Luke.stirling

With the recent success of Frozen and the anticipation of Moana, Caroline Siede examines the power of the Disney princess. Read the rest

Ketamine, a tranquilizer/anesthetic and recreational drug, can relieve symptoms of depression for up to a couple of weeks, writes psychiatrist Emily Deans.

Read the rest

Watching this classic video of Kinako, born in a Japanese pet shop, eating a rice ball is a delightful way to start my Friday.

Me ha parecido muy original y divertida esta galería de imágenes que superpone carteles de películas a fotografías reales, preparadas de forma precisa para que encajase perfectamente sin tener que añadir “photoshopeo”. Hay algunos mejores que otros, pero en general quedan estupendamente. Yo me anoto la idea para intentar algunos similares con los colegas, porque eligiendo bien la imagen se pueden conseguir sin demasiado trabajo.

Vía: Gran Angular

mylovelybirds:

293_2014

Brush your teeth, geeze.

A reminder that the English language evolved at a time when the counting system involved a "long hundred" equal to 120.

The long hundred, a unit of count = 120, appears to have arisen out of an ancient Germanic way of counting, one which is echoed in modern English. The “teen” suffix, as in four-teen, six-teen, etc, is not applied to one plus ten or two plus ten (they aren't one-teen and two-teen). Eleven and twelve are treated the same way as the first ten numerals; the break is after twelve, not ten... Note that this is not a duodecimal numeric system.

The use of the word in this manner lingered for a long time in England:

This reckoning of one hundred as six score still holds good (or did to my knowledge ten years ago) in Leighton Buzzard, Beds. If one ordered there 100 plants, for example, one received, and also had to pay for, 120: a hundred being always reckoned as six twenties. If one required simply 100, it was necessary to order five score.

So also here in Cardigan and around, taking eggs, for example, the dealer picking up three eggs in each hand, reckons that twenty times this makes one hundred.

Emily M. Pritchard (writing on 21 July 1906).
Archaeologia Cambrensis. 6th series, vol. 6, page 352.

Posted because this photo brings back pleasant memories of my childhood in Minnesota.  Every fall tiger salamanders by the dozens would accumulate at the base of our outside basement stairwell.  It was my not unpleasant chore as a youngster to corral them before they desiccated, and transfer them back to the nearby woods.


Photo of ringed salamanders from the Missouri Department of Conservation, via Nothing To Do With Arbroath.

Hulk attempts to make sense of the maelstrom. 

Doghouse Diaries, via This Isn't Happiness.

Eric Slivka, reporting for MacRumors:

Earlier this week, pharmacy chain Rite Aid shut down unofficial support for the Apple Pay and Google Wallet mobile payments systems, resulting in an outcry from users who have been testing out Apple’s new system since its launch on Monday. Rite Aid was not an official Apple Pay partner, but the payments system generally works with existing near field communications (NFC) payment terminals anyway, and many users had had success using Apple Pay at Rite Aid stores early in the week.

It now appears that fellow major pharmacy chain CVS is following suit and as of today is shutting down the NFC functionality of its payment terminals entirely, a move presumably intended to thwart Apple Pay. Google Wallet services are obviously also being affected by the move.

These retailers are part of a group (Merchant Customer Exchange, “MCX”) working on an upcoming mobile payment system called CurrentC. Here’s an article about CurrentC by Debbie Simurda, writing for Mainstreet Inc., a point-of-sale provider:

CurrentC mobile payments platform by Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) is a mobile wallet being developed by a group of major retailers who want greater control of payments, their mobile brand and mobile customer experience. They want to keep more of their customer data, rather than ceding to technology companies. MCX was established in 2012 and currently consists of 59 participating retailers, many large Tier 1 merchants, across all segments. […]

[Update: Not sure why, but Mainstreet Inc. took down the original article. I’m now linking to Google’s cached version of it.]

Here’s how it’s supposed to work:

The application can be downloaded for free from the App Store and Google Play Store. Available for both iOS and Android devices, it is designed to ‘simplify and expedite the customer checkout process by applying qualifying offers and coupons, participating merchant rewards, loyalty programs and membership accounts, and offering payment options through the consumer’s selected financial account, all with a single scan.”

• Using CurrentC mobile payments the point-of-sale displays a QR code for the customer to read with their phone.

• The QR code generates the payment token on the smartphone which verifies the shopper’s presence, identity and initiates the transaction between the merchant and the bank.

• The phone connects with the cloud for authorization and sends the approval to the merchant.

CurrentC doesn’t support the contactless Near Field Communications (NFC) used by Apple Pay.

QR codes. Good luck with that. Plus, CurrentC doesn’t even work with credit cards — it only works with prepaid store cards and debit cards tied directly to your bank account. Apple Pay is built atop the credit card system; CurrentC is a (futile, I say) attempt to eliminate credit card.

What Apple gets and what no one else in the industry does is that using your mobile device for payments will only work if it’s far easier and better than using a credit card. With CurrentC, you’ll have to unlock your phone, launch their app, point your camera at a QR code, and wait. With Apple Pay, you just take out your phone and put your thumb on the Touch ID sensor.

Tim Cook was exactly right on stage last month when he introduced Apple Pay: it’s the only mobile payment solution designed around improving the customer experience. CurrentC is designed around the collection of customer data and the ability to offer coupons and other junk. Here is what a printed receipt from CVS looks like. It looks like a joke, but that’s for real. And that’s the sort of experience they want to bring to mobile payments.

If I’m reading this right, and I think I am, these retailers who are shutting down their NFC payment systems are validating that Apple Pay is actually working, that people are actually using it. And remember, it only works with the month-old iPhones 6. Think about what happens a year or two from now when a majority of iPhones in use are Apple Pay enabled.

Think about what they’re doing. They’re turning off NFC payment systems — the whole thing — only because people were actually using them with Apple Pay. Apple Pay works so well that it even works with non-partner systems. These things have been installed for years and so few people used them, apparently, that these retailers would rather block everyone than allow Apple Pay to continue working. I can’t imagine a better validation of Apple Pay’s appeal.

And the reason they don’t want to allow Apple Pay is because Apple Pay doesn’t give them any personal information about the customer. It’s not about security — Apple Pay is far more secure than any credit/debit card system in the U.S. It’s not about money — Apple’s tiny slice of the transaction comes from the banks, not the merchants. It’s about data.

They’re doing this so they can pursue a system that is less secure (third-party apps don’t have access to the secure element where Apple Pay stores your credit card data, for one thing), less convenient (QR codes?), and not private.

I don’t know that CVS and Rite Aid disabling Apple Pay out of spite is going to drive customers to switch pharmacies (Walgreens is an Apple Pay partner), but I do know that CurrentC is unlikely to ever gain any traction whatsoever.

naamahdarling:

urulokid:

facebooksexism:

thebluelip-blondie:

skeptikhaleesi:

brownglucose:

nextyearsgirl:

The absence of women in history is man made.

How petty

just look at babe ruth’s face tho

so confused

so lost

i love it

pure hater shit

Jackie Mitchell…a bad ass lady I had never heard of. 

From her Wikipedia page: “Seventeen-year-old Jackie Mitchell, brought in to pitch in the first inning after the starting pitcher had given up a double and a single, faced Babe Ruth. After taking a ball, Ruth swung and missed at the next two pitches. Mitchell’s fourth pitch to Ruth was a called third strike. Babe Ruth glared and verbally abused the umpire before being led away by his teammates to sit to wait for another batting turn. The crowd roared for Jackie. Babe Ruth was quoted in a Chattanooga newspaper as having said:

"I don’t know what’s going to happen if they begin to let women in baseball. Of course, they will never make good. Why? Because they are too delicate. It would kill them to play ball every day."

Next up was the Iron Horse Lou Gehrig, who swung through the first three pitches to strike out. Jackie Mitchell became famous for striking out two of the greatest baseball players in history.

A few days after Mitchell struck out Ruth and Gehrig, baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis voided her contract and declared women unfit to play baseball as the game was “too strenuous.”^[5][10] Mitchell continued to play professionally,barnstorming with the House of David, a men’s team famous for their very long hair and long beards.^[11] While travelling with the House of David team, she would sometimes wear a fake beard for publicity.”

TL;DR: teenage girl strikes out two of the greatest baseball players ever, teenage girl gets her contract voided, teenage girl plays baseball wearing fake beard

These guys were so fucking injured by a teenage girl’s awesomeness that they literally threw a hissyfit and hung up a sign that said “NO GIRLS.”

They gave up.

They couldn’t handle it.

Losers. 

Teenage girls are amazing.

Thanks everyone for a glorious BAHFest West! Many people asked when we'll do more, and when we'll open up submissions. For that information, just stay tuned to our facebook page!

This much we know: Cpl. Nathan Cirillo was a soldier who took a solemn vow to uphold Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to uphold the values that make Canada Canada. We don't know what values Michael Zehaf-Bibeau espoused, why he took his gun to Parliament Hill. And it does not matter. Read the rest

avianrecon:

Kestrel family in England. 

Source.

These are my hole of babies. They are all mine.

I normally don’t read or watch blogs or youtube videos with titles along the lines of “PZ Myers is a …”; there are so many of them! And they’re so boring and repetitive and vacuous! But I was stranded in an airport all day yesterday, I was boreed, so I did read Luciano’s “P.Z. Myers Is a Dishonest Social Justice Warrior Who Doesn’t Know What ‘Atheism’ Means”. One small part was so funny it inspired me to create art.

In calling me a “dictionary atheist,” I suppose Myers is upset that I have the audacity to use “atheist” correctly. Moreover, the thing about the logic of Myers’ argument is that he could just as easily be talking about how, for example, nihilists are people, and have responsibilities to each other, and that nihilists’ collective lack of a grand purpose “shapes the pattern of those responsibilities.” This would be absurd, of course, and it shows how porous his definition of atheism is.

Heh. Yes. As it turns out, nihilists are people, and their beliefs do shape the pattern of their responsibilities to other people. Being a nihilist implies certain things about their beliefs and ideas, and how they’re going to interact with the world and others. How can it not?

Well, I suppose it could be the case that someone is using the word “nihilist” as a meaningless label — they picked it from a list of philosophical positions, thought it sounded spiffy, and decided they’d just be one. And then they stopped, didn’t think it through any further, and came to the conclusion that…there were no further conclusions to be drawn from that.

For such people who are Luciano-style nihilists, I thought I’d be helpful and make them a button. Print it out and pin it to your lapel or your hat (fedora, preferably.) Congratulations! You’re a nihilist!

What a surreal life Anita Sarkeesian must lead, in which virtually everything she says and does becomes grist for the Great Internet Lady Harassment Machine, Sarkeesian Division.

Take the latest blowup, which followed a few comments Sarkeesian made in the wake of Friday’s school shooting in Marysville, which may have been triggered by the shooter’s angry response to a romantic breakup. On Friday, Sarkeesian posted a few thoughts on the matter on Twitter:

While it it not literally true that every single mass shooter in history has been male, we are talking about an almost exclusively male club: one recent attempt at crunching the numbers found that 97% of school shooters have been male, and 79% of them white. (The Maryville shooter was Native American.)

In any case, the notion that a crime so heavily associated with men might have something to do with our society’s notions of masculinity isn’t exactly a radical notion. Indeed, it seems rather obvious.

But to Sarkeesian’s many haters, on Twitter and elsewhere, it was as if Sarkeesian had just posted a video of herself drowning puppies. Cue the twitterstorm.

Here are just a selection of the literally hundreds of lovely comments that Sarkeesian had Tweeted at her on Friday and Saturday after making her original comments.

[Giant TRIGGER WARNING for violent, explicit threats, harassment]

.

.

.

.

.

There were, of course, the explicit threats:

And the implicit threats:

And the sexual harassment:

 

And those who merely expressed their hope that Sarkeesian would kill herself:

Or die a horrible death:

Or simply die :

 

But not everyone wished violence on her. Some just told her that the threats and/or harassment she’s already getting is totally justified:

 

(Apparently by “fishing” Mr. de Alba means “expressing an opinion or making an observation.” Also note that the tweets that set off this latest wave of harassment didn’t contain the #GamerGate hashtag. )

Speaking of harassment, we’re just getting started in our chronicle of the latest wave.

Let’s continue with an assortment of Tweets using the c-word, a favorite slur amongst Sarkeesian’s detractors.

Why, yes, that is Suzanne McCarley, A Voice for Men’s “Assistant Managing Editor” happily adding her voice to the harassment.

Others pulled out the f-word:

 

She was called a “bitch.”

She was called a “whore.”

She was called a “terrorist.”

And a Nazi:

One fellow said that he thought Sarkeesian’s tweets were actually worse than the shooting itself:

And one even declared her “officially worse than Wil Wheaton,” the former Star Trek:TNG actor who has won mass opprobrium from internet dicks for publicly expressing his belief that people  should not be dicks.

To add insult to injury, a few reported Sarkeesian herself to Twitter for various imaginary infractions:

Another asked why she wasn’t in jail for her, er, crimes:

Just to remind you: these tweets are all from TWO DAYS’ worth of harassment and threats on Twitter. And this isn’t all of them.

At this point anyone who claims that Sarkeesian is “making up” the harassment she gets, or writing it herself, or just the work of a “few trolls,” is either disingenuous or delusional.

I’ll leave the last word to Sarkeesian herself.

EDITED TO ADD:

ATTENTION NEW COMMENTERS! I would like to draw your attention to this bit from my comments policy:

[I]f I’m writing about someone who’s gotten harassed by misogynists on the internet, and you want to talk about how much they deserved it, or what a lying liar they are? Well, fuck you! Your comments go right into the trash.

So take that into consideration. It might save you some time.

CORRECTION: I removed a screenshot of a Tweet that wasn’t threatening but was posted by a troll. See here.

 

Raven. Notice how much bigger their breaks are compared to crows.

pumpkinpienix:

igperish:

(x)

EVERY TIME I SEE HIM SAYING SOMETHING I LOVE HIM MORE UGH

FUCK YEAH DANIEL RADCLIFFE

-teesa-:

3.6.14

Aasif Mandvi interviews Fox Business commentator, Todd Wilemon.

"That’s why there is a bite out of the Apple logo." -slipperyfreud

[extrafabulouscomics]

“My daughter has not seen her biological dad since she was four. She’s 11 now. When she was two he contacted me and asked if I would allow him to terminate his parental rights so he could stop paying child support and I agreed.. I wanted to spare her the heartache of a revolving door father and the sacrifice of the financial support was well worth him never being able to disappoint her again. I never lied to her about where he went or who her dad was.. I have always answered her questions in the most age appropriate way possible. When she was four he contacted me and told me he has been diagnosed with cancer and would like to see her. I set aside a day and we met in the park. He had asked for two hours. He stayed 20 minutes and we never heard from him again.. Over the summer we ran into somebody that knows him and they commented on how she looks like his other children. They elaborated that he has settled down and has a family now. My stomach tied itself in knots thinking of how hurtful that must be to my daughter.. I cut the conversation short and we got in the car to leave and that’s when I saw her smiling. She said “mom.. He figured out how to be a dad. That’s such a nice thing. I’m happy for his kids.” And that’s the day an 11 year old taught me all I need to know about forgiveness”

- A comment on this Humans of New York post (via aboutme-g)

See you at BAHFest tomorrow!

You may have heard the latest MRA talking point, the claim that more men are raped than women in the US. Echidne of the Snakes takes that apart beautifully: it turns out it’s only true if you compare a bushel basket full of apples and oranges to a handful of grapefruit that you’ve pulled out of another basket containing a bunch of avocados and bananas.

It’s been a pretty shitty week. I don’t think I need to explain why. So here’s something to help take the edge off — a new meme featuring a phrase anyone who’s ever said anything critical of GamerGate has heard, again and again: “Actually, it’s about ethics in games journalism.”

This new meme, which started really taking off today on Twitter and Tumblr, seems to be becoming the new “not all men.” Which makes sense: “Not all men” is to mansplaining what “Actually … ” is to Gatersplaining.

Here are some of my favorites, taken from Twitter and from the new Tumblr blog titled, naturally, Actually … it’s about ethics in games journalism.

I made one myself out of an old #NotAllMen meme:

This blog, meanwhile, uses the phrase as a caption for New Yorker cartoons.

And then there’s this Tweet.

Thank you, anonymous meme-makers, and whoever came up with this in the first place! We needed this.

 

 

The "caller ID" no longer works on my office phone, so yesterday when I answered it, I heard "Hi !! This is [politician].  I know everybody hates robocalls, but..." [click]

I have grown not to just despise the politicians, but to hate the process.