It might not be a huge surprise, in the big scheme of things, but Dell's return to private ownership brought focus to its laptop designs and it is seeing growth in places formerly filled only with doom.

Mark Walton explains:

Going private, Dell claimed, would help the company plough more money into R&D, and create better products for consumer and business alike. Three years on, and Dell's strategy may finally be coming to fruition. At this year's CES it unveiled a new line of business notebooks and tablets under its Latitude brand. They sport premium materials like carbon fibre tops and magnesium alloy chassis, and much thinner and lighter designs. Crucially, they continue to feature the strong encryption, wireless tech, and remote management services demanded by IT managers. Finally, Dell has a desirable set of business notebooks.

If you're in the market for a Windows laptop, Dell's thin-bezel models are my faves right now. Check out the new Latitude 7370, a work-harder version of last year's lighter but slighter XPS 13. Their monitors are excellent. too.

Because a PIN-pad is so constrained and predictable, the accelerometer in your smartwatch is able to guess with a high degree of confidence (73%) what you enter into it -- it can also serve as a general-purpose keylogger, though with less accuracy (59%), thanks to the complexity of the keyboard. (more…)

After years of documenting instances in which parents and kids are terrorized by law enforcement and child welfare authorities because the kids were allowed to be on their own in public places, the Free Range Kids movement has gotten some justice: a new Federal law gives its official okey-doke to parents who let their kids get to school on their own. (more…)

Appears the new open carry laws in Texas, which have expressly allowed guns onto College campuses and into psychiatric hospitals, are back firing against open and concealed carry enthusiasts. Private business and property owners can ban firearms from their property by either posting signs, or verbally informing armed people they are not welcome to carry their weapons. Firearms enthusiasts are finding a lot of new signs around Texas.

The Trace has observed a wonderful exchange on a Texas gun rights forum:

Others had a more measured responses. “I would LOVE to OC everywhere I go,” Lynyrd wrote. “The fact is, it makes some people uncomfortable. Time may change that, but it will take years.” He cautioned his fellow gun owners to remember that “most all of the places we go outside our homes is still PRIVATE PROPERTY.” (Business owners can verbally notify open-carrying customers that they are not welcome in their establishments, regardless of whether a sign is posted or not.)

Weighing in again, the original poster, LTUME1978, felt that for Texas’s concealed carriers, the damage had been done. “The lid is off this can of worms and it will never go back,” reads a later post in the thread. “I hope the right to walk around looking like Wyatt Earp is worth it to the open carry folks because a lot of us are loosing our right to concealed carry and it may cost some of us our lives for your privilege to play cowboy.”

Airstream is making only 100 of these Pendelton Limited Edition trailers. They have a U.S. National Park Foundation motif, and Airstream will donate $1,000 to the National Park Foundation for each Pendleton trailer sold. The base price is $114,600. It comes with a stainless steel oven, a 3-burner cooktop, a refrigerator, 2 30-lb. propane tanks, deep-cycle-batteries, 2 Samsung HDTVs, a Blu-Ray player, and a high definition marine-grade Polk audio system. If you want the accessory kit that includes woolen blankets, a dining set, throw pillows, hand towels, you can order it separately.

kenny_yan‘s mechs are both superbly built and instantly recognizable, and this newest one looks to be the best yet. With four arms and an aggressive stance, this build pulls off a lot of complex angles as well as having great articulation thanks to the small Mixel joints. There’s not much more to say here other than to check the builder’s photostream to drink in all the detail; this one’s really worth the time.

liberalsarecool:

macleod:

1.) Bernie believes that black lives matter.

2.) Bernie was a civil rights activist and organizer in his youth and participated in the 1963 March on Washington.

3.) When asked about Islamphobia in America by a young Muslim woman, Bernie asked her to come down to the stage, hugged her and responded with “I will do everything I can to rid this country of the ugly stain of racism that has existed here for far too many years.”

4.) Bernie believes in police cameras and demilitarizing and diversifying police forces.

5.) Bernie believes in restoring the Voting Rights Act.

6.) Bernie wants to make public universities tuition-free by imposing a Wall Street tax.

7.) Bernie believes in automatically registering all Americans to vote once they turn the age of 18.

8.) Bernie wants a single-payer, universal health care system.

9.) Bernie “filibustered” for eight-and-half hours against Bush-era tax cuts, specifically the provisions that benefited high-income earners.

10.) In 2015, Bernie introduced a bill to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour by 2020.

11.) Bernie wants to invest $1 trillion in fixing our crumbling roads, public transit and waste plantswhich will provide jobs to Americans, particularly veterans.

12.) Bernie wants to reverse NAFTA and bring jobs back to America.

13.) Bernie believes men and women should be paid equally.

14.) Bernie wants to expand funding to Planned Parenthood.

15.) Bernie believes that every employee should have 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, two weeks of paid vacation and seven days of paid sick days.

16.) Bernie does not ask for money from billionaires or Wall Street. He even donated his check from notoriously douchey pharmaceutical CEO, Martin Shkreli, to an HIV clinic.

17.) Because Bernie flies coach.

18.) Bernie wants to break up big banks and end the practice of paying out big bonuses to CEOs. He also wants to reenact Glass-Steagall, a 1933 act that separated risky trading from conventional banking.

19.) Bernie has been a supporter of gay rights for decades.

20.) Because Bernie says things like this:

21.) Bernie opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

22.) Bernie was instrumental in pushing 2014 legislation that added billions of additional dollars to the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs. He also believes in supporting our veterans by offering them excellent health care and getting their benefits to them quickly.

23.) Bernie believes in the Iran Deal because:

24.) Bernie is serious about climate change and has a full plan on how he wants to combat it. This plan includes transitioning away from fossil fuels and investing in clean energy.

25.) Bernie believes in treating immigrants fairly and humanely, while creating a respectful system of legalization; he promises to use executive order if Congress prevents him from doing so.

And on the fun side, he looks like Doc Brown, he was mayor of one of the most hippie cities in America, Burlington, Vermont, and he released a folk album. 

(This post can be originally found here)

Bernie!

Hat tip to Stephen Law.

Feel free to post your own pseudo-profundities in the comments below. There’s a prize in it for the best one!

Sunbeam

What if all of the sun's output of visible light were bundled up into a laser-like beam that had a diameter of around 1m once it reaches Earth?

—Max Schäfer

Here's the situation Max is describing:

If you were standing in the path of the beam, you would obviously die pretty quickly. You wouldn't really die of anything, in the traditional sense. You would just stop being biology and start being physics.

When the beam of light hit the atmosphere, it would heat a pocket of air to millions of degrees[1]Fahrenheit, Celsius, Rankine, or Kelvin—it doesn't really matter. in a fraction of a second. That air would turn to plasma and start dumping its heat as a flood of x-rays in all directions. Those x-rays would heat up the air around them, which would turn to plasma itself and start emitting infrared light. It would be like a hydrogen bomb going off, only much more violent.

This radiation would vaporize everything in sight, turn the surrounding atmosphere to plasma, and start stripping away the Earth's surface.

But let's imagine you were standing on the far side of the Earth. You're still definitely not going to make it—things don't turn out well for the Earth in this scenario—but what, exactly, would you die from?

The Earth is big enough to protect people on the other side—at least for a little bit—from Max's sunbeam, and the seismic waves from the destruction would take a while to propogate through the planet. But the Earth isn't a perfect shield. Those wouldn't be what killed you.

Instead, you would die from twilight.

The sky is dark at night^{[citation needed]} because the Sun is on the other side of the Earth.^{[citation needed]} But the night sky isn't always completely dark. There's a glow in the sky before sunrise and after sunset because, even with the Sun hidden, some of the light is bent around the surface by the atmosphere.

If the sunbeam hit the Earth, x-rays, thermal radiation, and everything in between would flood into the atmosphere, so we need to learn a little about how different kinds of light interact with air.

Normal light interacts with the atmosphere through Rayleigh scattering. You may have heard of Rayleigh scattering as the answer to "why is the sky blue." This is sort of true, but honestly, a better answer to this question might be "because air is blue." Sure, it appears blue for a bunch of physics reasons, but everything appears the color it is for a bunch of physics reasons.[2]When you ask, "Why is the statue of liberty green?" the answer is something like, "The outside of the statue is copper, so it used to be copper-colored. Over time, a layer of copper carbonate formed (through oxidation), and copper carbonate is green." You don't say "The statue is green because of frequency-specific absorption and scattering by surface molecules."

When air heats up, the electrons are stripped away from their atoms, turning it to plasma. The ongoing flood of radiation from the beam has to pass through this plasma, so we need to know how transparent plasma is to different kinds of light. At this point, I'd like to mention the 1964 paper Opacity Calculations: Past and Future, by Harris L. Mayer, which contains the single best opening paragraph to a physics paper I've ever seen:

Initial steps for this symposium began a few billion years ago. As soon as the stars were formed, opacities became one of the basic subjects determining the structure of the physical world in which we live. And more recently with the development of nuclear weapons operating at temperatures of stellar interiors, opacities become as well one of the basic subjects determining the processes by which we may all die.

Compared to air, the plasma is relatively transparent to x-rays. The x-rays would pass through the plasma, heating it through effects called Compton scattering and pair production, but would be stopped quickly when they reached the non-plasma air outside the bubble. However, the steady flow of x-rays from the growing pocket of superhot air closer to the beam would turn a steadily-growing bubble of air to plasma. The fresh plasma at the edge of the bubble would give off infrared radiation, which would head out toward the horizon (along with the infrared already on the way), heating whatever it finds there.

This bubble of heat and light would wrap around the Earth, heating the air and land as it went. As the air heated up, the scattering and emission from the plasma would cause the effects to propogate farther and farther around the horizon. Furthermore, the atmosphere around the beam's contact point would be blasted into space, where it would reflect the light back down around the horizon.

Exactly how quickly the radiation makes it around the Earth depends on many details of atmospheric scattering, but if the Moon happened to be half-full at the time, it might not even matter.

When Max's device kicked in, the Moon would go out, since the sunlight illuminating it would be captured and funneled into a beam. Slightly after the beam made contact with the atmosphere, the quarter moon would blink out.

When the beam from Max's device hit the Earth's atmosphere, the light from the contact point would illuminate the Moon. Depending on the Moon's position and where you were on the Earth, this reflected moonlight alone could be enough to burn you to death ...

... just as the twilight wrapped around the planet, bringing on one final sunrise.[3]Here's an image which is great for annoying a few specific groups of people:

There's one thing that might prevent the Earth's total destruction. Can Max's mechanism actually track a target? If not, the Earth could be saved by its own orbital motion. If the beam was restricted to aiming at a fixed point in the sky, it would only take the Earth about three minutes to move out of the way. Everyone on the surface would still be cooked, and much of the atmosphere and surface would be lost, but the bulk of the Earth's mass would probably remain as a charred husk.

The Sun's death ray would continue out into space. Years later, if it reached another planetary system, it would be too spread out to vaporize anything outright, but it would likely be bright enough to heat up the surfaces of the planets.

Max's scenario may have doomed Earth, but if it's any consolation, we wouldn't necessarily die alone.

“In 1997, Michael Wayne Haley was arrested after stealing a calculator from Walmart. This was a crime that merited a maximum two-year prison term. But prosecutors incorrectly applied a habitual offender law. Neither the judge nor the defense lawyer caught the error and Haley was sentenced to 16 years.
 
   Eventually, the mistake came to light and Haley tried to fix it. Ted Cruz was solicitor general of Texas at the time. Instead of just letting Haley go for time served, Cruz took the case to the Supreme Court to keep Haley in prison for the full 16 years.
&mbsp;
   The case reveals something interesting about Cruz’s character. Ted Cruz is now running strongly among evangelical voters, especially in Iowa. But in his career and public presentation Cruz is a stranger to most of what would generally be considered the Christian virtues: humility, mercy, compassion and grace. Cruz’s behavior in the Haley case is almost the dictionary definition of pharisaism: an overzealous application of the letter of the law in a way that violates the spirit of the law, as well as fairness and mercy.”

-

The Brutalism of Ted Cruz

Ted Cruz: Petty, vindictive, power-hungry, and unfit to be president.

I completely missed this when it was said back in October:

Dr. Monica Miller of Citizens for a Pro-Life Society, one of the main organizers of this weekend’s protest rallies at Planned Parenthood clinics, said on Tuesday that even if Planned Parenthood were to stop performing abortions, she would still want to strip it of federal funding because it promotes a corrupt view of human sexuality including sex for recreation, sex for mere pleasure.

Planned Parenthood from the top to the bottom is a corrupt organization, Miller told Ave Maria Radio’s Teresa Tomeo, corrupt in its view of the sanctity of human life and corrupt in its view of human sexuality. And I say even if Planned Parenthood didn’t perform one single abortion, just the mere fact that its sexual ethic is corrupted means right there, should be the reason right there, that they should not receive any federal money. The kind of sexual ethic that Planned Parenthood promotes is sex for recreation, sex for mere pleasure.

Wow. At least she openly admits that having sex for pleasure is bad.

I guess I’ll have to stop. Oh, my–I was supposed to stop about 25 years ago.

I think I know who is corrupt, twisted, and in opposition to reality, and it sure isn’t Planned Parenthood.

Though they got little screen time, the pair that tried to capture BB-8 in a net near the beginning of The Force Awakens has been faithfully recreated by teohongtzer. Teedo is given a name drop by Rey (for he’s no respect for anyone), his steed is not. If you dig a bit you’ll find out it’s called a “Luggabeast” and they are cyborg creatures used to find droids and salvage on Jakku.

I’m hopelessly in love with this build. Partly because I’m a Star Wars nerd, partly because I’m a Warhammer nerd and this looks like a Juggernaut, and mostly because it’s just done so well.

To whomever said, “Turkeys can’t fly.”

The gold standard for researching the effects of diet on health is the self-reported food-diary, which is prone to lots of error, underreporting of "bad" food, and changes in diet that result from simply keeping track of what you're eating. The standard tool for correcting these errors comparisons with more self-reported tests. (more…)

£530. That’s how much it cost RPS to order an Oculus Rift to one of our distributed offices in the UK*. While I didn’t pay directly as such, it’s still a blood-chilling sum to spend on what, for now, still feels more like a peripheral to use with a select few experiments than a brave new age of PC gaming. I’m not going to write about whether it’s ‘worth it’ because I don’t know and won’t until the thing is strapped to my face. But I do want to chew over what that high price – which importantly is significantly less in the US, though more still in other territories – means.

… [visit site to read more]

The NSA's Crypto Cat and her friends are a set of trademark-registered kids' characters who have appeared for more than a decade in promotional materials like coloring books that the NSA uses it to encourage kids to grow up to be spies. (more…)

"Let's play" videos are a hugely popular online genre in which gamers narrate their playthroughs of games that excite and challenge them. (more…)

The parroted question-and-assertion from the copyright industry continues to be “authors must be paid” and “how will the authors get paid?”

This question-and-assertion isn’t just irrelevant, it’s also a sickening existential defense from an industry that makes sure that 99.99% of music authors never see a single cent in royalty. (A more proper question would be how a music author or composer can possibly earn a living with the copyright industry still in existence.)

Nevertheless, the question and assertion assume that the copyright monopoly exists with the purpose of making sure somebody gets paid. That’s not why it exists. More importantly, the question and assertion also assume that no culture, knowledge, or technology would get created without the copyright monopoly (or outside of the copyright industry).

The purpose of the copyright monopoly is clear: it’s worded quite explicitly in the United States Constitution, article 8. Its purpose is “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts”. The purpose is not for anybody to get rich, or make a living, or paid at all. The purpose is and was always to benefit the public. To generate progress, with the implicit meaning of making that progress available to everyone (or it wouldn’t be progress in any meaningful sense of the word).

Now, it has been assumed – as asserted by the copyright industry – that the only way to achieve this effect, across all fields and disciplines, is to lock the authorship up in a time-limited* monopoly. Various government officials have accepted this narrative.

The copyright industry therefore has two customers: first, it sells the idea of its unique capability of producing culture and knowledge to the government, in exchange for a monopoly when it does so. Second, it sells monopolized copies of that culture and knowledge to people in exchange for money. It’s important to realize that the copyright industry has two different sets of customers, and the first set has every reason to revisit the dishonest deal and get a new supplier.

Linux and Wikipedia (as well as other, less known achievements) show unambiguously that the idea of requiring any kind of payment for great tools, culture, or knowledge to come into being is an utter falsehood. It may be true in some cases. But the cases where it hasn’t been true have all shown that the basic premise, that the copyright monopoly is any kind of necessary, is the purest oxen fecalia.

And these projects, free in all aspects as they are, now underpin the Android operating system which powers three billion smartphones and well over half of the world’s servers in various incarnations of the GNU/Linux operating system. They support every lower- and higher-level education on the planet.

According to the copyright industry, these projects do not and cannot exist, as the authors weren’t paid.

According to reality, the copyright industry is wrong.

Let’s be clear here: the most common operating kernel for servers and mobile smartphones, which underpin the entire IT industry today, was written completely outside the copyright monopoly context with no need for anyone to get paid. The richest source of knowledge available, which underpin all college educations even if unofficially, was written completely outside the copyright monopoly context with no need for anyone to get paid.

This doesn’t mean that nobody should be allowed to sell anything. Quite to the contrary! But it can be conclusively deduced that government officials have been completely in the wrong when accepting the copyright industry’s assertion that nothing will ever get produced without a strong copyright monopoly. It can also be conclusively deduced that the business models that are based on free tools, culture, and knowledge are worth enormously much more to the economy than a manufacturing industry still trying to sell round pieces of silly data-carrying plastic when their competition ship the medialess information across the world in seconds.

Government officials should just stop buying the idea from the copyright industry that a monopoly is required for progress to take place. They should get a new deal from another supplier, and as is the case when this happens, the supplier being ditched – the copyright industry – has no say whatsoever about the new supplier or the new deal. More specifically, it’s more beneficial to a government to not hand out any kind of copyright monopoly at all, as more culture and knowledge – more progress – is created without it.

The copyright monopoly has demonstrated that it’s not just unnecessary, but downright harmful to progress, to the economy, and to civil liberties. The copyright industry should not be allowed to get away with its further Norwegian Blue parroting of “how should the authors get paid”. The question is not relevant.

Any honest business model is built without a legal monopoly in any case. Make money, good for you. But you don’t get to do so with a monopoly that cuts down on my rights, especially not with blatant lying.

*eternal

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Reuters photographer Arnd Wiegmann has been visiting and documenting some of the thousands of military bunkers and fortresses installed across Switzerland, most dating back to Word War II. Most of the bunkers have now been decommissioned and sold, as the threat of immediate invasion has disappeared. Many of the former fortresses now house museums, while others have become commercial ventures, becoming cheese aging warehouses, mushroom farms, hotels, and modern data centers.

fancybutpointless:

BB-8 and chickens

BB-8 gets all the chicks.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I used to write a lot of pop culture meta. Before I was a science nerd I was a different sort of nerd, one created in the smashing together of advanced English Literature classes and pop culture genre storytelling. Then I was invited to guest host a podcast and the science obsession started to elbow out all the other stuff on my to do list.

But they say you never forget how to ride the bike, so let’s dust ‘er off and take her for a spin around Star Wars: The Force Awakens. You should consider this your official spoiler warning.

Female & Exceptional; or, Cue The Fucking “Mary Sue” Chorus

While Star Wars is an ensemble cast, the story focused primarily on one person’s journey, with the other characters’ arcs being secondary. In the original trilogy, the focus was Luke’s arc. In the prequels, the focus was Anakin’s.

It’s clear after watching The Force Awakens that the focus of the next trilogy will be Rey. Her story was the primary driver of this movie, and – if the pattern continues – should continue to be the driver of the next two in this trilogy. In our ensemble cast, she’s arguable our main character.

And so, it should come as literally no surprise when, as the hero of our piece, she follows the pattern the Star Wars universe has established in the previous two trilogies for their lead protagonist: an exceptional person who comes from humble origins, then rises to claim and wield great power.

But Rey is female, she is newly at the head of a major franchise beloved by many, and so she must be dismissed. And these days the cool, hip way to dismiss a female character you don’t like is by calling her a Mary Sue.

Oh. Fuck. Off.

The Star Wars universe canon is populated by a large number of exceptional people, who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, who have access to exceptional abilities, learning curves, and skills. Look at all the exceptionally people in the movies: Anakin, Obi-Wan, Qui Gon, Yoda, Leia, Han, Palpatine, Amidala, even R2D2 for god sakes. This doesn’t even include the animated series – which has even more stories of exceptional people – or the extended universe of books.

These stories have always been about exceptional people, so it stands to reason the main characters of the current movie are all going to be exceptional, especially the ones who have access to the Force. To point at this one character and say “no no, she’s TOO exceptional” given the established pattern is just absolute bullshit.

And let’s talk about the precise ways in which she is exceptional. She’s a great mechanic and exceptional pilot. You know who else was both of those things? Anakin Skywalker. And while I don’t know what Luke’s mechanic skills were, it was clear from the beginning he was an ace pilot. Rey speaks Wookie and Droid. So does Luke. Anakin spoke Droid and at least two other alien languages as a young boy on Tatoonie.

Rey is also a Force user with a seemingly super fast learning curve. You know who else had a ridiculous Force learning curve? Anakin Skywalker. This fact about him is more or less what the entire set of prequel trilogies is about. And let’s talk about Luke’s learning curve: he gets good enough to take on Anakin in just a couple of years, with only a little bit of training from Yoda compared to the years of formal, Jedi Academy and padawan training Anakin had.

If anything, what we may be seeing in Rey – especially if one of her parents is a Skywalker – is a deliberate compounding of Force ability through the generations. With every successive generation, the ability gets stronger and more innate.

Also, for what it’s worth, remember that Rey was dropped on Jakku as an 7 or 8 year old girl (who we see in flashback) and was likely memory-wiped, given she doesn’t remember her life before Jakku. We also know Luke Skywalker was training Jedi before he went AWOL. It is likely, given what we know, that Rey was one of the students under Luke’s tutelage. During the Force Awakens what we might have been seeing is Rey re-discovering an ability that has already had some training boosting it, and is accessing that training in the same way someone who hasn’t played a piano in years still has the muscle-memory in place to pull off a reasonable tune.

Fine, Let’s Talk About Mary Sue

First of all, the definition of what a Mary Sue is and isn’t has become one of the most widely contested and oft-returned to conversations of wider fandom. It may be the most well-discussed idea to have ever come out of fandom culture: there are hundreds of thousands of words dedicated to trying to understand Mary Sue. To pin her down, unfold her parts, and examine her existence, value, problems, and impact.

Many of these discussions are extremely nuanced and well-considered. More people interested in trying to understand the layers of cultural baggage, stereotyping, and tokenism of women in media could do a lot worse than diving into the surprising depths the Mary Sue conversation is trying to unravel.

And there’s a lot to unravel. The term “Mary Sue” was coined and gained traction because it describes a very specific and hugely common trope in fanfiction. The author inserts a female character designed to represent their perfect self into an established canon universe, and this character becomes the gravitational force in the story, drawing toward it all favoured canon characters and pushing away all disliked canon characters. This creates a new, optimized universe with the author’s stand in – this idealized, exceptionalized version of herself – as the new central figure the universe revolves around. And in this shiny new reorganized universe, our author insert gets to be the person she wishes she could be and do the things she wishes she could do: be the hero and get the guy.

This was and still is an extremely common genre of fanfiction. And that’s OK. We read this type of fanfiction for the exact same reason we read a trashy romance novel, watch a soap opera, or enjoy a chick flick. Fantasy is fun. It’s normal. It relies on cliches and tropes because they’re good, reliable shorthand ways to hand-wave off the setup stuff we’re not really there for so we can get to and enjoy the fantasies we signed on for.

One of the reasons girls and women write a lot of this type of fanfiction is because these fantasies are not well-served by mainstream media in the same way male wish-fulfillment fantasies are. If we’re looking for straight-up romance, then there’s a lot to choose from. But as soon as we start looking for hero narratives that star a female character, the well dries up pretty quickly.

There are plenty of wish-fulfillment stories out there for men, our culture is awash with them. We find them on television, in movies, in video games, and in books. Boys and men who come from an ordinary life, are swept up in adventure, are bestowed with superpowers, extreme abilities, or suddenly important talents, become the driving force of the story, take on the mantel of hero, and ultimately win the day. Often they get the girl. Sometimes multiple girls. Many of them aren’t particularly well-written, but sometimes quality isn’t the point. Their purpose is not to inspire as great literature, but to respond to a particular set of common desires and fantasies.

So called “Mary Sue” stories do the same thing. Some of the cliches within this trope reveal the particular ways this genre serves its targeted female audience. For example, Mary Sue is instantly liked by everyone she meets, except for those people she, herself, dislikes. This is a cliche that doesn’t appear nearly as often in male wish fulfillment stories, but is practically required in the female equivalent. It’s exposed here as an underlying value and desire of many girls and women: the desire to be liked. Female wish-fulfillment stories allow their readers to inhabit a character who is nearly universally well-liked and respected, but who can also control and wield great power unapologetically without sacrificing that status in her community. When you consider the tightrope women walk in real-life school and business contexts to be something between “confident” and “bitchy”, this mixture of narrative elements makes a lot more sense.

And One More Thing: Dismissing The Teenage Girl In The Room

The Mary Sue conversation, even in fannish contexts, isn’t without its own baggage. The term “Mary Sue” is inherently connected to frustrating over-use, to author-insertion, wish fulfillment, and – most importantly – to poor quality writing, both the act itself and to ignorance in the ability to recognize the writing is of poor quality. It is regularly used to negate and dismiss what is often the first creative writing attempts of the author, who may be writing and sharing writing with an audience for the first time, who is often young (usually between 10 – 16), and is a short hand to say “ignore this, it’s junk, it was written by a lonely teenage girl”.

Many fanfic pieces with similar character tropes and cliches written by older fanfic authors or male fanfic authors often isn’t dismissed this way. The subtext of the term implies that something written by young girls is valueless, hopeless, and should be made fun of. Never mind the same character tropes appear in mainstream “professional” narratives in male characters all the time, and that most people’s first forays into creative writing often include very similar cliches.

This dismissal should be familiar to you: it’s very similar to the way we dismiss soap operas, romance novels, and chick flicks. In many ways, the term Mary Sue is a double-dismissal: wielded by “popular” fan writers in these groups, it dismisses a sub-genre of a genre that is already judged as valueless by our wider culture. In many ways, the derogatory use of the term “Mary Sue” within female fandom is an example of how ingrained sexism is within our culture. Even in our “safe spaces” some people are more safe than others.

“Traffic makes my head spin!”

via reddit

In this case, the cake was certainly a lie. [via]

It's been a year since the horrific Charlie Hebdo attack and the subsequent outpouring of defense of free speech from all quarters -- the insistence that free societies demand tolerance of viewpoints, even deeply offensive ones. (more…)

On the subject of the long history of enmity between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which is currently driving much of the Middle East's violence and since the new year has worsened considerably, there is an anecdote the Saudis like to tell.

That anecdote has appeared in the New York Times, PBS, and books, and is often repeated privately. Here is how a 2001 New York Times story recounted it (flagged by the Washington Post's Adam Taylor):

Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador in Washington, in an interview last month drew a stark comparison between Saudi Arabia today and Iran under the shah.

He offered this anecdote: In the late 1960's, the shah sent King Faisal a series of letters that said: ''Please, my brother, modernize. Open up your country. Make the schools mixed women and men. Let women wear miniskirts. Have discos. Be modern. Otherwise I cannot guarantee you will stay in your throne.''

King Faisal wrote back: ''Your majesty, I appreciate your advice. May I remind you, you are not the shah of France. You are not in the Élysée. You are in Iran. Your population is 90 percent Muslim. Please don't forget that.''

Prince Bandar concluded, ''History proved our point.''

This is a pretty revealing anecdote, but it's not revealing in the way that Bandar intends.

I don't think most historians would agree that Iran had a revolution because the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was insufficiently Islamist. Rather, I think they would point to Pahlavi's brutal police state, his perceived fealty to foreign powers, the corruption and Pahlavi excesses that outraged Iranian middle classes, and ultimately internal fissures within Iranian society and state institutions that allowed non-state civil society groups to organize against the state.

I also suspect most scholars would dispute Bandar and Faisal's implication that modernization is impossible in countries that are "90 percent Muslim." Indonesia is majority Muslim, and Jakarta feels pretty modern and cosmopolitan to me. There are plenty of discos and miniskirts in Beirut.

What's most revealing about Bandar's anecdote isn't that it's wrong. It's that it appears to earnestly reflect the Saudi government's worldview: its deeply held belief that modernization will bring violent revolution and that Muslim populations will only accept anti-modern ultra-conservatism.

This helps explain a key contradiction in the Saudi system: Saudi Arabia's ruling royals are, by all appearances, personally fairly liberal (relatively speaking), yet they enforce some of the most conservative laws on Earth and promote an ultra-conservative official state ideology. This is in part because Saudi leaders believe, as the Faisal anecdote shows, that Muslim-majority societies can only be ruled and kept stable by holding back modernity and giving the people ultra-conservative rule.

To understand how the Saudis arrived at this way of thinking, it helps to know the history of how Saudi Arabia came to be. The vast country was first unified by an 18th-century alliance between the ambitious al-Saud family and the followers of a puritanical fundamentalist named Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. The Sauds wanted to conquer and unify the area we now call Saudi Arabia, and Wahhab wanted to spread his ultra-austere and anti-modern brand of Islam, known today as Wahhabism. It worked, and though the state collapsed in 1818, it re-formed in the 1920s in much the same way: with the Saud family allying with a Wahhabist group called the Ikhwan ("brotherhood") to conquer most of the Arabian peninsula and call the new country Saudi Arabia.

Ever since then, the Saudis have ruled in an implicit bargain with the hard-line Islamists who helped them rise: The Saudis would rule, and the Islamists would have a state officially aligned to the Wahhabist interpretation of Islam. Obviously the Saudis don't need the Wahhabists to go out and conquer desert tribes anymore, but they do provide the Saudi regime with both ideological legitimacy and a base of support among the clerical establishment and its hard-line followers.

Throughout Saudi modern history, you can see the royal family dancing between the obvious need to be part of the modern world and its belief that it needs to satisfy the Wahhabist hard-liners. They'll roll back restrictions on women one day and then clamp down the next. It's why they'll fund extremists (or part of why they do it, anyway) even though these extremists often end up declaring war on the Saudi royal family. It's why they seek close ties with the United States yet spread an official Wahhabist ideology that often portrays the Americans as enemies of Islam.

These are contradictions that make life difficult for many Saudi citizens, particularly women and young people; that lead the Saudi royal family to oppose the democratization that they believe can only empower extremists; and that make the Saudi system itself more unstable — just as the shah had warned.

Cary Gabriel Costello is a trans-man in Milwaukee. Two-thirds of the time when he flies, the TSA has a complete freakout over the "anomalies" his body displays on the full-body scanner. (more…)

Comcast's CEO Brian Roberts has been doing a lot of spinning lately to explain his company's plan to increase its prices (already some of the highest in the developed world) by turning on usage caps and charging up the wazoo for people who exceed them. (more…)

micdotcom:

Didn’t find Rey’s strength believable? Guess again. There are so many more kick ass videos of Daisy Ridley training too.