e.g. & miscellanae

Sit at a transportation hub (airport, bus stop) or any public space and watch and tell me you're not watching primates the way we were trained.

(Do you know how hard it is to turn off thr parts of your brain that were devoted to body language tracking, movement trajectory prediction, classification of social interactions by antagonistic vs affiliative, tool use and mimicry flags, and mapping kinship and alliance trees?)

Twenty years ago, Judy Bolden served 18 months in a Florida prison. She has been free ever since, but she is still barred from voting by the state until she pays all court fines and fees associated with her conviction.

When Ms. Bolden sat to be photographed by The Times earlier this year, she said she had received a letter informing her that her outstanding debt was a few hundred dollars. Then she checked the Volusia County website and learned that she actually owes nearly $53,000. “I was so taken aback,” she said. “I was like, What? That’s not right. I was just deflated. It’s like, when is this going to end?”

Ms. Bolden is one of more than 700,000 people in Florida who are barred from voting because they can’t afford the financial obligations stemming from a prior felony conviction. “It’s like I’m not a citizen,” she said. “That’s what they’re saying.”

Earlier this year we asked Floridians whose voting rights had been denied because of a criminal conviction to sit for photographs, wearing a name tag that lists not their name but their outstanding debt — to the extent they can determine it. This number, which many people attempt to tackle in installments as low as $30 a month, represents how much it costs them to win back a fundamental constitutional right, and how little it costs the state to withhold that right and silence the voices of hundreds of thousands of its citizens. The number also echoes the inmate identification number that they were required to wear while behind bars — another mark of the loss of rights and freedoms that are not restored upon release.

This is the way it’s been in Florida for a century and a half, ever since the state’s Constitution was amended shortly after the Civil War to bar those convicted of a felony from voting. That ban, like similar ones in many other states, was the work of white politicians intent on keeping ballots, and thus political power, out of the hands of millions of Black people who had just been freed from slavery and made full citizens.

Even as other states began reversing their own bans in recent years, Florida remained a holdout — until 2018, when Floridians overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment restoring voting rights to nearly everyone with a criminal record, upon the completion of their sentence. (Those convicted of murder or a felony sexual offense were excluded.)

Democratic and Republican voters alike approved the measure, which passed with nearly two-thirds support. Immediately, as many as 1.4 million people in the state became eligible to vote. It was the biggest expansion of voting rights in decades, anywhere in the country.

That should have been the end of it. But within a year, Florida’s Republican-led Legislature gutted the reform by passing a law defining a criminal sentence as complete only after the person sentenced has paid all legal financial obligations connected to it.

Thousands of years ago, across Africa, Asia, and Europe: Malaria gets real aggressive and starts beating the crap out of humanity. Malaria is a blood-borne parasite carried by mosquitoes. People may not have identified this as the cause of malaria, but they sure could recognize the symptoms: chills, shakes, fever, generally feeling like you’re going to die, and actually dying.

Meanwhile, thousands of years ago, in the Americas: While they have some of their own health problems, malaria is not one of them. They do have this one kind of tree (scientific name Cinchona), of which they would grind up the bark and use it to treat fevers.

Zoom forward to about the 1500′s: Europeans arrive in the Americas and start trashing the place. Including, of course, introducing malaria. Rome sends out its legions of Jesuits to convert and loot the populace, because the it’s the Roman Catholic Church, what else is new.

It’s the 1630′s: Jesuits see this tree bark being used for fevers and wonder: huh. Could this miraculous powder help with malarial fevers? Turns out that the answer is yes.

Sometime between 1630 and 1645: One of these missionaries brings the bark back to Rome. Rome has really bad problem with malaria. Like, ‘malaria might have contributed to the fall of the Roman empire’ levels of bad. So all the Catholic clergy were like “fuck yeah, that’s one less thing we have to worry about while in Rome vying for power.”

1655: I was serious about that last part. To quote:

“Not a single participant in the papal conclave of 1655 died of malaria - the first time in recorded history that a Roman convocation had been so spared.”

Pan over to England: Oliver Cromwell is doing his best to bring the joys of Puritanism to all of the British Isles. Since this tree medicine is clearly Catholic in origin, Cromwell refuses to be Tainted by anything from That Church and will not use it. He proceeds to die of complications related to malaria.

1670, Still in England: An apothecary (proto-pharmacist), Robert Talbor, creates a secret formula that cures malaria. His cure DEFINITELY, 100%, does not contain any of that terrible Jesuit powder, why how dare you even suggest such a thing, what an appalling accusation. Of course, people eventually realized that it was indeed Jesuit powder, but their desire to not die was stronger than their desire to stick it to the Catholic Church.

1820 (Big time jump, cause chemistry is hard, yo): Two French scientists isolate the compound that actually cures malaria and name it quinine. This is really exciting, but they still can’t synthesize it. Which means if the West wants to not die of malaria, they need to get their quinine supplies from cinchona trees in South America. And Europe really needs to not die of malaria if they’re going to continue colonizing Africa, India, and everything else in the tropics.

Quick cut to the British in India: British soldiers in India have to drink quinine infused water, aka tonic water, as a medicinal. Quinine, however, is very bitter, and the soldiers were like, whelp, this is awful, if we have to drink it we might as well add some gin. Thus, the gin and tonic was born.

1850′s: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru are trying to maintain a tight monopoly on the lucrative quinine trade. Various Europeans attempt to smuggle out seeds and saplings of the cinchona tree, only to discover that certain species do not produce nearly as much quinine as others.

1861: Dude named Ledger tries to sell some seeds he got to the British government, but they tell him “no, last time you sold us cinchona seeds they were worthless.” So instead he sells them to Dutch, who plant them in Java. Lo and behold, these trees contain a very high quinine content.

By 1930: 97% of the world’s commercially consumed quinine is grown in Java, in Dutch-controlled Indonesia. Now the Dutch are the ones with the quinine monopoly.

1940 aka oh shit it’s World War II: The Nazis take the Netherlands, along with pretty much all of Europe’s quinine reserves, in yet another shining example of why drug monopolies are bad.

1942 and it’s still WWII: The Japanese take Java, which means the Allies now have zero access to quinine. This is a huge problem for the US in the Pacific Theater, where more American troops are dying of malaria than from Japanese weapons.

At the Smithsonian Institution: The U.S. military asks botanist Raymond Fosberg to go to South America and find more cinchona trees. So off he goes, traveling between Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, asking natives where he might find some trees. He was somewhat successful, sending 12.5 million pounds of bark to the USA in 1943 and 1944.

However, 1944, in a remote Colombian town: Fosberg hears German voices in the hotel room below his, and late that night there’s a knock at his door. It’s two Nazis, who confront him with, “We’ve been following you for weeks. We know who you are. We know what you’re doing here. …Would the USA be interesting in purchasing a large amount of pure quinine? We smuggled a bunch out of Germany.” I imagine Fosberg was quite happy to not be killed by Nazis.

After the war: Synthetic antimalarial drugs are finally created, meaning that while still important, quinine is no longer as essential as it once was.

Plants, People, and Culture: The Science of Ethnobotany by Michael Jeffrey Balick and Paul Alan Cox

for example people who grow up in areas where most everyone has the same accent, where the accent is more linked to identity, and doesn't move anywhere else in childhood have more stable accents than people who grow up surrounded by a mix of accents or move around

someone with a stable accent can move somewhere else and just never lose it. like the taxi driver i met who moved to glasgow from south-east london twenty eight years ago and has not lost his accent.

With covid on the rise and the vaccine readily available, more and more businesses are requiring their employees be vaccinated, and to prove that, they need a vaccination card.

Now, this is a problem for people who don’t want to be vaccinated, and there’s some people out there who are turning this into a business opportunity.

Meet “5starjazzii.” She has over 300,000 followers on Instagram and quite a few hustles. You’ll notice in her description “founder of antivaxmomma2.”

Yeah, that’s because “antivaxmomma,” her original account, got deleted, and I suspect it’s because she posted stuff like this, advertising that she’s selling fake covid 19 vaccine cards for 200 bucks a pop, but they’ll have real lot numbers on them. Now she’s been continuing this from her new account and even from her main account. She posted this the other day, explaining that she has a backlog of messages, and also that she’s looking to expand her team, so if you have computer access at hospitals or CVS, “DM me ASAP.”

Now that led me to believe that she’s either stealing existing lot numbers and putting them on the cards or she’s getting someone to enter people into the system that haven’t been vaccinated to generate their own lot numbers. But I didn’t want to make assumptions so I decided to message her and ask.

I told her I worked at a Walgreens. She said to text her ASAP. She asked if I had access to enter the vaccine information into the system and then asked, because I’m in Florida, how do people here verify they’re in the system, because in New York they have an app. And the person she has in New York doing this can provide the numbers that the people can check in the app. I explained that in Florida you have a site you can do that on and asked what exactly she needed. She told me she provides the person’s name, date of birth, address, the vaccination date, asked if I can backdate them, and then has me enter them into the system to generate lot numbers. So I would enter them into the system as if they had just received the vaccine, WHICH THEY HAVE NOT, but the system would believe that they have, and if someone checked those lot numbers, it would say their name. That made me curious how many people were doing this. She told me the woman in New York that’s doing it for her, she’s given 100 bucks a person, she’s doing at least 30 people a day, and that woman’s making 10,000 dollars a week. Do the math on that. On how many people are walking around with legal documents saying they’re vaccinated, and they are not. She’s also asked if I could provide her covid 19 cards.

Now you may ask, why would someone take the risk and do something like this? Well, it seems in her case that it’s at least due in part to the fact that she believes that the vaccines are sterilizing children as part of the Gay Agenda. Now, she’s not going to be doing this any longer, the FBI’s already been involved, but when I hear people say things like, “why bother getting the vaccine, people are getting covid who are fully vaccinated?” I have to wonder, are they?

In May 1969, a rumor spread like a wildfire through the French city of Orléans: young women mysteriously disappeared in the dressing rooms of six fashion stores in town. The victims were drugged and abducted through underground tunnels in order to be trafficked in international prostitution rings. Surely, that the owners of the incriminated stores were Jews could not be a mere coincidence. As the rumor gained momentum, the silence of the local media became suspect and eventually woven into the fabric of the conspiracy: the press was bought—fake news!—and the public authorities were in the know. On May 31, as many orléanais ran their errands along the stalls of the open-air market, small groups assembled in front of the incriminated stores in a volatile atmosphere. Were it not for the end of the market day and the beginning of a weekend focused on national elections, things may have gotten out of hand and one can easily imagine people “storming” the stores just like a QAnon follower stormed Comet Ping Pong fifty years later. What is striking about the Orléans episode is its similarities with today’s conspiracy theories: the horror hidden beneath a popular storefront, the global sex trafficking, the secret tunnels, the collusion of the media and the political elite. The only difference is that there was no Internet.

In the immediate aftermath of the rumor, sociologist Edgar Morin traveled to Orléans with some of his colleagues in order to understand how the conspiracy theory had emerged and spread. Translated into English in 1971, Rumor in Orleans is the account of his fieldwork. It is no longer in print, and as far as I can tell, has never been mentioned in relation to QAnon. Yet reading it today reveals the extent to which our understanding of conspiracy theories has changed. Morin could not blame the Internet and had to look for different factors. He tried to understand a moral panic that triggered the resurgence of old anti-Semitic mythologies in relation to changes in the demographic structure of the city, new gender identities, the role of women in the labor market, processes of economic modernization that disrupted the social and moral fabric of the town, and a slow urban decline that saw a former medieval capital turn into an outer banlieue of Paris. In short, Morin tried to understand the historical world in which the myth had gained traction—not an error of inference, let alone a defective epistemology.

What we see shapes what we hear

People often move their hands up and down to ‘highlight’ what they are saying. Are such ‘beat gestures’ important for communication? Hans Rutger Bosker from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and David Peeters from Tilburg University created words with an ambiguous stress pattern and asked listeners what they heard (DIScount or disCOUNT?). The beat gestures people saw influenced what they heard, showing that listeners quickly integrate verbal and visual information during speech recognition.

When politicians address an audience, they typically highlight important words with beat gestures, for example by moving their hands up and down. In fact, we all seem to do it: Such ‘flicks of the hands’ are among the most common gestures in everyday conversations. People align these gestures very precisely to the prominent words in speech. But do beat gestures help listeners to understand the speaker? Hans Rutger Bosker (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Radboud University) and David Peeters (Tilburg University) tested whether what we see shapes what we hear.

“In face-to-face communication, language entails much more than just speech”, explains senior investigator Hans Rutger Bosker. “Speakers make use of different channels (mouth, hands, and face) to get a message across. We want to understand how listeners make use of these different streams of information when they are listening to someone.” In a well-known illusion called the ‘McGurk effect’ , people hear a sound (like the ‘b’ in ‘ba’) as a different sound (for instance ‘pa’ or ‘fa’), depending on the lip movements they see. But is there also a manual McGurk effect? Does what we hear depend on the gestures we see?

Plato or plateau?

To investigate this question, the researchers chose a set of Dutch words that differed only in stress pattern. For instance, the word “PLAto”—with stress on the first syllable—refers to the philosopher from ancient Greece. However, “plaTO”, pronounced with stress on the second syllable, refers to a plateau. Participants watched a video of Bosker producing the words (with ambiguous stress) while making beat gestures (“Now I say the word ... plato”). Participants then had to decide which word they heard (PLAto or plaTEAU?). Would it matter whether beat gestures occurred at the first or second syllable?

Listeners were more likely to hear stress on a syllable if there was a beat gesture on that syllable. This ‘manual McGurk effect’ occurred for both words and non-words (“BAAGpif” or “baagPIF”?). Even more surprisingly, beat gestures influenced what vowel people heard (long or short ‘a’ in ‘baagpif / bagpif’), as vowel length is typically associated with the stress pattern of a word.

“Listeners listen not only with their ears, but also with their eyes”, says Bosker. “These findings are the first to show that beat gestures influence which speech sounds you hear”. Bosker and Peeters think that the effect of beat gestures may be even bigger in real life, when speech is less clear than in the lab. In noisy listening conditions, visual beat gestures might be even more important for successful communication. “So wash your hands, and use them”, Bosker adds jokingly.