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Showing posts from October 14, 2018

News from the post-anthropocene era

Another corporate gift to our children: Trump's EPA fires science panel because they were scientists and all. And scientists wildly believe the climate is changing disastrously because of... science! What could be sillier. Instead, believe your stock portfolio. So here is to the people making 2050 such a bad place to live. Thanks, and fuck you throughout all eternity.

11 degrees of shakespeare

Shakespeare he's in the alley With his pointed shoes and his bells... The discovery of degrees of separation is supposed to have been a mid-20 th century event. The story goes that Stanley Milgram invented this idea and did a famous experiment to show how many degrees of separation there are between two arbitrarily chosen persons. The experiment involved sending a package through the mail to an arbitrarily chosen person and telling that person that the package was intended for a certain other person. The receiver was to send the package to someone who might know the ultimate recipient.   Milgram published his work in 1967. All credit to Milgram. In an article on the small world hypothesis, as it is called in The Cut, Thomas Macmillan mentions some of Milgram’s predecessors:   ‘ Some thinkers, however, had been quietly wondering if apparently unconnected people might in fact be linked. The idea of six degrees of separation is sometimes traced to  a 1929 essay  by