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.

repeal and replace or never bet against the house

Someone observed in the days leading up to the awe-inspiringly awful Republican party plan to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act and instead give the uninsured and the uninsurable public a plan that only exacerbates every single, line-by-line, complaint that the party levelled against its sponsors and awards the companies that run the insurance exchanges, that if it were just re-branded as Trump Care™ or Big Orange™ with no changes to the structure and protocols, all involved would walk away reasonably happy.
Having had six years to stew over the act’s passage despite every effort to destroy it and still failing to have a contingency at the ready when their chance came, the controlling cadre of law-makers were compelled to fast-track some bit of garbage legislation with no one to stop them. Indeed, who in fact knew health care could be this easy?  There is a year-long moratorium on reproductive care and support for new parents because—why not?  With many Americans left in a quite precarious state, bereft of a measure of security and peace-of-mind, substituting subsidising health-care and making insurers less prone to discriminate over less than optimal wagers with tax credits that are overwhelmingly in favour of the regressively better-off is not a tenable surrogate and only ensures that the poor will stay poor and those preventable ailments of poverty will remain with generational consequences.

brave little toaster

At a Geneva automotive showcase, Volkswagen unveiled its autonomous, self-driving concept vehicle that’s being called Sedric (an abbreviation of “SElf-DRIving Car”) whose boxy chassis is being characterised as looking like an angry toaster bearing down on traffic. I find its appearance to be pretty endearing but I don’t know if I could adjust to being chauffeured around on a comfy sofa, the cockpit stripped of all controls. If I wanted that experience, it’s readily available at little to no cost and it’s called the bus. In any case, I would imagine that the notion of car-ownership will undergo a pretty radical change not long after these first prototypes are rolled-out.

june bride oder baumbastik

Amusing Planet has a nice profile and appreciation of the Bridegroom’s Oak (die Bräutigamseiche) of the Dodauer Forest of Eutin—north of Lübeck, a tree with its own postal code (Postleitzahl) and recipient of human correspondence and secret-keeper.
While the tree’s origins might be conflated with myth and the message of missionaries, the tradition of letter-writing can be traced back to historical star-crossed lovers. A forester’s daughter and the son of a Leipziger chocolatier used the oak as a letter-drop cite for their liaisons—to their parents’ initial disapproval. Later the parents relented and the pair was wed under the trees boughs in June 1891. Their fame spread by word of mouth and people began writing to the tree in hopes of finding true love. Letters deposited in the tree’s trunk are open to public-inspection and several matches have been made over the years. The Bridegroom’s Oak was itself married to the Holy Ghost horse chestnut (die Himmelgeister Kastanie) in April of 2009—across Germany in the Ruhrgebiet near Düsseldorf. The two seem to be handling their long-distance relationship quite well.