A room without a view
A billionaire has designed a windowless mega dorm to house 4500 students described as a prison ship and a self-storage unit. An architect on the project resigned in protest saying: “The building is a social and psychological experiment with an unknown impact on the lives and personal development of the undergraduates the university serves.” Backstory: UC Santa Barbara is in the middle of a student housing crunch that has the university housing some students in hotels. Enter 97-year-old billionaire Charles Munger, he would donate $200 million to the university for a student dorm building he would design — and name after — himself. Amateur architect Munger tells the New York Times: “The dorms in Santa Barbara would have ‘virtual windows’; students would have a knob to let them manipulate how much artificial light to let into their rooms as a way to mimic daytime or evening … If you want it romantic and dim, you can make it romantic and dim.” The LA Times explains: “In lieu of windows, students in Munger Hall would instead use a knob to manipulate the degree of artificial light illuminating their cells … I mean, rooms. And because that isn’t enough dystopia, the whole fake lighting system was inspired by the artificial portholes that Disney devised for its cruise ships.”
Dilation looks shocking
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The Sun reports that midwives at the Royal Oldham Hospital in Lancashire, UK, carved 10 Jill-o’-lanterns to show the stages of vaginal dilation during childbirth. Many women on the internet have commented that the pumpkins inspire them to never go through this experience again.
Karen in da house
A far-right US representative from Georgia has accumulated a lot of mask fines. Marjorie Taylor Greene has been documented not wearing a mask in the House of Representatives chamber, as is required, at least 20 times since May. With a $500 fine for the first offence and $2500 fines for all subsequent offences, her total is at least $48,000.
Did you know …
1. Human’s ability to smell petrichor (smell of wet earth from rain) is greater than a shark’s ability to smell blood in water. The human nose is extremely sensitive to geosmin and is able to detect it at concentrations as low as 400 parts per trillion. Some scientists believe that humans appreciate the rain scent because ancestors may have relied on rainy weather for survival.
2. Mountains on Saturn’s moon Titan are named after mountains in Middle-earth, the fictional setting of JRR Tolkien’s fantasy novels. The highest peak on Titan is Mount Doom (“Doom Mons”), which rises more than a mile above the surrounding plain. Tolkien’s Mount Doom made its first appearance in The Lord of the Rings in 1954. By coincidence, science fiction writer Stanley G Weinbaum had already placed a fictional Mount Doom on Titan in his 1935 story Flight on Titan. So, in honouring Tolkien, the International Astronomical Union also fulfilled Weinbaum’s vision.
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