Russian Sledges

Matt Smith continues to enjoy himself at this years San Diego Comic Con, and our friends over at BBC America have evidenced this with their latest video showing Smith walking the floors of Comic Con in a Bart Simpson mask!

Watch the video, below:

[youtube:mU0aD91nGKU]

[Source: BBC America]

Historical Map: General Form of Rapid Transit System, Winnipeg, 1959

Or to give it its full title: 1956 Populations and Estimated 1981 Populations of the Four Natural Sectors of Greater Winnipeg also General Form of Rapid Transit System Designed to Meet Basic Transit Needs of 1981 Notwithstanding Street Congestion

A lovely old planning map from the “Future Development of Public Transit in Greater Winnipeg” report by Norman D. Wilson. It shows the very general concept of a proposed rapid transit system along with the expected population growth in the greater Winnipeg area in the far-off distant future of 1981. The system — as outlined in the report, presumably — is expected to handle the transit needs of that future, “notwithstanding street congestion”.

(Source: Manitoba Historical Maps/Flickr)

CullenEllermanPhotography has added a photo to the pool:

A noisy little Snowy Owl chick watches us from behind the fence in its enclosure at the Highland Wildlife Park in Scotland. So ugly, yet so cute

jammo s has added a photo to the pool:

One of Sculthorpe Moors Barn Owl chicks being ringed

Svenni and his Icelandic birds. has added a photo to the pool:

Asio flammeus. Juvenile. Kjalarnes. 37-39cm. 320g. WS 95-110cm.

andrea.dusk has added a photo to the pool:

Tom Dean. has added a photo to the pool:

At the age of eighteen, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway who I thought was the catwoman woman but I googled it and they were different people. But Shakespeare was still happy with her.

harmonicakind:

sharknado passes the bechdel test

let that sink in for a minute

When commenting on a recent rape case, a Tsinghua University law professor, Yi Yanyou argued in Weibo that “It does more harm to rape a good woman than to rape a bargirl, a dancing girl, an escort or a prostitute.” Such argument echoes with the lawyer of gang rape suspect, Li Tianyi, the 17-year-old son of Chinese general Li Shuangjiang, who presented in the court that the gang rape is a case in which people “take turn to have sex” because the victim was a bargirl. Off Beat China has collected and translated Chinese netizens’ reactions.

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Here’s one way to fail at integrating Myanmar’s Muslim minority: don’t let them marry into the larger community. A Buddhist monk in Myanmar is calling on the government to bar Buddhist women from marrying Muslims without the consent of their parents and local officials.

According to the monk, U Wirathu, 2.5 million people have now signed a petition for the measure. (Some may have believed the petition was simply a call to protect Buddhist women, the Bangkok-based Irrawaddy Daily reports.)

Violence between Buddhists and Muslims has taken over parts of the formerly reclusive Southeast Asian nation, which has only just started to open up its economy and political system. The measure, which the monk tells the Irrawaddy Daily will be sent to Parliament only adds to tensions. In Youtube and DVD sermons, U Wirathu has been saying that Myanmar’s Muslim men marry Buddhist women and pressure them to give up their religion. He’s also accused Muslim women of purposely having more children in order to boost their numbers; Muslims currently account for just 5% of the population.

Fighting in Myanmar over the past year has killed hundreds and displaced over 150,000 people, mostly Muslims. (Myanmar is now the largest source of refugees in Southeast Asia.) The government’s meager efforts to stop the violence is chipping away at Myanmar’s image as Asia’s next frontier of economic growth. One worrying sign, according to a June report by the political risk firm Maplecroft, is that violence has spread far beyond the Rakhine State, where it started last year. Clashes taking place near the capital and in Yangon, Myanmar’s most populous city, could be destabilizing for foreign investment and development. The monks have called on a boycott of Muslim businesses, which dominate in sectors like transportation and construction.

It’s unclear how seriously lawmakers would consider Wirathu’s proposal. Myanmar’s opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi opposes the measure, as do several women’s rights groups in the country.

The Tumblr What Netflix Does is drawing attention to the company’s practice of showing wider-screen movies — films shot in the “Scope” formats, in the neighborhood of 2.39:1 instead of the standard widescreen ratio of 16:9.

Science works by proposing and disposing of hypotheses. Hypotheses come from a lot of places: previous research results, modeling, inspiration, and plain old intuition. Our intuition is a good source of scientific hypotheses because our species has evolved to possess an implicit model of the natural world that allows us to move, eat, balance, and so forth. Of course, this model is not perfect nor is it explicit. Which is why we need science. Nevertheless, it is a good source of hypotheses, and our intuitions about where things go when we throw them are an excellent place to begin elaborating, say, a classical mechanical account of projectile motion, regardless of where in the world you are when you throw something. This is because physical laws operate uniformly on earth, modulo extremely advanced concerns in quantum physics or the philosophy of science.

Given this, it may appear reasonable to suppose that our intuition could be a good source of hypotheses regarding society and culture. After all, humans are a single species and evolved in more or less the same way, and so the intuitions we have about how we live our lives should apply to all human commuities.

In fact, however, this is not a case. There is considerable variation in the organization of human conduct. There are evolutionary reasons for this since, as you can imagine, it results in populations that are highly adaptive. ‘Culture’ is the term that anthropologists use to describe the arbitrary, conventional structures of meaning which orient conduct in human communities. The laws of physics operate uniformly across the planet, while cultural systems vary. Anthropology is the science which studies  human behavioral diversity. Because culturally-influenced conduct can take radically different forms in different places, it is foolhardy to use intuitions developed in one culture as a source of hypotheses about another. For this reason, it is reckless practice for natural scientists to stray into the expert territory of our discipline simply because they believe that if they are good at testing hypotheses in one realm they must be good at it in another.

A good analogy to using the intuitions of one culture to to generate hypotheses about another culture would be to imagine a non-physicist with pre-theoretical intuitions about motion creating hypotheses about life aboard the international space station. Expectations about momentum, weight, and the behavior of fluids will founder in a micro-gravity environment. Because they have not had experience in microgravity, their intuitions will be incorrect.

Simply because you are very good at shark embryology does not mean that you are ready to speak authoritatively about human societies. And, I am sure you will agree, vice versa.

Often times specialized language in the life sciences is considered as a sign that those fields are mature and specialized, while specialized language in the human sciences is merely obfuscation or meaningless jargon. There seems to be an assumption that because biologists engage in marriage, commensality, and linguistic interaction they should, in principle, be able to understand all technical writing about these subjects. And yet somehow biologists think it obvious that layman cannot understand the the technical terminology of biochemistry, despite the fact that all laymen have metabolisms.

The analogy to microgravity is useful because demonstrates two other things.

First, our intuitions about the physical world are not completely wrong in micro-gravity. Because the space station and Los Angeles are located in the same universe, there are underlying basic similarities between both environments, and humans can adapt (because they are cultural) to both of them. Similarly, it would be wrong to argue that it is prima facie invalid to use intuitions developed in one culture to form hypotheses about another. It simply results in hypotheses which are deeply flawed, but which nonetheless have considerable appeal to people because they seem intuitively correct to them.

In fact, anthropologists spend a major part of their time dealing over and over again with hypotheses which have been definitely proven wrong — black people are ‘genetically’ good at singing, heterosexual monogamy is ‘natural’ — but which are consistently reinvented by people because these hypotheses appeal to those people’s (culturally shaped) intuitions. When anthropologists refuse to engage in discussion with laymen about these hypotheses, we are sometimes accused of being obsessed with political correctness or opposed to the ideals of scientific argumentation. In fact, the situation is somewhat different: we are acting like scientists who are too weary to engage with laymen who argue that a geocentric model of the universe is correct, and who furthermore adduce evidence to support their claims by pointing out that there is much evidence on their side. For instance, sources from the Internet (often from thirteenth century Europe) arguing for a geocentric view of the universe as well as the obvious fact that the sun sets regularly while the earth does not move.

Just as it takes a special sort of biologist to spend all of his time explaining evolution to creationists, so too does it take a special sort of anthropologist to give up their research and teaching and spend precious time explaining to the public sphere why their intuitions are wrong. It is a sign of progress that we consider some questions settled, at least until disconfirming data — not mere intuitive dissatisfaction with our findings — is made evident.

Second, just as the space station and Los Angeles occupy the same physical universe, so too do human communities share an underlying biological constitution. Just as our intuitions about the physical world can be improved through examination of many different physical environments (I imagine this would include microgravity, nanoscale, and low-temperature environments) so too can our intuitions regarding social life be improved by learning about places with different cultural orders. In making this argument about our intuitions I am not arguing that science is impossible or that people from other cultures are fundamentally inscrutable.

Indeed, it is to the credit of physicists that they have been able to develop models of the world that are sufficiently general that they can explain the dynamics of movement in both microgravity and normal Earth gravity. Indeed, Microgravity is a compelling experimental environment precisely because it allows us to increase the power of scientific models in a wide variety of scientific disciplines. Anthropology, similarly, requires cross-cultural research to develop theoretically. And this is the goal of (many) anthropologists.

Expertise in one academic discipline does not automatically translate to competence in another academic discipline. It is not the case that one discipline’s present is somehow destined to be another’s future. Different disciplines develop in different ways theoretically and methodologically, because of the nature of the object they study and the questions they are asking.

I'm going to put this here, because I'm in love. And I can't stop watching Janelle Monáe dance her butt off. I suspect you will share my opinion.

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I had mapped out a northwest route through Louisiana (starting in Baton Rouge) for the next two days, with four stops over about 250 miles, each with a hoped-for (and budget-friendly) theme: Mamou for music, Lecompte for pie, Natchitoches for history and Shreveport for art.

Totentanz #2 (Germany) 1988 (auf Deutsch) Editor: “Arno Brettraeger” (+Mitarbeiter: Thomas Hanzen)

A nice one from Germany (thanks much to B.B. for this great classic from the late 80′s!). If you can read German, you are in luck, if not, still some great content..check out the early Nuclear Blast ad for example, back when the label was punk (!) Features/interviews with the likes of Assassin, At War, Coroner, Deathrow, Solitude, Living Death, Revelation, Rage, Poltergeist, Tanakard, Voivod, and much more…

Entrance to the abandoned House-Monument of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Republic of Bulgaria. 

Google - Searching for “kerning” in Google, the letters in the word “kerning” have extra spacing. Searching “keming" does the opposite.

Elmer T. Lee

Elmer T. Lee, 93, the iconic master distiller whose name graces one of the bourbons made at Buffalo Trace, died Tuesday after a brief illness.

He was a pioneer in making single-barrel bourbons, and brought his first -- Blanton's -- to market in 1984. He retired in 1985, but was convinced to return to work as brand ambassador and master distiller emeritus for Buffalo Trace.

"We have lost a wonderful friend today, and he will be missed terribly," said Mark Brown, president and CEO of Sazerac, parent company of Buffalo Trace.

"In the world of making really fine whiskey, the role of master distiller is pivotal, but Elmer's meaning to those he met, came to know, and worked with closely extended far beyond that of a master distiller," Brown said.

"Elmer defined, in the simplest terms, what it means to be a great American: hard working, self-made, courageous, honest, kind, humble and humorous."

Lee was born in 1919 on a tobacco farm near Peaks Mill, Franklin County, KY. During World War II he served as a radar bombardier on a B-29, flying missions against Japan through 1945. In 1946, he was honorably discharged and returned home to study engineering at the University of Kentucky, where he graduated with honors in 1949.

In September 1949, Lee began working in the engineering department of the George T. Stagg Distillery in Frankfort. By 1966, he became plant superintendent, then plant manager in 1969. In 1984, he introduced Blanton's, the world's first single-barrel bourbon.

Lee was inducted into the Bourbon Hall of Fame in 2001, received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Whisky Advocate magazine in 2002, and a Lifetime Achievement Award and Hall of Fame induction from Whisky Magazine in 2012.

OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

The difference between this and the occupation of the Wisconsin Capitol Building is that Wisconsin is full of white people who are unlikely to be shot by police. I really hope these kids get out of this OK. :(

Original Source

Jay-Z has officially become Jay Z. The rapper has formally dropped the hyphen from his name, albeit so quietly that no one really noticed for a while. Mr. Z was first listed as Jay (no hyphen) Z in the liner notes for 2011’s Watch The Throne, and his name was recently changed on iTunes, but no one really pointed it out until Billboard this week. The publication says it got official confirmation of the punctuation switch straight from the rapper’s label, issuing notice to all the copyeditors out there. It’s not as big a nomenclatural story as Snoop Dogg changing his moniker to Snoop Lion, but it’s a bit of a shake-up all the same, maybe.

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A group of satanists say they’ve given the controversial Westboro Baptist Church a taste of its own medicine, performing a same-sex ritual at the grave of the mother of the church’s founder. Members of the Satanist Temple performed on Sunday what its spokesman describes as a “pink mass” an admittedly made-up ritual, celebrating gay love, at the grave in Meridian, Miss. Spokesman Lucien Greaves doffed a headdress made of horns as two male couples, and a female couple recited scripture, lit candles and made out over the grave. Members then posthumously declared Catherine Johnston, the mother of Westboro’s founder Fred Phelps, a lesbian.

Neko Case just helped Funny Or Die “launch” its new video series, the Dressing Room Sessions, with a totally awkward performance. It’s a lark, of course, but the clip below finds A.V. Fest headliner Case, Undercover veteran Kelly Hogan, and the rest of Case’s band crammed into a vintage store’s tiny dressing room, ostensibly to premiere the band’s new single, “Man.” Watch it if you like Case, Hogan, or footage of fake shoppers rolling their eyes.

For those who actually want to see Case perform “Man” along with a number of other songs, tickets for A.V. Fest are on sale now. On sale now, goddammit! 

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Detroit on Thursday became the largest city in U.S. history to file for bankruptcy, as the state-appointed emergency manager filed for Chapter 9 protection.

OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

My bad — everything is still terrible!

Last night was the 2013 MLB All-Star game. Ah, America’s pastime! Who doesn’t love a good baseball game? And what better way to open up America’s game then with a heartfelt rendition of ‘God Bless America’?

And…wait, a minute. Who is this guy coming out to sing God Bless AMERICA?

wow! Who is this unAmerican Spanish Mexican spic illegal foreigner terrorist singing ‘God Bless AMERICA’ at a game of baseball, our AMERICAN pastime?

Why, it’s New York born, United States citizen of Puerto Rican descent, Marc Anthony!

Look at this 100% American grammy award winning recording artist sing ‘God Bless AMERICA’ at the All-Star game. Absolutely disgusting. And the All-Star game was at Citi Field in NYC borough of Queens too! We can’t let this happen in Queens, the most ethnically diverse urban area in the world!

Spanish people!? Heartbreaking! We cannot let America become some sort of melting pot!

Yeah! Shouldn’t you be FROM America!? Like, sorry, New York City just doesn’t cut it.

Yeah, America! CLEAN. IT. UP. And “it" being anyone who LOOKS foreign!

But, Marc Anthony IS an American artist…

haha. Silly me. That doesn’t matter. HE MAKES A LIVING SINGING SONGS IN SPANISH. The devil’s language! And making a living from such a thing? A crime in the good ole’ U.S. of A!

And why get someone who makes money off of singing in some foreign language when you can get a true patriotic American…like Ke$ha!

Yeah! Mexicans, Castro, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Marc Anthony…they’re all the same anyway!

"Marc Anthony? Unamerican! Marc Anthony is Spanish!"

And there lies the real issue. The fact that Marc Anthony is an American citizen born in the United States does not matter. The point here is someone who is “NOT LIKE US" (white males) can not be a REAL American!

You see. Marc Anthony is from New York…but he doesn’t LOOK like it. I assume the last time Josh here has been to New York was about 100 years ago. But, what is the world coming to now-a-days!

And you can see here again. Being of Puerto Rican descent means you’re not a TRUE American. I mean, what do you think? It isn’t like Puerto Rico’s a part of the United States or something!

But hey, at least there’s one racist out there who sees the irony in this all…

God Bless Spain Mexico Puerto Rico AMERICA! Let’s play ball!

Original Source

Yesterday I posted a video of a common nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos) singing a lovely and complex song. Some readers thought it would make a nice ringtone or alarm and, sure enough, reader Cremnomaniac extracted the song as an MP3, tweaked it a bit, and made it available for 24 hours at the link below.  His post was at 8:41 pm yesterday (Wednesday), so you have until this evening to download it. Here’s his/her comment:

Here is the MP3 for anyone interested.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6iu2goojtjw7hgo/Luscinia.mp3

I will leave it open until this time tomorrow. I’ve edited it slightly to remove some of the larger silences only. It’s 39 seconds and 1.3Mb.
I must say that seeing the modulation and timings of the song in graphic form is incredible. The the patterns and precision are immediately recognizable.

I don’t know how to turn MP3s into ringtones or alarms, but I’m sure we have plenty of tech-savvy readers who can do it.

Do post below if you’re using it.

Devious global thief Carmen Sandiego may be making her way back to PBS stations. The network Instagrammed a picture (gleaned from Interpol, no doubt) of Sandiego’s signature hat and gloves with the note, “Where in the world did this come from? Stay tuned for something awesome!” It updated the page shortly thereafter with a not-so-vague clue, saying, “This is not about new episodes, but will be appreciated by any ‘90s kid.” Lest anyone be mildly confused, the “actual” (read: official) Carmen Sandiego Tweeted, “If I were to re-air my old PBS episodes, would you watch me?” There’s no confirmation of actual airdates yet, but the mere suggestion that reruns of the show could be coming back is enough to excite an old gumshoe all the same. Time to bone up on the ol’ giant Africa map.

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