Social insects are so weird….

Each of these aphids is a white bead, just half a millimeter across. In large numbers, they can compel Japanese trees to form large, hollow spheres called galls—roomy mansions in which hundreds or thousands of them can live. Like ants, bees, and termites, aphids divide their labor: Adults reproduce, while immature nymphs act as both workers and soldiers. If moth caterpillars tunnel their way into the galls, the nymphs stab these intruders to death, using the sharp mouthparts that they normally use to suck sap from trees. That deals with the caterpillar, but what about the huge hole that it leaves in the gall?

The aphid’s solution, discovered in 2003, is dramatic. Dozens or hundreds of the young soldiers will gather around a hole and discharge fluid from a pair of tubes on their backsides. This isn’t a gentle leak but a violent eruption, which drains the nymphs so thoroughly that they shrivel down to just a third of their initial volume. As they dry and die, they also use their legs to mix the fluids over the holes. These harden within an hour, sealing the gap and sometimes entombing the suicide plasterers.

Aphids Fix Holes in Their Home by Suicidally Erupting – The Atlantic

I love these.

Los Angeles-based artist Andrew Hem paints stylized scenes of solitary figures caught in moments of motion, introspection, and reverence. While integrated into their surroundings through carefully modulated color palettes, the figures’ floating poses and distant expressions suggest a dreamlike state. In an artist statement, Hem cites an early interest in graffiti as informing his current narrative style, which he creates with a combination of gouache, oil, and acrylic paint.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/04/andrew-hem-paintings/

This 2017 article includes some terrific analysis of the past and future of global inequality, both within countries and across them.

Examining the “World Inequality Report” — published Thursday by the creators of the World Wealth and Income Database, who include the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez — it is tempting to see the rising concentration of incomes as some sort of unstoppable force of nature, an economic inevitability driven by globalization and technology. The report finds that the richest 1 percent of humanity reaped 27 percent of the world’s income between 1980 and 2016. The bottom 50 percent, by contrast, got only 12 percent.

[…]

And yet, a careful examination of the data suggests there is nothing inevitable about untrammelled inequality. Take China and India, developing countries of billion-plus populations playing catch-up to pull themselves out of poverty. Incomes have become much more concentrated in both. But China’s economic strategy has delivered much more growth at a lower cost in terms of economic disparity. Comparing Europe with the United States and Canada offers similar contrasts.

Policy, it turns out, matters. More aggressive redistribution through taxes and transfers has spared Europe from the acute disparities that Americans have grown used to. Unequal access to education is helping reproduce inequality in the United States down the generations. On the other end of the spectrum of development, China’s strategy based on low-skill manufacturing for export, and underpinned by aggressive investment in infrastructure, has proven more effective at raising living standards for the bottom half of the population than India’s more inward-looking strategy, which has limited the benefits of globalization to the well-educated elite.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/14/business/world-inequality.html

Luminus 45-foot pyrosome, whee!! And they can get twice that long…

Surprisingly evocative.

This is a broadcast from a rat burrow in New York City’s Lower East Side.

Rats primarily speak above the threshold of human hearing (20khz), so this audio has been resampled and pitch-shifted down into a human-audible range. The broadcast is cached from the last 24-hours recorded and re-broadcast each day. Why? Who? http://brianhouse.net

http://ratradio.nyc/

I don’t imagine that the actual pictures will look nearly as cool as the illustration above, but I’m pretty excited for this nonetheless 🙂

This week we may get the first glimpse of what scientists have long been able only to theorize, calculate and simulate: the edge of a black hole. This is the so-called event horizon, beyond which even light cannot escape and where all known physical laws break down.

Astronomers who have created a global network of radio telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope are expected to release images of this elusive and inscrutable astronomical object on Wednesday morning. Such images would represent not only a major scientific accomplishment but also an opportunity to rethink the cosmos and our place in it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/opinion/black-hole.html

This is a phenomenal interactive explanation of how waves — and images! — can be decomposed into their component parts. Highly recommended if you want to teach someone about waves, audio, or compression (the page includes specific sections about all three of those).

http://www.jezzamon.com/fourier/index.html

The second report of the BEA also includes initial estimates of corporate profits and the taxes they pay (as well as much else). The purpose of this note is to update an earlier post on this blog that examined what happened to corporate profit tax revenuesfollowing the Trump / GOP tax cuts of late 2017. That earlier post was based on figures for just the first half of 2018.

We now have figures for the full year, and they confirm what had earlier been found – corporate profit tax revenues have indeed plummeted. As seen in the chart at the top of this post, corporate profit taxes were in the range of only $150 to $160 billion (at annual rates) in the four quarters of 2018. This was less than half the $300 to $350 billion range in the years before 2018. And there is no sign that this collapse in revenues was due to special circumstances of one quarter or another. We see it in all four quarters.

https://aneconomicsense.org/2019/03/28/taxes-on-corporate-profits-have-continued-to-collapse/

I found this essay pretty interesting; it tries to present the overall communist worldview rather than arguing point-by-point.

9.1 It’s a childish delusion that you just so happen to live in the only civilisation without propaganda.

9.2 Propaganda is rife. Consider public debate about just about any policy position. You’re constantly being told that even the slightest steps towards the subordination of exchange value to use value (e.g., universal healthcare) will maybe cause the economy to keel over dead and definitely rip ragged human economic activity in the sphere in question.

9.3 In many cases you know for a fact this can’t be true, because even in the capitalist world there are many countries where any policy that might be under debate has already been adopted. In the healthcare debate, people will tell you that the economy will suffocate, or at least that healthcare will bloat and become ineffective, if universal healthcare is implemented, even though anyone can drive to Canada.

9.4. In the US minimum wage debate, people will tell you that unemployment would spiral if minimum wages were raised to $15 dollars an hour. Meanwhile, in thoroughly capitalist Australia, a 21 year old fast food worker in Australia who is casual (without guaranteed hours) is entitled to $26 an hour (and no, Australian dollars don’t go much farther, or much less farther, than US dollars). At every turn, capitalism is presented as at once essential to human activity, but also very fragile and in need of the velvet glove treatment even though you can see it just isn’t true by buying a plane ticket.

Seeing Like a Communist – de Pony Sum – Medium

Nutt has long been developing a holy grail of molecules – also referred to as “alcosynth” – that will provide the relaxing and socially lubricating qualities of alcohol, but without the hangovers, health issues and the risk of getting paralytic. It sounds too good to be true, and when I discuss the notion with two alcohol industry experts, they independently draw parallels with plans to colonise Mars.

Yet Alcarelle finding its way into bars and shops is starting to look like a possibility. Seed funding was raised in November 2018, allowing Nutt and his business partner, David Orren, to attempt to raise £20m from investors to bring Alcarelle to market. “The industry knows alcohol is a toxic substance,” says Nutt. “If it were discovered today, it would be illegal as a foodstuff. The safe limit of alcohol, if you apply food standards criteria, would be one glass of wine a year.”

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/mar/26/an-innocent-drink-could-alcosynth-provide-all-the-joy-of-booze-without-the-dangers