Aszilvasy

Atlas Shrugged, part II, chapter II The decay of Colorado is accelerating. Men that Dagny knows personally, men who love their jobs and swear that they’ll never leave, that they’ll resist whatever blandishment or temptation is claiming their fellows, or at the very least that they won’t disappear without an explanation, are vanishing one after [Read More...]

Atlas Shrugged, part II, chapter II Because of the looters’ Fair Share Law, Hank Rearden can no longer choose his customers. In particular, he can’t legally sell to Ken Danagger, the owner of Danagger Coal in Pennsylvania, who badly needs Rearden Metal to brace the shafts of his coal mines. But Hank knows that Danagger [Read More...]

Last year, at a conference for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, The Big Bang Theory actress Mayim Bialik was a speaker. It made sense, I suppose: She’s on a show about nerds and she’s a “Brand Ambassador” for Texas Instruments. Hard to get more math-y than that.

It turns out Bialik is also a featured speaker at the annual convention for the National Science Teachers Association taking place in just over a week. Again, makes sense on paper, given the show she’s on and how she has a Ph.D. in neuroscience.

Oh. By the way. She doesn’t vaccinate her children:

[People Magazine:] Reader N.S. remembers reading about your contemplating whether or not to vaccinate the kids. What decision did you reach?

[Bialik:] We are a non-vaccinating family, but I make no claims about people’s individual decisions. We based ours on research and discussions with our pediatrician, and we’ve been happy with that decision, but obviously there’s a lot of controversy about it.

No… actually, there’s no controversy about it, at least when it comes to people who actually know things about vaccines. It’s only controversial in the circles inhabited by people who think Jenny McCarthy and Kristin Cavallari are wise parents.

How does someone who actively goes against scientific wisdom get chosen to speak at a conference of science educators?

I don’t know, but I sent an email last night to conference organizers asking them why they didn’t do their research — or why Bialik was invited if they did indeed know about her position. I’ll post an update if I hear back from them.

PZ Myers adds:

Will Jenny McCarthy be invited to deliver a keynote next year? How about Ken Ham — he’s very into ‘science’ education, you know. Gosh, if we’re going to open the door to quacks, the pool of potential speakers just expanded immensely! Joseph Mercola? Andrew Weil? Deepak Chopra!

Hopefully, some of the teachers who attend the conference will get a chance to question Bialik on her anti-science stance. And get it on camera, of course.

Star Wars R2-D2 Swim Trunks, from Hot Topic

Take R2-D2 with you to the beach by wearing these awesome R2-D2 Swim Trunks. These trunks basically turn your lower half into an Astromech droid.

Now you can take the little droid with you no matter where you go. These 100% polyester trunks look just like R2-D2. They just don’t walk on their own and make beeping noises. They make a great gift for your fellow Star Wars fan or for yourself.

Also: One-piece swimsuit for women

Previously: R2-D2 hoodie

Tom Jokinen ponders an afterlife of neither bliss nor torment, but unrelenting banality:

The 2004 French film Les Revenants (translated as They Came Back and since spun off into a Sundance TV series) imagines a world in which the dead neither ascend to heaven nor disappear to a black oblivion, but merely, as the title says, come back. To pick up where they left off. One day they emerge on the streets of a small French town in the same business-casual attire and over-coiffed funeral-home hairdos in which they were buried, seeming no worse for the wear. But they’ve changed. Emotionally flat and unreachable, it’s as if they’ve emerged from an unsatisfying, dreamless sleep and are caught in some vague, post-traumatic affective disorder which seems reasonable. Their attempts to re-integrate into society are fraught. Their families don’t know what to do with them. From here the director and co-writer Robin Campillo takes the ball and doesn’t so much run with it as amble into dark corners: this is a very quiet, very European zombie film.

For one thing, the return of the dead presents a social problem without precedent.

Do they get their old jobs back, given that they’re just not as bright or engaged as they used to be? Committees are struck, town meetings are held. Some families have moved on, spouses have remarried, so where will the dead sleep? Refugee-style facilities are considered. What about social programs? Are the dead still eligible for unclaimed pension benefits? Implications mount.

He goes on to compare the film to the “postmortem rom-com” Truly, Madly, Deeply:

[B]oth films have [a] thread in common: they present death as something less than spectacular, not unlike certain after-Modernist views on life itself—one dull thing after another. There are no zithers. We wear the same clothes. Cold air still chills us, we suffer from hangovers. It is a view of death for those who have outgrown grand narratives, where the afterlife is just more of the same. It is neither alluring nor transcendent: we will not come back as a flower or a frog or a potato, all of which at least promise a change of scenery. These films contemplate the plodding, uneventful banality of death: we’ve lost the comfort of the story with a happy ending.

(Video: Scenes from Les Revenants)

Sadie the puppy takes over his bigger friend Foxey's food bowl.


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Inspired by This Is a Generic Brand Video, an article written by Kendra Eash for McSweeney's Internet Tendency, stock footage company Dissolve used their own libary to put together this video that pokes fun at the clichés found in typical promotional brand videos.


Dissolve Footage

For those wondering how Archer can possibly recover from its Archer: Vice season and create a lasting foundation for its recently announced two more seasons, we now have an answer besides shut up, it’s a cartoon. Creator Adam Reed tells Entertainment Weekly that the show will “sort of unreboot, or whatever—deboot” from the current storyline that finds the ISIS team working as outlaws, country and otherwise, and “get back to the basics of some spy missions.” Still, probably don’t expect some sort of “it was all a dream,” continuity-erasing cop-out: Reed mentions that the sixth season will find Lana dealing with motherhood and pawning babysitting duties off on her coworkers, specifically describing a scene that involves Pam “chewing up Vienna sausages and then spitting them into the baby’s mouth like a gorilla,” suggesting Pam will, like the show, finally kick cocaine. Fortunately for Archer—as it ...

According to Box Office Mojo, one of the highest-grossing movies this weekend was… God’s Not Dead:

That would be the Christian movie starring Kevin “Hercules” Sorbo. He plays a godless college professor trying to indoctrinate his students into losing their faith… until he runs into one brave Christian. It’s one of those movies ripped right from the pages of Snopes.

The question is whether the movie will peter out over the next few weeks or whether it’ll become one of the highest-grossing Christian movies of all time. After the first weekend, it’s already #15 on that list.

If you got dragged to the movie this weekend, let us know how many atheist stereotypes you were able to check off your list

In a development that should immediately prompt an Internet-wide effort to reconcile the canons of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy and the Song Of Ice And Fire series, an astute Reddit user has discovered Gandalf’s sword in the Game Of Thrones TV show’s Iron Throne. The Redditor, who goes by the handle NoMoreHodoring, posted a convincing side-by-side photo that shows a weathered version of Gandalf’s sword (as seen in the Peter Jackson movies) almost centered on the show’s iconic seat of power. Further down in the Reddit comment thread, other users note that a sword just to the right of Gandalf’s blade bears a strong resemblance to a sword sold online as Robin Hood’s sword. This revelation could complicate the show’s mythology even further. Or we could just assume that when the Game Of Thrones set designers needed to create a chair ...

Atlas Shrugged: Part 1, The Movie After that last year of plowing through Ayn Rand’s verbiage, it’s about time for a palate cleanser. And I have just the thing: the colossal cinematic wreck that is Atlas Shrugged: Part 1. Feast your eyes on the capitalist glory of the trailer: The film was released in 2011, [Read More...]

Atlas Shrugged, part I, chapter X While Dagny has been criscrossing the country seeking the inventor of the motor, she learns from Eddie Willers that the looters are once again making absurd demands, this time clamoring for new laws that would kill the John Galt Line and strangle the industry of Colorado: The Union of [Read More...]

Atlas Shrugged, part I, chapter X Last time, Lee Hunsacker had mentioned to Dagny that he was the only one who ever beat Rand’s superhero banker Midas Mulligan. Now he’s going to tell us how: “Midas Mulligan was a vicious bastard with a dollar sign stamped on his heart,” said Lee Hunsacker… “My whole future [Read More...]

Atlas Shrugged, part I, chapter X OK, folks, programming note: Next week’s post will be the last for this chapter, which ends the first part of this book. Once that’s done, I’m going to jump right into a short review of the cinematic hilarity that is Atlas Shrugged: Part 1. Rent or stream a copy [Read More...]

Atlas Shrugged, part I, chapter X Still in Oregon, listening to Lee Hunsacker rant about the failure of his factory, Dagny hears him mention a name she recognizes: “I worked like a dog, trying to get somebody to lend us the money. But that bastard Midas Mulligan put me through the wringer.” She sat up [Read More...]

Atlas Shrugged, part I, chapter IX Hank comes to Dagny’s apartment to celebrate the success of the John Galt Line, which is now back under the ownership of Taggart Transcontinental. Hank has an extra reason to be pleased with himself: his sexual conquest of Dagny, a term I use advisedly since he now thinks of [Read More...]

The Washington Post, via the Pew Research Center, presents an interesting chart. But watch that question:

(The actual wording in the survey is: “Which one of these women is dressed most appropriately for public places?”

Maybe these results aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. After all, ”appropriate” is a pretty ambiguous word, because it can refer to something that’s demanded by one’s social environment, or it can mean “that which an individual considers suitable and proper for herself.”

If I visit a mosque, I will take off my shoes before entering. The Muslims who worship there expect me to, and there is no point in antagonizing them over something so inconsequential. Removing my shoes, then, is appropriate within that context. But if no one was looking and no one cared, I would explore the mosque fully shod, just as I would a church — or a Walmart. In those environments, shoes are perfectly “appropriate.”

Likewise, a woman in Tehran or Islamabad might consider her uncovered tresses a perfectly appropriate appearance for her, and yet, mindful of social and religious mores, grudgingly choose to wear a chador or a head scarf.

And, as one commenter points out,

Since women can be arrested and prosecuted for not wearing the niqab in Saudi Arabia, of course the respondents would choose the garment that is mandated by the government. It has nothing to do with what they would choose for themselves [or] their wives.

Exactly.

Pew says that

Only in Turkey and Lebanon do more than one-in-four think it is appropriate for a woman to not cover her head at all in public.

This confirms the problem with the question — because when you ask it differently, you get very different results:

Saudis appear to be particularly conflicted, with 74 percent saying it is only appropriate for a woman out in public to dress herself in a tent (a burqa or niqab); at the same time, almost half of Saudi respondents — close to the number for the officially secular Turks! — believe a woman should dress how she wants.

Just maybe, Islamic countries’ government constraints on women’s freedoms aren’t as popular as the enforcers would like to think.

Back in October, Christopher Schaeffer announced his candidacy for election to the Pomfret Town Board in New York. He was elected the following month and was sworn in Thursday.

Why is any of that relevant to the rest of you?

Because of how Schaeffer took his oath of office: With a strainer on his head as a representative of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster:

When the OBSERVER asked afterward why he wore a colander on his head, Schaeffer said he was a minister with an even more unique organization – the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

“It’s just a statement about religious freedom,” he said. “It’s a religion without any dogma.”

Fantastic

Schaeffer added that he was in part inspired by Pastafarians in Russia who were charged with organizing an unsanctioned rally as they walked to “promote happiness, cheerfulness and harmlessness.”

Those who criticize him for this — and a lot of commenters at the Observer, where this story was first reported, are doing just that — are missing the point. This wasn’t an anti-religious gesture or even a gesture to make a mockery of local politics. It was a statement showing that Schaeffer represents everybody, no matter their religious faith, an idea that doesn’t really come across when politicians put their hands on the Bible.

I reached out to Schaeffer last night to get more information about why he did this, but I haven’t heard back yet. Incidentally, he ran for New York State Senate a few years ago but lost.

They write essays like this one:

I am the ’70s child of a health nut. I wasn’t vaccinated. I was brought up on an incredibly healthy diet: no sugar till I was one, breastfed for over a year, organic homegrown vegetables, raw milk, no MSG, no additives, no aspartame. My mother used homeopathy, aromatherapy, osteopathy, we took daily supplements of vitamin C, echinacea, cod liver oil. I had an outdoor lifestyle; I grew up next to a farm, walked everywhere, did sports and danced twice a week, drank plenty of water. I wasn’t even allowed pop; even my fresh juice was watered down to protect my teeth, and I would’ve killed for white, shop-bought bread in my lunch box once in a while. …

As healthy as my lifestyle seemed, I contracted measles, mumps, rubella, a type of viral meningitis, scarlatina, whooping cough, yearly tonsillitis, and chickenpox, some of which are vaccine preventable. In my twenties I got precancerous HPV and spent 6 months of my life wondering how I was going to tell my two children under the age of 7 that mummy might have cancer before it was safely removed.

So having the “natural immunity sterilized out of us” just doesn’t cut it for me. How could I, with my idyllic childhood and my amazing health food, get so freaking ill all the time?

Kate Dries applauds the author:

[Amy] Parker’s republished article has clearly hit a nerve: it has over 80,000 Facebook likes and dozens of comments from people who also suffered from illnesses after not being vaccinated. That’s probably because Parker’s is a story that’s rarely heard. While the internet is full of anti-vaxxers who speak about the harm vaccines have done to their children, the stories of the people who have been harmed by not being vaccinated are far fewer. That’s because developed nations exist in a bubble where, until recently, the standard of behavior was to be vaccinated. Those who argue against it, as Parker explains, are taking advantage of their good fortune that the majority of people around them are vaccinated.

Previous Dish on vaccines here, here, here, and here.

Isaac Asimov’s predictions from 50 years ago have gone viral. Brian Merchant pushes back on them:

Taken as a whole, Asimov’s vision for 2014 is wildly off. It’s just that ’Genius predicted the future 50 years ago’ makes for a great article hook. Asimov does hit a couple of his predictions pretty close to home: He ballparked the world population (6.5 billion); he anticipated automated cars (“vehicles with ‘robot brains’”); and he seems to have described the current smartphone/tablet craze (“sight-sound” telephones that “can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books.”)

But he also thought we’d have a colony on the moon, be living under a global population control regime, eating at multi-flavored algae bars, and letting machines prepare us personalized meals. Most divergent of all, he believed that increasing automatization of labor would spawn not inequality or joblessness, but spiritual malaise.  … Asimov imagined that humanity would decide to distribute the wealth accrued by the automatons, and the problem wouldn’t be lost capital for workers, but lost meaning. Of course, in reality, it’s both—and therefore a much, much bleaker scenario.

Jerry Coyne points to the Internet as something Asimov didn’t see coming either:

[T]he world is becoming plugged in in a way Asimov simply couldn’t predict. When you walk down the street in an industrialized country, or ride in a plane or train, notice how many people are using their cellphones, iPads, iPods, or computers. Google Glass, the wearable computer, is next. This is the way the whole world will go. (My theory is that eventually the entire Earth will resemble New York City.) Connectivity has brought tremendous advantages: think of the ability to access information at your desk instead of a making a laborious trip to the library. And electronic journals and instant publication have markedly sped up the progress of science. Well, perhaps we won’t be as bored, but we may lose the skills of interpersonal communication.

Asimov made many other predictions. In general I think he did pretty well—certainly better than I would have—but it’s remarkable how many other people got stuff wrong, usually predicting a more technologically advanced or ideologically repressive society than we have now. Remember Nineteen Eighty Four (written in 1949), or The Jetsons cartoon series, which supposedly took place in 2062?

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From Isaac Asimov’s “Visit to the World’s Fair of 2014,” written on August 16, 1964:

Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The I.B.M. exhibit at the [1964 World’s] fair has no robots but it is dedicated to computers, which are shown in all their amazing complexity, notably in the task of translating Russian into English. If machines are that smart today, what may not be in the works 50 years hence? It will be such computers, much miniaturized, that will serve as the ‘brains’ of robots. In fact, the I.B.M. building at the 2014 World’s Fair may have, as one of its prime exhibits, a robot housemaid – large, clumsy, slow-moving, but capable of general picking-up, arranging, cleaning, and manipulation of various appliances. It will undoubtedly amuse the fairgoers to scatter debris over the floor in order to see the robot lumberingly remove it and classify it into ‘throw away’ and ‘set aside.’ ”

Not sure what to think of this sponsored section on #SouthSudan in the Dec. 30 issue of @TIME. pic.twitter.com/yfj8BYVl68

— clairelambrecht (@clairelambrecht) December 28, 2013

I should end the year on an upbeat note, shouldn’t I? But Time Inc. ruined it. The surrender of journalism to advertizing and public relations – not alliance with, but surrender to – was the biggest media story of 2013 that the media almost didn’t cover at all. But it’s right there in black and white, if buried on the slowest news day of the year:

Time Inc. will abandon the traditional separation between its newsroom and business sides, a move that has caused angst among its journalists. Now, the newsroom staffs at Time Inc.’s magazines will report to the business executives. Such a structure, once verboten at journalistic institutions, is seen as necessary to create revenue opportunities and stem the tide of declining subscription and advertising sales.

Now remember this is not some desperate trade magazine; this is Time Fucking Inc. Journalists at Time will report directly to those on the business side (or is that now an anachronism?) seeking advertizing revenues and sponsored content contracts. That’s what the editors now are. And listen to the howls of outrage swirling around every other journalistic institution, read the columns decrying the end of independent journalism, witness the mass exits of outraged editors, observe the talking heads fulminate and readers rebel!

Actually, there was one resignation, and it was a deeply honorable one:

Among those who expressed concern was Martha Nelson, the recently departed editor in chief. Before Mr. Ripp came aboard and brought on Mr. Pearlstine, the magazines’ editors all reported to Ms. Nelson, who was seen as a staunch defender of newsroom autonomy. Late last summer, Mr. Ripp invited Ms. Nelson to Nantucket to discuss his plans, according to several current and former Time Inc. executives. Troubled by the idea of reporting to the business side, she resigned.  “When Joe suggested a new structure that required editors to report to the business heads, I wasn’t comfortable being part of it,” Ms. Nelson said. “You can’t take apart what you have promoted and built.”

This is the way the press ends. Not with a bang but a “revenue opportunity.”

… the more likely they will find a way to get high.

By Lisa Skye,Paul Rasche  Published: December 31st, 2013  The new year is all about one thing: contemplating the creeping black hand of death that waits to claim us all. And while the rest of pop culture will spend the next week or so talking about the Nelson Mandelas and Paul Walkers of the world, every ye

.@BA_Influencers Can we cut out the middleman and you guys just take a big, wet shit right on my soul? Might save time.

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) December 27, 2013

He continues here.

Biogeneticist Eric S. Lander makes the connection:

Therapeutic development has already been transformed by genomics. There are 800 different anticancer drugs in clinical development today. Cancer drugs used to be just cellular poisons, but almost all of these new ones are targeted at particular gene products that have been discovered. But it’s just a start. Some of the new cancer drugs can miraculously make tumors disappear. The problem is that, a year later, the cancer in many cases comes roaring back, because some of the cells have developed mutations that make them resistant. So genome scientists are now finding and targeting these mutations as well. Remember in the 1980s, when HIV was a fatal disease? What made it become a chronic, treatable disease? It was a combination of three drugs. Any one of those drugs alone, the virus could mutate its way around. But with the combination of all three, the chance that a virus could find its way around all of them was vanishingly small.

That’s what’s going to be happening in cancer. If you didn’t know the HIV story, you would be depressed: you put all this work into the drug, and a year later the cancer has developed resistance. But if you understand that this is a game of probability, and there is only a finite number of cancer cells and each has only a certain chance of mutating, and if we can put together two or three independent attacks on the cancer cell, we win.

Wah Wars (Star Wars)
Cardboard Box Office is a project created by Lilly and Leon and their cute baby Orson that recreates memorable scenes from famous movies with some cardboard and other household objects.

The project began after finding that we had accumulated both a lot of cardboard boxes (due to moving to a new country) and a baby (due to giving birth). With our social lives drastically altered we decided to find a way to make some of those housebound weekends a little more fun.

The costumes, props, and sets in Cardboard Box Office are created entirely out of everyday household items, toys, cardboard, and three individuals slowly losing their sanity. Enjoy!

Papa la vista, Baby! (Terminator 2: The Judgement Day)

The Dark Knighty-Night (The Dark Knight)

Castababy (Cast Away)

You're Gonna Need a Bigger Baby (Jaws)

Bubbalien (Alien)

The Good, the Bad and the Dribbly (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly)

The Life Domestic (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou)
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