Adverbly – Page 13 – Fine Browsing, Hand Delivered to Your Internet Viewing Screen

In 1906, the Bronx zoo exhibited an African man alongside monkeys.

28 November 201228 November 2012 Richard

A truly disgusting episode from our country’s depressingly racist past:

[…] the zookeepers

Ota Benga, at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, showing his sharpened teeth. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

convinced Benga [one of the Congolese tribe of Mbuti pygmies] to play with the orangutan in its cage. Benga obliged. Crowds gathered to watch the two monkeying around. The keepers gave Benga his bow and arrow; he shot targets, squirrels, the occasional rat. Bones were scattered about the cage to add a whiff of cannibalism. The keepers goaded Benga to occasionally charge the bars of his enclosure, baring his sharp teeth. Children screamed. Adults were at turns horrified and titillated. “Is that a man?” a visitor asked. A circus owner offered to throw a party for Benga, a French spinster offered to purchase him, and a black manicurist offered to paint his nails. Hornaday posted a sign outside of the cage, displaying Benga’s height, weight, and how he was acquired. “Exhibited each afternoon during September,” it concluded.

One hundred years later, I like to think we’ve come a long way. You can read the full article at the New York Magazine.

Saudi Arabia implements electronic tracking system for women

27 November 201227 November 2012 Richard

A Saudi woman. (Photo credit: Retlaw Snellac)

Saudi Arabia, already known for its staggering misogyny, just got a little more Orwellian (or, for the Margaret Atwood fans — Gileadean?):

RIYADH — Denied the right to travel without consent from their male guardians and banned from driving, women in Saudi Arabia are now monitored by an electronic system that tracks any cross-border movements.

Since last week, Saudi women’s male guardians began receiving text messages on their phones informing them when women under their custody leave the country, even if they are travelling together.

You can read the full story here.

Cambridge University to study threat from artificial intelligence at “terminator center”

26 November 201226 November 2012 Richard

From the Daily Mail:

A centre for ‘terminator studies’, where leading academics will study the threat that robots pose to humanity, is set to open at Cambridge University.

Its purpose will be to study the four greatest threats to the human species – artificial intelligence, climate change, nuclear war and rogue biotechnology.

The Mail, of course, sensationalizes this, as it tends to do: the actual name for the think tank is the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. At any rate, I’m glad we have top minds thinking about these issues.

You can read the original article here.

Full moon doesn’t make you crazy, researchers conclude

26 November 201226 November 2012 Richard

Bad news for those who claim to be afflicted with lycanthropy:

Contrary to popular belief, there is no connection between lunar phases and the incidence of psychological problems. This is the conclusion reached by a team of researchers directed by Professor Geneviève Belleville of Université Laval’s School of Psychology after having examined the relationship between the moon’s phases and the number of patients who show up at hospital emergency rooms experiencing psychological problems.

Read the rest here.

Scientists prove South Pacific island “doesn’t exist”

24 November 201224 November 2012 Richard

I bet those cartographers feel silly now. From BBC News:

A South Pacific island, shown on marine charts and world maps as well as on Google Earth and Google Maps, does not exist, Australian scientists say.

The supposedly sizeable strip of land, named Sandy Island on Google maps, was positioned midway between Australia and French-governed New Caledonia.

But when scientists from the University of Sydney went to the area, they found only the blue ocean of the Coral Sea.

The phantom island has featured in publications for at least a decade.

You can read the rest of the story here. Apparently, incidents like this aren’t as uncommon as one might think: Wikipedia has a long list of other “phantom islands” that have been debunked throughout history. (My favorites from this list include Antillia, the mysterious Isle of Seven Cities, and the sinister-sounding Isle of Demons, a legendary land once believed to exist near Newfoundland.)

It’s Black Friday, Charlie Brown

23 November 201223 November 2012 Richard

Jimmy Kimmel Live shows us the true meaning of Black Friday with this touching short.

(via Laughing Squid)

The Kowloon Walled City

23 November 201223 November 2012 Richard

The Kowloon Walled City was something straight out of dystopian fiction – but it was very much factual for the 33,000 people who lived there. Kowloon, as Wikipedia succinctly puts it, was a “densely populated, largely ungoverned settlement in Kowloon, Hong Kong.” In fact, the 6.5-acre

English: Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong, photographed from an airplane Deutsch: Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong, Luftbild (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

enclave was the most densely populated space on earth: approximately 1,255,000 inhabitants per square kilometer! For comparison, Wikipedia points out that “Hong Kong as a whole (itself one of the most densely populated areas on earth) had a population density of about 6,700 inhabitants per square kilometer.” The settlement dates back to AD 960, but its namesake walls were built by the Chinese in 1847, after the British took control of Hong Kong proper. Following Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II, the Chinese reclaimed Kowloon and opened it to refugees; it was then that its population dramatically increased. The Walled City was ultimately cleared and demolished in 1994.

Right now, there’s an ongoing “ask me anything” thread at Reddit, posted by Reddit user Crypt0n1te, a former inhabitant of the Walled City. He writes:

I lived in KWC when I was 2-3 years old but I have no recollection of that time. Later on, even though our family moved out of there, but since I was enrolled in the schools near there and my parent worked during the day, so my bro and me were dropped off at my relative’s place in KWC everyday. I got to know the place pretty well because I spent at least 4 hrs there everyday from 1984 to 1991. So ask away!

You can read his thread here: I grew up in the cyberpunk-esque dystopia called Kowloon Walled City which inspired the setting in Ghost in the Shell. AMA.

You can see more pictures of the Kowloon Walled City here.

A Boltzmann brain is a hypothesized self-aware entity

21 November 201221 November 2012 Richard

… which “arises due to random fluctuations out of a state of chaos,” according to Wikipedia. Confused? The idea is this: there is a surprising degree of organization in our world, in apparent conflict with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which holds that total entropy in a closed universe will never decrease (some see this as justification for belief in a creator deity).

Ludwig Boltzmann proposed that “we and our observed low-entropy world are a random fluctuation in a higher-entropy universe.” Even “in a near-equilibrium state,” Wikipedia explains, “there will be stochastic fluctuations in the level of entropy. The most common fluctuations will be relatively small, resulting in only small amounts of organization, while larger fluctuations and their resulting greater levels of organization will be comparatively more rare.”

Here’s where “Boltzmann brains” come in:

If our current level of organization, having many self-aware entities, is a result of a random fluctuation, it is much less likely than a level of organization which only creates stand-alone self-aware entities. For every universe with the level of organization we see, there should be an enormous number of lone Boltzmann brains floating around in unorganized environments. In an infinite universe, the number of self-aware brains that spontaneously randomly form out of the chaos, complete with false memories of a life like ours, should vastly outnumber the real brains evolved from an inconceivably rare local fluctuation the size of the observable universe.

If I were a Boltzmann brain (as, apparently, is statistically likely), could I ever know? Would it matter? A new form of a debate philosophers have waged for years – let’s call it neo-solipsism.

We’re coming back.

1 November 20121 November 2012 Richard

An all-new season of Adverbly is coming to internets near you, later this November. Stay tuned!

Sick Indonesians turning to “railroad therapy”

30 August 201130 August 2011 Richard

Indonesia’s health care system is not the best in the world, and given the country’s widespread poverty and traditions of mysticism, it is perhaps unsurprising that some are turning to “alternative treatments.” From medicalxpress.com:

(AP) — Ignoring the red-and-white danger sign, Sri Mulyati walks slowly to the train tracks outside Indonesia’s bustling capital, lies down and stretches her body across the rails.

Like the nearly dozen others lined up along the track, the 50-year-old diabetes patient has all but given up on doctors and can’t afford the expensive medicines they prescribe.

In her mind, she has only one option left: electric therapy.
[…]She turned to train track therapy last year after hearing a rumor about an ethnic Chinese man who was partially paralyzed by a stroke going to the tracks to kill himself, but instead finding himself cured.

It’s a story that’s been told and retold in Indonesia.

Until recently, more than 50 people would show up at the Rawa Buaya tracks every day. But the numbers have dropped since police and the state-run railroad company erected a warning sign and threatened penalties of up to three months in prison or fines of $1,800.

No one has been arrested yet, and none of the participants in train track therapy has died.

You can read the whole story here.

Hiatus

30 August 201130 August 2011 Richard

Dear friends and loyal readers,

As I am currently in Indonesia, this blog will be on temporary hiatus. I may randomly update it with Indonesian-related stories throughout the year.

What is this mysterious cheeseburger?

1 July 20111 July 2011 Richard

This was spotted in western Pennsylvania by our friend Olivia. There was nothing else around it.

Update: Our friend Todd points out that this is an Officer Big Mac climb-in jail playground from the original character lineup of the McDonaldland ad campaign. What it’s doing in a field in rural PA, of course, is anyone’s guess.