Month: September 2018
September 28, 2018
September 27, 2018
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How First Capital Realty Curates Retail Communities Through Neighbourhood Acquisitions
“‘ Shops at King Liberty’. Photo: First Capital Realty By Mario Toneguzzi First Capital Realty has strategically made an effort of consolidating real estate…”
September 26, 2018
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What If Reality Isn’t Real? – Member Feature Stories – Medium
“Maybe it’s best to start at the end. “I’m sorry, I’m running a bit short of time,” I say casually on the phone to Robin Hanson before the last question of my…”
September 25, 2018
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Nobody Was Going To Solve These Cold Cases. Then Came The DNA Crime Solvers.
“A woman in a ditch. A baby in a parking lot. The DNA Doe Project has the ability to identify cold case victims — so why don’t they take on every case? Their…”
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The Nasty Feud Over What Killed the Dinosaurs
“Illustrations by Denise Nestor 1. Gerta Keller was waiting for me at the Mumbai airport so we could catch a flight to Hyderabad and go hunt rocks. “You won’t…”
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Raphael Bob-Waksberg, In Good Faith
“Photo-Illustration: Maya Robinson/Vulture and Photos by Getty Images and Netflix Raphael Bob-Waksberg is reading me some numbers. As the seasons of BoJack…”
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A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Literary Canon
“Illustration: Tim McDonagh Why Now? Okay, assessing a century’s literary legacy after only 18 and a half years is kind of a bizarre thing to do. Actually,…”
September 24, 2018
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“”It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know…”
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How Auto-Tune Revolutionized the Sound of Popular Music | Pitchfork
“How Auto-Tune Revolutionized the Sound of Popular Music An in-depth history of the most important pop innovation of the last 20 years, from Cher’s “Believe” to…”
September 22, 2018
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Ilse Schaefer (1921 – 2018)
My mother died two weeks ago. She was 97.
I think the 35,668 days she spent on this planet covered an incredible range of highs and lows both for humanity and for her personally.
There were two billion people on the planet when she arrived and seven and a half billion when she left. She lived to see widespread adoption of refrigeration, automobiles, radio, TV, mobile phones, and the Internet, as well as the eradication of many diseases through vaccines and improved hygiene, the spread of democracy around the world and so much more. Also, depressions, fascism, communism, gun violence, terrorism, economic inequality, and the continuing oppression of women and people of colour.
She lived through many personal hardships like hyperinflation in 1920s Germany, the rise and fall of the Nazis, hiding her newborn daughter in the woods when the air raid sirens sounded, emigrating to a land where she did not know the language, working in a fish factory or as a cook at a hospital to make ends meet, and losing her husband and child to the cruel hand of cancer.
Ultimately, I think she was happy with her life and with her death. She ended her working life in the scientific journal acquisition department at the University of Waterloo, living in comfortable apartments with all she ever wanted materially. Once she retired – 35 years ago – she travelled, painted, learned to swim, fell in love twice more after her husband’s death, and lived to see her granddaughters graduate university and start their adult lives.
She’d been physically fit and living independently until this Spring when she had a rapid series of strokes that left her bed-ridden, unable to care for herself, and with limited communication abilities. This was exactly what she’d been hoping to avoid, praying that she’d be taken swiftly when the end came. She’d talked of ending her own life if she was ever unable to look after herself, but my mother didn’t think she could do much more than stop eating, and when she tried that a month after her stroke, it proved much harder than she imagined.
Fortunately, in talking to her fantastic care team, I discovered that Ontario’s laws had been changed in the last year or so to allow for Medical Assistance In Death (MAID) in particular circumstances. This was what she’d always been hoping for, a way to end her life with the dignity, privacy, and comfort she had always sought in life.
It took about a month to go through the process to have her approved for the medical procedure. That’s lightning fast for a medical process with government oversight, but a lifetime if you’re waiting and praying for the end.
We found out on a Monday that she’d been approved and that her death would be at 9:00 PM on Saturday, September 8th. This is a rather bizarre thing to know. Our society does not have the rituals to accommodate awareness of your own or your loved one’s time of death. It made for an odd week, but it was wonderful in that it gave us time to say our goodbyes and to make plans so that the experience would be pleasant for her.
When the time arrived, she was at home with the lights down low and soft music playing in the background. I held her hand as the doctor administered a series of drugs via IV injection that made her sleep, then become numb, then stop breathing. It took less than five minutes and she went from saying “I’m not sleepy yet” to eyes closed and no more motion or pain or fear in moments. I’m so thankful we allow this most humane form of ending one’s life and I hope this becomes available to everyone everywhere.
For all the commonalities the 7.5 billion of us on this planet have, I think we are all essentially unique. I’ll miss her uniqueness in this vast world. I keep thinking of things I want to tell her about how my day is going, or how the kids are doing. I’m sure I’ll get over that in time, but for now, I appreciate those moments to remember her connection to and love for us all.
September 21, 2018
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And Then There Were (N-One) – Uncanny Magazine
“I considered declining the invitation. It was too weird, too expensive, too far, too dangerous, too weird. Way too weird. An invitation like that would never…”
September 20, 2018
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Thought
I had over 150 articles saved in Instapaper, so, rather than picking up a new book, I decided to hunker down this week and work my way through that backlog. I’m not quite at Instapaper Zero yet, but getting there. I apologize for the link dump over the last few days, but they are ALL fascinating.
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Consciousness Began When the Gods Stopped Speaking – Issue 54: The Unspoken – Nautilus
“J ulian Jaynes was living out of a couple of suitcases in a Princeton dorm in the early 1970s. He must have been an odd sight there among the undergraduates,…”
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The Hidden Meaning of Kids’ Shapes and Scribbles
“Want to receive exclusive insights from The Atlantic—while supporting a sustainable future for independent journalism? Join our new membership program, The…”
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Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer – Robert Epstein | Aeon Essays
“No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words,…”
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The Real Story of Automation Beginning with One Simple Chart
“Illustration by Amanda Wray Robots are hiding in plain sight. It’s time we stop ignoring them. There’s a chart I came across earlier this year, and not only…”
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The Future of Online Dating Is Unsexy and Brutally Effective
“When I give the dating app LoveFlutter my Twitter handle, it rewards me with a 28-axis breakdown of my personality: I’m an analytic Type A who’s unsettlingly…”
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Don’t let the rich get even richer on the assets we all share | George Monbiot
“‘You can see enclosure at work in the Trump administration’s attempt to destroy net neutrality.’ A protest against plans to roll back net neutrality…”
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The Body That Understands What Fullness Is – Unruly Bodies – Medium
“T he first weight-loss surgery was performed during the 10th century, on D. Sancho, the king of León, Spain. He was so fat that he lost his throne, so he was…”
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What can Aristotle teach us about the routes to happiness? – Edith Hall | Aeon Essays
“In the Western world, only since the mid-18th century has it been possible to discuss ethical questions publicly without referring to Christianity. Modern…”
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“Illustration by Jim Cooke Whitney Phillips Published 05.22.18 Executive Summary Full Report Tips for Reporters The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for…”
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Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong
“From the 16th century to the 19th, scurvy killed around 2 million sailors, more than warfare, shipwrecks and syphilis combined. It was an ugly, smelly death,…”
September 19, 2018
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What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?
“Remember Galton’s experiments on visual imagination? Some people just don’t have it. And they never figured it out. They assumed no one had it, and when people…”
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Concept-Shaped Holes Can Be Impossible To Notice
“I. When I wrote about my experiences doing psychotherapy with people, one commenter wondered if I might be schizoid: There are a lot of schizoid people in the…”
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“by Jacob Mikanowski Garry Winogrand, proof sheet from 1982 or 1983 Garry Winogrand used to say that he took photographs of things to see what they would look…”
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Rethinking therapy: How 45 questions can revolutionize mental health care in Canada
“Therapy is a tried-and-true treatment for what ails our minds, but it hasn’t caught up with medicine in tracking the data needed to make patients better. Could…”
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“The chapter says something like: The characters may not have known it, but something had ended, and something else was about to begin. Illustration by Sophia…”
September 18, 2018
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Too Many Atheists Are Veering Dangerously Toward the Alt-Right
“Many Americans have been rightly horrified by the videos of white supremacists shouting “Jews will not replace us!” But what has gone less noticed is that,…”
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Sam Harris and the Myth of Perfectly Rational Thought
“Sam Harris, one of the original members of the group dubbed the “New Atheists” ( by Wired !) 12 years ago, says he doesn’t like tribalism. During his recent,…”
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It’s Possible to Reverse Climate Change, Suggests Major New Study
“A liquid fuel, synthesized from water and carbon dioxide by Carbon Engineering Carbon Engineering A team of scientists from Harvard University and the company…”