[championkid]

I had a very minor argument today after I’d announced that I would not be attending any anti-surveillance demonstrations planned for tomorrow. Since Occupy, I have pretty much sworn off traditional placards and chants protests, on the grounds that, in the absence of any real mass support, they become masochistic rituals of powerlessness and capitulation. If you want to feel marginal and disempowered, stand in the middle of Times Square with about one hundred other people with placards, watching tourists being amused by you, while the fake sunshine of gazillion watt advertising shines off their faces. This may not be the right way to feel — perhaps the powers find this stuff more dangerous than it looks on the surface — but it’s the way I do at these things and why I’m done with them for the time being.

In light of doing more thinking about this than usual today, I was delighted to discover this wonderful Soundcloud of students interrogating NSA recruiters at the University of Wisconsin. This, to me, is exactly the right kind of peaceful protest at this particular stage in opposition to surveillance and a perfect demonstration of leveraging the internet when numbers aren’t on your side. The full story is written up on The Huffington Post. In a nutshell, some really smart students relentlessly interrogated NSA representatives about what the NSA does and the ways in which the flacks have misrepresented that during the recruiting session. There is quite a lot to love here: the students doing the interrogating — I only know the name of one, Madiha Tahir — are marvelously well-informed, eloquent, relentless and calm and they make the government’s representatives look like lying fools. The result is educational, empowering, revealing and genuinely disruptive in all the ways public protest should be but too rarely is.

I am not inviting either/or-ing here. All forms of protest are better than nothing. But, to me, this is really how to do it now.

Redditor AJ192 took this spectacular shot of a lightning during last night’s fireworks in Rio Rancho, New Mexico.

3
#kites #burningman #2011 #playa #black #rock #city #nevada #america #three #pink #yellow #red #clouds #sky #flying #windy (at Black Rock City, NV)

brooklynmutt:

Egyptian protestors direct laser lights on a military helicopter flying over the presidential palace in Cairo

(via @AFP)

Bhutan is a landlocked state in South Asia located at the eastern end of the Himalayas. Bhutan is the only country in the world measuring its Gross National Happiness, and based on a global 2006 Business Week survey, the country was rated happiest in Asia and the eighth-happiest worldwide.

More of the beautiful landscapes, rich culture, and interesting people in Bhutan can be found in our image search.

Photos from Vittore Buzzi, bsmethers, Michael Foley Photography, Eugene Bakker, longwei66 – shadowgrahy.org, bigID, George Talusan, samthe8th, and fahim_123752.

Photographer Alexander Semenov (previously) who is well known for his documentation of oceanic wildlife, recently turned his camera upward and captured some fascinating photographs of jellyfish against the clouds and various sunsets. In some instances the water was so clear appears as if the animals are practically hovering in the sky. See much more over on Flickr.

Because of the run-down and sometimes violent nature of poor urban neighborhoods, we often assume that the people who live there don't care that much about where they live. A lot of academic research has gone into trying to understand the connection between perceptions of neighborhood safety and community cohesion, most of it finding that people are less invested in their community the more dangerous they think it is.

An interesting study, published recently in the journal Race and Social Problems, adds a surprising wrinkle to what we know about these places. The researchers, Ronald O. Pitner, ManSoo Yu, and Edna Brown, were trying to assess "levels of community care and vigilance" among 70 black adults, most of them women, living in low-income, high-crime neighborhoods in an unidentified large Midwestern city.

In less academic language, they wanted to know if these people took pride in their neighborhoods, felt a sense of community there, and were willing to look out for their neighbors – and, if so, whether those attitudes were associated with income level, crime rates or neighborhood perception. The researchers surveyed each subject with a mailed questionnaire or telephone interview, and they compared the results with local crime data.

Income levels turned out to be strongest predictor of "community care" and vigilance, but not in the way that the authors suspected. All of these people lived in low-income neighborhoods, but they weren't all equally poor. The residents with the lowest incomes turned out to care the most about their communities (based on agreement with statements like "if I witnessed a crime in my
neighborhood, I would report it").

The study had an admittedly small sample size drawn from only a single city. But the authors raise an interesting theory for this finding that may well apply elsewhere: People with the lowest income are stuck with the communities they have. Their higher-income neighbors have more mobility and may simply be biding their time until they move on. And this has implications for how community workers and officials should try to build the kind of cohesion and social capital in these neighborhoods that would make them feel like safer places to live.

Top image of a police car, seen through a chain-link fence, as it drives through a Chicago neighborhood: Jim Young/Reuters

via https://www.etsy.com/listing/126671006/alpacas-dream-in-the-himalayas-mountain

Dustin Hoffman remembers the initial planning for Tootsie, the film in which his character disguises himself as a woman for a job. It was the first makeup test which led Hoffman to break down in tears over a huge revelation about men and women in our society. 

(via Dressing Like A Woman Made Dustin Hoffman Cry | The Mary Sue)

(via Event Horizon: Operation TARDIS Tree House)

via http://www.tineye.com/search/6e6e441a58047e6621d47970f8b2c3c655c2f28e?sort=size&order=desc

Crazy Ideas That Are Borderline Genius [via]

Previously: Useless Things You Don’t Need to Know

beatonna:

If you aren’t totally quaking in your boots at the news of millions of bees dead, yet again, you’re nuts.

cineraria:

Rhythmic gymnast Shin Soo-ji’s first pitch - YouTube

science-officer-spock:

Nichelle Nichols on meeting Martin Luther King jr. 

time-for-maps:

Hamedan, Iran.

Hawk moths may be jamming bat sonar signals by rubbing their genitals.

The behaviour, reported in Biology Letters on 3 July, creates an ultrasonic noise that could be used to scare off an attacking bat and to jam the bat's sonar.

By: Kadhim Shubber, Edited by: Nate Lanxon

[lefthandedtoons]

thetrekkiehasthephonebox:

oldsportyspice:

thenewenlightenmentage:

Found! 3 Super-Earth Planets That Could Support Alien Life

The habitable zone of a nearby star is filled to the brim with planets that could support alien life, scientists announced today (June 25).

An international team of scientists found a record-breaking three potentially habitable planets around the star Gliese 667C, a star 22 light-years from Earth that is orbited by at least six planets, and possibly as many as seven, researchers said. The three planet contenders for alien life are in the star’s “habitable zone” — the temperature region around the star where liquid water could exist. Gliese 667C is part of a three-star system, so the planets could see three suns in their daytime skies.

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I vote that we call it Vulcan.

For several weeks now, Portland residents have had the unexpected pleasure of walking through an alien greenhouse of huge, bizarrely colored carnivorous plants. These 17-foot-tall monstrosities loom over the sidewalk of NW Davis Street, glowing with self-generated electricity and looking like they might suddenly rotate toward a passerby and bellow, "FEED ME, SEYMOUR!"

Portland installed this unnatural plantlife as part of the Mall Project, an ambitious facelift of nearly 60 blocks downtown. The sculptures are permanent street lamps, positioned to create a pedestrian-friendly link between Chinatown and the Pearl District. "By referencing the patterns of native Oregon native and other carnivorous plants and inserting a quirky expression of nature into an urban environment," writes the Regional Arts and Culture Council, "these sculptures celebrate Old Town Chinatown neighborhood's unique and diverse community."

They also exist to broadcast to the world that, ya know, Portland is still weird. Dan Corson, the Seattle-based artist who made the things, believes that hairy, gland-filled, insect-gobbling freaks of nature are a perfect match for the local populace. (There is some editorializing there from me, obviously; the artist says he loves Portlandians.) "I think [pitcher plants] are so interesting because they almost seem to cross species, from plant to animal," he says. "Their morphology is so crazy, intriguing and sometimes a bit naughty – often like the characters I see in this neighborhood of Portland."

Corson is a self-described "tropical-plant geek" who has a chocolate farm in Hawaii that he uses to cultivate strange flora. For the Portland gig, he drew from his fascination with the Pacific Northwest's Cobra Lilies and tropical Nepenthes "monkey cup" pitchers, so called because chimps sometimes slurp from their liquid-filled bowls. He painted the fiberglass shells to resemble the natural coloring of pitcher plants, and attached photovoltaic cells to their tops so they appear to bioluminesce at night. Lacking are citronella candles to repel any mutant, 40-pound mosquitos or bottleflies attracted to these immense plants.

The artist says he would have enjoyed making them act more like their forest cousins, running off the digested fluids of rats, pigeons and other urban animals. But seeing as how the Regional Arts and Culture Council is responsible for their upkeep, the gruesome task of cleaning them out took that concept "right off the table," he says. "But I would love a more hands-on client being willing to upkeep something like a cross of methane-producing composting toilets and a solar ignitor to burn off the methane at night, and provide fertile compost for the urban farmers."

Take a gander at Portland's newest city greenery:

Here are some of the plants that inspired Corson's odd street fixtures:

Images courtesy of Dan Corson

Using the smallest components from repurposed antique pocket watches and other time pieces, New-Jersey based artist Sue Beatrice of All Natural Arts assembles curious sculptures of animals and human figures. Given the nature of watch movements I can’t help but want to see each one of these things spring to life. See much more here. (via my modern met)