Nautilus Magazine: Listening for Extraterrestrial Blah Blah

If one is looking for signals from an extraterrestrial civilization, why not practice on some of the non-human communication systems already known on our own planet? Whales have had a global communication system for millions of years—longer than Homo sapiens has even existed. Bees, which communicate in part by dancing, had democratic debates about the best places to swarm millions of years before humans came up with democracy as a political system. And other examples abound. No person I know of who has studied another animal’s communication system has ever concluded that the species was dumber than they’d previously thought. [...]

Put simply, we may well have received a message from intelligent beings and neglected it because it didn’t conform to our expectations for what a signal should look like. And this might be why we have yet to detect any interstellar communications in 50 years of searching. [...]

Most linguists used to suppose that Zipf’s Law was a characteristic of human languages only. So we were quite excited to find that, upon plotting the frequency of occurrence of adult bottlenose-dolphin whistles, that they, too, obeyed Zipf’s Law! Later, when two baby bottlenose dolphins were born at Marine World in California, we recorded their infant whistles and discovered that they had the same Zipf’s Law slope as baby human babbling. Thus baby dolphins babble their whistles and have to learn their communication system in a way not dissimilar from the way baby humans learn their languages. By the time the dolphins reached the age of 12 months, the frequency of occurrence distribution of their whistles had reached a –1 slope, as well. [...]

To transmit knowledge, even a very advanced extraterrestrial civilization would still have to obey the rules of information theory. While perhaps not being able to decipher such a message because of lack of common symbols (the same problem we have with, for example, humpback whales), we would get an indication of how complex their communication system—and thereby their thought processes—may be. If the conditional probabilities of a SETI signal are, for example, 20th-order, then not only is the signal artificial in origin, but it would reflect a language far more complex than any on Earth. We would have a quantitative measure of the complexity of the thought processes of a transmitting ETI species.

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Quartz: Rooftop hydroponic systems in cities produce vegetables that are cheaper and healthier than rural farms

A paper published this past July the journal Agronomy for Sustainable Development reports that growing leafy greens in rooftop hydroponic systems can not only produce a steady supply of vegetables—it can also be cheaper than buying store-bought alternatives. [...]

Rooftop farming could also create jobs and reduce the carbon footprint of transporting foods into cities, says Wanquing Zhou, a research associate at the Worldwatch Institute. Those are essential side effects, considering the rapid urbanization currently underway in China: By 2020, Guangzhou’s population is expected to nearly double from 9.62 million in 2010 to 15.17 million—almost equivalent to adding the entire population of New York City. [...]

For the two-year study, researchers constructed a “screenhouse”—a semi-enclosed structure with a roof—on top of a two-story building inside the South China Botanical Garden. Surrounded by screens to ward off armies of insects that thrive in Guangzhou’s summer subtropical climate, 14 hydroponic tanks inside the screen house nursed and fed a forest of seven different greens, including caraway, potherb mustard, and Italian lettuce. The crops were then rotated based on their natural growing seasons—from November through March, bouquets of crown daisy and Italian lettuce populated the screenhouse, while summer and fall months brought waves of leaf mustard. [...]

The team also tested two greens and found that they contained fewer contaminants than their market counterparts—including pesticides, nitrate, lead and arsenic. If the finding holds up for the other five vegetables, the hydroponic screenhouse model could be particularly relevant for urban farming. New York, Philadelphia, Detroit and Shanghai have all had traces of lead contamination pop up in their urban soils.

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Quartz: Why India is terrified of free-range vaginas

India is a famously complicated place. For women, it’s doubly complicated—we live with staggering mainstream sexism and both casual and egregious violence at every level of the power pyramid. You can choose not to conform, but only if you’re willing to negotiate the crass misogyny and judgement that will come your way, and to risk your physical safety. Driving at night, you might be followed by a car filled with men who try to run you off the road. Walking down the street, you might find people staring and breaking into song, or groping you. People will try to make you aware of your shameful oddness in thousands of little ways. [...]

When you don’t fit in, people are much more likely to assume that you don’t belong and don’t know any better than that you need to be taken down a peg or two. When they know that you do belong, they are very much more uncertain about how to treat you. Uncertainty has two positive points: it is not objectionable; and it makes people hesitate, a breach which you can nimbly fill with deliberate calm and normalcy. When you choose calmness and normalcy, you are often choosing it for the other person too, who didn’t know which way to go. [...]

Leaving a jewel of a man is not the sort of thing you do lightly. In a society that is pathologically devoted to marriage, and hates free-range vaginas, you can expect shock and horror. Oddly, other than a few close friends who urged me to think about it, nobody said a single word to me, though I know people talked about it a lot. That’s the upside of living in a liberal elite cocoon in which people are too polite to bring up your separation, but love to speculate behind your back about whether maybe you’re a lesbo. After we split, my ex-husband used to take special pleasure in making sure we arrived simultaneously at a party, just to confuse the crap out of everyone.

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Mic: Here's why people keep going to psychics and fortunetellers

And with that, I am now among the 15% of Americans who have admitted to visiting a fortuneteller or psychic. In spite of the fact that claiming to commune with the supernatural realm is widely dismissed as a sham — and is also a class B misdemeanor in New York City that could cost a fortune teller up to $500 in fines — palmists and Tarot card readers occupy storefronts throughout the city and advertise online. And people continue to seek them out: according to a 2016 survey of paranormal beliefs conducted by Chapman University, 14.1% of those surveyed believe astrologers, fortune tellers and psychics can foresee the future and nearly half (46.6%) believe that places can be haunted by spirits. [...]

While McBride sees clients of all ages, she's noticed that young people come mainly for a particular drama, such as relationships or family issues. "It can get pretty specific as far as astrology goes," McBride said. "I can get right to something immediately. A therapist has to get to know you, hear your story."

Norton believes Tarot card reading and the like have helped her to analyze her relationships with different people. Often, she was surprised at how accurately the reader would talk about their personality traits and motives. "It can kind of give hope to some people that things are gonna work out," she said. "Even if it is a scam, it's just an interesting way to look at your life in a different way and [be] introspective."

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Jacobin Magazine: Neoliberalism in the Rose Garden

During the campaign, most candidates advocated a “return to real social democracy” and the working class. Unfortunately, with the exception of Karolina Leaković — who called for a Jeremy Corbyn–like turn in the party, but won less than 1 percent in the first round of voting — these were empty populist slogans. And members, well aware that their party has become a social-democratic formation in name only, seemed to see the rhetoric as just that.

The SDP, though one of Croatia’s two major parties since Yugoslavia’s collapse, has largely spent its life in opposition. Only when the HDZ is experiencing great inter-party crisis has the SDP been able to take over.

Historically, the party, a successor to the League of Communists of Croatia (SKH), found support in the industrial centers and ethnically mixed regions. During the war in the 1990s, however, the party’s power collapsed, violence and deindustrialization eroding its former strongholds. [...]

Rightward-moving electoral alliances have been underpinned by a deep commitment to Third Way policies. During a recent stint in power, from 2011 to 2015, the party busied itself not with fighting for workers’ rights but with weakening labor law and pushing privatization. This experience turned the last remnants of the party’s working-class base against it. The party now relies on voters in the most economically developed regions and the most educated segments of the population.

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CityLab: The Geography of Hate in the U.S.

It’s been a little over a month since the election of Donald Trump, and reports of hate crimes keep on coming.* Across the nation, more than 900 incidents of hate-related intimidation or harassment were reported in just the first 10 days following the election, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

But to what degree do the existence of hate groups actually track with support for Trump? And what other factors might be playing into the specific places where hate groups are on the rise in the U.S.?

To get at this, we look at the current geography of hate using the SPLC’s detailed data base of hate groups. The SPLC defines hate groups as organizations and associations that “have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics,” and which participate in “criminal acts, marches, rallies, speeches, meetings, leafleting or publishing.” Its database, which culled from websites and publications, citizen and law enforcement reports, field sources and news reports, identifies 892 active hate groups across the 50 states. [...]

The map reveals the basic geography of hate groups in America. Hate groups are most highly concentrated in the South and the northern Plains states (the tallest states on the map). Arkansas (7.4), Mississippi (6.4) and Tennessee (6.2) have the largest concentrations of hate groups, followed by South Dakota (5.8), Montana (5.8), and Delaware (5.3).

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Al Jazeera: Why are Roma blamed for Europe's rejection of refugees?

When the Bulgarian Ministry of Education announced the launch of a scholarship programme for 700 Romani high school students (individual awards totalling $32, monthly) in October, ethnic Bulgarian parents protested across the country.

National television programmes reported the scholarships as an "unjust measure that discriminates against non-Roma", and a Bulgarian MP from a progressive centrist party questioned whether this "ethnic-based privilege" should be considered unconstitutional.

Considering that only nine percent of Roma complete secondary education and that one-third of the Bulgarian Romani population live in absolute poverty (PDF), it is hard to see how Roma in Bulgaria could be labelled as privileged, in any context. Yet, the argument persuaded many people to protest against the proposed scholarship programme. [...]

A recent article by Leonid Bershidsky in Bloomberg presents the issue differently. "Eastern European national governments … have no idea how to integrate the Roma," he writes, going on to quote the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev, who says this failure contributes to "Eastern Europe's compassion deficit" towards Muslims and refugees. [...]

When Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic continue to place Romani children in segregated schools, one can have doubts about the sincerity of Eastern European countries' willingness to provide better opportunities for their Romani citizens. 

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Motherboard: California’s Hypothetical Plan to Start a Space Agency Is Legal and Feasible

In a scathing speech Wednesday in front of some of the most important climate scientists in the world, California Gov. Jerry Brown vowed to fight Donald Trump’s anti-environmental policies every step of the way. One audacious promise particularly stood out: Brown said that if Trump turns off NASA’s climate-monitoring satellites, the state “is going to launch its own damn satellites.” [...]

The legal issues will of course depend on the specifics of California’s program—if the state pursued a public-private partnership, it could simply buy data from a commercial satellite company that secures launch permits from the federal government. But let’s presume for a moment that California wants to start its own honest-to-goodness space agency, or, at the very least, wants to handle the launch and monitoring of its satellites. There are two main questions: Would such a plan be feasible? And can the state legally do so? [...]

Depending on the capabilities California would want, it could launch a satellite for much cheaper. Startup Skybox Imaging, which was rebranded as Terra Bella after Google purchased it, launched its first imaging cubesat for less than $50 million. For context, California’s government spends in the neighborhood of $100 billion per year. It is currently $400 billion in debt, but has a balanced budget and has begun the slow process of paying off those debts.

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