Hump Day Potpourri

Massive earthquake devastates Balochistan Province , SW Pakistan 

More than 300,000 people have been affected over a total of six districts – Awaran, Kech, Gwadar, Panjgur, Chaghi and Khuzdar – Balochistan government spokesman Jan Muhammad Buledi said.

He told BBC Urdu that the death toll currently stood at 328 – 160 in Awaran town, 125 in other areas of Awaran district and 43 in Kech.

It is feared the death toll could rise once other areas are reached. The number of wounded is reportedly more than 440.

 

Registering 7.7 presumably on the Moment Magnitude Scale reveals this to be a huge seismic event, so huge that it caused an island formation to appear off the shore of Gwadar in the Arabian Sea. It is yet unclear exactly what kind of geological formation the newly created island is, though it appears to be a mud volcano produced by shifting sediments.

This photo of the newly created island from the International Business Times:

“Navy geologist Mohammed Danish said that the stretch of land was 18 metres (60 ft) high, 30 metres long and 70 metres wide”

More photos from IBT:

Pakistan Earthquake: Death Toll Hits 265 and New Island Emerges in Arabian Sea [FIRST PHOTOS]

 

Interesting developments from the scientific frontier…

Chris Mooney posted the following article today, saying “This is a bombshell. Popular Science is shutting down web comments, due to trolls and our growing scientific understanding of just how much they mess up reasoned discourse.

Why We’re Shutting Off Our Comments: Starting today, PopularScience.com will no longer accept comments on new articles. Here’s why. 

Comments can be bad for science. That’s why, here at PopularScience.com, we’re shutting them off.

It wasn’t a decision we made lightly. As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former,diminishing our ability to do the latter.

…even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader’s perception of a story, recent research suggests.

A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.

 

 

 

Benjamin Franklin, 1706-1790

 

Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man.

 

I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong.

 

He that can have patience can have what he will.

 

We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.

 

 

 

 

Food for Thought on the following article: Parsing out “free exchange of ideas” from “indiscriminate exchange of opinions” – the former being as fallacious as the idea of the “democritizing capacity of the internet…” discourse as a zero-sum game of either/or – misapplication of “deflection” and “distraction” where a single notion must be upheld in a superior position to all others…

Writing Professor Under Fire For Attack Against Republicans: On the “Free Exchange of Ideas”

The troublesome aspect of opinions is that although they seem personally inspired – with each person creating for themselves a response to conditions they observe – our opinions are more certainly shaped by the surrounding conditions than our own original genius. Surrounding conditions, the social and cultural milieu, the economic and political arrangements are the waters within which our minds swim. And in asymmetrical power distribution, you can expect that our opinions are not being shaped to disturb that distribution.

How do we re-orient such an arrangement? It seems that when our opinions are serving a foundational inequality, we should not be trumpeting them, but rather investigating them. We need to question the unquestioned mantras of the day, especially the illusion that we personally design the world the way we personally design a Facebook page or a web site, that all things personal exceed and are opposed to all things societal. (emphasis mine)

The mainstream media is loathe to point out in the dramatic way it deserves that our democracy has turned into a plutocracy, and I suppose the reason for this has much to do with the mainstream media’s ties to the top 20%. Americans remain unconcerned with this slow, but seemingly inexorable alteration of democracy to plutocracy because the story gets lost amid other stories. And it does seem as if Pandora’s Box has been opened when it comes to story making, what some call a “democratization” of journalism, a freer exchange of ideas because everyone is now involved, free to comment, to like, to blog, to opine.

In the absence of any Solomon of judgment or Oracle of Truth, or what scientists call an external point of reference to which all claims can be adjudicated, what we have now is a cacophony of voices. We have a whirlwind of opinions that either blow heatedly and often viciously, but mostly emptily in cyberspace, or they take the shape that an asymmetrical power gives them by virtue of owning the mechanisms of influence, i.e. volume, spectacle and repetition.

 

Socrates, 470-399 BCE

 

 

Regard your good name as the richest jewel you can possibly be possessed of – for credit is like fire; once you have kindled it you may easily preserve it, but if you once extinguish it, you will find it an arduous task to rekindle it again. The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.

 

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