Luke.stirling

My new Locus column is What If People Were Sensors, Not Things to be Sensed? Read the rest

I already knew that acupuncture had failed to show significant effects in clinical trials, but this video also mentions some things about the history of acupuncture in China — it was rejected by Chinese scholars long ago, and was only revived as a tool for propaganda.

The comments on the video are amazing. A lot of people don’t like the guy’s beard, but there is also this sentiment I’ve heard many times before:

Your are such a jerk. You are making fun about thousands of people who just believe in something. Is that so wrong ? Even if its just placebo, who cares ? Just let people be happy. They arent hurt by acupuncture, so just let them do what they want. Because of these videos I dont wanna follow this channel anymore.

Spoken like someone who really doesn’t care about the truth at all. Note that the speaker isn’t taking away anyone’s acupuncture needles…he’s merely saying the facts, that acupuncture is junk science.

Hovertext: You can't jail me! I'm just a character in a sleeping man's dream!

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The Volcano House, "a saucer shaped mid-century icon perched on top of a 150-foot cinder cone," is $650,000 or best offer -- but you'll have to commute to the Mojave. Read the rest

Emmanuel Goldstein writes, "2600 Magazine is being threatened with legal action for using bits of ink splatter on the Spring 2012 cover that Trunk Archive Images claims it has the rights to. That's right, ink splatter. The sophistication of the tracking software in actually being able to detect specific splotches of ink throughout the entire Internet is as astounding as it is scary. But it also happens to be dead wrong as the ink splatter in question actually belongs to an artist in Finland." Read the rest

“For a man who was just trying to fix his vandalized windshield, there is no break over the break.
 
“I got a ticket for something that I was close as I could be to resolving,” Nick Berlin said.
 
A day after a vandal had thrown a rock at his windshield, Berlin made an appointment at a local auto glass shop to have it replaced.
 
Just as he was about to pull into the auto glass shop, an Adams County Sheriff’s Deputy pulled Berlin over and issued him a ticket for an “unsafe vehicle.””

-

Man ticketed for broken windshield while trying to fix it

Are you fucking kidding me? The officer who wrote this ticket should be fired.

There are so many ships in the Star Wars Universe and always new ones to discover if you’re a casual fan. I’ve never heard of the Wild Karrde smuggling ship until seeing this rendition by KW Vauban. The model stays true to the appearance of the original and even features a detailed interior that you can see in the gallery on MOCpages.

Goddess's friend snapped this shot of a perfect piece of timely cosplay.

The new licenses can be read from up to 30' away and at the last minute, nearly all privacy protections were stripped from the bill mandating them. Read the rest

"Plantation" = "labor camp"; "slave-owner" = "enslaver"; "Union troops" = "US troops." Read the rest

thestray:

There’s no other commentary I can add, this is just perfect. There’s no logical or sane rebuttal.

“Davis opposes gay marriage for what she claims are religious reasons. No one is forcing her to marry a woman, officiate at a same sex marriage or do anything else. But there’s a hitch. She’s also county clerk, a job which has been handed down within her family as a sort of property. And the job - like police officers, judges and a slew of other government positions - is in the business of enforcing laws. But now the laws of the state and country include a law which she says violates her religious beliefs.
 
This is a tough position and her only real choice in line with her religious beliefs is to resign her position so as not to violate those beliefs - even though it was a good paying job she inherited from her mother and plans to pass on to her son. But Davis doesn’t want to give her job! Who does? She wants a job enforcing the public laws. But there’s a public law she doesn’t want to enforce, which means she really can’t do the job without violating her religious beliefs. But she doesn’t have the courage of her convictions that would allow her to quit her job. It’s a classic case of wanting to have your cake and eat it too. So she wants to be able to keep her job but just not do part of it, sacrifice for her religious beliefs but also hold on to the job. This is never what religious liberty has meant in any context ever.”

- Having Her Cake

Hovertext: Can we please have this? Please please please?

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Sorry this one’s a little late.

Trans people have to walk this really fine line with respect to acceptable gender expression. Deviating from what is considered ‘normal’ for their gender results in the credibility of that gender being called into question in ways that just don’t happen with cis people.

(while this happens with all trans people,  I’m going to focus on trans women for this post)

The truth is, while feminism is making awesome inroads in creating space for women to adopt a range of gender expressions beyond what social norms of ‘women’ have prescribed, so often that only applies to cis women. Trans women who ‘break’ femininity are regarded as essentially  ‘letting slip’ their ‘actual gender’.

This is a symptom of the fact that trans people are largely still considered to be ‘acting like ‘ their gender – ‘acting’ being the operative term. People see their gender as being something that sits upon a deeper truth – some less genuine, something deceptive.

There’s another side to this, of course, for trans women who adopt non-transgressive expressions of femininity – they’re accused (often within the feminist community) of reinforcing stereotypes, damaging the image of women.

So there’s really no way to win. Trans women who conform too much are essentially accused of being in bad drag, trans women who don’t conform enough are accused of a lack of commitment to their gender.

That great work we do, where we’re troubling what gender norms are, challenging sexist ideals, and taking control of our bodies? We need to make sure that we’re opening up those opportunities for ALL women. And we need to make that space available for all other genders, as well. I don’t believe in feminism that opens doors to some people while locking them for others.

 

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Hovertext: The Society's meeting invitations are held deep deep underground in an insurance claims adjustment department.

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 The game for which I wrote the dialog, and a lot of the story is OUT for PS4! Please give it a look, gamer geeks :)

“[W]hen people like Huckabee and Cruz come to Davis’s defense, they’re not standing for religious liberties. They’re advocating for someone’s ability to use her role as a government official to impose her religion on others, including people on her own staff, in a way that discriminates against same-sex couples. If that doesn’t violate the separation of church and state enshrined in the Constitution, I’m not sure what does.”

- Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee’s support for Kim Davis gets religious liberty all wrong

Why does this keep happening?

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Alice! That cat is full of it.

Remember that a tour could be coming your way, sooner rather than later!

We have a lot of interviews and things on the go for Step Aside Pops as it gets near the release date, so expect to see a whole lot of activity! If you're listening to the CBC, I'll be on As It Happens in the next while, and on Q later in the month.

Earlier this summer, Michael Shermer wrote a column for Scientific American to explain Why Do Cops Kill?. I was rapturously unaware of it because he’s an author I long ago decided I could ignore, but just recently a reader had to destroy my state of ecstatic ignorance by pointing it out to me. I read it with growing disbelief, my jaw sagging further and further at the dreadful illogic and the scientismic insipidity of the thing. How does he still get published?

To make it short, for those who prefer not to read anything associated with The Shermer, his answer is…it’s not racism, it’s because they have brain circuitry. No, really. It’s even illustrated with a cartoon of a clockwork murder-bot.

The ongoing rash of police using deadly force against minority citizens has triggered a search for a universal cause—most commonly identified as racism. Such soul searching is understandable, especially in light of the racist e-mails uncovered in the Ferguson, Mo., police department by the U.S. Department of Justice’s investigation into the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

When black people are being killed at a greater rate than white people, and we actually have racist documents written by perpetrators, then why yes, racism does seem like a likely explanation. What more do you need?

Since that’s the opening paragraph, you know what’s coming next: a great big enormous “BUT”.

To whatever extent prejudice still percolates in the minds of a few cops in a handful of pockets of American society (nothing like 50 years ago), it does not explain the many interactions between white police and minority citizens that unfold without incident every year or the thousands of cases of assaults on police that do not end in police deaths (49,851 in 2013, according to the FBI). What in the brains of cops or citizens leads either group to erupt in violence?

Oh. Start by diminishing the problem: it’s only a few cops in a handful of pockets, and we are so much better than we were 50 years ago. You can tell right away that this was written by a white guy who wants to handwave away the problem.

But then comes a line of reasoning that has me wondering what drugs he was on while he was writing this piece. We can ignore racism as an explanation, because white police don’t shoot all the black citizens they meet, and the majority of interactions between police and citizens don’t involve violence. Police kill about a thousand people per year, but we should ignore that because they don’t usually kill people? That makes no sense. No one argues that racism is only expressed in the form of murder sprees against black people, so telling us that the police don’t kill every black person they meet is awfully poor evidence that racism isn’t a factor.

Likewise, telling us that almost 50,000 instances of non-lethal attacks on police officers occurred is a total non sequitur. It is irrelevant. The article starts with the problem of the police killing black people, declares it a small and shrinking problem, and then tells us that there were a lot of cases of people fighting against police officers? It makes no sense. That datum does not address his thesis in any way.

He also selectively cites that data. 50,000 attacks sounds like a lot — those poor oppressed policemen — but that figure includes all incidents of resisting arrest, not the ones where an officer was killed. That number is smaller: 76 officers died in the line of duty in 2013. Of those, 49 died in traffic accidents, and 27 as a result of criminal attacks. 27 is still too many, but if we’re going to compare murder scores, the police are winning.

But even those numbers don’t let racism off the hook. Shermer needs a non-racist scapegoat, so he digs down and comes up with an even more irrelevant and stupid explanation. It wasn’t racism, it was their brain that made them kill.

An answer may be found deep inside the brain, where a neural network stitches together three structures into what neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp calls the rage circuit: (1) the periaqueductal gray (it coordinates incoming stimuli and outgoing motor responses); (2) the hypothalamus (it regulates the release of adrenaline and testosterone as related to motivation and emotion); and (3) the amygdala (associated with automatic emotional responses, especially fear, it lights up in response to an angry face; patients with damage to this area have difficultly assessing emotions in others). When Panksepp electrically stimulated the rage circuit of a cat, it leaped toward his head with claws and fangs bared. Humans similarly stimulated reported feeling uncontrollable anger.

Jeepers, that sounds so sciencey. Look at that! Networks and circuits, generally obscure polysyllabic neuroanatomical terms, and cats with electrodes planted in their heads!

OK, so who’s been going around installing chronic stimulating electrodes into cops’ amygdalas? If only we could get them to stop doing that, it would end this epidemic of seeming racism.

Once again, like throwing random numbers around in the first part of his essay, this neurobiological explanation is empty and useless. I don’t deny that there is brain circuitry involved in violent responses…of course there is. But it doesn’t explain why one cop gunned down Michael Brown.

I would ask the obvious question. Does Michael Shermer have a rage circuit in his brain? Yes, he does. Does that explain why he’s a raging racist? That latter question is not implied by the fact that behavior is driven by neurons. Having this circuitry does not mean you are determined to murder black people. I have a rage circuit. You have a rage circuit. All the victims of execution by the police had a rage circuit. His explanation is as pointless as telling us that there is are motoneurons in our spinal cord that excite the flexor digitorum profundus to contract, causing our trigger fingers to bend.

You cannot reduce people to a collection of proximate causes. That Shermer thinks you can, and that this is a profound explanation, is as much a case of useless babble as claiming that it was sin or demons or an imbalance of humours that is causing inequities and racial tension. It is not helpful. It has no explanatory power. It is fucking stupid.

But this man has a column in Scientific American.

In July the movie streaming site MovieTube was sued by the MPAA, which tried to shut it down with a broad injunction.

Last month a coalition of global tech firms including Google, Facebook, Twitter protested the MPAA’s request, which would require search engines, ISPs and hosting companies to stop linking to or offering services to MovieTube.

The MPAA eventually dropped the request as MovieTube shut down voluntarily, but we can expect more of these requests in the future. In fact, they are already quite common in the fashion industry.

This year alone Gucci has targeted hundreds of “infringing” websites that sell knockoffs without permission, and the fashion icon has no trouble getting courts to shut these sites down through similar injunctions.

Gucci’s most recent case was filed three weeks ago (pdf). It targets 221 websites and is similar to lawsuits that were filed previously, which accuse site owners of selling counterfeit merchandise.

In the complaint Gucci asks for a preliminary injunction to prevent all third parties from doing business with the site. This includes payment services, social networks and other online services.

Furthermore, Gucci specifically requests an order to prevent “search engines, Web hosts, domain-name registrars and domain-name registries” from facilitating access to the sites in question.

Gucci’s request

While this case is still pending, the designer company has had success with previous requests. In May, for example, Gucci obtained an injunction which prohibits search engines from linking to 184 sites, while ordering domain name registrars to hand over the domains.

Unlike with the MovieTube case, there has been little public outcry about the Gucci cases. However, the Electronic Frontier Foundation believes that they pose a significant threat.

“The Gucci cases are certainly of concern for the same reasons as the MovieTube case, and they deserve more public scrutiny,” EFF attorney Mitch Stoltz informs TF.

“Vaguely written orders that could be used to co-opt numerous Internet intermediaries into blocking or filtering websites are an abuse of the law and threaten some of the same harms as the infamous SOPA bill did,” he adds.

In all fairness, Gucci shouldn’t get all the ‘credit’ here. Several other designer brands have successfully requested similar injunctions in the past, including Louis Vuitton and Chanel.

Similarly, media company ABS-CBN has been granted broad injunctions by American courts before.

Still, none of these cases triggered the same response as the MovieTube case did. Perhaps the involvement of the MPAA was needed to really hit a nerve with the tech companies?

In any case, it’s clear that Hollywood isn’t setting the trend here, they’re simply following a path already laid out by others.

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

Found in Word Nerd, by John D. Williams, Jr.

The creators of the game Year Walk have prepared a special treat for us: a free e-book of Swedish scary stories to tell in the dark. Read the rest

It's always the Russians, beating us in the never-ending arms race of Totally Unsafe Things That Are Fun to Watch. (more…)

There is a lot you can say about Kim Davis, the Rowena County Clerk in Kentucky who is making a stand against same-sex marriage.

You’ve probably been reading the news, and you know that Kim Davis has gone to court multiple times, even to the Supreme Court, to try to get a religious exemption from having to sign off on marriage licenses for same-sex couples. Even though it’s her job to issue these licenses, she’s an elected official, so she can’t just be fired for refusing to do her job. There is a certain amount of schadenfreude to see this woman stand up for her bigoted beliefs and to keep getting shot down by the court, to the point where she will likely now go to jail. She is in the wrong because same-sex marriage is not just a civil right, it’s the law. And I am in no way defending her, just to make that clear. I’m trying explain what exactly her beliefs are, why she thinks she’s not a hypocrite, and how you can counter people with this mindset (if you choose to engage with the other side–which you don’t have to do).

We all know about her past: the various divorces, children, adultery, and re-marriages. (Although, to be honest, even if she weren’t hypocritical for allowing herself to have the same marital freedoms that she is denying others, she would still be completely wrong.) And this might sound weird, but Kim Davis and her supporters do not think she’s a hypocrite.

Here’s a little explanation about her perspective. According to Ms. Davis, she started going to a (Apostolic Christian) church four years ago, and she considers herself “saved” because she asked for forgiveness and she’s now faithful. In certain types of Christianity, you are considered saved through grace, meaning that you just need to ask for forgiveness and make an honest effort to adhere to the religious dogma, and you’re good! It doesn’t matter if you’re not perfect–Christians acknowledge that nobody is perfect but that they’re saved anyway. I saw someone ask, does this mean that Hitler could be saved if he repented before his death? Yes, that is exactly what that means. I grew up in the Bible Belt, and in high school, there was always an influx of people coming in on Monday saying how they were “saved,” only to “sin” again by Saturday. And probably get saved again on Sunday, who knows. (I, on the other hand, was raised in the Lutheran church, which was comparatively moderate to the other churches in my county.) Anyway, my point is, whatever she’s done in her past, in her eyes and in the view of her church, she’s forgiven. And she feels she has to deny same-sex marriage because if she were to allow it, she would be actively “sinning” by indirectly condoning it.

So, you can try to say that she’s hypocritical for being divorced and committing adultery, but you won’t get through to the Christians on her side, because they have forgiven her and she’s no longer living that lifestyle. She also believes that same-sex marriage goes against the Bible (because her religion takes the Bible literally) and that Jesus was against it.

Here’s something you can say that might get through to the anti-gay Evangelicals: Jesus does not take a clear position on same-sex marriage. A lot of the anti-gay stuff in the Bible is in the Old Testament, whereas Christianity is supposed to be all about Jesus and the New Testament. And the New Testament barely mentions homosexuality, apparently, and even so, it doesn’t explicitly say that homosexuality is any greater a “sin” than any other sin (and even then, we’re talking about an English version of a text that was originally non-English, so the exact wording may be incorrectly translated–which is kind of what makes English-speaking Bible-Literalists so silly). The reason that Christians keep the Old Testament around is because it’s a reminder of how vengeful their god can be, and how amazing it was when Jesus sacrificed himself to their god so that they would all be saved and go to Heaven, as long as they believed in the teachings of Jesus (a.k.a. John 3:16).

In the New Testament, Jesus mentions marriage occasionally, and he mentions how God created men and women. But he never explicitly says that marriage between partners of the same sex/gender should be denied! He just acknowledges marriages that he’s heard of. This is obviously a hotly-debated subject, based on translations and interpretations. Here is a summary of the passages that some Christians use, from the New Testament, to say that homosexuality is a sin, and here are those same passages that are refuted by a pro-gay Christian site.

When Kim Davis says that her authority is the Christian god, she’s right (in her mind). It would go against her religious dogma to allow same-sex couples to get married, and she honestly believes that she would go to Hell for that, so what she’s going through right now is logically-consistent with her beliefs. In fact, I bet she’s glad to be going to jail, because she probably views this whole episode as a test of her faith, and she probably thinks that jail is preferable to Hell. It will be interesting to see how long she stays in contempt of the court.

Disclaimer: I’m just an atheist who was raised Christian in the Bible Belt, so I have a working understanding from observing Southern Baptists, but I’m not a biblical scholar (which is why I suggest you read the sites above if you actually want to debate a legit Evangelical). 

I’ve seen people try to say, it’s a good thing that the judges who granted her divorces did so despite their religious views, and I would agree that it’s a good thing that people who work for the government are able to put aside their magical beliefs in order to follow the law of the land. However, even though I can’t speak for her, she would probably counter with the point that if a judge refused to grant her a divorce due to their religious belief, she just would’ve gone to another judge. In fact, one of her fellow bigoted clerks is using the same argument right now: why can’t the same-sex couples just find another county clerk to sign off on their marriage license? (I have a better question: why do we have to continue to pay government employees for refusing to do part of their job?)

And while we’re at it, here are other you can stop saying about her: stop commenting on her looks. It doesn’t matter what her hairstyle is, what clothes she wears, or whether or not she gives you a boner. If she were beautiful, she would still be a horrible bigot. If she had the body of a Fox News anchor, she would still be a civil-right-denying anti-gay zealot. It doesn’t matter what she looks like. It doesn’t matter that she’s a woman.

Also, stop making fun of her for being a Southerner. There are plenty of Southerners who are pro-LGBT rights, like the couples who live in her county who are trying to get married. Kim Davis might have a Southern accent, and she might be representative of a lot of bigoted Southerners, but being Southern does not make her a bigot. Adhering to the religious dogma of her bigoted church, however, does. So let’s divorce (haha) ourselves from the idea that only Southerners are the ones who are anti-LGBT, because unfortunately you can find those attitudes everywhere.

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In Beijing, China banned 2.5 million cars from driving for 2 weeks to get this beautiful blue sky for a World War II commemorative parade. As soon as the parade was over, the ban was lifted, and the blue vanished within 24 hours. Read the rest

timemachineyeah:

This is a jar full of major characters 

Actually it is a jar full of chocolate covered raisins on top of a dirty TV tray. But pretend the raisins are interesting and well rounded fictional characters with significant roles in their stories. 

We’re sharing these raisins at a party for Western Storytelling, so we get out two bowls. 

Then we start filling the bowls. And at first we only fill the one on the left. 

This doesn’t last forever though. Eventually we do start putting raisins in the bowl on the right. But for every raisin we put in the bowl on the right, we just keep adding to the bowl on the left. 

And the thing about these bowls is, they don’t ever reset. We don’t get to empty them and start over. While we might lose some raisins to lost records or the stories becoming unpopular, but we never get to just restart. So even when we start putting raisins in the bowl on the right, we’re still way behind from the bowl on the left. 

And time goes on and the bowl on the left gets raisins much faster than the bowl on the right. 

Until these are the bowls. 

Now you get to move and distribute more raisins. You can add raisins or take away raisins entirely, or you can move them from one bowl to the other. 

This is the bowl on the left. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?

You can’t tell for certain, can you? Adding or removing a raisin over here doesn’t seem to make much of a change to this bowl. 

This is the bowl on the right. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?

When there are so few raisins to start, any change made is really easy to spot, and makes a really significant difference. 

This is why it is bad, even despicable, to take a character who was originally a character of color and make them white. But why it can be positive to take a character who was originally white and make them a character of color.

The white characters bowl is already so full that any change in number is almost meaningless (and is bound to be undone in mere minutes anyway, with the amount of new story creation going on), while the characters of color bowl changes hugely with each addition or subtraction, and any subtraction is a major loss. 

This is also something to take in consideration when creating new characters. When you create a white character you have already, by the context of the larger culture, created a character with at least one feature that is not going to make a difference to the narratives at large. But every time you create a new character of color, you are changing something in our world. 

I mean, imagine your party guests arrive

Oh my god they are adorable!

And they see their bowls

But before you hand them out you look right into the little black girls’s eyes and take two of her seven raisins and put them in the little white girl’s bowl.

I think she’d be totally justified in crying or leaving and yelling at you. Because how could you do that to a little girl? You were already giving the white girl so much more, and her so little, why would you do that? How could you justify yourself?

But on the other hand if you took two raisins from the white girl’s bowl and moved them over to the black girl’s bowl and the white girl looked at her bowl still full to the brim and decided your moving those raisins was unfair and she stomped and cried and yelled, well then she is a spoiled and entitled brat. 

And if you are adding new raisins, it seems more important to add them to the bowl on the right. I mean, even if we added the both bowls at the same speed from now on (and we don’t) it would still take a long time before the numbers got big enough to make the difference we’ve already established insignificant. 

And that’s the difference between whitewashing POC characters and making previously white characters POC. And that’s why every time a character’s race is ambiguous and we make them white, we’ve lost an opportunity.

*goes off to eat her chocolate covered raisins, which are no longer metaphors just snacks*