Jun 24, 2020

Jun 23, 2020

Today's Beau

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column


We can stop exalting flawed human actors, and still praise their heroic actions.
Which would go along way to short-circuiting the rise of the next personality cult.

Today's GIF

Fly and be free

A Tik Tok



camycamo4

@camycamo4 ##corrupt ##trump ##ShaveItOff ##Summer2020 ##blm ##usa ##fathersday ##happyfathersday ##fl ##az ##wi ##iw ##io ##mi ##ga ##nc ##pa ##penn ##ad ##psa ##vote ##2020election
♬ original sound - camycamo4

COVID-19 Update

Steady growth, but at least for now the rate is low.

Some cities - eg: Dallas and Phoenix - are saying their ICUs are at, or nearing, capacity.

At least one children's hospital has said they're admitting adult COVID-19 cases now.


Top 20 Countries


Top 20 States


Today's Tweet



Lots of these goin' around.

Jun 22, 2020

Today's Sarah

Sarah Cooper - How To Empty Seat


These are just getting better - the blackout endings are borderline genius.

That's Hot


Forbes:

This past weekend, a small Russian town in the Arctic Circle hit a scorching temperature, 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit. While the temperature has to be verified by experts, if it stands, it will be the hottest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic Circle.

The small Russian town of Verkhoyansk is known for its brutally cold winters and is one of the coldest towns on Earth. However, temperatures in recent months have skyrocketed double digits above average temperatures.

The average high temperature in Verkhoyansk in June is 68°F, meaning
this record day was over 30 degrees hotter than average. For reference, the coldest month of the year Verkhoyansk is January where the high is, on average, -44°F. Yes, you read that correct, negative 44 degrees Fahrenheit is the average high temperature in January.

Well There's Your Problem

So how do we get from, "holy fuck that was fuckin' awful" to "hey, let's build a monument to the guy who made it so fuckin' awful"?

Here's part of it - Northwestern (2012):

Remember the telephone game where people take turns whispering a message into the ear of the next person in line? By the time the last person speaks it out loud, the message has radically changed. It’s been altered with each retelling. 


Turns out your memory is a lot like the telephone game, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study.

Every time you remember an event from the past, your brain networks change in ways that can alter the later recall of the event. Thus, the next time you remember it, you might recall not the original event but what you remembered the previous time. The Northwestern study is the first to show this.

“A memory is not simply an image produced by time traveling back to the original event -- it can be an image that is somewhat distorted because of the prior times you remembered it,” said Donna Bridge, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and lead author of the paper on the study recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience. “Your memory of an event can grow less precise even to the point of being totally false with each retrieval.”

The fog effect over time is something of a blessing when we're talking about a PTSD kinda thing for an individual.

But when it becomes a mass delusion, then we've set our selves up to repeat the thing that was so fuckin' awful.

Memory Studies

Collective and Individual Memory

Memory operates on the individual as well as the collective level. "Memory nonetheless captures simultaneously the individual, embodied, and lived side and the collective, social, and constructed side of our relations to the past”. It allows for individuals, groups and societies to be creative as its “anachronistic quality—its bringing together of now and then, here and there—is actually the source of its powerful creativity, its ability to build new worlds out of the materials of older ones”.

Memory aids in the formation of identity. This alignment, however, is not a direct one as “our relationship with the past only partially determine who we are in the present, but never straightforwardly and directly, and never without unexpected or even unwanted consequences that bind us to those whom we consider other”. Our identities are therefore formed based on personal memories but also the interactions with other memories.

Don't Litter

Nope - not today, son.