Russian Sledges

VATICAN CITY (RNS) The Vatican’s culture ministry warned on Thursday (Jan. 31) that the Catholic Church risks losing future generations if it doesn’t learn how to understand young people, their language and their culture.

The Pontifical Council for Culture invited sociologists, web experts and theologians to a three-day, closed-door event on Feb. 6-9 aimed at studying “emerging youth cultures.”

According to a working paper released ahead of the meeting, the church risks “offering answers to questions that are not there” if it doesn’t learn “the cultural reality of young people.”

A study released last October by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life showed that young people are increasingly disconnected from religion, with one in three Americans aged 18-29 describing themselves as religiously unaffiliated.

The Rev. Melchor Sanchez de Toca, undersecretary of the Vatican’s culture department, said in an interview that the church’s youth problem is not just “quantitative” — evidenced by a decline in key indicators, such as baptisms and church attendance — but also “qualitative.”

The youth world, he said, has changed “radically,” but the church “is still offering what it has been offering for the past 500 years.”

“We keep on giving the same answers but the way questions are posed is now totally different.”

Even if youth culture is often marked by individualism, superficiality and hedonism, the council’s president, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, said during a Thursday press conference that its “diversity” is “not only negative” but “contains surprising seeds of fruitfulness and authenticity.”

In his effort to understand young people’s language and feelings, Ravasi confessed to listening to a CD by the late British pop singer Amy Winehouse, noting that “a quest for meaning emerges even from her distraught music and lyrics.”

In a first for a Vatican meeting, the event will be opened by a rock concert by Italian Christian rock band The Sun.

Participants, mostly bishops and Catholic lay leaders, will also hear from young Catholic activists from countries such as Indonesia and Madagascar, while American blogger Pia de Solenni will speak on the “emotional alphabet” of young generations.

The post Vatican admits it doesn’t fully understand youth culture appeared first on Religion News Service.

lumber:

Embroidered Dog Animation—Front and Back by Aubrey Longley-Cook

Want to kill a couple hours poring over imaginary topography? Over at The Fantasy Reader, there's an amazing index of maps from fantasy novels, covering everybody from Patrick Rothfuss to George R.R. Martin. Prepare to be drawn into realms of wonder. And mountains. Lots of mountains. [A Fantasy Reader, via Saladin Ahmed and Genreville] More »

Socializing doesn’t have to mean giving up control of your content by handing it over to a social network.

The CEO of Dropbox, Drew Houston, has told Technology Review more than once that he is building the “file system for the Internet” (see here and here). But news from the company yesterday suggests they may actually be enabling something more – decentralized social networking that doesn’t rely on everyone’s content being entrusted to one central store, such as Facebook.

MEXICO CITY -- Archaeologists say they have turned up about 150 skulls of human sacrifice victims in a field in central Mexico, one of the first times that such a large accumulation of severed heads has been found outside of a major pyramid or temple complex in Mexico.

Experts are puzzled by the unexpected find of such a large number of skulls at what appears to have been a small, unremarkable shrine. The heads were carefully deposited in rows or in small mounds, mostly facing east toward the rising sun, sometime between 660 and 860 A.D., a period when the nearby city-state of Teotihuacan had already declined but the Aztec empire, founded in 1325, was still centuries in the future.

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Established in 1913, Harvard University Press is a "leading publisher of convergent works in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences" and, as its name implies, it is the imprint of Harvard University. Facing challenges with making the transition to apps, digital reading devices, and web browsers using its previous identity — an honorable and traditional shield — Harvard University Press has introduced a new logo designed by New York, NY-based Chermayeff & Geismar.

Partner Sagi Haviv's solution — six equal crimson rectangles that form an abstract H that can also be seen as books on a shelf, windows, or a modern tablet — is simple enough that it will be effective both in traditional applications, such as book spines and title pages, and also in digital media such as app icons, browser icons, and ebooks. […] "The new identity also puts the emphasis on the Harvard name (previously obscured within the seal), underscoring the Press's historic and ongoing relationship with the University."
— Press materials provided by Chermayeff & Geismar

Hey, pssst… Don't tell anyone but the old logo was a shield with the usual vines and stuff and awkward typography in a circle (except that this was an oval so it's even weirder) which in turn had the Harvard Veritas shield in it, making it a doubley-super-powered traditional shield that gave gravitas and higher meaning to each and every author's published words and without it the whole imprint might be considered a sham. Worse, with a very corporate logo, Harvard University Press could look as if it had sold out. I am, of course, poking fun at the University of California situation and, while this is not the exact same thing, the "Before/After" image is almost the exact kind of change that so infuriates people associated with a university. Nevertheless, change is here. And this change is excellent.

The new logo is a wonderful abstraction of the letter "H" — it's the first thing I saw — as well as books on a shelf. Even before I read the press release or explanation it was obvious what it was. And to do it with six chubby sticks is magnificently simple. It puts it right up there with other iconic university press logos like MIT Press and the old Yale University Press. The typography is a simple serif that doesn't do much, which is really all it needs to do: spell out the name and move on. A great redesign that brings us one step closer to a world without centuries-old shield logos.

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The first thing I thought when I saw this "now you see it, now you don't" kitchen in Germany is how nice it'd be to have the ability to hide a messy post-dinner kitchen with the press of a button, especially if you live in a studio apartment. I don't think that was their primary design consideration, but still. See more photos below: More

For years, I've talked about how the Internet has affected the process of choosing a baby name. It has helped shift our baseline for assessing popularity and "uniqueness" from internal ("How does this name strike me? Have I met a lot of people with that name?") to external ("How many Google results does this name return?")

A baby name choice, though, is just the starting point of the lifelong name experience. The more we live online, the more the first impressions we make are via our names. And given the reality of online life, that means that search results can shape the impressions we make on strangers...even if the results have nothing to do with us as individuals.

A new study demonstrates one pernicious example of this. Latanya Sweeney, a Harvard Professor of Government and Technology, discovered that web searches for her name frequently yielded advertising results with texts like "Latanya Sweeney, Arrested?" and "Check Latanya Sweeney's Arrests." As Dr. Sweeney had no arrest history, it seemed likely that the advertisers were keying on her name itself -- and perhaps on her distinctly African-American given name.

Dr. Sweeney generated lists of characteristically white and characteristically black first-last name pairs. She then ran searches on these names, and found that the "black" names were significantly more likely to generate ads suggestive of an arrest than the "white" names. The arrest-focused ads appeared regardless of whether the background-search firm presenting the ad actually had any arrest records for that name. (Edited for clarity per communication from Dr. Sweeney.)

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Sesame Street did a series of tweets the other day in the style of The Monster at the End of This Book, which is a favorite of mine and my kids.

Grover: That tweet, did it say there was a MONSTER at the end of it?

Grover: It did? Well, please do not retweet that tweet!

Grover: YOU RETWEETED THE TWEET!

Tags: books   Sesame Street   The Monster at the End of This Book   Twitter

You probably know that owls can rotate their heads a remarkable 270 degrees in either direction. It's practically their trademark — but it's a move that by all measure should result in a massive stroke or embolism, the result of torn blood vessel linings and the onset of fatal clots. Nobody's understood the physiology that lets owls do this — until now. More »

Jim Jarmusch has finally released the first glimpse of his long-awaited vampire movie Only Lovers Left Alive. We can not wait to see what Jarmusch will do with this genre, but he's already won us over by casting Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton as the starring pair of vampire lovers. More »

Location: Online
Specialty: Laser-cut city maps
Price Range:($$) Mid-Range


Forged out of a fascination for urban life, designers Chauntelle Trinh and Eckard Buscher have created a series of paper-cut cityscapes capturing the distinct intricacies that make urban landscapes so unique. More

Tyler Cowen gets the best email. Case in point is this advice from a former cab driver on the best way to get your stolen car back:

If your car is ever stolen, your first calls should be to every cab company in the city. You offer a $50 reward to the driver who finds it AND a $50 reward to the dispatcher on duty when the car is found. The latter is to encourage dispatchers on shift to continually remind drivers of your stolen car. Of course you should call the police too but first things first. There are a lot more cabs than cops so cabbies will find it first -- and they're more frequently going in places cops typically don't go, like apartment and motel complex parking lots, back alleys etc. Lastly, once the car is found, a swarm of cabs will descend and surround it because cabbies, like anyone else, love excitement and want to catch bad guys.

Tags: crime   how to   taxis   Tyler Cowen

Take a look inside the mind of Indiana Jones. An old draft for Lawrence Kasdan's Raiders of the Lost Ark script has appeared over at Cinephilia & Beyond with tons of notes in the margins from Harrison Ford himself. More »

The Ultimate in Otter Relaxation

More at the Daily Otter! Via Das Otterhaus

Big announcement coming soon!

Like Cyrano giving advice to Christian from underneath Roxanne’s balcony, now you too can can advise young suitors trying to win the heart of the object of their affection.

[Lauren] had the idea of using objective, third-party observers checking in on her dating activities and giving advice as to what she should do next. Yes, she’s streaming her dates over the Internet and asking for advice from Mechanical Turk workers.

The idea behind this project isn’t that [Lauren] isn’t looking for advice from her own Cyrano, but rather to open up new, previously unexpected possibilities. Turk workers will watch the stream while [Lauren] presents them with options telling her to smile more, laugh, change the subject, or ask a question. [Lauren] receives these results as a text message, where she’ll comply with the Internet’s wishes and hope her date doesn’t go horribly awry.

It’s an interesting project to say the least, but we’ve got to wonder about the quality of the advice given from her online advisers. Turk workers do take their jobs more seriously than random people on the Internet, so barring an invasion from /b/, [Lauren]‘s night might just go alright.

Filed under: lifehacks

The Family Research Council, an anti-gay hate group, has filed amicus briefs in both the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8 cases before the Supreme Court. In these briefs, FRC claims that gays and lesbians do not deserve nondiscrimination protections because of their sexual orientation, but adds that even if they did, the Court could still rule against them in these cases. The group explains this by pointing out that gay people can enter opposite-sex couples, and thus laws like DOMA and Prop 8 do not discriminate specifically against gay people, just same-sex couples:

In his concurring opinion in Andersen v. King County, Justice J. M. Johnson noted that the state DOMA “does not distinguish between persons of heterosexual orientation and homosexual orientation,” and identified a recent case in which a man and a woman, both identified as “gay,” entered into a valid opposite-sex marriage. It is apparent, therefore, that the right to enter into a marriage that would be recognized under § 3 of DOMA “is not restricted to (self-identified) heterosexual couples,” but extends to all adults without regard to “their sexual orientation.”  Contrary to the understanding of the California Supreme Court,  a law that restricts marriage (or the benefits thereof) to opposite-sex couples does not, on its face, discriminate between heterosexuals and homosexuals.  The classification in the statute is not between men and women, or between heterosexuals and homosexuals, but between opposite-sex (married) couples and same-sex (married) couples.

FRC could have used the same argument in 1967 to defend bans on interracial marriage, something like, The classification in the statute is not between white people and colored people, but between same-race couples and mixed-race couples, differentiated for the purposes of racial integrity. Just as it’s clear such an argument would still be discrimination based on race, so too are DOMA and Prop 8 discrimination based on sexual orientation.

FRC relies on its own myths to support its other myths. The brief argues essentially that gay people don’t exist — that their identities are not immutable and can only be defined by behavior. Only with this narrow conception of the lives of gay people would any of these arguments hold up, and fortunately reality modern-day reality does not allow for such naivete.

It’s worth noting that RightWingWatch also noticed a stunning contradiction in FRC’s briefs. In an attempt to dissuade the Court from recognizing sexual orientation as a suspect class (like race and gender), FRC argues in the DOMA brief that gays are a powerful group, particularly given the victories for marriage equality in the November 2012 elections. However, in the Prop 8 brief, FRC argues the opposite: since 30 states have banned same-sex marriage, there is no “emerging awareness” that the right to marry extends to same-sex couples. In other words, FRC’s version of “truth” is whichever spin supports its argument against equality.

“Lazaro Dinh was initially issued a new license after presenting his marriage certificate at his local DMV office and paying a $20 fee, just as newly married women are required to do when they adopt their husband’s name.
“It was easy. When the government issues you a new passport you figure you’re fine,” he said.
More than a year later Dinh received a letter from Florida’s DMV last December accusing him of “obtaining a driving license by fraud,” and advising him that his license would be suspended at the end of the month. Ironically, it was addressed to Lazaro Dinh.
“I thought it was a mistake,” he said.
But when he called the state DMV office in Tallahassee he said he was told he had to go to court first in order to change his name legally, a process that takes several months and has a $400 filing fee.
When he explained he was changing his name due to marriage, he was told ‘that only works for women,’” he said.”

- Florida man accused of fraud after name change in ‘act of love’ - Yahoo! News

The video for "How Long," from How To Destroy Angels' debut album, Welcome Oblivion, imagines a terrifying, dystopian future where man hunts man for survival.

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emmyc:

beatonna:

Heyyy maybe you’ve seen that first picture being posted all over facebook?  I know I have!  I also know that the jokes were originally by Ben Kling, as you can see by following this link!  There are also more where they came from!  Cute stuff. 

Now jokes like “Be Mein” could be pretty coincidental but on the whole I don’t think so!  I just wanted to direct you to the original artist, because hey, fight that good proper attribution fight.  Facebook is a no mans land of nothing attributed to anyone ever.

Ben is my IRL friend and I hate the internet and I’m gonna smack all you fuckin’ joke-stealing jerks up OK? Also, you tasteless weirdo who re-purposed his jokes, I feel really sorry that you have 0 design sense and couldn’t see that his drawings were wayyyyyy cuter valentines than your crappy photoshops. AARRGHH

If you like Ben’s original cool cute valentines, you can purchase them here!! http://www.redbubble.com/people/benkling/collections/179130-dictator-valentines?product_type=greeting-card

Internet people: stop taking credit for things you didn’t do. Just stop! You gain nothing from it. There’s no shame in not being creative so there’s no need to steal someone else’s work to pretend like you are.

By Meghann Wilhoite

I have a confession to make: I have a terrible memory. Well, for some things, anyway. I can name at least three movies and TV shows that Mary McDonnell has been in off the top of my head (Evidence of Blood, Donnie Darko, Battlestar Galactica), and rattle off the names of the seven Harry Potter books, but you take away that Beethoven piano score that I’ve been playing from since I was 14, and my fingers freeze on the keyboard. My inability to memorize music was in fact the reason I gave up on my dream of being a concert pianist—though, in retrospect, this was probably the right move for me given how lonely I would get during hours-long practice sessions…

I’ve since come to terms with my memory “deficiency,” but a recent New York Times article by Anthony Tommasini on the hegemonic influence of memorization in certain classical performing traditions brought some old feelings to the fore. Why did I have to memorize the music I was performing, especially considering how gifted I was at reading music notation (if I may say so myself)?

As Tommasini points out (citing this article by Stephen Hough), the tradition of performing from memory as a solo instrumentalist is a relatively young one, introduced by virtuosi like Franz Liszt and Clara Schumann in the 1800s. Before that, it was considered a bit gauche to play from memory, as the assumption was that if you were playing without a score in front of you, you were improvising an original piece.

I should be clear at this point that I have nothing against musicians performing from memory. Indeed some performers have the opposite problem to mine: the sight of music notation during performance is a stressor, not a helper. Nonetheless, I do feel that the stronghold that memorization has on classical soloist performance culture needs to be slackened.

One memory in particular related to memorization haunts me still. After sweating through a Bach organ trio sonata during a master class in the early 00s, the dear late David Craighead gave me some gentle praise and encouraged me to memorize the piece. “Make it your own” were his words. I was devastated. How on earth was I going to memorize such a complex piece?

In spite of my devastated feelings, I heard a nagging voice in the back of my mind telling me Dr. Craighead was right. If only I could memorize the piece, it truly would be my own. I’d heard before from other teachers that the best way to completely “ingest” a piece was to practice it until you didn’t need the score anymore. The lone recital I gave from memory during my college years was admittedly an exhilarating experience; I definitely felt that I had a type of ownership over the pieces, even if I was in constant terror of having a memory lapse. In hindsight, though, I believe my sense of ownership was not a result of score-freedom, but from the hours and hours (and hours) I spent in the practice room preparing for the recital.

Whether or not you are moved by my struggles (being a little facetious here), I think that, in 2013, it is time for us to acknowledge the multiplicity of talents a classical soloist may possess, and stop trying to squeeze everyone into the same box.

Meghann Wilhoite is an Assistant Editor at Grove Music/Oxford Music Online, music blogger, and organist. Follow her on Twitter at @megwilhoite. Read her previous blog posts on Sibelius, the pipe organ, John Zorn, West Side Story, and other subjects.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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The post To memorize or not to memorize appeared first on OUPblog.

Chai tea is one of the “it” flavorings of the ’10s, and Yahara Bay, which produces the V Bourbon we reviewed a few days ago, takes a different tack than the various chai liqueurs on the market.

Instead, the company flavors vodka with chai to create a unique (and more powerful) spirit.

The color of whiskey, Seraphine smells big and chai-like, with that unmistakeable cinnamon/allspice+tea character on the nose. There’s raisins, cardamom, and nutty notes in there. It’s altogether a lot of fun. The body is a different animal, though, and wholly unexpected. Instead of that big, creamy rush, what comes along is a surprisingly thin, and not entirely flavorful animal.

The initial flavor component is chai-like and in keeping with the nose, but it isn’t more than a second until the vodka base takes over. It’s devoid of much character, just a simple, and rather watery undercarriage that wipes away the deliciousness of the chai. It’s a thin and dull direction for such a promising spirit to take, and makes me wonder how exactly you’d use something like this. Liqueurs, with their stronger flavors and smoother bodies, would go further in cocktails, and some of them work well on their own. Seraphine would require a lot of doctoring — one recipe I’ve seen includes non-dairy creamer — to make the magic happen.

C+ / $29 / yaharabay.com

I’m seeing double! Four Borises! Alright, I hope you enjoyed that reference to The Simpsons classic “Homie The Clown,” but we’ve got business to attend to. Japanese experimental-metal heroes Boris are heading to the United States with some very special plans. In a tour that totes itself as being “from the past, the present, and through to the future,” the band is taking residency for two nights in a number of US cities. If you’ve got a very specific bucket list that involves seeing Boris two nights in a row without having to leave town, this is your time.

If you’re not that person, there’s still good reason to go to both Boris dates. For the first date in each city, the band promises performances of their all-time classics, along with new songs never performed in the US before. That said, those all-time classics presumably don’t include any parts of the group’s 2000 album Flood, which the band will be performing most of during each residency’s second night. Those second nights will also include a noise/drone/experimental set. If that wasn’t enough (though it should be, you greedy parasites), the band will also be selling a limited edition tour-only release at their merch table.

“But what if I live in Austin and I wanted to see them at Austin Psych Fest?” you say. Well, they’re playing that, too.

Boris dates:

04.27.13 - Austin, TX - Carson Creek (Austin Psych Fest)
05.01.13 - Washington, DC - Rock and Roll Hotel
05.02.13 - Washington, DC - Rock and Roll Hotel
05.04.13 - Allston, MA - Brighton Music Hall
05.05.13 - Allston, MA - Brighton Music Hall
05.06.13 - New York, NY - Le Poisson Rouge
05.07.13 - New York, NY - Le Poisson Rouge
05.10.13 - Chicago, IL - Lincoln Hall
05.11.13 - Chicago, IL - Lincoln Hall
05.18.13 - Seattle, WA - The Crocodile
05.19.13 - Seattle, WA - The Crocodile
05.21.13 - San Francisco, CA - Rickshaw Stop
05.22.13 - San Francisco, CA - Rickshaw Stop
05.23.13 - Los Angeles, CA - The Echoplex
05.24.13 - Los Angeles, CA - The Echoplex

• Boris: http://borisheavyrocks.com

Tree house

Last year, Courtney Stanton organized a conference for game developers whose 12-person speaker roster was half women, and half men.

And she did it without considering the gender of applicants.

In the world of tech conferences, that gender ratio is almost unheard of — let alone getting there without actively saying yes to certain applicants just because you know they’re female.

Stanton is a product manager for a video game publisher. She wanted to put together a conference for game developers, make it accessible — and get onstage speakers more diverse than, as she put it, “the same four straight white men agree(ing) with each other on some panel.”

How did she do it? By actively recruiting women through every possible channel. She attended events and spoke to women. She encouraged women she knew to submit speaking proposals. She recruited online. She met people for coffee and promised to mentor them, review their slide decks, help them brainstorm — whatever it took to get women to apply.

That’s because, as she points out, women tend to be less assertive than men in promoting themselves. In other words, if you ask a room equally full of women and men to submit proposals to speak at a conference, the men are going to respond in far greater numbers than the women.

To balance the submissions, you need to work harder to recruit women.

Once she had proposals in hand, the balance of submissions was roughly evenly split between women and men. Stanton was able to pick what she thought were outstanding choices for each session. Result: A 50-50 split, without compromising on the quality.

Since she published her post before her event, the No Show Conference, actually took place, I contacted Stanton this week to ask her how the conference had been received.

“The actual conference went really well — the quality of the content was stellar and, across the board, very highly rated by attendees,” she told me in an email.

“I think the biggest thing the event has led to is other conferences using my approach,” Stanton added, mentioning JSConf, a programming conference in Berlin last fall, which credited her example for helping it get 25 percent female speakers.

“I’m starting to see more people talking about this idea of recruiting for submissions instead of holding spaces open for specific minority representation,” she said.

It’s an approach I’ve used when recruiting employees, whether at VentureBeat or elsewhere. If you don’t make an active effort to widen the circle of candidates, you’re just going to draw from the same pools you always draw from.

VentureBeat also produces a lot of conferences, usually with lots of dudes onstage — the photo above, from the last DEMO conference we produced, is an exception I’m especially proud of. We’re actively working on increasing the representation of women onstage, starting with our upcoming Mobile Summit. Stanton’s approach will help.

If you value diversity, you need to make an effort to recruit from groups that you aren’t part of or which aren’t usually represented in your company or your event.

But once you’ve done the outreach, consider the applicants on their merits alone. That’s the only way to ensure excellence in your outcome, whether that’s your startup team or your speaker roster.

Final note: Stanton said her conference actually opened doors for several women, who went on to speak at other conferences after making their first public-speaking appearance at hers. Talk about a ripple effect.

Hat tip: Hacker News and Attendly

Photo credit: Stephen Brashear/Flickr

Filed under: Entrepreneur, Games, VentureBeat

Crazy article from the Smithsonian about a Russian family that disappeared into the Siberian wilderness in 1936 and had no contact with other people for more than 40 years. In the process, they missed World War II, the Moon landing, and the start of the Cold War.

...beside a stream there was a dwelling. Blackened by time and rain, the hut was piled up on all sides with taiga rubbish-bark, poles, planks. If it hadn't been for a window the size of my backpack pocket, it would have been hard to believe that people lived there. But they did, no doubt about it.... Our arrival had been noticed, as we could see.

The low door creaked, and the figure of a very old man emerged into the light of day, straight out of a fairy tale. Barefoot. Wearing a patched and repatched shirt made of sacking. He wore trousers of the same material, also in patches, and had an uncombed beard. His hair was disheveled. He looked frightened and was very attentive.... We had to say something, so I began: 'Greetings, grandfather! We've come to visit!'

The old man did not reply immediately.... Finally, we heard a soft, uncertain voice: 'Well, since you have traveled this far, you might as well come in.'

Super fascinating. This short documentary (in Russian) shows something of how the Lykov's lived. (via @davidchang)

Tags: Russia