A few years ago a student walked into the office of Cesar A. Hidalgo, director of the Collective Learning group at the MIT Media Lab. Hidalgo was listening to music and asked the student if she recognized the song. She wasn’t sure. “Is it Coldplay?” she asked. It was “Imagine” by John Lennon. Hidalgo took it in stride that his student didn’t recognize the song. As he explains in our interview below, he realized the song wasn’t from her generation. What struck Hidalgo, though, was the incident echoed a question that had long intrigued him, which was how music and movies and all the other things that once shone in popular culture faded like evening from public memory.

Last month Hidalgo and colleagues published a Nature paper that put his crafty data-mining talents to work on another question: How do people and products drift out of the cultural picture? They traced the fade-out of songs, movies, sports stars, patents, and scientific publications. They drew on data from sources such as Billboard, Spotify, IMDB, Wikipedia, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and the American Physical Society, which has gathered information on physics articles from 1896 to 2016. Hidalgo’s team then designed mathematical models to calculate the rate of decline of the songs, people, and scientific papers.

The report, “The universal decay of collective memory and attention,” concludes that people and things are kept alive through “oral communication” from about five to 30 years. They then pass into written and online records, where they experience a slower, longer decline. The paper argues that people and things that make the rounds at the water cooler have a higher probability of settling into physical records. “Changes in communication technologies, such as the rise of the printing press, radio and television,” it says, affect our degree of attention, and all of our cultural products, from songs to scientific papers, “follow a universal decay function.”
http://nautil.us/issue/68/context/how-well-forget-john-lennon

Though it has been three years since David Bowie died, his legacy continues to inspire fashionistas.

The rock star was known for wearing vibrant colors and imaginative textures, looks mimicked by scores of trend setters. But perhaps no other creatures bear a more striking likeness to Bowie than sea slugs.

Hear me out.

This is an argument that inspired the entire creation of Bowiebranchia, a blog that’s been active since 2015 with the sole purpose of comparing the iconic styles and moods of the late rock star with these soft-bodied, underwater invertebrates.

Nudibranchs, sacoglossans and other sea slugs carry showy exteriors on purpose. These creatures burst with colors to warn predators that their slimy innards may be toxic or distasteful. By drawing comparisons between sea slugs and the man who created Ziggy Stardust, Bowiebranchia exposes what we can learn about the wild, beautiful and competitive evolution of both.
More: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/why-these-sea-slugs-look-so-much-like-david-bowie

Steve King under fire after embrace of white supremacy

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) faces a potential censure motion from congressional Democrats and splintering support among Republicans after using racist language in a New York Times interview, questioning when the terms “white nationalist, white supremacist and western civilization” became “offensive.”

The statements drew denunciations from across the political divide, including from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. King later issued a statement rejecting the labels of “white nationalism and white supremacy” and calling himself a “nationalist.” King said the fact that he is “an advocate for Western Civilization values” does not mean he subscribes to the “evil ideology” of white supremacy.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/10/steve-king-white-supremacy-congress-1077665

Rep. King yells at man questioning him about extremism, boots heckler from event

Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, erupted in anger and kicked a man out of an event on Thursday after the man questioned King's connection to white supremacist ideology and linked it to the recent Pittsburgh synagogue shooting.

Kaleb Van Fossen, who was identified by The Des Moines Register as the questioner, asked King about his past controversial comments, which prompted a fiery response from the lawmaker.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/steve-king-yells-man-questioning-him-about-extremism-ejects-him-n929976