Medical school in blog form MAY 21
Why go to medical school when you can just read this Medical School tumblr blog? Includes posts on open heart surgery, sickle cell anemia, and a simple suturing demonstration:
America is bad for your health MAY 20
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." And I'll give them heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and a shorter lifespan. A growing body of research suggests that there is often a high health toll when it comes to coming to America.
A growing body of mortality research on immigrants has shown that the longer they live in this country, the worse their rates of heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes. And while their American-born children may have more money, they tend to live shorter lives than the parents.
The pattern goes against any notion that moving to America improves every aspect of life. It also demonstrates that at least in terms of health, worries about assimilation for the country's 11 million illegal immigrants are mistaken. In fact, it is happening all too quickly.
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Does good music need to be good? MAY 20
I enjoyed and agree with much of Sasha Frere-Jones' take on Daft Punk's recent album, Random Access Memories.
Daft Punk's fourth studio album, "Random Access Memories," is an attempt to make the kind of disco record that they sampled so heavily for "Discovery." As such, it serves as a tribute to those who came before them and as a direct rebuke to much of what they've spawned. Only intermittently electronic in nature, and depending largely on live musicians, it is extremely ambitious, and as variable in quality as any popular album you will hear this year. Noodly jazz fusion instrumentals? Absolutely. Soggy poetry and kid choirs? Yes, please. Cliches that a B-list teen-pop writer would discard? Bring it on. The duo has become so good at making records that I replay parts of "Random Access Memories" repeatedly while simultaneously thinking it is some of the worst music I've ever heard. Daft Punk engages the sound and the surface of music so lovingly that all seventy-five loony minutes of "Random Access Memories" feel fantastic, even when you are hearing music you might never seek out. This record raises a radical question: Does good music need to be good?
Unknown mathematician hits a home run MAY 20
Yitang Zhang, an unknown mathematician who worked at Subway while trying to find an academic position earlier in his career, has written a paper that makes significant progress towards understanding the twin prime conjecture, "one of mathematics' oldest problems".
Editors of prominent mathematics journals are used to fielding grandiose claims from obscure authors, but this paper was different. Written with crystalline clarity and a total command of the topic's current state of the art, it was evidently a serious piece of work, and the Annals editors decided to put it on the fast track.
Just three weeks later -- a blink of an eye compared to the usual pace of mathematics journals -- Zhang received the referee report on his paper.
"The main results are of the first rank," one of the referees wrote. The author had proved "a landmark theorem in the distribution of prime numbers."
Rumors swept through the mathematics community that a great advance had been made by a researcher no one seemed to know -- someone whose talents had been so overlooked after he earned his doctorate in 1992 that he had found it difficult to get an academic job, working for several years as an accountant and even in a Subway sandwich shop.
"Basically, no one knows him," said Andrew Granville, a number theorist at the Universite de Montreal. "Now, suddenly, he has proved one of the great results in the history of number theory."
Reminds me of a certain patent clerk and his theories about time and space. History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. (via @daveg)
The Sea's Strangest Square Mile MAY 20
You've heard of Weird Twitter but now there's Weird Ocean. This square mile of water in the Lembeh Strait has some of the strangest and most unique marine life on the planet.
Includes an appearance by the always delightful cuttlefish. (via @Colossal)
The myth of crack babies MAY 20
In the 1980s, crack babies were all over the news. They were supposed to have severe mental and physical problems, overwhelm our schools and health care institutions, and cost us billions of dollars. None of this happened because the media latched onto some limited preliminary research and blew it all out of proportion.
Retro Report has gone back to look at the story of these children from the perspective of those in the eye of the storm -- tracing the trajectory from the small 1985 study by Dr. Ira Chasnoff that first raised the alarm, through the drumbeat of media coverage that kept the story alive, to the present where a cocaine-exposed research subject tells her own surprising life story. Looking back, Crack Babies: A Tale from the Drug Wars shows the danger of prediction and the unexpected outcomes that result when closely-held convictions turn out to be wrong.
This video was produced by a new news organization called Retro Report, which revisits old news stories with a sober eye..."a smart, engaging and forward-looking review of these high-profile events". In addition to the crack babies story, they've also explored the New York garbage barge and the Tailhook scandal.
Deracialization surgery MAY 20
Chris Stokel-Walker introduces us to Leo Jiang, who used to be Hao Jiang and is one of the thousands of people each year who get plastic surgery in order to look less Asian and more Western. Or not.
"Race does not enter the consciousness [in Asia] in the same way it does here," explains Sharon Lee, an assistant professor at New York University who has written extensively about plastic surgery in Asia. "It's easy to pathologize a whole country of people." The West's preoccupation with race colors its opinion, projecting discomfort onto surgery that for many may not have any overt racial elements. "This notion that Korean women want to become white becomes a really easy answer," Lee says. "That's not to say that race isn't important, but when we stop there we're overlooking much larger structural and historical phenomenons. No Korean woman says, 'I want to look white.'"
The Long Swath MAY 20
Back in April, the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (aka a NASA satellite with a bitchin' camera) took photos of the Earth along a swath of land 120 miles wide by 6,000 miles long, from Russia to South Africa. Then they stitched it into a mesmerising 15-minute video:
Feel free to put on some Sigur Ros while you watch. (via the atlantic)
Too much celebrity MAY 20
George Packer, writing for the NY Times on the subject of modern celebrity:
Our age is lousy with celebrities. They can be found in every sector of society, including ones that seem less than glamorous. We have celebrity bankers (Jamie Dimon), computer engineers (Sergey Brin), real estate developers/conspiracy theorists (Donald J. Trump), media executives (Arianna Huffington), journalists (Anderson Cooper), mayors (Cory A. Booker), economists (Jeffrey D. Sachs), biologists (J. Craig Venter) and chefs (Mario Batali).
There is a quality of self-invention to their rise: Mark Zuckerberg went from awkward geek to the subject of a Hollywood hit; Shawn Carter turned into Jay-Z; Martha Kostyra became Martha Stewart, and then Martha Stewart Living. The person evolves into a persona, then a brand, then an empire, with the business imperative of grow or die -- a process of expansion and commodification that transgresses boundaries by substituting celebrity for institutions. Instead of robust public education, we have Mr. Zuckerberg's "rescue" of Newark's schools. Instead of a vibrant literary culture, we have Oprah's book club. Instead of investments in public health, we have the Gates Foundation. Celebrities either buy institutions, or "disrupt" them.
The say what you want club MAY 20
Writer Tom Junod on journalism and regret:
I remember walking into a dinner party after Slate called the Angelina profile the Worst Celebrity Profile of All Time. My arrival was greeted with silence; people did not know what to say. So I brought it up, not just to ease the tension but also because I was, like my editor, perversely proud of being so honored, knowing that you can't hope to write the Best Celebrity Profile of All Time unless you are absolutely prepared to write the Worst. I'm not in this business because I expect to be admired but rather because I want the freedom to say what I want to say and get some kind of reaction for saying it, so if I can't enjoy the fact that Slate devoted 2,500 words to the Angelina profile then I've lost something of myself that I desperately need to preserve in order to write the way I want to write. The great vice of journalism in the age of social media is not its recklessness but rather its headlong rush for respectability -- its self-conscious desire to please an audience of peers rather than an audience of reader -- and the first step towards respectability is regret.
Here's his profile of Jolie and the Slate takedown of it. And you can like this post riiiiight down here (God, please do):
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David Chang cooks space food for Chris Hadfield MAY 17
Momofuku's David Chang cooks up some gourmet space food for celeb astronaut Chris Hadfield.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work out so well. Who knew that gravity was so useful? But stay for the best part of the whole thing...right at the end, Hadfield feeds himself asparagus like a fish.
Mat Honan visits Google Island MAY 17
After taking in a four-hour keynote at the Google I/O conference, Mat Honan is transported to a magical place called Google Island.
The soft, froggy voice startled me. I turned around to face an approaching figure. It was Larry Page, naked, save for a pair of eyeglasses.
"Welcome to Google Island. I hope my nudity doesn't bother you. We're completely committed to openness here. Search history. Health data. Your genetic blueprint. One way to express this is by removing clothes to foster experimentation. It's something I learned at Burning Man," he said. "Here, drink this. You're slightly dehydrated, and your blood sugar is low. This is a blend of water, electrolytes, and glucose."
I was taken aback. "How did you..." I began, but he was already answering me before I could finish my question.
"As soon as you hit Google's territorial waters, you came under our jurisdiction, our terms of service. Our laws-or lack thereof-apply here. By boarding our self-driving boat you granted us the right to all feedback you provide during your journey. This includes the chemical composition of your sweat. Remember when I said at I/O that maybe we should set aside some small part of the world where people could experiment freely and examine the effects? I wasn't speaking theoretically. This place exists. We built it."
I was thirsty, so I drank the electrolyte solution down. "This is delicious," I replied.
"I know," he replied. "It also has thousands of micro sensors which are now swarming through your blood stream."
"What... " I stammered.
"Your prostate is enlarged. Let's go hangout now. There's some really great music I'd like to recommend to you."
You could consider this a follow-up to 2004's EPIC 2014 by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson.
Daft Punk, Goat Lucky MAY 17
Daft Punk + goats who yell like people = not the funniest thing you've seen in your life but it hits a certain spot, that's for sure.
(via @thebakerruns)
All shootings aren't created equal? MAY 16
American tragedies don't occur on the southside of Chicago or the New Orleans 9th Ward. They don't occur where inner city high school kids shoot into school buses or someone shoots at a 10-year old's birthday party in New Orleans. Or Gary, Indiana. Or Compton. Or Newport News.
David Dennis asks (and answers) a compelling question: Why isn't the New Orleans Mother's Day parade shooting a national tragedy?
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The three types of specialist MAY 16
From a passage of Kurt Vonnegut's Bluebeard, the three types of specialists needed for the success of any revolution.
Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening team with a peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb that life may be.
The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.
The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius -- a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in general circulation. "A genius working alone," he says, "is invariably ignored as a lunatic."
The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find: a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. "A person like this working alone," says Slazinger, "can only yearn loud for changes, but fail to say what their shapes should be."
The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain everything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. "He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting," says Slazinger. "Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey."
Slazinger, high as a kite, says that every successful revolution, including Abstract Expressionism, the one I took part in, had that cast of characters at the top -- Pollock being the genius in our case, Lenin being the one in Russia's, Christ being the one in Christianity's.
He says that if you can't get a cast like that together, you can forget changing anything in a great big way.
(via @moleitau)
Meme star chart MAY 16
From XKCD, a chart of the memes that various star systems are just hearing from the Earth's light-speed communications.
This is the meme version of Contact's opening credits scene, which is one of my favorites:
Human embryos successfully cloned (sort of) MAY 16
A group of researchers in Oregon have successfully cloned human embryos. No, really:
The researchers, at Oregon Health and Science University, took skin cells from a baby with a genetic disease and fused them with donated human eggs to create human embryos that were genetically identical to the 8-month-old. They then extracted stem cells from those embryos.
The embryo-creation technique is essentially the same as that used to create Dolly the sheep and the many cloned animals that have followed. In those cases, the embryos were implanted in the wombs of surrogate mothers.
These embryos won't work for producing clones humans...they are being used to harvest stem cells.
The Oregon researchers, who published a paper on their work in the journal Cell, say their goal is what has been called therapeutic cloning: making embryonic stem cells that are genetically identical to a particular patient.
Embryonic stem cells can turn into any type of cell in the body, like heart cells, muscles or neurons. That raises the hope that one day the cells will be turned into replacement tissue or even replacement organs to treat a host of diseases.
Explore history through Google Maps MAY 16
MyReadingMapped makes use of Google Maps & Google Earth to tell stories about history. For instance, here are maps of The Civil War and the American Revolution, a map of Roald Amundsen's 1910 South Pole expedition, and a map of the wars of Alexander the Great.
List of NYC's outdoor summer movies MAY 15
There are a lot of outdoor movies showing in NYC this summer: here's a listing of the whats, wheres, and whens. Movies include The Goonies, Jaws, Duck Soup, Moonrise Kingdom, Grease, and Blade Runner.
Strongbox MAY 15
The New Yorker introduces their Strongbox, a way to anonymously send files to editors at the magazine.
Strongbox is a simple thing in its conception: in one sense, it's just an extension of the mailing address we printed in small type on the inside cover of the first issue of the magazine, in 1925, later joined by a phone number (in 1928-it was BRyant 6300) and e-mail address (in 1998). Readers and sources have long sent documents to the magazine and its reporters, from letters of complaint to classified papers. (Joshua Rothman has written about that history and the magazine's record of investigative journalism.) But, over the years, it's also become easier to trace the senders, even when they don't want to be found. Strongbox addresses that; as it's set up, even we won't be able to figure out where files sent to us come from. If anyone asks us, we won't be able to tell them.
Strongbox is based on DeadDrop, an open source app built by Aaron Swartz.
