Pocket reading list : Week 1.2 of July
Sexy beasts : I don't know why I hadn't asked the questions that were being answered in this article earlier. There are male birds out there with bright and extremely beautiful feathers, feathers that are primarily used to attract their female counterparts. And I should've asked the question "How does the bright and beautiful feathers help the female understand which male is stronger/fitter/better to reproduce with?", which this article answers. And there are things involved that came as a surprise to me.
How Seattle Gave Up on Busing and Allowed Its Public Schools to Become Alarmingly Resegregated : Apparently Seattle schools in the 70s and 80s enforced racial uniformity in schools in the area, by providing bus service to students if they needed to travel to a school a little further away, in the hopes of achieving racial uniformity. But now, the current administration and ignorant/biased/elite/pretentious/dumb parents are apparently resegregating the schools, converting them to be primarily white or non-white in certain regions.
How the New Horizons Spacecraft Was Developed : Science takes time. Sometimes decades. Sometimes budget constrains can force you to go back to the drawing board or get innovative to do more with less. Sometimes plans have to be made for decades in advance. Sometimes redundancy has to be integrated into the system from the beginning because it might be hard or impossible to retrieve the equipment after setting it up/releasing it. This is a brilliant account of how one specific science mission, one that has captured the public attention this past year.
The dark side of Guardian comments : It is common knowledge that women and non-white journalists get verbally attacked more than white journalists do. This knowledge was just empirical. Until The Guardian decided to quantitatively answer this question by looking at the comments it receives on it's numerous articles. And while the results aren't exactly surprising, they are one more thing we can use to silence people who say defend the other side of the argument.
Here’s What Happened When A Group Of Scientists Went To Confront Their Congressional Tormentors : Science reporting isn't an exact science. It should be but sadly, most of the time, it isn't. As such, research can be construed and written about, entirely out of context, and the findings can be construed to fit the narrative that the author wants to convey, instead of what the research actually is about. This is an account of how politicians, to extend their narrative, dumbed down and contorted research findings to demean them and the scientific process.
How Seattle Gave Up on Busing and Allowed Its Public Schools to Become Alarmingly Resegregated : Apparently Seattle schools in the 70s and 80s enforced racial uniformity in schools in the area, by providing bus service to students if they needed to travel to a school a little further away, in the hopes of achieving racial uniformity. But now, the current administration and ignorant/biased/elite/pretentious/dumb parents are apparently resegregating the schools, converting them to be primarily white or non-white in certain regions.
How the New Horizons Spacecraft Was Developed : Science takes time. Sometimes decades. Sometimes budget constrains can force you to go back to the drawing board or get innovative to do more with less. Sometimes plans have to be made for decades in advance. Sometimes redundancy has to be integrated into the system from the beginning because it might be hard or impossible to retrieve the equipment after setting it up/releasing it. This is a brilliant account of how one specific science mission, one that has captured the public attention this past year.
The dark side of Guardian comments : It is common knowledge that women and non-white journalists get verbally attacked more than white journalists do. This knowledge was just empirical. Until The Guardian decided to quantitatively answer this question by looking at the comments it receives on it's numerous articles. And while the results aren't exactly surprising, they are one more thing we can use to silence people who say defend the other side of the argument.
Here’s What Happened When A Group Of Scientists Went To Confront Their Congressional Tormentors : Science reporting isn't an exact science. It should be but sadly, most of the time, it isn't. As such, research can be construed and written about, entirely out of context, and the findings can be construed to fit the narrative that the author wants to convey, instead of what the research actually is about. This is an account of how politicians, to extend their narrative, dumbed down and contorted research findings to demean them and the scientific process.