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Pandas!

Rest in peace, H.R. Giger

A noticia VÍDEO: Godzilla engasga com Fiat 500L em comercial americano foi publicada no site Notícias Automotivas - Carros.

Someone has recreated the Game of Thrones opening sequence so that it happens in Super Mario World. It's pretty great.

Anonymously spilling personal gossip and corporate secrets online is all fun and games–until someone gets a subpoena. Startups like Secret and Whisper have defined a buzzy new category of social media, attracting millions of users and tens of millions of dollars in venture capital investments with the promise of allowing anyone to communicate with anonymity. […]

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I could write several paragraphs about how much I hate Neti pots, the device designed to pour water up into your sinus cavities, where it remains for hours before slowly draining down your throat (and, unless you use sterile water, may cause a brain infection) but instead I thought it might be better to show you this video of me using a Neti Pot.

When editors Rose Fox and Daniel José Older started out to create their anthology Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, they did so with a mission: To offer stories with more than the “usual suspects” of fantasy characters and tropes — to give space to stories and people outside of the expected. Here’s how they went about doing it, and how they went about getting the means to make the anthology happen.

ROSE FOX AND DANIEL JOSÉ OLDER:

How do you transform a longstanding vacancy into an opportunity? How do you take an empty, unfriendly space, air it out, and make it welcoming? These are the challenges we faced when we set out to edit Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History.

The vacancy, of course, exists in the hallowed halls of fiction—specifically historical and speculative fiction. Here we find one dominant narrative, that same singular narrative that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned us about: the story of the anointed white heterosexual cisgender man saving the world. We’re over it. We’ve seen it countless times. It’s boring. And what good is a solitary thread to depict a world that’s a vast, complex, multicolored quilt?

Where one story reigns supreme, thousands and thousands of others languish untold. This is not accidental, though it’s also not always conscious. Marginalization of people and stories doesn’t come out of thin air. It’s created by a thousand decisions on the part of writers, agents, editors, publishers, librarians, and booksellers:

• “I don’t want to write marginalized characters because I worry about getting it wrong.”
• “An egalitarian culture wouldn’t be realistic.”
• “I invited submissions from authors who were already notable in the field, because their names will help sell the anthology.”
• “We’re looking for books that we know will do well in the current marketplace.”
• “Readers won’t pick up a book with a character like that on the cover.”
• “I have no idea how to promote this story. It’s really cool, but who would read it?”
• “Boys don’t read as much as girls do, so we need to encourage them with more books about boys doing boy things.”

Collectively, over a period of decades, these individual decisions steamroll non-dominant voices right off the map.

Meanwhile, our author friends have been saying very different things:

• “My story was rejected because the editor ‘couldn’t relate’ to the main character.”
• “I built a story around something that happened to me, and was told that things like that don’t happen anymore.”
• “I wanted to submit to that magazine until they published a story that was full of stereotypes about my culture.”
• “My professor told me that people like me don’t write SF/F.”
• “My fantasy novel, set in a world that’s completely different from ours, was shelved under ‘African-American Literature’ just because I’m Black.”

We decided it was time—really, long past time—to take part in the fight against the dominant narrative and make space for the truths that have gone untold. We wanted to tell the truth about our histories, not the stories that make it into textbooks, and we wanted to decolonize speculative fiction. That was the big idea that became Long Hidden.

With the expert guidance and support of our publishers, Bart Leib and Kay Holt at Crossed Genres, we set out to create an atmosphere of bravery with precision and gentleness, free from deception. Our submission guidelines (http://longhidden.com/submissions/) asked for care and empathy, because we knew we would be seeing stories of violence and sorrow as well as bravery and triumph. We couldn’t pretend away the pain that oppression has caused throughout history. We weren’t interested in narrative of the privileged savior and we said so; we also asked authors to approach the concept of revenge with subtlety and caution, knowing that the truth of history is more complex than the tables being turned. We asked for stories of friendship and family and community, because in hard times those personal connections are both threatened and vital. And we encouraged speculative elements that incorporated real-world religion, superstition, and folklore, because the supernatural has its dominant narratives too.

We invited everyone to contribute, not just big names, because we know how hard it is for even tremendously talented authors to break in. We were intentional about reaching out into communities that don’t usually see calls for submissions for speculative fiction anthologies. We extended our call out far beyond the traditional boundaries of mainstream SF/F. We approached writers who had never published before and writers who had never written speculative fiction before. We explicitly requested and welcomed stories from women, writers of color, queer and trans* writers, and disabled writers, knowing that it takes a clear invitation to overcome the general feeling in the industry that such authors and their stories are unwelcome. We offered SFWA pro rates to honor the hard work it takes to write a story of the painful past, and asked the wider community of readers to fund our project through Kickstarter so we could afford to pay our authors and artists something close to what they were worth.

The response was tremendous. Submissions and pledges poured in. In a few days, the Long Hidden Kickstarter met its goal, and soon after we’d doubled it. By the end, we’d shot far past the initial goal and beyond what any of us had thought possible. People gathered en masse to declare that this was a space that needed to be opened in the closed ranks of both speculative and historical fiction.

Twenty-seven stories emerged from the many, many amazing ones we’d been sent. They were stories that collectively held a vast range of voices, scopes, characters, and unspoken truths. They were from authors around the world. They were heartbreaking and hilarious and true in the way all great fiction is. They were challenging. And most of all, they were in conversation with one another, despite depicting many different people, places, and eras. We enlisted artists with diverse backgrounds and styles to give them the illustrations they deserved.

Each story challenged our assumptions, privileges, stereotypes, doubts, fears, and uncertainties. As we worked with the authors and artists and each other, we were profoundly moved and changed by these tales of struggle, survival, triumph, and pain.

The “long hidden” stories have been here all along, as have the voices that tell them, but the industry hasn’t been listening. We’re thrilled that social media and crowdfunding have opened up new avenues for untold narratives to get their due, and we look forward to a great many more emerging into the light. Long Hidden isn’t the beginning, or the end.

—-

Long Hidden: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Createspace

Read a story excerpt with commentary by contributor Sunny Moraine. Visit the book’s Web site. Follow editor Rose Fox on Twitter. Follow editor Daniel José Older on Twitter.

1. Ants blockade their emergency exits.

2. Numerosity and income inequality.

3. What do we know about momentum investing?

4. Why marijuana shops are forced to run like lemonade stands.  (A short meditation on the productivity of banking.)

5. Will stand-up comedy make it in China?

6. Legal medical marijuana seems to cause more binge drinking.

Reasons why they made a new Spider-Man

What if I got a boyfriend?

Taco Cat

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Thanks to reader Sarah for suggesting the topic of exams! Here are more educational chickens.

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An owl having a bad feather day

A convexidade forte, naqueles problemas de otimização, mostra que diversidade é sempre interessante. Bom, é mais ou menos isto. Agora, repare que isto mostra o quanto economistas – ao contrário do que dizem os maus sociólogos e outros que não estudaram Economia porque estavam fazendo politicagem na faculdade – são os que mais gostam de diversidade por motivos óbvios.

Quem já estudou Teoria da Produção sabe que há uma grande diversidade (pun intended) de funções de produção e também que economistas adoram funções de produção bem gerais que incluem casos extremos como seus casos particulares (como a boa e velha CES, por exemplo).

Esta história de que diversidade (convexidade) é bom não se restringe aos manuais por um motivo simples e frequentemente esquecido: buscamos descrever como funciona a realidade, não como ela deveria funcionar. Trata-se de uma análise positiva, não normativa.

Eis, portanto, o exemplo de hoje. Pesquisadores descobriram que a diversidade de abelhas gera ganhos de bem-estar para fazendeiros. Eu sei, eu sei, a gente poderia falar de externalidades aqui – e o exemplo até cabe para um texto sobre o assunto – mas repare que o estudo não é de economistas, mas de entomologistas. Mesmo assim, eles fazem um experimento interessante e um cálculo econômico simples. Segue o trecho:

Using the price the farmers’ set per pound for their blueberries, the authors found that if two different species of bee pollinated the blueberries, a farm would see a $311 crop yield per acre; for three bee species, it would be $622; for four, $933, and so on. Since the scientists only observed five distinct species, they can’t speculate on the effect of biodiversity beyond five—but they assume that eventually the relationship would flatline (and added species would no longer mean bigger berries), but they didn’t reach that threshold naturally in the study. All told, Burrack and her colleagues calculated that for every additional species, the North Carolina blueberry industry could expect an additional $1.4 million in yield increase.

Legal mesmo, vou repetir, é que os autores se preocuparam em fazer uma estimativa – ainda que simples – do ganho de bem-estar. A diversidade, portanto, taria um ganho de US$ 1.4 milhões para a indústria de blueberry da Carolina do Norte. Não é só uma conversa de entomólogos ou de ambientalistas. Aliás, eis aí o incentivo para que pessoas defendam a diversidade de abelhas: todos ganham com isto e o ganho está quantificado.

Eis um bom exemplo de interdisciplinaridade que raramente vemos defendido pelos auto-denominados “defensores do pluralismo metodológico”. Eles só querem pluralismo com soft sciences ou com grupos com os quais tenham afinidade ideológica. Eles são pouco pluralistas, na verdade. Nada de conversar com o pessoal das Ciências Naturais, Estatística ou Computação. Ironicamente, são muito menos pluralistas do que nós, do mainline da economia. Viva as abelhas!

Arquivado em:Uncategorized Tagged: blueberry, Ciências Econômicas, entomologia, pesquisas

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I know nothing about cars…