Luke.stirling

Jennifer Jenkins writes, "What could have been entering the public domain in the US on January 1, 2015? Under the law that existed until 1978 -- Works from 1958. The films 'Attack of the 50 Foot Woman,' 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,' and 'Gigi,' the books 'Our Man in Havana,' 'The Once and Future King,' and 'Things Fall Apart,' the songs 'All I Have to Do Is Dream' and 'Yakety Yak,' and more -- What is entering the public domain this January 1? Not a single published work." Read the rest

Another gem from the latest Der Spiegel NSA leaks: the NSA can listen in on all Skype traffic and read Skype messages, because Microsoft hands over its keys. Read the rest

The 32-year old Tao Liu knows the city of Hefei like his backyard. Since 2005 he’s traveled up, down and across the city in Eastern China on his motorbike reading water meters for a local utilities company. The job was tedious, exhausting and unrewarding, until he picked up a camera.

For the past 3 years Liu has used his spare time to capture intimate, witty and humorous street photos of Hefei. “I like taking photos because I can hang around on the streets and capture an image when something interested me but was neglected by others,” Liu told the Global Times. “I want to remind people of the touching moments in life.” He was interviewed after his photos went viral on China’s social network Weibo.

Liu has no formal training in photography but cites Daido Moriyama – often referred to as “the father of street photography” – as a primary influence. “I found him [to be] a very focused photographer,” says Liu in an interview with TIME. “I chose my camera based on what he uses.” Liu’s photos, intentionally or not, seem to poke fun at things like commercialization and urbanization. Liu clearly has a knack, not only for being in the right place at the right time, but for a keen eye that spots charming, serendipitous scenes amongst the hustle and bustle of everyday life. You can keep up with him and his work on Lofter. All photos courtesy the photographer. (via Time)

"The Deadweight Loss of Christmas," published in American Economic Review (Joel Waldfogel, UMN) estimates that "on average, the waste attributable to poorly chosen seasonal gifts was between 15 and 20 per cent of the purchase price of the gift" ($10B/year in the US alone!). Read the rest

Pink Pearl apples are generally medium sized, with a conical shape. They are named for the color of their flesh, which is a bright rosy pink sometimes streaked or mottled with white. They have a translucent, yellow-green skin, and a crisp, juicy flesh with tart to sweet-tart taste. Pink Pearl apples ripen in late August to mid-September. It is susceptible to scab, and the fruit tend not to keep well on the tree once ripe.

It is every mother’s worst nightmare to lose a child, and I have to feel Carla May Alcorn’s pain.

My sweet 16 year old son, Joshua Ryan Alcorn went home to heaven this morning. He was out for an early morning walk and was hit by a truck. Thank you for the messages and kindness and concern you have sent our way. Please continue to keep us in your prayers.

This is certainly not the time to take exception to the religious sentiments in her announcement. Except…

Those sentiments contributed to the misery of their daughter, Leelah Alcorn. She wasn’t just hit by a truck, she committed suicide after years of misery when her parents denied who she actually was.

If you are reading this, it means that I have committed suicide and obviously failed to delete this post from my queue.

Please don’t be sad, it’s for the better. The life I would’ve lived isn’t worth living in… because I’m transgender. I could go into detail explaining why I feel that way, but this note is probably going to be lengthy enough as it is. To put it simply, I feel like a girl trapped in a boy’s body, and I’ve felt that way ever since I was 4. I never knew there was a word for that feeling, nor was it possible for a boy to become a girl, so I never told anyone and I just continued to do traditionally “boyish” things to try to fit in.

When I was 14, I learned what transgender meant and cried of happiness. After 10 years of confusion I finally understood who I was. I immediately told my mom, and she reacted extremely negatively, telling me that it was a phase, that I would never truly be a girl, that God doesn’t make mistakes, that I am wrong. If you are reading this, parents, please don’t tell this to your kids. Even if you are Christian or are against transgender people don’t ever say that to someone, especially your kid. That won’t do anything but make them hate them self. That’s exactly what it did to me.

My mom started taking me to a therapist, but would only take me to christian therapists, (who were all very biased) so I never actually got the therapy I needed to cure me of my depression. I only got more christians telling me that I was selfish and wrong and that I should look to God for help.

When I was 16 I realized that my parents would never come around, and that I would have to wait until I was 18 to start any sort of transitioning treatment, which absolutely broke my heart. The longer you wait, the harder it is to transition. I felt hopeless, that I was just going to look like a man in drag for the rest of my life. On my 16th birthday, when I didn’t receive consent from my parents to start transitioning, I cried myself to sleep.
I formed a sort of a “fuck you” attitude towards my parents and came out as gay at school, thinking that maybe if I eased into coming out as trans it would be less of a shock. Although the reaction from my friends was positive, my parents were pissed. They felt like I was attacking their image, and that I was an embarrassment to them. They wanted me to be their perfect little straight christian boy, and that’s obviously not what I wanted.

So they took me out of public school, took away my laptop and phone, and forbid me of getting on any sort of social media, completely isolating me from my friends. This was probably the part of my life when I was the most depressed, and I’m surprised I didn’t kill myself. I was completely alone for 5 months. No friends, no support, no love. Just my parent’s disappointment and the cruelty of loneliness.
At the end of the school year, my parents finally came around and gave me my phone and let me back on social media. I was excited, I finally had my friends back. They were extremely excited to see me and talk to me, but only at first. Eventually they realized they didn’t actually give a shit about me, and I felt even lonelier than I did before. The only friends I thought I had only liked me because they saw me five times a week.

After a summer of having almost no friends plus the weight of having to think about college, save money for moving out, keep my grades up, go to church each week and feel like shit because everyone there is against everything I live for, I have decided I’ve had enough. I’m never going to transition successfully, even when I move out. I’m never going to be happy with the way I look or sound. I’m never going to have enough friends to satisfy me. I’m never going to have enough love to satisfy me. I’m never going to find a man who loves me. I’m never going to be happy. Either I live the rest of my life as a lonely man who wishes he were a woman or I live my life as a lonelier woman who hates herself. There’s no winning. There’s no way out. I’m sad enough already, I don’t need my life to get any worse. People say “it gets better” but that isn’t true in my case. It gets worse. Each day I get worse.

That’s the gist of it, that’s why I feel like killing myself. Sorry if that’s not a good enough reason for you, it’s good enough for me. As for my will, I want 100% of the things that I legally own to be sold and the money (plus my money in the bank) to be given to trans civil rights movements and support groups, I don’t give a shit which one. The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights. Gender needs to be taught about in schools, the earlier the better. My death needs to mean something. My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say “that’s fucked up” and fix it. Fix society. Please.

Goodbye,

(Leelah) Josh Alcorn

She knew her parents would try to bury the truth of her death, so she scheduled her suicide note to appear on the web, so that her message couldn’t be hidden.

A parent’s worst nightmare might be the death of a child, but I should think a child’s worst nightmare would be being denied by a parent, in life and even more cruelly in death.

beeftony:

zetsubonna:

thank you so fucking much, science side of tumblr

One small correction: using cowpox to treat smallpox isn’t vaccination, it’s a similar but distinct process called inoculation. A vaccine uses a weakened, mostly dead form of the virus to let your body do some target practice. An inoculation actually infects the body with a related, but less severe form of an illness, and the antibodies developed from fighting it off also repel the more deadly disease.

carudamon119:

ライブドアニュース ‏@livedoornews  

【ストレス発散に】通常の約6倍サイズ、超巨大エンターキー「BIG ENTER」

asylum-art:

Famous Musician Portraits from Their Own CDs - Mirco Pagano & Moreno De Turco

It’s very popular to create musicians portraits from vinyl records or recycled cassette tapes. This time the following portraits were created from cds. For the inauguration of First Floor Under, a pop-vanguard culture magazine, artists Mirco Pagano & Moreno De Turco  spent more than 200 hours lining up the CDs to recreate the portraits of seven world-famous musicians: Bob Marley, Elvis Presley, Jim Morrison, Jimmy Hendrix, Michael Jackson, James Brown, and Freddie Mercury. Take a look!

Wow. Very cool. But… where da women at? What, no Janis? No Nina? No Joan? No Tina? No Madonna? 

(via robertdafoto)

thefrogman:

Llama at Machu Pichu by Erica Kuschel [website | flickr | facebook]

The funny thing is that the early reviews of the movie were pretty lukewarm, not just from critics but from regular test audiences. Now after this controversy, people are hailing it as the greatest comedy of our generation.

It’s also caused a resurgence of those stupid NORTH KOREA BEST KOREA memes. That’s just annoying, though.

What makes me angry is that by mocking North Korea, the mockers are reinforcing the DPRK’s state propaganda. If you think the North Korean government is stupid or you see them as toothless cartoon villains, then you’ve already been indoctrinated by it. Hook, line, and sinker. Without getting too much into my personal life, I have close ties with people deeply involved in North Korea. I’ve befriended DPRK defectors and people who have dedicated their lives to dismantling the Kim regime.

North Korea is the only Orwellian police state in the world and it has been that way for almost 70 years. Other nations have tried to maintain a government like the DPRK’s in the modern world and failed. The USSR broke apart. Fascist Italy fell. Nazi Germany fell. Gaddafi was ousted and killed.

Yet the DPRK endures. People don’t rebel, other countries don’t invade them, and they still receive concessions from the international community even as they continue developing their nuclear program. Stupid governments can’t keep 24.9 million people drinking the Kool Aid and force exponentially more powerful countries into bargaining positions.

A large part of why North Korea endures is because they’ve carefully engineered how they want to appear to the West. Horrific things are happening there right now. Some of my friends have been sent to juvenile concentration camps where kids were beaten and raped by the guards. Camps where kids had their feet cut off for attempting to escape. Friends who saw a fresh corpse on the street every day they walked home from school, left to starve to death on the sidewalk because of the Great Famine. Friends who were forced to eat bark to survive, friends who witnessed cannibalism.

There is so much information out there about how horrible and dangerous North Korea is but the international community doesn’t receive pressure from their constituents to do anything about it because everyone views North Korea as a joke. That is a very intentional, calculated move by the DPRK government. They are fully aware of how ridiculous and empty their threats sound. Those statements are nothing but propaganda fed to the West.

B.R. Myers is one of the world’s foremost scholars of North Korea and he pointed out that North Korea is not very socialist or communist. In fact, if you read the North Korean constitution, you won’t find a single mention of socialism or communism. But they are very Confucian, and a lot of what they talk about in their constitution is aligned with Confucian principles. That also goes for their foreign policy. It’s straight out of the Art of War. To quote Sun Tzu:

"If your enemy is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him. If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. If he is taking his ease, give him no rest. If his forces are united, separate them. If sovereign and subject are in accord, put division between them. Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected."

And that’s exactly what North Korea does. They know they can’t possibly withstand a military invasion from a first world power, but at the same time, they can’t risk a policy of close contact because it would compromise the internal propaganda they minister to their citizens.

So they make ridiculous threats they can’t possibly carry out. They get angry about comedy movies. They play the role of the tiny man with a huge chip on his shoulder, and the international community responds accordingly. The unspeakable atrocities North Korea is committing against its citizens is overshadowed by the global public perceiving North Korea as a cartoon villain. And when North Korea does do something legitimately dangerous like missile tests in Japanese waters or firing upon submarines, it is without warning, provocation, grandstanding, or boasting. Nothing came of the RKS Cheonan attack because there was no hard evidence that linked it back to the DPRK. Do you think an inept government can pull that off?

This is how they control their public image. It’s how they make it clear they are not to be fucked with when they want to be taken seriously, but when they need to relieve international pressure off themselves, they start talking like Darth Vader, and the laughs and mocking that follow work to North Korea’s benefit.

Did you know they’re also heavily involved in organized crime? You probably haven’t and you’ll never hear North Korea boasting about it, even though their criminal enterprises are a legitimate threat that causes actual damage overseas. They want to divert people’s attention away from things like Room 39 so they make wild threats they cannot possibly carry out and the international media eats it up. Room 39 is a multibillion dollar criminal enterprise but we have little information about it. People struggle to accept that the DPRK can run operations like this because of the misguided belief that the DPRK is run by boneheads.

Look at what the response has been like for their threats about The Interview. The DPRK knows damn well they can’t bomb any American movie theaters. But they used their grand, puffed up threats as propaganda. And it isn’t the first time they’ve indoctrinated the West with idle threats.

What’s the response to North Korean news on any popular media website? North Korea Best Korea! ROR! You are now banned from r/pyongyang! Any discussions about the concentration camps or human rights abuses are completely drowned out by stupid memes, stupid memes which exist because North Korea presented itself as an evil empire out of a sci-fi book and the West ate it up. North Korea is already associated with vapid memes in the eyes of young westerners. Now it’ll be associated with a slightly above average comedy movie and hammy threats, playing right into the belief that North Korea like a real-life version of Mordor or the Galactic Empire.

When you hear about the Galactic Empire killing trillions of people in Star Wars, you don’t feel anything because it’s exaggerated fiction. On a subconscious level, it’s easy to feel ambivalent towards millions of people being tortured, raped, and starved on a daily basis when you view the oppressing power in the same level of ridiculousness as Darth Vader.

But Kim Jong Un is not Emperor Palpatine. The Workers’ Party are not Sith Lords. They are completely sane, flesh-and-blood men and women no different from me or you who torture and imprison regular people.

Real people. People who are fathers, daughters, uncles, friends. Imagine if your family lived in a country where one misstep you make could land you and your children in the gulag. If you have daughters, you can expect them to be gang raped by guards. You can expect them to have forced abortions for carrying mixed children. If you have a relative that has special needs, expect them to be executed for polluting the gene pool.

When you step back and start deprogramming yourself from the media conditioning that North Korea has been feeding you, it’s not so easy to be so flippant about North Korea, is it? Suddenly it becomes as disturbing as joking about the deaths of Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, or creating memes out of the two NYPD officers who were murdered in cold blood simply for being in uniform. Picture that on a scale magnified by millions and perpetuated every single day.

So the fact that the world is congratulating itself for being so witty and edgy for mocking North Korea is what made me angry this week. I’ve seen more outrage against North Korea for bullying Sony into pulling this movie than I have when the UN released its report on North Korean concentration camps.

If the world was able to see North Korea soberly as the most brutal dictatorship in the world, it wouldn’t be such a pain in the ass convincing people to get involved. That’s harder to do now that everyone is lapping up the DPRK’s Kool Aid without realizing.

Why is this the issue Reddit wants to have protests over?

The real way to stick it to North Korea would be to start organizing mass donations to nonprofits dedicated to ending it, making their human rights abuses viral, and starting an online movement that pressure world leaders into breaking the Kim regime. That would actually scare the shit out of the DPRK.

TLDR
The Interview is out and millions are spending cash on watching it.

Like rice paper, I guess. Neil deGrasse Tyson made a couple of light-hearted tweets on Christmas that prompted an awful lot of whining. From the reaction, you’d think he’d posted this joke:

Jon Rosenberg

I don’t even think that’s particularly offensive, but Tyson’s jokes were tame, even compared to that.

Seriously: he mentioned that Christmas isn’t particularly significant to non-Christians, pointed out that Newton was also born on Christmas, commented on the commercialization of the holiday, and said something about the physics of Rudolph’s red nose. Not a single Zombie Jesus joke. And a bunch of hair-trigger Christians reacted like he’d taken a dump on a church pew.

He’s a douche, they said; they accused him of mocking other people’s precious traditions; and of course, there was a heavy dose of Fatwah Envy — he’d never dare mock Muslims! But I really liked the nonsense they tell themselves about science.

@neiltyson This is disrespectful to Christians. Jesus created the science you cherish so much. Everyone finds God eventually, you will too.

— Brian Fagioli (@brianfagioli) December 25, 2014

This is disrespectful to Christians. Jesus created the science you cherish so much. Everyone finds God eventually, you will too.

I think we can just let Neil deGrasse Tyson have the last word.

Imagine a world in which we are all enlightened by objective truths rather than offended by them.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) December 27, 2014

Imagine a world in which we are all enlightened by objective truths rather than offended by them.

NdT has also responded directly to the ‘controversy’.

vortex-mmxii:

YES BLACK PEOPLE! Fuck Fox!
#AntonioMartin #ICantBreathe #Ferguson #AnotherOne

And here’s more festive cheer!

Merry Christmas.

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

Relief is here! Just listen to this sampling of…Scientology music!

If you listen to the whole thing, at the very end you get to hear L. Ron Hubbard himself sing (or try to, anyway). And you’ll then find yourself reconciled to “pa-rum-pa-pa-pum” and “fa-la-la-la” and all the other crap playing non-stop in every commercial locale in town right now. Or at least, you’ll be able to say, “It could be worse.”

Google invited me down to Mountain View to preview the latest generation of their self-driving cars.