September 4, 2014
What is pedophilia?
Is it a condition or an orientation? Can it be corrected? CBC Ideas explores these questions through two real cases.
Childhood Amnesia
The Great Forgetting. Our first three years are usually a blur and we don’t remember much before age seven. What are we hiding from ourselves? [more inside]
2 1/2 Blocks in 2 1/2 Years
"Since the middle of Kindergarden, I have been taking pictures of my daughter on her short walk to school in NYC. 1,380 photos later, we finally made it." [more inside]
Spicing traditional realism with enchantments of popular page-turners
"The weakness underlines the biggest trap of time machine fiction: with its emphasis on patterns and symbols, it's always in danger of devolving into a kind of interpretative game, a lit-crit mystery whose meanings must be decrypted rather than naturally perceived. Authors unbounded by time are susceptible to the allures of omniscience, which can turn their characters into puppets and snuff out the lifelike vitality of the realist tradition." Sam Sacks at Prospect Magazine writes about the rise of time machine fiction.
i want the regina dress now
Geeky women's clothing company Her Universe teamed up with Hot Topic and Nerdist to present a fandom couture competition and fashion show. Here are some highlights. [more inside]
Download vs. store-bought games. Which is hotter?
Downloading video games from the Internet creates a larger carbon footprint than driving to the store to purchase the same game on a Blu-ray disc, according to findings published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology. [more inside]
My Little Tulpa: Friendship is Magic
"Tulpas are sentient beings imagined into existence using meditation-style exercises. Their creators, known as 'tulpamancers', form the internet’s newest subculture, meeting online at tulpa.info and the subreddit r/tulpas." [more inside]
Best. Name. Ever.
Scientists at Drexel university have discovered and described the most complete supermassive dinosaur ever found. According to paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara, the titanosaur "weighed as much as a dozen African elephants or more than seven T. rex. Shockingly, skeletal evidence shows that when this 65-ton specimen died, it was not yet full grown. It is by far the best example we have of any of the most giant creatures to ever walk the planet." It's name? Dreadnoughtus .
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Games for tomorrow's programmers.
Blockly Games is a series of educational games that teach programming. It is designed for children who have not had prior experience with computer programming. By the end of these games, players are ready to use conventional text-based languages.
Celebrity Defector
Park Yeonmi shares the story of her treacherous escape from North Korea to South Korea. (Video - transcript available). Also interviewed is Mrs. Lee, a defector who attempted to escape North Korea 9 times before finally succeeding; she describes her brutal experience in the prison camps. [more inside]
McDonnells Convicted
Former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell has been found guilty of 11 counts of conspiracy, bribery, and extortion, for receiving $177,000 in gifts from dietary supplement executive Johnny Williams. The governor's wife Maureen McDonnell was convicted on eight counts of corruption and an additional count of obstructing a grand jury investigation.
Mr. McDonnell, who carried his wife over the threshold of the Executive Mansion the day of his inauguration, portrayed her in his testimony as a harridan whose yelling left him “spiritually and mentally exhausted,” and who was so cold that after he sent her an email pleading to save their marriage, she did not reply. ... The government dismissed the defense strategy of portraying the McDonnell marriage as broken, and Ms. McDonnell as a “nutbag” who was smitten with Mr. Williams. The former governor was trying to “throw his wife under the bus,” the prosecutor, Michael S. Dry, said in closing statements.McDonnell and his wife each face jail sentences of up to 20 years for each corruption offense.
RIP Joan Rivers
The staples are punk as hell.
I haven't been blogging for a while. Now I'm ready to tell you the story. Just so you're prepared, the story ends with "in two weeks I'm having brain surgery."
Or maybe that's how the story should begin.
"Bangkok is the bright city. The green lights outside the city? No idea"
While on ISS, astronaut Reid Wiseman captured and tweeted a picture that captured night time picture of the Gulf of Thailand, including a vast area of green lights, distinct from the white, yellow and orange lights of adjacent cities. Reid wrote "Bangkok is the bright city. The green lights outside the city? No idea… " but others did know: it was many fishing boats with green fishing light attractors. [more inside]
Surviving an ISIS Massacre
Ali Hussein Kadhim, the only known survivor out of hundreds of an ISIS massacre outside of Tikrit in Iraq, tells his story. Ali, a Shi'a, was saved only by the kindness of people in the Sunni neighborhood around him. TW (violence): First video in link is an interview with Ali and includes footage of soldiers being shot.
The simplest & most efficient way to text a taco to anyone in the world.
Taco Text texts tacos. iOS only... for now.
"I'm going by the word of God"
Last month, a video of a teenager coming out to his family went viral, (trigger warning), now viewed almost 6 million times. The young man who is disowned and abused in that video, Daniel Pierce, after receiving more than $90,000 in donations to live on his own, has now asked that donations be re-directed to Lost-N-Found Youth, a shelter in Georgia for LGBT Homeless Youth. Rolling Stone profiles The Forsaken: A Rising Number of Homeless Gay Teens Are Being Cast Out by Religious Families
Standard (flavored) Markdown
In 2009, StackOverflow and Discourse developer Jeff Atwood called out prominent Apple commentator and Markdown developer John Gruber for failing to produce an unambiguous Markdown specification or maintain the Markdown reference implementation. [more inside]
Whoops....
What happens when you break a sculpture in a gallery Gallery patron sits on bench in gallery, turns out bench was artwork, bench breaks. Ethical and financial panics ensue. [more inside]
Out of this world
With her most recent series, Alienation, South African photographer Anelia Loubser finds the extraterrestrial in all of us. Here are the mugshots she used as source material. More Loubser at Behance, Facebook, and Twitter.
When I found out they were black, my world just stopped.
“These are young people who refuse to be put in a box, but are still trying to make sense of themselves. Over the years, the concept of Black rock has been rejected by both Blacks and whites. Afropunk shows that there are other types of Black experiences. It’s exciting to see Blacks who are unafraid to go a different way.” Afropunk Before Afropunk [more inside]
Run Walter, RUN
is global collapse imminent?
They kicked hetero butt up and down the state of Chihuahua
The Man Without a Mask, The New Yorker on Cassandro and the role of the exótico within lucha libre.
“It was Baby Sharon who encouraged me to step out of Mister Romano,” Armendáriz said. Baby Sharon was an exótico—a luchador who wrestles in drag. Exóticos have been around since the nineteen-forties. At first, they were dandies, a subset of rudos with capes and valets. They struck glamour-boy poses and threw flowers to the audience. As exóticos got swishier and more flirtatious, and started dressing in drag, the shtick became old-school limp-wristed gay caricature. Crowds loved to hate them, screaming “Maricón!” and “Joto!” (“Faggot!”). The exóticos made a delightful contrast with the super-masculine brutes they met in the ring. Popular exóticos insisted that it was all an act—in real life, they were straight. Baby Sharon was among the first, according to Armendáriz, to publicly say that, no, he was actually gay.[more inside]
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