June 2, 2015
"Hey, you know some kids have two daddies, right?"
The Straight Parents’ Guide to How Not to Raise a Homophobe — and How to Be a Better Ally by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie for "Outward" at Slate.
The harassment of abortion providers and their families
‘Our Demand Is Simple: Stop Killing Us’
Since Aug. 9, 2014, when Officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson Police Department shot and killed Michael Brown, Mckesson and a core group of other activists have built the most formidable American protest movement of the 21st century to date. Their innovation has been to marry the strengths of social media — the swift, morally blunt consensus that can be created by hashtags; the personal connection that a charismatic online persona can make with followers; the broad networks that allow for the easy distribution of documentary photos and videos — with an effort to quickly mobilize protests in each new city where a police shooting occurs.[more inside]
I .. did not believe there are structures .. that we are not aware of
"In a stunning discovery that overturns decades of textbook teaching, researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have determined that the brain is directly connected to the immune system by vessels previously thought not to exist." While the article at Sciencedaily.com may be a bit breathlessly excited about it, even the more somber source article in Nature agrees that this "may call for a reassessment of basic assumptions in neuroimmunology"
Al Jazeera tackles the thorny subject of legal guardianship
Al-Jazeera has recently taken on the topic of legal guardianship, in which a US citizen deemed incompetent to manage their own finances becomes a "ward of the state." When judges can take away senior citizens' basic rights (aired 5/26/2015) tells the story of Dorothy Luck, and a related written piece dated 6/1/2015 gives a detailed account on the story of John Stout, a Texas minister who helped "send Bibles to the moon" was declared incompetent after trying to give away some of his land. [more inside]
“...the darkest most troubling chapters in our collective history”
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission report. [Toronto Star] [Autoplay Video]
A heart-wrenching and damning report culminates a six-year examination of residential schools that oversaw the ill-treatment of aboriginal children for more than a century. It pieces together a horrifying history that has been repeatedly dismissed or ignored.[more inside]
It's not paranoia if they are flying mysterious planes over your house
I don't like you because you're dangerous.
The Iceman List, by Tim Carmody. Classic movie antagonists who were pretty much right all along.
Meet Australia's newest suicidally-sexed marsupials
Scientists in Queensland have discovered two new species of carnivorous marsupials, and raised another from subspecies to species status. Unfortunately, the little guys are at risk from climate change and habitat loss. Also: the males are screwing themselves to death. [more inside]
Senate Approves USA Freedom Act
The vote of 67 - 32 will move the measure to President Obama's desk. Previous reports suggest that he will sign it immediately.
"Why do you have to talk about that stuff?"
David Sedaris talks about surviving the suicide of his sister Tiffany
'Key word is “seemed” in that sentence. But thank you for that.'
Self-driving trucks and the drivers that won't drive them
Self-Driving Trucks Are Going to Hit Us Like a Human-Driven Truck. Musings on the potentially devastating economic impact of self-driving trucks. Previously.
Nearly 700 in South Korea quarantined for MERS
In South Korea, 2 people have died of MERS, with 18 people becoming infected over the past 10 days, resulting in nearly 700 people being placed in quarantine. A man broke quarantine and traveled to China, subsequently testing positive for China's first confirmed case of MERS. Untill recently, all cases of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) had been linked to countries in and near the Arabian Peninsula. Right now, there is no vaccine for MERS and no treatment.
Haters Asked to Hate
After the Thrill is Gone: Has a director ever gotten so bad you start to wonder whether you were wrong to love their earlier movies?
Because your mother doesn't work here
Are you a central San Francisco resident who is too busy to get your trash out to the curb on time once a week? Well your worries are over with TrashDay.
Heck, maybe you're too busy for everything. No time to feed yourself because you need to lock down that seed round term sheet with your AngelList syndicate? Here Comes The Airplane.
A $2.50 gadget that extends disposable battery life by 800 percent
Batteriser is a simple metal sleeve that promises to give consumers up to eight times more life from their disposable batteries. [more inside]
Good Grief!
"Thank you dear sister, greatest of all sisters, without whom I'd never survive."
The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show aired on Saturday mornings on the CBS network from 1983 - 1986. Only 18 episodes were ever produced. [more inside]
The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show aired on Saturday mornings on the CBS network from 1983 - 1986. Only 18 episodes were ever produced. [more inside]
Attempts to solve security problems [with] dualism are usually wrong.
Joanna Rutkowska is the creator of the Qubes OS, one of the preeminent security researchers on virtualization security, and CEO and founder of Invisible Things Lab. [more inside]
The Russian Troll Factory
The Agency is every online community member's worst fears come to life: a real honest-to-goodness troll/noise factory where dozens of employees using hundreds of accounts post thousands of highly targeted and coordinated attacks as awful comments on Twitter, Facebook, and forums in order to sway public opinion about geopolitics. From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities...
Klaus
Klaus, a new film in development by Sergio Pablos Animation Studios, uses traditional hand-drawn animation and secret compositing techniques to bring its world to breathtaking, painterly life.
"...he extends his preferences in games to All True Gamers..."
Games have the opposite problem: an elitism defined by the absence of taste, or simply by bad taste [...] Stepping into games is like arriving at a cheese-tasting party where most of the crowd is angrily murmuring that cheddar and swiss are always and objectively the best cheeses on grounds of utility and pleasure, that assholes offering a plate of mold-laced bleu are an affront to any real cheese-lover, that brie may simply be too soft to be a real cheese.A Lack of Taste (via Offworld)
Le cinéma est une invention sans avenir
Lumière and Company was a project realised in 1995 to mark the centenary of the Lumière brothers’ first movies. Forty directors were given the use of a restored Lumière Cinematograph and asked to make a film under 1895-style constraints: (1) the films could be no longer than 52 seconds; (2) no synchronized sound was permitted; (3) no more than three takes were allowed. Any editing had to be done in-camera. Nearly all of the completed shorts have been compiled into a YouTube playlist. Please note that some of the clips contain nudity: treat this post as NSFW. Les Frères Lumière previously: 1, 2. [more inside]
Temptation in the Archives - and more
UCL Press University College London is pleased to announce the launch of UCL Press, the University’s in house publishing arm, on 4 June 2015. UCL Press will be the first fully Open Access university press in the UK with all books, journals and monographs freely available online, creating a diverse and accessible global knowledge resource.
Inside Disney's radical plan to modernize its cherished theme parks.
The Messy Business of Reinventing Happiness. The story behind FastPass+ at DisneyWorld. [more inside]
Books before print
"If you love old books, you've come to the right place." Quill is a project by Medieval book historian Erik Kwakkel and librarian/photographer Giulio Menna, detailing the laborious process of creating a manuscript before Gutenberg. Learn what a "quire" is, and the origin of the term "watermark." [more inside]
Charles Peter Kennedy (25 November 1959 – 1 June 2015)
Charles Kennedy, the former leader of the Liberal-Democrats, dies aged 55, one month after he lost his seat in the 2015 UK general elections. The police are treating his death as not suspicious. [more inside]
Chip McCallahan Forever
Duke Nukem Forever. Earthbound and Donkey Kong 64 on Virtual Console. DnD RPGs and LucasArts adventure games on GOG.com. What an age we live in, in which vidya games we were once denied are suddenly no longer denied. And now, Chip's Challenge and its fabled sequel, classic puzzle games long thought permanently unrereleasable and unreleasable respectively due to copyright issues, have finally been released on Steam (and let's not forget its spiritual successor from during the drought, Chuck's Challenge 3D). But why stop there? Fans have created a bunch of free extra levels for the original game, including three epic collaborative level packs, and a free program (first version, newer version) capable of running them. The latter version also has a convenient bundle including all three level packs and an intro pack that serves as a tutorial. [more inside]
How to fix inequality: Squash the finance industry and redistribute more
Joe Stiglitz on Inequality, Wealth, and Growth: Why Capitalism is Failing (video; if you don't have 30m, skip to 20m for discussion of political inequality, wealth, credit and monetary policy) - "If the very rich can use their position to get higher returns, more investment information, more extraction of rents, and if the very rich have equal or higher savings rates, then wealth will become more concentrated... economic inequality inevitably gets translated into political inequality, and political inequality gets translated into more economic inequality. The basic and really important idea here is that markets don't exist in a vacuum, that market economies operate according to certain rules, certain regulations that specify how they work. And those effect the efficiency of those markets, but they also effect how the fruits of the benefits of those markets are distributed and the result of that is there are large numbers of aspects of our basic economic framework that in recent years have worked to increase the inequality of wealth and income in our society... leading to a society which can be better described, increasingly, as an inherited plutocracy." [more inside]
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