finally republicans are worrying about women's health

high-fructose

Via Kottke comes a comprehensive exposé by the New York Times shows how the sugar lobby bribed researchers to shift the blame of coronary disease and all the other ill-effects (real and reputed, since the findings and received-wisdom is perhaps not to be trusted) that the substance can cause to saturated-fats and other culprits.
Though we’d like to think, nearly five decades on, that as consumers and political animals we are justifiably accomplished in spotting misdirection and skeptical of the pronouncements of experts, a little nudge has great ripples and derails agency and choice as much as the discussion. We are responsible for our health and well-being, without a doubt, but plying sugar-coated inquiries have created such a dearth of selections that it’s been made nearly impossible to make informed decisions. What do you think? It’s hard to hold such behaviour to account, no matter how unconscionable it is. Even if you chose to go beyond from scratch and grow your own food from seed (if you can find a supply not tainted by a vertical monopoly), you’d be even harder pressed to find a plot of land not systemically polluted or otherwise compromised by contamination.

industrial light and magic

A few months ago, the studio behind the Star Wars franchise and ArtStation solicited the talents of some of the best concept artists in the industry, asking them to reimagine iconic scenes from the saga. Because it was a competition, technically there ought to be front-runners, but all the submissions deserve honourable-mentions. Check out the whole gallery at the link up top.

omega man

Most address with confidence the premise of the coming technological Singularity and the underlying notion that artificial intelligence will surpass human ability and escalate quickly surpassing human comprehension, and while the reality now seems tantalisingly close the concept was minted by Hungarian-American mathematician and futurist John von Neumann back in 1958.
Maybe it seemed just around the corner back then, as well. Singularity, fraught with its promise and apprehension, probably owes it coinage to a contemporary and complementary theological concept, developed and elaborated in 1955 by controversial Jesuit priest and paleontologist (discoverer of Peking Man) Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, called Point Oméga. The idea of the Omega Point (in English) premises that all sentient beings in the Cosmos are constantly evolving towards a higher social consciousness, which is ultimately indistinguishable from and one with the divine. Later writers championing Chardin’s concept believed it was something to strive for but would never be achieved—perhaps as detractors of the technological Singularity have put forward. I wonder if a spiritual singularity could be heralded by having created something that transcends what we as creators understand.

beyond the uncanny valley of the dolls

The eerily realistic school girl called Saya is the creation of design duo Teruyuki and Yuki Ishikawa, and although fully virtual and computer-generated does seem to cross over from the uncanny and surpasses hyper-realism to something indistinguishable from an authentic human being. I wonder what that achievement might mean in terms of the Turing test for this level of human-machine interface and whether we want to be comfortable with that. What do you think? Should artificial beings be made to wear some emblem or badge to mark them as such, like the hologram Rimmer on Red Dwarf who was marked with an H on his forehead?

peer-review oder lügensteine

There was something vaguely familiar among this list of the most infamous scientific hoaxes that prescribe a preventative dose of healthy skepticism that the Presurfer shared. One of the pranks was perpetrated in my old town of Würzburg, just around the corner, at the prestigious university, where among other things, x-rays were discovered, probably began innocently enough but soon became a ruinous scandal.
Rock-hound, early fossil-prospector (though there were collections, at the time in 1725, people didn’t understand how fossils were formed and preserved) and dean of the School of Medicine Johann Bartholomeus Adam Beringer was known to hunt for specimens in the vineyards of Eibelstadt on the outskirts of the city, and some of the professor’s colleagues thought it would be a hoot if they planted some stones there for their cantankerous and rather arrogant co-worker to find. They etched into pieces of limestone impressions of bugs and frogs, which Beringer theorised were either fossils from before the Great Flood or were the artifice of prehistoric tribes. On later expeditions, Beringer also found fragments that bore the name of God in Hebrew characters, and with the evidence of the Tetragrammaton, Beringer decided that these could be no human artefacts but rather “capricious fabrications of God Himself.” Beringer commissioned a lithographer and began publishing volumes of his amazing findings. Even though disliked by the university staff, the hoaxers realised that they had gone too far and admitted to the fraud, discrediting not only Beringer academically but all involved as well. Some of Beringer’s so called Lügensteine (lying stones) are on display at the regional museum housed in Fortress Marienberg, and perhaps that’s where I was introduced to these eighteenth century pranksters.  Be sure to check out the link up top for more scandalous episodes of deception and duping.

dark dorkingtons

There were quite a few hen-fanciers during the Victorian Era, producing quite a few distinctive show-breeds, popularised by the Queen herself having received a pair of exotic chickens from China. I first recall seeing these chicks with their hair did on Bibliodyssey’s former web-presence, since migrated to the socials but still a wonderous visual and literary archive worth the visit. The heights of the craze, hen-fever, were captured in the definitive volume “The Illustrated Book of Poultry” by Lewis Wright—first published in 1870 and periodically reissued over the next several decades. Check out the appreciation and gallery from Kottke at the link above to learn more and see who else is in the hen-house.

overt and covert

Beginning with some lines of haiku lifted from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, Hyperallergic explores how the battery of diagnostic tests that psychologists use or purport to use (recalling that for the Rorschach ink blots and the like, there are no wrong answers—just crazy ones) taken out of the clinical-setting and context become accidental-art. I especially enjoyed the primer on the now discredited narrative-type or storytelling exams, like the Thematic Apperception Test or Make a Picture Story that operated on the principle that the subject’s motives and character would be revealed by his or her projections, since our veiled self-indictments must mean that we are repressed or vicarious ourselves.