Introducing Hate, the Map

Holy shit, Americans are assholes (via Floating Sheep)

In a lot of ways, the Geography of Hate affirms what we already know: Americans are fucking racist. Homophobic and ableist, too.
But while that may not come as any great surprise, the map reveals a startling bigotry coursing beneath our preconceived notions of just where in the US hate is harbored most. Americans, it turns out, fall racist and homophobic and ableist, and are apparently vocal enough about it to spout off bigotry on social media, in no real discernible pattern, though it's often where we least expect bigotry that we find it rearing its ugly head.
The visualization comes way of Humboldt State University's Dr. Monica Stephens and the Floating Sheep--the same group that made a map of post-election Twitter hate speech. It comprises 150,000 geo-coded hate tweets flagged between June 2012 and April 2013 for including the word "chink," "gook," "nigger," "wetback," "spick," "cripple," "dyke," "fag," "homo," or "queer". At first blush it's awfully depressing, a real day ruiner, or worse. Click around and most slurs--not all, but most--see the intercontinental US pocked by deep reds, the research team's translation for "most hate." Jesus Christ. Is it 2013? It can't be 2013.
But, really? That can't be right, can it. Surely something's off. How can we be sure "positive" uses of an otherwise hateful slur (e.g., “dykes on bikes #SFPride”) weren't inadvertently swept up in the Geography of Hate? Contextualiztion is crucial--is everything, really. Did Stephens' team allow for it?
They did. In fact, this is why they used humans (read: Humboldt State students), not machines, to analyze the entirety of the 150,000 offending tweets, all drawn from the University of Kentucky's DOLLY project. (It was also very much the reason the project got underway in the first place, as the Floating Sheep got a fair deal of flak over whether their post-election map contextualized hate rigourously enough.) It was a matter of avoiding "any algorithmic sentiment analysis of natural language processing," the researchers write, "as many algorithms would have simply classified a tweet as ‘negative’ when the word was used in a neutral or positive way. The students were able to discern which were negative, neutral, or positive."
As such, the map only includes those tweets used in explicitly negative context. Like so much of modern life, it's an uncomfortable truth perhaps best summed up by the late George Carlin.

This Is Life in a 400 PPM World

Okay, so it won't be that bad. Yet. Image: Flickr

It already ranks as one of the grimmest measurements ever taken. Climate scientists found that for the first time in approximately three million years, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached 400 parts per million. The reason that figure was splashed across the front page of the New York Times—and why top White House advisors find it "truly frightening"—should be well understood by now. Carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas, and the more that accumulates in the atmosphere, the more sunlight it traps—and the more the globe warms.
We've now added enough CO2 to the atmosphere to change the lives of every human on the planet. This isn't an exaggeration. An increasingly large portion of the CO2 clogging our atmosphere comes from human activity—from our coal-fired power plants, our petroleum burning cars, our factories. Before we had any of those, carbon dioxide accounted for just 280 ppm. That means we've already turned up the dial on the planet's central heating by some 42 percent.
As with most heating units, it will take a little time for the temperatures to catch up with the new setting. But many of those changes are already under way. Life in a world where carbon accounts for 400 ppm is going to be quite different from the old 280 ppm world. The climate is now fundamentally different than it was 40, 30, even 20 years ago.
When I was born, in the mid-1980s, the amount of CO2 that had accumulated in the atmosphere was just enough to account for 350 ppm—the amount climatologists like NASA's Dr. James Hansen have identified as the threshold between a stable climate and an unpredictable, potentially volatile one. Between the 1800s and then, humans—mostly the United States and Europe—had built enough carbon-belching power plants and factories to add 70 ppm to the atmosphere.
Yet in my short life alone, human activity has pumped enough carbon pollution into our skies to raise the bar a full 50 ppm more. That's a huge change—out of the 120 ppm humans have added in total, nearly half of it has occurred in just under 30 years. That's the rest of the world following suit, building fossil fueled power plants and industrializing; the same way the U.S. did.
And that's enough carbon to transform our climate to the point that it better resembles another geologic era entirely: The Pliocene. That era, which took place from 5.8 to 2.6 million years ago, was the last time there was so much CO2 was blanketing the planet. According to the geological record, the CO2 levels of 360-400 ppm that marked the Pliocene made the world a drastically different place than the one that you and I grew up in.
Here are some characteristics of the 400 ppm world then—and those that are likely to be reprised in coming years:
-Sea levels were, on average, between 50 and 82 feet higher.
-Temperatures were 2-3˚C higher, or about 4-6 ˚F, than they are today.
-Arctic temperatures were between 10-20 ˚C hotter.
-Many species of both plants and animals existed several hundred kilometers north of where their nearest relatives exist today.
-Vast swaths of land turned into swamps.

Image: Liverpool University

This is our 400 ppm world. Hotter, nastier, even less predictable than the one you got comfortable with. This is the world that your kids are going to be growing up in. And some of the irrevocable damage has already been done.
"We've taken one of the largest physical features on earth--the Arctic--and we've broken it; new data shows 80 percent of the ice that was there 40 years ago is gone. So now we'll find out what disappears between here and 450," Bill McKibben, the environmentalist and author of Eaarth: Life on a Strange New Planet, told me in an email.
What seems like pessimism is actually gloomy pragmatism. McKibben knows that if we keep our factories humming, our cars guzzling, and coal plants firing, we'll hit 450 ppm in less time than we hit 400.
"Sadly, we're shooting right past 400 ppm and likely to commit to at least 450 ppm within a matter of years if we don't begin ramping down our greenhouse gas emissions," the preeminent climatologist Michael E. Mann told me.
And if there's one thing that's worse than a 400 ppm world, it's a 450 ppm world.

"If we cross 450 ppm we likely commit to just under 4˚ F warming of the globe relative to preindustrial," Mann continued. "That's a world where the most extreme summers we've ever seen, like last summer, with its record heat and drought, decimated crops, unprecedented wildfires, and devastating Superstorm Sandy, will be the typical summer. And the extreme summers? There is no analog in our past for what that would look like."
That world is just decades, even years away. I won't recite a full list of dangers a world like this holds—the one that includes displaced climate refugees, tensions over diminishing resources, increased reach of tropical diseases, battered coastal populations—but suffice to say that the 400 ppm world and its successors can be ugly places.
The Arctic is already melted. Sea levels are rapidly rising. We've seen a full 1˚ F of temperature rise since mid-century. Scientists are predicting that climate change is indeed going to devastate plant and animal habitats worldwide, much as it did in the Pliocene. This is the 400 ppm world, and it's upon us. The only question now is if we're going to keep cranking the central heat—are we going to turn this sauna into an inferno? We'd have to embrace a whiplash transition away from fossil fuels and towards clean energy—otherwise we can say hello to planet hotbox.
"Fortunately, there is still time to avoid that future," Mann says. "But not a whole lot of time. Breaching the sobering milestone of 400 ppm simply puts an exclamation mark on that."

The Feds Are Making It Hurt in Every Way Possible For Weev, But for What?

Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, who is currently serving jail time for exposing an AT&T security hole, got an in-person visit from his lawyer Tor Ekeland on Sunday. The four-hour-plus drive out to the Pennsylvanian penitentiary from his Brooklyn offices was mandatory for Ekeland, as the prison has denied him access to his client since he was placed in solitary confinement for unconfirmed reasons weeks ago. 
Ekeland, accompanied by two of weev’s female friends who tweeted the experience under #weevroadtrip, learned he was sharing a 10x10 cell in solitary with a cellmate, and is let out three times a week for a 15-minute shower. And that’s it. Ekeland called this treatment “odd for someone convicted of a non-violent computer crime” in a recent phone interview, and “a bit draconian” as it appears “[weev] is being punished for his speech.”
Reasons for the “administrative detention”—what the prison is calling solitary confinement—are still unclear. Normally, inmates are put into housing like weev’s if they have started a fight in the prison. But weev did no such thing. Ekeland spoke to his client in a visitation booth separated by glass, with communication only audible through telephone, “like in the movies.”
The penitentiary also threatened to relocate weev regularly, in order to disrupt communications with friends, as well as rooming him with gang members and terrorists if he tries to communicate with the outside world via Internet again. weev tweeting and posting messages to SoundCloud is not illegal, but disrupts the federal government’s goal of weev quietly carrying out his prison sentence and thus fading from public memory.
Even more troubling than the “administrative detention,” threats, and limited access to letter-writing materials and stamps: the prison is not serving weev gluten-free meals. weev has special dietary needs as he has Celiac’s disease, an autoimmune disorder of the small intestine that causes him to have an adverse reaction to gluten. Ekeland learned his client has gone to see the prison doctor, but his diet has not changed. The food his friends brought weev was not allowed, nor was weev able to keep any of the notes his friends brought him.

Let VICE School You on the Web This Internet Week

You think you know everything about the internet because you managed to bookmark a few free porn sites and up-voted some Grumpy Cat meme's on Reddit? Well, there's a lot more to the web than carnal perversions and dwarf felines: it's a tool that connects millions of disparate people and ideas together, impacting everything from the food we eat to the way we date. To help you get a grip on all of this high-tech shit and the ways it enhances our lives, David-Michel Davies and Neil Vogel of the Webby Awards, and Katherine Oliver of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment came together in 2008 to form Internet Week—a celebration of all things digital and the luminaries behind all those ones and zeros.

VICE will be joining in the geek fun at Internet Week for the third year in a row, by hosting a series of panels ranging from the importance of social media in the conflict in Syria to the effects of internet piracy. VICE's sister technology site, Motherboard, will also be hosting a week of panels around the future of drugs, drones, and code. And VICE's founder Shane Smith, accompanied by legendary media mogul Tom Freston, will top the week off with a keynote address on Thursday evening.

The nerdy hoopla is happening right now at Manhattan's Metropolitan Pavilion. But if you can't make it in person because you've dived so deep into the nether realms of internet smut and cat memes that you can't even bear the thought of leaving your computer, you're in luck—you can stream all the stuff going down at Internet Week over the internet! 

Jodorowski's Dune Would Have Been More Insane Than You Can Even Imagine

Image: Giger's rendering of House Harkonnen from Jodorowsky's Dune

In 1974, the Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky set about turning the classic sci-fi novel Dune into a major motion picture. He recruited Orson Welles, Pink Floyd, H. R. Giger, David Carradine, Salvador Dali, and Mick Jagger to the project, completed 3,000 pieces of story art, and spent millions of dollars preparing for production. Investors balked when he asked for more—and when they realized the script would account for a meandering 14-hour film—and it was ultimately shelved.
David Lynch would famously take up the mantle and go on to turn Dune into an epic flop. So today, Jodorowsky's effort remains one of the most famous movies never made. A documentary about the lost film debuted at Cannes, and it's getting rave reviews—it's essentially a prolonged bull session with Jodorowsky about the aborted project. 

Juggalos Are OK, Cupid

Screenshot via OkCupid Juggalos
Something like 70 percent of the internet is people going, “Hey did you see this cute/funny/sad/tragic/OMG/WTF/fail thing?” and passing around the meme du jour—a wacky crime story from Florida, an amazing photo of natural phenomenon that just has to be seen to be believed, a fake video of an eagle snatching a kid in a park, a cat that looks like something other than a cat. Yesterday, the hot, clickable content being viewed, blogged, reblogged, shared, and no doubt monetized was a Tumblr called OkCupid Juggalos.
Juggalos, of course, are diehard fans of the crypto-Christian rap duo Insane Clown Posse, and OkCupid is a really popular free online dating site. Combine the two things, and you get awkward, posturing selfies of men and women with painted faces and poorly done tattoos, coupled with their ungrammatical statements about being “chill,” loving Faygo, and being “crazy.” Hilarious.
The site is part of a subgenre of Tumblrs devoted to pointing out people, usually men, who have bizarre OkCupid profiles that sometimes make them sound like psychopaths or rapists. (It’s such a popular trope that OkCupid Juggalos isn’t even the only Tumblr devoted to Juggalos on OkCupid.)  OkCupid Goldmine documents a grab bag of creeps and weirdos; Okc_ebooks gets gullible users to respond to messages that are actually gibberish tweets from bot/poet @Horse_ebooks; the creator of OkCupid Enemies sought out people who weren’t good matches for him or her to find freakish profiles (that one’s apparently now defunct); Fedoras of OKC targets the usually nerdy, Reddit-using, neck-bearded gamer types who think they look good in fedoras; and Nice Guys of OkCupid (also defunct) went after dudes who claimed to be “nice guys” but were clearly entitled, misogynistic dicks who had some fucked-up thoughts about women.

Australian Scientists Think "Salamander-Like" Human Limb Regeneration Is Possible

An axolotl salamander's limb in the process of regeneration. Image: Nature

I am a human, so if my limbs fall off, they stay off. This is unfortunate. It's also why Australian scientists are working to enable "salamander-like" limb repair in people. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers new insights into how salamanders self-repair, and holds clues as to how humans might learn from their example.
Salamanders, you see, are one of the few vertebrates with full-fledged regenerative capabilities: they can repair their hearts, brains, and spines, and they regrow entire limbs. What makes all that regeneration possible are cells called macrophages. These cells not only kill off invasive bacteria and fungi, study author Dr. James Godwin, of the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University, tells ABC Australia, they "actively determine repair."

Image: Georgia Tech University

Humans have macrophages, too, but no limb repair. So Godwin and his team of researchers set out to study what makes the salamander's restorative cells different. They extracted the macrophages from an axolotl, an aquatic species of salamander, and discovered that without macrophages, limb regeneration shut down entirely—the salamanders became like us, with lost limbs turning into stumps. But the scientists found that "Full limb regenerative capacity of failed stumps was restored by reamputation once endogenous macrophage populations had been replenished."
The discovery led Godwin to believe that a chemical release accompanying the deployment of macrophages is essential to limb regeneration—and that it's entirely possible that by emulating that chemical release, we may be able to spur human limb regeneration. As he writes in the study's abstract: "Promotion of a regeneration-permissive environment by identification of macrophage-derived therapeutic molecules may ... aid in the regeneration of damaged body parts in adult mammals."
In other words, if he can identify which chemicals are driving that limb repair, he may be able to concoct a medicinal treatment that could actually help humans regrow limbs right in the emergency room.
"The long-term plan," he said, "is that we'll know exactly what cocktail to add to a wound site to allow salamander-like regeneration under hospital conditions."