[John Hodgman has an excellent article on Obamacare. -egg]

Once the stories started rolling in, it really brought home to me how many young people’s lives have been profoundly altered and affected by sudden illness/accidents. Some didn’t have insurance for one reason or another and are still digging themselves out of the hole. Some DID have insurance, and in every case, no one said, I AM SO SAD I WASTED THAT MONEY ON INSURANCE.

via John Hodgman, The Ultimate (Frisbee) Argument for Visiting Healthcare.gov.

…Lake Natron in northern Tanzania does a pretty good job of illustrating Dante’s vision.

Unless you are an alkaline tilapia (Alcolapia alcalica) – an extremophile fish adapted to the harsh conditions – it is not the best place to live. Temperatures in the lake can reach 60 °C, and its alkalinity is between pH 9 and pH 10.5.

The lake takes its name from natron, a naturally occurring compound made mainly of sodium carbonate, with a bit of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) thrown in. Here, this has come from volcanic ash, accumulated from the Great Rift valley. Animals that become immersed in the water die and are calcified.

via Deadly lake turns animals into statues – environment – 01 October 2013 – New Scientist.

[Here’s a pair of really fantastic articles by the same guy. The first is a visit to a Finnish nanotech lab that focuses on biomimicry to create miraculous materials from, like, trees…]

We’re here for a conversation between Ikkala, Kokkonen and me, to see if we can sketch out some areas of shared interest, between a scientist and two designers. Ikkala’s team specialise in the self-assembling of material, based on increasingly deep understanding of the nacreous matter in seashells—mother of pearl, in plain English—or the structure of butterfly wings and beetle shells, or cellulose fibres in birch. Ville and I both have experience of different kinds of assembly, from objects to buildings to organisations. The conversation proves to be one of the most pleasurably challenging I’ve had for a while, and I’ll be picking over its remains for some time. This essay is one way of trying to make sense of it all.

via cityofsound: Essay: The Garage of Small Things; nanotechnology, biomimicry and design practice (Annex).

[And the second is some thoughts about how the distinctive history of Finnish object design could be brought into the future with those materials. -egg]

Artek’s essential problem is that the entire furniture business is struggling for cultural relevance. Furniture is important for putting things on, yet unlike in the mid-twentieth century, it says less and less about our age. We know that, as architecture theorist Kazys Varnelis puts it, “technology is our modernity” now; inner space, not interiors.

“Finnish design can no longer afford to be complacent”

[Probably my favorite of Stross’ Laundry stories yet, free to read online. Anyone who thinks unicorns are cute should probably be forced at gunpoint to read this…-egg]

“To paraphrase the stern & terrible Oliver, I beseech you, Robert, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken about unicorns. They are an antique horror that surpasses human understanding, a nightmarish reminder that we are but swimmers in the sunlit upper waters of an abyss…”

via Equoid by Charles Stross | Tor.com.

[danah boyd, as usual, bringing exceptional subtlety to questions about privacy, surveillance, and teens. Her work never fails to be amazing. -egg]

Urban theorist Jane Jacobs used to argue that the safest societies are those where there are “eyes on the street.” What she meant by this was that healthy communities looked out for each other, were attentive to when others were hurting, and were generally present when things went haywire. How do we create eyes on the digital street? How do we do so in a way that’s not creepy?  When is proactive monitoring valuable for making a difference in teens’ lives?  How do we make sure that these same tools aren’t abused for more malicious purposes?

What matters is who is doing the looking and for what purposes. When the looking is done by police, the frame is punitive. But when the looking is done by caring, concerned, compassionate people – even authority figures like social workers – the outcome can be quite different. However well-intended, law enforcement’s role is to uphold the law and people perceive their presence as oppressive even when they’re trying to help. And, sadly, when law enforcement is involved, it’s all too likely that someone will find something wrong. And then we end up with the kinds of surveillance that punishes.

If there’s infrastructure put into place for people to look out for youth who are in deep trouble, I’m all for it. But the intention behind the looking matters the most. When you’re looking for kids who are in trouble in order to help them, you look for cries for help that are public. If you’re looking to punish, you’ll misinterpret content, take what’s intended to be private and publicly punish, and otherwise abuse youth in a new way.

via danah boyd | apophenia » eyes on the street or creepy surveillance?.

These stunning flowers might look like they have been created using lace or delicately cut from paper but they are actually made from the skeletons of dead animals.

Sculptor Hideki Tokushige purchases rats and mice from pet shops in frozen batches that are normally used to feed reptiles.

He then defrosts the small creatures and cuts away the flesh until he has collected hundreds of miniscule bones.

Because of the delicate nature of the work it can often take up to a month to carefully dissect the small animals.

via Artist Hideki Tokushige creates flowers from the bones of dead mice and rats | Mail Online.

[Too cool. -egg]

The bacterium Vibrio fischeri is a squid terraformer. Although it can live independently in seawater, it also colonises the body of the adorable Hawaiian bobtail squid. The squid nourishes the bacteria with nutrients and the bacteria, in turn, act as an invisibility cloak. They produce a dim light that matches the moonlight shining down from above, masking the squid’s silhouette from predators watching from below. With its light-emitting microbes, the squid becomes less visible.

via How To Terraform A Squid – Phenomena: Not Exactly Rocket Science.

[There are so many awesome ones that I’m hard-pressed to choose. -egg]

Jon Rafman.

[Great essay on writers’ last words. 1977. -egg]

It occurred to me that writers traditionally do seem to come to dramatic ends themselves, as if they deserved the same ironic or bizarre conclusions they so often gave the characters in their books.

The Russian writers: Tolstoy, packing his knapsack and setting off from home on that last strange journey of his that ended up at the railroad station at Astapovo, where he died in the stationmaster’s room; or Gogol, with leeches on his great nose, the bishops filing slowly by, as he lay thinking how he could destroy all extant copies of Dead Souls; or Chekhov, packed in a box labeled OYSTERS, being transported back home on a bed of ice from the Black Forest where he died.

It was not only the manner in which certain writers died that was interesting: often they managed to push out a memorable last word or two which seemed too studied even to put into fiction: Goethe’s “More light!” or Henry James’s “Ah, it is here, that distinguished thing”—now discounted by Leon Edel. Some of the words which one would like to have overheard were lost, of course. Aeschylus must have had a final comment on being conked by the turtle which an eagle, trying to break it on the rocks below for a meal, dropped on the dramatist’s bald pate. In my notes I imagined Aeschylus regaining consciousness briefly:

“What happened?”

“Well, sire, you were hit on top of the head.”

“By what? It felt awful.”

“A turtle.”

Then the memorable phrase must have come, just a faint, unheard murmur, before the dramatist’s eyes clouded over.

via The Last Laugh by George Plimpton | The New York Review of Books.

[So beautiful <3 <3 <3 <3. Lots more pics on the Colossal page. -egg]

The Negative Space of a House Cut Inside a 908-Page Book | Colossal.