Sophianotloren

It’s time to get back to 2016 stump speeches. And yes, I know Hillary just did her first one, but I’m way behind. I’ll get to her soon. This week it’s Rick Santorum’s turn. For 2016 he’s re-branding himself as a protector of the native-born white male Christian American worker.

It seems like there’s an unusual amount to cover in the weekly summary: The House has at least temporarily blocked the TPP trade deal. A commitment of more troops to “advise” and “train” Iraqi troops fighting ISIS got lots people (i.e., me) worried about creeping into a new Iraq War. There was all the reaction to that Texas pool party. And some other stuff worth raising to your attention from John Oliver and Jay Rosen. Plus: some disturbing trends in red-state higher education. And an amazing weather photo to close on.

Figure the Santorum article to appear between 9 and 10, and the weekly summary between 11 and noon.

California Republicans in their gated communities are not happy about Gov. Jerry Brown's new water restrictions.  Residents of super-rich places like Rancho Sante Fe are finding out that yes, these bourgeois limitations actually do apply to people like them, and they're pretty pissed off. Drought or no drought, Steve Yuhas resents the idea that it is somehow shameful to be a water hog. If you

chords tunnel #1

Sound installation by Rubén D’hers is a room with 40 acoustic guitars and connected motorized fans, played together to create a sublime drone sound:

More Here

Sex is wonderful.

Bodies are beautiful —  in every size, shape, shade, and configuration.

Orgasms feel great… but they also aren’t the only goal in sex, as long as it’s enjoyable for everyone involved!

Whatever or whoever turns you on — no matter how fucked up it might seem, no matter how bizarre or unusual or dirty or perverted you might believe it to be — I guarantee there are lots of other people around the world who are just as aroused by the exact same thing.

You don’t need to feel ashamed of who you are, what your body looks like, or for getting off to whatever you do.

With luck (and often lots of patience) you’ll find an opportunity to make it happen for you! No guarantees, of course, which kinda sucks (and not in any of the good ways…) but it’s more likely than you might think!

Everybody’s different when it comes to the infinite complexities of sexuality, but we have far more in common with each other than we have different between us — and that’s a marvelous thing.

AND! It’s just as valid, just as much totally okay, if you’re not a sexual creature! Plenty of humans don’t find themselves sexually attracted to anyone, don’t get turned on by stuff the way other folks do. That’s okay!

You are beautiful, you are okay, and I love you. ♥♥♥♥♥

Filed under: General

On Friday an explosion tore through the old city district of the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, destroying part of the 2,500-year-old UNESCO World Heritage site. A number of apartment buildings were leveled, scattering rubble and debris into an adjacent garden. Many have attributed the attack, in which at least six civilians were killed, to Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government has denied responsibility for the explosion, as have the Houthi rebels, according to the New York Times.

“I am profoundly distressed by the loss of human lives as well as by the damage inflicted on one of the world’s oldest jewels of Islamic urban landscape,” Irina Bokova, UNESCO’s director general, said in a statement on Friday. “I am shocked by the images of these magnificent multi-storied tower-houses and serene gardens reduced to rubble. This destruction will only exacerbate the humanitarian situation and I reiterate my call to all parties to respect and protect cultural heritage in Yemen.”

The attack comes just as talks on the crisis in Yemen, organized by the United Nations, began today in Geneva, Al Jazeera reports. Representatives for the Houthi rebels, the General Peoples’ Congress — former President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s party — and the exiled government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi are expected to attend. “The region simply cannot sustain another open wound like Syria and Libya,” said UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon.

The fortified old city of Sana’a has been inhabited for some 2,500 years, and its distinctive, multistory apartment buildings made of rammed earth date back to before the 11th century. Prior to the destruction wrought by the Yemen’s ongoing civil war, the area included over 6,000 homes, 100 mosques, and 10 hammams (baths). It was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage Site list in 1986.

The 11-volume On the Mixtures and Powers of Simple Drugs by 2nd-century Greek physician Galen, with its ancient guidelines for pharmacology, was standard reading for centuries in the medical profession. Now one of the earliest translations has been digitally reassembled, potentially providing new insights into the origins of modern medicine.

As thoroughly reported earlier this month by Marck Schrope for the New York Times, Grigory Kessel, a Syriac scholar at Philipps University in Marburg, Germany, happened to notice the similarity between a 6th-century Galen book in Syriac he was examining in 2013 owned by a Baltimore collector, and a leaf he’d recently seen at Harvard University. In the years since he has led an effort to track down the seven missing folio leaves from the Simple Drugs edition, which took him on journeys to 10 different libraries from the Vatican to a Sinai monastery in Egypt. The final piece of the puzzle, found at the National Library of France in Paris, was digitized last month. The Digital Galen Syriac Palimpset by Galen of Pergamon, as he’s often known, can now be found online under a Creative Commons license, enhanced through technology provided by the Walters Art Museum.

Why it required such thorough digitizing is because at one point, in medieval times, this particular edition of Simple Drugs was turned into a hymn book and the forward-thinking prescriptions like exercise for disease and bloodletting were lost beneath religious songs. The scanned folios are available in various colors and contrasts to bring the words out. However, there are only a very small number of scholars of Syriac, an Aramaic dialect once widespread around the Fertile Crescent, so the translation and study of the text will be slow.

It may seem like there’s a new digitization project every week, but Kessel’s research has the potential to tell us something new about science in the ancient world, and how the medicine we have today evolved. It’s a much more direct translation from Galen’s original words than anything previously known. These kinds of projects are also essential for scholarly access, considering the bulk of the text is with a private collector. In this way it’s similar to the recent digitizing of the 16th-century Codex Mendoza that has long been out of Mexico since the Spanish conquest, giving Mexican scholars better access. The Galen project is also reconstructing a lost narrative like the massive digitization of all the materials related to the development of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. These are all completely different undertakings in terms of their subjects and contexts, but such projects emphasize how this obscure medical book — with its pieces scattered around the world — can contribute meaningfully to our contemporary knowledge.

View the digitized Syriac Galen Palimpsest online.

via http://www.flickr.com/photos/birdbrid/3617856328/

After seven months of not-so-voluntary deep sleep, the comet lander Philae has finally woken up in earnest. The European Space Agency got in contact with its explorer for 85 precious seconds late on June 13th, receiving 300-plus data packets that she...

vincentvangozer:

misskrystyl:

I was looking through my brother’s yearbook and I’m dying

I’ll share a few of my favorites but there are so many

The fandoms are strong with these ones

Jabs at reality are always a favorite

And my personal favorite

As much as I fear for the future of the next generation (because they’re being handed a shitty shitty pile of shit in so many ways), I’m not nearly as worried about them being unaware or walking into this world without valuable snark.

Yes, we were on opposite ends of the house.

“

Hopefully, this is one of the last gasps of the “Internet is not society” crew. The Internet is society. You don’t get to be a different person in some imaginary world by making up a pseudonym on Reddit. You don’t get to be a bad person without judgment or payback. Yes, I’m judging. This is my column on my site. I get to judge. But I also think I have the vast majority of decent, kind people behind me.

If you want to defend public discussion of “fat people hating,” I’d love to see you defend it in person. Maybe at work, in front of your boss, or by shouting out your views in a supermarket parking lot. Let’s see where that gets you.

The vast majority of decent, kind people—I want to think this, at least—believe that “fat people hating” and tossing around racial and sexual slurs is gross and demeaning, and there should be less of it in our world, not more.

There is a need for a First Amendment to defend awful people politically, because political winds change and the state has unique coercive power, but there’s no compulsion for private individuals or companies to give those people a forum, or for that matter not to shun them. The founders of this country didn’t assume that it would become a place with no social control; in fact, social control is the libertarian alternative to political control.

”

- Does Reddit Need Terrible People to Survive?

It was a thoroughly modern announcement: before a blog post or a news conference there was the tweet. The Philae lander on Comet 67P tweeted the message, "Hello Earth! Can you hear me?" at 5:30am EDT today by way of announcing that the months of wait were over, and the lander had resumed operation. Scientists have been trying to regain contact with Philae since mid-March, listening for signals via the orbiting Rosetta spacecraft. Now the hope is that the lander will make contact again and

Part 1 – women and sex

A while back one of my fellow humourless killjoy feminist friends came up with the idea of a list of “Things we wished people spoke more openly about”.

The conversation that ensued lead to several revelations amongst the group and numerous exclamations of “I am SO glad we’re talking about this” and “OMG I thought this was just me” and “why don’t we talk about this stuff? This is GREAT.”

So this is part two of my ongoing but irregular series – “Things we wish were talked about more openly.”

Just like last time, I am going to add a lengthy content warning, mainly for the benefit of my family who might not want to read about my intimate shizzle.

This blog, and indeed probably the whole series, will feature talk of things like sexual acts, body parts, bodily functions and fluids and other things that often make people (right across the gender spectrum) feel uncomfortable. It’s almost certainly going to make my family feel uncomfortable, so if you’re related to me, you might want to stop right here.

I am going to say, straight up, that a lot of the things that are likely to come up are things that I personally find really difficult to talk about. I spent a lot of time hating my body and not really wanting to look at it, feeling awkward and anxious about sexual acts, being ashamed and scared of things my body did and generally feeling unable to talk about it. So just as you might be leaving your comfort zone to read this, I am going out of my comfort zone to write it. So we’re on this journey together.

And so…

“I wish we spoke more openly about…

Menstruation and PMT”

I recall that my school education session on periods was woefully inadequate. It left us all with the impressions that:

• If you have sex, you will get pregnant. So don’t.
• When you are on your period you are gross KEEP IT A SECRET AT ALL COSTS
• Periods are gross and icky. DON’T TALK TO BOYS ABOUT THEM
• It’s just a few tablespoons of blood (LIES)
• Vajayjays are dirty. Try not to touch them
• EEEUUUW

I was never really told what was coming out of me was pretty amazing or marvellous or perfectly ok. It’s taken me decades to be able to unpick all this.

What does get talked about a lot is PMT – but it’s usually framed as a big joke as to why women are in a bad mood or being grouchy. There’s a lot of talk about OH LOL HORMONES BE MAKING GIRLS CRAZY BITCHES but it’s not taken terribly seriously. But PMT symptoms can be really serious, and varied and honestly? They can really really suck. Treating PMT as some ‘bitches be crazy lol’ thing does a great deal of harm to women who are having real physical and mental symptoms. So forgive me if someone makes some bullshit “on the rag lol” joke at me and I imagine ripping your fucking nipples off. It’s easy to be a humourless bitch when you’re not actually being funny.

But there is no ‘once size fits all’ for PMT – and women experience all sorts of different symptoms. Some lucky ones don’t get any. Personally, I get really mood swingy, teary and grumpy and find it hard to concentrate. I don’t always connect the dots sometimes; I spend 3 days wanting to kill things/other people/myself and crying at fucking adverts and because of my history of mental ill health every time I’m like THE DEPRESSION IS COMING BACK. 3 days later I’m like “oh. Hello womb lining.” I have to pee way more, my IBS flares up. I don’t want to do anything. At all. I don’t even want to write this blog. I had to force myself to sit at this laptop today. My body temperature is higher and I feel hot all the time. Boyfriends haven’t always understood why I don’t want to snuggle when I am on my period. BECAUSE I AM MELTING GET OFF ME. I don’t get cramps – for which I am eternally grateful – but I do get hormonal migraines. Regular as anything, once a month. Full on, someone-is-trying-to-stab-their-way-out-of-my-eye-socket-with-an-icepick migraines. Painkiller resistant, soul destroying, please kill me now migraines. Every period. I’ve been having periods since I was 14. So in theory I’ve been having migraines every month for over 20 years. That’s more than 240 migraines.

Only I haven’t, because (with the agreement of my GP) I run packets of pills together to avoid having periods for several months at a time. This suited me down to the ground for many years, as I still believed all the things I learned at school about periods (refer to the list above) and therefore was really happy to not have gross blood doing gross things euw gross.

A lot of crap is  talked about hormones and what they do (see the ‘boys will be boys‘ rubbish excuse) but that’s sort of the point isn’t it? Hormones are punchlines or excuses and that detracts from being able to talk about them in a meaningful way.

 

It took me many many years to get over the idea that my vagina-during-my-period was gross and untouchable. Vaginas are naturally self cleaning. Period blood is seen as a waste product, like poop or pee – but it’s not remotely the same thing. It’s the uterine lining that a woman’s body has prepared to grow a foetus. If you think about it, that’s probably the cleanest thing ever. It has to be – it’s going to grow, nurture and nourish a tiny potential life which hasn’t got its own immune system. It’s…kind of amazing when you think about it. But it also isn’t just blood. There’s all sorts of weird stuff coming out of there. Weird textured stuff. Clots. Weird stringy sticky stuff. I swear I thought I was completely abnormal for YEARS because this ‘couple of tablespoons of blood’ they’d told me about at school bore no relation to this flood of weird Xenomorph-acid-like substance. I thought I was ill or weird. It took a long time before I felt comfortable enough to talk to other women about this and you know what we discovered? We ALL thought our discharge was weird and we all wished we’d just talked about it years ago.

So why don’t we talk about this? When talking about it helps us understand each other better? Helps women feel they are normal and not alone, and helps guys understand what women are going through. It’s such a huge taboo that it has an entire Wikipedia page about it. Why is it such a huge taboo? In these enlightened times, does it need to be a taboo at all?

Gloria Steinem wrote a rather marvellous essay imaging a world in which Men were the ones that menstruate. Of course, it’s satire, and not entirely serious. But it’s a refrain I’ve heard often. If men had periods, toilets would always have sinks inside the cubicle. Sanitary products would not only be not subject to VAT, they’d be FREE. If men had periods, there’d be allowance in job laws that allowed flexible time off for PMT.  If men had periods, it would be a sign of strength, not of weakness.

It’s been a ‘man’s world’ for a long time, and feminism has been making gains over the last 40 years in leaps and bounds. It may seem like a weird ask, but I would like a next big leap to be for the taboo over talking about periods to die in a fire. It’s not just an issue here in the UK with girls feeling confused and alone and scared/wary of their own bodies – in other countries it has serious ramifications for the education, welfare, safety and wellbeing of women and girls.

We need to be able to talk about menstruation, our own, other women’s, those of women the whole world over, without fear or revulsion or jokes or snarky jokes. Boys and girls both need to learn how normal and natural they are, that they aren’t dirty or weird. Men and women need to learn how to communicate properly about what their bodies do.

Periods are perfectly normal. Let’s talk about them.

 

 

 

 

I am not a fan of Brendan O’Neill. I think he’s a libertarian ass and under all the pretense, an old-fashioned conservative. He has, of course, decided that Tim Hunt is being persecuted.

The Illiberal Persecution of Tim Hunt
An old guys tells a bad joke and academia descends into a frenzy

New rule #1: when you’re going to accuse a group of being in a “frenzy”, explain what you mean and give evidence.

Because I don’t see it. I’ve been seeing academics write about it and deplore Hunt’s words; I’ve seen them suggest that this behavior ought to be publicly repudiated by major organizations. That sounds about right to me. That’s what ought to be done: academics and journalists ought to express their opinions honestly, and have an expectation of some accountability.

New rule #2: when you start accusing a group of being in a “witch hunt” or comparing them to the Inquisition, you have to be specific in saying exactly what they ought to do differently.

Yes, O’Neill compares the response on Twitter to the Inquisition.

The response to Hunt is way more archaic than what Hunt said. Sure, his views might be a bit pre-women’s lib, pre-1960s. But the tormenting and sacking of people for what they think and say is pre-modern. It’s positively Inquisitorial.

The irony is too much to handle: Hunt is railed against for expressing an old-fashioned view, yet the railers against him do something infinitely more old-fashioned: they expel from public life someone they judge to have committed heresy. Kick him out. Strip him of his titles. Mock his misfortune. “Savour the moment.” How awfully ironic that the Royal Society, which played a key role in propelling Britain from medievalism to modernity, is now being asked to behave in a medieval fashion and send into the academic wilderness a heretic among its number.

Excuse me, but how has he been expelled from public life? Is he in solitary confinement in a cage somewhere? Is his ability to interact in public in any way diminished compared to, say, me, or Brendan O’Neill, or yours? Is he wandering in a wilderness, or is he crying in his comfortable home with the expensive paintings on the wall and a lovely gold medal from the Nobel Foundation?

Here’s what’s illiberal: that someone said something repugnant and stupid in public, and Brendan O’Neill does not think the public should be allowed to judge that person. We are supposed to give a certain privileged subset of humanity carte blanche and never criticize them. Deciding that a public figure has uncivilized, ignorant views…why, that’s not to be allowed! And to speak out and actually say that those views are vile…why, that it is the true vileness!

So O’Neill does have a suggestion for how we all should respond to people like Hunt. We should all shut up.

The Hunt incident is quite terrifying. For what we have here is a university, under pressure from an intolerant mob, judging a professor’s fitness for office by his personal thoughts, his idea of humour. Profs should be judged by one thing alone: their depth of knowledge. It shouldn’t matter one iota if they are sexist, stupid, unfunny, religious, uncouth, ugly, or whatever. All that should matter is whether they have the brainpower to do the job at hand.

Oh, gosh. I had no idea. Professors are exempt from all the normal rules of human behavior! Perhaps science isn’t really part of the domain of human experience after all. We get to be judged on one narrow criterion, and everything else is excluded. At long last, I can kick puppies! I can spit on poor people in the street! I can go play in a national forest with a chainsaw!

Oddly, though, the administrators and faculty at my university don’t think that way. It’s not as if every year I go in and take a test on developmental and cellular biology, and my “depth of knowledge” determines my employment status.

I am regularly evaluated on the academic holy trinity: research, teaching, and service. Did you know that public outreach, administration, collegiality, and communication are actually regarded as significant components of the professor’s job? O’Neill clearly doesn’t.

So his answer is flatly wrong and unrealistic. Professors aren’t excused from being more than grant-writing lab-running machines.

So what would O’Neill’s actual solution to this “illiberal frenzy” be? Are my posts on the Tim Hunt affair to be deleted? Should anyone on Twitter who was appalled at his behavior have their accounts banned? Perhaps we’re just prohibited from saying anything about Hunt’s offensive remarks — we should all change the subject to something about cyclin-dependent kinases.

Once again, conservative histrionics are exposed for what they are: a massive case of projection. The whine about illiberal academia is really a complaint that we can disagree strongly.

Speaking as someone who loves bitters, this is my idea of a happy place. (Somewhere in Portland. Found via r/cocktails)

mostlysignssomeportents:

Science writer and poisons specialist Deborah Blum rounds up the year’s news stories regarding malicious poisoners and expresses her disappointment that poisoners are often incredibly stupid about how they go about their trade (though, of course, it’s possible that we only hear about the dumb ones because the smart ones get away clean).

But poisoners tend to have, let’s say, a curious way of seeing the world — and their place in it. When detectives interviewed Lampron, he felt he had cause: “He said he was close to retirement and he should be able to slow down the last few months.” Just as a Michigan college student who sent her roommate to the hospital (again in the first week of December) explained that she poured bleach into the other girl’s tea after they argued over who should wash dirty dishes. Her roommate was “mean” about it, she said.

I’ve written before about bleach poisonings. They remind us that household supplies are the most frequent source of such attacks. They remind us that people sometimes just  poison to punish. In November, for instance, a deputy sheriff in Florida was charged with dumping hand sanitizer into a co-worker’s coffee following an argument over vacation days.

They remind us, once again, that the everyday poisoner is vindictive. Sneaky. But not necessarily that smart.

Dumb Poisoners: A Year-End Appreciation [Wired/Deborah Blum]

Read the rest…

Last April, the Calbuco Volcano in southern Chile erupted for the first time in 40 years. Martin Heck from Timestorm Films was on site to film the entire thing and just released this phenomenal 4K timelapse. What a magnificent and terrifying view. (via Vimeo Staff Picks)

where you least expect it

got back from my day of hiking at the park and had a mean hunger. thought i’d go back to “racks” for the burger they’re known for, but walked down to find they were closed.

everything was closed.

for a place that has legalized gambling and prostitution, they certainly do adhere to the lord’s day.

so i ambled back to my hotel to find something at their 24-hour diner. and find something i did.

this is “the italian job”. it’s a burger topped with pepperoni slices, pizza sauce, and mozzarella cheese. and it is, i swear to you, in the top 10 burgers i’ve ever had. hands down. no kidding.

hipster burger joints could only hope to be this good.

i expected very little from my little hotel diner dinner, and now i can say they blew my wee mind. i only stopped eating to take breaths.

love it when i’m humbled by unexpected good food.