October 15, 2015

Transgender Girls are Welcome to Join the Girl Guides of Canada

After years of allowing transgender children to join only on a case-by-case basis, the Girl Guides of Canada have released new guidelines(pdf) that make their stance on the issue clear and official: "All persons who live their lives as female are welcome to join the organization." [more inside]
posted by ladyriffraff at 11:01 PM PST - 45 comments

Hong Kong Is Slowly Dimming Its Neon Glow

"Since the mid-20th century, endless towers of flashing, throbbing neon have defined Hong Kong’s landscape as much as Victoria Harbor and the skyline of densely packed high-rises. 'When you think of Hong Kong and visual culture, one of the first things that comes to the fore is neon signs,' said Aric Chen, the design and architecture curator of M+, a museum that is collecting images of Hong Kong’s neon signs online and some of the signs themselves as they are retired, including the neon cow. The Hong Kong immortalized in the films of Wong Kar-wai, the director of 'In the Mood for Love' and 'Chungking Express,' is awash in neon, Mr. Chen said. 'If his representations of Hong Kong in the popular imaginations are seminal, which I think they are,' he said, 'you can’t separate that image from the neon ambient glow.' But the neon of Hong Kong’s streets is dimming." (Previously).
posted by SpacemanStix at 10:12 PM PST - 16 comments

Talent and Creativity expressed through dance

MacArthur Genius Grant award winner Michelle Dorrance is a tap dancer. Here she is performing on Colbert with the house band, Stay Human. This is really beautiful. She is a tap dancer, musician and choreographer breathing new life into a uniquely American art form in works that combine the musicality of tap with the choreographic intricacies of contemporary dance. Dorrance uses her deep understanding of the technique and history of tap dancing to deconstruct and reimagine its artistic possibilities. [more inside]
posted by bobdow at 10:10 PM PST - 12 comments

Do you need vulva emoji? Or do you want to keep typing ({|})?

Feministing has done an article on Flirtmoji's recent release of 15 vulva emoji, realistically asymmetrical and in a variety of pleasant colors. Designer Katy McCarthy did an interview on her work on these sexually explicit emoji and the necessity of inclusivity.
posted by bile and syntax at 7:35 PM PST - 40 comments

How Doctors Take Women's Pain Less Seriously

"If she had been alone, with no one to agitate for her care, there’s no telling how long she might have waited." Nationwide, men wait an average of 49 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain. Women wait an average of 65 minutes for the same thing.
posted by headspace at 6:17 PM PST - 114 comments

"The problem of abuse is the greatest challenge the web faces today."

Umair Haque on Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn From It):
Can we create a better web? Sure. But I think we have to start with humility, gratitude, reality — not arrogance, privilege, blindness. Abuse isn’t a nuisance, a triviality, a minor annoyance that “those people” have to put up with for the great privilege of having our world-changing stuff in their grubby hands. It will chill, stop, and kill networks from growing, communities from blossoming, and lives from flourishing.
posted by metaquarry at 5:46 PM PST - 100 comments

Mans' best friend.

How Dogs Forge A Bond With Rio’s Homeless That Is Life-Saving For Both.
posted by adamvasco at 5:29 PM PST - 5 comments

The First Legal Abortion Providers Tell Their Stories

The Cut [NYMag] speaks to seven doctors who practiced on the cusp of Roe. Many are still practicing. [more inside]
posted by melissasaurus at 5:07 PM PST - 9 comments

Real-time Expression Transfer

Researchers at Stanford produce real-time, photo-realistic expression transfer. [Auto plays with sound]
posted by klausman at 4:50 PM PST - 39 comments

When you look in the mirror, who do you see?

Reflections of the past is an award-winning photo series by commercial advertising photographer Tom Hussey. [more inside]
posted by Dashy at 3:12 PM PST - 11 comments

What You Can Learn From Hunter-Gatherers' Sleeping Patterns

Here’s the story that people like to tell about the way we sleep: Back in the day, we got more of it. Our eyes would shut when it got dark. We’d wake up for a few hours during the night instead of snoozing for a single long block. And we’d nap during the day. Then—minor key!—modernity ruined everything. Our busy working lives put an end to afternoon naps, while lightbulbs, TV screens, and smartphones shortened our natural slumber and made it more continuous. All of this is wrong, according to Jerome Siegel at the University of California, Los Angeles. Much like the Paleo diet, it’s based on unsubstantiated assumptions about how humans used to live.
posted by sciatrix at 3:10 PM PST - 43 comments

You can't count on the web, okay?

The web, as it appears at any one moment, is a phantasmagoria. It’s not a place in any reliable sense of the word. It is not a repository. [more inside]
posted by pjern at 2:39 PM PST - 33 comments

Six Degrees of a Different Bacon

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon. Collaboratively mapping connections in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. (Via)
posted by immlass at 1:32 PM PST - 9 comments

“I do not consider literary forms to exist in a hierarchy,”

History v Historical Fiction by Jane Smiley [The Guardian] Historical fiction is not a secondary form – I was condescended to by a conservative historian who cannot see that he too constructs stories.
“The condescender was Niall Ferguson, a conservative historian about 15 years younger than me, who wanted to be sure that I understood that the historical novel is all made up, but that historical non-fiction, written by historians is truth. He referred to his research. I referred to my research. He wasn’t convinced. I suggested that the demands of history and fiction are slightly different – that since a novel is a story, it must be complete, and since a history must be accepted by the reader as accurate, it must be incomplete.”
posted by Fizz at 1:30 PM PST - 43 comments

In Search of 'Desiderata'

"Desiderata" is a 1927 poem by Max Ehrmann. It's been subjected to misattribution and mutation (the second Google result is a typo-ridden version that's lurked on a .edu site since 1996 and substitutes "Neither be critical about love" for "Neither be cynical about love" and "Be careful" for "Be cheerful". Even Snopes prints a version with "careful" rather than "cheerful.) Daniel Nester digs into the history of the poem in a piece published on the website of the Poetry Foundation.
posted by larrybob at 11:08 AM PST - 64 comments

Cult of the cosmic

How space travel became the unofficial religion of the USSR [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:24 AM PST - 17 comments

Come, let us have some tea and continue to talk about happy things.

The Non-Judgmental Guide to Getting Seriously Into Tea (slSeriousEats) [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 10:15 AM PST - 93 comments

It seemed nearly impossible for a movie to fail by Fandango's standards.

Be Suspicious Of Online Movie Ratings, Especially Fandango's — FiveThirtyEight.com notices a consistent pattern in Fandango movie ratings, and warns against the perils of relying on ratings provided by companies trying to sell you the product being rated. [more inside]
posted by tonycpsu at 9:29 AM PST - 184 comments

Norvig Does Probability

A delightful exposition on probability and related paradoxes. [more inside]
posted by andrewcooke at 8:43 AM PST - 27 comments

"You’re so sweet, Bonney. You’re too sweet."

Nathan Fielder, host of Nathan for You, talks to AV Club writer John Teti's mother, who expressed a strong dislike for Fielder on a podcast last year. [more inside]
posted by coreywilliam at 8:10 AM PST - 8 comments

💻💬

There are at least three emoji-based programming languages: 🍀 (aka 4Lang; bubblesort example), Emojinal, and HeartForth (stack-based, for extra obscurity; factorial example). [more inside]
posted by jedicus at 8:05 AM PST - 29 comments

Put it on the board....YES!

To put an exclamation point on the Chicago Cubs winning their first postseason series at Wrigley Field in the 100 year history of Wrigley Field, rookie Kyle Schwarber hit a dramatic 400+ foot shot over the new video scoreboard in right field... [more inside]
posted by eriko at 7:18 AM PST - 171 comments

"Paint her greener!"

The green Orion slave girl. Star Trek's almost-forgotten 1965 original pilot contained a sequence that would later become iconic: the dancing, seductive green Orion slave girl. Getting her to stay green, though, was a different matter entirely. [more inside]
posted by zooropa at 6:25 AM PST - 28 comments

Sex Blah-sitivism

We tell women to have sex with as many partners as they desire while neglecting to tell men to study up on female anatomy. But who wants sex if it’s not good? A woman’s right to say ‘meh’
posted by almostmanda at 6:20 AM PST - 192 comments

The Drone Papers, from the Intercept

The Drone Papers-The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The documents, provided by a whistleblower, offer an unprecedented glimpse into Obama’s drone wars. [more inside]
posted by nevercalm at 6:17 AM PST - 57 comments

ONE BASEBALL PLAYER SLAPPED ANOTHER BASEBALL PLAYER ON THE BUTT

At the beginning of October, the Toronto Blue Jays at long last clinched the AL East division, ending a record 22-year drought [prev.]. Meanwhile, after a disastrous, injury-plagued 2014 season, the Texas Rangers rebounded from a late-summer nadir to improbably win the AL West title. The two teams collided in a best-of-five series -- Texas won two, then Toronto. It all came down to Wednesday night's showdown. Tied 2-2 after six, the 7th inning proceeded to unravel over the next 53 minutes in increasingly bizarre and dramatic fashion. To wit: A freak accident. A controversial call. Roars and brickbats from the crowd. The mayor tweets for calm. A comedy of errors. A violent slide. An epic home run, and an even more epic bat flip. Benches clear. Players ejected. Fans arrested. And the slap-ass heard 'round the world. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 6:15 AM PST - 109 comments

"I'm sorry, Mikhail, if I could? Didn't mean to cut you off there."

...or, how a woman would have to ask Gorbachev to tear down this wall.
posted by nightrecordings at 4:06 AM PST - 38 comments

At least there's Big Boo

Why Don't Queer Butch Women Exist in Games? Meanwhile, Julie Compton wonders Why Hollywood Can't Get with Butch Women. And Jack Halberstam asks, Is the Butch Back?
posted by thetortoise at 1:07 AM PST - 40 comments

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