Interesting Links for 08-01-2018

[andrewducker]

Sexual dimorphism of brain structure in the 1-month infant

(tags: gender brain )

"Me and Harry Potter" (by the original book cover artist)

(tags: harrypotter art books )

How Smart People Talk About Themselves

(tags: Intelligence )

Is Your Child Lying to You? That’s Good

(tags: children lying Intelligence )

WH Auden reviews The Fellowship Of The Ring

(tags: lotr review )

Black Mirror: 1951

(tags: comic Technology funny )

Baby kangaroos are the easiest animal to kidnap

(tags: animals video cute )

Solar doesn’t need a “breakthrough”. It’s a breakthrough on it’s own.

(tags: solarpower viaDanielDWilliam GoodNews )

The old year is slain. With luck, the next one we raise will be better.

(tags: comic time life )

BBC China editor Carrie Gracie quits in equal pay row

(tags: bbc gender pay money equality feminism )

Sarah Silverman’s response to a sexist tweet is a much-needed ray of hope

(tags: sexism hate abuse love twitter )

Girl who shaved her head for cancer charity 'put in isolation' by school

(tags: hair school girls OhForFucksSake )

Open Banking starts next week. Meet the man making it happen

(tags: banking Technology uk )

If you find a package full of mysterious white powder - DO NOT SNORT IT!

(tags: OhForFucksSake drugs idiocy )

Harry Potter vs Brexit

(tags: uk europe fascism usa harrypotter fanfic )

Jeremy Corbyn's views on Brexit: a long held stance on Europe

(tags: Europe labour politics uk )

LG Display's 65-inch OLED TV can roll up like a poster

(tags: tv technology )

Beijing bets on facial recognition in a big drive for total surveillance

(tags: china surveillance )

Chinese shoe company tricks people into swiping Instagram ad with fake strand of hair

(tags: advertising fraud genius )

Fujitsu has a citywide surveillance solution. I wonder how many other companies are selling such things

(tags: surveillance Technology )

Facts aren’t everything – understanding parents’ moral reasons for avoiding vaccination

(tags: vaccination morality psychology )

Birth-order effects may be strong - but also very specific

(tags: children birth personality psychology )

Blackbeard's Book Club? Document Discovery May Reveal Pirate Reading List

(tags: pirates books history )

Comments

[supergee]

Edmund Wilson said that Auden's love for Lord of the Rings indicated that gay men don't really mature.

[andrewducker]

Clearly a terrible human being.

[cmcmck]

WTF is wrong with that school?

[alithea]

Quite! What would they have done if she'd lost it due to a medical condition, I wonder.

"Me and Harry Potter" (by the original book cover artist)

[jack]

Oh, that's interesting. I hadn't even realised they came from different artists, I remembered the style being quite similar, if anyone had asked I'd have assumed the same person drew them. It looks like he's done some nice books since, I must have a look at them.

How Smart People Talk About Themselves

[jack]

I mean, some people really do seem good at EVERYTHING. Although now I consider it, they probably don't talk like that, even if they are a genius in an unusually wide range of fields, they likely seems incisive and curious always, not arrogant.

Though there are people who are intelligent AND annoyingly arrogant.

I also think, people often feel there's a dichotomy where there isn't. I don't think Trump is especially clever. But I do think he's good at what he does, of getting people to buy in to something he's arranging and coming out on top. And going around saying how clever he is DOES WORK on a lot of people, even though I think he muddled into that, rather than calculating it as a strategy.

Girl who shaved her head for cancer charity 'put in isolation' by school

[jack]

Oh gosh, that's awful :( Whenever I read stories like that, I always want to hear some details -- does the school just hate children, or is there some reason behind this rule? are they illegally applying different hair codes to people of different genders? have they had a rash of skinhead violence or something? did they write the rule and then stupidly stick to it where it clearly didn't apply, or did they hate this particular instance of it?

But I've slowly started to accept, there's usually some sort of clusterfuck behind the story and the details don't matter (usually, yes, they are just awful, sometimes nothing bad happened at all, the story is randomly reported completely out of context)

Is Your Child Lying to You? That’s Good

[jack]

That's interesting. I guess, understanding that people can have a different view of facts to you based on what you said is necessary for any sophisticate interpersonal communication, and it's impossible to not realise lying is *possible*.

Although something else I've noticed is that 'honesty' may be more learned than natural. Like, people learn skills of "recounting events", but also learn skills of "say a thing, and get a result". People learn that "please" is a way to ask people to do things. People learn that "it was a mistake" is a way to get people to not be cross about something that happened. The understanding of whether someone else would view it as a mistake, and the deliberate subversion of that, may usually lag behind the observation that this is something people say in some circumstances. People need to *learn* how to accord their thoughts, their words, and the real world. And deliberately lying is when they learn how to subvert that, but you may get falsehoods without a real intent to lie before that's very well understood.

[danieldwilliam]

My takeaway from the Silverman story is that the US needs socialised health-care.

[cmcmck]

I'm a retired teacher and worked for years with severely disabled and terminally ill kids and some of those kids had cancer and therefore no hair.

I'd have been praising this lass to the skies had she been in my classes!

[alithea]

That seems a much more reasonable response! There are quite enough issues for kids to cope with without being told having no hair makes you unfit to be seen :(

[calimac]

Actually, what Wilson wrote was, "Certain people - especially, perhaps, in Britain - have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash."

As to who those "certain people" might be, this is presumptively a reference to his citation earlier of five enthusiastically pro-Tolkien critics, four of whom were British but only one of those four was homosexual (I know nothing about the one American).

[calimac]

Since that's a fact I already live with daily, praying my wife's job doesn't go away and worrying what will happen when she retires, my takeaway from the article was, I hope the guy wasn't spinning an invented sob story. Because if he wasn't, once this goes viral, others will do exactly that.

[andrewducker]

Terrible, terrible people, I'd guess...

Re: "Me and Harry Potter" (by the original book cover artist)

[andrewducker]

I didn't twig that they were different artists either.

Re: Girl who shaved her head for cancer charity 'put in isolation' by school

[andrewducker]

Yeah. There might be a reason. But I'm not at all convinced that it's a good one.

[supergee]

Gore Vidal says there is a more specific reference in Wilson's published diaries.

[calimac]

Hm. I have access to a library with all the volumes of that, so I'll go look.

Re: Girl who shaved her head for cancer charity 'put in isolation' by school

[adrian_turtle]

My first thought was that they wanted her to perform femininity, and she couldn't do it in the required mode with a shaved head. But 1cm of hair is a brush cut! She could have put on a pink hat or headscarf and been back in the classroom right away. (That would also work for a student who lost hair for medical reasons, or for one who was already hairless when she started going to that school.)

does the school just hate children
No. They hate weirdos and rebels. They think it's more important to punish any hint of nonconformity than to educate. Most kids don't use much algebra or chemistry once they leave high school. They all need to know how to fit in with a group, they all need to know how to deal with bullies in positions of authority.

Intelligent children who don't lie much

[amaebi]

I think that being honest with one's children, oneself, helps a lot. Along with narrative about how too much lying breaks communication, in the case of children who are susceptible to narrative.

[amaebi]

My response to the Silverman story (apart from agreeing with US need for socialized healthcare) is that the enculturation of trying to hurt something as a Twisted Call for Help when it comes from a White man isn't very desirable. Though Silverman remains laudable.

Re: If you find a package full of mysterious white powder - DO NOT SNORT IT!

[franklanguage]

Over 30 years ago, when I was a freshman in college, my roommate's boyfriend claimed to have received delivery of a box of unknown white powder in the mail. Assuming it was coke, he cut himself a long line and snorted it.

Uh, no: it was heroin. How stupid do you have to be to ingest in any way an unlabeled, unknown substance? The mind boggles.

[randomdreams]

Back when I was more of a reprobate, we used to put powdered sugar in bags and leave it around in the hopes that someone would try to snort it.

Re: If you find a package full of mysterious white powder - DO NOT SNORT IT!

[danieldwilliam]

After the 2001 Anthrax letters there was a spate of spoof attacks with people posting packages of white powder to large organisations.

IIRC my work was evaculated because of a suspicious package arriving in the mail room.

Re: Girl who shaved her head for cancer charity 'put in isolation' by school

[j_v_lynch]

My 14 year old daughter shaved her head for her Stranger Things Eleven costume at halloween. The most commentary she got from the school was teachers complimenting her costume.

[calimac]

I've looked it up, and Vidal is right. Wilson wrote, "Homosexuals don't seem to have flowered and borne fruit, don't seem to have fully matured: Auden with his appetite for Tolkien."

Worse, the context is an observation that heterosexual desire creates "rapture and despair ... heroisms and excesses." But homosexual desire, he concludes, doesn't. So it's doubly insulting.

This is in 1967/68, over a decade after his Auden-bashing review of LOTR, so it's still nagging him after all that time.

I'm astonished that this additional quote doesn't seem to have made it into the awareness of Tolkien studies. I'll have to do something about that.