In case you saw my previous post, it turns out to not be true. The Great Barrier Reef is in poor shape, for sure, but not yet dead.

http://www.snopes.com/scientists-pronounce-great-barrier-reef-dead/

[Video of the continuous 24-hour performance of the tail end of the Nine Inch Nails song “The Day The World Went Away” in which I recently had the pleasure of participating. The piece was conceived and organized by Curt Cloninger; my compatriot was Abigail Griffin. -egg]

Deep/Young Ethereal Archive : current exhibits : Day-Long Duet (The Day The World Went Away)

[Maximize your screen, turn up the brightness a bit, and sit back & enjoy. I’m pretty sure you won’t regret it. -egg]

Interested in documenting one of the oldest animals on Earth, Barcelona-based production company myLapse set to capture the minimal movements of brightly colored coral, recording actions rarely seen by the human eye. The short film took nearly 25,000 individual images of the marine invertebrates to compose, and photography of species, such as the Acanthophyllia, Trachyphyllia, Heteropsammia cochlea, Physogyra, took over a year.

The production team hopes the film attracts attention to the Great Barrier Reef, encouraging watchers to take a deeper interest in one of the natural wonders of the world that is being rapidly bleached due to climate change. You can see more up-close images of the coral species featured in this film on Flickr. (via Sploid)

The Great Recession and its aftermath shattered the policy consensus on economics. What would come next? It’s taken a while, but we’re witnessing the emergence of an important new vision.

Before the crash, complacent Democrats, whatever their disagreements with their Republican peers, tended to agree with them that the economy was largely self-correcting. The Federal Reserve possessed the tools to nudge the economy to full employment, they thought. What’s more, government programs, while sometimes a necessary evil, were likely to be an inefficient drag compared with the private market. Inequality was something to worry about, sure, but hardly a crisis, and policies were correspondingly timid and market-focused.

But there’s been a quiet revolution in thinking about economic issues — at least on the left. Call the developing consensus the “new liberal economics.” Emerging from a wide range of academic research, popular writing, and activist energy, it reflects an economic liberalism that is both more comprehensive and self-confident than what was produced during the era of conservative dominance. Yet it’s not a nostalgic throwback but a forward-looking set of ideas and policies building out of the failures of the old paradigm.

Source: The “new liberal economics” is the key to understanding Hillary Clinton’s policies – Vox

This is not a profile of Hillary Clinton. It is not a review of her career or an assessment of her campaign. You won’t find any shocking revelations on her emails, on Benghazi, on Whitewater, or even on her health care plan.

This is an effort to answer a question I’ve been struggling with since at least 2008: Why is the Hillary Clinton described to me by her staff, her colleagues, and even her foes so different from the one I see on the campaign trail?

Source: Understanding Hillary: The Clinton America sees isn’t the Clinton colleagues know. Why are they so different?

Pornography has changed unrecognizably from its so-called golden age—the period, in the sixties and seventies, when adult movies had theatrical releases and seemed in step with the wider moment of sexual liberation, and before V.H.S. drove down production quality, in the eighties. Today’s films are often short and nearly always hard-core; that is, they show penetrative sex. Among the most popular search terms in 2015 were “anal,” “amateur,” “teen,” and—one that would surely have made Freud smile—“mom and son.” Viewing figures are on a scale that golden-age moguls never dreamed of: in 2014, Pornhub alone had seventy-eight billion page views, and XVideos is the fifty-sixth most popular Web site in the world. Some porn sites get more traffic than news sites like CNN, and less only than platforms such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and PayPal. The twenty-first-century porn kings aren’t flamboyant magazine owners like Larry Flynt, whose taboo-breaking Hustler first published labial “pink shots,” in the mid-seventies, but faceless tech executives. The majority of the world’s tube sites are effectively a monopoly—owned by a company called MindGeek, whose bandwidth use exceeds that of Amazon or Facebook. Its C.E.O. until recently was a German named Fabian Thylmann, who earned a reported annual income of a hundred million dollars; he sold the company while being investigated for tax evasion.

The millions of people using these sites probably don’t care much about who produces their content. But those who work in porn in the United States tend to draw a firm line between the “amateur” porn that now proliferates online and the legal adult-film industry that took shape after the California Supreme Court ruled, in California v. Freeman (1989), that filmed sex did not count as prostitution. Since then, the industry has been based in Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Valley, where its professional norms and regulations have mimicked its more respectable Hollywood neighbors. In “The Pornography Industry: What Everyone Needs to Know” (Oxford), Shira Tarrant explains how that industry works in the new age of Internet porn, and sets out to provide neutral, “even-handed” information about its production and consumption.

It’s not an easy task. Since the “porn wars” of the seventies and eighties, when feminists campaigned against the expanding pornography industry (and other feminists sided with Hustler to defend it), talking about pornography in terms of mere facts has seemed impossible. The atmosphere of controversy makes it hard to avoid moral positions. Even to suspend judgment may be to take sides.

Source: Making Sense of Modern Pornography – The New Yorker

[Holy. Crap. This is some serious state-of-the-art work! -egg]

[New advances in rat control: considerably more interesting than you probably think 🙂 -egg]

First, the myths. There are no “super rats”. Apart from a specific subtropical breed, they do not get much bigger than 20 inches long, including the tail. They are not blind, nor are they afraid of cats. They do not carry rabies. They do not, as was reported in 1969 regarding an island in Indonesia, fall from the sky. Their communities are not led by elusive, giant “king rats”. Rat skeletons cannot liquefy and reconstitute at will. (For some otherwise rational people, this is a genuine concern.) They are not indestructible, and there are not as many of them as we think. The one-rat-per-human in New York City estimate is pure fiction. Consider this the good news.

There may be no “king rat”, but there are “rat kings”, groups of up to 30 rats whose tails have knotted together to form one giant, swirling mass. Rats may be unable to liquefy their bones to slide under doors, but they don’t need to: their skeletons are so flexible that they can squeeze their way through any hole or crack wider than half an inch. They are cannibals, and they sometimes laugh (sort of) – especially when tickled. They can appear en masse, as if from nowhere, moving as fast as seven feet per second. They do not carry rabies, but a 2014 study from Columbia University found that the average New York City subway rat carried 18 viruses previously unknown to science, along with dozens of familiar, dangerous pathogens, such as C difficile and hepatitis C. As recently as 1994 there was a major recurrence of bubonic plague in India, an unpleasant flashback to the 14th century, when that rat-borne illness killed 25 million people in five years. Collectively, rats are responsible for more human death than any other mammal on earth.

Source: Man v rat: could the long war soon be over? | Jordan Kisner | Science | The Guardian

Recent Colorado transplant Jacob van Loon creates geometric watercolors that seem to visually reference abstract architectural renderings. The colors in his works look as if they have bled beyond recognition of a specific site or landmark, yet still retain a strict set of dense and chaotic lines. The paintings trap specific colors in the boxes of their grid-like surface, yet also allow some to traverse throughout the work, alternating between clean and hazy sections of muted blues and bright oranges.

“By the time I have a final sketch, the layers of primer are caked up and full of valleys and ridges created by broad brush strokes,” van Loon told The Creator’s Project. “When I’m ready for color, it’s not just about pragmatically filling in the spaces, it’s about putting paint down, letting it travel in the valleys and ridges, and seeing where and how it all comes to rest.”

Source: Geometric Watercolors by Artist Jacob Van Loon | Colossal