Interesting Links for 29-10-2020

[andrewducker]

Covid in Scotland: 78 patients sent to care homes after testing positive

(tags:Scotland pandemic OhForFucksSake )

What SOFIA's discovery of water on the Moon is, and isn't

(tags:water moon )

What's going on with the sentencing of the police officer who murdered his lover

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1321425591531425792.html
(tags:murder police law UK )

Sexual Eeling (or how people spent 2000 years thinking new Eels spontaneously generate

(tags:fish reproduction history sex )

The Earth Is Pulsating Every 26 Seconds, and Seismologists Don't Agree Why

(tags:earth noise weird )

If you want people to work together on a shared solution take away the option to have their own private one. (this is why I'm against private schools)

(tags:psychology inequality society )

Exposed: Special procurement channels for 'VIPs' and Cabinet contacts - offering up to 45% profit

(tags:UK corruption pandemic OhForFucksSake )

This hot tub brings all the birds to the yard

(tags:birds video winter )

Reminder that you don't actually own videos you "buy" from Amazon (or most other providers)

(tags:videos intellectual_property amazon )

Zardoz child is the best Halloween costume

(tags:halloween children funny )

Comments

Sexual Eeling

[claudeb]

The history of science if fascinating. Note the 11th century! female scientist who proposed a reasonable explanation for once, and of course everyone else ignored her. The more things change...

[jducoeur]

If you want people to work together on a shared solution take away the option to have their own private one. (this is why I'm against private schools)

An alternate viewpoint to consider:

To make a long story short, my mother moved a dozen or so miles, to a smallish town, when I was about 12. My 7th grade time there was abysmally horrible. I'm sure it was a lovely school for most of the students, but it was intensely conformist and anti-intellectual -- I was a bullied outsider for pretty much the entire year, with absolutely no peer group whatsoever.

Around the middle of the year, I went to my father and said, quite frankly, "We are getting me into a private school next year, or I'm going to kill myself". Would I have done it? I'm honestly unsure, but my misery level was high enough that I might well have.

So having the outlet -- a means of escape from a majoritarian hell -- more or less saved my life. I won't argue that it's an ideal solution: fixing the underlying problem with the school would have been better. (And heaven knows, I show my privilege in the path we did take.) But one family, much less one tween boy, doesn't necessarily have the ability to move the needle when you're in a hostile cultural context...

[andrewducker]

Oh, I totally appreciate that sometimes they improve things. And we live in an imperfect world, which we have to deal with as it is, not as we'd like it to be.