Perhaps we need to ask our patients how they would design their ideal emergency department. Has anyone thought to do that? I know they would like caring, kind, compassionate staff. Staff who are not carrying serious emotional damage with them to work and back every day. It would be good for all of us to get this right. And soon.
Software engineering principles, from Robert C. Martin's book Clean Code, adapted for JavaScript. This is not a style guide. It's a guide to producing readable, reusable, and refactorable software in JavaScript.
Not every principle herein has to be strictly followed, and even fewer will be universally agreed upon. These are guidelines and nothing more, but they are ones codified over many years of collective experience by the authors of Clean Code.
Tom Scocca: Now the Plan Is for Donald Trump to Impeach Himself? (Hmm Daily)
The migrant children will still be dead and the public funds will still be in the Trump Organization’s bank accounts and the whole cavalcade of corruption will still be as corrupt as ever, but it won’t matter. If the Democratic leadership chooses to stall for the next 16 months, so it can turn the question of Trump’s fitness for office over to the voters, the voters should logically conclude that the opposition party doesn’t believe he’s done anything seriously wrong. It’s the message on which Trump and the Trumpists hang all their hopes for reelection: there is no alternative.
Emily Bazelon: White People Are Noticing Something New: Their Own Whiteness (NYT)
As long as white people continue to see ourselves as the norm and the neutral, we haven’t replaced as much as we might imagine. We continue to act as racial managers, clinging to the job of setting the culture’s terms and measuring everyone else’s otherness against those terms.
Katie Wheeler: It’s Time to Rethink How Recycling is Done (The Nib)
China doesn’t want to sort your trash anymore.
If the world of recycling is to move forwrd, the emphasis should be on re-educating the public and holding corporations responsible for creating affordable, accessible, eco-friendly products.
NOTE: This entire comic strip is inaccessible because there is no alt text or transcription. 🙄
Illusory sound texture reveals multi-second statistical completion in auditory scene analysis
Demonstrations of ‘illusory sound texture’—basically, your brain continuing to ‘hear’ a sound texture that doesn't exist while it is interrupted by another sound.
From the paper abstract:
Sound sources in the world are experienced as stable even when intermittently obscured, implying perceptual completion mechanisms that “fill in” missing sensory information. We demonstrate a filling-in phenomenon in which the brain extrapolates the statistics of background sounds (textures) over periods of several seconds when they are interrupted by another sound, producing vivid percepts of illusory texture.
Ableism is not a list of bad words. Language is *one* tool of an oppressive system. Being aware of language -- for those of us who have the privilege of being able to change our language -- can help us understand how pervasive ableism is. Ableism is systematic, institutional devaluing of bodies and minds deemed deviant, abnormal, defective, subhuman, less than. Ableism is *violence.*
This list has been compiled and changed over time with input from many different disabled people, people with disabilities, self-advocates, d/Deaf and hard of hearing people, people with chronic illnesses, sick people, mad people, neurodivergent people, etc. -- and I am always responsive to suggestions from folks who are directly impacted.
Jordyn Taylor: If You Care About Mental Illness, It's Time to Stop Saying "Crazy" and "Insane" (Mic.com)
"Using that kind of language sends the message that it's OK to trivialize mental illness and lazily substitute real people's lived experiences for 'wild,' 'silly,' 'dangerous' or 'out of control,'" Lydia X. Z. Brown, an activist, writer and speaker focused on disability justice, said in an email.
"For people able to change their everyday language, becoming conscious of how often they use ableist words like 'crazy' or 'insane' is one small way of reducing the stigmatizing effects of casually ableist expressions," Brown said.
Lili Loofbourow: The Kavanaugh Accusation Has Men More Afraid Than Ever (Slate)
It’s useful to have naked misogyny out in the open. It is now clear, and no exaggeration at all, that a significant percentage of men—most of them Republicans—believe that a guy’s right to a few minutes of “action” justifies causing people who happen to be women physical pain, lifelong trauma, or any combination of the two. They’ve decided—at a moment when they could easily have accepted Kavanaugh’s denial—that something larger was at stake: namely, the right to do as they please, freely, regardless of who gets hurt. Rather than deny male malfeasance, they’ll defend it. Their logic could not be more naked or more self-serving: Men should get to escape consequences for youthful “indiscretions” like assault, but women should not—especially if the consequence is a pregnancy. And this perspective extends 100 percent to the way they wish the legal system to work: Harms suffered by women do not rate consideration, much less punishment. (I recommend Googling the mortality rate for women when abortion was illegal.)
‘Old Town Road’: See How Memes and Controversy Took Lil Nas X to No. 1 (NY Times)
In the latest “Diary of a Song” episode, Lil Nas X is joined by the producer YoungKio — who didn’t even know he was a part of “Old Town Road” until he heard it in a video meme — and Billy Ray Cyrus, who lent the song another layer of novelty and outlaw credibility. The video also features cameos by the influencers @nicemichael and @elitelife_kd, who were crucial to the track’s early rise.
Maybe I’m trying to make up for my personal failings through social activism, journalism, and other projects, as a way to try and make up for my lousy personality. In other words, activism and journalism are also just some sort of emotional crutch for me. It makes me feel quite inauthentic, frankly. But regardless of the deeper psychological motivations for my actions, call it being self-righteous or what have you, I still don’t think I’m wrong.
Maria Bustillos: The 1% Nightmare Class Politics of Taylor Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down” (Popula)
I mean this reaction to poverty is not even mocking, or laughing. The have-nots hate the haves just for being themselves, glorious, glossy and rich; thus the haves needn’t, and won’t, even acknowledge that the have-nots exist, those gap-toothed ignorant peasants in their gross marabou-free clothes. They need to shut up, control themselves. Calm down.
Proponents of Libra are all yabbering on about “serving the world’s unbanked,” as if it were 15 or 20 years ago. For more than a decade, Kenya has already had M-Pesa, a thriving micropayments system based on trading cell minutes!! M-Pesa predates Bitcoin, and has expanded from Kenya through East and Central Africa, and on beyond to the Middle East and India, covering millions of people who most emphatically do not need Mark Zuckerberg sticking his grubby mitts in their wallets.
Bitcoin was meant as a curb on the man, perhaps even as a strike against the Man; Libra is the Man.
Maria Bustillos: Paper Books Can’t Be Shut Off from Afar (Popula)
Eight or nine years down the road, we can be pretty sure that if a tech behemoth suddenly feels like doing something horrible, they just will do it. Please buy paper books.
A collaborative social publishing engine.
Known allows any number of users to post to a shared site with blog posts, status updates, photographs, and more.
Its robust open source framework can be used to build fully-fledged community sites, or a blog for a single user. It's up to you.
Stacey Abrams, the Democratic State of the Union response speaker, and other authors respond to Francis Fukuyama's Foreign Affairs essay "Against Identity Politics" and discuss the meaning and value of identity politics in the United States and beyond.
The marginalized did not create identity politics: their identities have been forced on them by dominant groups, and politics is the most effective method of revolt.
Shannon Keating: The Time I Went On A Lesbian Cruise And It Blew Up My Entire Life (Buzzfeed)
I didn’t expect that spending a week with a couple thousand lesbians on a cruise ship would push me to radically reconsider the future I’d planned for myself.
Here’s What Ta-Nehisi Coates Told Congress About Reparations (NYT)
Many of us would love to be taxed for the things we are solely and individually responsible for. But we are American citizens, and thus bound to a collective enterprise that extends beyond our individual and personal reach. It would seem ridiculous to dispute invocations of the founders, or the Greatest Generation, on the basis of a lack of membership in either group. We recognize our lineage as a generational trust, as inheritance and the real dilemma posed by reparations is just that: a dilemma of inheritance. It’s impossible to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery.
The Dream World of Dion McGregor (He Talks in His Sleep)
n 1964, Decca Records released one of the most extraordinary LPs in recording history: a compilation of ten somniloquies by a loquacious sleeptalker named Dion McGregor. Despite having been a commercial flop, The Dream World of Dion McGregor (He Talks in His Sleep) has become a cult classic during the fifty years since its original appearance.
Vivus is a lightweight JavaScript class (with no dependencies) that allows you to animate SVGs, giving them the appearence of being drawn. There are a variety of different animations available, as well as the option to create a custom script to draw your SVG in whatever way you like.
Natalie Angier: New Ways Into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’ (NYT)
Now researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response.
Other sounds, by contrast — a dog barking, a car skidding, a toilet flushing — leave the musical circuits unmoved.
Paris syndrom is a condition exhibited by some individuals when visiting or going on vacation to Paris, as a result of extreme shock at discovering that Paris is different from their expectations. The syndrome is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, or hostility from others), derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others, such as vomiting.