November 22, 2016
Race in China
Who is Chinese? The Upper Han. "China today is extraordinarily homogenous....Unless someone is the child of a Chinese national, no matter how long they live there, how much money they make or tax they pay, it is virtually impossible to become a citizen. Someone who marries a Chinese person can theoretically gain citizenship; in practice few do. As a result, the most populous nation on Earth has only 1,448 naturalised Chinese in total, according to the 2010 census. Even Japan, better known for hostility to immigration, naturalises around 10,000 new citizens each year; in America the figure is some 700,000."
Revenge of the tabloids
Rocked by the phone-hacking scandal and haemorrhaging readers, the rightwing tabloids seemed to be yesterday’s news. But now, in Theresa May’s Brexit Britain, they look more powerful than ever, Andy Beckett, The Guardian
I don't know if Steve Axford is a fun guy but his fungi photos are fun!
Steve Axford photographs fungi. Fungi that is blue, orange, yellow, and purple. Fungi with gills and without. And not just fungi, but also other living things around the world.
"I gave my eye to the coyote in the flour sack"
‘The Door Noises Made Us Deaf’: An Oral History Of ‘Star Trek’ The Onion sister site Clickhole is back with another oral history—this time of Star Trek.
In case you missed the earlier editions:
First Try!
You Make It, We Skate It! Does what it says on the big cardboard box: The Braille Skateboarding crew opens a package at the beginning of each video, they put together a skateboard with the components inside, and then they skate it. The first one was a deck made from billet aluminum. They built another board with machined wheels | A Lego deck | Ultimate carpet board | Baseball wheels | Bouncy ball board | Bearings for wheels | 3D-printed trucks | Glass deck! (Plexiglass deck!) | Crocheted grip tape | Aaron Kyro lifelike deck | Magnetic wheels | Skateboard stilts | Tree stump deck | Barrel board | Memory foam deck | Scooter deck | Supermini deck | Hockey puck wheels | (partial) Best of... it just keeps going! The ingenuity is extensive and the skill impressive. Keep an eye out for games of SKATE (or SK8 depending on time limitations).
The scariest things in the grocery store.
This guy tastes the things you will still be able to find in the store three years after the start of the zombie apocalypse. A whole chicken in a can. Breakfast in a can. Potted meat, (the worst sounding list of ingredients.) And canned ground beef.
"Diversity is beautiful" (Potentially NSFW)
The Vulva Gallery is a series of illustrations by Hilde Atalanta of all kinds of vulvas - celebrating the vulva in all its diversity all over the world. Also on Instagram.
Photos of a lesser-known ecosystem
The Secret World of Bog - a photo essay about the beautiful boglands of British Columbia's outer coast.
a uniform chorus of desperation
"In 2015 alone, Women on Web*, the Dutch not-for-profit, received more than 600 emails from US women looking for a way to end their own pregnancies. (The group does not send abortion drugs to the US, because the US does not outright ban abortion.) Women on Web agreed to share scores of these emails with the Guardian, providing an unprecedented window into the lives of women who feel they have no other option but to end their pregnancies themselves." [more inside]
Prose and then code
"Eve is a programming language and IDE based on years of research into building a human-first programming platform. From code embedded in documents to a language without order, it presents an alternative take on what programming could be". Repository.
Glasses, Kilts, and the Basketballers Who Wear Them
The mid-2000s saw the NBA reeling in the aftermath of the Malice at the Palace. Feeling alienated by the rise of expressions of hip-hop culture among NBA players, corporate sponsors were threatening to leave the league in droves. In order to bridge the growing gap between the league and its financial base, David Stern and the NBA’s white leadership commenced an all-out assault on the symbols of blackness sported by the hip-hop generation, with a dress code as its chief weapon.[more inside]
Settle in: its going to be a long winter
The hygge conspiracy: If this is the year in which globalisation has been found wanting by millions, hygge appeals to an earlier age, an imagined past, where one could take back control or make a country great again. [SL GuardianLongRead]
Club of Rogue
Roguelike Celebration 2016 schedule and links to all talks. I missed this, but there was a Roguelike con of sorts back in September in San Francisco. There are a bunch of interesting talks about everything Roguelike. E.g. Procedural generation, Markov Chain text generators etc.
Even somewhat recluse developers Bay 12 of Dwarf Fortress fame gave a talk about the inspirations for their hilarious patch note simulator.
The recordings can be found on Youtube and Internet Archive
« Previous day | Next day »