Drops Flag, Walks Away
Question: How many South Carolina Representatives does it take to lower a Confederate flag? Answer: 94. At least that seemed to be the case as the S.C. “House of Representatives voted 94-20 on Thursday to remove the flag.” The flag will be officially lowered on Friday — which means the introduction of the rotary phone and the first working phonograph can’t be far off…
+ WaPo: “Over 13 excruciating hours, the entire country watched as the ghosts of the Civil War seemed to stir once more. There was soul-searching and breast-beating, shouting and tears, insults and accusations and amendments, lots of them, designed to thwart a vote … But then Jenny Horne decided that she had had enough.”
Check the Scoreboard
Women lead men in the category that really matters: Life expectancy. But the average lifespan of women was not always longer than that of men. The LA TImes reports that scientists are finally starting to understand what changed.
If You Teach a Man to Placebo
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Teach a man to sell fish oil, and he’ll be able to pay others to catch, cook and serve the fish. The marketing and selling of fish oil has followed an all-too familiar path: The product promises health benefits. The studies can’t find those health benefits. And people still keep on buying the product anyway.
+ According to a recent study, people are more suspicious when things smell fishy.
That Giant Sucking Sound
As far as we know, the outages at the NYSE and United Airlines were unrelated to cyber-terrorism and to each other. But Zeynep Tufekci argues that we should still be scared. “The big problem we face isn’t coordinated cyber-terrorism, it’s that software sucks … This is a major headache, and a real worry as software eats more and more of the world.”
Bed, Wrath and Beyond
“They have to wake up when their brain tells them to be deeply asleep. Waking a teen at six in the morning is like waking an adult at three at night.” In the third part of her series on sleep, The New Yorker’s Maria Konnikova reports on how most of us feel during the day: The Walking Dead.
All Talk
“What was it like to drop into conversations and virtually seduce strangers? How much would I find out about the people I wooed?” Fusion’s Kashmir Hill decided to find out what it’s like to be an invisible girlfriend for a month. (I’d settle for being a slightly less husky husband.)
Play That Monkey Music Bright Boy
On the surface, scientists’ ability to wire monkey brains together taught us that monkeys really like juice. But there’s a bigger picture according to one of the project researchers: “I can imagine surgeons coordinating surgery together or mathematicians visualizing the solution to a problem together. Or musicians and artists with a new way of working creatively.”
Eurotrashed?
Did Bloomberg stumble onto a key clue on how things will turn out in Greece? “Between June 28 and July 4 at a Hilton hotel in Athens, transactions on a Bloomberg reporter’s Visa credit card issued by Citigroup Inc. were posted as being carried out in Drachma EQ,”
Sugar. Gluten and the Highfalutin
You’ve got to hand it to Ariana Grande for keeping the summer doldrums from making our eyes glaze over with a weird new scandal (if you can even call it that). She simulated some public donut licking, made out with her friend, and then said she hated America (clearly referring the American diet). WaPo makes the case that the real lesson here is that the cameras are always watching. I’d add that there’s probably also an important cautionary lesson about dropping ecstacy in a donut shop.
Bottom of the News
The West will run out of water. Mountains will crumble, We will soon be swallowed by the seas. But relax: Slack launched emoji reactions.
+ Are these minions swearing?
+ There’s a bonus if you hike to the top of Mt Fuji. Free WiFi.
+ And, before we end, let’s cool off with a look at an Icelandic fog waterfall.
