Living Tree Bridges In A Land Of Clouds

PHOTOS: Living Tree Bridges In A Land Of Clouds (NPR)

Images: Prasenjeet Yadav

"When I think back to my own arduous trek across this hillscape, I begin to comprehend how much the geography of this place is characterized by isolation and disconnectedness. Even today, most of these villages do not have road access. A trip to the closest town might require climbing down into valleys and crossing flooding rivers to reach another village.

But crossing these rivers isn't possible without a bridge.

It's hardly surprising, then, that it was the need for connectedness that provided the first guiding impulse for these ancient experiments in bioengineering. Tree bridges are structures that are literally rooted in the terrain and that thrive under the relentless pressures of the wettest land in the world."

         ~ Prasenjeet Yadav

via: lost

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America's Most Racist Town?

[ed. Harrison, Ark. Lovely place. Hope they don't rely on tourism much.]

Do We Believe in U.F.O.s? That’s the Wrong Question

We were part of The New York Times’s team (with the Washington correspondent Helene Cooper) that broke the story of the Pentagon’s long-secret unit investigating unidentified flying objects, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, in December 2017.

Since then, we have reported on Navy pilots’ close encounters with U.F.O.s, and last week, on the current revamped program, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force and its official briefings — ongoing for more than a decade — for intelligence officials, aerospace executives and Congressional staff on reported U.F.O. crashes and retrieved materials.

We’re often asked by well-meaning associates and readers, “Do you believe in U.F.O.s?” The question sets us aback as being inappropriately personal. Times reporters are particularly averse to revealing opinions that could imply possible reporting bias.

But in this case we have no problem responding, “No, we don’t believe in U.F.O.s.”

As we see it, their existence, or nonexistence, is not a matter of belief.

We admire what the great anthropologist Margaret Mead said when asked long ago whether she believed in U.F.O.s. She called it “a silly question,” writing in Redbook in 1974:

“Belief has to do with matters of faith; it has nothing to do with the kind of knowledge that is based on scientific inquiry. … Do people believe in the sun or the moon, or the changing seasons, or the chairs they’re sitting on? When we want to understand something strange, something previously unknown to anyone, we have to begin with an entirely different set of questions. What is it? How does it work?”

That’s what the Pentagon U.F.O. program has been focusing on, making it eminently newsworthy. And to be clear: U.F.O.s don’t mean aliens. Unidentified means we don’t know what they are, only that they demonstrate capabilities that do not appear to be possible through currently available technology.

In our reporting, we’ve focused on how the Department of Defense, the Office of Naval Intelligence and members of two Senate committees are engaged with this topic. Current officials are now concerned about the potential threat represented by the very real, advanced technological objects: how close they can come to our fighter jets, sometimes causing a near miss, and the risk that our adversaries may acquire the technology demonstrated by the objects before we do.

So if U.F.O.s are no longer a matter of belief, what are they and how do they do what they do?

And if technology has been retrieved from downed objects, what better way to try to understand how they work?

Our previous stories were relatively easy to document with Department of Defense videos of U.F.O.s and pilot eyewitness accounts backed up by Navy hazard reports of close encounters with small speeding objects.

But our latest article provided a more daunting set of challenges, since we dealt with the possible existence of retrieved materials from U.F.O.s. Going from data on a distant object in the sky to the possession of a retrieved one on the ground makes a leap that many find hard to accept and that clearly demands extraordinary evidence.

Numerous associates of the Pentagon program, with high security clearances and decades of involvement with official U.F.O. investigations, told us they were convinced such crashes have occurred, based on their access to classified information. But the retrieved materials themselves, and any data about them, are completely off-limits to anyone without clearances and a need to know.

by Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: NYT/US Navy

[ed. See: No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public (NYT).]

Mitch McConnell Could Rescue Millions. He's Going On Vacation

The worst economic news on Thursday was not the official announcement that the American economy shrank at an annualized rate of 32.9 percent in the second quarter of 2020 — a grim quantification of the pain caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

No, the really bad news was the lack of action on Capitol Hill.

Congress needs to extend the emergency aid programs that were created in March to help Americans endure a broad suspension of economic activity. Instead, even as the pandemic rages on, Congress is allowing those aid programs to expire.

People who lost jobs during the pandemic have received $600 a week from the federal government on top of standard unemployment benefits. For many, the money is all that has kept them from going hungry and has allowed them to stay in their homes. It has prevented a significant increase in the share of Americans living in poverty. But those payments end this week, even as unemployment remains at a level last experienced during the Great Depression.

The federal government also is ending a moratorium on evictions, as well as a program that provides aid to small businesses.

Among those pleading for aid that hasn’t come: state and local governments starved of tax revenue. School districts that need money for safety equipment. Hospitals caring for the victims of the pandemic. Elections officials bracing for November.

The abject failure to act is not the fault of Congress in a collective sense. House Democrats passed a serviceable aid bill more than two months ago. Responsibility for the current debacle rests specifically and squarely on the shoulders of the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, and the other 52 Senate Republicans.

From the moment Congress passed the last big coronavirus aid bill, in March, it has been a matter of public record that the aid was going to end in August.

For a time, there was reason to hope that the worst of the pandemic could be over by now, too. But it has been clear for weeks that the United States has failed to control the pandemic and that many Americans still would need economic aid beyond July. Yet Mr. McConnell and his caucus chose to spend the summer confirming federal judges rather than confronting the crisis.

Only in recent days have Republicans belatedly begun a frantic effort to devise a coherent response to the crisis. Like students who wait until the night before an assignment is due, they have pleaded for more time and asked if they could submit a part of the work. The nation will suffer the consequences.

Mr. McConnell put forward a proposal on Monday that included billions of dollars for new F-35 jet fighters, but not a penny in aid for state and local governments. In any event, it quickly became clear that many Senate Republicans were not exactly on board. “There’s no consensus on anything,” said Mr. McConnell’s deputy, Senator John Cornyn of Texas. Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, called the proposal “a mess.”

Lawmaking is laborious and rarely proceeds in a straight line. If the calendar still said June, there would be less reason to worry about these convolutions.

But behaving in late July as if it were still June is a recipe for disaster.

Even with the infusion of trillions of dollars in federal aid since March, many Americans are struggling to ride out the crisis. Almost 40 million people do not expect to be able to make their next rent or mortgage payment. Almost 30 million Americans said they did not have enough to eat during the week ending July 21. Last week, for the 19th straight week, more than a million people filed fresh claims for unemployment benefits.

Grim as those numbers may be, the United States is on the verge of an even deeper crisis.

Ernie Tedeschi, an economist at Evercore ISI, a financial research firm, estimates that failing to resume the federal unemployment payments would cause a drop in consumer spending large enough to eliminate about 1.7 million jobs — roughly the magnitude of job losses during the recessions of the early 1990s and the early 2000s.

Britt Coundiff of Indianapolis is living on unemployment benefits after losing her job at an art-house cinema. Without the federal payments, she’ll be left with a weekly state payment of $193. She told Talmon Joseph Smith of The Times, “With two kids and rent and groceries, that is not enough for us to survive.”

On Thursday, Senate Republicans proposed an inadequate stopgap: a narrow extension of supplemental unemployment benefits. Instead of continuing the $600 weekly payments, however, Republicans proposed cutting the sum to $200 a week, through the end of the year. That would replace only a portion of the income of the average unemployed worker, which is reasonable in normal times; it encourages people to find jobs. But in the midst of a pandemic, with few jobs available, the benefit cut is an act of pointless cruelty.

Democrats refused to accept the proposal, and Republicans refused to do anything more.

The result: More than 20 million unemployed Americans are about to lose $600 a week. They need the money. They can’t find jobs. And the Senate is leaving for vacation.

by Editorial Board, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Michael Houtz; photograph by Alamy

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[ed. See also: Screwing Up Is What We Do (LARB) |  Read more:

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They Will Kill The Post Office If They Can Get Away With It

Conservatives have always been very blunt about their opposition to the United States Postal Service. Milton Friedman said plainly: privatize it. On the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, a McKinsey partner says the agency is “obsolete” and must be “phased out,” that its popularity is solely due to “nostalgia.” The Trump administration has not tried to disguise its intentions. Its “Delivering Government Solutions in the 2st Century” document announces plainly that the administration wants to privatize the service, turning it into a “private postal operator that delivers mail fewer days per week and to more central locations (not door delivery).” The administration says:

A private entity would also have greater ability to adjust product pricing in response to changes in demand or operating costs. Freeing USPS to more fully negotiate pay and benefits rather than prescribing participation in costly Federal personnel benefit programs, and allowing it to follow private sector practices in compensation and labor relations, could further reduce costs.

So: a post office that operated (1) to serve investor profits rather than the public good, (2) has higher prices (3) pays lower wages and cuts workers’ benefits and (4) delivers a few days a week, and not door-to-door but to “central locations” that you have to shlep your packages from. This is the dream!

It sounds awful, yes. But conservatives are always going to be committed to privatizing the post office, no matter what. This is because they hold firmly to an ideological conviction that government is incapable of working as well as private, for profit-companies. They believe, as a matter of religious faith rather than evidence, that the public sector is necessarily ineffective, even when the USPS is ranked the most efficient postal service in the world, beating out many privatized postal services.

If a government agency were to function well, it would threaten right-wing ideology in a very serious way. When public services work well, they make it difficult to convince people of the argument that strong public institutions are the “road to serfdom” and that the welfare state is a form of slavery. Look at the National Health Service in Britain: despite the right-wing myths in America about its uselessness, the NHS is so popular among Britons that a Conservative prime minister like Boris Johnson has to praise it highly and pay tribute to its greatness. Once people have experienced good free-at-point-of-use public services, they like them, and they don’t want to get rid of them.

This creates an incentive for conservatives in government to make the user experience of government as dreadful as possible. If people absolutely hate every interaction they have with public airports or schools or the DMV, they will certainly be more receptive to the argument that government cannot succeed and must be turned over to for-profit corporations. Nevermind that in other countries, public schools and public airports function perfectly well, thus disproving the idea that the problem is that ours are public rather than that ours are poorly-run. Americans are rarely told about what other countries are like, so we do not get to see that you can eliminate private schools almost entirely and still have an excellent education system.

Donald Trump has insisted that he wants the USPS to raise prices on packages, possibly “by up to four times,” and threatened to withhold coronavirus aid to the agency if they did not increase prices. USPS packages are already not cheap and go up constantly, and Trump’s idea would make the USPS more expensive than FedEx and UPS. The postal service is the most popular government agency, with over 90% of Americans wanting it to receive renewed financial assistance from the U.S. government. A good way to try to destroy that public goodwill is to do what Trump wants to do: jack up prices and to delay mail deliveries.

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

Image: uncredited
[ed. For an example of the "inefficiency" set-up, see also: USPS workers sound alarm about new policies that may affect 2020 mail-in voting CNN.]

Cancel Culture: A Taxonomy of Fear

We live in a time of personal timorousness and collective mercilessness.

There might seem to be a contradiction between being fearful and fearless, between weighing every word you say and attacking others with abandon. But as more and more topics become too risky to discuss outside of the prevailing orthodoxies, it makes sense to constantly self-censor, feeling unbound only when part of a denunciatory pack.

Institutions that are supposed to be guardians of free expression—academia and journalism in particular—are becoming enforcers of conformity. Campuses have bureaucracies that routinely undermine free speech and due process. Now, these practices are breaching the ivy wall. They are coming to a high school or corporate HR office near you.

The cultural rules around hot button issues are ever-expanding. It’s as if a daily script went out describing what’s acceptable, and those who flub a line—or don’t even know a script exists—are rarely given the benefit of the doubt, no matter how benign their intent. Naturally, people are deciding the best course is to shut up. It makes sense to be part of the silenced majority when the price you pay for an errant tweet or remark can be the end of your livelihood.

Do these problems really matter so long as we have a president who daily tramples on rights, civil discourse, and the rule of law? They do. Of course, we must keep our focus on the danger this administration presents. But it is also our moral and strategic obligation to vigorously defend the principles of a free society. Upholding these values will help us defeat Trumpism.

The process by which sinners are punished and apostates expelled can seem random. But there are rules and patterns to the ways in which speech is being silenced. Analyzing and understanding these can help us stand up to the illiberalism of this moment, whether it comes from the left or the right.

To that end, here is my taxonomy of fear.

The Perils of Safety (...)

Confronted with words, ideas, or decisions they dislike, a growing number of people are asserting that they are in danger of suffering psychological or even bodily harm. But when one party asserts that a debate threatens their very well-being, it is hard to deliberate on policy—or topics such as race and gender. The result is a narrowing of the space for public discussion and an inability to teach ever more ideas and books.

Contamination by Association (...)

VanDerWerff’s note certainly illustrates safetyism. Going one step further, it also assumes the truth of a principle of “contamination by association.” People, the logic goes, cannot only be made unsafe by the beliefs or statements of their colleagues but also by those with whom their colleagues associate.

Intent Is Irrelevant (...)

Whether or not the accused had an intent to commit wrong-doing is a central question in many criminal prosecutions. Though it might be less obvious, understanding someone’s intent is just as crucial to our social functioning. If we decline to understand why others acted the way they did, or to take into account whether they intended any harm, we multiply the number of violations we perceive—and often end up treating benign people as moral wrongdoers.

Report to the Authorities (...)

Of course, some things do need to be reported. But when you live in a society in which people are primed to disclose all discomfort to authority figures, trust and goodwill quickly erode. It also means being aware that you yourself might end up as the subject of a complaint. As Lukianoff and Haidt write, “life in call-out culture requires constant vigilance, fear, and self-censorship.” But shaming someone, especially when done publicly as part of a group, “can award status.”

One of the most disturbing examples of this trend is that high school students are now being encouraged to excavate each other’s social media, looking for instances of racial insensitivity and making them public. “Many students believe the only consequence their peers will take seriously is having their college admissions letter rescinded,” reports the New York Times. As a sixteen-year-old administrator of a social media account exposing the alleged racism of her classmates explained, “people who go to college end up becoming racist lawyers and doctors. I don’t want people like that to keep getting jobs.” (...)

To be sure, being shunned by your peers or having your admission to college rescinded is not the same as going to jail. But in the age of the internet, social censure can, much like a criminal record, mark someone for life. Do we really want a world in which someone’s educational and professional prospects are diminished because of something they said—genuinely stupid or offensive though it may have been—when they were fifteen?

A Chilling Effect

Some on the left still claim cancel culture doesn’t exist. Mass firings, they say, are not taking place. Only a few people—who probably deserved it!—have lost their jobs.

But it doesn’t require mass dismissals to put many people in a genuine state of unease and intimidation. A few chilling examples are enough to spread the fear to a lot of people that an inadvertent error can destroy your life. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat writes, “the goal isn’t to punish everyone, or even very many someones; it’s to shame or scare just enough people to make the rest conform.” (...)

Many people ask why any of this should matter in the age of Donald Trump—a president who attacks free speech, stokes bigotry and division, and believes he is above the law. It matters because we have seen what happened when his enablers on the right failed to stand up to the worst impulses of their leader. These enablers are now morally responsible for the tragic consequences of their inaction.

We better make sure that we don’t end up committing the same sin. For as Thomas Chatterton Williams writes, “ a generation unable or disinclined to engage with ideas and interlocutors that make them uncomfortable … open[s] the door—accessible from both the left and the right—to various forms of authoritarianism.”

by Emily Yoffe, Persuasion |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. Of course, social media plays a massive role in making this phenomenon worse, but that's just stating the obvious. It's also possible to point to mass media's herding tendencies (and the economic incentives that support it), and general balkanization of information as consumers rely on niche sources for news.]

How Social Isolation Affects the Brain

Daisy Fancourt was at her home in Surrey in southeast England when the UK government formally announced a nationwide lockdown. Speaking in a televised address on March 23, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson laid out a suite of measures designed to curb the spread of COVID-19, including closing public spaces and requiring people to stay home except for exercise and essential tasks. For Fancourt, an epidemiologist at University College London (UCL), the announcement meant more than just a change to her daily life. It was the starting gun for a huge study, weeks in the planning, that would investigate the effects of enforced isolation and other pandemic-associated changes on the British public.

In more normal times, Fancourt and her colleagues study how social factors such as isolation influence mental and physical health. Before Johnson’s late-March announcement, the team had been watching as Italy, and subsequently other countries in Europe, began closing down public spaces and enforcing restrictions on people’s movements. They realized it wouldn’t be long before the UK followed suit. “We felt we had to start immediately collecting data,” Fancourt says. She and her colleagues rapidly laid the groundwork for a study that would track some of the effects of lockdown in real time. Between March 24 and the middle of June, the study had recruited more than 70,000 participants to fill out weekly online surveys, and in some cases answer questions in telephone interviews, about wellbeing, mental health, and coping strategies.

This project and others like it underway in Australia, the United States, and elsewhere aim to complement a broader literature on how changes in people’s interactions with those around them influence their biology. Even before COVID-19 began its global spread, millions of people were already what researchers consider to be socially isolated—separated from society, with few personal relationships and little communication with the outside world. According to European Union statistics, more than 7 percent of residents say they meet up with friends or relatives less than once a year. Surveys in the UK, meanwhile, show that half a million people over the age of 60 usually spend every day alone.

These figures are concerning to public health experts, because scientific research has revealed a link between social isolation—along with negative emotions such as loneliness that often accompany it—and poor health. “We are seeing a really growing body of evidence,” says Fancourt, “that’s showing how isolation and loneliness are linked in with incidence of different types of disease [and] with premature mortality.” Alongside myriad connections to poor physical health, including obesity and cardiovascular problems, a range of possible effects on the human brain have now been documented: Social isolation is associated with increased risk of cognitive decline and dementia, as well as mental health consequences such as depression and anxiety.

It’ll be years before researchers understand whether and how measures enacted during the pandemic play into any of these risks. The sort of isolation people are experiencing right now is unprecedented, and is compounded with other pressures, such as fear of disease and financial strain. But now more than ever, it’s important to study the effects of social isolation, and potential means to mitigate it, says Stephanie Cacioppo, a social neuroscientist and cognitive psychologist at the University of Chicago. “We’re a social species,” she says. “We really need others to survive.”

The cognitive effects of prolonged social isolation

In 1972, French adventurer and scientist Michel Siffre famously shut himself in a cave in Texas for more than six months—what still clocks in as one of the longest self-isolation experiments in history. Meticulously documenting the effects on his mind over those 205 days, Siffre wrote that he could “barely string thoughts” together after a couple months. By the five-month mark, he was reportedly so desperate for company that he tried (unsuccessfully) to befriend a mouse.

This kind of experiment, and less extreme isolation periods such as those experienced by spaceship crews or scientists working in remote Antarctic research stations, has offered glimpses of some of the cognitive and mental effects of sensory and social deprivation. People routinely report confusion, changes in personality, and episodes of anxiety and depression. A crueler version of those experiments is continually underway in prisons across the world. In the US alone, tens of thousands of incarcerated people are in long-term solitary confinement, with devastating and lasting effects on cognitive and mental health. (See “Extreme Isolation” below.)

For most of human society, however, social isolation acts in more insidious ways than these “experiments” capture, often disproportionately affecting vulnerable members of the population, such as the elderly, and with effects accumulating slowly such that they may go unnoticed for many years, if not decades. The effects of this subtler sort of social isolation, which some health researchers and psychologists have already described as a public health risk, are better observed in longer-term studies that look for links between a person’s social connections and how the mind functions.

Many studies have found that chronic social isolation is indeed associated with cognitive decline, and that isolation often precedes decline by several years. One 2013 study, for example, measured cognitive function at two time points in a cohort of more than 6,000 older individuals taking part in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). People who reported having fewer social contacts and activities at the beginning of the study, researchers found, showed greater decline in cognitive function, as measured by verbal fluency and memory recall tasks, after four years.

by Catherine Offord, The Scientist |  Read more:

Image: Istock.com, Maria Zamchy

Julian Lage & Chris Eldridge

Google’s Top Search Result? Surprise! It’s Google

In Google’s early years, users would type in a query and get back a page of 10 “blue links” that led to different websites. “We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible,” co-founder Larry Page said in 2004.

Today, Google often considers that “right place” to be Google, an investigation by The Markup has found.

We examined more than 15,000 recent popular queries and found that Google devoted 41 percent of the first page of search results on mobile devices to its own properties and what it calls “direct answers,” which are populated with information copied from other sources, sometimes without their knowledge or consent.

When we examined the top 15 percent of the page, the equivalent of the first screen on an iPhone X, that figure jumped to 63 percent. For one in five searches in our sample, links to external websites did not appear on the first screen at all.

A trending search in our data for “myocardial infarction” shows how Google has piled up its products at the top. It returned:

• Google’s dictionary definition.
• A “people also ask” box that expanded to answer related questions without leaving the search results page.
• A “knowledge panel,” which is an abridged encyclopedia entry with various links.
• And a “related conditions” carousel leading to various new Google searches for other diseases.

All of these appeared before search results by WebMD, Harvard University, and Medscape. In fact, a user would have to scroll nearly halfway down the page—about 42 percent—before reaching the first “organic” result in that search.

Google’s decision to place its products above competitors’ and to present “answers” on the search page has led to lawsuits and regulatory fines. A number of websites said it killed their revenues—and their companies. Founders of both innovative startups and companies that had been around for a decade or more told The Markup that once Google started placing its product first, they didn’t stand a chance.

Travel research firm Skift wrote in November that the entire online travel industry is suffering. “The fact that Google is leveraging its dominance as a search engine into taking market share away from travel competitors is no longer even debatable.”

The choice to highlight its own products has been deliberate: Internal emails unearthed by the European Commission in an antitrust investigation show Google staffers discussing the need to place its comparison-shopping product at the top of the search results to garner traffic. An email the following year noted traffic to the retooled product had more than doubled from four million to 10 million visits, and “most of this growth is from improved google.com integration.”

Sally Hubbard, an expert on antitrust and technology companies with the Open Markets Institute, said Google’s decisions in search have huge implications. “Imagine you go to the library, and the card catalog is picking and choosing what book to get based on what makes the library the most money.”

Google makes five times as much revenue through advertising on its own properties as it does selling ad space on third-party websites.

by Adrianne Jeffries and Leon Yin, The Markup | Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: How We Analyzed Google’s Search Results (The Markup).]

ARM Support Lets Smartphone Users Help Find COVID-19 Cure

Scientists, biochemists and health experts have been working feverishly to find a cure for COVID-19, one of the most severe pandemics of our lifetimes.

This week, researchers announced a development that will allow the average person on the street to join in the battle.

Neocortix, a company specializing in creating supercomputers from a massive shared network of cellphones, announced Tuesday the release of support for ARM64, the architecture underpinning the majority of processors running today's cellphones. This means that users of tens of millions of Android phones, ARM-based servers and Raspberry Pi devices can use those resources to contribute to the effort to combat the coronavirus.

Users simply run an app that taps into their device's idling cycles to contribute to massive computational projects exploring the structure of coronavirus, predicting its trajectory and analyzing potential cures. The combined power of a massive army of personal devices exceeds the capabilities of virtually all of the most powerful computers today.

"As we head towards a world of a trillion connected devices, developer innovation is helping to tackle some of the world's most complex challenges from the endpoint and edge to the cloud," said Paul Williamson, an ARM vice president and general manager. "Arm-based technology can contribute spare compute capacity to critical COVID-19 research and it's incredible to see Arm's global developer ecosystem come together to support this effort."

Neocortix is working with two distributed computing power projects that are making inroads towards a cure. They have relied on shared computing to conduct their research, but until now they were restricted to volunteer parties using only non-ARM-based computational power.

Folding@home, based at Washington University in St. Louis, earlier this year uncovered novel protein structures that were previously not accessible to researchers. The research organization's web site explains how it utilizes the shared resources of participants:

"The project uses statistical simulation methodology that is a paradigm shift from traditional computing methods. As part of the client-server model network architecture, the volunteered machines each receive pieces of a simulation (work units), complete them, and return them to the project's database servers, where the units are compiled into an overall simulation. Volunteers can track their contributions on the Folding@home website, which makes volunteers' participation competitive and encourages long-term involvement."

The other distributed computing project is being conducted by Rosetta@home, established by the Baker Laboratory at the University of Washington. The group recently accurately predicted the atomic-scale structure of the SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) protein weeks before it was definitively measured in a laboratory setting. Thanks to a shared computational network consisting of more than 100,000 volunteer computers, the group also successfully created antiviral proteins that neutralize coronavirus and optimized antiviral drugs for animal testing trials.

"We've been watching the increasing computational power of phones and other mobile devices for years," said Greg Bowman, director of Folding@home. The expansion of research afforded by ARM64 support "provided the perfect opportunity to tap into these resources to accelerate our COVID-19 research."

All the average citizen with a cellphone has to do is fire up the Neocortix app, ideally during a period of low phone activity, and link into the massive computational network crunching massive numbers.

In fact, users can earn a little spare change. According to Neocortix, it will pay users up to $80 a year if they run the app while their phones charge for eight hours each night. If they have a spare phone they rarely use, leaving it on continuously while connected throughout the year can earn them $240.

by Peter Grad, Tech Xplore |  Read more:

Image: CDC

Stump and Nails

Adopted from the German game... Stump is played with a bad ass stump, hammer, nails, and LOTS of beer. I have played the game with many different groups over the years and the rules are always different. This is WRONG and straight-up SACRILEGE! For the sake of the integrity of the game, I will list what I consider the Unofficial Rules of The Game, as supplied by WorldStump.com.

These guys are the foremost authority on the game, and the following Rules of Play comes from their site-

Before the Game Starts

1. One person should be designated to prepare the stump for play. After the first game, it is common for the winner to assume the honor of preparing the stump for the next game.

2. To prepare the stump, determine how many players (or teams) will participate in the game. One nail should be hammered into the top surface of the stump for each player. The nails should be hammered into the stump straight and as little as possible, however, they should be far enough in that they are sturdy and will not fling out if they are hit at an angle (usually an inch or so will do). The nails should be spread evenly in a circle around the surface of the stump.

3. Each player “claims” a nail by placing his or her foot on the stump next to the nail. This will be his nail for the duration of the game. It is generally understood that people will claim the nail directly in front of them, though this does not necessarily have to be the case.

4. Each player must have a beer (can, bottle, cup, or other suitable container containing beer) on his or her person (defined as being supported entirely by said person and their clothing, not by any other objects) at all times. The only exception to this rule is during Home Improvement (see below), when a player can legally put his or her beer down until Home Improvement is completed.

5. It is general practice to use the claw of the hammer to open your beer, even if this means disrupting the course of play.

Rules of Play

The winner is the last player whose nail remains standing.

1. Each player, in turn, shall toss the hammer such that it makes at least one full 360-degree rotation before he touches it again. The player shall not be allowed more than one toss per turn for any reason (unless it is part of a Trick – see Rule 2a).

2. Once the hammer is caught the player shall attempt to bring it down immediately and without hesitation upon an opponent’s nail, driving it into the stump. Any attempt at “cocking” or “aiming” the hammer shall be considered foul play and subject to criticism.

2a. The standard toss is a back flip, such that the hammer flips claw first. However, all non-standard tosses are acceptable and encouraged, provided the toss does not violate Rules 1 or 2. Non-standard tosses are often referred to as “Tricks”. Click here for a list of Tricks and Trick Ideas. If the Trick includes a double toss (for example Under the Leg to Around the Back) it must remain a continuous motion and should not be an attempt to gain better control after a sub-par first toss. Attempting Tricks is considered to add general excitement to the game, and if successful, carries with it the potential for increased penalties for opponents (see Rule 3).

3. If a player succeeds in striking an opponent’s nail, and the nail becomes visibly shorter or bent, that opponent shall sip from his beer an amount proportionate to the damage inflicted, with additional amounts consumed for any showmanship or Tricks displayed in the toss and catch (see Rule 2a), in which case the number of sips should be a direct reflection of the victim’s respect for the Trick or showmanship.

4. If any player sees sparks resulting from the hammer striking a nail, it is a Social. Every player must take a sip from his own beer. The common announcement one makes when he sees sparks is “Spaaks!” – a throwback to the game’s suspected New England origin.

5. If a player drops the hammer during the toss, it is considered a Spazz and the player loses his turn. The player must take a sip from his own beer.

5a. If a player drops the hammer during the toss, and the hammer comes to rest directly on top of the stump, the person in the direction the handle of the hammer is pointing must chug his entire beer. The toss is still considered a Spazz, and the player who tossed must take a sip from his own beer.

6. If a player’s nail should become bent during the game, he may, during his turn only, choose to fix his own nail. This process is called “Home Improvement”. The player can take as long as he likes to fix the nail to his satisfaction, though his efforts are subject to comment by the other players. It is considered honorable to ensure that the nail is straight and in a position to be hit cleanly.

6a. During Home Improvement, it is generally expected that all other players will place a foot on the stump for stability.

7. A player is eliminated from the game (and thereby takes no more turns) once any part of the head of his nail passes below the level of the surface of the stump (including bending over the edge of the stump without actually entering it). A generally accepted test of whether a player is still active is whether one can pass a fingernail underneath the head of the nail without obstruction. Any obstruction of free movement shall result in the player being deemed inactive.

8. Should a player’s nail bend such that the head passes below the surface of the stump, thereby eliminating the player, this player can be resurrected if another player strikes the nail, regardless of intent, in such a way that the head of the nail emerges from the surface of the stump. The resurrected player will re-enter the game in the same rotation pattern as before elimination.

9. Inactive players should continue to comply with Rules 4, 5a, and 6a.

After the Game

Upon completion of a game (when only one nail remains standing), the players shall arrange themselves in order, clockwise around the stump, from first place to last place according to the results of the game.

Each player should ensure that he or she has sufficient beer remaining. If not, he or she should prepare another beer.

A “Waterfall” shall commence, whereby all players simultaneously begin chugging their beers (commonly after a toast to “The Stump”). The first place player can stop chugging at any time. The second place player must not stop chugging until after the first place player has stopped. The third place player must not stop chugging until after the second place player has stopped, and so on until the last place player chooses to stop drinking.

It is considered foul play to “cheat” during the Waterfall, incorporating such tactics as pretending to drink, drinking very slowly, or creating a “lake” in your mouth.

It is common for the winner of the game, should he choose to do so, to drive his own nail fully into the stump.

The following are additional rules of play and/or acceptable variations of the rules-

by Jared Vincent, Unofficial Networks |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. My buddy Jerry and I were talking the other night about obscure bands and he mentioned one he'd seen in a Texas bar years ago while playing Nails (fyi...band's name was Sleeze Beeze - think Def Leppard, but possibly sleazier). Anyway, he also noted that it wasn't a particularly good idea to mix the two - that particular band, and a bunch of guys with hammers. So, I'm like, "Nails? What's that?" Here's his version:

Apparently it all starts with 8 in. nails pounded into a stump, each about a dollar bill deep (the dollar bills all have to be standing up straight on end to begin). From there everyone takes turns whacking away until your nail is the last one standing. There might be some intricate game theory involved (such as it is), so teamwork could be helpful, or you might even pound your own nail in a ways from time to time just to keep it from being an easy target. Whatever. And this goes on for like, however long it takes - 20 minutes or more depending on the number of beers consumed. Classic. See also: How to Play Nails (Stump) - with videos (Instructables Outside).]

Seth Armstrong, Hillside, 2019
via:

Fake Fans, Fake Invitations

Those fake baseball fans are creeping people out (The Verge)

[ed. I think I'm losing my mind. In other baseball news, see also: Trump Won’t Throw First Pitch At Yankees Game Because No One Asked Him To (Vanity Fair).]

A Message to the City (Seattle) from Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

"Sometimes, I feel like an entire culture has misplaced something, and it's... everything."

Good morning. It's Monday, July 27, and it's supposed to be blazing hot today—hottest day of the year so far.

Also blazing hot? The talents of novelist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, whose fourth novel, The Freezer Door, comes out in November.

There's a blurb on it from Maggie Nelson (!!) that says: "In a happy paradox common to great literature, it’s a book about not belonging that made me feel deeply less alone... I stand deeply inspired and instructed by its great wit, candor, inventiveness, and majesty."

Mattilda reads a little from The Freezer Door in her message today, but first she cracks: "I wrote a book about alienation, and then everything got worse."

by The Stranger |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

When Grandparents Are Estranged From Their Grandchildren

Since my own granddaughter’s birth almost four years ago, I’ve spent hours caring for her each week.

In this, I’m just plain lucky. We have stayed tight because I could reach her apartment in 75 minutes (in pre-pandemic times) by public transit, and because I haven’t inadvertently alienated my daughter or son-in-law.

But almost every time I write about grandparents, someone expresses anguish in the comments section about being unable to see or even call a beloved grandchild. Estrangement brings heartache I can’t truly imagine.

“You learn that you don’t have the relationship you thought you had with your children,” said a doctor in Western Massachusetts who is an estranged grandparent. Like several I spoke with, she asked for anonymity because she hoped for a future cease-fire.

She hasn’t seen her son and his seven children since 2015, except at a family funeral where they didn’t speak. He and his wife have blocked her email, she said, and sent gifts back unopened. “I feel like I’m being erased,” the doctor said.

How often this happens remains an unanswered question. In a 2012 survey of nearly 2,000 grandparents conducted for AARP, 2 percent said they never saw the grandchild who lived furthest away — but distance or illness could also account for that.

The numbers could well be higher. At heart, estrangement from grandchildren reflects estrangement from adult children, the gatekeeper middle generation that can promote or deny access. (...)

What leads to estrangement? Dr. Coleman, who works with estranged families and conducts webinars on the subject, puts divorce — in either generation — high on the list. “Children of any age can blame one parent for a divorce or feel a need to ally with one or another, or have problems with the new person the divorced parent brings into the family,” he said.

In the younger generation, divorce can create estrangement if a custodial parent no longer wants an ex’s family involved.

Sometimes, longtime grievances from adult children’s own childhoods surface when they become parents themselves. “Maybe they had an uneasy truce, but now that they have their own kids they’re anxious that their parents will hurt their children in the same way,” Dr. Coleman said.

by Paula Span, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Andrea Ucini

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift Is Singing About More Than Taylor Swift—and Rediscovering Herself in the Process (The Ringer)

... there’s no denying that Folklore, easily the most subdued and monochromatic Swift album yet, paints a rich inner landscape with just that one color (iron gray), and it rises to the grim occasion of sinking into a maudlin reverie worthy of this terrible year of global unease and self-quarantine. It’s a Cling to a Grand Piano Bobbing in a Stormy Ocean album for a Cling to a Grand Piano Bobbing in a Stormy Ocean era. Never a bombastic singer as either country stars or pop stars go, Swift sounds as muted as ever here, contemplative and relatably downbeat even when she’s singing a whole-ass song about the vibrant woman who used to live in her $17.75 million Rhode Island mansion.

Yes, “The Last Great American Dynasty,” as upbeat and propulsive as this record gets, is a very explicit tribute to Rebekah West Harkness, the eccentric multiple divorceé and Standard Oil heiress/widow who filled her Rhode Island mansion’s pool with champagne and her fish tank with scotch; “stole her neighbor’s dog and dyed it key-lime green,” a splendid detail after Swift’s own master-songwriter heart; and upon her death in 1982, had her ashes placed in a $250,000 urn designed by Salvador Dalí. (This song is also your first opportunity to hear Swift sing the word “bitch.”) Naturally, Harkness has inspired multiple lengthy explainer blog posts in the past 72 hours, because Swift wrote a song about her, because Swift owns her house now. (The refrain “She had a marvelous time ruining everything” becomes “I had a marvelous time ruining everything.”) And wow is it impressive, genuinely impressive, how charming this song is given the fact that it’s a white pop star, in July 2020, singing a song about her $17.75 million Rhode Island mansion.

[ed. The song Cardigan has nearly 30 million YouTube views, five days after it's release. I've never been much of a Taylor Swift fan but you have to admit she does have her hands pretty firmly grasped on the throat of American pop music and culture these days (and the songs on this album are actually pretty good).]