Music: Ronu Majumdar, Ry Cooder, Jon Hassell — ‘A Day For Trade Winds’
‘Carbon bubble’ could spark global financial crisis, study warns
The Guardian reports: Plunging prices for renewable energy and rapidly increasing investment in low-carbon technologies could leave fossil fuel companies with trillions in stranded assets and spark a global financial crisis, a new study has found. A sudden drop in demand for fossil fuels before 2035 is likely, according to the study, given the current global investments and economic advantages in a low-carbon transition. The existence of a “carbon bubble” – assets in fossil fuels that are currently overvalued because,…
Five myths about the refugee crisis
Daniel Trilling writes: The refugee crisis that dominated the news in 2015 and 2016 consisted primarily of a sharp rise in the number of people coming to Europe to claim asylum. Arrivals have now dropped, and governments have cracked down on the movement of undocumented migrants within the EU; many thousands are stuck in reception centres or camps in southern Europe, while others try to make new lives in the places they have settled. But to see the crisis as…
Under Russian occupation, Crimea’s demographics are being reshaped
RFE/RL reports: An important but widely overlooked demographic transformation has been under way in the Ukrainian region of Crimea since it was annexed by Russia in 2014. Ukrainian officials and analysts say hundreds of thousands of people from across Russia have been brought into the disputed region in an effort by Moscow to transform the composition of its population. “Since 2014 there has been a mass movement of people from Siberia,” Sergei, who moved to Crimea from St. Petersburg and…
Germans view China as much more reliable political partner than the U.S.
14% of Germans consider the US a reliable partner36% of Germans consider the Russia a reliable partner43% consider China a reliable partner Source: Politbarometer, 17 May 2018, sample size 1,200 pic.twitter.com/NhcRPsp5M0 — Thomas Rid (@RidT) June 5, 2018
Why Trump is winning and the press is losing
Jay Rosen writes: There is alive in the land an organized campaign to discredit the American press. This campaign is succeeding. Its roots are long. For decades, the Republican coalition has tried to hang together by hating on elites who claim to know things, like: “What is art?” Or: “What should college students be taught?” Or: “What counts as news?” The media wing of this history extends back to Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964. It passes through Spiro Agnew’s speeches…
World dangerously underestimating economic cost of climate change, study finds
HuffPost reports: Leading global forecasts widely underestimate the future costs of climate change, a new paper warns. The findings, to be released Monday in the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, say projections used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rely on outdated models and fail to account for “tipping points” ― key moments when global warming rapidly speeds up and becomes irreversible. The IPCC, established in 1988, is the leading international body for assessing climate change,…
The spiritual part of our brains — religion not required
Ephrat Livni writes: Scientists seek to quantify everything—even the ineffable. And so the human search for meaning recently took a physical turn as Columbia and Yale University researchers isolated the place in our brains that processes spiritual experiences. In a new study, published in Cerebral Cortex (paywall) on May 29, neuroscientists explain how they generated “personally relevant” spiritual experiences in a diverse group of subjects and scanned their brains while these experiences were happening. The results indicate that there is…
Music: Erik Truffaz — ‘In Between’
Donald Trump now challenges the rule of law
Jonathan Chait writes: For most of Donald Trump’s presidency, the specter of a coming constitutional crisis has loomed over the Russia investigation. The newly leaked memo by Trump’s lawyers, obtained by the New York Times, suggests that such a crisis is not merely a likelihood, but that it has already begun. The memo proposes several tendentious interpretations of the publicly available facts of Trump’s behavior, along with some legally questionable and amateurish citations of precedent. But the most important passage…
Google’s artificial intelligence drone project for the Pentagon provoked backlash for the company
Gizmodo reports: Google will not seek another contract for its controversial work providing artificial intelligence to the U.S. Department of Defense for analyzing drone footage after its current contract expires. Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene announced the decision at a meeting with employees Friday morning, three sources told Gizmodo. The current contract expires in 2019 and there will not be a follow-up contract, Greene said. The meeting, dubbed Weather Report, is a weekly update on Google Cloud’s business. Google would…
Music: Erik Truffaz ft. Ed Harcourt — ‘Red Cloud’
Theory of predictive brain as important as evolution — an interview with Lars Muckli
Our brains make sense of the world by predicting what we will see and then updating these predictions as the situation demands, according to Lars Muckli, professor of neuroscience at the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Glasgow, Scotland. He says that this predictive processing framework theory is as important to brain science as evolution is to biology. Horizon magazine: You have used advanced brain imaging techniques to come up with a model of how the brain processes vision – and…
Aristotle’s lessons on happiness
Edith Hall writes: In the Western world, only since the mid-18th century has it been possible to discuss ethical questions publicly without referring to Christianity. Modern thinking about morality, which assumes that gods do not exist, or at least do not intervene, is in its infancy. But the ancient Greeks and Romans elaborated robust philosophical schools of ethical thought for more than a millennium, from the first professed agnostics such as Protagoras (fifth century BCE) to the last pagan thinkers….
Jaron Lanier is convinced that social media is toxic, making us sadder, angrier and more isolated
The Guardian reports: Many of the ideas in Jaron Lanier’s new book start off pretty familiar – at least, if you are active on social media. Yet in every chapter there is a principle so elegant, so neat, sometimes even so beautiful, that what is billed as straight polemic becomes something much more profound. The concept of random reinforcement, for example: addiction fed not by reward but by never knowing whether or when the reward will come, is well known….
How music can fight prejudice
Tom Jacobs writes: The outpouring of hostility toward immigrants and refugees has reminded us that ethnocentrism remains a fact of life in both Europe and the United States. Combating it will require teaching a new generation to view members of different cultures as potential friends rather than threatening outsiders. But what mode of communication has the power to stimulate such a shift? New research from Portugal suggests the answer may be music. It reports schoolchildren around age 11 who learned…