Category: .

I’m taking a chance on having my blog get in big trouble in Brussels, but this site uses cookies and I’m not going to make anybody stop to click an acceptance. At long last somebody has to stand up and do nothing.

The new album is excellent.

Personal computers are not computers, any more than automobiles are engines. Just as automobiles’ engines power their movement, the true computers inside what we call personal computers power what they do. Those names, “personal computer” and “smartphone”, are older than the tools they now label. “Personal computer” became popular in the late 1970s, for gadgets that most of us today couldn’t use. The modern personal computer, or PC, took shape in the late 1990s when browsing the Web found a wide audience.

White People: I Don’t Want You To Understand Me Better, I Want You To Understand Yourselves

Ijeoma Oluo:

Why do I know white culture so well? Because I’m a black woman. And while I, and just about any person of color who has spent their lives in a white supremacist society, know enough about white culture to write a book or two on whiteness and option the bestseller movie rights, y’all know almost nothing about us and even less about yourselves.

Find yourselves white people. Find yourselves so that you can know what whiteness is. … Find yourselves so that racism no longer surprises you.

Seeing the world clearly takes trouble. It is ongoing work to educate myself on racism, both my own personal racism and the systemic kind.

The hard part is knowledge of my own footprint:

• self-interest in continuing racism
• failure to act when opportunities came up
• fully believing racist ideas

The easy part is that all I have to do is keep putting one foot in front of the other. Once I learn something it stays learned.

Trump said Germany has accumulated an immense lack of investment over many years, according to one of our sources, telling Merkel the U.S. feels taken advantage of for spending so much on defense

But we’re increasing military spending:

Other primates are clever and emotionally present like humans. So how do are we different? From There is a moral argument for keeping great apes in zoos | Aeon Ideas:

We did a study with pairs of orangutans in which we tested their ability to communicate and cooperate to get rewards. We hid a banana pellet so that one orangutan could see the food but couldn’t reach it. The other orangutan could release a sliding door and push the pellet through to her partner, but wasn’t able to take it for herself. They did okay (but not great) when playing with me, and they mostly ignored each other when playing together. We then performed a similar set of studies with human two-year-olds. Compared with the apes, the two-year-olds were very good at getting the reward (stickers) when they played with an adult.

Taken together, these studies tell us something about human evolution. Unlike apes, humans are good at pooling their talents to achieve what they can’t do alone. It’s not that the apes don’t care about getting the food – they got frustrated with one another when things were going wrong, and one orangutan in particular would turn his back and sulk. However, unlike humans, they don’t seem to be able to harness this frustration to push themselves to do better.