When an unsuspecting researcher followed a mysterious command on a 4chan board, he found himself drawn into a scavenger hunt that led him down the darkest corridors of the internet and stretched across the globe. But in a place where no one shows his face and no one plays by the rules, how do you tell where the game ends and reality begins?
via Chasing the Cicada: Exploring the Darkest Corridors of the Internet | Mental Floss.
[Some interesting odd corners of the natural world. -egg]
Because it allows one to acquire knowledge otherwise inaccessible to common perception, science gives us access to a whole other landscape, with terrifying and beautiful scenery. It is hard to discuss the history of earth through deep time without falling into epic geopoetry: an oxygen catastrophe so intense the oceans rusted; the sudden diversification of life at the beginning of the Cambrian; the collapse of a habitable Antarctica with the opening of the Drake passage and the start of the circumpolar currents.
I’m going to share a few of the stranger creatures that live in this landscape, or the glimpses that we’ve gotten of them through the haze. They are horrifying, but beautiful, and I think that they make us look at everyday things in new, challenging ways.
[Oh, I agree with this so much. It’s a big part of why I stay in Asheville — most of the people I know here keep their lives in reasonable balance. -egg]
The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Not long ago I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain […] What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven, cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school — it’s something we collectively force one another to do.
via The ‘Busy’ Trap.
[Very, very handy website. -egg]
Examine.com makes it easy to look up what actual scientific studies say on various supplements. From popular supplements like vitamin D and fish oil, to more esoteric ones like berberine and spirulina, this website has it covered (and over 17000 citations).
[Malcolm Gladwell, ahem, hits it out of the park. -egg]
The other great doping pariah is Lance Armstrong. He apparently removed large quantities of his own blood and then re-infused himself before competition, in order to boost the number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells in his system. Armstrong wanted to be like Eero Mäntyranta. He wanted to match, through his own efforts, what some very lucky people already do naturally and legally. Before we condemn him, though, shouldn’t we have to come up with a good reason that one man is allowed to have lots of red blood cells and another man is not?
via Malcolm Gladwell: Do Genetic Advantages Make Sports Unfair? : The New Yorker.
[tl;dr — we really don’t know much about most mental illness or how to make drugs that help it. -egg]
*
Having been discovered by accident, however, [psychiatric drugs] lacked one important element: a theory that accounted for why they worked (or, in many cases, did not).
That didn’t stop drug makers and doctors from claiming that they knew. Drawing on another mostly serendipitous discovery of the fifties—that the brain did not conduct its business by sending sparks from neuron to neuron, as scientists previously thought, but rather by sending chemical messengers across synapses—they fashioned an explanation: mental illness was the result of imbalances among these neurotransmitters, which the drugs treated in the same way that insulin treats diabetes.
[Totally awesome question, coupled with a great overview of changes in lifespan over the last couple hundred years. -egg]
You may well be living your second life already. Have you ever had some health problem that could have killed you if you’d been born in an earlier era? Leave aside for a minute the probabilistic ways you would have died in the past—the smallpox that didn’t kill you because it was eradicated by a massive global vaccine drive, the cholera you never contracted because you drink filtered and chemically treated water. Did some specific medical treatment save your life? It’s a fun conversation starter: Why are you not dead yet? It turns out almost everybody has a story, but we rarely hear them; life-saving treatments have become routine. I asked around, and here is a small sample of what would have killed my friends and acquaintances:
[Very, very helpful in getting a sense of what a reasonable level of paranoia is. -egg]
The latest Snowden document is the US intelligence “black budget.” There’s a lot of information in the few pages the Washington Post decided to publish, including an introduction by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. In it, he drops a tantalizing hint: “Also, we are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit internet traffic.”
Honestly, I’m skeptical. Whatever the NSA has up its top-secret sleeves, the mathematics of cryptography will still be the most secure part of any encryption system. I worry a lot more about poorly designed cryptographic products, software bugs, bad passwords, companies that collaborate with the NSA to leak all or part of the keys, and insecure computers and networks. Those are where the real vulnerabilities are, and where the NSA spends the bulk of its efforts.
via How Advanced Is the NSA’s Cryptanalysis — And Can We Resist It? | Wired Opinion | Wired.com.
[So here’s what Assad has to say. -egg]
Today there are many Western politicians, but very few statesmen. Some of these politicians do not read history or even learn from it, whilst others do not even remember recent events. Have these politicians learned any lessons from the past 50 years at least? Have they not realised that since the Vietnam War, all the wars their predecessors have waged have failed? Have they not learned that they have gained nothing from these wars but the destruction of the countries they fought, which has had a destabilising effect on the Middle East and other parts of the world? Have they not comprehended that all of these wars have not made people in the region appreciate them or believe in their policies?
From another perspective, these politicians should know that terrorism is not a winning card you play when it suits you and keep it in your pocket when it doesn’t. Terrorism is like a scorpion; it can unexpectedly sting you at any time. Therefore, you cannot support terrorism in Syria whilst fighting it in Mali; you cannot support terrorism in Chechnya and fight it in Afghanistan.
via Bashar al-Assad: «All contracts signed with Russia are implemented» – Известия.
[Totally kickass short story about technology, memory, and written vs oral tradition. Highly recommended. -egg]
Millions of people, some my age but most younger, have been keeping lifelogs for years, wearing personal cams that capture continuous video of their entire lives. People consult their lifelogs for a variety of reasons—everything from reliving favorite moments to tracking down the cause of allergic reactions—but only intermittently; no one wants to spend all their time formulating queries and sifting through the results. Lifelogs are the most complete photo album imaginable, but like most photo albums, they lie dormant except on special occasions. Now Whetstone aims to change all of that; they claim Remem’s algorithms can search the entire haystack by the time you’ve finished saying “needle.”
via The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang — Subterranean Press.