April 25, 2011
Freedom of Speech or Human Rights Violation?
Vancouver comedian Guy Earle and the restaurant he was performing at were fined a combined C$22,500 by the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal after a 2007 incident where Earle mocked a member of the audience. [more inside]
IstyOsty and KittenBlock
They were going for edginess
"The first improvement in toilet paper since the 1880s"
In 2009, Telebrands Corporation released the Comfort Wipe.
But that's not all! Josh Rimer introduces... the Comfortable Stick! Because toilet paper is so archaic and disgusting. (NSFW at all, at all)
But that's not all! Josh Rimer introduces... the Comfortable Stick! Because toilet paper is so archaic and disgusting. (NSFW at all, at all)
Joi Ito named director of MIT Media Lab
MIT is expected to announce tomorrow its naming of Joichi Ito as head of the MIT Media Lab (NYTimes). This is noteworthy because rather than being a star of academia, design, or engineering, he is a 44-year-old venture capitalist. [more inside]
Please don't Litter
Cute overload The Shiba Inu Puppy Cam has returned, this is the third (and, according to the site, last) litter from the original puppy cam dog mom that we've seen before.
Take a break from the world...
"Your dad was meta as fuck"
Gotta die sometime and from something.
What Is Good for the Heart May Not Be Good for the Prostate, Study Suggests. In a major study that appears to overturn a lot of previous research, the largest and most authoritative study ever to examine the association of dietary fats and prostate cancer risk has found an inverse association in the effect of Omega-3 fatty acids in heart disease and in prostate cancer. A lot of recent conventional wisdom has been upended, with the role of all fatty acids undergoing substantial revisions in our understanding. [more inside]
This view of time does not look encouraging for time travelers
The concept of time as a way to measure the duration of events is not only deeply intuitive, it also plays an important role in our mathematical descriptions of physical systems. For instance, we define an object’s speed as its displacement per a given time. But some researchers theorize that this Newtonian idea of time as an absolute quantity that flows on its own, along with the idea that time is the fourth dimension of spacetime, are incorrect. They propose to replace these concepts of time with a view that corresponds more accurately to the physical world: time as a measure of the numerical order of change.
No Marriage Until Gay Marriage Is Legal
The Douglass Blvd. Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky has voted to stop signing marriage licenses until gay marriage is legalized by the state.
"Cultivated leisure is the aim of man."
SINCE THE YEAR 2000
Make Some Noise
"Good people, unfortunately due to circumstances beyond our control, the "clean" version of our new album, The Hot Sauce Committee pt 2 has leaked. So as a hostile and retaliatory measure with great hubris we are making the full explicit aka filthy dirty nasty version available for streaming on our new site. We hope this brings much happiness, hugs, and harmony. Enjoy Kikoos for life!" [more inside]
Think again, again
Every year, nine million children under five die from preventable diseases such as diarrhea and malaria. Often, the treatments for these diseases are cheap, safe, and readily available. So why don't people pick these 'low-hanging fruit'? Why don’t mothers vaccinate their children? Why don’t families use bednets, or buy chlorinated water? And why do they spend such large amounts of money on ineffective cure instead?Poor Economics is a book and website by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo. It has maps, graphs, and data drawn from the research at MIT's Poverty Action Lab. It is currently being reviewed and discussed (1, 2, 3) at the Economist. BONUS: Duflo discusses the book and Randomized Controlled Trials (Wikipedia: RCT).
The 98-year-old judo master
After nearly a century, Keiko Fukuda still lives for judo [video]. Earlier this month, Fukuda turned 98. The last surviving student of Judo founder Jigoro Kano, she teaches classes in the Bay Area despite having lived nearly a century. Fukuda, at 9th degree black belt, is the highest-ranking woman in judo history. [more inside]
Flying the Flag, Fleeing the State
Flags of Convenience allow ship owners to register ships to countries other than their own. More than half of current merchant ships are registered under them. As you might imagine, such a system can lead to abuse. In an op-ed in today's New York Times, Rose George suggests some changes. [more inside]
2011 on track to be the worst year for wildfires in Texas history
Texas is burning. Despite it being only April, due to severe drought conditions, over 1.8 million acres have already burned throughout the state, which could soon surpass the two million acre record set in 2006. Here are the 10 largest current wildfires as seen from orbit. [more inside]
The Philanthropist "Godman"
"For the progress of humanity, work alone is not adequate, but the work should be associated with love, compassion, right conduct, truthfulness and sympathy. Without the above qualities, selfless service cannot be performed."On Sunday morning, Indian guru Sri Sathya Sai Baba passed away. He leaves behind a massive empire, several million mourning devotees worldwide, an extensive religious philosophy, a great deal of controversy and a legacy of large-scale philanthropic projects in India, including free hospitals and mobile medical facilities, a free university and schools, and other efforts which included supplying clean water to hundreds of rural villages. [more inside]
Get your pussy willows and squirt guns ready!
"The man who gave comics its memory" Bill Blackbeard 1926-2011
Bill Blackbeard, founder of the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, passed away March 10. The Comics Journal calls him "without question or quibble the only absolutely indispensable figure in the history of comics scholarship for the last quarter century." [more inside]
Tractatus Digito-Philosophicus
"This is a somewhat odd venture: a translation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus into the domain of software development." Wait, not so crazy, Harrison Ainsworth explains, "Central in the Tractatus is the concept of the ‘proposition’: a statement about the world that can be true or false. It is a logical artifact used to describe the world (and so links logic and world together). This maps straightforwardly to software: a proposition becomes a program. Where a proposition describes the world, a program constructs the imagination, or intended-world – an artifact. A program is like an executable proposition."
Bourbon: Is there anything it can't do?
Robot Elephant!
(notes on) biology, a short stop-motion animation (5.39) by ornana films, features a robot elephant. You have to wait a bit, but it's worth it. Stuff gets good at about 2.25.
"Police in the US now rival criminals, and exceed terrorists as the greatest threat to the American public."
A federal justice report on policing in New Orleans since 2009 presents damning evidence of brutality, cop misconduct and systemic abuse of black citizens post-Katrina. The city’s jails are not far behind. No limits to the law in NoLa
The cold, incompetent stupidity of the system
Massive leak reveals secret dossiers on 759 captives
The Guantanamo Files New York Times and Guardian
() For all the sensitive types that can't read actual wikileak files with out having tanks on your lawn or SWAT teams down your chimney, please rest assured that none of my links here or inside lead directly to *sekrets*) [more inside]
() For all the sensitive types that can't read actual wikileak files with out having tanks on your lawn or SWAT teams down your chimney, please rest assured that none of my links here or inside lead directly to *sekrets*) [more inside]
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