Favorites from dialetheia
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Ennui floods in.
I Don't Think David Brooks is Okay, You Guys
Albert Burneko is worried about America's foremost thinkfluencer.
Summer-ish, VERY comfortable, closed-toe shoes that go with skirts?
During the winter, I wear my Born boots to work with all my skirts and dresses. (They're similar to these)
But what do I wear in the summer??
I see you are writing an academic article while being female...
...can I help you with that? PLOS (The Public Library of Science) gets rid of reviewer and editor as a result of sexist statements, from Science Insider; Retraction Watch's summary. Here's the direct link to the apology and update on peer review policy from the PLOS ONE blog. Finally, this story gets the BuzzFeed treatment, plus some of the scientific community's responses using the hashtag AddMaleAuthorGate (additional examples: 1, 2, 3, 4, and the Microsoft Assistant paperclip: 5)
"Femininity, as it turns out, can be a barrier to enlightenment."
The psychotherapist Carl Jung, after seeing a photo of the Arctic explorer Augustine Courtauld, remarked that Courtauld's was the face of a man 'stripped of his persona, his public self stolen, leaving his true self naked before the world.' For women, this is doubly true: a woman's life is one lived under surveillance, a system of inner and outer regulations even more restrictive than a man's. Even a simple stroll down the sidewalk becomes an exercise in self-loathing. Suck in your stomach. Straighten your hem. (What if it rides up, exposing you?) Every shop window offers a glimpse of your own reflection. Adjust, adjust, adjust.So where are all the women hermits?
It's enough to drive a woman crazy (and isn't this what we're always being accused of?). It's enough to drive any woman to the woods.
The Rat Paths of New York
It's common to frame ecology as a science that gets practiced in wild, untraveled areas. But cities have an ecology all their own, and the design of a given city contributes to the diversity of animals that make their homes there. Rats are particularly good at navigating cities, but other species might have a tougher time getting around.
Gush.
It is not polite to say that I have no uterus. People react as though I’ve bullied them, stepped over a line. But they are the ones who pushed themselves into my body to begin with, assessing its suitability as habitation for an embryo. I’m only pointing out that, no matter how nice the curtains, how lovely the paint scheme, there’s no actual house there at all. No place to put a potential human.--Positive I Don’t Have a Uterus
The Days of the Enola Gay
Science Needs a New Ritual
And so transcendence can take the form of blindness to differences between people and to our own biases. We assume scientists all think and believe the same things, even beyond the unequivocal data. We are all equal as scientists if we all value the same principles. And what we value comes almost entirely from Enlightenment-era Europe. This is a troubling state of affairs if we claim to strive for all humanity.
Please help us name a mini-golf goat.
There is a cute goat who lives in a cute little goat house. With the help of about 5 bunny rabbit friends, he (or she?) keeps the grass trimmed at an abandoned mini-golf (putt-putt) place. We stop there occasionally to talk to the goat and to fantasize about running a mini-golf-ery since it's for sale. But what is a clever name for a goat associated with mini-golf? We are at a loss for a good one, properly punny.
Getting a Clinical Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder
I am a female over 40 and will be getting a clinical psych evaluation from my state rehab agency because I've told them I suspect I am on the spectrum. I'm looking for accommodation and support via the diagnosis. I'm concerned about getting misdiagnosed.
"She's as wild as a caged animal. Try again in a few days."
My mother is like another country I used to live in, familiar but no longer a place I call home. When I visit, I don't stay long; dysfunction is the official language, the terrain is a desert of constantly shifting emotions, and the weather is grey when it's not dark and stormy. Estrangement is so much easier.
How do I develop my sense of time awareness?
Help a grad student with a very skewed perception of time! How do you train yourself to become more aware of time passing? What mechanisms/tricks have you used successfully to become more timely?
Cinderelly, Cinderelly
I like to write and I want to do it more, but I only seem to be able to get into the "zone" after around midnight. Is this something you've experienced? Can I rewire my brain?
I present to you the top-three mind-blowing concepts...
"Come As You Are"
an illustrated book review at The Nib and mirrored at Oh Joy Sex Toy [previously] by Erika Moen & Matthew Nolan.
Plus Size Androgyny?
So, I'm a mid-30s genderfluid person who would like to start dressing in a more masculine to androgynous manner in a business casual workplace. Complicating factors? I've got an aggressively female body, short with hips and boobs that can't really be minimized, plus I am a fattie (US size 20/22) and slowly shrinking). So what the hell do I do with that?
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Tableflip Dot Club:
2015's coolest club is for all those women in tech who had feelings about Ellen Pao & more.
It's Been 70 Years Since A Clear US Military Victory
A war machine that costs about as much as the rest of the worlds' militaries combined just doesn't win wars anymore.
Why is this, and how can such an expensive public program that obviously fails to achieve its stated goals carry on unscathed?
What's the matter with Kansas?
As of July 1, 2015, the safest, most convenient procedure used for second-trimester abortions will be illegal there.
During a private ceremony on Tuesday, April 7, Gov. Sam Brownback signed SB 95 into law, making Kansas the first state in the nation to criminalize a medical procedure commonly utilized in cases of incomplete miscarriage as well as pregnancy terminations performed after 12 weeks: Dilation and Evacuation, or D&E. Perhaps surprisingly for a law that criminalizes a medical procedure, the text of the law [PDF] does not use any medical terminology whatsoever.
During a private ceremony on Tuesday, April 7, Gov. Sam Brownback signed SB 95 into law, making Kansas the first state in the nation to criminalize a medical procedure commonly utilized in cases of incomplete miscarriage as well as pregnancy terminations performed after 12 weeks: Dilation and Evacuation, or D&E. Perhaps surprisingly for a law that criminalizes a medical procedure, the text of the law [PDF] does not use any medical terminology whatsoever.
The Worst Place on Earth
A visit to Baotou Lake
where rare earth minerals, used in "green" products and electronics, are processed.
I was completely embarrassed by it at the time
There is crying in science. That’s okay.
People cry. Scientists are people. Therefore, scientists cry. So why is it that scientists and academics can get so freaked out by a colleague or student crying?
"We can all feel good about deploring it."
Carbon Capture by Jonathan Franzen [New Yorker]
Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation?
And so I came to feel miserably conflicted about climate change. I accepted its supremacy as the environmental issue of our time, but I felt bullied by its dominance. Not only did it make every grocery-store run a guilt trip; it made me feel selfish for caring more about birds in the present than about people in the future. What were the eagles and the condors killed by wind turbines compared with the impact of rising sea levels on poor nations? What were the endemic cloud-forest birds of the Andes compared with the atmospheric benefits of Andean hydroelectric projects?
Help me find new music with really good lyrics!
One of the things that I reliably love in music is lyrics that sound like good poetry. Help me find more musicians who reliably include this trait in their work!
Women and social networks at work
Women often have decreased access to professional networks and mentors for a variety of reasons--men are more likely to mentor and sponsor other men, informal social networking often centers around gendered activity, women may simply not have the time to do after-work socializing. This is unfortunate, since networks and mentoring are incredibly valuable for female professionals and entrepreneurs. The obvious solution has been to encourage early-career women to network more and "better" and highly-placed women to mentor and support younger women, but this has had mixed results. It turns out that highly-ranking women do disproportionately mentor and support lower-ranking women--but only if they aren't "tokens" at their level of their own workplace but instead part of multiple women at that level.
Better Call Saul: Pimento
Tables turn.
Next iPhone game for a Monument Valley lover
I just got an iPhone 6, and I am obsessed with Monument Valley. What else should I be playing?
IT WOULD HAVE BEEN ENOUGH
The Heroic and Visionary Women of Passover
, a short essay by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt of Adas Israel Congregation in Washington, D.C.
Practical help for woman with Aspergers?
What print or online resources would you recommend for a woman who is diagnosed with Aspergers as an adult? Or what advice can you offer?
The creek the city loved to hate
Charlotte, NC is unusual in not being located on the coast of an ocean, lake, or major river. Instead, it has Little Sugar Creek: The creek the city loved to hate
What is up with bra sizing, anyway?
In recent years, many women will have noticed new articles insisting that most of us wear bras that don't fit and that women should measure themselves in a new way. But the sizes that are easily and cheaply available to women are nowhere near the sizes that these experts insist women should be wearing. How did this state of affairs come to be? It turns out the answer lies in the history of bra manufacture.
DOMAIN OF PRIME FROG
"This blog is dedicated to discussing games where you play as a frog, but it might also talk about games which just have heavy frog presence in them. The borders are unclear and the road ahead is hazy. Come with me on the journey to be a frog."
♥FROG WORLD♥
♥FROG WORLD♥
Graeber on Gawker, on extractive democracy
"This is a profound transformation, and one we barely talk about. "
Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber sees the FBI Ferguson report as a window into how American democracy is changing.
aspiring to a world in which personality is unchained from gender
Boys Don't Cry
If you take any personality trait—aggressiveness, say—and draw a bell curve for the distribution of this trait in girls and boys, you will find there are many girls who are more aggressive than a number of boys. But when adults buy into traditional masculine or feminine ideologies, they rear their children to conform to those norms. They try to force girls who are aggressive into not being aggressive, or boys who are nurturing into not being nurturing.Brian Gresko interviews psychologist Dr. Ronald Levant on the evolution of maleness and the sociocultural forces that have long stifled men and fathers.
Writing a scientific manuscript
I've done all the analysis for my thesis, but how do I write a scientific manuscript?
Is the enthusiasm of the Internet FOR SCIENCE hurting real scientists?
That's the argument made by Ben Thomas earlier this week.
Thomas charges that overenthusiastic viral sharing of half-baked scientific projects can make it more difficult for more well-planned projects to achieve success, particularly when high-profile crowdfunded projects go on to flop badly. Worse, the public backlash when real, messier science fails to live up to the flashy, unrealistic claims that media and social media hype blows up can have repercussions even for scientists who are funded by traditional grants. Signe Cane has a useful criticism of Thomas' piece with advice for non-specialists on how to try to separate cool things in real scientific work from cool things that are mostly hype and exaggerations. On the flip side of crowdfunding, Jacquelyn Gill shares her experience of using crowdfunding to fund her scientific research, ultimately concluding that it was a hell of a lot of work for relatively minimal payout. And Terry McGlynn, another ecologist, expresses some reservations about the effects of crowdfunding and other publicly marketed initiatives on science more broadly.
I think I internalized my parents' neglect. Now what?
I recently realized that my parents were inattentive to my needs as a child and teenager to a much greater degree than is usual or reasonable, and that my own longstanding patterns of passivity and self-neglect may be due to this. What do I do about it?
Saving species is essentially a forever-type problem.
If other horses are the equivalent of feral dogs, then the Przewalski’s horse is a wolf. In its native Mongolia, where it goes by the name takhi, it is known as the father of horses. Mongolians regard the takhi as spiritual, holy animals, and for millennia they largely left them alone... The trouble all began in the late 19th century, when the Western world finally took note of the takhi. Nikolai Przewalski, a Polish-born explorer serving as a colonel in the Russian army, “discovered” the horses during an 1878 expedition to the Mongolian-Chinese frontier. Naturally, Przewalski named the horse after himself, and when he returned to the West, word quickly spread among zoos, adventurers, and curio collectors about the mysterious wild horses.
What can we do better as a community in these cases?
Coding Like a Girl - sailor mercury at Medium:
"Apparently, presenting as feminine makes you look like a beginner. It is very frustrating that I will either look like not a programmer or look like a permanent beginner because I have programmed since age 8. I have basically always wanted to be a programmer. I received undergrad and grad degrees from MIT. I’ve worked as a visiting researcher in Honda’s humanoid robotics division on machine learning algorithms for ASIMO.
"I don’t think that any of these things make me a better programmer; I list them because I am pretty sure that if i were a white man with these credentials or even less than these credentials no one would doubt my programmer status."
"To all the men who turned their misogyny into a game"
"What I couldn't say" by Anita Sarkeesian, part of the "What I couldn't say" session at the All About Women Festival at the Sydney Opera House this week
Bear with me here - where can I find this shirt?
Help me find a shirt that Jordan Peele wore during a Season 2 Key and Peele episode.
Hannibal: Kaiseki
While Will continues to assert his innocence, Hannibal and Jack try to come to terms with the fact that he's in jail; Kade Purnell visits Will.
Sastrugi: ridges of snow formed on a snowfield by the action of the wind
With the recent news that nature words are being removed from children's dictionaries, I'm looking for many more nature words and their definitions to add to my lexicon. Books, blog posts, whatever, I'll take them all. The more obscure and localised the better.
(Title taken from here).
Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon
Have you ever wondered just how Sherlock Holmes got information out of the people he spoke with? Well, wonder no more!
Sadness is a legitimate emotion.
Pre-therapy, this is the only thing I was ever taught, implicitly and explicitly, about sadness: It is bad.Journalist and author Mac McClelland explores the relationship between recovering from PTSD and learning how to live in the presence of sadness: How I Learned To Be OK With Feeling Sad.
You do not want it. If you've got it, you should definitely try to get rid of it, fast as possible. Whatever you do, don't subject other people to it, because they do not like that.
Sadness can be legitimately problematic, absolutely. If your sadness comes from seemingly no place or even an obvious place but keeps you from participating in life or enjoying anything and refuses to abate no matter how long you go on letting it express itself, you of course can't keep living like that. But culturally, we aren't allowed to be sad even for a little while. Even when it's perfectly sensible. Even when, sometimes, we need it.
insufficient context, scale, frequency or scope
"Instead, most current systems, almost without fail, do the opposite. Moderators responsible for content and complaints, regardless of gender, are making decisions based not just on the information they are reviewing, but on the way in which the information flows – linear, acontextual and isolated from other incidents. They are reliant, despite their best efforts, on technical systems that provide insufficient context, scale, frequency or scope. In addition, they lack specific training in trauma (their own or users) and in understanding gender-based violence. " -- "Silicon Valley sexism: why it matters that the internet is made by men, for men", by Soraya Chemaly, The New Statesman
FCC votes for Net Neutrality
When President Obama appointed Tom Wheeler (a former top telecom lobbyist) as chairman of the FCC, he got a lot of grief for selling out his '07 pledge to protect Net Neutrality -- the founding principle long prized by open web activists that ISPs cannot privilege certain data over others, without which dire visions of a tiered and pay-for-play internet loomed. Earlier, weaker attempts at net neutrality had failed in court, and the new chairman looked set to fold.
But after an unprecedented outcry following last year's trial balloon for ISP "fast lanes" -- including a viral appeal by John Oliver, a public urging by the president, and perhaps Wheeler's own history with the pre-web NABU Network -- the FCC yesterday voted along party lines to enact the toughest net neutrality rules in history, classifying ISPs as common carriers and clearing the way for municipal broadband. ISPs reacted with (Morse) venom, while congressional Republicans are divided over what they called "Obamacare for the internet."
Movie: They Live
Nada, a wanderer without meaning in his life, discovers a pair of sunglasses capable of showing the world the way it truly is. As he walks the streets of Los Angeles, Nada notices that both the media and the government are comprised of subliminal messages meant to keep the population subdued, and that most of the social elite are skull-faced aliens bent on world domination. With this shocking discovery, Nada fights to free humanity from the mind-controlling aliens.
Ideas for Elementary Science Stations
I'm trying to set up a number of "stations" at home for long-term observation and record keeping. The observers are ages 3-7, but I'm not looking for crafty or disposable, cheap science projects or stations like they sell at hobby stores. These stations can be built all at once, or assembled over time (as the kids get older).