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link roundup 6

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I don’t remember much about 2009 — I think I was in 9th grade, or maybe 10th — but I know almost every line of dialogue in that year’s finest YouTube video: “Hanwei Practical XL Katana Unveiling HD,” posted by the user “That Sodding Gamer.” If you haven’t seen it, you won’t be disappointed. In it, a man who looks to be in his late 20s unboxes a mid-range replica sword with the help of his mother and younger brother. He recounts his past encounters with low-quality swords as he struggles to remove the plastic packaging. His demeanor is alternately bored and petulant, even as he comes face to face with his long-awaited $210 purchase. His mother, entrusted with the camera, seems to annoy him. Her bemusement at her adult son’s interests is palpable, but she sounds resigned to her fate: Her grandchildren will be swords and sarcastic T-shirts. Such is life in an austerity economy.

The findings, published March 24 in Science, offer a critical insight into how and why the body’s ability to fix DNA dwindles over time and point to a previously unknown role for the signaling molecule NAD as a key regulator of protein-to-protein interactions in DNA repair. NAD, identified a century ago, is already known for its role as a controller of cell-damaging oxidation.

Additionally, experiments conducted in mice show that treatment with the NAD precursor NMN mitigates age-related DNA damage and wards off DNA damage from radiation exposure.

Nick Land’s neoreactionary, right-wing accelerationism is racist in any conventional sense of that term. Yet Land is also a quite interesting thinker of capitalism, and because capitalism, broadly defined, is the reality that structures and will continue to structure human existence throughout the foreseeable future, he is perhaps worth paying attention to. His overriding political and ethical ‘goal,’ from which his racism, his eugenicism, and technological fetishism spring, is optimize for intelligence, which for him is both the Darwinian law of the universe (‘Gnon’), as well as a functional description of what really-exisiting capitalism actually does. Even to call it a ‘goal’ is misleading, as for Land capitalism is an abolition of Hume’s is/ought distinction. What capitalism ‘should’ do (optimize for intelligence) is, as a matter of fact, what it does. Land’s Acclerationism, insofar as it can be understood as a political program, simply counsels that we let this process be, because we don’t really have the capability to control it anyway.

But the progressive detachment of so many adult American men from the reality and routines of regular paid labor poses a threat to our nation’s future prosperity. It can only result in lower living standards, greater economic disparities, and slower economic growth than we might otherwise expect. And the troubles posed by this male flight from work are by no means solely economic. It is also a social crisis – and, I shall argue, a moral crisis. The growing incapability of grown men to function as breadwinners cannot help but undermine the American family. It casts those who nature designed to be strong into the role of dependents – on their wives or girlfriends, on their aging parents, or on government welfare. Among those who should be most capable of shouldering the burdens of civic responsibilities, it instead encourages sloth, idleness, and vices perhaps more insidious. Whether we choose to recognize it or not, this feature of the American condition – the new “men without work” normal – is inimical to the American tradition of self-reliance…

Attackers that have capabilities to deliver high intensity acoustic interference in close proximity to the target MEMS sensor [embedded accelerometers in consumer electronics] can spoof the sensor to output arbitrary, attacker–chosen, signals. Our experiments demonstrate the spelling of the word “WALNUT” over the output signal of a MEMS accelerometer. With proper knowledge of the algorithms that are utilizing the polluted sensor data, adversaries may be able to control the behavior of a system that relies on the sensor data to make automated decisions.

It’s not just about the emerging economies in general, but rather one such economy in particular: China. By purchasing power parity measures China is now the No. 1 economy, and the world’s leading exporter, in addition to its longstanding role as the world’s most populous country. It has had an almost unbroken string of high-growth years since 1979, often at double-digit rates, and it avoided much of the negative fallout from the financial crisis. Its geopolitical influence and its military have been gaining on the U.S. or Europe for decades.

If several generations of Westerners were intrigued by communism, Marxism, Stalinism and even Maoism, is it so implausible to think they might feel some kind of magnetic attraction to the less liberal systems that are flourishing today?

How much of a threat is postmodernism to science? There are certainly some external attacks. In the recent protests against a talk given by Charles Murray at Middlebury, the protesters chanted, as one,

“Science has always been used to legitimize racism, sexism, classism, transphobia, ableism, and homophobia, all veiled as rational and fact, and supported by the government and state. In this world today, there is little that is true ‘fact.'”

When the organizers of the March for Science tweeted:

“colonization, racism, immigration, native rights, sexism, ableism, queer-, trans-, intersex-phobia, & econ justice are scientific issues,” many scientists immediately criticized this politicization of science and derailment of the focus on preservation of science to intersectional ideology. In South Africa, the #ScienceMustFall and #DecolonizeScience progressive student movement announced that science was only one way of knowing that people had been taught to accept. They suggested witchcraft as one alternative.