Fascinating, though there's a big question mark over whether it'll remain stable as you return to lower pressures....
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A bit late to this, but just remember: ACAB
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This is a great first step, though disappointing that the footage won't be available to anyone. Can you think of a defensible reason to restrict members of the public from knowing how animals are slaughtered?
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"Immigrants don’t owe you any explanations for their existence. Please stop with the well meaning talk about how immigrants make this country great, as if we ONLY grant citizenship to great individuals. If citizenship were based on greatness and contribution, we would be revoking the papers of white people who didn’t do anything with their lives." Texangeles
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A recent review of Eichmann in Jerusalem (which I have never read). Loads of interesting points I was unaware of. The author notes the importance of "a general attitude of annoying obstructionism" in resisting evil, which I think is something even those of us who aren't willing or able to mount the barricades can get on board with.
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"For Schnell and the others in the program, the urgency of the opioid overdose crisis couldn't be any more obvious. "I feel guilty. I feel guilty that I have this and I don't have to worry," he said. "I have one less friend now than I had two weeks ago," said Schnell. "If he had been in this program, he would be alive today, as I am."" CBC
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Great to see that, now that India is on the brink of completing a universal payments system, it is contemplating a universal basic income
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Gosh, 3 years of military service adds, on average, 3.6 years to the life expectancy of Israeli men. Not that I'm suggesting more military service, especially in the IDF! But exercise really makes a difference...
"In the case of Israel, a variable representing the interaction between military spending as a percent of GDP and length of military service explained 3.6 years of life expectancy. These data support the hypothesis that military service can improve the physical fitness of men, and therefore reduces their chances of death from diseases associated with low levels of physical activity."
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"Swiss (French) TV has uncovered that many orphans in Cambodian orphanages are actually not really orphans. These children are just their to meet the demand of altruistic Swiss to help poor Cambodian orphans. These Swiss actually pay to help a few weeks at an orphanage and to teach English or other things deemed useful (maybe so they can signal how altruistic they are to their friends)." Marginal Revolution
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"...the idea of having a ‘hair of the dog (that bit you)’ was once entirely literal. In the Middle Ages, anyone bitten by a stray dog would run after the offending animal in an attempt to pluck out one of its hairs: a poultice with that hair was believed to greatly ease the post-drinking blues" BBC
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"...opium use was well entrenched in Europe and the United States long before large-scale Chinese migration beyond Asia. In fact, the laudanum and “soothing syrups” that were widely consumed at all levels of Western society were far more intoxicating than the opium commonly smoked in China. It might also be noted that the volume of opium exported from the U.S. to China dwarfed opposite flows, as American traffickers came to replace their British counterparts in the trade following the Second Opium War. (The Astor, Forbes, and Delano family fortunes, for example, may all be traced to the sale of narcotics to China.)" Points
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"It was, in fact, common knowledge among CIA clandestine officers, and surely in the embassy of Vientiane, that bombers sometimes dropped ordnance on Laos because they wanted to unload it on the way back from North Vietnam, or because they needed target practice, or because there were communists somewhere near villages in central and northern Laos, and destroying the towns might possibly kill some soldiers of Pathet Lao sympathizers." Marginal Revolution
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A guide to current factional divides amongst the ruling class of DRC, and why it's so difficult to achieve lasting peace
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I think about this a lot...
"We must each relearn many basic life lessons during our individual lifetimes, lessons that millions or billions of others already learned in their previous lifetimes, or that millions or billions of others are currently learning in parallel with us. There seem huge potential gains from finding better ways to learn from our ancestors and colleagues." Overcoming Bias
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"breaching is far more common when pods of humpback whales are far apart (at least 4,000 meters or 2.5 miles), and fin or tail slapping is more frequent as groups split or come together. The authors say these patterns suggest breaching and slapping play a role in both long-distance and close-range communication. By slamming their massive bodies into the water, the resulting sounds, like a drum, can travel enormous distances." QZ
Nice work
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"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture... An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan. Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us … [but] who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements?” Guardian
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:'( :'(
"As many as 13,000 opponents of Bashar al-Assad were secretly hanged in one of Syria’s most infamous prisons in the first five years of the country’s civil war as part of an extermination policy ordered by the highest levels of the Syrian government, according to Amnesty International." Guardian
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Nice work
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The director of Top Gun, on the famous volleyball scene...
"“I didn’t have a vision of what I was doing other than just doing soft porn... I knew I had to show off all the guys, but I didn’t have a point of view… so, I just shot the sh*t out of it. I got the guys to get all their gear off and their pants and sprayed them in baby oil.”
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"the operatives use their phones to record about two dozen spins on a game they aim to cheat. They upload that footage to a technical staff in St. Petersburg, who analyze the video and calculate the machine’s pattern based on what they know about the model’s pseudorandom number generator. Finally, the St. Petersburg team transmits a list of timing markers to a custom app on the operative’s phone; those markers cause the handset to vibrate [when] the operative should press the spin button." Wired
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It's still not clear exactly what happened here, but past form suggests it was probably targeting migrants, sex workers and other marginalised groups. Catching actual criminals requires investigation, which is difficult and doesn't look great on camera; picking on easy targets only requires busting down a few doors - easy night's work, and the newspapers love it.
