LINKS - December 14th, 2022
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human. LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
Scientists Achieve Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough With Blast of 192 Lasers
By Kenneth Chang, The New York Times
“Fusion would be essentially an emissions-free source of power, and it would help reduce the need for power plants burning coal and natural gas, which pump billions of tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.”
“But it will take quite a while before fusion becomes available on a widespread, practical scale, if ever.”
Orphaned neurological implants
By Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic.net
“Earlier this year, many people with Argus optical implants – which allow blind people to see – lost their vision when the manufacturer, Second Sight, went bust:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete
“Nano Precision Medical, the company's new owners, aren't interested in maintaining the implants, so that's the end of the road for everyone with one of Argus's ‘bionic’ eyes. The $150,000 per eye that those people paid is gone, and they have failing hardware permanently wired into their nervous systems.”
From Bowling Alone to Posting Alone
By Anton Jäger, Jacobin
“Despite these evident faults, however, Putnam’s book has stood the test of time. Statistics still point to a steady decline for many secular membership organizations. Despite growing public approval for union efforts, the US unionization rate declined by 0.5 percentage points to a mere 10.3 percent in 2021, returning to its 2019 rate. The political developments of the last decade, from COVID-19 lockdowns to the escalating downsizing of classical parties, also validated Putnam’s intuition. More than that, his book has now been used to explain the uncertainty of the Donald Trump years, in which the controlled demolition of the public sphere in the 1980s and 1990s drove a new form of resentment politics.”
Inequality in Retirement
By Jonathan Wolff, The Philosophers’ Magazine
“But with that last contrast – those who work in retirement for the money, and those who do so to stay active – we have hit on something very important: inequality in retirement. For some, retirement is a time of financial stress, hovering around the poverty line, struggling to make ends meet, often in fragile health. For others retirement is the prime of life. Inequality in retirement deserves much more attention than it has received, certainly by theorists of justice. Of course, sociologists of ageing have had the post-work period of our lives in their sights for a long time, observing the status inequality between those in work and those in retirement, and, typically, the social devaluation of those who are retired. But it is wrong to treat people in retirement as a single, undifferentiated group. There may be significantly more financial, social and health-related variation between people in retirement than between people in work.”
Everyday Life in the Ice Age
By Paul Pettitt, The Past
“The book dispels a number of myths, in fact: Ice Age Homo sapiens were neither short in stature nor lived short lives; neither did these ‘cave men’ (and women) live in caves, at least beyond the daylit zones of their entrances, which they improved the comfort of by long-disappeared soft furnishings (you’ll have to read it to find out what these were!). They did explore the depths of caves, however, and with its erudite coverage of artistic and ritual activities in these dark and mysterious places the book brings Bahn’s expertise in Palaeolithic art to the fore. What emerges is a picture of a highly inventive, resilient, creative, and artistic social ancestor, coping successfully with wild, dangerous environments, in which they displayed an intimate knowledge of a diverse set of resources from large megafauna such as horses, bison, and reindeer, through small trappable animals such as terrestrial fur-bearers, fish, and birds, to gatherable plants. All of these appeared and disappeared as the annual cycle changed, requiring considerable information retention, something we should admire from the perspective of our attention-poor ‘clickbait’ minds.”