Luke.stirling

thesociologicalcinema:

"Wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is."

~ Paul Krugman

animatedamerican:

deepbones:

Listen, when you use a word of hate ironically — like, and your defense is “I’m not racist, how could you ever think I’m racist??” I want you to imagine owning a gun, but never buying live ammunition. You only purchase blanks. Ok?

And say sometimes when you hang out with your close friends, you take out your gun, which they know contains no live ammunition, and you shoot it at stuff, and you think it’s funny. And maybe the first time you do it, they’re like “Shit. I mean, I know those are blanks, but that’s kind of fucked up,” but your argument is, “But I can’t really hurt anyone! They’re just blanks!” And over time they just get used to it and find it kind of funny. “Oh, that Cliff, sometimes he takes his gun out and shoots some blanks, but he doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just funny! You know how it goes.”

Now, imagine that over time, having received the acceptance for your actions from your friends, you decide you can start firing blanks around people you’ve never met. In mixed company. You’re at a dinner party one night, you’ve had a few, so you go “Hey, wanna see something cool?!” and those who are your friends at the party know what’s coming, so they’re prepared, but then the people who don’t know you, they see you whip out a piece and go “Oh shit, I’m going to die, it’s everything I feared,” but your friends explain to them it’s not a big deal, there’s nothing to be afraid of, “Cliff wouldn’t hurt a fly,” so they eventually, begrudgingly, don’t say anything about it, don’t call you, Cliff, a fucking asshole. “Fine, it’s kind of ridiculous, but whatever.” Something like that.

And then you are at a large public place. A concert, an open mic, where you and your friends are outnumbered by the rest of the audience. And maybe someone pushes you or gives you a hard time, so you decide, just to give the guy a taste of his own medicine, to pull out your gun, and fire some blanks. Give him a real, real visceral jump. And everyone around you feels threatened, unsafe, about to be part of something they were always on some subconscious level afraid would happen, but at the same time hopeful it would never happen because our society’s getting smarter and more considerate of those around them. And then some other people, who after seeing it happen, feel relieved that you were firing blanks, but also feel empowered by your choice to fire a weapon in a public place, and choose to do the same thing.

Do you get it yet?

The fact is that derogatory remarks, whether used sincerely or ironically, and ammunition, whether blank or live, still creates the same environment of discomfort and fear every time it is used. So cut the shit.

- Junot Diaz

And that’s not even counting what your funny little joke might do to someone who has been shot at, or actually shot, with live ammunition.

“An outbreak of the measles at Kenneth Copeland’s Texas megachurch has gotten some attention because (1) measles is something children are generally vaccinated for, these days and (2) Kenneth Copeland is, of course, an anti-vaccine crackpot. In what seems to be yet another bitterly ironic attempt by God to teach noisy religious fundamentalists what-for, the church has thus become the epicenter of a small but worrisome outbreak that has so far infected 10 and resulted in the Department of State Health Services issuing an alert spanning North Texas.”

- Anti-vaccine megachurch hit with measles epidemic, now offering free vaccinations

dearnonacepeople:

Hari Kondabolu is a super funny comedian who also happens to be an amazing human being y’all should check him out.

He was on the Nerd Boat we just got off of today.  We now have his CD.

Czech: A free word order language. Yoda speaks consistently in SOV. Interestingly enough, putting an object before a verb does sound unusual to most speakers of Czech.
Estonian: A free word order language. Yoda retains the English OSV order. This is grammatical in Estonian, but does make it seem as though Yoda is constantly stressing the object phrase as the main point of his statements. This gives his speech an unusual quality.
French: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV.
German: An SVO or SOV language. Yoda brings the Object to the front (OSV), like in English.
Hungarian: A free word order language. There is nothing unusual about Yoda’s speech.
Italian: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV. Note: OSV is also the syntax used in the Italian of the less-proficient speakers of Italian from the region of Sardinia.
Japanese: An SOV language. Yoda seems to use a more or less correct syntax, with a more archaic vocabulary.
Korean: An SOV language. Nothing is unusual about Yoda’s grammar.
Norwegian: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV.
Romanian: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV. He also places adjectives before the noun instead of after the noun, and uses an archaic form of the future tense.
Spanish: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV.
Turkish: An SOV language. Yoda speaks in OSV. Note: This order is also used in classical Ottoman poetry, so the syntax may have been chosen in order to emphasize Yoda’s wisdom or age.

wanokokoro-japan:

Genko-an Temple (Kyoto,JAPAN)

Summer/Fall/Winter

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Neil Armstrong’s purse: First moonwalker had hidden bag of Apollo 11 artifacts | collectSPACE.

Neil Armstrong had a secret stash of moon landing mementos.

The first man to walk on the moon kept a bag full of small parts from the lunar module “Eagle” that he and his Apollo 11 crewmate Buzz Aldrin famously piloted to a landing at Tranquility Base on July 20, 1969. The stowage bag was discovered by Armstrong’s widow after he died in 2012.

“I received an email from Carol Armstrong that she had located in one of Neil’s closets a white cloth bag filled with assorted small items that looked like they may have come from a spacecraft,” Allan Needell, the Apollo curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, wrote in a blog published on Friday (Feb. 6). “Needless to say, for a curator of a collection of space artifacts, it is hard to imagine anything more exciting.”

The bag, itself flown to the moon, was referred to as the “McDivitt purse,” after the Apollo 9 astronaut whose idea it was to include aboard the spacecraft.

Read more & The Armstrong Purse: Flown Apollo 11 Lunar Artifacts.

pleatedjeans:

someone is an idiot [x]

NICKERS and SICKERS

blunt-science:

Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about creationism, science celebrities and kids on National Geographic. Watch the full video here.

aspiringdoctors:

Thank you!

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Molt, stretch, attack camera.

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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serrae:

zakkorama:

"Now Colin, you’ve always been seen as a romantic lead to the ladies. How did you apply this to a gay context? Was it difficult for you? How did you-"

Hero.

Not just that he said it, but that he seemed really angry that he had to.

sosososososssosssosooo important

A woman whose c.difficile infection was treated with a fecal transplant from her overweight daughter experienced rapid and dramatic weight gain as soon as her daughter's microbial nation took hold in her gut. Read the rest

The UK is becoming the first country to legalize the creation of baby humans from three different adult humans. Read the rest

A study of students in Israel by Victor Lavy and Edith Sand has discovered a surprising result…or maybe not so surprising to you, but I was rather shocked. Math teachers score girls’ performance lower when they know their identities.

In math, the girls outscored the boys in the exam graded anonymously, but the boys outscored the girls when graded by teachers who knew their names. The effect was not the same for tests on other subjects, like English and Hebrew. The researchers concluded that in math and science, the teachers overestimated the boys’ abilities and underestimated the girls’, and that this had long-term effects on students’ attitudes toward the subjects.

For example, when the same students reached junior high and high school, the economists analyzed their performance on national exams. The boys who had been encouraged when they were younger performed significantly better.

They also tracked the advanced math and science courses that students chose to take in high school. After controlling for other factors that might affect their choices, they concluded that the girls who had been discouraged by their elementary schoolteachers were much less likely than the boys to take advanced courses.

But…math. Isn’t that one of those incredibly objective disciplines in which questions all have a right answer and a best method, and there’s no wiggle room for adjusting a score? Just like all of science — there’s no subjectivity here at all.

No, when you’re evaluating how well students think, there’s always lots of room for taking student knowledge into account. I teach genetics, and it’s a good example: I grade exams with my nice brief key by my side, and when students come up with the same answers I do, it’s easy and fast. But when they don’t, I have to look much more closely. Did they just make an arithmetic error in the last step? Did they understand the basic concepts, but just fail to integrate them all? Did they demonstrate a complete lack of comprehension of basic Mendelian principles? I have to see some sign of understanding in the work to make the effort to track through the problem more carefully, and it would be tempting to, for instance, know that this student did poorly on their last exam, so it’s not worth the effort to try and figure out what dumb mistake they made this time.

(I take steps to avoid that trap: I grade papers anonymously, not looking at the name on the first page.)

But I have a hard time imagining taking a negative attitude towards a math problem on the basis of the solver’s sex. Apparently it’s common enough that it actively skews assessments downward, though.

I’m familiar with the Swedish study that showed a pervasive bias against women scientists on the job market, but it’s clear the problem goes much deeper: women are being discouraged from going into math as early as middle school.

The paper also tried to puzzle out what was going on with these teachers, and found some other interesting correlations.

Older and single teachers seem to favor boys over girls: the coefficient of a dummy indicator of being older than 50 years old is positive and significant (0.206, SE=0.104), and so is the estimate of the indicator for single teachers (0.315, SE=0.202). The estimated coefficient for teachers from Europe-North America origin is negatively and significantly correlated with teachers’ biases (-0.204, SE=0.113). The other individual characteristics that we examined are being married (positive but insignificant) and the number of children and the proportion of daughters, both of which have negative coefficient but not significantly different from zero.

So older teachers are more biased in favor of boys; there’s hope that that effect will diminish as a newer generation of teachers takes over. I don’t think we can insist that teachers get married.

I also wondered about the effect of the teacher’s sex on this problem. Buried deep in the paper is an interesting revelation: they couldn’t look at that because all of the teachers in their sample were women. We learn two things from that, of course: that women can propagate sexist attitudes (no surprise), and that teaching is a deeply gendered profession. The gender distribution in the teaching profession also has to be sending a message to girls and boys.

Here’s the authors’ conclusion.

We also find that favoritism of boys among math and science teachers has an especially large and positive effect on boys math test score and on their successfully completion of advance math and science studies in high school; the respective effect on girls is negative and statistically significant. The estimates of the direct-subject effect in math are of special interest because of the considerable gender gap in math achievements and its impact on future labor market outcomes. Moreover, since this gap in math achievement partly results from teachers’ stereotypical biases against girls in mathematics, eliminating these biases will go a long way toward reducing the math achievements gender gap, and it will also decrease the gender gap in enrollment in advanced math studies. The impact on the various end of high school matriculation outcomes carries meaningful economic consequences because these high stakes outcomes affect sharply the quantity and quality of postsecondary schooling and impact earnings at adulthood as well.

Another message we should take away from this: teaching is important. All you primary school teachers out there are shaping society as a whole.

As reported in the Washington Post:

Ukraine, to use a technical term, is broke. That's what you call a country whose currency has lost half its value in just two days.

The problem is simple: Ukraine has no money and barely any economy... The hyrvnia fell from 16.8 to 24.4 per dollar, and then again to 25.3 on Friday, on this news that the government wouldn't intervene it in anymore. In all, it was a 50 percent decline in 48 hours...

Why is Ukraine so doomed? Well, it's been mismanaged on a world-historical scale by oligarchs who, for decades, have skimmed billions off the country's nonexistent growth. That last part's not hyperbole. It seems almost impossible, but Ukraine's economy has actually shrunk since communism ended in 1991. Or since 1992. Or even 1993. And now its not-so-cold war with Russia is destroying the little that's left. It's not just that the rebel strongholds in the factory-heavy east have deprived Ukraine of a quarter of its industrial capacity. It's that it can't afford to fight against what's still it's biggest trading partner—Russia. Think about that. You don't usually trade a lot with the country you're going to battle against, but Ukraine's economy is so dependent on Russia's that it still trades more with it than any other. That means anything that hurts Russia, like lower oil prices or sanctions, just redounds onto Ukraine, and puts it in an even bigger financial hole.

TYWKIWDBI gets about 150 visits/month from readers in Ukraine.  I would love to hear your thoughts in the comment thread for this post.

My daughter is a qualified nutritionist, and offers this orthorexic prescription for attaining peak health, longevity, and vigor through a simple, easy-to-follow diet.

Part of the Samsung Smarttv EULA: "Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition." Read the rest

California's insane publicity rights regime mean that the general -- who's been dead for 69 years -- can't be a video-game character because people might mistakenly think he endorses the game. Read the rest

shihlun:

Walead Beshty’s FedEx Sculptures series (2005 - present).

Walead Beshty constructs glass vitrines that are the exact dimensions of a FedEx box, and he then places the glass boxes into a FedEx box and ships it to the exhibition site. The glass sculptures then show the wear and tear of its travels through “space and time.”. This cracked surface is supposed to represent a record of the sculpture’s “hidden life” as though the sculpture were an exposure of a photograph. The FedEx boxes the sculpture is delivered in then becomes the base for the artwork. Beshty then gives the sculptures a title which consists of a record of the journey the box took to arrive at the exhibition.

wreckingbally:

Jeffrey Cranor on the Anti-Vaccines Nonsense

vaspider:

genderfuckedover:

thewomanfromitaly:

i-am-river:

So, i read this awful article using bathroom “scare tactics,” which was claiming that trans women are potential rapists. “Men” who dress as women to gain access to women only spaces and force them self on women. This really upset me and i had a bit of a Twitter rant. They were read by others and i was urged to post them in other media also, so i am posting them here. (Edited together in easy reading format from top to bottom.)

This is the link in the first tweet about how there are no cases of a trans woman attacking a cis woman in public restrooms: Link 1.

This is the link in the second tweet about the cases where trans people are assaulted in the bathroom by cis people: Link 2.

if you’re cis and you follow me i’m gonna need you to reblog this

don’t care if you’re cis or trans, this is important.

Be an ally. Police the bathroom police.