Luke.stirling

There’s been a lot of this recently.

The winner of this month’s raffle is Kevin from Plymouth. He get’s a signed print of a J&M strip of his choice.

Become a patron here.

UPDATE: This comic was posted a minute before I heard of the appalling act of terrorism in Paris. I have no words adequate to express my grief and outrage.

In sympathy and solidarity with Charlie Hebdo:

Why not become a Patron of the Blasphemous Arts? Book shop here

I’m impressed. It takes awesome levels of fuckuppery to achieve this: they convinced a major tech company to invest $300 million in an initiative to oppose #gamergate’s goals.

Intel’s big goal last year was to eliminate conflict minerals from its processors and supply chain, and this year it’s putting some of its money into something completely different: diversity. During its keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show today, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said the company plans to spend $300 million over the course of the next five years to improve diversity. That goes for both the underrepresentation of women, as well as minorities in the technology industry, something that’s become a hot button topic as technology companies try to diversity their workplaces, and increase the appeal of computer science courses.

As for why this is happening now, Krzanich cited issues faced in gaming and technology over the past year, alluding to Gamergate, which the company became embroiled in following an advertising snafu. At the time, the company said "Intel believes men and women should be treated the same. And, diversity is an integral part of our corporate strategy and vision with commitments to improve the diversity of our workforce." Today, Krzanich elaborated on that by saying Intel’s own internal goal was to reach what he referred to as a "full representation in all levels" in its workforce by 2020. That not only includes its rank and file, but at the executive level as well.

It reminds me of circumstances a few years ago when a few strident anti-feminists blew up over conferences having conduct policies…and then conferences all started having those policies as a matter of course. Only in this case, we’re talking a $300 million rebuff.

I think it’s a matter of consciousness-raising…raising the consciousness that opponents of these sorts of sensible progressive ideas are ridiculous morons.

BELL BELL BELL BELL BELL

In the latest episode of Things You Might Not Know, host Tom Scott explains why the prime meridian at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich in London, is not actually at 0° longitude according to GPS. In his explanation, Scott discusses how the Earth is not round, and describes disagreements among various mapping systems.

A friend of mine asked me last night if I’d be able to shoot a scene today for a movie he’s working on. The role would be Tommy’s love interest. It’s a quick scene that didn’t pay much but he’s a friend I’m willing to do a favor for and come on, I’ve seen The Room, doing a scene with Tommy Wiseau would be so awesome. I couldn’t wait to tell him about the porn parody of his movie!

I knew he was weird, but I didn’t think he’d be an asshole.

I drove all the way to fucking Sun Valley, which is an hour away from where I live, to their studio. I went inside, met some of the crew, then headed upstairs to meet Tommy. I was so thrilled to get to meet this guy. We’re introduced to one another and he’s told that I am the one to play his girl. He’s very nice and we talk for about 10 minutes. We had an excellent conversation about the various comic cons we’ve both attended and so, because of my cosplay and name, I reveal my porn background. He didn’t seem phased. Now, usually, I know when I need to be discreet about this aspect of my life, I don’t like to, but I do it. It didn’t even cross my mind to keep this fact under wraps considering there are 3 other porn stars in this cast and one of them was even there on set already as one of the main characters. So, we wrap up the conversation and I head back downstairs for lunch.

While I’m downstairs, the behind the scenes camera guy is filming me talking to one of the directors about my scene, looking at sides and figuring out details. Then another director, or the producer, I’m not sure, reveals that Tommy won’t do the scene because he doesn’t want it to be with a porn star. I’m immediately uncomfortable now and since the camera is still rolling on us, I play it off a bit like “well he doesn’t know what he’s missing” and “it’s ok I’m used to this sort of thing”. And you know what, I AM used to this sort of thing. It happens often and it fucking sucks. It makes me feel disrespected and like I’m some sort of subpar human being. I’ll get roles or people will ask me to be in something and then they find out who I am and they go with someone else. I’ve never had it happen while I was already on set. It was so uncomfortable. Here was their main lead, refusing to work with me, a minor role. I’ve caused a ruckus. I’m a very empathetic person that tries to see things from everyone’s perspective so part of me understands and respects that everyone has their own personal morals and values and thus has the right to refuse to work with someone. Just like owners of establishments have the right to refuse service to anyone. This doesn’t make it ok, though. And it makes you an asshole. A rude, inconsiderate asshole.

I wasted a good portion of my day to go play a character in a movie opposite someone who I was very excited to meet and work with only to be disrespected and made to feel terrible by that person.

He hid in his dressing room, wouldn’t apologize to me, and when confronted by my friend about it all, he couldn’t complete full sentences and fielded everything to his manager who also had nothing to say.

Tommy Wiseau, I’m so sorry that you are so narrow minded. I genuinely thought you were cooler than that. I am disappoint.

I’m so tired of this double standard. EVERYONE WATCHES PORN. I can guarantee he’s jerked it to me at least once. Statistically, he’s had to have. But I’m not a real person with feelings or skills nor do I deserve respect because I like to get fucked, like every other human being in the world, and have managed to make a career out of doing something I love. Fucking asshole, you don’t know what you’re missing.

wintersoldierfell:

americandreambarbie:

hands-down one of my all time favorite taylor moments

What fucks me up about this is that he’s using a classic abusive behaviour on her.

He starts out by doing something that seems innocent but which is often a tactic used by abusive men to get past women’s defenses and justify their own behaviour. “I’m a nice guy. I’m not mean. I wouldn’t do anything bad.” And without being specific to this guy, TSwift calls him on it: she points out that there’s a very high correlation between self-labeling as a “nice guy” and not actually being very nice. It’s as polite as she can be without actually saying explicitly that this guy’s a jerk, but everyone listening knows that she’s basically just said, “Hey, you just did this thing that’s shitty.”

And his response is to try to gaslight her. Gaslighting is when you try to manipulate someone by making them doubt their perception of reality. It sounds like it would be impossible, but it’s actually incredibly common among abusive men, and often appears hand in hand with this creepy “I’m nice” crap. What he does is, rather than argue with her about whether most guys who self-label as nice are actually jerks, or move on to another topic, or shout her down—-what he does is DENY REALITY. Guys who self-label as nice aren’t nice? Cool—he’ll just assert that he never did that. Despite the fact that he JUST DID IT. ON CAMERA.

People who date men: if a man ever does this to you, run like hell. It’s the beginning of a very steep slope. Men who lie to you about behaviour you’ve observed—who lie to you about documented reality—in order to serve their own ends are not men you can trust. They are not good people. RUN THE FUCK AWAY.

Meanwhile, a million props to Taylor Swift for calling that shit out.

Financier-developers with ties to some of the century's most notorious war criminals are building Eko Atlantic, an offshore city near Lagos, to house the burgeoning, confiscatory millionaires of Nigeria, while in the oft-bulldozed slums of Lagos genuine, climate-resilient floating buildings are taking to sea. Read the rest

Ladar Levison -- persecuted founder of the now-shuttered private mail service Lavabit, as used by Edward Snowden -- has made great progress on his Darkmail project, a joint initiative with Phil "PGP" Zimmerman's also shut-down Silent Circle private email service. Read the rest

Consider that the 15 hottest years on record have all come since 1997. Or that this will be the third straight decade to break the mark for global temps. And that it’s been 358 months since the planet had a cooler-than-average month, and more than 100 years since we last had a record-cold month.

pyranova:

komradesparx:

afrosomalibitch:

Random posters have been popping up on London bus-stops speaking the truth about our fucked up police forces. Lmao @ the police officer calling it in (3rd picture), the truth hurts!

(The riots mentioned are the London riots of August 2011 which happened after the police shot dead, Mark Duggan, an unarmed black man in Tottenham. The shooting was later ruled to be ‘lawful’ hence how they ‘got away with it’.)

Remember Police Brutality is truly global.

Anti-Black and racism are truly global.

californialad:

me watching movies on the couch

current status: Chipotle burrito.

hungrychirpers:

Day 16: Both birds were put into a cage for the first time. We also made some little hats for them!

Merry Christmas!

vinegod:

by あーや

St. Nichowlas

avianawareness:

yes

Everyday.

Mmm, Pi. (photo via josusofsuburbia)

"Deep-sea anglerfish are strange and elusive creatures that are very rarely observed in their natural habitat. Fewer than half a dozen have ever been captured on film or video by deep diving research vehicles. This little angler, about 9 cm long, is named Melanocetus. It is also known as the Black Seadevil and it lives in the deep dark waters of the Monterey Canyon. MBARI's ROV Doc Ricketts observed this anglerfish for the first time at 600 m on a midwater research expedition in November 2014. We believe that this is the first video footage ever made of this species alive and at depth."

That paper that proposed that most cancers were due to bad luck, that is, that they were a consequence of biological factors that could not be controlled, has been surprisingly controversial. I thought it was a fairly unsurprising paper that confirmed what we already suspected, but wow, the furious pushback has been something to behold.

Today, though, a couple of MDs have responded to the paper and reinforce what I said.

Steven Novella thinks the general logic is sound.

This is an interesting study and it will be interesting to look at replications and other methods, if they are available, of making the same sort of estimation. What this study suggests is that at least 2/3 of all all cancers are due to random mutations – bad luck. The figure may be higher once breast and prostate cancers are included. Of the remaining third it is not clear how much is due to inherited genes vs lifestyle factors.

The logic of the study is sound, in my opinion. The authors assume that lifestyle and genetic factors affect the risk of tissue specific cancers, but not cancer in general. This study would miss, however, lifestyle or genetic factors that affected the risk of all cancers (regardless of tissue type) equally. One might argue, therefore, that it overestimates the role of random mutations, but that is only if you accept that there are universal risk factors out there.

David Gorski emphasizes that the result actually fits well with prior estimates of the relative contribution of environmental/genetic factors and a probabilistic component.

That cancer is due to a combination of random probabilistic processes, environmental exposures, and heredity is a non-controversial statement. What is controversial are estimates of the relative contribution of environment, given that the percentage of cancers due to inherited cancer-causing mutations is known and low. Take the example of breast cancer, which is a cancer for which environmental and lifestyle contributions are not particularly high, with perhaps 27% of breast cancers being due primarily to environment (which includes diet and exercise, as well as hormone replacement therapy). The vast majority of those environmental contributions come from obesity and alcohol consumption, neither of which reaches the double digits, percentage-wise. Yet there are organizations that promote the idea that “chemicals” in our environment are a major cause of breast cancer. Unfortunately, about 5-10% of breast cancer is inherited, while perhaps up to 27% has a strong environmental component. That leaves around 60% of breast cancer (or, even using higher estimates, at least 50%) as falling into the “we don’t know” or “stochastic” category, with, sadly, nothing that we know of right now that can be done to prevent these cases, while the 10% of hereditary cases can only be prevented by aggressive means, such as chemoprevention or prophylactic surgery.

I still find it interesting, though, that so many people have complained to me about ascribing phenomena to chance — there are some serious misconceptions floating about out there, and I’ve always taken these ideas for granted. I guess I can’t. David Colquhoun and I spent an enlightening afternoon yesterday trying to get through to a few people on Twitter who could not believe we actually thought chance was a reasonable explanation for anything. I did not have the impression that these were anti-science people, or creationists, or anything absurd like that — they just had a striking psychological antipathy to the whole idea of random effects.

Fascinating. Random events are not even scientific? Where did this idea come from? Everything has to have a “cause” of some sort? Weird.

Maybe it’s because a lot of my early training in biology was in genetics, and there you acquire a strong appreciation for the importance of chance events. Genetic gene mapping, for instance, is done by looking at recombination frequencies — the probability that a meiotic crossover event will occur between two genes on the same chromosome, which is a factor of the physical distance separating them. We understand the physical basis of this event, which involves a protein, Spo11, that binds to a random location on the chromosome and induces a double strand break. Why does it land on a particular spot? It’s all about the higgelty-piggelty jiggling of proteins in the cellular environment — there isn’t a magic finger telling Spo11 to go to a pre-defined place on the chromosome, it simply does its job wherever it happens to find itself.

You could say the recombination event has a specific cause, the protein complex that cuts and swaps strands of DNA, but the question at hand — why does it recombine at a particular spot in a particular chromosome? — is not specified by any causal agent in the cell. It’s random.

It’s not unscientific. We can study chance processes statistically, no problem. If we threw out all study of chance as unscientific hocus pocus, well, there goes genetics. And epidemiology. And chemistry. And any science that uses statistics. Dang.

Why do they reject chance? One idea that emerged is that they have an excessive faith in causality, and paradoxically, too much trust in the ability of science to give complete, exhaustive explanations for everything.

No, it won’t. The more I learn about chemistry and biology, the stronger the value of understanding chance becomes.

I think the idea is that all we have to do is catalog all of the efficient causes to work out every step of an event. Your cancer was caused by a cosmic ray striking and damaging the short arm of your 12th chromosome, creating a defective RAS oncogene. That cosmic ray originated in a supernova 15,000 light years away. That exploding star condensed from a cloud of matter that originated in the Big Bang, so all we have to do is map how every atom, from the beginning of the universe to that detonation in a distant star, and further, every molecular event in the evolution of that RAS oncogene that put it in that particular location on the chromosome, and then every event in your life that led to that cell and your body to be in that specific location to intercept that cosmic ray, we’ll finally understand why you have cancer.

It takes a very deterministic attitude to find that explanation at all satisfying.

No matter how hard we work, we will never have a sufficiently detailed explanation of every feature of the universe to negate the importance of chance. I think quantum physics is also drilling down deep into the nature of how the universe works, and finding that chance plays a role; but even if it were found that the universe is completely deterministic, the complexity of the phenomena and the number of parameters means that those kinds of causes are unknowable, and randomness is a good higher-level description of what is going on.

So get used to it. Why did you get cancer? Bad luck. Chance. But of course, the odds might also have been skewed by inheriting a gene that predisposes you to cancer, or by a poor diet, or by your odd habit of spiking your morning tea with N-ethyl-N-nitrosourea.

This Rube Goldberg machine by Christian Bechinie showcases an elegantly designed ball contraption surrounded by brick-built dominoes. Check out the entertaining video and see it all in motion.

Link: the artist is Eric Brunning of Vancouver's Adorned (via JWZ)

Friendly reminder that you can buy sweets called “Ärsche mit Ohren” in germany, which is literally translated with “asses with ears”

“Portraits of Time” is a series of photographs showing the oldest and most majestic trees on the face of the Earth. Photographer Beth Moon traveled to the far corners of the world over a period of 14 years in the process of shooting the shots, traveling to remote regions where the trees have largely remained undisturbed by mankind.

Many of the trees have “survived because they are out of reach of civilization,” Moon writes. They were found on mountainsides, private estates, and protected lands. Some of the trees only exist in a very specific area (e.g. baobab‘s on the island of Madagascar).

Moon’s project has taken her to locations in the United States, Europe, Asia, Middle East, and Africa. She selects her trees based on three criteria: age, size, and/or notable history. After identifying a tree that would be suitable for her series, she will travel out to the location to capture a portrait of it.

The images are intended to “celebrate the wonders of nature that have survived throughout the centuries,” Moon states. “I cannot imagine a better way to commemorate the lives of the world’s most dramatic trees, many which are in danger of destruction, than by exhibiting their portraits.”

On her website, Moon writes that she uses platinum printing as a “noble process in the digital age”:

With platinum printing, noted for its beautiful luminosity and wide tonal scale, the absence of a binder layer allows very fine crystals of platinum to be embedded into the paper giving it a 3 dimensional appearance. Unrivaled by any other printing process, platinum, like gold, is a stable metal. A print can last for thousands of years. This process gives tones that range from cool blacks, neutral grays, to rich sepia browns.

Here are some of the photographs in the series (some of the trees are thousands of years old):

Portraits of Time [Beth Moon via Colossal]

Image credits: Photographs by Beth Moon and used with permission

fullofwhoa:

s-hayashi:

Tee trinken / Drinking Tea  - Lei Xue LINK

fuuuuck I really dig this