Month: March 2018

ASMR

W Magazine recently recruited Parks And Recreation and Legion star Aubrey Plaza for its ongoing, aurally uncomfortable video series, “Celebrity ASMR,” which is exactly what it sounds like. But where folks like Jake Gyllenhaal, Margot Robbie, and Gal Gadot only paid loudly-smacking lip service when they sat down way too close to W’s mics—posting videos a mere 2 or 3 minutes in length—Plaza approached the task with the same intensity with which she appears to tackle pretty much everything in her life, laying down a 36-minute sonic odyssey in search of “the tingles.” Also, a lot of it was about how much she still hates Jerry.

The shushing sound of voices whispering, or clothes rustling—and then a tingling feeling begins on the scalp, and spreads down into the neck, shoulders, and limbs, and along with it comes a state of calm, or even euphoria. This is how people who experience autonomous sensory meridian response, or ASMR, describe the peculiar phenomenon. ASMR is “similar to the deep relaxation someone might feel if they’re getting a massage”. It’s a form of auditory-tactile synesthesia; “brain tingles.”

Who We Are and How We Got Here

The case of the Ancient North Eurasians showed that while a tree is a good analogy for the relationships among species — because species rarely interbreed and so like real tree limbs are not expected to grow back together after they branch — it is a dangerous analogy for human populations. The genome revolution has taught us that great mixtures of highly divergent populations have occurred repeatedly. Instead of a tree, a better metaphor may be a trellis, branching and remixing far back into the past.

Aral Sea Restoration

But Kazakhstan’s North Aral Sea has seen a happier outcome, thanks to a nearly $86m project financed in large part by the World Bank. Along with repairs to existing dikes around the basin to prevent spillage, an 13km dam was constructed just south of the Syr Darya River. Completed in the summer of 2005, this dam, named Kokaral, surpassed all expectations. It led to an 3m increase in water levels after just 7 months—a goal that scientists initially expected would take 3 years.

Retiring in Prison

Why have so many otherwise law-abiding elderly women resorted to petty theft? Caring for Japanese seniors once fell to families and communities, but that’s changing. From 1980 to 2015, the number of seniors living alone increased more than 6x, to almost 6M. And a 2017 survey by Tokyo’s government found that more than half of seniors caught shoplifting live alone; 40% either don’t have family or rarely speak with relatives. They have no one to turn to when they need help.

Artificial Rain

China is planning the implementation of a large-scale weather changing project to ensure a consistent rain supply. The system is created from a network of solid fuel burning chambers that produce silver iodide, a compound with a structure much like ice that can be used in cloud seeding. Once in place, the system has the potential to increase rainfall in the region by up to 10 billion cubic meters a year. 10000s of the small burning chambers will be installed across the Tibetan Plateau in an attempt to increase rainfall in an area 3x as big as Spain

Steps to self-driving

This is why so much work is going into how the vehicle might communicate with the user – ‘this is an L5 journey and you can sleep’, or ‘I’ll drive myself for the next hour, and alert you 5 minutes before it’s time for you to take over’? Does that autonomous golf cart just refuse to cross an invisible line into a neighborhood where it’s not certified for autonomy? And can you push the Johnnycab driver out of the way?