This innocuous-looking greenery is one of the most feared plants in the world. Its sting is so agonizing that a slight brush to the hand from one of the leaves can make a person throw up from the pain.

Not that the leaves are the only dangerous part. Only the roots of the Gympie are free of the fine hairs that lodge in the skin and deliver the sting. Every subsequent moment of pressure on the hairs causes them to put out more poison into the skin. The pain feels like fire, and it lasts. As long as the hairs are embedded in the skin, the pain keeps coming. Stings from the Gympie cause the lymphatic system to go into overdrive. A person’s throat, armpits, and groin swell up and ladle on the pain as the lymph nodes expand.

Just being around the Gympie hurts. It sheds its hairs continuously. Scientists believe that the stinging hairs keep the ground clear so it can take advantage of those sunny gaps in the canopy. Botanists working in the field go into sneezing fits and get nose bleeds from standing near the plant. Botanists who handle hundred-year-old specimens of Gympie still get stung.

Through the years, a few people have had extensive encounters with the plant. One man, who fell into a bush during World War II, was strapped to a hospital gurney, screaming, for three weeks. Another got hit in the chest in the late 1990s. For two years, his chest hurt every time he took a cold shower.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/if-you-touch-this-plant-it-will-make-you-vomit-in-pure-1693770289

https://curiosity.com/topics/the-suicide-plant-has-the-most-painful-stingers-in-the-world-curiosity/

Gympie-Gympie: Once stung, never forgotten

A

As journalists at InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Timeshave revealed since 2015, Exxon, the world’s largest oil company, understood that its product was contributing to climate change a decade before Hansen testified. In July, 1977, James F. Black, one of Exxon’s senior scientists, addressed many of the company’s top leaders in New York, explaining the earliest research on the greenhouse effect. “There is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon-dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” he said, according to a written version of the speech which was later recorded, and which was obtained by InsideClimate News. In 1978, speaking to the company’s executives, Black estimated that a doubling of the carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by between two and three degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as ten degrees Celsius (eighteen degrees Fahrenheit) at the poles.

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Exxon spent millions of dollars researching the problem. It outfitted an oil tanker, the Esso Atlantic, with CO₂ detectors to measure how fast the oceans could absorb excess carbon, and hired mathematicians to build sophisticated climate models. By 1982, they had concluded that even the company’s earlier estimates were probably too low. In a private corporate primer, they wrote that heading off global warming and “potentially catastrophic events” would “require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.”

An investigation by the L.A. Times revealed that Exxon executives took these warnings seriously. Ken Croasdale, a senior researcher for the company’s Canadian subsidiary, led a team that investigated the positive and negative effects of warming on Exxon’s Arctic operations. In 1991, he found that greenhouse gases were rising due to the burning of fossil fuels. “Nobody disputes this fact,” he said. The following year, he wrote that “global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs” in the Beaufort Sea. Drilling season in the Arctic, he correctly predicted, would increase from two months to as many as five months. At the same time, he said, the rise in the sea level could threaten onshore infrastructure and create bigger waves that would damage offshore drilling structures. Thawing permafrost could make the earth buckle and slide under buildings and pipelines. As a result of these findings, Exxon and other major oil companies began laying plans to move into the Arctic, and started to build their new drilling platforms with higher decks, to compensate for the anticipated rises in sea level.

s journalists at InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Timeshave revealed since 2015, Exxon, the world’s largest oil company, understood that its product was contributing to climate change a decade before Hansen testified. In July, 1977, James F. Black, one of Exxon’s senior scientists, addressed many of the company’s top leaders in New York, explaining the earliest research on the greenhouse effect. “There is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon-dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” he said, according to a written version of the speech which was later recorded, and which was obtained by InsideClimate News. In 1978, speaking to the company’s executives, Black estimated that a doubling of the carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by between two and three degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as ten degrees Celsius (eighteen degrees Fahrenheit) at the poles.

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Exxon spent millions of dollars researching the problem. It outfitted an oil tanker, the Esso Atlantic, with CO₂ detectors to measure how fast the oceans could absorb excess carbon, and hired mathematicians to build sophisticated climate models. By 1982, they had concluded that even the company’s earlier estimates were probably too low. In a private corporate primer, they wrote that heading off global warming and “potentially catastrophic events” would “require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.”

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/26/how-extreme-weather-is-shrinking-the-planet

In 2003, Tsao and her collaborators discovered that certain regions in the primate brain are most active when a monkey is viewing a face. The researchers dubbed these regions face patches; the neurons inside, they called face cells. Research over the past decade had revealed that different cells within these patches respond to different facial characteristics. For example, some cells respond only to faces with eyes while others respond only to faces with hair.

“But these results were unsatisfying, as we were observing only a shadow of what each cell was truly encoding about faces,” says Tsao. “For example, we would change the shape of the eyes in a cartoon face and find that some cells would be sensitive to this change. But cells could be sensitive to many other changes that we hadn’t tested. Now, by characterizing the full selectivity of cells to faces drawn from a realistic face space, we have discovered the full code for realistic facial identity.”

Two clinching pieces of evidence prove that the researchers have cracked the full code for facial identity. First, once they knew what axis each cell encoded, the researchers were then able to develop an algorithm that could decode additional faces from neural responses. In other words, they could show a monkey a new face, measure the electrical activity of face cells in the brain, and recreate the face that the monkey was seeing with high accuracy.

Second, the researchers theorized that if each cell was indeed responsible for coding only a single axis in face space, each cell should respond exactly the same way to an infinite number of faces that look extremely different but all have the same projection on this cell’s preferred axis. Indeed, Tsao and Le Chang, postdoctoral scholar and first author on the Cell paper, found this to be true.

“In linear algebra, you learn that if you project a 50-dimensional vector space onto a one-dimensional subspace, this mapping has a 49-dimensional null space,” Tsao says. “We were stunned that, deep in the brain’s visual system, the neurons are actually doing simple linear algebra. Each cell is literally taking a 50-dimensional vector space—face space—and projecting it onto a one-dimensional subspace. It was a revelation to see that each cell indeed has a 49-dimensional null space; this completely overturns the long-standing idea that single face cells are coding specific facial identities. Instead, what we’ve found is that these cells are beautifully simple linear projection machines.”

http://www.caltech.edu/news/cracking-code-facial-recognition-78508

The extremely hot, extremely massive, extremely bright stars—known as Wolf-Rayets—that compose the system are rotating far more rapidly than they’ve been known to do in our galaxy, where various conditions tend to slow them down. Stranger still is that the dust, which is expanding outward at the relative snail’s pace of around a million miles per hour, seems to be immune to the solar wind being generated by the stars. “It was like finding a feather caught in a hurricane just drifting along at a walking pace,” said coauthor Peter Tuthill, of the University of Sydney, in a release.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/star-system-named-for-egyptian-snake-god

The French creative company La Machine recently premiered their latest creation, a nearly 50-foot-tall robotic Minotaur, in Toulouse, France. The beast marched through the labyrinthine streets of the city’s old town accompanied by a 42-foot spider for the group’s latest production The Guardian of the Temple. The pair of machines performed an operatic interpretation of the myth of Ariadne, a Cretan princess who helped Theseus overcome the Minotaur, to live music. These impressive kinetic sculptures are La Machine’s latest project from their oeuvre of mechanical bestiary which has operating worldwide since 1999.

Bringing together artists, technicians, and show decorators, this unique group of enthusiasts and experts construct atypical show objects, and movement is the key factor for their awe-inspiring performances and creations. La Machine’s animal-like works turn the cities into dream worlds. “We always work on movement,” La Machine’s head of marketing, Frédette Lampre tells Colossal. “It’s our artistic line and we always use the fine material such as wood, leather, copper, or glass, and never use plastics.”

The mechanical spider was constructed over the course of two years by a team of around 60 people. The mythical Minotaur machine is half electric and half combustion, and moves around the city with the help of 17 operators. Although this technical beast weighs over 10,000 pounds, it still has the capacity to move smoothly and realistically between the city’s large buildings and blast steam out of its large nostrils.

A 46-Foot-Tall Minotaur Roams the Streets of Toulouse, France in La Machine’s Latest Urban Opera | Colossal

That’s when Frying-Pan Jack told me – you know, he’d been tramping since 1927 – he said, “I told myself in ’27, if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor, I will henceforth cease to work.” Hah! You don’t have to go to college to figure these things out, no sir! He said, “I learned when I was young that the only true life I had was the life of my brain. But if it’s true the only real life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition?” Fat chance!

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50629/mezzo-cammin

“There are only two industries. This has always been true,” said Madame Ping, enfolding a lovely porcelain teacup in her withered fingers, the two-inch fingernails interleaving neatly like the pinions of a raptor folding its wings after a long hard day of cruising the thermals. “There is the industry of things, and the industry of entertainment. The industry of things comes first. It keeps us alive. But making things is easy now that we have [technology]. This is not a very interesting business anymore.

“After people have the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment. Everything.”

IMHO this is a real worry. Ignore the (awful) details of how Brian Kemp is trying to distract everyone from this by accusing the Democratic Party, and focus on the fact that in 15 states, there’s genuine risk of vote manipulation by malicious actors, who don’t even need to be experienced hackers at all.

The first vulnerability identified in the email is on the My Voter Page, where voters can check their registration, the status of their mail-in or provisional ballots, or change their voter information. After following a commonly used link, one arrives at a page that is not secure. To view any file on the server that runs the My Voter Page nothing more is needed than typing any file name into the web browser, the experts said.

Kemp’s Aggressive Gambit to Distract From Election Security Crisis

That’s a hell of a good point (although presumably it’s not a luck that anyone would have wished for).

…while they were obviously unlucky in their disastrous 2016 defeat, in most respects liberalism and the Democratic Party have been very lucky since. So their optimism isn’t just a gritted-teeth pose; it’s an appropriate reaction to a landscape that’s more favorable than it easily might have been.

To understand this good fortune, consider two counterfactuals. In the first, the last 21 months proceeded in exactly the same fashion — with the strongest economy since the 1990s, full employment almost nigh, ISIS defeated, no new overseas wars or major terrorist attacks — except that Donald Trump let his staffers dictate his Twitter feed, avoided the press except to tout good economic news, eschewed cruelties and insults and weird behavior around Vladimir Putin, and found a way to make his White House a no-drama zone.

In this scenario it’s hard to imagine that Trump’s approval ratings wouldn’t have floated up into the high 40s; they float up into the mid-40s as it is whenever he manages to shut up. Even with their threadbare and unpopular policy agenda, Republicans would be favored to keep the House and maintain their state-legislature advantages. All the structural impediments to a Democratic recovery would loom much larger, Trump’s re-election would be more likely than not, and his opposition would be stuck waiting for a recession to have any chance of coming back.

Then consider a second counterfactual. Imagine that instead of just containing himself and behaving like a generic Republican, Trump had actually followed through on the populism that he promised in 2016, dragging his party toward the economic center and ditching the G.O.P.’s most unpopular ideas. Imagine that he followed through on Steve Bannon’s boasts about a big infrastructure bill instead of trying for Obamacare repeal; imagine that he listened to Marco Rubio and his daughter and tilted his tax cut more toward middle-class families; imagine that he spent more time bullying Silicon Valley into inshoring factory jobs than whining about Fake News; imagine that he made lower Medicare drug prices a signature issue rather than a last-minute pre-election gambit.

This strategy could have easily cut the knees out from under the Democrats’ strongest appeal, their more middle-class-friendly economic agenda, and highlighted their biggest liability, which is the way the party’s base is pulling liberalism way left of the middle on issues of race and culture and identity. It would have given Trump a chance to expand his support among minorities while holding working-class whites, and to claim the kind of decisive power that many nationalist leaders around the world enjoy. It would have threatened liberalism not just with more years out of power, but outright irrelevance under long-term right-of-center rule.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/opinion/sunday/midterms-democrats-trump.html