Collection

It's been a bit of a while, but I've been collecting ALL sorts of links to share and not gotten around to posting them on Spoutible, my sole social home now on Teh Intarwebs.

My apologies, by the way, for the formatting. I literally am collecting these from a zillion sources, it's late, and my head is pounding. So - here goes...

German museum weirdly asks Italy to give back the Discobolus

The implicit bias problem won’t be solved by training alone | Aeon Essays

"Eugene Ofosu, asked whether same-sex marriage legalisation was associated with reduced anti-gay implicit biases across US states. His team studied US IAT scores between 2005 and 2016, and what they found was striking. While the implicit anti-gay bias for each state, on average, decreased at a steady rate before same-sex marriage legislation, these biases decreased at a sharper rate following legalisation, even after controlling for demographic variables such as participants’ age and gender, as well as state-level factors such as education and income."

Development hell (nature.com) 

"the story may have been less about idiot male techs and more about the NASA approach of solving all problems with more equipment. ...if you want to hear about NASA engineers not understanding female anatomy, better options are available ..."

What To Do When Your Period Comes… In Space ‹ Literary Hub (lithub.com)

Indigenous people wrestle with Buffy Sainte-Marie false identity claims - The Washington Post 

I've spoken for years about what I call Colonizer #Trek (lookin' at you, #TNG). Here is an interesting look at the questions of ethics, resources, private and public management, and financial and disability access as well as other barriers to participation in space - and what the heck's going on already. "The popular narrative that space is a bottomless reservoir of resources does not fit the facts." ... "(W)e are at step zero." Please enjoy this well-written essay.

As space gets more commercial, how can it be governed ethically? | Aeon Essays

Meet the absentee gods and nefarious spirits of ancient Mesopotamia | Aeon Videos

Cats have nearly 300 facial expressions | Science | AAAS

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/10/16/fox-news-violent-crime/ 

Perception Census | Welcome (dreamachine.world)

FBI: Killings fell 6 percent in 2022, violent crime declined - The Washington Post

In post-communist Europe, economics is laden with morality | Aeon Essays

In France, workers build a castle from scratch the 13th century way : NPR

Alien life might not be something science can ever ‘discover’ | Aeon Essays

For socialism and freedom: the life of Eugene Debs | Aeon Essays

Reviving Virginia’s historic Black cemeteries after decades of neglect - The Henrico Citizen

The deeper I’ve fallen down this rainbow-colored rabbit hole, the more I’ve come to understand that my shock at the breadth of queerness in nature is a symptom of a horrible miseducation, of centuries of science bullying the abundance of queerness off the record.
Orion Magazine - A Work of Love

Also, Biological Exuberance may be #MyNewDragName

Native Americans are building their own solar farms (bbc.com)
Native Americans are building their own solar farms
For decades, Native Americans were reliant on the US government to bring them power. Now, that may be changing


The last 2 are gift links - no paywall:

https://wapo.st/3tdrl9I

Jubilation and high expectations as Poland marks end of right-wing rule

Donald Tusk as prime minister will face challenges fixing relations with the E.U., restoring independence to courts and media and loosening abortion restrictions.

We will keep finding ways to Karen up the place. Pee-yew.
https://wapo.st/3RbTS7u
First-time author loses book deal for ‘review bombing’ authors on Goodreads
Cait Corrain, the author of the sci-fi fantasy novel “Crown of Starlight,” has faced backlash for “review bombing” fellow authors for months through fake Goodreads accounts.

WFH Window

The day is impossibly beautiful and breezy. Dazzling.

Nekkid baby has returned to my strip of the sidewalk, on a tiny bicycle. Riding it like a scooter. One foot on a pedal, one accelerating heedlessly.

An hour ago, with his mommy, he had walked by wearing nothing but a pull-up diaper, holding a sippy cup, absorbed utterly by anything under his nekkid little feet. Leading with his lil' boy belly. Dappled in sunshine.

But now, on his bike, daddy along for the ride literally, he is dressed and helmeted and speeding. I hear no wailing; he must be good at not falling.

He fades down the road.

The passel o' boys across the street from me are outside playing some game, squealing with joy between yelling like angry badgers, all modulated by occasional, calm dad-voice.

It. Is. OSUM.

Oh man - another bloodcurdling scream! Kids at play so often sound so terrifying!!! It sounds exactly like my own neighborhood, circa 1978.

Between this, tweeting birds, and inviting breezes, I am hard put to finish part 2 of the month's reporting. Gah.

There is this very specific inflection to kids playing - an elastic up-and-down wave, nothing like so tidy as a sine - in which the sound of injustice resonates with purity. BUT WHYYYYY ... can't I go over here ... does he get to run to the next base ... am I not wiii-ii-iiiiiii-in-in-innniiiinnng?

The breeze in the maple outside the window, playing with the grass, scintillating in the treetops across the way. The beagle a couple houses away, Expressing Opinions.

It is ... beautiful.


***


Just a few miles away, filthy Confederate monuments I want to see for myself, updated for our age by people angry, and sad, and bereft for the several-millionth time in 400 years. The police chief here has been on the side of citizens. Just south of us, another chief stood with his people. It is not loaves and fishes The Beatitudes, and it IS optics and choices and amplification calculated - but it is good to see choices for those these polices forces are here to protect and serve.

One of my dearest friends, my best neighbor at work, a woman I love so much - I have heard the sirens, but she heard those and the sound of "no justice/no peace" and "I can't breathe" all this weekend. She is a living blessing.

The Daughters of the Confederacy could have done as others have - served history instead of themselves, as an institution. Why anyone would care to be institutionalized with a group of worshippers of the Lost Cause - people lionizing rebels, who broke away from and tried to destroy the United States - is beyond comprehension. Their existence is shameful, and their mission indefensible. They should relinquish their revolting relics to actual historians, donate their facilities, repent and make reparations. They are shameful. They burned - for a little while - this weekend. This is not looting, it is reprimand, and long past due.

Lee's tired horse, on an exalted platform of ridiculous loftiness - tail down and tired, while the old General still rides, ramrod straight and UNASHAMED, bronze and burnished, but shat on daily by local pigeons with more rectitude - is bedaubed with graffiti. Stuart's plinth, a little shorter, surrounded by a wrought iron bridge it could *not* have been easy to bring down - but brought down it has been, by living bodies who matter more than these rebels do.

Leave them desecrated, the echo of the desecration these insurgents brought to the United States, in dividing them. Remember them for the failures they were. Let the bronze and granite decay, the rot take them over. Leave them to rot, or take them away altogether.

Leave Kehinde Wiley's living horseman in their place - no traitor, but an AMERICAN man - pristine and strong and proud and standing for something. Let him tower over the others as they fall down.


***


It would take only minutes to see what has been done, and what has been undone, in my city. I will probably drive out - before the newly enacted curfew - to see what I need to know. To be a part of it.

To see the dazzling sun, perhaps, set ... on these newly-faced (hardly DEfaced - how do you "ruin" idolatrous monuments to traitors?) images.

To breathe the good air, and commit to using my privilege ... so that little nekkid kiddo can stay untouched a while longer.

Collection

WOW, this is a fascinating piece of legal history and a wide-ranging look at civil forfeiture. When journalism goes this deep into stories, I can't tear myself away. And the story is a moment of "bipartisan" cooperation (yes, theoretically the SCOTUS is not supposed to be party-based, but we all know perfectly well that's hogwash). An excellent read because it's great writing, engaging storytelling, relevant and hopeful history.

T-Rex at the American Museum of Natural History. NEATO-SPEDITO! Don't even pretend you don't want to see this.

I grew up with the affectionate use of "am" in my house. White and Southern and old as I am, this wasn't correlated to Black American speech, though we were familiar with the stereotypes. The "am" was just linguistic overlap, though its tone of juvenilization/baby-talk usage has a distinctive paternalism, viewed alongside the hideously racist exaggerations of blackface speech. In our family, it was our intimacy: dad would ask us or our friends, "How am ya?", but it was certainly not a greeting he used with colleagues. I'm fascinated to see the roots that am between us. I'm also reminded of the long-held belief that Appalachian American speech preserved Elizabethan English for centuries - the truth of which is delightfully more complex than "yes, it did" or "no, it didn't." The lineage of Black American English is more complex than its reception has generally allowed. It's hard not to want to protest, "but my dad wasn't racist" ... even as it's impossible not to see the Colonial heritage of a language long-shared only because of slavery.

Once again, Diane's fascination with the archaeology of poo ... oh man - "comes to the fore"? "raises its head"? I'm not sure how to put this that isn't lame scatalogical humor. Anyway: NEATO, it's excremental science again! This time, on the moon. <Resists the Schrödinger's poo joke> Go! Learn the wonders of human contamination in space ... or the secrets of seeding (cue echo-boom voice effect) LIFE ITSELF.

Collection

Just two mourning posts today.  I've got a post archived, but this just is not the time.

For anyone in reach, the Met has an exhibition of mourning gowns of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  I would love to see this, but though I'm on the correct coast, "in reach" just now has a proportion that keeps this event off my social calendar.

Pour La Victoire, always meticulous and fascinating, with copious detail photos, also has a look at just one mourning gown, but a fascinating look it is.  In this case, too, the comments add to the post.  Take a look at a rare and endangered silk dress, circa 1867.

Museums and Money

Seeing this article on the drastic slashing of personnel at museums in the U.K. has me thinking once again about the cultural destruction wrought upon us by the interests who see fit to shut down the government in the name of getting their way around a law rightfully passed on my own soil.  We've all heard about national park shutdowns and all those people whose weddings and camping trips have been affected.  Every now and then you even here a side note about the children going without food because of this business.

The damage to our culture by the economic barbarities, whether by removing employees' livelihoods or by the irreparable compromises to our art and even architecture, is dizzying.  For every Kickstarter to refurbish and preserve images created for The Raven, there are invisible losses, some of them human, some of them not, perhaps, directly related to the shutdown, but born of our economy's cruelties nonetheless.  The little-discussed, but not unseen decimation of our art, culture, history, archaeology are just as dangerous a loss to history as the destruction of Buddhas in Afghanistan, or the looting of European art history by Nazis.  Just as evil, and born of self-interests no less bitter.  Neglect, or withdrawal, can be as brutal as bombs.

We are a fragile race, humanity.  Our cultures are as vulnerable as gossamer in a storm.  When we fail as stewards art, architecture, beauty - history doesn't judge that excellent thinking.

Quoth The Raven: Kickstart Me

The Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia is housed, not in a home of Edgar Allen Poe, but in the oldest home remaining in the city where he did live.  It's a smallish place, whose pretty back garden is sometimes a venue for weddings and receptions, in a busy stretch on the side of a historic hill.  Someone once called me from that place, and I had "EDGAR ALLEN POE" on my caller ID, tenaciously loved and preserved, until the day I moved out of that home.

The Poe Museum is a place I have visited; not as immediately impressive a museum as the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts perhaps, nor the Science Museum, the Children's Museum, nor even the Valentine Museum.  It is, however, one of many of Richmond's homages to its favorite son.

Image:  poemuseum.org

In the Poe Museum are to be found some of the most fantastical illustrations for The Raven.  It is a pleasure to see that these illustrations are subject to a Kickstarter fund for their preservation.  I've seen the state of preservation described in The History Blog's article, and to see them saved would be a pleasure.  I may have to learn how to contribute to a Kickstarter myself.