Graphic Chatter

LAST UPDATE April 22, 2022

News and information culled from the internet

CANCER

A study of thousands of tumors has been able to detect internal patterns which are signs of types of cancer – Science Daily

We were able to perform a forensic analysis of over 12,000 NHS cancer genomes thanks to the generous contribution of samples from patients and clinicians throughout England. We have also created FitMS, a computer-based tool to help scientists and clinicians identify old and new mutational signatures in cancer patients, to potentially inform cancer management more effectively."

Michelle Mitchell, chief executive of Cancer Research UK, said: "This study shows how powerful whole genome sequencing tests can be in giving clues into how the cancer may have developed..."

Books

How A Book is Made – NY Times

While digital media completely upended industries like music, movies and newspapers, most publishers and authors still make the bulk of their money from selling bound stacks of paper.

Here, we will show you how vats of ink and 800-pound rolls of paper become a printed book.

Sleeping

"It's Almost Impossible to Overstate How Good For You Sleep Is" – Article at GQ Magazine

Public Domain

Winnie the Pooh goes into Public Domain – Bristol Post

400K sound recordings enter public domain – QA

22 Notable Public Domain items for 2022 – KSL

Public Domain superheroes banding together "YouTuber Proposes Public Domain Superhero Cinematic Universe" – comicbook

Public Domain Day in Australia – National Library of Australia

Related: "For more than two years, we’ve been fighting to free the Aboriginal flag from the restrictions of copyright. Last night it was announced the iconic flag – which has become a symbol of Aboriginal Australia since it was first flown at a land rights rally in 1971 – has finally been freed..." – Broadsheet

Rock and Roll Documentaries

1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything

Editorial:

Documentaries on Rock and Roll are usually pretty poor affairs, reeking of the self-importance of the industry projected onto the personalities narrating or conducting the interviews that make up such histories, meanwhile the real pitch of the thing is that a fan gets to view and hear their favorite acts (sandwiched in between the commentary) and perhaps see or hear a piece of music that's a rare recording.

But within the documentaries is a rather outsized estimation of Rock and Roll's importance and impact. Maybe that's to be expected from the comments of the performers who lived the experience and in recounting it speak of Rock's impact looming large. But the documentaries that use these oral explorations of "rock and roll milestones" can't seem to couch all of this in a reality of what is going on in the culture surrounding rock and roll. This dilemma shows up in documentaries about sports, Hollywood, and political figures, too, and it shows off the easy distortions that documentaries traffick in, and how the glamour of the subject ends up so often being given another coating of lacquer in the language of marketing while deceitfully (whether intended or not) pretending to be a true history of the subject with some fair sense of proportion.

Which is what comes across in 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything. With voice-overs by rock and roll performers like David Bowie and Alice Cooper, among others, you get a sense of balance in that these performers state their goals (usually fame and money, and a desire to musically experiment), but this is then wrapped inside the words of rock and roll critics of the period (people from Rolling Stone Magazine, for example), and the self-importance of the music, it's cultural worth, and the snobbery of it all makes the narration veer into language that is just barely a few steps away from being plain publicity materials for the acts and the genre itself, and the attendant publications and critics of the genre.

At its worst, this kind of presentation is both religion and political idealogy, with the sermons of rock and roll (which in these kind of tellings isn't just music, but hairstyles, clothing, and probably most important of all, attitudes) creating cultural change and then saying people "were different" after the experience of the music. But that is straight-up, unadorned marketing, that's "if you buy this product you will be different" classic Madison-Avenue persuasion, and the failure of rock and roll as a faith system is that if you subtracted rock and roll out of the history of (say) the United States you would not be able to detect any significant difference, there would still be crooked politicians (no matter how much Pete Tounsend says "we won't get fooled again"), you'd have crime, huge rates of divorce (music that sings about Love so much ought to have made a dent in this problem, if it in fact it had that power). There's still pollution, the "summertime blues" and so many other problems. So what exactly did rock and roll change?

The answer is it didn't change the world, and its lasting impact on culture is as fleeting as all the music styles that preceded it. Chuck Berry (who probably should have a royalty paid to his estate from the vast, vast majority of rock acts that followed in his wake and copied his guitar stylings) sang that "Rock and Roll will never die" and yet the genre has only barely outlived the guy who made this prophecy, its prowess as an art form shrinking yearly as other genres have substantially taken over the stage. Rather than being the music that changed everything, rock and roll is just what was on the radio while it all happened.

BRAINS

A Stanford Professor is studying the brains of folks who claim encounters with UFOs

His robust resume—300 research articles, 40 US patents, founding of eight biotech companies, and honored as one of Stanford’s top 25 inventors—makes him, easily, one of the most accomplished scientists publicly studying UAPs [Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon]...

...For a couple of these individuals we had MRIs from prior years. They had it before they had these incidents. It was pretty obvious, then, that this was something that people were born with. It's a goal sub-goal setting planning device, it's called the brain within the brain. It's an extraordinary thing. This area of the brain is involved (partly) in what we call intuition. For instance, Japanese chess players were measured as they made what would be construed as a brilliant decision that is not obvious for anybody to have made that kind of leap of intuition, this area of the brain lights up. We had found people who had this in spades. These are all so called high-functioning people. They're pilots who are making split second decisions, intelligence officers in the field, etc.

December 10, 2021: Story at Vice

Disaster

The intricacies of the global supply chain

A jar of Nutella sums up all the intricacies of global supply chains along with the economic, social and environmental challenges facing the international community today perhaps more than ever. Hazelnuts from Turkey, palm oil from Australia or India, cocoa from Africa, sugar from Brazil or Europe and vanilla aroma from France are integrated in a package of the famous hazelnut praline.

Article at powergame [in Greek - use Google Translate to change to English]

History

Sorting out the origin of the mysterious Etruscans

The question of where the Etruscans came from has been a perennial question in the study of ancient history.

Story at Live Science

Public Domain / Copyright

The expiring copyright on Mickey Mouse & the looming activities of eager artists

The copyright for Walt Disney’s 1928 cartoon Steamboat Willie — which introduced the world to Mickey Mouse — is set to expire and enter the public domain in three years. The rights will include the character Mickey Mouse as he appeared in the film. But in 1988, in an effort to avoid this very same issue, Disney successfully lobbied Congress to lengthen the number of years that copyrights can be held. The law is called the Copyright Term Extension Act but has also also been dubbed “the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.”

Hollywood Reporter