antone’s, became an institution in the music world. The musicians he mentored, including Stevie Ray Vaughan and Gary Clark Jr., would rejuvenate the blues form, creating a distinctive Austin sound.

Then, in 1970, a local band manager named Eddie Wilson was looking for a venue in South Austin and stumbled across a decrepit National Guard armory. He transformed it into the Armadillo World Headquarters, a strange amalgamation of psychedelic, country, hippie, and rock ‘n’ roll. There were only 250,000 people in Austin then, but 50,000 of them were students. Musicians began moving to town, as if some homing device were summoning them all at once. Jerry Jeff Walker came from New York, Guy Clark from Houston, Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan from Dallas. Marcia Ball was on her way from Baton Rouge to San Francisco when her Austin-Healey Sprite broke down in Austin, and she never went farther. Austin already had a flourishing musical subculture, in other words, even before Willie Nelson played the Armadillo in August 1972.

All of these disparate cultural trends that were careening past each other in Austin like swirling electrons suddenly coalesced into a recognizable scene when Willie arrived. He occupies a place in Texas, and especially in Austin, that no one else can claim. He was a jazz-infused country singer with a gospel background, and a songwriter with some notable hits. When his house in Nashville burned down, he decided to return to Texas, hoping to find more creative freedom. He let his beard grow and put his hair in pigtails. You never saw a man looking like that in Texas, but Willie could get away with it.

Because he is so culturally confounding, and because his songs are so much a part of the land, everybody claims Willie. He’s a leftist, a Bernie Sanders fan, but he’s beloved even by Tea Party types like Ted Cruz and Rick Perry. For decades he has advocated legalization of marijuana in a state where the laws of possession are quite punitive. He has even been cultivating his own brand, Willie’s Reserve. Every once in a while, some state trooper or deputy sheriff will pull Willie’s bus over and “discover” his stash. Willie has gotten off with a free concert, but the arrests are universally seen as poor sportsmanship.

In 2016, I went to Willie’s annual Fourth of July picnic. Mickey Raphael, Willie’s harmonica player, invited me on the bus (there are actually three of them in Willie’s entourage; this one was weed free). As Willie has gotten older and even more physically diminished, there’s an existential quality to his performances. Nearly all of his contemporaries are gone. During performances, Willie stands alone in front, with Mickey a couple steps behind his left shoulder, providing a kind of harmonic commentary. It’s a conversation that has been going on a long time. “This is my 43rd picnic,” Mickey told me.

As he was showing me around the bus, Mickey pulled back the drape on his closet. “You’ll want to see this,” he said, pulling out a gray guitar case. Inside was Trigger, the guitar that Willie named after Roy Rogers’ beautiful horse. It is perhaps the most famous musical instrument in America, rivaled only by Lucille, B. B. King’s black Gibson, although there have been many Lucilles and only one Trigger. “Here,” Mickey said, handing it to me.

Trigger is really light. It has a big hole near the bridge, worn through by Willie’s pinky and ring fingers. Pick marks have scored the face paper thin. The entire instrument feels sheer, the frets worn down to nearly nothing. It’s been signed many times—Leon Russell used a pocketknife—but the signatures are fading into the patina. If you saw this guitar at a garage sale, you would walk on by. And yet Trigger has somehow maintained its distinctive mellow voice, a sound Willie thought resembled that of his hero, Django Reinhardt, although to me it sounds like Willie himself, twangy and full of character.

by Lawrence Wright, Austin Monthly |  Read more:

Image: Ala Lee

Just Tough It Out

 

Is Chronic Pain Something More People Should Accept?

Image: Ariel Davis
[ed. Yes, better to make people suffer intolerable pain than end up dependent on pain-relief medications. Just meditate yourself to good health! (or suicide) See also: People With Chronic Pain Respond to Doctors Advocating 'Pain Acceptance']

The Rationalization of Publishing

Now that the ad-only experiment has decidedly failed, quality information providers will be able to build strong businesses, and consumers will be better served than ever

It was not a dumb idea. It may have even been the right idea at the time.

That is: With no printing costs and the ability to reach a much larger audience, publishing — the kind that had been traditionally supported by a combination of direct consumer dollars and advertising — could be supported by advertising alone. If so, it would be a huge win/win: Free information for the world and strong businesses with global reach.

It wasn’t obvious 20 years ago that by going down that road, publishers — who traditionally differentiated on brand, quality, and audience — were entering a commodity business that would be dominated by software and scale. And, even if it was, was there a better option? Getting money from consumers over the internet wasn’t easy back then. Entering a credit card was a lot of friction, and no one trusted it. Besides, publishers were getting paid. Advertisers still cared about brand and context. And, really, how bad was a little banner ad? It’s not like they were taking over your screen and tracking you across the web. And certainly they weren’t influencing what was getting published. It was an okay trade-off for access to great content (most of which was paid for by print ad money anyway).

The only thing that went wrong was the inevitable. Business always optimizes for where the money comes from, and advertisers weren’t in it for the public good. Which means they eventually got the better end of the deal, with the rest of us suffering through an experience that was necessarily compromised.

That story has played out. It will continue to play out for years — free, cheaply produced content isn’t disappearing. It will just get worse. But there will also be an abundance of non-free, non-cheaply produced content that an increasingly large and discerning audience is hungry for.

Look at the renaissance in television — it was driven by a better (non-advertising) business model. Even though there’s still plenty of free, ad-supported TV. A hundred million households pay Netflix alone for delicious, differentiated, ad-free fare. Look at music. At one point, the sky was falling in that industry because everyone was downloading music for free. Yesterday, Spotify went public and is worth $30B, helping the labels bounce back with them.

With both TV and music, the consumer offering is far superior to anything we had before, and there are more options for creators. (True, musicians at the top aren’t making as much as the glory days — but far more musicians are making some money, and it’s way easier than ever to get your music out to a fanbase.) This is the power of a differentiated, competitive market — increasing quality and convenience for consumers, and riches for the winners.

There are three arguments you typically hear against the TV and music/publishing analogy:

1) People will pay for entertainment but not information

This is silly. It might not be as big as entertainment, but the global demand for information — I’m talking news, journalism, analysis, opinion, essays, instruction, etc. — is not small. There are certainly some people who only will pay for entertainment, but the people who have the most money care about understanding the world and their place in it.

2) People will pay for audio and video but not text

This also doesn’t make a lot of sense. People value time, convenience, and quality. People read more than ever. And books are still a multi-billion dollar market.

3) People won’t pay for what they’ve historically gotten for free

This is true and would be a problem if you also assume: They will continue to be able to get it for free and/or the thing they’re asked to pay for is the same as they’d get for free.

People are not dumb. But their information diet has been subsidized by print ad revenues and no-longer-sustainable digital CPMs for a lot of years. It will be painful, especially for publishers, to ween off that drug. But supply and demand will kick in. As paywalls go up (and, inevitably, many publishers go out of business), there’s just going to be less great stuff to get for free.

Will people just lower their standards? Perhaps. In fact, our standards have been gradually lowering for years. We’ll read crap on the web we wouldn’t have put up with in print. But as advertising gets replaced with better business models (subscription, inevitably), people will see they can expect more. No one was clamoring to pay more for TV before The Sopranos came around. (People subscribed to HBO for the second-run movies.) No one even imagined such TV. Now we can’t stand to sit through ads or crappy content. The same thing will happen.

There is — and probably always will be — a surplus of free content. But that’s like saying there’s a surplus of free food in the dumpster behind the alley. Some of it may be perfectly good, but most of us would rather pay for something more reliable and convenient if we’re able. And many people will pay a lot for something superior.

This is the case in media — TV and music, as mentioned, but also video gamesand radio make billions per year from consumers who can access free alternatives. But it’s also the case in every other market, from coffee to clothes. People choose the level and style they want and are willing to pay for — and providers compete to get their business.

The reason quality — of content and experience — has gone down in publishing, not up, despite the power of competition and technology, is because publishers are competing for advertiser dollars, not audience dollars. Business model is gravity. Once publishers are competing for audience dollars, the product they produce will get dramatically better.

How it will play out

This is not to say that every publisher just needs to start charging a subscription, and people will run for their credit cards. (Monthly recurring revenue FTW 💸!) The average thinking, reading person reads from dozens of sources per month. Even if they were very cheap, there will be subscription fatigue. Cognitively, and economically, people will be able to rationalize a handful of content subscriptions at most (in addition to their 2–3 music/TV subscriptions).

Outlets that are very big in terms of content volume/frequency or that have superfans will be able to make subscriptions work — see NYT and The New Yorker. Or that have very low costs and a niche audience — see Stratechery.

That leaves out the vast majority of publishers in the world. If everyone had a digital wallet in their browser and was willing to do micropayments as they cruise around the web, that might be a solution. But that’s very unlikely. And, it’s not clear how to design that to create a healthy feedback loop (i.e., keep click bait and popularity from being rewarded over quality).

There is a likely solution, though. And it’s, again, demonstrated by other media types. There’s a reason we don’t subscribe to TV shows or our favorite bands individually: 1) It would be a pain in the butt. 2) It would be a much worse deal. We pay for bundles, which give us access to lots of options. It’s great, and it will be great for published content, as well.

There won’t be a Spotify of publishing — with literally everything you want. But there will be a Netflix and Hulu and Amazon, etc. — each with a substantial amount of things you want. You might also have your superfan subscriptions (Patreon-based individuals), and your company-expensed subscriptions (The Information), but most consumers will have one or two of the big bundles.

by Ev Williams, Medium |  Read more:

[ed. Enjoy Duck Soup while you can. It won't be around much longer.]

How to Find New Music You'll Actually Like

Some people can dig up great music like magic, or have friends inside the industry who keep them updated. Some people are contented with their weekly Spotify Discover playlist. But if you need more ways to find music, here are 50 ideas, taken from Twitter users, my colleagues at Lifehacker’s publisher Gizmodo Media Group, and some of my own habits. Some are obvious, some bizarre, some embarrassing, but they’ve all helped people find their new favorite song, or even their favorite band.

“Best Of” Lists

If you’re getting into a new era or genre, or if you just want to “be more of a music person,” you might enjoy a guided tour.

1. Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: Fill out your knowledge of canonical popular music with one of the most famous “greatest music” lists, published in 2012. The list is a mix of music so popular it’s painfully clichéd, and important albums that you probbly missed if you weren’t in the right generation.
2. Pitchfork collects the top 100 or 200 albums of every decade: the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Pitchfork digs a little deeper than Rolling Stone, with a little less concern for an album’s mass appeal.
3. And the Slog culture blog loves to tell you what Pitchfork missed.
4. AllMusic’s annual best album lists are beautifully presented, with album art and a short description that links to a longer review. AllMusic doesn’t rank its listings, instead breaking out alphabetical lists by genre.
5. Or search “best [genre]” and find a source you like. Pitchfork and Rolling Stone will show up a lot, as will NPR, Complex, and Uproxx. (I’m currently working through Q Magazine’s 40 cosmic rock albums and Rolling Stone’s 50 greatest prog rock albums.) But so will sites dedicated entirely to that one genre, which will choose deeper, more distinctive cuts.
6. Rate Your Music has over 40,000 user-created lists; scroll to the “popular lists” section or browse the list of “ultimate box sets,” which compile the best of niche genres like Belgian techno, neoclassical dark wave, and mumble rap.
7. 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: A doorstopper of a book reviewing all the essential albums from the 1950s to 2005. Discogs has the list for free.

Music Review Sites

If you find a site whose taste matches yours, great! If not, you can still use these to just see what’s out this week.

1. Metacritic Music averages critical reviews, so it’s a good starting point, and shows you what’s controversial or universally acclaimed. From there you’ll find review sites like these:
2. “I check Pitchfork every morning to see what just came out; they publish 4-5 album reviews a day. I don’t really read it or care what they say too much. Pitchfork’s ratings are arbitrary!”—Joel Kahn, senior video producer at Lifehacker
3. Consequence of Sound uses a letter-grade system for reviews, and streams new tracks as they come out (sometimes before they hit Spotify or iTunes).
4. Needledrop keeps a running “loved list” of its favorite new songs. It’s a tight selection; this year’s list only has 13 tracks so far. (via Péter Szász, managing director at GMG Hungary)

The Rest of the Internet

The internet wants, very badly, for you to hear new music.

1. Each month, Bandcamp names the best new music on the platform, in varying genres. E.g., March’s best ambient music, or February’s best hip-hop. (via Maria Sherman)
2. You can dig deeper into Bandcamp by “tag surfing” from a band you like to others, or following the Bandcamp blog, says GMG developer Janos Hardi.
3. SoundCloud is similarly built for wandering; when you’re done with a track, it autoplays something else you might like. Find an artist you enjoy, then check out the tracks they’ve “liked.” Tag surfing works great here as well.
4. Pandora might show up in Google below the jewelry brand of the same name, but it’s still one of the best “custom radio” services. Just tell it an artist you like and it builds a new station. For less obvious results, plug in a band that you’ve only recently fallen in love with.
5. iHeartRadio is also still around, streaming radio stations (both old-school and niche digital-only) based on your genre preferences.
6. Tools like Gnoosic and Musicroamer work like tiny versions of Pandora or Spotify Discover, suggesting new music based on what you enter.
7. Spotify and Apple Music try to alert you to new releases by artists you already like, but their delivery systems kind of suck. (Just give me a playlist, and don’t clog it up with bands I “might like,” you weirdos!) But you can fix that with services like Album Reminder, MuzeRoom, muspy, Beathound, and Swarm.fm. They all offer different options for importing your listening history from iTunes, Spotify, or last.fm, plus options for manually entering bands to follow.
8. You might have a hard time getting your friends to gather for an in-person listening party, but you could probably coax them onto JQBX, where users synch up their Spotify playback in a virtual DJ room. You need Spotify Premium to use it, but JQBX also lets you import and export music to Spotify—plus its search function seems to work better than Spotify’s own. Lifehacker loves it.
9. If your workplace has a chat app, start a channel for sharing music. That’s where I got all the recommendations from my GMG colleagues, and it’s also where Nathan Edwards, senior editor at the Wirecutter, finds music: “Our work Slack has a music channel and there’s usually recs from people younger and cooler or older and wiser than me.”
10. Join last.fm, which tracks your music listens across different platforms, and you’ll have a centralized record of your listening habits, along with recommendations. I’ve had an account for over a decade, and sometimes I dig into the archives to find forgotten favorites.
11. If you’re still using Facebook, join some music-based groups, or follow the pages of specific artists. Music recommendation communities can be intimidating, but Facebook has a way of making it all feel accessible.
12. Apple Music, as everyone knows, sucks at algorithmic music recommendation. But its staff-curated playlists are intricate and reliable. For major artists, Apple supplements its “essentials” lists with “next steps,” “deep cuts,” and music that influenced or was influenced by the artist. There are even playlists of the best covers of certain artists.
13. Compilation streams on SoundCloud: On “Vintage Obscura Summer Mix 2014,” I found the Smiles original “I Am Just a Star on a Democratic Flag,” which you won’t find on Spotify or Apple Music. (You will find a beautiful, if less haunting, cover by Pink Flames.)
14. Compilation streams on YouTube: The internet is really into the stream “lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to,” stream. Gaming site Polygon even made a parody, lofi chill beats X hip hop study X waluigi. The 7clouds account runs 7 live streams of good background music.
15. /r/vintageobscura is the source for that summer mix; all entries are obscure tracks from 1900 to 1989. Most entries link to YouTube, home of all rarities. You’ll find more mixes and genre filters in the right rail.
16. NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series is a fun listen in itself, but it’s also a cool way to get a “live” introduction to an artist. Most of the concerts are 15-20 minutes, the correct length for a music set. If there’s anything wrong with discovering music this way, it’s that everyone sounds their best behind the tiny desk.
17. Similarly, the A.V. Undercover series brings in bands to play covers of famous songs, from a tracklist hand-picked by Lifehacker sister site the A.V. Club. If you like the “cheesy song played straight” trope, there’s plenty here for you—try Atlas Genius’s cover of Hootie and the Blowfish’s “Only Wanna Be With You.”
18. You probably already bump into covers when you’re looking for music. Try collections of covers of your favorite artists (Spotify probably has a cover for every Beatles song), to find groups that might have a different sound, but share your love of the first artist.
19. “Vice News Tonight has a tragically overlooked segment called New Music Corner in which they ask musicians to comment on new releases from other acts. This construct leads to surprising moments like Weezer discussing new tunes from Bjork and Kelly Clarkson, Yo La Tengo being baffled by a new David Byrne record, Andrew W.K. somehow finding glee in every scrap of recorded sound, or Liam Gallagher walking off the set for being subjected to modern music. Finally, a way to experience new music while watching Run The Jewels beef with Sheryl Crow.”—Rex Sorgatz, author
20. Subscribe to some music podcasts. Each episode of Song Exploder breaks down one song’s inspiration, composition, and production. That’s where I first heard Ibeyi and Mitski. It’s also a good place to rediscover older acts in a new phase of their careers.
21. “The podcast Reverberation Radio is just a weekly playlist. Most songs not on Spotify though,” says Beth Griffenhagen. There are currently 257 available episodes, and in each one, the music feels obscure, like something you heard in a dream.
22. Tumblr has tons of individual music blogs. The good ones—the ones with really obscure shit—can be tough to find. But search Tumblr for band names and dig around til you find a blog that matches your taste. You could start at naquelescaminhos, recommended by Jezebel writer Ashley Reese.
23. Late Night Tales: Each album in this compilation series is curated by a recording artist like the Flaming Lips or Belle and Sebastian. You’ll hear some rarities and deep cuts as the artists try to impress and surprise you. Here’s a sampler from Bandcamp.
24. Check out other releases from your favorite artist’s label. “Follow the labels on Twitter and they’ll tweet support for other bands and labels.”—Pat Cartelli
25. “See who your favorite artists are talking about. I’ve found that often people who work in music—those on top of their discovery game—learn about cool new shit before everyone else simply because they saw a musician they like tweet about it.”—Maria Sherman

Soundtracks

Music rating sites have to churn through everything as it comes in; soundtracks are curated samplers of one particular sound.

1. I first heard a lot of my favorite songs through my favorite TV shows. Some shows (like GIRLS, Atlanta, The Magicians, Divorce, and Mad Men) are just constantly playing bangers. “[Soundtracks] remind me of the poignant scenes they underscore, so the songs alone can elicit that same catharsis & blend of emotions,” says Lou McLaren. “Watch CW shows to hear what the teens are listening to,” says Alicia Adamczyk, finance editor at Lifehacker.
2. Same goes for movie soundtracks, which will have a narrower range of sound, but often their own original hits, like Black Panther, Call Me By Your Name, and anything from Wes Anderson.
3. And don’t forget video game soundtracks; sister site Kotaku fell in love with Far Cry 5’s in-game cult radio. The Grand Theft Auto series has always been a home for rarities by good bands. More instrumental soundtracks can make great work/study music. We’re fans of the soundtrack to 2d platformer Celeste, which combines piano, synth, and drums.
4. Look, I’ve not only googled the music from Apple ads, I’ve done it at least five times. Apple has a good ad agency! They pick the songs because they’re catchy! I’m not ashamed but I feel like I’m supposed to be! AppleMusic.info lists the music from Apple commercials from 1984 to 2017.

by Nick Douglas, Lifehacker |  Read more:

Image: Vinyl Films

Andres Orjuela
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The Importance of Not Having Autonomous Killer Robots

It’s strange how many things that “shouldn’t even need to be said” actually urgently need to be said. Here is something that shouldn’t need to be said: building a swarm of deadly armed robots, and then giving those robots the autonomous ability to decide who to kill, is one of the worst ideas imaginable. Fortunately, it’s such a colossally stupid and suicidal concept that human beings would never actually pursue it, let alone spend billions of dollars trying to make the robots as efficiently deadly and free of meaningful control as possible. This is the stuff of Black Mirror episodes, not reality, where (as Steven Pinker assures us) life on earth is getting more peaceful, more intelligent, and less horrifying all the time. Right?

Hah. Actually the Defense Department is proudly boasting of its swarm program, and investing considerable resources into making sure that the robots will not only be able to kill as many things as possible, but decide for themselves which things are worth killing. As the unsettling cheerful man in this DARPA video explains, the military is seeking to expand its drone swarm capabilities for “operations in urban environments” and is soliciting proposals that will answer the questions “What disruptive new capabilities does the proposed technology provide to a swarm?” and “How does the proposed technology scale to provide exponential advantage by implementing it in a swarm?” (Funny how the ubiquitous language of “scaling” and “disruption” is applied to building flying death robots.) The program is well underway and there have been plenty of tests (the Navy has been firing off swarms of drones as part of a program that is literally called LOCUST). As a FOX News article that reads like a Defense Department press release, called “How deadly drone swarms will help US troops on the frontline” explains:

No enemy would want to face a swarm of drones on the attack. But enemies of the United States will have to face the overwhelming force of American drone teams that can think for themselves, communicate with each other and work together in hundreds to execute combat missions…. Say you have a bomb maker responsible for killing a busload of children, our military will release 50 robots – a mix of ground robots and flying drones…Their objective? They must isolate the target within a 2 square city blocks within 15 to 30 minutes max… It may sound farfetched – but drone swarm tech for combat already exists and has already been proven more than possible. In 2016, the US military launched a drone swarm of 103 Perdix drones from three F/A-18 Super Hornet jet fighters.

We can see exactly why this is horrifying. It’s worth thinking about where the “urban environments” in question will end up being, and who the suspected “bomb makers” to be executed without trial will be. (...) The United States military has a presence in 50 out of 54 African countries, where it conducts nearly 10 missions per day (hardly ever discussed, thanks news media). The “urban environments” where the autonomous death robots will be tested are going to be those whose residents have no recourse when their wedding parties are bombed.

The scary thing here is not just the “swarming” aspect of the new drone technology, though that’s alarming enough. (In fact, the Black Mirror episode about a woman on the run from deadly robots distorted the situation for dramatic effect; in reality, humans would never have that much of a chance of survival.) More concerning is the fact that the Defense Department’s new call for proposals emphasizes “autonomy,” i.e. allowing the drones to use their own judgment free of human control. The military wants to be able to release a swarm of drones, give it a mission, and send it off on its way. Considering that nowhere in DARPA’s promotional materials can I find a discussion of the importance of making sure the drones don’t massacre a wedding party, robot autonomy is a concerning prospect.

This is why the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots (an amusing name, but a deadly serious cause) strongly emphasizes the need for international prohibitions on autonomous weapons systems. There’s a good xkcd comic emphasizing how odd it is that there is so much public fretting over “sentient artificial intelligence” and so comparatively little about “the swarms of self-controlled deadly drone swarms that are literally being built right now.” The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots seeks a “comprehensive, pre-emptive prohibition on the development, production and use of fully autonomous weapons–weapons that operate on their own without human intervention.” This is a good idea. But there has been little international pressure for such an agreement, and securing one will take a coordinated global campaign. An international treaty is the only way forward, though. Russia and China are building their own autonomous weapons systems, and as with nuclear weapons, no country is going to unilaterally disarm.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Tony Thornburg
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Johnny Cash

The Working Class Has a $3 Trillion Weapon: Pension Funds

It feels like America’s working class has been losing the class war for as long as we can remember. But it has one wildly powerful, often forgotten tool: trillions of dollars sitting in pension funds. Might this enormous pool of capital be labor’s greatest weapon in its fight against the power of capital itself?

The awesome political potential of this money is the topic of “The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder,” a new book by David Webber, a law professor at Boston University. Even though organized labor has been getting its ass kicked politically for decades now, its vast pension funds can exercise an incredible amount of power—though their ability to do so is under continuous assault.

Webber answered our questions about labor’s capital, and how it can serve all of us.

Splinter: Is it accurate to say that the pension funds of labor organizations are the single most powerful economic force aligned with the interests of the working class? Should we be encouraged or discouraged by the answer?

Webber: I think that’s probably right. There are different ways of assessing the total value of these pension funds. They run from $3-$6 trillion. One estimate by the Federal Reserve puts the number around $5.6 trillion. These funds own roughly 10-15% of the stock market, and somewhere closer to one-third to one-half of private equity. They are certainly the most powerful working class institutions that operate directly inside the markets. No other financial institutions come close either in terms of size or alignment of interests. Their power is loaded with contradictions and ironies. They’ve been described as “labor’s capital”—I think Teresa Ghilarducci first used the term—and it’s certainly odd that, of all the institutions created by labor in the 19th and 20th centuries, labor’s capital may have the best chance of surviving into the 21st.

I think the strongest power on Earth today is the capital markets. During the financial crisis ten years ago, they broke Greece, pushed Italy and Spain to the edge, forced massive bailouts. I remember watching the Republicans reject the bailouts, and then after the stock market went into free fall, they came right back to Congress and passed it. $700 billion from a Republican House of Representatives. And then the car manufacturers had to beg to for a $17 billion bailout, and their CEOs were ritually humiliated on Capitol Hill before they could get it. The power differential was striking. Given the power of markets, I think unions and workers absolutely must have capital strategies departments, staffs, employees. It’s not enough to invest in organization, elections, legislation, lawsuits. Those are important too. But often, by the time you’re in court, Congress, or the voting booth, the market has already created the facts on the ground. Labor needs a voice inside the markets themselves. Arguably, market voice counts more than any other kind. (...)

Why are labor pension funds so uniquely positioned to promote better corporate governance policies at big companies? Why don’t all big investment firms want to promote such democratic policies?

One of the main reasons why these big public pension funds, these worker funds, have been so well-positioned to promote better corporate governance is because they lack many of the conflicts that other funds have. For better or worse, companies have often been hostile to corporate governance reforms pushed on them by “outsiders”—meaning their own shareholders. Corporate managerial culture is often: we know best how to run ourselves, thanks very much. Given the hostile posture, many funds like mutual funds prefer to stay quiet about these issues, to operate behind the scenes if, at all, or at most to support initiatives brought by others. Remember, mutual funds make a lot of money from managing the 401(k) plans of big companies. They don’t want to undermine their own business prospects by aggressively challenging the CEO’s pay, for example. There are also social network effects that can hinder mutual fund activism. Mutual fund managers travel in the same social circles and attend the same business schools as corporate managers. That’s not true of the teachers or other public employees on pension fund boards... Maybe the most blatant example of the difference between worker funds and everyone else is in litigation. Roughly 40% of securities fraud class actions and deal class actions are brought by public pension funds and labor union funds. Other investors tend not to take action in the face of fraud, in part for the reasons just described.

Finally, I think that there is a public-spirited ethos to these pension funds that leads them towards activism. In the book, I mention a sheriff-trustee of a police and fire pension fund who explained why his fund brought securities fraud lawsuits: “Half my guys carry axes and the other half carry guns. We’re not about to sit back and let ourselves get ripped off and not do anything about it.” There’s an element of social responsibility to that attitude.

Political critics of our pension system say that it is an unsustainable financial drain on cities and states, and that we should move from “defined benefit” pensions towards a system of private, individual retirement accounts. What do you make of this argument, and the motivations behind it?

Much of the debate over the sustainability of defined benefit pension funds turns on a known unknown: the future performance of markets. If markets perform over the next thirty years the way they have performed in the last eighty, then we’re fine. If they substantially underperform, there will be serious issues. Most of the debate right now is over how to account for that risk of underperformance. A substantial segment of the right wing position on pensions is that we must assume the worst case scenario. Other voices suggest that it is illogical to assume the worst case scenario, and that relying on assumptions that are slightly more conservative than actual market performance over the past several decades is sufficient. Ideology and self-interest are everywhere in this debate. I do worry greatly that some of the right-wing critique stems from a desire to undercut the public sector, renege on pension promises, keep wages and compensation low, and avoid any increase in taxes—particularly on the wealthy—that might be required to pay for the services that we have already consumed, that we have already received from these public workers, whether they be teachers, firefighters, sanitation workers, etc. The way that some jurisdictions in this country promised to pay pensions, pensions that are not particularly generous, and then reneged on those commitments is simply outrageous.

All that said, my main concern about pension reform is on the effect it would have on these funds as investors. The number one solution advocated by pension reformers is to break up these big collectively managed defined benefit pensions into millions of individually managed 401(k) accounts or the like. That’s perverse. First, there is a lot of evidence that these funds leave retirement savers with insufficient assets, and that they are loaded up with high fees that most of us have no prayer of understanding. In other writing I compare having a pension to being in a union, and having a 401(k) to being in a right to work state. We 401k investors are isolated, atomized, with little leverage vis-à-vis companies, and our investment managers. We actually benefit from these large defined benefit funds being in the market, engaging in shareholder activism on behalf of all of us. We will all be harmed if these funds are broken up into individually managed accounts like the rest of us, even if we are not actually participants in those funds. Their work benefits us all. Breaking them up is one of the main objectives of pension reform. I call it “economic voter suppression.” Pension funds have voice in the markets, but if they are converted to individually managed accounts, they will lose that voice. They will be silenced, just like the rest of us. I think the collective voice of these institutions should be preserved, and that can be done, crisis or no crisis.

by Hamilton Nolan and David Webber, Splinter |  Read more:

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Student Loans Are Too Expensive To Forgive

Late last year, graduate students watched as legislators in the House debated giving them a hefty new tax bill: A version of the GOP tax plan proposed to treat tuition waivers as taxable income. Although that plan was later dropped, Congress is once again considering legislation that could affect graduate students’ bottom lines. And the federal government is considering ending some of its student loan forgiveness programs, which could raise the economic barrier to entering certain public service professions and leave social workers, teachers and other people in public-service fields that require graduate degrees paying thousands of dollars more for their education. (...)

The costs of the suite of plans currently offered by the government to lessen the burden of grad school debt has ballooned faster than anticipated, and the federal government stands to lose bundles of money. A new audit from the Department of Education’s inspector general found that between fiscal years 2011 and 2015, the cost of programs that allow student borrowers to repay their federal loans at a rate proportional to their income shot up from $1.4 billion to $11.5 billion. Back in 2007, when many such programs launched, the Congressional Budget Office projected they would cost just $4 billion over the 10 years ending in 2017.

The cost of the loan forgiveness programs exploded, in part, because policymakers did not correctly estimate the number of students who would take advantage of such programs, according to higher education scholar Jason Delisle. Now there’s an emerging consensus that some programs should be reined in, but ideas on how much and in what ways vary by party affiliation. Senate Democrats just introduced a college affordability bill that focuses on creating “debt-free” college plans by giving federal matching funds to states that, in turn, would figure out ways to help students pay for school. In the past, President Barack Obama acknowledged the need to require borrowers to repay more of their debts and made some proposals for modifying the programs’ rules. The GOP goes much further in its suggestions: A new proposal from House Republicans would eliminate some loan-forgiveness programs entirely.

The federal government currently offers several types of loans, with varying repayment terms, one of which can cover up to the full cost of a student’s graduate program. If, after they leave school, a borrower signs up for an income-driven repayment plan, they will pay back their loan at the rate of 10 percent of their discretionary income each year, and the remaining balance will be forgiven after 20 years.

Under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, however, a student’s debt can be forgiven after just 10 years. The program was created to ease economic barriers to entering public service, which is defined as work for any federal, state, local or tribal agency, or any tax-exempt nonprofit.

Right now, a Georgetown Law grad who’s gunning for a job at a U.S. attorney’s office and enrolled in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program would expect that the federal student loans she took out to help pay her $180,000 tuition will be forgiven after 10 years. If, like the typical lawyer, she graduates with $140,000 in federal student loan debt and her salary rises from $59,000 to $121,000 a year over her first 10 years on the job, she could have the government wipe out $147,000 in debt — the full remaining principal of her debt plus interest — according to a 2014 studyfrom the think tank New America, which Delisle co-authored.

Or let’s say a second-grade teacher with a master’s degree and $42,000 in federal student loan debt (a typical amount for a first-year teacher after undergraduate and graduate school) earns in the 75th percentile for his age for 10 years. If he dutifully fulfills all the requirements for a federal debt forgiveness program — including completing all of the onerous paperwork — he, for now, stands to have about $33,000 of that debt forgiven, according to the New America report.

But this year the House is poised to consider the PROSPER Act, which would, among other things, reinstate a cap on how much graduate students could borrow (up to $28,500 per year, or $150,000 total) and shrink the number of income-based repayment programs currently available for both grad and undergrad students from five to just one, though a traditional, non-income-based repayment plan will also be available. (...)

“Everyone in legal education is scared to death that some of these federal programs could go down the drain,” Cornblatt says. “Everybody wants to make sure that the ability to attract these kids is not compromised” because of proposals like the PROSPER Act.

So, let’s return to our hypothetical Georgetown Law grad, the would-be attorney who wants to go into public-sector law and is enrolled in the loan forgiveness program. If the PROSPER Act passes, rather than paying 10 percent of her discretionary income for 10 years and having $147,000 in federal student loan debt forgiven, she would have to choose from one of the two repayment plans it allows. That means she’d either pay 15 percent of her discretionary income until she’s paid off as much as she would have under a 10-year plan, with some of the interest potentially forgiven, or she would have to use a standard 10-year repayment plan, also with no loan forgiveness involved.

It’s a bleaker picture for a social worker — who likely needs a master’s in social work to practice and typically starts with an annual income of $24,000, earning $57,000 annually by year 10, according to the New America report. If that social worker is enrolled in one of the currently available income-based repayment programs, all of his remaining federal loan debt (typically $49,000 upon graduation) can be forgiven. Including interest, that would be around $51,000 — more than the original loan — even though he would have repaid about $15,000 over the years. Without loan forgiveness, he’d be looking at many more years of loan payments.

Though Kelchen predicts that if the PROSPER Act passes, some colleges will try to either increase how much financial aid they offer or reduce tuition, he cautions, “I don’t think it will be enough to make up for loss of loan access, particularly in low-paying fields.”

by Amanda Palleschi, FiveThirtyEight | Read more:

Image: Jaap Arriens/Getty

The Massive Prize Luring Miners to the Stars

Sending a spacecraft to the far reaches of our solar system to mine asteroids might seem like an improbable ambition best left to science fiction. But it’s inching closer to reality. A NASA mission is underway to test the feasibility on a nearby asteroid, and a niche group of companies is ramping up to claim a piece of the pie.

Industry barons see a future in finding and harnessing water on asteroids for rocket fuel, which will allow astronauts and spacecrafts to stay in orbit for longer periods. Investors, including Richard Branson, China’s Tencent Holdings and the nation of Luxembourg, see a longer-term solution to replenishing materials such as iron and nickel as Earth’s natural resources are depleted.

Millions of asteroids roam our solar system. Most are thought unsuitable for mining, either because they’re too small, too inaccessible to Earth or because the materials that make up the asteroid have little value. But we know of almost 1,000 asteroids that show potential. Timing is everything, though. The varied orbits of these asteroids mean that many are nearby only once every several years.

The estimated potential value of some of these asteroids–assuming you could completely mine them, and assuming current market valuations–is so substantial as to be barely comprehensible. The most valuable known asteroid is estimated to be worth $15 quintillion, according to Asterank, a database owned by Planetary Resources, a company that aims to mine asteroids. That represents the world’s total gross domestic product (about $80 trillion) 192,283 times over. (...)

Osiris-Rex, a U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration spacecraft, is on its way to a near-Earth asteroid to check out whether it will be viable for extracting water and minerals.

It’s expected to reach the asteroid, Bennu, in December, becoming the first U.S. mission to retrieve a sample of an asteroid and return it to Earth to be studied, said Dante Lauretta, a University of Arizona professor, who is working in conjunction with NASA as he oversees the mission.

“We’re interested in finding sources of water for furthering exploration,” Lauretta said in an interview. “Anytime you’re involved in space flight, it’s a risky business. We have a lot of technologies to overcome the challenges of navigating a spacecraft around the asteroid.”

Bennu comes very close to Earth every six years and scientists estimate that asteroids of its type are made of about 10 percent iron and nickel. Asterank values Bennu at $670 million, though Lauretta says too little is known about Bennu’s composition to understand its potential value.

During its time at Bennu, the spacecraft will analyze the asteroid’s shape and chemistry, sample its surface materials and collect data on its orbit so scientists can determine the likelihood of it crashing into Earth in the future. The spacecraft is scheduled to return to Earth in 2023, he said.

“The next iron age is going to be in space as people use technology to build communities,” said Chris Lewicki, president of Planetary Resources, one of the first movers on asteroid mining. The company aims to launch a mission by 2020 to identify water resources in asteroids.

Mining will take longer, but he says that shouldn't surprise anyone. It’s “not unusual” for mining projects on Earth to take upwards of 15 years before they're productive, he said.

Lewicki expects the space economy could morph into at least a $1 trillion market as mining picks up. “It’s unchartered territory.”

The U.S. isn’t the only country eyeing intergalactic mining. Tiny Luxembourg wants to become the space hub of the European Union. It passed a law in 2017 that gives companies the rights to whatever they extract from asteroids. The U.S. has similar rules in its 2015 Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act. Setting early ground rules was the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, administered by the UN’s Vienna-based Office for Outer Space Affairs. It keeps space free of all national sovereignty or ownership claims–plus nuclear weapons–and restricts the use of the moon and other space bodies to peaceful purposes. It was signed by about 60 countries, including the U.S.

by Susanne Barton and Hannah Recht, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: NASA/Kim Shiflett

Drinking Straw Shrimp Lure

[ed. Strangely mesmerizing.]

Charles Bartlett, c. 1920-1921, Surf Riders, Honolulu

[ed. See also: Seeing Honolulu Through a Surfing Life and Joan Didion's Honolulu (The Metropole)]

Peter Tosh

The Class System

Until this week, I had never flown first class before. But on my way back from North Carolina, I was given an unexpected upgrade to Seat 1F, and treated to the full premium air travel experience. Given that first class seats seem to cost about three times as much as economy seats, I suppose I expected a fair bit of luxury. As it turns out, these are—as far as I could observe—the perks you are granted:

• The seats are slightly less uncomfortable, and you are able to move your legs.
• You are offered drinks when you get on board the plane, instead of only when you reach cruising altitude. 
• These drinks are served in glasses rather than plastic cups.
• When they come around with snacks, instead of just handing you a packet of biscuits, they allow you to choose which packet of biscuits you would like out of a basket containing multiple different types of biscuits.
• You have exclusive access to the forward lavatory, though it is the same as the rear lavatory.
• You board early, so that you can spend time sitting on the plane that would otherwise have been spent sitting at the gate.
• The flight attendants address you by name, and make a somewhat greater effort to pretend to like you.

If there were other differences, I did not notice them. I have been told that you are also given “free alcohol.” The alcohol itself isn’t special, since you can purchase it in coach, so the perk is more accurately characterized as “the illusion of free alcohol” or “alcohol priced into your ticket rather than bought on the plane.”

On the whole, an underwhelming list. It is not immediately clear why you would pay $500 or more for this assemblage of tiny extras. But there is one more thing you get when you fly first class, a feature they don’t list on the airline’s website: you get to know that you are in first class. A distinction is made between you, the first-class passenger, and the steerage passengers, who file past you one by one seeing exactly who you are and where you are sitting. (This is not always the case, but even when everyone else doesn’t parade past you, the fundamental aspect remains, namely the knowledge of having separated yourself from the majority of your fellow travelers.)

First class tickets are obviously not “worth it” in the sense of providing anything that can reasonably be called value for money. The seats aren’t actually much more conducive to rest or spinal health, having a glass instead of a cup isn’t exactly decadent luxury, and even the expanded range of available biscuits doesn’t alter the fact that airline snacks are airline snacks. There are two reasons, then, why one might purchase a first-class ticket. First, one is so stupendously wealthy that no price is too high to pay for even small improvements, meaning that if an airline charged $500 to passengers who wanted tea instead of coffee, you wouldn’t think twice about paying it if tea was what you wanted. The second explanation is that the improvements aren’t what’s being bought. What is being bought is status.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Why Are the Poor Blamed and Shamed for Their Deaths?

I watched in dismay as most of my educated, middle-class friends began, at the onset of middle age, to obsess about their health and likely longevity. Even those who were at one point determined to change the world refocused on changing their bodies. They undertook exercise or yoga regimens; they filled their calendars with medical tests and exams; they boasted about their “good” and “bad” cholesterol counts, their heart rates and blood pressure.

Mostly they understood the task of ageing to be self-denial, especially in the realm of diet, where one medical fad, one study or another, condemned fat and meat, carbs, gluten, dairy or all animal-derived products. In the health-conscious mindset that has prevailed among the world’s affluent people for about four decades now, health is indistinguishable from virtue, tasty foods are “sinfully delicious”, while healthful foods may taste good enough to be advertised as “guilt-free”. Those seeking to compensate for a lapse undertake punitive measures such as hours-long cardio sessions, fasts, purges or diets composed of different juices carefully sequenced throughout the day.

Of course I want to be healthy, too; I just don’t want to make the pursuit of health into a major life project. I eat well, meaning I choose foods that taste good and will stave off hunger for as long as possible, such as protein, fibre and fats. But I refuse to overthink the potential hazards of blue cheese on my salad or pepperoni on my pizza. I also exercise – not because it will make me live longer but because it feels good when I do. As for medical care, I will seek help for an urgent problem, but I am no longer interested in undergoing tests to uncover problems that remain undetectable to me. When friends berate me for my laxity, my heavy use of butter or habit of puffing (but not inhaling) on cigarettes, I gently remind them that I am, in most cases, older than they are.

So it was with a measure of schadenfreude that I began to record the cases of individuals whose healthy lifestyles failed to produce lasting health. It turns out that many of the people who got caught up in the health “craze” of the last few decades – people who exercised, watched what they ate, abstained from smoking and heavy drinking – have nevertheless died. Lucille Roberts, owner of a chain of women’s gyms, died incongruously from lung cancer at the age of 59, although she was a “self-described exercise nut” who, the New York Times reported, “wouldn’t touch a French fry, much less smoke a cigarette”. Jerry Rubin, who devoted his later years to trying every supposedly health-promoting diet fad, therapy and meditation system he could find, jaywalked into Wilshire Boulevard at the age of 56 and died of his injuries two weeks later.

Some of these deaths were genuinely shocking. Jim Fixx, author of the bestselling The Complete Book Of Running, believed he could outwit the cardiac problems that had carried his father off to an early death by running at least 10 miles a day and restricting himself to a diet of pasta, salads and fruit. But he was found dead on the side of a Vermont road in 1984, aged only 52.

Even more disturbing was the untimely demise of John H Knowles, director of the Rockefeller Foundation and promulgator of the “doctrine of personal responsibility” for one’s health. Most illnesses are self-inflicted, he argued – the result of “gluttony, alcoholic intemperance, reckless driving, sexual frenzy, smoking” and other bad choices. The “idea of a ‘right’ to health,” he wrote, “should be replaced by the idea of an individual moral obligation to preserve one’s own health.” But he died of pancreatic cancer at 52, prompting one physician commentator to observe, “Clearly we can’t all be held responsible for our health.”

Still, we persist in subjecting anyone who dies at a seemingly untimely age to a kind of bio-moral autopsy: did she smoke? Drink excessively? Eat too much fat and not enough fibre? Can she, in other words, be blamed for her own death? When David Bowie and Alan Rickman both died in early 2016 of what major US newspapers described only as “cancer”, some readers complained that it is the responsibility of obituaries to reveal what kind of cancer. Ostensibly, this information would help promote “awareness” of the particular cancers involved, as Betty Ford’s openness about her breast cancer diagnosis helped to destigmatise that disease. It would also, of course, prompt judgments about the victim’s “lifestyle”. Would Bowie have died – at the quite respectable age of 69 – if he hadn’t been a smoker? (...)

Similarly, with sufficient ingenuity – or malicious intent – almost any death can be blamed on some mistake of the deceased. Surely Fixx had failed to “listen to his body” when he first felt chest pains and tightness while running, and maybe, if he had been less self-absorbed, Rubin would have looked both ways before crossing the street. Maybe it’s just the way the human mind works, but when bad things happen or someone dies, we seek an explanation, preferably one that features a conscious agent – a deity or spirit, an evil-doer or envious acquaintance, even the victim. We don’t read detective novels to find out that the universe is meaningless, but that, with sufficient information, it all makes sense. We can, or think we can, understand the causes of disease in cellular and chemical terms, so we should be able to avoid it by following the rules laid down by medical science: avoiding tobacco, exercising, undergoing routine medical screening and eating only foods currently considered healthy. Anyone who fails to do so is inviting an early death. Or, to put it another way, every death can now be understood as suicide. (...)

While the affluent struggled dutifully to conform to the latest prescriptions for healthy living – adding whole grains and gym time to their daily plans – the less affluent remained mired in the old comfortable, unhealthy ways of the past – smoking cigarettes and eating foods they found tasty and affordable. There are some obvious reasons why the poor and the working class resisted the health craze: gym memberships can be expensive; “health foods” usually cost more than “junk food”. But as the classes diverged, the new stereotype of the lower classes as wilfully unhealthy quickly fused with their old stereotype as semi-literate louts. I confront this in my work as an advocate for a higher minimum wage. Affluent audiences may cluck sympathetically over the miserably low wages offered to blue-collar workers, but they often want to know “why these people don’t take better care of themselves”. Why do they smoke or eat fast food? Concern for the poor usually comes tinged with pity. And contempt.

by Barbara Ehrenreich, The Guardian | Read more:

Image:Stephen Voss for the Guardian