hr 1275

Amidst the flurry of coverage, I missed the fact that the House Resolution that replaces the Affordable Care Act is actually called the “World’s Greatest Healtcare Plan of 2017.” That really throws down the gauntlet, I think, and is inviting challengers to come up with something better, which is a pretty low bar for access. Perhaps one without lifetime caps, mental healthcare coverage, coverage for reproductive health and support for new families, affordable rates for the elderly and infirm?  What superlatives would you give to Dear Leader’s other real or threatened accomplishments of corporate welfare and codified xenophobia?

honeycomb hideout or finding buzz

Dispiritingly, the bee mascot is missing from the cartons of a popular breakfast cereal brand to highlight the seriousness of the plight of bees around the world, as Super Punch corroborates. The cereal box prize of this campaign is wildflower seeds to help bring back the bees and a raft of educational material on what individuals can do to improve their local ecology. I do hope that this send the message that sticks with especially young breakfast-eaters that we can indeed do something and bring back the bees.

fjord fairlane

Ground-breaking is to begin next year in Norway to create the world’s first waterway tunnel to be navigable by large, steamer-sized vessels, as Super Punch reports. The seventeen hundred metre massive engineering project is not meant to make sea-faring routes shorter by carving out a short-cut or more direct path, but rather to protect ships at this most treacherous point along the Norwegian coast, entering the Stadhavet Sea where the waters and weather of the North and Norwegian seas come together quite violently.

5x5

i spit in your general direction: on the contrary, the Archerfish is far more accurate, inviting a discussion on the intelligence of very small brains, via Æon magazine
 
dank meme: the leak dump of tactics for exploiters aren’t all best-practises, nor the most up-to-date

what the dormouse said: journey down a rabbit hole in Shropshire leads to the discovery of a fantastic Templars’ grotto, via Boing Boing

allen wrench: Swedish lifestyle and furnishing empire introduces tables and chairs that snap together by means of a wedge dowel

oh, aunt jess: a curated collection of Murder, She Wrote guest-star trading-cards

flipping the script

Writing for Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok confronts us with a preview of an unsettling theatrical experiment conducted by New York University, wherein professors reversed the genders of the two US presidential candidates and directed professional actors to recreate the debates—portraying not only the dialogue and tone but also their respective body language.
Audiences expected confirmation of their beliefs that as few could stomach the behaviour of Candidate Trump on the dais, no one could tolerate such conduct coming from a woman. Instead their actual reception was quite different and spectators (participants in the experiment) could hardly reconcile themselves to what they were feeling, relating to the actress and harbouring distrust for the actor. What do you think is going on here? There’s a clip from the NYU campus at the link up top. Does unscripted lashing out come across as extemporaneous speech when one sees it coming from a woman?

bed of nails

A far better solution than surfaces coated with antimicrobial chemicals which are just as prone to propelling the survival of the fittest as any other hygienic strategies, material science to looking toward the dragon fly, as TYWKIWDBI informs, for a novel way to repel germs.
Engineers have created a structure out of black silicon, nanopillars, that are very punishing to the cellular membranes of bacteria, just like the topology found on the insects’ wings. Once on this sort of surface, should the microbe move it will be sheared to pieces. Other research projects have yielded nano-structures that inhibit the bacteria sticking at all or being disruptively slippery to discourage cohesion and infection.

stay bronze pony boy or the telescreens have no off switch

Originally the missions of consulates and embassies were distinct—the consuls not simply being an outpost of the chief ambassador, but while the embassy represented the foreign-relations interests of the sending and the host nations, consulates were established in order to champion the business and economic interest of their credentialing nation-state.
Arguably there’s been quite a bit of mission-creep and the institutions have taken on overlapping roles—and fighting for the interest of domestic businesses abroad might ought not to be held to the same standards which govern diplomacy. I’ve only chanced to be in depths of the compound in Frankfurt once and could well imagine what activities might be carried-out in those labyrinthine, subterranean corridors. According to the latest tranche of documents released by Wikileaks, the US Central Intelligence Agency used the facility as a base of operations for surveillance and subterfuge for all of Europe, the Middle East and Africa (DE/EN). It’s not as if we hadn’t been warned multiple times before, and these revelations about the spy-base plus the UK’s collusion were among the few concrete details (also demonstrating that Russian hackers didn’t have a monopoly on silly code-names with Brutal Kangaroo, malware hiding in digital images, or Weeping Angel, fake off buttons on snooping gadgets) in page after page of tools for prising vulnerabilities and making sure those wounds are kept open once on the open market and certainly would confer economic advantages.