According to documentation (PDF) we obtained from Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, in 1973 an area of land near Nichinan City was designated as “experimental forestry” and one of the experiments was to try and measure the effect of tree spacing on growth. The experiment was carried out by planting trees in 10 degree radial increments forming 10 concentric circles of varying diameters.

Part of what makes the crop circles so alluring are their concave shape, which was an unexpected result of the experiment that would suggest tree density does indeed affect growth. The trees are due to be harvested in about 5 years but officials are now considering preserving the crop circles.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/12/tree-crop-circles-emerge-in-japan/

Daniel (née Mallory) Ortberg <3 :

There’s something truly wonderful about referring to a procedure as specific as a bilateral mastectomy with a term as blandly ominous as top surgery.

Is it serious, doc? “Yeah, son. I’m afraid there’s nothing to do but schedule you for top surgery.”

What parts of me will be affected, doc? “The top.”

What are you gonna do to the top of me? “Surgery. We’re going in and we’re gonna have to Surger your Top.”

“Just get rid of the whole thing, doctor,” I imagined myself saying generously, swinging my legs from the examination table. “Take the whole top off. I want my neighbors to have a clear view to the sea. Give it away to the deserving poor, who may have no top to speak of. I’ll get by just fine with a bottom and a middle. No top for me — I’ll get by.”

Daniel Ortberg: Top surgery was the best $6,250 I ever spent – Vox

The day’s just getting started, and the Trump house of cards is already crumbling. This morning, Special Counsel Robert Mueller dropped a legal bombshell on the administration by filing court documents announcing a plea bargain with Trump’s confidant’s lawyer’s friend’s associate Gorpman, and Gorpman’s testimony could spell major trouble for Bleemer, which must be terrifying for Trump.

Legal Bombshell: Mueller Flipped Trump’s Confidant’s Lawyer’s Friend’s Associate Gorpman (Who Could Testify Against Bleemer!) And It’s Not Even Lunchtime

Oh look, a whole new way that Facebook has violated your privacy!

Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.

The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.

Oh, and also…

Facebook empowered Apple to hide from Facebook users all indicators that its devices were asking for data. Apple devices also had access to the contact numbers and calendar entries of people who had changed their account settings to disable all sharing, the records show.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/facebook-privacy.html

The world is in the midst of the greatest movement of people since the end of the World War II, and the combination of increasing global inequality and climate change will only increase its pace. Two hundred million people are on the move now, and as many as a billion might become migratory by 2050. Citizenship, the only tool we have for guaranteeing rights and responsibilities in a world of nation-states, is subject to increasing pressure to adapt. Today’s virtual citizenship caters mostly to the wealthy, or the poor. Could tomorrow provide new opportunities for everyone? And if possible, will the results look more like what’s been done for the global elite or for the most disadvantaged?

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/virtual-citizenship-for-sale/553733/

https://www.giannisarcone.com/wp/blog/category/kinetic-art/

Wow, neat 🙂

Click through for video.

Did you know that the sushi-making scene in Wes Anderson’s latest film Isle of Dogs took over a month to produce? In a recent time-lapse video, animator Andy Biddle (who has previously worked on Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox and the Grand Budapest Hotel) shows the detailed steps he took for the film’

A Time-Lapse Look at the Making of Isle of Dogs’s Animated Sushi Master

The millions of dots on the map trace highways, side streets and bike trails — each one following the path of an anonymous cellphone user.

One path tracks someone from a home outside Newark to a nearby Planned Parenthood, remaining there for more than an hour. Another represents a person who travels with the mayor of New York during the day and returns to Long Island at night.

Yet another leaves a house in upstate New York at 7 a.m. and travels to a middle school 14 miles away, staying until late afternoon each school day. Only one person makes that trip: Lisa Magrin, a 46-year-old math teacher. Her smartphone goes with her.

An app on the device gathered her location information, which was then sold without her knowledge. It recorded her whereabouts as often as every two seconds, according to a database of more than a million phones in the New York area that was reviewed by The New York Times. While Ms. Magrin’s identity was not disclosed in those records, The Times was able to easily connect her to that dot.

The app tracked her as she went to a Weight Watchers meeting and to her dermatologist’s office for a minor procedure. It followed her hiking with her dog and staying at her ex-boyfriend’s home, information she found disturbing.

“It’s the thought of people finding out those intimate details that you don’t want people to know,” said Ms. Magrin, who allowed The Times to review her location data.

Like many consumers, Ms. Magrin knew that apps could track people’s movements. But as smartphones have become ubiquitous and technology more accurate, an industry of snooping on people’s daily habits has spread and grown more intrusive…

Source: Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret

Tackling climate change is a complicated undertaking, to say the least. But here’s a good rule of thumb for how to get started:

Electrify everything.

Replace technologies that still run on combustion, like gasoline vehicles and natural gas heating and cooling, with alternatives that run on electricity, like electric vehicles and heat pumps. Get as much of our energy consumption as possible hooked up to the power grid.

The need for electrification is well understood by climate and energy experts, but I’m not sure it has filtered down to the public yet; the consensus on it is fairly new. For decades, the conventional wisdom has been the other way around: Electricity was dirty and the process of generating it and transmitting it involved substantial losses, so from an energy conservation point of view, the best thing to do was often to burn fossil fuel on site in increasingly energy-efficient devices.

So why did the CW change?

https://www.vox.com/2016/9/19/12938086/electrify-everything

At the risk of oversimplifying, there are two broad “Russian collusion” theories. One lacks credibility. The other just got a slight boost yesterday when Jerome Corsi provided to the Washington Post what appears to be a draft statement of offense from the special counsel’s office. Let’s call them the James Bond theory and the Austin Powers theory. The James Bond theory is fading. The Austin Powers theory may well be true.

The heart of the James Bond theory is the unsupported Steele dossier. This is the tale of collusion that has long captivated elements of the left-wing media — involving alleged “kompromat,” clandestine meetings, financial leverage, and all the stuff of a classic spy story. According to this theory, collusion represented the marriage of a sophisticated Russian intelligence operation with a near-treasonous Trump campaign — apparently full of hyper-competent operatives who could sneak, undetected, into Europe for key meetings with Russian assets.

The James Bond theory, for example, puts Michael Cohen in Prague in 2016 to meet with Russians, or Paul Manafort in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to meet with Julian Assange — two reports with dubious (to put it charitably) sourcing that all too many members of the mediaswallowed whole. The James Bond theory makes Russian collusion and Trump cooperation dispositive in the election. This was the scheme that upended American democracy.

I’m sorry. I don’t buy it. Not yet. Not without actual, substantial evidence. Indeed, the evidence is so thin that it’s in the Trump team’s interests to keep it in the news. The media’s eagerness to fall for anonymous sources and lurid stories hurts their credibility. It helps the Trump team to make the case that this story is the story, and if this story is false, all collusion claims are false.

But there’s another version of the collusion tale.

This is the Austin Powers theory, and it’s supported by actual evidence. This is the picture that emerges not from anonymous allegations and Clinton campaign–funded opposition research but rather from the emails and documents publicly revealed so far. Under the Austin Powers theory, the Trump campaign had in its orbit and near-orbit a collection of comically inept crooks and grifters who were looking to gain any advantage they could — without regard for morality, law, or common sense.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/jerome-corsi-roger-stone-and-the-austin-powers-theory-of-russian-collusion/