Yasutada.sudo

Just when you were hoping there were no new ways to be racist, it turns out people may be racist against dogs. Black Dog Syndrome is the name shelter workers have given to the tendency of dark-furred pups to languish in kennels while their lighter-furred brethren get adopted. “The effect is very real,” says Mirah Horowitz, executive director and founder of Lucky Dog Animal Rescue. “We recently had a litter of five very cute, very fluffy puppies, two yellow and three black. And the yellow ones all went immediately, but for the black ones it took weeks.”

Icelandic girl Harriet Cardew was denied a passport by her home country, and it's all because of her English name.

Cardew's father, Tristan, was born in the UK and moved to Iceland 14 years ago.

Coffee firm Lavazza teamed up with Argotec to create the "ISSpresso" machine. "The final version of the coffee machine will be the first real Italian espresso machine on The International Space Station," reports AP, "and will coincide with a six-month mission by Italy’s first Italian female astronaut, Samantha Cristoforetti." (Photo: Lavazza)

Bitlit works with publishers to get you free or discounted access to digital copies of books you own in print: you use the free app (Android/Ios) to take a picture of the book's copyright page with your name printed in ink, and the publisher unlocks a free or discounted ebook version.

No, really, it is. This is what's lovingly referred to as 'outsider music,' and it's fabulous.

Read the rest

Footage of a Japanese politican crying hysterically during a hearing has gone global. Ryutaro Nonomura, 47, was accused of misusing about $30,000 in government funds during trips—but his apology is made of pure viral gold.

Banksy's classic "taking the piss" essay (adapted from an essay by Sean Tejaratchi) is a moving, important screed about the colonization of public space by advertising.

A man in Germany who has one full arm and one stump arm got an apology and refund from police after an asshole cop fined him for cycling with one arm. Read the rest

"Found at Gallery at Ice in Windsor, UK painted by Brian Weavers."

It's more than just a good workout. High-altitude climbers (paradoxically) don't eat as much as they do at sea level. Here's why.

Fascinating history at Nature, about the way war began the still-unfinished process of integrating female minds into the scientific world.

Earin are Bluetooth earbuds that have no cables or other attachments, making them virtually undetectable when they’re in someone’s ears. The Swedish team of designers behind the tiny headphones is currently seeking funding on Kickstarter to help bring the product to market.

Earin represents Olle Lindén’s vision which came to life in 2008 after seeing the intro of the movie ‘Definitely Maybe’, where the actor Ryan Reynolds walks down a crowded New York city street with just a pair of small earbuds without cables, listening to, as he says “the soundtrack of a perfect day”. After seeing this movie, Olle was inspired to “create a perfect wireless experience” so his headphones were formed.

via Gadgetify, The Awesomer

I don’t know about other disciplines, but academic writing in the humanities has become notorious for its jargon-laden wordiness, tangled constructions, and seemingly deliberate vagary and obscurity. A popular demonstration of this comes via the University of Chicago’s academic sentence generator, which allows one to plug in a number of stock phrases, verbs, and “-tion” words to produce corkers like “The reification of post-capitalist hegemony is always already participating in the engendering of print culture” or “The discourse of the gaze gestures toward the linguistic construction of the gendered body”—the point, of course, being that the language of academia has become so meaningless that randomly generated sentences closely resemble and make as much sense as those pulled from the average journal article (a point well made by the so-called “Sokal hoax”).

There are many theories as to why this is so. Some say it’s several generations of scholars poorly imitating famously difficult writers like Hegel and Heidegger, Lacan and Derrida; others blame a host of postmodern -isms, with their politicized language games and sectarian schisms. A recent discussion cited scholarly vanity as the cause of incomprehensible academic prose. A more practical explanation holds that the publish or perish grind forces scholars to turn out derivative work at an unreasonable pace simply to keep their jobs, hence stuffing journals with rehashed arguments and fancy-sounding puffery that signifies little. In the above video, Harvard cognitive scientist and linguist Steven Pinker offers his own theory, working with examples drawn from academic writing in psychology.

For Pinker, the tendency of academics to use “passives, abstractions, and ‘zombie nouns’” stems not primarily from “nefarious motives” or the desire to “sound sophisticated and recherché and try to bamboozle their readers with high-falutin’ verbiage.” He doesn’t deny that this takes place on occasion, but contra George Orwell’s claim in “Politics and the English Language” that bad writing generally hopes to disguise bad political and economic motives, Pinker defers to evolutionary biology, and refers to “mental habits” and the “mismatch between ordinary thinking and speaking and what we have to do as academics.” He goes on to explain, in some fairly academic terms, his theory of how our primate mind, which did not evolve to think thoughts about sociology or literary criticism, struggles to schematize “learned abstractions” that are not a part of everyday experience. It’s a plausible theory that doesn’t rule out other reasonable alternatives (like the perfectly straightforward claim that clear, concise writing poses a formidable challenge for academics as much as anyone else.)

Pinker’s talk was part of a larger Harvard conference called “Stylish Academic Writing” and sponsored by the Office of Faculty Development & Diversity. The full conference seems designed primarily as professional development for other academics, but layfolks may find much here of interest as well. See more talks from the conference, as well as a number of unrelated videos on good academic writing here. Or, for more amusement at the expense of clunky academic prose, see the results of the Philosophy and Literature bad writing contest, which ran from 1995-98 and turned up some almost shockingly unreadable sentences from a variety of scholarly texts.

Related Content:

Steven Pinker Explains the Neuroscience of Swearing (NSFW)

John Searle on Foucault and the Obscurantism in French Philosophy

“Lol My Thesis” Showcases Painfully Hilarious Attempts to Sum up Years of Academic Work in One Sentence

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Steven Pinker Uses Theories from Evolutionary Biology to Explain Why Academic Writing is So Bad is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

The post Steven Pinker Uses Theories from Evolutionary Biology to Explain Why Academic Writing is So Bad appeared first on Open Culture.

If you're looking to buy a new video card or monitor, Linus at TechQuickie explains the differences between display connectors like DisplayPort, DVI, and HDMI.

Read more...

Isaac Hou spins and swirls, gracefully riding a Cyr wheel in the streets and abandoned buildings of Taiwan. Well known as a local street performer, juggler, and acrobat, fan videos of his performances have gone viral before, but this short from Kuma Films really showcases the New Jersey native’s quick spinning moves, especially in the slow motion shots.

Related watching: Angelica Bongiovonni rides a Cyr wheel, Circulus performs in an abandoned Victorian sail factory, and more from Kuma — Epic Pen Spinning.

via The Awesomer.

Redditor Ergas has a disgusting way to lure fruit flies to a very personal fiery death. Read the rest

Liquor Off is a Tokyo store that buys and sells used booze. (more…)

"Drone pilots and other crew members swear, scream and yell at their remote-control video screens when the aircraft fly out of control.

br> Airshowfan writes, "Over the past several years, various citizen groups in Brazil have used the power of online crowdsourcing in creative ways to tackle social problems large and small." Read the rest

How many did you understand right away without opening Wikipedia?

Made by Max Knoblauch.

If you find yourself embarrassed of the sites you frequent—or you're just browsing at work—Timesify can switch on the class by making whatever you're reading look like a New York Times article.

Read more...

Self-appointed visionary Maddox shares and explains his opinion on the abundance of life hack videos that are on the internet in his funny new video, “Things You’re Doing Wrong Every Day: Everything.” According to Maddox, many of the life hacks are both dangerous and unnecessary.

via reddit

Musician Brett Domino gives a quick guide on how to make a pop song like Jason Derulo. Brett also features his original pop song “Sexy When You Do That“, which was inspired by actress Jennifer Lawrence. The track is available to purchase online from Bandcamp.

via Tastefully Offensive

Yes, pinball is illegal in Oakland, California. But this week, the 80-year-old law, tied to anti-gambling ordinances, will be reversed. Read the rest

From the 19th century up through the Dust Bowl a wide cross-section of farmers, politicians, and scientists believed that the more intensively you farmed the Great Plains, the more rain would fall and farming conditions would improve.

Ian's Shoelace Site ("Bringing you the fun, fashion & science of shoelaces") has a clear step-by-step tutorial for tying a Surgeon's Shoelace Knot.

Also known as the "Tibetan Trekking Knot" or "Sherpa Knot", this is the most common secure shoelace knot: Make a Standard Shoelace Knot, but before pulling tight, run the loop around and through the middle for a second time.