December 6, 2016
An exhaustive look at the life and lawsuits of Backpage.com, originally started by the jerks who turned alt-weeklies into a chain to compete with Craigslist’s “Adult Services” section. / The Ringer
“Democrats in the Senate use demographics as their excuse for the fact that they only have one African-American member in their ranks. They’ll tell anyone who listens that they wish this wasn’t the case and to the untrained ear, it sounds true. It isn’t.” There is only one black chief of staff in the entire Senate. The most diverse office might be Republican Tim Scott’s, from South Carolina. / New York Daily News
Ever wonder why, for a variety of reasons, the rape scene from Last Tango in Paris is so unbearable to watch? Because it wasn’t acted. Maria Schneider wasn’t told ahead of time what would happen because Bertolucci “wanted Maria to feel, not to act, the rage and the humiliation.” / The New York Times
“We’re lucky we got to see Verhoeven film Schwarzenegger holding Michael Ironside’s severed arms aloft while smirking and delivering a one-liner, but we should’ve seen that exact same thing happen at least three more times.” On the “garden of delights” that is Total Recall. / The A.V. Club
“While some see this new prediction tech as like a new pipe tech that could improve all pipes, no matter their size, it is actually more like a tech only useful on very large pipes. Just as it would be a waste to force a pipe tech only useful for big pipes onto all pipes, it can be a waste to push advanced prediction tech onto typical prediction tasks.” Machine learning is all the rage, but most firms really just want the cachet of leading-edge tech; they could get their predictions with a simple regression and good clean data. / Overcoming Bias
A massive team of PhD linguists is teaching Google’s search function to respond to natural language inquiries by showing it how titles, deks, and headers pull from key points in text articles. / Wired
From Shane Griffin’s “Chromatic” series, wherein “the failure of colors to converge through the lens creates beautiful emissions of the specturm.” / Shane Griffin
Larger and larger—and thus deadlier and deadlier—guns are being used in crimes and homicides in many large American cities. / thetrace.org
“Imagine dynamic pricing for brain cycles. With brain plug firmware installed, why not rent out your spare cycles while you sleep to solve problems like factoring products of large primes?” Even as technologies come and go, the rhetoric of progress endures, its promises callow and naive as ever. A review of Nicholas Carr’s new book, Utopia is Creepy. / LA Review of Books
The military has long exposed soldiers to toxic fumes and carcinogens. The most recent case, of massive open-air “burn pits” in Iraq and Afghanistan—where human waste was burned along with medicine, batteries, and car parts—was treated by the government much in the same way as previous cases: Denial via obfuscation of data and faulty science. / The New Republic
“He’s been paid a hell of a lot of money by the VA over the years, and I think they don’t want to admit that maybe he [isn’t] the end all and be all.” For years, the VA has turned to Alvin Young—“Dr. Orange”—to explain why it shouldn’t give veterans exposed to the herbicide medical treatment or compensation. / ProPublica/The Virginian-Pilot
During World War II, anticipating another “chemical war” like WWI, the military tested substances such as mustard gas and lewisite on tens of thousands of soldiers. This was first revealed in the early ’90s, after afflicted veterans made enough noise to begin an inquiry. / ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
For over two decades, military researchers at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland—which is still operational—tested everything from sarin gas to LSD and MDMA on US troops, many of whom were coerced into participating or lied to altogether. / ecbc.army.mil, i2.cdn.turner.com
It was US military and State Department human testing that was cited as an “ethical example” of such testing by prosecutors at the Nuremberg Doctors’ trial. / Wikipedia
The “technosphere” comprises every human artifact and artificial structure. If weighed, it would add up 30 trillion tons, “roughly 110 pounds of human-made crap per square meter.” / Gizmodo
“Even if somehow, someway, they build this pipeline, they’ve inadvertently sparked a whole generation of us indigenous folks and everyone who wants to stand with us to fight for Mother Earth. We’re going to inherit this planet, bro, and everyone’s welcome to inherit it with us if they want.” The #NoDAPL protest movement has launched a new generation of Native American activists / Mother Jones
Science is beautiful: With footage captured by a microscope, a short film about the growth of white silver and black lead during metal displacement reactions. / Vimeo