Monday Mule Pack – Fake News, Space Dust, Neanderthals, and Ben Carson
March 13, 2017
A weekly look at some of the more interesting articles from around the web.
Fake news website starts as joke, gains 1 million views within 2 weeks
Unlike many fake news purveyors, McDaniel didn’t want to sway conversations or make money through ad revenue. Curious about how easily people could be fooled, he cooked up a post he thought would normally sound too crazy for anyone to believe, just to see if it caught on.
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“I was surprised by how gullible the people in the Trump groups were, but as I continued to write ridiculous things they just kept getting shared and I kept drawing more viewers,” McDaniel told PolitiFact. “I saw how many fake ridiculous stories were making rounds in these groups and just wanted to see how ridiculous they could get.”
MM: Hilarious. For more fun, go read the comments on the dude’s website after he revealed his site was fake—some people still refuse to accept that the stories were made up.
Flecks of Extraterrestrial Dust, All Over the Roof
“Your car is covered with cosmic dust,” Dr. Brownlee said. “We inhale this stuff. We eat it every time we eat lettuce.”
The astounding political divide over what it means to be ‘American’
What the numbers suggest is that not only are Democrats and Republicans living in two different countries — socially, culturally and politically — but they also don’t even agree on what the country should, at its center, be. Partisanship now extends not just to whom you vote for and why but also what you think the United States is and should be.
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Indians are certain they invented the zero. But can they prove it?
The ancient Mayans used an empty tortoise-like “shell shape” to depict zero, but Indian historians say that it did not seem to have influenced global numeral systems. Arab merchants encountered the zero in India and carried it to the West.
This May Be the Oldest Known Sign of Life on Earth
The microfossils also lend support to the idea that the warm, watery, mineral-rich neighborhoods around submerged vents are prime places for life to emerge, whether on this planet, on the seafloors of icy moons, or elsewhere in the universe.
Americans are having less sex than they once did
The decline in sexual activity was sharpest among people in their 50s, people with a college degree, people with school-age children, people in the South and those who do not watch pornography.
MM: Bad news for me—I have a college degree, live in the South, and don’t watch pornography. Yikes.
An Artist Helps iTunes’ User Agreement Go Down Easy
“I didn’t imagine anyone would pay me for this,” Mr. Sikoryak said.
You’ll never guess who tweeted something false that he saw on TV
It’s not uncommon for politicians and presidents to get facts wrong. It is uncommon, though, for presidents to get facts wrong that are so easily and so immediately disprovable.
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And everyone will shrug: That’s just Trump! Last week, he tweeted an obviously false and easily disproved claim about the Democrats blocking his Cabinet picks — picks for whom he never even sent the necessary paperwork to Capitol Hill. Everyone shrugged; the tweet is still sitting there. That’s just how it works now, apparently. Trump watches TV, tweets something false and everyone just sort of dismisses it as Trump being Trump. Maybe someone will write an amazed, snarky news story about it, but that’s as far as it goes.
Middlebury College and the generational clash within liberalism
Students everywhere should wonder how free speech, a central liberal value, is instead becoming the banner of conservatives.
MM: I think these incidents, to a certain extent, are being overblown, as I believe that most liberals still celebrate free speech. But I’m starting to wonder. The fact that this is happening at all is deeply troubling, and the left had better end this quickly if they want to stay relevant in this country. They clearly haven’t learned from Trump’s victory.
The Spanish Neanderthal was suffering from a dental abscess, possibly caused by a subspecies of the bacterium Methanobrevibacter oralis. Poplar found in the sample likely provided salicylic acid—the active ingredient in aspirin—for pain relief.
Employees who decline genetic testing could face penalties under proposed bill
Employers could impose hefty penalties on employees who decline to participate in genetic testing as part of workplace wellness programs if a bill approved by a U.S. House committee this week becomes law.
MM: This is an interesting debate. I’d have to think about it some more, but I’m not sure I have a problem with the bill. It all depends on what exactly companies can do with the information.
And Carson once proposed that the Old Testament prophet Joseph built the Great Pyramids of Giza to store grain, as The Washington Post reported in 2015, based on the doctor’s interpretation of the Book of Genesis when, in fact, the ancient Egyptians constructed the pyramids, which are not hollow, for pharaohs to use as royal tombs.
