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

Does what it says on the tin

An unending verion of Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes No. 1

Source: Gnossiennes No. 1 Forever

Startlingly lovely.

Sculptor Noah Deledda transforms everyday aluminum cans into works of art using nothing but his fingertips. Deledda carefully presses and creases intricate geometric patterns into the surface of plain cylindrical cans using carefully placed pressure from his fingers and the edge of his nails. The artist explains in a statement on his site, “Through sculpture I try to create something unique out of an ordinary object. In this case, a common disposable object. The technique itself also embodies this theme of elevation by implementing the incidental gestures of disposal, the ‘scratch, dent and crease.’ Through artistic principles these actions are re-imagined.” Deledda shares process videos on Instagram and his website, where his sculptural vessels are also available for purchase.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/10/pressed-cans/

One part of life where [American] restlessness does not apply is politics. Almost everyone who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 had voted for Mitt Romney four years earlier, just as almost everyone who voted for Hillary Clinton had previously voted for Barack Obama. People who vote tend to settle on a party with which they identify in young adulthood, then stick with it. By contrast, half of American adults have switched religious denomination at some point, according to the Pew Research Centre. The datasets do not line up in a way that makes the conjecture possible to prove, but it is a fair bet that, at least among those most engaged in politics, Americans are more likely to change their religion than to change their party.

Partisanship eats away at the sense that it is possible to think for yourself. Partisanship also obviates the need to take opposing views seriously. Faced with a political decision, such as whether to support Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, or talks between America’s government and North Korea’s, it is far easier to listen to the people you normally agree with and adopt their view. Weighing up evidence is hard, time-consuming work: in this respect, partisan thinking is another shortcut to happiness.

When thinking is so entrenched, those who change their minds have a kind of superpower, for only they can demonstrate independent reasoning. That explains the fascination with the small subgroup of voters who chose Obama in 2012 and then Trump in 2016. Psephologists and journalists treat these creatures as ancient Romans treated birds, studying their flight paths to see what the omens are. Writers who have switched sides, though less numerous, exert a similar fascination.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/10/20/switching-parties-in-trumps-america