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an aural noise

word salad: The Free Soul School is a international workshop project, where musicians from all over the world meet up, jam, record music, and produce an album over the duration of a week.

some of the things I read while eating breakfast in antisocial isolation


What Is Lake-Effect Snow?
A snowstorm that slammed into Western New York left more than six feet of snow in places. Blame the Great Lakes.


Parts of the Buffalo area saw more than 6 feet of snow over three days in November 2022. Embiggenable.


IT’S HARD FOR MOST PEOPLE to imagine six feet of snow in one storm, like the Buffalo area saw over the weekend, but such extreme snowfall events occasionally happen along the eastern edges of the Great Lakes. The phenomenon is called “lake-effect snow,” and the lakes play a crucial role. It starts with cold, dry air from Canada. As the bitter cold air sweeps across the relatively warmer Great Lakes, it sucks up more and more moisture that falls as snow.

I’m a climate scientist at UMass Amherst. In the Climate Dynamics course I teach, students often ask how cold, dry air can lead to heavy snowfall. Here’s how that happens. Lake-effect snow is strongly influenced by the differences between the amount of heat and moisture at the lake surface and in the air a few thousand feet above it.

A big contrast creates conditions that help to suck water up from the lake, and thus more snowfall. A difference of 25 degrees Fahrenheit (14 Celsius) or more creates an environment that can fuel heavy snows. This often happens in late fall, when lake water is still warm from summer and cold air starts sweeping down from Canada. More moderate lake-effect snows occur every fall under less extreme thermal contrasts.

The wind’s path over the lakes is important. The further cold air travels over the lake surface, the more moisture is evaporated from the lake. A long “fetch”—the distance over water—often results in more lake-effect snow than a shorter one. Imagine a wind out of the west that is perfectly aligned so it blows over the entire 241-mile length of Lake Erie. That’s close to what Buffalo was experiencing during the storm that started Nov. 17, 2022.

The US right is stoking anti-LGBT hate. This shooting was no surprise
What happened in Colorado Springs this weekend was part of a trend of escalating violence targeting gay spaces.


‘Like most bigots, homophobes know little about the groups they target, and their hatred doesn’t hew to logic.’


As far as mass shootings, go, it was over quickly. Just before midnight on Saturday, a man carrying multiple magazines of ammunition entered the Club Q, a gay bar in Colorado Springs, Colorado, spraying gunfire. As bullets flew, two patrons at the club subdued the attacker by grabbing a gun from him, and hitting him with it. They held him down until police arrived. The first 911 call was made at 11.56pm; the killer was taken into custody at 12.02am. But in those six minutes, five people were killed, including Daniel Aston and Derrick Rump, two men who were tending bar, and Kerry Loving, a partygoer. Eighteen were wounded. As the clock struck midnight, it became a holiday for the bar’s community: Transgender Day of Remembrance, which honors trans people killed in hate attacks, was observed on Sunday.

There’s a grim routine, these days, to the mass shootings in America. Some elements remain constant from shooting to shooting. Usually, the gunman is a young white man, and usually, he has a history of violence against women. There will have been mental health episodes, or previous run-ins with police. But none of this history will have stopped him from getting a gun. American mass shooters tend to use automatic or semi-automatic long guns, the kind that aren’t available to civilians in other countries. Almost always, they purchased them legally.

In the aftermath, the public makes a grim calculus. How many dead? How many wounded? The initial numbers that trickle out through the media tend to tick upward in the following hours and days, as more of the injured arrive in local hospitals and some of the wounded pass away. Americans compare the latest massacre to the others, rationalizing to keep the panic and despair at bay. “That one wasn’t so bad,” we tell ourselves. “Only three were killed.” This has become the price of being in public in America, a psychic tax that we all pay when we leave the house: that the next time, when the next gunman opens fire in a school, or a church, or a grocery store, that one of the anonymous numbers printed in the newspaper will be someone we love.

In the hours after a gunman stormed into Club Q, a morbid kind of box checking began. Yes, it was a young white man who committed the rampage – this time a 22-year-old. Yes, the shooter had a history of violence against women: the attacker was arrested last year after an hours-long standoff with police after making a bomb threat against his mother. He was charged with multiple felonies, but, yes, he still had access to guns. Yes, the killer used an AR-style long gun to murder his victims. And yes, the killer appears to have rightwing ties: he’s the grandson of a far-right California state assemblyman who supported the January 6 insurrection. On Monday, the shooter was charged with five counts of murder and several hate crimes.

The Post Office Regretted Designing This Anti-Drinking Stamp


In 1981, alcoholics faced tremendous stigma, said the National Council on Alcoholism, even as alcohol itself remained as popular as ever. Call someone an alcoholic, and that was more of a moral condemnation than a statement of their condition. The NCA wanted to change people’s minds to make them think of it as a disease, a disease that can be treated and where no one’s tempted to assign blame.

That year, the US Postal Service put out a new stamp about alcoholism. “Alcoholism—you can beat it!” it said. The “o” took the form of the symbol of the campaign against alcoholism, a caduceus that doubled as a key pointing upward. The symbol was kind of obscure, but it still looked cool, and you don’t need to recognize it to see it as representing hope and a solution.

The stamp released to more fanfare than most stamps. It got its own article in the New York Times, and the NCA took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal telling people about the stamp. The postal service printed a whole lot of them (over nine million, according to collectors). Then, some months later, USPS just destroyed most of them and made no more, because it was clear the public wasn’t buying them.

The problem was, if someone stuck the stamp on the envelope and sent it to someone else, that was like declaring they could beat their alcoholism, together. Meaning, it was a way of telling someone you’ve noticed their drinking and want to help them stop. Either that, or it sounded like an admission of alcoholism and a request for help, and most people sending mail didn’t want to go either of those routes.

Yeah, We’ll Beat Him Again.
Donald Trump is officially running, and I’m confident it’s not going to go well for him.


In perhaps the least surprising political news since he left the White House in January of 2021, Donald Trump has officially announced his candidacy for the Presidency of the United States. With a boring, lackluster speech that countless people watching live on social media pointed out lacked his typical charisma, the President began his campaign before all of the midterm elections had even been called.

Personally, as of this moment anyways, I am confident we will beat this man again.

If Donald Trump becomes the nominee which is all but inevitable, given the results of the elections over the course of the past four years, I don’t see how he will win. In fact, given the numbers and as I and countless others have been saying since the midterms were held, it could potentially be a blow for the GOP they wouldn’t be able to recover from for years.

There’s another interesting tidbit this time, too…

He’s going to have to do it without the backing of Rupert Murdoch, and his right wing media enterprise.

NBC’s Mike Sington took to Twitter to write:

Of course, Murdoch’s media empire includes print media such as The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal. But most importantly of all, it includes FOX News.

Elon Musk and the Logic of Arrogance
He throws away $44 billion while Bezos pledges to give his money away.


Elon is getting all the press but Jeff is actually trying to be a human. Musk would rather not be seen as human, normal, or a person with a conscience. That may be why he excels at running hardware companies, but has no clue about dealing with actual people.

Billionaires seem to dominate our attention spans these days. They are all over the place and many seem to be mentally ill like Ye. Or wildly narcissistic like the Kardasshians. I’m sorry but I’m not even sure how to spell their name. Nor do I care.

Only in America can appearance or sheer nuttiness somehow make you wealthy beyond comprehension. This week we are watching Elon Musk, a genius of sorts who built actually useful rockets and crummy EVs, intentionally throw away $44 billion because he can.

This might be the sickest thing I have ever witnessed, to blow a sum of money that could save innumerable lives, change the world in positive ways, or build value, jobs, and a future, for nothing. And I thought Donald Trump was a narcissist.


”まる箱”は大人気です! ”Maru Box” is very popular!


THE LAST TAB . . .

The Most Important Brain in Neuroscience History
The man who factory resets every 30 seconds.


Henry Molaison convulsed on the ground.

His body twitched. His mouth clenched and he squirmed with his eyes closed. The people around him began panicking, not knowing what to do.

It was just another day for Henry.

Seizures had ravaged his body since childhood. He had epilepsy but attributed his condition to a bike accident at 7 years old.

Eventually, Henry was taken to Hartford Hospital where an experimental surgery was carried out. Dr. William Scovilleemoved a chunk of Henry’s brain — the part causing the seizures (8 cm of his hippocampus).


Photo of Henry

The groundbreaking results weren’t revealed until 50 years later at the time of his death.

The miraculous surgery aftermath
Henry woke up and never had another seizure. It was an incredible stroke of good fortune — at first.

The doctor came back 30 minutes after congratulating Henry on his surgery, and Henry didn’t remember their first interaction.

Doctors quickly realized Henry was having massive memory issues — often unable to remember more than 30 seconds into the past.


Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.

Ed., etc. I didn’t have time to do this today.


Assimilation Complete