November 28, 2016
Global sea ice has hit a record low, with Arctic ice melting instead of refreezing as it typically does during November. / New Scientist
1. A softening of racism, not investment in education, boosted Asian-Americans to the middle class. Before World War Two, Asian-Americans were discriminated against viciously, but something happened in the following decades, and by 1980 they received nearly equal pay to whites employed in the same field. That allowed them to invest in education for their children, but Asian-Americans with the same educational background still receive 5% less than white employees. / The Washington Post
2. Minorities are getting PhDs, but they aren’t getting professorships. “Saying that there are not enough applicants in the pool can no longer be an excuse,” as between 2005 and 2013 almost 6,000 scientists from underrepresented minorities earned their doctorates—but the number of junior faculty in that group fell by six. Minorities are often eliminated from academic searches for not having credentials consistently denied to people of color. / The Atlantic
Code enables all manner of shady activity, from the relatively innocuous (enrolling people for email newsletters without their consent) to the totally insidious (convincing patients they need medicine that may be harmful). Programmers can always say they’re just following orders, but new conversations about ethics in code indicate some kind of institutional program is necessary. / Business Insider
You’ll never solve this one: The inventors of the Infinity Puzzle used the concept of the Klein bottle—a topological object with no inside or outside—to invent a puzzle without boundaries. / n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com, mathworld.wolfram.com
See what the U.S.-Mexico boundary looks like relative to the size of other countries. / interaktiv.morgenpost.de
“No checks and balances can redeem what we’ve unleashed. The reality is that half of the voters chose white supremacy, though saying that makes me a hypocrite. I was a much more extreme partisan than a vast majority of Trump voters and I never would have recognized that label.” David Duke’s godson, the former “bright future” of the white supremacy movement, denounces Trump. / New York Times
New York has half as many old school diners today as it did 20 years ago—the kind with affordable menus and international staff, not a slew of early a.m. DJ’s featured in a restaurant called Diner in Manhattan’s Meatpacking district. / thedinernyc.com
“As a society we’ve been conditioned to be generally more tolerant of manipulative, egomaniacal behavior from white women.” It’s good that television depicts complicated women, but white feminist characters are too often able to pawn off responsibilities. / The Establishment
There are approximately 40,000 pieces of junk left in space by astronauts, some of which may forbode ill for Earth. / YouTube
The puzzling rise of Stephen Bannon from the internet’s frat row to a top office in the West Wing may have less to do with Donald Trump’s personal ideology than that of a little-known hedge-fund heiress and activist libertarian mega-donor named Rebekah Mercer. / Politico
Very lovely: photographs from “the secret world of bog,” a lesser-known ecosystem, from British Columbia’s outer coast. / Hakai Magazine
In case you needed to feel a little more inconsequential this Monday: a football field is used to map out Earth’s past (and humanity’s tiny moment in it). / NPR
To help the previously-offline population of Myanmar adapt to the internet, publications called Facebook and The Internet have launched, running aggregated social media posts for newsstand digests. / BuzzFeed
Track 65 years of worldwide military spending with a new extended database. / sipri.org
“The writing, it should go without saying, is bad. A chapter begins: ‘From the beginning of time, people have struggled with sleep.’ In fact, from the beginning of time, sophomore English teachers have been taking red pen to any essay that starts with ‘from the beginning of time.’” On Arianna Huffington’s empty Sleep Revolution. / Current Affairs