June 27, 2010
A Minute and 100 Metres Down the Road
A Minute and 100 Metres Down the Road. The soldier outside the station had one hand on the barrel and the other on the butt of his shotgun. There were two military trucks by the bus stop and two soldiers in the back-right seats of every bus leaving Urumqi station... I arrived via long-haul train, 40 hours and just under 4000km in a hard-seat, from Beijing, where rumours were circulating about the extent of the military presence, needle attacks, Uighur and Han street gangs, and the validity of the reports coming out of Xinjiang. After four days I left with more doubts about why ethnic tensions in Urumqi arose and how they could be resolved. [more inside]
Get down off your cross.
Did Jesus die on a cross? A Christian scholar says crucifixion was not an execution method in the time of the New Testament.
It keeps animators employed, doesn't it
Whether we first saw their works as parents, as children, as animation buffs, or just soft-hearted grownup viewers, Mefites have been quick to view, love, praise, analyze, criticize and follow the output of our favorite animation studio, a little company that started in the early '90s and came from behind to revitalize American animation. I am of course referring to the company behind Tiny Robots, What's Up: Balloon to the Rescue, The Frog Prince, Little Princess School, and The Little Panda Fighter -- Video Brinquendo. (Via. Previously.) [more inside]
Did Bill Clinton have anything to do with our definition of sex?
What counts as sex? A group of researchers at the University of Kentucky-Lexington, thinks that Bill Clinton’s famous assertion that he “did not have sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky may be the reason so many young people today don’t consider oral sex to count as doing the deed.
The study "Sex Redefined: The Reclassification Of Oral-Genital Contact"PDF which was conducted in 2007 and published this month in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, surveyed 477 students enrolled in a human sexuality course at a large state university about their views on sex. What they found was that only 20 percent of those students considered oral-genital contact to be sex, compared with nearly 40 percent of a similar group of students surveyed in 1991.
Pound Puppy
Helping the Congo by Reducing Conflict Mineral Demand
I'm A Mac and I've got a dirty little secret. Consumers are funding warlords in the Congo who rape and pillage, through their demand for high tech items. The Enough Project and Raise Hope For Congo are trying to change this. Conflict minerals 101.
DO YOU SEE THE LIGHT?!!!!
Given it is Sunday, feel free to get your Jesus on with The Mighty Clouds of Joy. Somebody say Amen.
What the Earth knows
Experts are little help in the constant struggle in this conversation to separate myth from reality, because they have the same difficulty, and routinely demonstrate it by talking past each other. Respected scientists warn of imminent energy shortages as geologic fuel supplies run out. Wall Street executives dismiss their predictions as myths and call for more drilling. Environmentalists describe the destruction to the earth from burning coal, oil, and natural gas. Economists ignore them and describe the danger to the earth of failing to burn coal, oil, and natural gas. Geology researchers report fresh findings about what the earth was like millions of years ago. Creationist researchers report fresh findings that the earth didn’t exist millions of years ago. The only way not to get lost in this awful swamp is to review the basics and decide for yourself what you believe and what you don’t.
[more inside]
Lookit Ira Glass Tryin' To Be Funny!
At the Webby Arwards, the drummer from OK GO got into a staring contest.
SPOOGE!
Holy nostalgia fetish, it's Ward Sutton's bat porn.
Fired For Fornication
Jarretta Hamilton, a teacher at a Christian school in Orlando, was fired after it was discovered that her baby was conceived before she was married.
"A book is not born, but rather becomes, a translation"
As translation contretemps go, the one surrounding French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) and her foundational work of modern feminism, Le Deuxième Sexe, first published in two volumes in French in 1949, remains one of the most tempestuous and fascinating. For decades, Beauvoir scholars in the English-speaking world bemoaned, attacked, and sought to replace the widely used 1953 translation by H.M. Parshley (1884-1953), a zoologist at Smith College who knew little philosophy or existentialism, had never translated a book from French, and relied mainly on his undergraduate grasp of the language. A few years back, they succeeded in getting the rights holders [...] to commission a new translation. [... But] Norwegian Beauvoir scholar Toril Moi, a professor at Duke and one of the foremost critics of Parshley's translation, savaged the new version in the London Review of Books. [...] How everyone involved got from vituperative discontent to hopeful triumph and back to discontent makes an instructive tale in itself and offers some lessons for what matters and doesn't in the evolution of a classic.
« Previous day | Next day »