Luke.stirling

Photo: Neil deGrasse Tyson in graduate school in Texas, sometime in the 1980s. (more…)

Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. (more…)

Astronomical artist Björn Jónsson stitched together still images captured by the New Horizons spacecraft as it flew past the dwarf planet Pluto last month. Read the rest

The image was created when lightning struck while a photograph was taken during a storm.

It's not Photoshopped and hasn't undergone any post-imaging processing.  There is a perfectly logical explanation - detailed and illustrated at Metabunk.

Sent home from high school for violating the school's dress code.

Not because of the faded jeans.

Because her outfit doesn't completely cover her clavicle (collarbone).

This incident didn't happen in a church school - she attends Woodford County High School, a public school in Versailles, Kentucky, just a short distance from where I used to live.  The controversy regarding the dress code was recently reported by the Lexington Herald-Leader:

An online petition has begun seeking support to change Woodford County High School's 11-year-old dress code...

Wednesday was the first day of classes for students. One Facebook post said there was "a group of female students standing in the office" because they were not complying with the dress code.

Another post said, "This is ridiculous! Parents are being called away from important jobs and students are missing important class time because they are showing their collarbones!"...

Among the criteria in the Woodford County High dress code is that students must wear a rounded crewneck shirt or a button-down shirt that may have only the top button open. Shirts must not expose the collarbone. Shorts and skirts must be knee-length or longer.

Last year the students at the school created a 33-minute video about their grievances.

Created by Wuxa, image via BlockWorks

The Minecraft Brutalist Build yielded some rather attractive results as part of RIBA’s Day of Play earlier this month. The Brutalist Build was a partnership between RIBA (the Royal Institute of British Architects) and BlockWorks, a team or artists, architects and designers who specialise in Minecraft projects.

… [visit site to read more]

An anonymous reader writes: XKCD cartoonist Randall Munroe will be publishing a new book in November, but it's already become Amazon's #1 best-seller in two "Science & Math" subcategories, for mechanics and scientific instruments. Inspired by a cartoon describing NASA's Saturn V rocket as "the up-goer V", Randall's created a large-format collection of blueprints describing datacenters, tectonic plates, and even the controls in an airplane cockpit — using only the thousand most common English words. "Since this book explains things, I've called it Thing Explainer," Randall writes on the XKCD blog, trying to mimic the humorously simple style of his book. Randall's previous book of scientific hypotheticals — published one year ago — is still Amazon's #1 best-selling book in their "Physics" category, ranking higher than Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Indoor plants clean the air, make our spaces look great, and could also boost productivity . But choosing the right kind of indoor plant will depend on the kind of light we have and whether or not we tend to kill plants . That’s where this flowchart comes in.

Read more...

Hovertext: There's a lot of networking to be done on the Dark Side.

New comic!
Today's News:

“The GOP establishment has been plotting to consign Donald Trump to the electoral scrap heap ever since he entered the race. The question we should ask is why.
 
One hopes his enemies would be motivated by disgust for his sexist and racist remarks. But Trump has articulated positions that, however crude, are squarely in the party’s mainstream. Marco Rubio opposes abortion even if a pregnancy is the result of incest or rape. Jeb Bush sees no reason for the federal government to allocate a half billion dollars to women’s health, and urges workers to work harder as a part of the cure for our economic malaise. Trump’s statements on immigration are just more bombastic versions of his opponents who want to seal the border with Mexico and deny undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship.
 
And it can’t be because Trump displays a libertarian strain. His main antagonist, Rand Paul, a staunch libertarian, is tolerated by the war-mongering Republican leadership, even though he has expressed disagreement with the Bush administration’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
 
So why is Trump the enemy, really? The GOP will say it’s because he’s a clown, he has no experience, he can’t win, he’s more a celebrity than a politician. This might all be true. But there’s another big reason they’d rather not talk about.
 
At the debate and numerous public appearances, Trump has matter-of-factly stated that he is an equal opportunity donor to Republican and Democratic candidates—not for the purpose of civic duty or altruism, but in exchange for influence. He has openly deemed his gifts to politicians a business expense. He went so far as to declare, before 24 million viewers at the debate, that he uses his donations to obtain favors from legislators who are all too eager to bow to his requests. He not-so-subtly implies that politicians are bought and paid for by him and other financial moguls. And he expects a fair return for those dollars, measured in policy rewards like zoning adjustments, subsidies for building projects and long-term tax relief.
 
In short, he lets the cat out of the bag about something the political system has spent more than a century to disguise.”

- [Trump] went so far as to declare, before 24 million viewers at the debate, that he uses his donations to obtain favors from legislators who are all too eager to bow to his requests. He not-so-subtly implies that politicians are bought and paid for by him and other financial moguls. In short, he lets the cat out of the bag about something the political system has spent more than a century to disguise.

70sscifiart:

Syd Mead retro-futurism

Name your price above $15 and get DRM-free ebooks by Cat Rambo, Nancy Kress, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Catherine Asaro, Jody Lynn Nye, Judith Tarr, Vonda McIntyre, and Janis Ian! Read the rest

A show conceived to help low-income kids keep up with their affluent peers will now be "paywalled so that rich kids can watch it before poor kids can." Read the rest

By default, Windows listens to you, gathers your keystrokes, watches your browser history and purchases and sends them to Microsoft and its partners -- but even if you turn off all the tickboxes in the hellishly complex privacy dashboard it still gathers and sprays your data. Read the rest

Jebus. The stupidity of the media is maddening. Here are two articles now out there: Don’t freak out, but scientists think octopuses ‘might be aliens’ after DNA study and Octopuses ‘are aliens’, scientists decide after DNA study. These reporters are embarrassing.

Not to freak you out or anything, but scientists have just revealed that octopuses are so weird they’re basically aliens.

The first full genome sequence shows of that octopuses (NOT octopi) are totally different from all other animals – and their genome shows a striking level of complexity with 33,000 protein-coding genes identified, more than in a human.

Bullshit.

As I said earlier, the study is open access. Read it. If you can’t understand the big words and the details, then you shouldn’t be writing news stories on science.

The study says exactly the opposite. It shows that octopuses use genes shared with vertebrates — the common metazoan toolbox. They have amplified genes used by other earthly animal life in unique ways, but protocadherins are a known earthly family of molecules, and zinc finger genes are a known earthly family of genes. This study reinforces the concept of common ancestry.

Do I need to add that it’s even plainly said in the abstract? Just read the abstract!

The core developmental and neuronal gene repertoire of the octopus is broadly similar to that found across invertebrate bilaterians

I just know this nonsense is going to be propagated by creationists everywhere, and I’m going to have to slam it down repeatedly. The only good thing is that it’s an easy one to rebut, and I’ll have many excuses to wrap my virtual tentacles around their rhetorical throats and squeeze.

---

It begins.

Proving that octopuses are creatures that arrived from another planet, possibly from another solar system, may not be revealed any time soon. However, their alien existence upon the Earth is expected to be the focus of significant research in the coming years. It is likely that they will be found to be born of the Earth, but the mysticism that they may be aliens makes the genome discovery quite intriguing.

New comic! (link)

This comic originally appeared on Everyday Feminism.

When we talk about reproductive rights, we’re often talking about access to abortion – it’s the most visible and widely contested right around reproductive health right now. But reproductive rights encompasses an entire gauntlet of issues, from how one is able to control when or if they get pregnant, to how that pregnancy is cared for, to how a birth is managed, to how a person can sustain a family. There are barriers to everyone of those issues.

The thing is, if I get pregnant, I want the safe, competent abortion I deserve. But I also want the people I care about to have the safest pregnancies, births, and families they can have. Feminism is about fighting for all of these rights

Share

gifthetv:

5 Things You Should Know About Racism | Decoded | MTV News

Last Saturday, police say, a 48-year-old Houston man named David Conley climbed in a window of the house where his ex-girlfriend lived with her husband and six kids. Using rope, and handcuffs he’d bought a few days earlier, he restrained the entire family. He then shot them all, one by one, starting with his ex-girlfriend’s husband, and ending with her.

Police took Conley into custody after an hour-long standoff.

Why hasn’t this horrific case of mass murder gotten the media attention that other mass shootings have gotten? Possibly because seven of the eight victims were black.

And possibly because, well, cases of men murdering their families are so common that they barely make the national news any more — even when the men in question kill more people than many much-better known mass murderers.

Someone shooting random people in a theater or a mall — that’s news. Men killing their exes and their children? That’s just part of the background noise.

Conley has reportedly confessed to everything, telling police in detail how he planned and carried out the eight murders. He has a long history of violence, having served five years in jail for a previous attack on his on-again-off-again girlfriend, Valerie Jackson.

In a series of jailhouse interviews, he’s been a bit more cagey on the question of guilt. But he’s been a lot less shy in discussing the motives for the murders he won’t publicly admit to.

He seems to have murdered eight people because Valerie wasn’t raising her children the way he wanted them raised. (Never mind that he was an on-again, off-again father as well as an on-again, off-again boyfriend, and that only one of the six children was his.)

And he was angry at her for “cheating” on him — with her husband.

The children “were growing up to be monsters, they were disrespectful,” Conley complained to one local TV reporter. “I’m not saying they’re dead because of that. I’m not even saying I killed them.”

“The Bible says, ‘Thou shall respect your mother and father or your days shall be short,” he told the Houston Chronicle. “I’m not God, but you know, then, I’m the man of the house.”

Let that sink in for a second:

“I’m not God, but you know, then, I’m the man of the house.”

At the time of the murders, of course, Valerie’s husband, Dwayne Jackson, was the “man of the house.” But Conley felt that Dwayne, the father of five of the six children, was somehow usurping his own rightful authority.

“He tried to pimp out over me and take everything, rule over my house.” he complained to one local TV reporter. “How would you feel?”

But it seems pretty clear that his most virulent anger was aimed at Valerie. He blamed the alleged bad behavior of the children — particularly his son Nate — on her.

“Nate didn’t give me any respect because of what his mother was doing to me,” he told the TV reporter. “She was cheating on me.”

Conley apparently made her pay for this “disrespect,” killing her last, after forcing her to witness the murder of her husband and her six children.

Yet he seems to think he’s the victim here — disrespected by his children, his authority as “man of the house” usurped by another man, and “cheated” on by a woman he had previously beaten and repeatedly left. When he asked a reporter “how would you feel,” he apparently assumed the reporter would feel some sympathy for him.

This is toxic masculinity at its worst.

 

Zachary Lewis is quite the LEGO architect. For the last year or so since picking LEGO up again as an adult and joining a local LEGO club in Ohio, he’s been alternating between highly detailed houses and highly detailed interior rooms — each one built for a specific person. My favorite of Zachary’s houses so far is this one: “Mom’s House.”

While the classic 1950’s one-story ranch house is not my favorite form of American architecture (I live in one), this build by Zachary is pretty amazing — from the paneling on the garage door to the wood slat siding and brick walls. Smaller details jump out as well, like the barbecue out back and the small window/fan into the attic.

I could highlight just about every photo Zachary has posted in his photostream, but I won’t spoil your enjoyment — go spend some time poring over “Wesley’s Room,” “Robert’s House,” “Elliott’s Room,” and more.

But since I can’t help myself, here’s a beautiful Georgian-style house in Zachary’s hometown of Shaker Heights, Ohio.

foodffs:

Southwest Stuffed Chicken Breast

Really nice recipes. Every hour.

Show me what you cooked!

Oh shit son.

The infractions she's charged with are so minor, it's hard to believe. Read the rest

So it turns out that yelling about people you hate all day every day on the internet isn’t really very good for you.

As an article in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week notes,

The research has been clear for decades: Venting is bad for us. …

 

In studies, people report that they feel better after venting. But researchers find they actually become angrier and more aggressive. People who vent anonymously may become the angriest and most aggressive.

In fact, “venting” is really the wrong word for it. Anger doesn’t build up in our body like some sort of gas, that we can relieve with a series of loud and smelly anger-farts on Twitter or in the comment section of a newspaper article we disagree with.

The “venting” theory has been with us a long time, the WSJ piece notes, and it seems to make sense on an intuitive level.

Venting has an ancient history. Aristotle believed in catharsis—the purging of emotions. More recently, Sigmund Freud talked about the hydraulic model, saying that if someone holds anger inside without letting it out, it will build to dangerous levels, much the way steam in a pressure cooker will build if it is not vented.

But anger isn’t a gas. Those who’ve studied the issue suggest that “venting” — whether in person or anonymously on the internet — causes us to become more obsessed with what is angering us, not less. Instead of purging our anger, we end up stewing in our own juices — to switch the metaphor from gas to liquid.

I certainly see plenty of evidence of this amongst the people I write about on this blog and on the internet at large. Those who “vent” their anger the most vociferously don’t get less angry over time, as you would expect if they were actually “venting” something toxic inside of them. Instead, many of them just get angrier and angrier.

We might consider the sad (and very, very angry) career of a certain former A Voice for Men bigwig, who went from being the only member of the AVFM collective who seemed to have any degree of self-awareness to someone who spends his days lashing out at feminists and former allies in what has become a neverending Twitter meltdown.

We might consider the assorted YouTube yellers who’ve become perpetual rage machines; no matter how many rants they upload to YouTube on the purported evils of Anita Sarkeesian or Anita Sarkeesian or even Anita Sarkeesian, their rage is never ever “vented.”

I mean, look at this guy:

That’s no way to live.

The problem isn’t just the anger; it’s the obsession. One of the main reasons that “venting” keeps you angry is that it leads you to ruminate longer about the things that infuriate you the most, when it would be much more healthy for you to stop thinking about these things at all.

Now, obviously, I spend a decent portion of my days reading about, writing about, and sometimes even arguing with, some pretty hateful shitheads. I think it’s important to write about these people. But I try not to let them dominate my life and my thoughts to the exclusion of everything else, and I try not to let my anger at them overcome me.

I don’t read the comments on my YouTube videos. (Well, not regularly.) I avoid tit-for-tat Twitter battles with sea-lions and dogpilers. (Well, most of the time.) I clear my head watching dumb TV and playing Alphabear and doing various other things that have nothing whatsoever to do with the ridiculous and infuriating misogynists of the internet.

And I hope the rest of you are doing that too.

Well, I know a lot of you are, if the wonderfully digressive comments you all leave on this blog make clear. Because talking about games and recipes and posting cat pics and other brain bleach really does keep us all a bit healthier.

Which reminds me: I haven’t posted any open threads in a while. I’ll go do that now.

In the meantime, here’s ten hours of a snow shovel that sounds like “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

H/T — r/GamerGhazi

The company abused the Windows installer's anti-theft mechanism, which reads the firmware for executables at install-time, embedding a ton of crappy, insecure shovelware that would be added to your computer every time you reinstalled the OS. Read the rest

america-wakiewakie:

Oath Keepers Turn Up at Michael Brown Protests in Ferguson, Missouri

This is called white privilege. 

futurejournalismproject:

The Best Auto-Reply

Via Elan Morgan:

When we give so much of our media space over to discussion about the irritation that is listening to women’s voices, we miss the underlying truth and strengthen an already powerful and ugly cultural bias. This ongoing, superficial public discussion about women’s speech habits is really about our resistance to listening to or featuring women in public discussion. It is not about how women need to be taught how to speak.

The bias against women in public dialog, from the complaints about the way they speak to our reticence to see them in positions of power, limits their participation in the culture and the politics that affect change not only in their own lives but also in their communities and the larger world. This imbalance has deep and broad social, political, and economic impacts for all of us, both women and men.

That is what we really need to be talking about.

Image: Screenshot of an auto-reply email created by Katie Mingle of the design — and design thinking — 99% Invisible podcast.

betthearm:

invisiblelad:

revolutionarykoolaid:

Last Night in Ferguson (8.11.15): Shit continues to be fucked up. The police continue to outright assault protesters and make indiscriminate arrests. A year later, the police are also no better at de-escalating tensions. And then, the Oath Keepers showed up… who the fuck and why?! Overall, nearly 150 protesters were arrested yesterday in Ferguson/St Louis. #staywoke #farfromover

If you ever want evidence of what it is to operate in a police state; where suppression of journalists, squelching of public assembly and peaceful protest are shrugged off and or encouraged by “tyranny fearing” armed militiamen who help do it… this is American dystopia. 

The human rights nightmare that was bad enough the first time. Now its just obvious that nothing whatsoever has changed. 

The police are not here to help you. At all. ever.

We need to hear from the Good Cops. Where are the Good Cops who are going to publicly stand up against this sort of thing?