Binaryjesus

In 2013, photographer Christopher Johnson published A Better Life, a beautiful hardbound collection of photo portraits of 100 atheists, accompanied by our thoughts on how we maintain a better life — not in spite of our atheism, but because of it. He’s now working on a documentary film using the video footage he collected during the project: if you want to help make it happen, here’s the Kickstarter.

This is the piece I wrote to accompany the photos he took of me, and of me and Ingrid.

So there’s kind of a weird story about these photos.

The day these photos were taken was the day I found out I had cancer. I literally had gotten the news about the cancer thirty seconds before Chris knocked on my door.

I considered cancelling — but I’d already had to cancel on Chris once, not even two weeks earlier. Ironically, because my father died the day we were first supposed to shoot. And this project was important to me. So I put on my best game face, and went ahead with the shoot.

I didn’t tell Chris. I hadn’t had a chance yet to tell Ingrid, and with all due respect to Chris, I wasn’t about to tell some photographer I’d never met that I’d just been diagnosed with cancer before I told my wife. So again — game face. We walked around my neighborhood looking at street art, and we sat in my backyard, and we talked about joy and purpose and the meaning of life when there is no God and death is final… and every time I looked into the camera lens, I was thinking, “Cancer. Cancer. Cancer.”

It was, to say the least, a very strange day. Especially when Ingrid showed up to join me on the shoot: I knew about the cancer, but she didn’t know, and I didn’t want to tell her until after Chris had left… so I had to do the shoot with her, knowing that I was about to tell her this enormous horrible news, and sitting with the knowledge that she didn’t yet know. But it also gave the photo shoot an intensity, a poignancy. Sitting with Ingrid in our home; talking about what gives my life value; framing shots that might capture part of the essence of that life — all not knowing how much of it I’d have left — put a sharp focus on that day, even as it made it deeply surreal. And even in the moment, it seemed like some sort of metaphor: we have so little control over what happens to us in our lives… but we can choose how to respond to it. I chose to handle this dreadful day, this dreadfully bizarre day, by biting the bullet and moving forward with the things that matter to me.

I got lucky. The cancer was caught early; it was entirely treated with surgery; I am now cancer-free. But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at these photos without thinking of the strangeness of that day… and without thinking, not only of how beautiful life is, but how fragile.

What if they didn’t live happily ever after? Nickelodeon storyboard animator Jeff Hong has a new Tumblr blog in which he illustrates the potential unhappy endings of Disney movies. It’s called Unhappily Ever After, and you don’t want to see the illustrations if you don’t have a sense of humor about fictional cartoons. But if you do, be ready to groan, laugh nervously, and have your childhood ruined. -via Buzzfeed

TV today, embarrassment of riches, hubbub hubbub, Golden Age — but my god for the love of all that's Bechdel everyone should be watching and losing their feminist-leaning minds over Orphan Black right now. What if I told you there is a femmed-up ass-kicker about clones with the campy dark humor of Heathers that's feminist in its bones and also riveting and fun, plus pulls off all the things people say female-led shows don't do? Face, naysayers! Face. Clone face. Because clones. Burn!

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There's an entire goddamned tumblr of this stuff and it's magnificent. It even includes the actual species of be-googlied sea critter, and source attribution. And it's not even photoshopped! Man, the oceans are amazing. [HT: Theremina] Read the rest

Click the photo to watch the video.

Today, Tuesday, May 13th, 2014, is the last day you can watch the video of David Bowie’s Space Oddity that Colonel Chris Hadfield recorded aboard the International Space Station.

Bowie's last day – we had permission for a year, so our Space Oddity video comes down today. One last look: http://t.co/z6umXHoPCk

— Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) May 13, 2014

He was able to get a license for the song for a year, and that year’s up. So go watch it now, before it vanishes!

(Or if you’re feeling like a bit of a rebel, you may want to download it before it disappears. It doesn’t take much searching to find out how to download YouTube videos.)

Zack writes, "Here's a collection of PDFs of ALL the original scripts to Patrick McGoohan's surreal cult classic, along with several unmade scripts and several multiple drafts of episodes. It's the next-best-thing to being in The Village, minus the brainwashing and evil weather balloons."

"While I was in Zurich, Switzerland for my 2002 art show," says Coop, "We were invited to visit the home of the legendary artist HR Giger." [Previously: RIP, Giger]

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud writes, "Public.Resource.Org is pleased to announce the launch of the 2014 Official Summer of Code!

We've selected 3 states -- Georgia, Idaho, and Mississippi -- and are raising funds to have the Official Legal Codes sent down to the Internet Archive to be scanned and made available to all. Your tax-deductible contribution can help make the law available to the people! Find out more at: YesWeScan.Org/ Read the rest

By pancake artist Nathan Shields, whose other creations we've previously featured.

Today, I'm going to cover a topic that I think we could all stand to learn a little more about: scammers. I am not referring here to fake Nigerian princes, or even those people who come up to you in parking lots and ask for gas money to visit their dying grandfather, who – if you don't fork it over fast enough – is also a decorated World War II veteran. Instead, I'm talking about the worst kind of scammer: suburban soccer moms.

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Japanese police arrested a 27 year old man called Yoshitomo Imura, alleging that he 3D printed several guns and posted videos to Youtube of himself firing it. They say they seized five guns from Imura's home in Kawasaki City. The videos showed that two of these guns were capable of firing rounds -- what sort isn't specified -- through a stack of ten sheets of plywood, and this caused Japanese police to class them as lethal weapons. A Japanese press account has Imura admitting to printing the guns, but insisting that he "didn't know they were illegal."

As I wrote a year ago when 3D printed guns first appeared on the scene, the regulatory questions raised by them are much more significant than the narrow issue of gun control. But there's a real danger that judges, lawmakers and regulators will be distracted by the inflammatory issue of firearms when considering the wider question of trying to regulate computers. Read the rest

Found via Reddit. Click the photo to see it at full size.

The best part about this comic is that it’s entirely true! Fire’s the best. What’s not to like? It burns shit, it’s hot, it’s fire-colored. Absolutely A+ material, fire. But why am I telling you? Arthur Brown said it best:

Set something on fire today*. You won’t regret it. It will be impossible for you to regret it.

T

*DON’T

Johannes writes, "Indie Box One is a personal server appliance that allows us to 'bring our data home' from the big Internet companies, and run indie Web applications at home. Many geeks have run their own home servers for a long time, but it's time consuming, and not possible for most people. Although it runs only free/open-source code, Indie Box One is made for humans, not just geeks, and comes with automatic software upgrades, dynamic DNS, an app store and things like that so normal people can own and control their personal data, too." $500 gets you a fully loaded server. Read the rest

Bridget Erickson, a freshman at St Paul, MN's Nova Classical Academy tried unsuccessfully to get the school board to create a student advisory seat on the board. Roundly ignored, she turned to the by-laws governing the board and discovered that there was no minimum age for board members, so she's now she's running for a full-fledged seat on the Nova Classical Academy school board. Read the rest

Do you ever wonder why everyone looks at you with astonished faces when you're driving? Well, here is a start. If you do any of these things when you drive, you are raising the blood pressure of everyone around you with your embarrassing driving. Whether you are just clueless or a bit self righteous, make sure you pay close attention. You may even learn something here.

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VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED: Emily Letts filmed her abortion and posted it online, she said, to remove the stigma surrounding abortion

Janet Vertesi, assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University, had heard many people apologize for commercial online surveillance by saying that people who didn't want to give their data away should just not give their data away -- they should opt out. So when she got pregnant, she and her husband decided to keep the fact secret from marketing companies (but not their friends and family). She quickly discovered that this was nearly impossible, even while she used Tor, ad blockers, and cash-purchased Amazon cards that paid for baby-stuff shipped to anonymous PO boxes.

We ordered everything baby-related on Tor. I’ve used a lot of browser plugins and software on my career. A lot of people just asked if I downloaded an ad blocker. But I wasn’t worried about the ads; I was worried about the data collection that fuels the advertising. If I had an ad blocker, I wouldn’t be able to see what the internet knew about me. So we used a traceless browser for baby things. Everything else, I did on my normal browser. We got everything in cash that we could. We’d do research online, using Tor, and then go out and buy things in cash in person. For some purchases online, we made through Amazon, and we set up an Amazon account from a private email account and had it deliver to a local locker in Manhattan, so it wasn’t associated with our address. We stocked it with Amazon gift cards that we bought with cash. So we did those kinds of things to draw a distinction between our online lives and our offline lives.

Meet The Woman Who Did Everything In Her Power To Hide Her Pregnancy From Big Data [Jessica Goldstein/Think Progress]

(Thanks, Alan!)

(Image: pregnant woman, Teza Harinaivo Ramiandrisoa, CC-BY-SA)

Remember the kickstarter for the sugar skull spoon? They not only completed successfully, but are now in full production, and are available retail through the Colossal store for $13.

The Colorado Symphony Orchestra will perform a series of concerts where attendees are encouraged to smoke weed. The bring-your-own-cannabis concerts, called "Classically Cannabis: The High Note Series," are a collaboration with pro-pot producers Edible Events.

"We see ourselves as connecting classical music with all of Colorado," Colorado Symphony Orchestra director Jerry Kern told the Denver Post. "Part of our goal is to bring in a younger audience and a more diverse audience, and I would suggest that the patrons of the cannabis industry are both younger and more diverse than the patrons of the symphony orchestra."

image: oboe bong, provenance unknown

Three weeks ago in the remote northeastern Nigerian town of Chibok, over 200 girls were kidnapped from their boarding school dormitories in the middle of the night. By some reports, as many as 275 children may have abducted; more than 40 escaped. The militants who abducted the mostly 16-18 year old girls are from Boko Haram -- a group whose name means "Western Education is Forbidden." As the name implies, they are on a murderous campaign to eliminate education in West Africa.

Reports are surfacing this week that the militants are treating the girls as sexual slaves, "marrying" them to soldiers who have carried them off to neighboring states including Chad and Cameroon. In plain words, this means the girls are being raped and impregnated against their will -- and who knows what additional forms of torture and abuse, or how many have died.

Why has this story received so little attention in the West? For example, the New York Times has published exactly one reported piece, on April 17. Perhaps if the girls were on a ferry in Korea, a jet liner in the Indian Ocean, in the owner's box at a Clippers basketball game, or if they were white, we'd care more.

Today in Nigeria, women are marching to demand more resources to find the young women.

In the New Yorker, the voice of a girl who escaped and survived.

From NPR:

"It's a situation of present, continuous agony. Everybody is terrified at the thought of what they might be going through. There's just no reason why these girls could have been targeted. They're so innocent, so harmless," [Author Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani] says. "They're probably Muslim and Christian. It's frightening. They're not being seen as Hausa, Yoruba or Igbo [three of Nigeria's major ethnic groups]. They're not being seen as northerners or easterners. They're just seen as children."

Some of the women who'd gathered (7hrs) early at Unity Fountain for the rally. #Bringbackourgirls #Nigeria #Abuja pic.twitter.com/PFQN2FnFDv

— Nkem Ifejika (@nkemifejika) April 30, 2014

By joining the March today, you are make a statement that these our Girls' MOTHERS are not ALONE in their pain. pic.twitter.com/ikdeU043VY

— oby ezekwesili (@obyezeks) April 30, 2014

Korefe presents "The Real Cookbook," a book whose leaves are large lasagne noodles, impressed with a recipe for lasagne. As you read the recipe, you peel off each page and slather it with sauce and cheese, building up the dish described in its pages, leaving behind no trace save for your satisfied appetite and a slight propensity to insulin resistance.

---

---

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The first and only Cookbook you can actually read, cook and eat.

(via That Book Smell)

Welcome to the eighth article in the Spring Cleaning series, where I take articles that have languished unfinished for too long, finish them, and finally post them here on the Accordion Guy blog. In case you missed any of the previous seven, I’ve listed them below:

1. Burgers. Burgers everywhere.
2. Which beer is most likely to land you in the emergency room?
3. Weber Cooks, the saddest cooking show
4. Get on your bicycle!
5. Fireworks and sensitive body parts
6. Work!
7. Storytelling, “Save the Cat”, and same-old-same-old in Hollywood

In this installment, I look at financial advice…

The 4-by-6 card that has the best financial advice

The 4-by-6 card with all the financial advice you’ll ever need.
Click the photo to see it at full size.

On financial matters, Harold Pollack of the blog The Reality-Based Community says that the best advice fits on an index card. After having a conversation with Helaine Olen, author of the book Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry, he took her advice and summarized it on a 4-by-6-inch index card, pictured above. The text of the card reads as follows:

• Max your 401(k) or equivalent employee contribution. (In Canada, the closest analogue is the RRSP; see this quick summary on the MoneySmarts blog for the similarities and differences between 401(k)s and RRSPs.)
• Buy inexpensive, well-diversified mutual funds such as Vanguard Target 20xx funds.
• Never buy or sell an individual security. The person on the other side of the table knows more than you do about this stuff.
• Save 20% of your money.
• Pay your credit card in balance in full every month.
• Maximize tax-advantaged savings vehicles like Roth, SEP, and 529 accounts.
• Pay attention to fees. Avoid actively-managed funds.
• Make financial advisor commit to a fiduciary standard.
• Promote social insurance programs to help people when things go wrong.

Pound Foolish by Helaine Olen

Pound Foolish is Helaine Olen’s look into the “myths, contradictions, and outright lies” that have been perpetuated by the personal finance industry, which started as a response to the Great Depression and has since grown to become a juggernaut that sells the illusion of financial security but provides little in the way of actual help. In Pound Foolish, Olen says that there are many myths about spending and saving, including these ones, which I’ve taken from the book’s site:

• Small pleasures can bankrupt you: Gurus popular­ized the idea that cutting out lattes and other small expenditures could make us millionaires. But reduc­ing our caffeine consumption will not offset our biggest expenses: housing, education, health care, and retirement.
• Disciplined investing will make you rich: Gurus also love to show how steady investing can turn modest savings into a huge nest egg at retirement. But these calculations assume a healthy market and a lifetime without any setbacks—two conditions that have no connection to the real world.
• Women need extra help managing money: Product pushers often target women, whose alleged financial ignorance supposedly leaves them especially at risk. In reality, women and men are both terrible at han­dling finances.
• Financial literacy classes will prevent future eco­nomic crises: Experts like to claim mandatory sessions on personal finance in school will cure many of our money ills. Not only is there little evidence this is true, the entire movement is largely funded and promoted by the financial services sector.

“Most of the financial advice published and dished out by the truckload is useless,” Olen writes, saying that it’s “oblivious to the messiness of the human condition.”

A former personal financial columnist for the Los Angeles Times herself, she says that most advice fails to factor in matters such as job loss, long bouts of unemployment (who are often caught in a vicious circle because employers don’t want to hire long-term unemployed), medical bankruptcy (which accounts for the majority of personal bankruptcies in the US), and high-interest debt. Many employers think of employees purely as costs…

@hblodget @adamcohen15 They are costs. Full Stop. They don’t have a stake, they hold nothing. They trade their labor for money.

— Daryl Tremblay (@DarylT) July 30, 2013

…and believe that it’s a law of capitalism to pay their employees as little as possible. When people manage to save, their savings gets outclassed by the stagnation or drop in housing prices and interest rates, and other economic events well beyond their control. Even the good advice that comes out means little when you have little savings.

At the same time, the issue of staying afloat financially is seen in the hyper-individualistic culture of America as a problem one could deal with on one’s own rather than as a social problem. The quip commonly attributed to Steinbeck seems quite true: the American poor don’t see themselves as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, which is why you end up with fake “heroes” like “Joe the Plumber”, who is neither named Joe more a licensed plumber, but is a staunch defender of tax cuts for the rich. This has created an industry of snake oil that feeds off people’s fear, especially as people approach retirement age; in 2009, the AARP found that one in ten people over 55 had attended a “free financial seminar” in the past three years.

Talking with Helaine Olen

Harold Pollack, who created the 4-by-6 index card above, talked to Olen in a two-part interview. In the first part, shown below, they discuss topics such as:

• How she became a personal finance columnist,
• Why divorce is bad for your financial health,
• Why trusting financial advisors is generally a bad idea, even if your advisor is above ethical reproach,
• The false hopes placed in personal financial skills to offset stagnant wages for millions of Americans,
• That Suze Orman isn’t one of the world’s greatest financial advisors, but has found one of the world’s greatest sales gigs:

In the second part, shown below, they go on to cover things like those dinners where hucksters sell rip-off variable annuities to seniors afraid of outliving their savings. According to Pollack, “these salespeople predictably trash Social Security—the one solid source of annuitized wealth Americans can turn to in their retirement years”:

If you’d like to hear more about the ideas in Pound Foolish, here’s an hour-long presentation featuring Olen talking about the ideas in her book at a gathering put together by The New America Foundation’s Asset Building Program:

Original found here; I cleaned up the typesetting.

I wanted so badly for taco yogurt to be real.

From a Washington Post profile of trans servicemen and women:

More than two years after the repeal of the law that barred gay men and lesbians from serving in the military openly, transgender service members can still be dismissed from the force without question, the result of a decades-old policy that dates back to an era when gender nonconformity was widely seen as a mental illness.... Transgender service members are increasingly undergoing procedures to align their bodies more closely with the genders with which they identify. Medical experts, meanwhile, are urging the Defense Department to rescind a policy they view as discriminatory and outdated, noting that some of America’s closest allies, including Canada, Britain and Australia, have done so seamlessly.

A suit brought by four Muslim-American men with no criminal records asserts that the FBI put them on the no-fly list in order to pressure them to inform on their communities. Brooklynite Awais Sajjad, one of the plaintiffs, says that he was denied boarding for a flight to visit his sickly grandmother in Pakistan in 2012, and that subsequently, the FBI told him they would remove him from the no-fly list only if he worked as an FBI informant. Sajjad's has tried all the official means of getting himself removed from the no-fly list, without any success. Sajjad's co-plaintiffs tell similar stories.

The case echoes that of Dr Rahinah Ibrahim, the first person to successfully appeal being placed on the US no-fly list. In her case, it emerged that she had been put on the list due to an administrative error (an FBI officer ticked the wrong box on a form) and that subsequently the DHS, Justice Department and FBI conspired to use state secrecy to cover up their error, even though they knew that there was no conceivable reason to keep Ibrahim on the no-fly list.

Sajjad and co will have to overcome the same secrecy privilege and the same culture of ass-covering indifference to innocence from the FBI and its allies in government. I don't like their chances, but I wish them luck.

Sajjad's attorneys, Susan Hu and Diala Shamas, told Ars that, prior to filing this suit, Sajjad had exhausted all other possible administrative procedures. They explained that, upon learning of his no-fly list status, he immediately filed a Department of Homeland Security Traveler Redress Inquiry Program (TRIP) application, as well as an appeal a year later. But never heard back from DHS regarding either this initial application or appeal.

Hu and Shamas also said that their clients' constitutional due process and free speech rights have been violated. The no-fly redress procedures, they argued, fail to provide any meaningful notice or opportunity to see or challenge the allegations that gets someone placed on the list. Additionally, their clients' placement on the no-fly list, allegedly in retaliation for exercising their rights to not become informants, violates their First Amendment rights, the lawyers said.

"The lack of transparency is the biggest problem here," Hu said. "It's not enough to tell the American people to trust us. Especially when you have clear instances of abuse."

Hu further described what the plaintiffs hope to accomplish in suing the government: "Our clients are not a risk to aviation security. So the government should tell them that they are off the no-fly list. They also need to create adequate safeguards so that our clients have opportunity for notice and a fair hearing. We hope to make the whole process more transparent."

Suit claims Muslims put on no-fly list for refusing to become informants [Joe Silver/Ars Technica]

(Image: J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building, Cliff, CC-BY)

Cards Against Humanity is a game where you find out who has no soul.

Hey Guys,

Occasionally I hit some bumps trying to navigate the SS Panties through the waters of the business world, and I hit a doozy last Christmas. I discovered a company that scores sites based on content, and that score can have a severe impact on ad revenue. I’ve documented my adventure in this article: https://medium.com/p/3f559a96e166

While we’ve come out the other end OK, this is a problem that can still be affecting other artists out there that use banner ads to generate revenue.

My intent isn’t to bring out the pitchforks against these guys, but to bring attention to their practices in the hopes of increasing the transparency of their organization (e.g. having a better appeal process).

So take a look, and share the article! Hopefully it’ll help someone out there.

-obby

P.S. You guys rock.

The wrestling team at Parkersburg South High School in West Virginia seems to care more about promoting Jesus than it does providing a welcoming environment for all students.

Specifically, one Bible verse — Philippians 4:13: I can do all things through Him who strengthens me — is emblazoned all over the place.

On their t-shirts, which they wore during the season:

Atop their school’s gym doors:

Even on their school’s website, where it was listed as the official team motto as recently as February:

Just to be clear, if this were just the students themselves making t-shirts, this wouldn’t be an issue. They have every right to do that. But when school officials allow the Bible verse to be painted in the gym and printed on the website, they’ve crossed an unconstitutional line. That’s an endorsement of Christianity, pure and simple.

After Patrick Elliott of the Freedom From Religion wrote district officials a letter warning them of the legal violations, they began to take some action.

They scrubbed the website of the motto.

They said they would paint over the verse in the gym. (Though they haven’t done so yet.)

And the team’s Facebook page seems to have deleted any images or references to the shirt (and they’re not responding to commenters who want to know where they can purchase one).

As you can imagine, the parents of team members are flipping out because, you know, “Christian Persecution” and all. One family even hired a lawyer who thinks that since the students aren’t forced to wear the shirts, everything should be perfectly fine.

But again, that’s missing the point. The problems are the school’s promotion of the Bible verse and the coercive nature of the shirts.

The district’s superintendent, Dr. Patrick Law, says he doesn’t know anyone on the team who complained about the message. But of course he wouldn’t know.

Imagine being on that team, where you’re surrounded by Jesus-lovin’ at all times. Are you really going to take a stand against it? I’m not saying you’d be kicked off the team, but who wants to be the least popular person in a sport where you’re dependent on the support and encouragement of your teammates? It’s much easier to just go along with the crowd and not raise a fuss.

As Katherine Stewart said so eloquently in The Good News Club about students who compete on teams where they’re surrounded by faith,

… they know that the locker room is no place for dissent, and that a refusal to participate [in the religious rituals] could easily be construed as a sign of a lack of commitment to the team. They have learned that they have to pray to play.

We don’t know who tipped off the FFRF to the problems at Parkersburg, but it wouldn’t be surprising to me if it was a member of the team who didn’t want to be publicly outed.

Of course, Todd Starnes and the usual defenders of Christian privilege are complaining about how their freedoms are under attack. Starnes says this is the work of “militant atheists,” proving that he knows very little about both law and war. To no one’s surprise, Starnes completely ignores the fact that the school’s website included the verse and that it was painted atop the gym doors. Those facts would destroy his narrative because they’re undoubtedly illegal.

Instead, he focuses on how no one complained about the motto for ten years. As if no one was bothered by this until FFRF came onto the scene. He ignores the possibility that no one said anything for so long out of fear of being harassed or picked on by “loving” Christians. Which is precisely what’s happening now.

Anyone complaining about the FFRF’s challenge needs to defend the verse painted in the gym and the verse on the school’s website. And while we’re at it, let’s see them defend all of those things if it were a verse from the Koran instead of the Bible.

They won’t do that, though. They’re too busy pretending like they’re upset because they can’t stamp lines from their holy book anywhere they want.

(Thanks to Brian and Daryl for the link)