2021-05-19
Cool
Worthy
etc
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Where Do Butts Come From? - The Atlantic
Many of the animals that have managed to keep some version of the anus embellished upon it, and now harbor an organ of immense extravagance. Turtles, like sea cucumbers, breathe through their butt. Young dragonflies suck water into theirs, then spew it out to propel themselves forward. Scorpions jettison their posterior when attacked from behind, evading capture but tragically losing their ability to poop (and eventually dying with their abdomen full of excrement). Lacewing larvae incapacitate termite prey with the toxic flatulence they emit from their end—“they literally KO their enemies with death farts,” Ainsley Seago, an entomologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, told me.
Horseshit
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(Nov 2020) USDA investigating horse in pick-up truck on I-40 in Tennessee
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freenode now belongs to Andrew Lee, and I'm leaving for a new network.
+ [My Resignation from Freenode](https://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_461) > the freenode IRC network has been taken over by a narcissistic > Trumpian wannabe korean royalty bitcoins millionaire. To make > a long story short, the former freenode head of staff secretly > "sold" the network to this person even if it was not hers to > sell, and our lawyers have advised us that there is not much > that we can do about it without some of us risking financial > ruin. Fuck you Christel, lilo's life work did not deserve > this.
celebrity gossip
Culture War / Re segregation / Identdoctrination
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Google AI chief says reputation hit to unit is 'real' after turmoil
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Black Lives Matter says it stands with Hamas terrorists in Israeli conflict
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Hidden order in online extremism can be muddled by nudging collective chemistry
Disrupting the emergence and evolution of potentially violent online extremist movements is a crucial challenge. Extremism research has analyzed such movements in detail, focusing on individual- and movement-level characteristics. But are there system-level commonalities in the ways these movements emerge and grow? Here we compare the growth of the Boogaloos, a new and increasingly prominent U.S. extremist movement, to the growth of online support for ISIS, a militant, terrorist organization based in the Middle East that follows a radical version of Islam. We show that the early dynamics of these two online movements follow the same mathematical order despite their stark ideological, geographical, and cultural differences. The evolution of both movements, across scales, follows a single shockwave equation that accounts for heterogeneity in online interactions. These scientific properties suggest specific policies to address online extremism and radicalization. We show how actions by social media platforms could disrupt the onset and ‘flatten the curve’ of such online extremism by nudging its collective chemistry. Our results provide a system-level understanding of the emergence of extremist movements that yields fresh insight into their evolution and possible interventions to limit their growth.