https://www.businessinsider.com/senegal-building-2-billion-futuristic-city-inspired-by-nature-2018-9

The prevailing dietary wisdom of the 16th century, as presented in these medical guidebooks, relied on two assumptions: first, that the process of digesting foods was actually a form of cooking. Indeed, cooking stood as the basic metaphor for the systems that sustained all life. Seeds were cooked into plants; when the plants appeared above the ground, the heat of the sun cooked them into ripe fruits and grains. If humans gathered these foodstuffs, they could cook them further to create edible dishes. Finally, the internal heat of the body turned the food into blood. The body then expelled as feces what was not digestible. Excrement joined putrefying dead animals and plants to begin the life cycle again.

The second assumption about food and health in this scenario involved maintaining a proper equilibrium of bodily fluids by eating a suitably balanced diet. Doctors and chefs of the time believed that four fluids, or humors, circulated in the body: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. These humors corresponded to the four Aristotelian elements–air, water, fire and earth. Because blood was hot and moist, it corresponded to air; phlegm was cold and moist and thus resembled water; yellow bile was hot and dry, similar to fire; black bile was cold and dry, connected to earth.

Ideally, the human body was slightly warm and slightly moist, although in practice the exact balance varied from individual to individual, depending on variables such as age, sex and geographic location. Older people were believed to be colder and drier than younger ones; menstruating women colder and wetter than men; southern Europeans more hot-blooded than their neighbors to the north. The perfect meal, like the perfect human temperament, was slightly warm and slightly moist, but combinations away from this center could be used as mild dietary correctives to warm and moisten the elderly, dry out the moister sex, and calm down the southerner or perk up the northerner.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/birth-of-the-modern-diet-2006-12/

The thing is, I absolutely love programming languages. I work as a graphics and video game developer, which is thrilling and challenging work, but secretly I would rather be hacking on compilers. I love languages because, of everything I’ve encountered in computing, languages are by far the weirdest. They combine the brain-bending rigor of abstract math, the crushing pressures of capitalistic industry, and the irrational anxiety of a high school prom. The decision to adopt or avoid a language is always a mix of their perceived formal power (“Does this language even have this particular feature?”), employability (“Will this language get me a job?”), and popularity (“Does anyone important use this language anymore?”). I can’t think of another engineering tool that demands similar quasi-religious devotion from its users. Programming languages ask us to reshape our minds, and that makes them deeply personal and subjective.

Source: A crash course in compilers – Increment: Programming Languages

Who knew?

The story goes that Winston Churchill noticed that bricklayers at his Chartwell Estate wore a heavy boiler suit. Next he went to his shirtmaker Turnbull & Asser asking them to make a similar garment from a suit fabric. Winston Churchill was so thrilled with the result that he ordered a batch of siren suits in different fabrics.

The famous prime minister called his one-piece suit a “romper suit”. People dubbed it a siren suit though. When the sirens in London warned about bombers during WWII, Winston Churchill and citizens of London would swiftly put on a lightweight one-piece suit, “the siren suit”, before going to a bomb shelter.

https://sartorialnotes.com/2017/02/01/churchills-romper-suit-siren-suit/

https://therake.com/stories/style/the-overall-effect-and-call-of-the-siren-suit/

This is funny and good and worth reading, and I find a lot of those techniques useful in my own life 🙂

I’ve read many narratives about white people just touching black hair and I read them with my mouth open. Not because of the racism, even. Just because as a polite person the idea of just reaching out and touching anyone’s hair makes my eye twitch. When would it be appropriate? If there was a very large poisonous spider in their hair. If I was doing a magic trick. Or after six or more years of marriage.

There are exceptions. I pat the heads of toddlers I’ve known for more than six months. If tiny children volunteer to sit on my lap or ask to ride around on my back while I make horse noises, I make eye contact with their parents first and then comply. Afterwards I might skritch their toddler heads a little. I am not opposed to tousling in certain defined and appropriate circumstances.

But a whole class of problems goes away from my life because I see people as having around them a two or three foot invisible buffer. If there is a stray hair on their jacket I ask them if I can pluck it from them. If they don’t want that, they’ll do it themselves. If their name is now Susan, it’s Susan. Whatever happens inside that buffer is entirely up to them. It has nothing to do with me.

https://medium.com/s/story/how-to-be-polite-9bf1e69e888c

Fascinating and fairly alarming excerpt from Michael Lewis’ new book:

Chris Christie noticed a piece in the New York Times – that’s how it all started. The New Jersey governor had dropped out of the presidential race in February 2016 and thrown what support he had behind Donald Trump. In late April, he saw the article. It described meetings between representatives of the remaining candidates still in the race – Trump, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders – and the Obama White House. Anyone who still had any kind of shot at becoming president of the United States apparently needed to start preparing to run the federal government. The guy Trump sent to the meeting was, in Christie’s estimation, comically underqualified. Christie called up Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to ask why this critical job had not been handed to someone who actually knew something about government. “We don’t have anyone,” said Lewandowski.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/27/this-guy-doesnt-know-anything-the-inside-story-of-trumps-shambolic-transition-team

This is a painful read, and an important reminder that we have not yet finished with the excesses that began in the months after 9/11.

I have defended men and women on death row for nearly all of my thirty years as a lawyer, and have represented people caught up in the excesses of the “war on terror” since very shortly after that war was launched. For more than a decade, I have been counsel for Zayn al-Abedin Muhammad Hussein, known more widely as Abu Zubaydah. Abu Zubaydah was the first person immured in a “black site,” the clandestine prisons operated around the globe by the CIA from early 2002 to late 2006. He was the first prisoner to have his interrogation “enhanced,” and the only person subjected to all the DOJ-approved interrogation techniques, as well as a number that were never approved (including, for example, rectal rehydration). The infamous torture memo was, in fact, written specifically to legitimize Abu Zubaydah’s torture.

At the time of his capture and for years afterward, government officials took great pains to demonize Abu Zubaydah in order to justify his abuse. “The other day,” President George W. Bush announced at a Republican fundraiser in April 2002, “we hauled in a guy named Abu Zubaydah. He’s one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States. He’s not plotting and planning anymore. He’s where he belongs.” Various senior administration officials described Abu Zubaydah in comparably colorful terms.

These pronouncements, however, are not what set the torture scandal into motion. For that, we can thank a “psychological assessment” written by unnamed CIA officers and faxed to John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer who was the lead author of the torture memo. This document described Abu Zubaydah as “the third or fourth man in al-Qaida” and “a senior Usama Bin Laden lieutenant” who had been “involved in every major al-Qaida terrorist operation” and was “a planner of the 11 September hijackings.” He “managed a network of [al-Qaeda] training camps,” “directed the start-up of a Bin Laden cell in Jordan,” and “served as al-Qaeda’s coordinator of external contacts, or foreign communications.” He was also alleged to be “engaged in ongoing terrorism planning against US interests.” For good measure, he had supposedly written the organization’s “manual on resistance techniques” and had a particular expertise in thwarting conventional interrogations. It was this assessment that provided Yoo with the “facts” needed to legalize the unlawful and rationalize the unthinkable.

*

The “facts” recounted above to justify this torture were all false. Abu Zubaydah was no lieutenant to Osama bin Laden. He held no position in al-Qaeda, senior or otherwise. He had no part in September 11 or any other al-Qaeda operations. He did not operate a network of al-Qaeda camps, open an al-Qaeda cell in Jordan, or manage al-Qaeda’s external communications. He did not draft any resistance manual, for al-Qaeda or anyone else, and had no special expertise in resisting interrogations.

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/09/28/the-innocence-of-abu-zubaydah/

When the World Happiness Report announced recently that Finland is the happiest country in the world, we Finns reacted the same way as we have reacted to other top rankings in various international comparisons: we criticized the methodology of the study, questioned its conclusions and pointed to the shortcomings of Finnish society.

It’s not the first time something like this has happened. When the World Economic Forum ranked Finland as the most competitive economy in Europe in 2014, the chief executive of the Finnish Chamber of Commerce, Risto Penttilä, felt obliged to write an opinion piece for the Financial Times where he tried to prove that the results couldn’t be right.

This time it is my duty, as a Finnish expert on well-being research, to explain why the happiness of the Finns has been greatly exaggerated.

More particularly, I’ll argue that there are four separate ways to measure happiness—and depending on which one we choose, we get completely different countries at the top of the rankings.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/finland-is-the-happiest-country-in-the-world-and-finns-arent-happy-about-it/

Egg nods vigorously

Psssssst. Hey kid.

Wanna see the inside of a leatherback sea turtle’s esophagus? pic.twitter.com/8bZHo5FprN

— Dr. David Shiffman 🦈 (@WhySharksMatter) September 23, 2018

New York Times provides an extensive and comprehensive picture of what we know so far about Russia, Trump, and the 2016 election:

For many Americans, the Trump-Russia story as it has been voluminously reported over the past two years is a confusing tangle of unfamiliar names and cyberjargon, further obscured by the shout-fest of partisan politics. What Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in charge of the investigation, may know or may yet discover is still uncertain. President Trump’s Twitter outbursts that it is all a “hoax” and a “witch hunt,” in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, have taken a toll on public comprehension.

But to travel back to 2016 and trace the major plotlines of the Russian attack is to underscore what we now know with certainty: The Russians carried out a landmark intervention that will be examined for decades to come. Acting on the personal animus of Mr. Putin, public and private instruments of Russian power moved with daring and skill to harness the currents of American politics. Well-connected Russians worked aggressively to recruit or influence people inside the Trump campaign.

To many Americans, the intervention seemed to be a surprise attack, a stealth cyberage Pearl Harbor, carried out by an inexplicably sinister Russia. For Mr. Putin, however, it was long-overdue payback, a justified response to years of “provocations” from the United States.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/20/us/politics/russia-interference-election-trump-clinton.html