Luke.stirling

Maybe you remember your childhood Atari or that rec room NES, but today's kids are growing up with mobile games, and sixth-grader Madeline Messer has noticed something weird. Read the rest

When men are twenty-five years old, they are at their drinking peak: 13 drinks a week. Women peak at age 40, drinking about 4 alcoholic beverages a week. Read the rest

“Our notions about happiness entrap us. We forget that they are just ideas. Our idea of happiness can prevent us from actually being happy.”

- Thich Nhat Hanh

jenny holzer

You probably know that Mars hasn't always been so barren, but have you wondered what it was like in its heyday? You almost wouldn't recognize it, according to an international team of scientists. They've used six years of atmospheric monitoring to de...

i realize this is a bit of a longer post, but i truly couldn’t find a way to quote it and still do it justice.

h/t to feministlibrarian for the lead on this brilliant analogy by rockstar  dinosaur  pirate princess

Whoever you are initiating sexytimes with, just make sure they are actually genuinely up for it. That’s it. It’s not hard. Really.

If you’re still struggling, just imagine instead of initiating sex, you’re making them a cup of tea.

You say “hey, would you like a cup of tea?” and they go “omg fuck yes, I would fucking LOVE a cup of tea! Thank you!*” then you know they want a cup of tea.

If you say “hey, would you like a cup of tea?” and they um and ahh and say, “I’m not really sure…” then you can make them a cup of tea or not, but be aware that they might not drink it, and if they don’t drink it then – this is the important bit –  don’t make them drink it. You can’t blame them for you going to the effort of making the tea on the off-chance they wanted it; you just have to deal with them not drinking it. Just because you made it doesn’t mean you are entitled to watch them drink it.

If they say “No thank you” then don’t make them tea. At all. Don’t make them tea, don’t make them drink tea, don’t get annoyed at them for not wanting tea. They just don’t want tea, ok?

They might say “Yes please, that’s kind of you” and then when the tea arrives they actually don’t want the tea at all. Sure, that’s kind of annoying as you’ve gone to the effort of making the tea, but they remain under no obligation to drink the tea. They did want tea, now they don’t. Sometimes people change their mind in the time it takes to boil that kettle, brew the tea and add the milk. And it’s ok for people to change their mind, and you are still not entitled to watch them drink it even though you went to the trouble of making it.

If they are unconscious, don’t make them tea. Unconscious people don’t want tea and can’t answer the question “do you want tea” because they are unconscious.

Ok, maybe they were conscious when you asked them if they wanted tea, and they said yes, but in the time it took you to boil that kettle, brew the tea and add the milk they are now unconscious. You should just put the tea down, make sure the unconscious person is safe, and – this is the important bit – don’t make them drink the tea. They said yes then, sure, but unconscious people don’t want tea.

If someone said yes to tea, started drinking it, and then passed out before they’d finished it, don’t keep on pouring it down their throat. Take the tea away and make sure they are safe.  Because unconscious people don’t want tea. Trust me on this.

If someone said “yes” to tea around your  house last saturday, that doesn’t mean that they want you to make them tea all the time. They don’t want you to come around unexpectedly to their place and make them tea and force them to drink it going “BUT YOU WANTED TEA LAST WEEK”, or to wake up to find you pouring tea down their throat going “BUT YOU WANTED TEA LAST NIGHT”.

Do you think this is a stupid analogy? Yes, you all know this already – of course you wouldn’t force feed someone tea because they said yes to a cup last week. Of COURSE you wouldn’t pour tea down the throat of an unconcious person because they said yes to tea 5 minutes ago when they were conscious. But if you can understand how completely ludicrous it is to force people to have tea when they don’t want tea, and you are able to understand when people don’t want tea, then how is so hard is it to understand when it comes to sex?

Whether it’s tea or sex, Consent Is Everything.

artandsuchevan:

"Life’s Lil Pleasures" by Evan Lorenzen 

©2015 Evan Lorenzen

handsoffmydinosaur:

Monster Issues - An ongoing project :) 

You can find more on my Facebook page 

I swear, this wholesome-looking meal isn’t penance for anything. It’s not a budget-friendly apology for the frenetic unplanned redecorating project or atonement for the fact that I’ve basically only wanted to eat chocolate, peanut butter, bread and pasta for the last 22 weeks. It’s not compensation for the frosting that didn’t make it onto the cake and was eaten instead with a spoon, or the impulsive meringues last weekend. It’s only ever-so-quietly a warning that the next thing coming on this site is so decadent, you might wish to advance yourself some greens, grains and beans.

... Read the rest of red bean and green grain taco bowl on smittenkitchen.com

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© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. | permalink to red bean and green grain taco bowl | 118 comments to date | see more: Beans, Budget, Grain/Rice, Tex-Mex, Vegan, Vegetarian

It's like "celabrate"
On your literacy day:

 

It's a "great job"

On a depressing cake.

 

It's the good advice

That you just didn't take couldn't spell!

 

And who would have thought?

 

It figures!

 

Thanks to Melissa S., Wilma S., M.K., Teresa, & Jennifer B. for our daily recommended dose of irony.

*****

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Why did violins slowly develop f-shaped sound-holes? Because it makes them more acoustically powerful than their ancestors, which had holes shaped liked a circle -- as a team of MIT scientists recently concluded.

Read the rest

They're basing their case on the 14th Amendment, which addressed slavery by guaranteeing all persons equal protection under the law, and since corporations are people, well... Read the rest

Jonathan Dushoff had issues with students in his population biology class cheating on his exams. One year there was suspicious behavior, but Dushoff and the proctors weren't able to prove the students cheated as it happened. So he looked closely at the test results to find the guilty students.

The final is entirely multiple choice. I got the results files from the scantron office. I figured that I wouldn't quite know what to do with a comparison just between these two kids (unless the tests were identical), and that it would be just about as easy (and far more informative) to compare everybody to everybody else. It's still kind of hard for me to get used to the fact that we have computers now and can really do stuff like this. I calculated the number of identical right answers and the number of identical wrong answers for each pair of students (~18K pairs), and plotted it out.

The diagonal line indicates two students who had the exact same wrong and right answers. No pair of students did this, but there were four outlying pairs that got close, shown in red. And looking back at the seating arrangements, in a class of 200 students, all four pairs were students who sat adjacent to each other.

Dushoff has since gone back to multiple exam versions.

Tags: cheating, education

Is the bellicose conspiracy doofus Alex Jones moving further into Men’s Rights territory?

In this video, posted on his Infowars site today, Jones introduces a special report on what he calls the “bizarre excesses of the anti-human transhumanist super-Nazis who are the feminazis.”

In the report itself, Infowars’ Paul Watson – like Jones, a bit of a yeller — describes an evil plot spearheaded by Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and the National Basketball Association to – brace yourself – encourage men to do more housework and child care. This includes, Watson reports ominously, scrubbing the dishes and even doing laundry.

Is nothing sacred to these depraved superfeminazis? Don’t men already have enough chores to do? Indeed, as Watson notes, there are reports of men taking out the trash, shoveling snow and even mowing the lawns.

Never mind that surveys suggest that women do anywhere from twice to three times the amount of housework as men. Never mind that this includes working women, and even working mothers. Indeed, as Bryce Covert noted in a Nation piece last year, “even mothers who work full-time will still put in a week and a half’s worth more time on household tasks than their male partners each year.”

I’m sure Watson and Jones would dismiss all this evidence as femisupernazi propaganda. Indeed, Watson starts in on a very Men’s Rightsy rant about how men work more hours than women and do more dangerous jobs and so on and so on.

Never mind that even men who don’t work do less housework than women and that overall, if you add up paid work and housework, men work three hours less a week than women do.

Watson even throws suicide rates into the equation, as if the fact that men are more likely to succeed at suicide than women has anything to do with who is washing the dishes and changing the diapers.

“Isn’t it ironic,” Watson bellows,

that Sandberg, architect of the ‘ban bossy’ campaign is now bossing men on how to behave in the privacy of their own homes?

Uh, dude, the whole point of the “ban bossy” campaign was to point out that women invariably get called “bossy” for acting the same way as men who are invariably not described as bossy.

The fact that you’re calling her “bossy” for urging men to do more housework kind of proves her whole point.

After noting that Sandberg’s new campaign has a number of – gasp! – corporate sponsors, Watson declares that it

has nothing to do with advancing equality and everything to do with creating more division between the sexes through social engineering and the promotion of 

– wait for it –

misandry!

Even the evil Hillary Clinton has signed on to the campaign.

Watson rails on about sky-high divorce rates – even thought the rate has been dropping for decades. But never mind:

Feminism has clearly been a disaster for relationships between men and women. Feminism is a cancer to marriage in America. This campaign is only going to lead to more pressure on men, more resentment, more arguments and the breakdown of more relationships.

So, in conclusion, I guess, women should never suggest that men do anything differently?

Apparently. Watson, after lecturing us all about the evils of feminism, demands that Sandberg et al,

stop lecturing people on how to behave in the privacy of their own [explosion sound effect] home.

Shouting now, he orders the nazisuperfemis

Stop being bossy by dictating how gender roles in household tasks should be decided upon by couples.

Dude, you’re sounding a little, dare I say it, bossy.

Stop implying that men are deficient or losers because they’re not doing enough laundry or not cleaning up enough dirty dishes …

And so on. His voice dripping with contempt, Watson continues on with his tirade, sounding like nothing so much as an angry Men’s Rights Redditor on a rampage. Jones, muttering incoherently into his microphone, can be heard over Watson’s rant.

Watson throws in a reference to “cutural marxism.” He describes Sandberg et al as “joyless feminist harpies.” Then the segment lurches to a halt and Jones starts up again, declaring the evil plot to get men to wash a few more dishes as “a plan to wreck women” and give more power to the “megabanks raping us.”

It’s a little weird to see dudes who think the world is run by Moloch-worshipping Illuminati parroting so many MRA talking points – or, in this case, yelling points.

It’s also a bit weird to realize that Watson’s “argument” is actually a good bit more coherent, and less obviously misogynistic, than the Youtube rantings of most MRAs. Hell, he didn’t even call Sandberg a bitch or, you know, that word that starts with c.

Jones et al may need to step up their game — and crank up the hatred —  if they really want to make inroads into the Men’s Rights movement.

please…go on.

Barry writes, "There's a thing called pattern flying, where pilots compete to perfectly execute an elaborate set of compulsory tricks." Read the rest

In what can only be described as “best part usage of the month”, Paddy Bricksplitter used the oversized minifig head from his LEGO Art Carousel to create this perfectly staged vignette entited “Attack Of The 50 foot mini figure“. Although I think “50 inch” would have done pretty well too!

I’m digging the trendy furnishings of this downtown apartment, which appear to include a Mondrian, and the forced perspective skyscrapers in the background, and OH MY GOD THERE’S A GIANT HEAD OUTSIDE THE WINDOW (ﾉﾟοﾟ)ﾉ

http://www.reddit.com/user/color178924/submitted/


http://www.reddit.com/user/pinkhead/submitted/


http://www.reddit.com/user/churc22/submitted/


http://www.reddit.com/user/combinesd/submitted/


http://www.reddit.com/user/JRShane88/submitted/


http://www.reddit.com/user/bkgunner/submitted/


http://www.reddit.com/user/stickylou/submitted/


http://www.reddit.com/user/fantasticrachelfox/submitted/


http://www.reddit.com/user/Walsy28/submitted/


http://www.reddit.com/user/mochiko8/submitted/

catsbeaversandducks:

Ten Ninja Cats. One Philosophy.

"Train like you are 2nd, but play like you are 1st."

(photos via reddit)

New comic!
Today's News:

 Sorry about the RSS bug. Should be fixed now.

by Amazing Super Powers

The closer we look at the situation in Ferguson, the more vile it gets. The courts were stacking minor fines on people — especially black people — and then putting them on a merry-go-round of constantly accumulating fines. And when the poor were unable to pay the fines, they were thrown in jail. One woman had to pay over $500 on a $150 parking fine, and even that didn’t clear the debt.

But if you were a rich white debtor, you got a completely different kind of treatment.

The judge in Ferguson, Missouri, who is accused of fixing traffic tickets for himself and colleagues while inflicting a punishing regime of fines and fees on the city’s residents, also owes more than $170,000 in unpaid taxes.

Ronald J Brockmeyer, whose court allegedly jailed impoverished defendants unable to pay fines of a few hundred dollars, has a string of outstanding debts to the US government dating back to 2007, according to tax filings obtained by the Guardian from authorities in Missouri.

This judge bragged about his ability to gouging money out of his constituents, worked simultaneously as judge, prosecutor, and private attorney, and then didn’t pay personal taxes or employer taxes for his legal business.

I guess Missouri (and other states) are re-enacting a collection of medieval fiefdoms. Except that’s slandering the Middle Ages.

Color Palettes of Hayao Miyazaki, Hyo Taek Kim

by Pie Comic