Today, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced new representation and inclusion standards for Oscars® eligibility in the Best Picture category, as part of its Academy Aperture...
With powerful Santa Ana winds expected to create challenges for firefighters Tuesday, the Bobcat Fire burning in the Angeles National Forest north of Monrovia nearly doubled in size for the second straight day. The Bobcat Fire has burned 10,344 acres and still had zero containment as of 10 p.m. Tuesday, according to the U.S. Forest Service. The fire is churning through some vegetation and brush which has not burned in more 60 years. “The canyons that this fire has lined up with — Monrovia Canyon, Santa Anita Canyon, Little Santa Anita Canyon — those canyons have not burned since 1957 in the Monrovia Peak Fire,” Angeles National Forest Chief Robert Garcia said Monday.
For those looking for #BobcatFire maps that include Pasadena and Altadena evacuation warnings, it's above Sierra Madre Blvd/Woodbury. https://t.co/qYFQ4VLier
— Lisa S (@IrreverentFem) September 9, 2020
Event the local Altadena Sheriff’s station had little detail on a phone call. (I’m sure they got swamped.)
The Bobcat fire ignited on Sunday and quickly grew to threaten Mount Wilson.
Phone notifications that disappear too quickly in emergencies can be really bad UI.
Intro to a monthly column that explains important backpacking product standards, interviews key people, and analyzes industry standards.
The reason this blog still exists today, after going through so many iterations, is that I always self-dogfood. This is a term in the IndieWeb community that means that I use my own creations. On my blog, everything has been built by me, for me. I haven’t thought about whether my code could be use...
Five months ago, President Trump’s re-election campaign had a huge financial edge over Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s. The Times conducted an extensive review of how the Trump team spent lavishly to show how that advantage evaporated.
After 25 years I feel Britain has broken my trust. I’m one of many academics who now see their future in Europe
Jessica Krug, an associate professor at George Washington University, has written extensively about Africa, Latin America, the diaspora and identity, all while claiming her own Black and Latina heritage.
A tall plume of smoking is rising from a brush fire in the Azusa area during an afternoon of triple-digit heat across Southern California. The tower of smoke from Angeles National Forest can be seen from the San Gabriel Valley and beyond. Details about how the 1,800-acre fire started were not immediately available. The fire was reported near 14300 West…
A rapidly spreading fire in the Angeles National Forest near the Azusa area is threatening structures on Sunday, officials said.
The Bobcat Fire erupted around 12:20 p.m. and has scorched about 1,800 acres of heavy fuels, according to forest officials. Video from the scene shows smoke rising from the Azusa area.
“Firefighters are experiencing erratic fire behavior,” officials said.
The fast-moving fire had exploded to about 500 acres by 2:40 p.m., doubled in size in just two hours and then grew another 800 acres by 6 p.m. It was 0% contained.
Could a marriage policy first pursued by the Catholic Church a millennium and a half ago explain what made the industrialized world so powerful—and so peculiar?
Henrich, who directs Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, is a cultural evolutionary theorist, which means that he gives cultural inheritance the same weight that traditional biologists give to genetic inheritance. Parents bequeath their DNA to their offspring, but they—along with other influential role models—also transmit skills, knowledge, values, tools, habits. Our genius as a species is that we learn and accumulate culture over time. Genes alone don’t determine whether a group survives or disappears. So do practices and beliefs. Human beings are not “the genetically evolved hardware of a computational machine,” he writes. They are conduits of the spirit, habits, and psychological patterns of their civilization, “the ghosts of past institutions.” ❧
Annotated on September 06, 2020 at 11:03AM
WEIRD people have a bad habit of universalizing from their own particularities. They think everyone thinks the way they do, and some of them (not all, of course) reinforce that assumption by studying themselves. In the run-up to writing the book, Henrich and two colleagues did a literature review of experimental psychology and found that 96 percent of subjects enlisted in the research came from northern Europe, North America, or Australia. About 70 percent of those were American undergraduates. Blinded by this kind of myopia, many Westerners assume that what’s good or bad for them is good or bad for everyone else. ❧
This is a painful reality. It’s also even more specific to the current Republican party. Do as we say, not as we do.
This is the sort of example that David Dylan Thomas will appreciate.
Annotated on September 06, 2020 at 11:09AM
By the time Protestantism came along, people had already internalized an individualist worldview. Henrich calls Protestantism “the WEIRDest religion,” and says it gave a “booster shot” to the process set in motion by the Catholic Church. Integral to the Reformation was the idea that faith entailed personal struggle rather than adherence to dogma. Vernacular translations of the Bible allowed people to interpret scripture more idiosyncratically. The mandate to read the Bible democratized literacy and education. After that came the inquiry into God-given natural (individual) rights and constitutional democracies. The effort to uncover the laws of political organization spurred interest in the laws of nature—in other words, science. The scientific method codified epistemic norms that broke the world down into categories and valorized abstract principles. All of these psychosocial changes fueled unprecedented innovation, the Industrial Revolution, and economic growth. ❧
Reading this makes me think about the political break in the United States along political and religious boundaries. Some of Trumps’ core base practices a more personal religion and are generally in areas that don’t display the level of individualism, but focus more on larger paternalistic families. This could be an interesting space for further exploration as it seems to be moving the “progress”(?) described by WEIRD countries backward.
Annotated on September 06, 2020 at 11:19AM
If Henrich’s history of Christianity and the West feels rushed and at times derivative—he acknowledges his debt to Max Weber—that’s because he’s in a hurry to explain Western psychology. ❧
This adds more to my prior comment with the addition to Max Weber here. Cross reference some of my reading this past week on his influence on the prosperity gospel.
Annotated on September 06, 2020 at 11:21AM
Henrich defends this sweeping thesis with several studies, including a test known as the Triad Task. Subjects are shown three images—say, a rabbit, a carrot, and a cat. The goal is to match a “target object”—the rabbit—with a second object. A person who matches the rabbit with the cat classifies: The rabbit and the cat are animals. A person who matches the rabbit with the carrot looks for relationships between the objects: The rabbit eats the carrot. ❧
Annotated on September 06, 2020 at 11:25AM
Toppling the accomplishments of Western civilization off their great-man platforms, he erases their claim to be monuments to rationality: Everything we think of as a cause of culture is really an effect of culture, including us. ❧
Annotated on September 06, 2020 at 11:27AM
He refutes genetic theories of European superiority and makes a good case against economic determinism. His quarry are the “enlightened” Westerners—would-be democratizers, globalizers, well-intended purveyors of humanitarian aid—who impose impersonal institutions and abstract political principles on societies rooted in familial networks, and don’t seem to notice the trouble that follows. ❧
Annotated on September 06, 2020 at 11:29AM
You cannot claim to support the rule of law while also ignoring it.
David Frum (The Atlantic)At the Canada-U.S. border, I encountered a study in contrasts.
It did not have to be this way. But as Trump aptly said of himself and his policy, “It is what it is.” He accepted more disease in hopes of stimulating a stronger economy and winning reelection. He’s waiting now for the return on that bet. As so often in his reckless career, his speculation seems to be that if the bet wins, he pockets the proceeds. And if the bet fails? The losses fall on others. ❧
A very apt description of Trump’s life philosophy. Also a broad perspective at how many Republicans and Libertarians seem to view the world economically: privatizing profits and socializing losses.
Annotated on September 06, 2020 at 10:55AM
Nothing bonds a group more tightly than a common enemy that is perceived as a mortal threat.
A powerful tribal identity bonds the president to his supporters. As Amy Chua, the author of Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, has argued, the tribal instinct is not just to belong, but also to exclude and to attack. “When groups feel threatened,” Chua writes, “they retreat into tribalism. They close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them.” ❧
Annotated on September 06, 2020 at 10:34AM
“Motivation conditions cognition,” Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, wisely told me. Very few Trump supporters I know are able to offer an honest appraisal of the man. To do so creates too much cognitive dissonance. ❧
Annotated on September 06, 2020 at 10:36AM
That they are defending a person who is fundamentally malicious, even if he makes judicial appointments of which they approve, is too painful for them to admit. ❧
But surely in the multi-millions of Republicans, they could find someone who could also appoint those judges, but not have the myriad moral failings that Trump does. For surely if they can’t, then they’re doomed to failure and misery sooner or later.
Annotated on September 06, 2020 at 10:38AM
But what’s different in this case is that Trump, because of the corruption that seems to pervade every area of his life and his damaged psychological and emotional state, has shown us just how much people will accept in their leaders as a result of “negative partisanship,” the force that binds parties together less in common purpose than in opposition to a shared opponent. ❧
Annotated on September 06, 2020 at 10:41AM