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Weekly Links : May 29
Found this week: "fail" is the new schadenfreude, malwebowent trolls, avoiding burnout, enjoying the silence, the paradox of cancer in whales.
Why is everyone saying "fail" all of a sudden?
Christopher Beam, slate.com
"Why has fail become so popular? It may simply be that people are thrilled to finally have a way to express their schadenfreude out loud. Schadenfreude, after all, is what you feel when someone else executes a fail. But the fail meme also changes our experience of schadenfreude. What was once a quiet pleasure-taking is now a publicand competitive sport."
Mattathias Schwartz, nytimes.com
"Two female Yale Law School students have filed a suit against pseudonymous users who posted violent fantasies about them on AutoAdmit, a college-admissions message board. In China, anonymous nationalists are posting death threats against pro-Tibet activists, along with their names and home addresses. Technology, apparently, does more than harness the wisdom of the crowd. It can intensify its hatred as well."
Scott Boms, alistapart.com
"Ultimately, burnout results from a lack of equilibrium. When you lose your balance, physically, you fall over. Burnout is very similar, except that once you’re down, it can be a real challenge to get back up."
Lane Wallace, theatlantic.com
"But what concerns me as much or more about incessant connection through Twitter, texting, Facebook, Crackberrys, and yes, even 24/7 instant news ... is that all those technologies enhance an already bad inclination humans (and especially Americans) have. And that is: an overweening desire to be distracted from being alone in silence ... or having to come to terms with whatever we might find there, if we slowed down enough to let it catch us."
Why don't all whales have cancer?
John Nagy et al., oxfordjournals.com
"Larger organisms have more potentially carcinogenic cells, tend to live longer and require more ontogenic cell divisions. Therefore, intuitively one might expect cancer incidence to scale with body size. Evidence from mammals, however, suggests that the cancer risk does not correlate with body size. This observation defines "Peto's paradox." Here, we propose a novel hypothesis to resolve Peto's paradox. We suggest that malignant tumors are disadvantaged in larger hosts."
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