Archive for November 22nd, 2022
How Coffee Fueled Revolutions—and Revolutionary Ideas
Jessica Pearce Rotondi writes in History:
Sultan Murad IV decreed death to coffee drinkers in the Ottoman Empire. King Charles II dispatched spies to infiltrate London’s coffeehouses, which he saw as the original source of “false news.” During the Enlightenment, Voltaire, Rousseau and Isaac Newton could all be found talking philosophy over coffee. The cafés of Paris sheltered revolutionaries plotting the storming of the Bastille and later, served as the place authors like Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre plotted their latest books.
History is steeped in ideas sparked over cups of coffee. Here’s a rundown of the revolutionary power of the commonplace café.
The First Coffee House Opens in the Ottoman Empire
Coffee houses began in the Ottoman Empire. Since liquor and bars were off-limits to most practicing Muslims, coffeehouses provided an alternative place to gather, socialize and share ideas. Coffee’s affordability and egalitarian structure—anyone could come in and order a cup—eroded centuries of social norms. Not everyone was pleased by this change.
In 1633, Sultan Murad IV decreed that the consumption of coffee was a capital offense. Murad IV’s brother and uncle had been killed by janissaries, infantry units who were known to frequent cafes. The sultan was so dedicated to catching coffee sippers in the act that he allegedly disguised himself as a commoner and prowled Istanbul, decapitating offenders with his hundred-pound broadsword.
Ottoman sultans issued and retracted coffeehouse bans well into the 18th century to prevent the gathering of dissidents. But by then, . . .
The library of Alexandria and its reputation
Peter Gainsford writes in the Kiwi Hellenist:
Many people are aware that the library of Alexandria is hugely overblown. Sure, there’ll always be people insisting that it was a magical place that held the secrets of Göbekli Tepe, Doggerland, and blond blue-eyed Europeans building pyramids in Mexico and Bolivia: there’s no point engaging with people like that. The thing is, pretty much everyone has heard of it.
Last week the History subreddit paid some attention to a piece I wrote in 2015 dispelling some myths about the Alexandrian library. Which is nice. Some people misread it and thought I was claiming it was true that ‘the burning of the library of Alexandria was “the most destructive fire in the history of human culture”’. That’s a pity, but understandable. (One reader was angry at my claiming to be a Kiwi and a hellenist: that was entertaining.)
On a more serious note, several readers pointed out that there were other library losses in history that were far more destructive. And that’s absolutely correct. Any time books are destroyed that don’t exist in other copies in other libraries, that’s a catastrophic and irreversible loss.
You can argue about whether specific incidents belong in this category. The destruction of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad in 1258 didn’t exactly put an end to the Abbasid knowledge economy and book culture, any more than the Alexandrian fire did in hellenised Egypt.
But some tragedies really are catastrophically destructive. The fire at the . . .
A Soil Fungus That Causes Lung Infections Is Spreading Across the U.S.
I don’t have a garden, but if I did, after reading this article I would definitely wear a face mask when cultivating the soil.
AOC Calls Out Lauren Boebert For Her ‘Thoughts And Prayers’ Tweet After Colorado LGBTQ+ Club Shooting
Alan Herrera reports in Comic Sands:
New York Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called out Colorado Republican Representative Lauren Boebert for “elevating anti-LGBTQ hate rhetoric” after Boebert published a tweet in which she offered “prayers” to the victims of a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs.
Boebert had earlier called the shooting—which resulted in five deaths and at least 25 injuries—”absolutely awful” and offered “prayers” to the victims and their families, adding:
“This lawless violence needs to end quickly.”
Ocasio-Cortez responded shortly afterward and noted that Boebert’s tweet rings rather hollow considering she has “played a major role in elevating anti-LGBTQ+ hate rhetoric and anti-trans lies.”
Ocasio-Cortez added that Boebert has used her time in Congress to block “even the most common sense gun safety laws,” concluding:
“You don’t get to ‘thoughts and prayers’ your way out of this. Look inward and change.”
Indeed, Boebert is one of the most high-profile anti-LGBTQ+ members of Congress, sharing bigoted opinions about members of the Biden administration and even complaining about the existence of drag bars.
Boebert has previously made headlines for . . .
The shrinking future of college
Kevin Carey reports in Vox about an abrupt decline. From the article:
. . . In four years, the number of students graduating from high schools across the country will begin a sudden and precipitous decline, due to a rolling demographic aftershock of the Great Recession. Traumatized by uncertainty and unemployment, people decided to stop having kids during that period. But even as we climbed out of the recession, the birth rate kept dropping, and we are now starting to see the consequences on campuses everywhere. Classes will shrink, year after year, for most of the next two decades. People in the higher education industry call it “the enrollment cliff.”
Among the small number of elite colleges and research universities — think the Princetons and the Penn States — the cliff will be no big deal. These institutions have their pick of applicants and can easily keep classes full.
For everyone else, the consequences could be dire. In some places, the crisis has already begun. College enrollment began slowly receding after the millennial enrollment wave peaked in 2010, particularly in regions that were already experiencing below-average birth rates while simultaneously losing population to out-migration. Starved of students and the tuition revenue they bring, small private colleges in New England have begun to blink off the map. Regional public universities like Ship are enduring painful layoffs and consolidation.
The timing is terrible. Trade policy, de-unionization, corporate consolidation, and substance abuse have already ravaged countless communities, particularly in the post-industrial Northeast and Midwest. In many cases, colleges have been one of the only places that provide good jobs in their communities, offer educational opportunities for locals, and have strong enough roots to stay planted. The enrollment cliff means they might soon dry up and blow away.
This trend will accelerate the winner-take-all dynamic of geographic consolidation that is already upending American politics. College-educated Democrats will increasingly congregate in cities and coastal areas, leaving people without degrees in rural areas and towns. For students who attend less-selective colleges and universities near where they grew up — that is, most college students — the enrollment cliff means fewer options for going to college in person, or none at all.
The empty factories and abandoned shopping malls littering the American landscape may soon be joined by ghost colleges, . . .
Good news for millennials
Take a look at this post by Kevin Drum on how millennial wealth is looking up.
Turn on two-factor authentication for Facebook
After reading an article by Tatum Hunter in the Washington Post (no paywall), I immediately turned on two-factor authentication for my Facebook account. You should do that, too. The article begins:
The first time 100 people tuned in for a live stream Lucretia Groce hosted on her Facebook cooking page, she felt a rush. Some viewers, including cancer patients whose appetites had been suppressed by chemo, told Groce that watching her cook made them feel hungry again. “It really touched me,” Groce said, adding that “it felt like I had known these people forever.”
It all abruptly ended a year ago, when Groce got kicked out of her account. Someone had posted abusive content from her page, an email from Facebook said. When she tried to report the action as an error, Facebook showed her the offending post: A video of two children being forced to perform a sex act.
Her account had been hacked. Groce said she cried for hours. Why did the site show her something so horrible with no warning? And how, without access to her personal account, could she recover the business page she had worked hard to grow?
She had started the page after quitting her job as a home health aide at the start of the pandemic. After years producing multiple videos a week, she had grown the page to 17,000 followers. The extra income from ads in her videos allowed her to pay bills and stash aside some savings, she said.
Her frustrating experience is not unique. Help Desk, the personal technology section at The Washington Post, has received hundreds of emails from people locked out of their Facebook accounts with no idea how to get back in. Many lose their accounts to hackers, who take over Facebook pages to resell them or to game search-engine rankings.
In some cases, losing the account is an inconvenience. But in many others, it is a threat to the finances, relationships or well-being of the user. Groce, for instance, estimates she has lost $18,000 in income after waiting for months for her account to be unlocked.
“We have clients crying on Zoom calls, as they have lost their business and livelihood,” said Jonas Borchgrevink, founder of Hacked.com, which helps victims navigate the notoriously confusing process for recovering hacked Facebook accounts.
Facebook shot to global dominance by promising to be a central hub for our lives, introducing tools to help us run businesses, make payments and even keep track of loved ones during disasters. But once you hit a snag, like an account takeover, that support disappears, dozens of users say, leaving people to flounder in an automated system.
Despite reporting revenue of more than $27 billion in the third quarter, Facebook parent company Meta is a multinational technology giant without real customer support, users say. This month Meta announced it will lay off 11 percent of its workforce. It is unclear how these cuts will affect account security and customer support.
Last year Facebook told The Post it was working on new processes to solve these problems. A year later, not much appears to have changed. The company has no new initiatives for helping people recover their accounts.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal last week, Meta has disciplined more than two dozen employees and contractors over the past year for illicitly accessing user accounts, in some cases accepting bribes to do so.
Meta has said . . .
Continue reading. (no paywall)
Why women aren’t from Venus, and men aren’t from Mars
In Nature, Emily Cooke interviews Gina Rippon:
Early research into schizophrenia alerted neuroscientist Gina Rippon to what she now calls the myth of the gendered brain, a term she used in the title of her first book. By examining examples taken from brain–behaviour research during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, right up to contemporary studies, the book, published in 2019, investigates the desire to find biological explanations for gendered societal norms. Rippon argues that our brains are not fixed as male or female at birth, but are instead highly plastic, changing constantly throughout our lives and influenced by the gendered world in which we live.
The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience that Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain was written in part, she says, to address dubious research, or what is sometimes called neurotrash. Rippon first encountered it in the 2000s. At the time, she was working at the Aston Brain Centre, part of Aston University in Birmingham, UK. Shocked by the misuse of sex and gender reporting in neuroscience, she became set on changing the rhetoric. Rippon is now professor emeritus of cognitive neuroimaging at Aston University.
What is neurotrash?
It is what we’d generally call pseudoscience — bringing a kind of scientific legitimacy to an argument.
Early brain images were very seductive, with people thinking, ‘Brilliant, we can find the God spot,’ for instance. Images were hijacked by self-help gurus, relationship counsellors and even those espousing single-sex education. Just adding a picture of the brain in, say, book chapters on why boys and girls are different gave tremendous credibility. Also, the beginning of this century saw ‘neuro’ everything. Just put ‘neuro’ in front for that sexy science-y feel — for example, neuromarketing or neuroaesthetics.
The word neurotrash highlights misleading information: telling stories that might be partly true, sustaining stereotypes and feeding myth continuation, for example about the right brain and left brain. This is the idea that the brain is a ‘game of two halves’, when in fact the whole of your brain is working for you the whole of the time.
These stories were often well written and certainly more accessible than arcane journals. They also resonated with people’s experiences. We believed that men and women were different, and here were the scientists saying ‘you’re right, and this is why’.
How did your own research in the field take shape?
I began my career in the 1980s, and became interested in sex differences in the brain and how different regions could be better configured for various tasks — making me one of the people I subsequently criticized.
When setting up my own laboratory, I had a range of cognitive tests, such as verbal fluency tasks or visuospatial tasks, that would allegedly differentiate men from women reliably. However, over a period of 18 months I frustratingly didn’t find any differences, so became dispirited. The research made me realize that the whole right-brain, left-brain idea is based on very shaky evidence — possibly not something to hang my future research career on. So I stopped doing that sort of work and moved on, becoming involved in dyslexia research.
In 2006, shortly after I’d joined Aston, the engineer Julia King became the university’s first female vice-chancellor. She was interested in the under-representation of women in science, and wanted to know what researchers at Aston were doing that might be relevant to understanding this.
Aware that brain imaging was being used to talk publicly about neuroscience, I reviewed how the field pursued the belief in the male versus the female brain. Horrified by the discipline’s misuse, I wrote a review and started a public conversation.
At the 2010 British Science Festival, I gave a talk about the so-called differences between women’s and men’s brains, showing that, when you look at the data, they’re not that different after all. I was trying to dispel the stereotypical myths that men are ‘left-brained’ — logical, rational and good at spatial tasks — and women are ‘right-brained’ — emotional, nurturing and good at verbal tasks.
We’re not from Mars or Venus (to quote relationship counsellor John Gray’s 1992 book), we’re all from Earth! I assumed that people would thank me and just move on, but it caused an absolute furore and gave me early exposure to media backlash.
One favourite comment (now . . .
Otoko Organics and the superb Fendrihan Mk II
Edwin Jagger’s somewhat coarse (but comfortable on the face) knot instantly created a lather from Otoko Organics, an unusual and highly pleasing Australian shaving compound. Not exactly a soap, it produces an effective and slightly stiffish lather with a clean and pleasant fragrance, probably from the pear essence that’s part of the formula.
Fendrihan’s MKII razor is a thoroughbred workhorse, if there were such a thing: a combination of attractive design, excellent workmanship resulting in first-rate fit and finish, fine comfort, and highly efficient performance. It’s made of stainless steel, and this model is bronze coated.
Three passes left my face exceptionally smooth, and a splash of Speick finished the job.
The tea this morning is Murchie’s Hatley Castle Blend: “Black tea, green tea (including Jasmine).”
Later On 