Ich heiße Hans

theatlantic:

Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?

Yvette Vickers, a former Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. Upstairs, she found Vickers’s body, mummified, near a heater that was still running. Her computer was on too, its glow permeating the empty space.

The Los Angeles Times posted a story headlined “Mummified Body of Former Playboy Playmate Yvette Vickers Found in Her Benedict Canyon Home,” which quickly went viral. Within two weeks, by Technorati’s count, Vickers’s lonesome death was already the subject of 16,057 Facebook posts and 881 tweets. She had long been a horror-movie icon, a symbol of Hollywood’s capacity to exploit our most basic fears in the silliest ways; now she was an icon of a new and different kind of horror: our growing fear of loneliness. Certainly she received much more attention in death than she did in the final years of her life. With no children, no religious group, and no immediate social circle of any kind, she had begun, as an elderly woman, to look elsewhere for companionship. Savage later told Los Angeles magazine that she had searched Vickers’s phone bills for clues about the life that led to such an end. In the months before her grotesque death, Vickers had made calls not to friends or family but to distant fans who had found her through fan conventions and Internet sites.

Vickers’s web of connections had grown broader but shallower, as has happened for many of us. We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible. Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment. In 2010, at a cost of $300 million, 800 miles of fiber-optic cable was laid between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange to shave three milliseconds off trading times. Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.

Read more. [Image: Phillip Toledano]

theatlantic:

Enough, Already: The SOPA Debate Ignores How Much Copyright Protection We Already Have

The most frustrating part of the discussion around SOPA has been watching politicians and commentators fail to acknowledge the vast resources we already devote to protecting copyright in the United States. Over the past two decades, the United States has established one of the harshest systems of copyright enforcement in the world. Our domestic copyright law has become broader (it covers more topics), deeper (it lasts for a longer time), and more severe (the punishments for infringement have been getting worse). These standards were established through an alphabet soup of legislation: the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act of 1997, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, and the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO-IP) Act of 2008. And every few years, there’s a call for more.

Read more at The Atlantic

npr:

Caption: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with her late husband, Marty Ginsburg, an accomplished amateur chef. (via At The High Court, A Tribute To A ‘Chef Supreme’)

Credit: Mariana Cook/Supreme Court Historical Society

canisfamiliaris:

Genetics of Light and Dark Turkey Meat Explained

A common question at holiday tables this week may be “white meat or dark?”

Now scientists have identified the genetic switch that governs the formation of the two types during development.

White and dark meat differ in appearance because each is made up of a distinct type of muscle fiber. Dark meat comprises so-called slow-twitch muscle fibers, which are specialized for extended exertion, whereas white meat is made up of fast-twitch fibers that fuel short, intense bursts of energy. That much has been known for some time. The genetic mechanism underlying the specification of one muscle type versus the other was unclear, however. Philip Ingham of the University of Sheffield and his colleagues studied muscle cells of developing zebrafish and found that a gene dubbed u-boot (ubo) plays a key role in determining what type of muscle develops by controlling the transcription factor protein known as Blimp-1:

We have seen Blimp-1 before, as it is also used to determine the type of some white blood cells, but this is the first time it has been linked to muscle development. The find is particularly important because it is likely that the same switch is used in mammals, fish and birds.

(via jtotheizzoe :: Scientific American)

dc rivals

flavorpill:

Check Out the London 2012 Olympic Posters

missing new york on this chilly fall evening. a view from my window on riverside drive (circa fall 2009). an oldie but a goodie.

laphamsquarterly:

With the 7 billionth person born, check out our map from “The Future” issue, which lays out the very real changes the Earth will undergo by the year 2050.

(via thenewrepublic)

sfmoma:

Today is Walker Evans’s birthday. If he was alive, he’s be an incredibly wise 108 year old.

See Evans’s “Subway Passengers” SFMOMA | Explore Modern Art | Our Collection | Walker Evans | [Subway Passengers, New York])

(via npr)