November 9, 2015
A place where our language lives
A short film: The winter stories of the Ojibwe are vital narratives that offer a historical and moral guide for understanding the environment and our people’s place within it. One of these stories tells of the first maple sugar gathering. A tree offered its life-force (sap) for use by the people to help keep them alive through a difficult winter when many were starving to death. This tree asked to be cared for in return and to be thanked properly for this gift. Each spring the students at Waadookodaading Ojibwe Language Immersion School open the school sugar bush with a retelling of this story and an opening feast of thanks.
I bean, Ubeam, we all beam...
UBeam claims to be able to do wireless charging via ultrasound. "UBeam, a high-profile start-up backed by some of Silicon Valley's most prominent investors, has become a tech industry sensation because of the wireless charging technology it says it has developed... But the company, which has never demonstrated a fully-functioning prototype, is now facing an onslaught of questions about whether it can actually deliver the breakthrough it is promising." EEVblog is critical. The demo.
On being a starving art critic
"So, we all need to remember that except for like 1% of 1% of 1% of everyone in the art world, almost no one in the art world makes money." Jerry Saltz turn his pockets inside out out to reveal that, despite being one of the best known art critics working, he lives paycheck to paycheck. The original facebook post is here. [more inside]
I guess it’s sunglasses all the time now
Facial recognition software is increasingly being deployed in the retail sector. Stores say this helps them achieve 2 main goals: identify shoplifters, and target high-spending customers. [more inside]
A Handout Is The Best Hand Up
A generation of evidence affirms cash transfers as among the most powerful means of eliminating extreme poverty in the world. Transfers of money, along with transfers of food vouchers, have seen Brazilian inequality plummet alongside the numbers of the very poor.
Grave Metallum
The infrequently updated blog Heavy Latin chronicles and translates the uses, and misuses, of Latin by metal bands.
…something that was encouraged by Satan.
Dr. Leo Spaceman (from the 30 Rock series) and Dr. Ben Carson (from the Republican presidential debate series) are both doctors. They both say outlandish things. A group of MeFites have placed Dr. Spaceman's quotes on Dr. Carson's pictures and vice versa. No verisimilitude has been lost in these exchanges. [via mefi projects]
Not paying your writers SUCKS.
The Rumpus is not of the same world as The Huffington Post, and therein lies the problem with this conversation: somewhere along the line, in an important and valuable attempt to be pay writers better, the issue of what any given publication could legitimately afford was thrown out the window. Paying writers = the right side of history, period. If you don’t have the financial backing of venture capital or a man with a lot of money, you shouldn’t even exist. Your continued dedication to existence is in fact offensive to the very writers you claim to nurture. [...] I’m sensitive to this issue as a website that was unable to pay most of its writers from our inception in 2009 until late 2013. We didn’t have the money to pay them, that’s just a fact. The money did not exist, we could not summon it from the sky; we’re lesbians, we inherently lack rich husbands. Maybe that means we should’ve given up, I’m not sure, but that makes me really frightened for the future of independent journalism by and for populations even more disenfranchised than our own. How can we advocate for both disenfranchised writers and disenfranchised publishers? Because the thing is… Not paying your writers SUCKS.- Autostraddle: The “Who Pays Writers” Conversation Needs a Little Nuance
A Near-sighted Scrap Pile
R2-D2, beloved blue and white astromech droid or perhaps, the biggest scumbag in Star Wars? via Geek.com.
"No, he loves treading water."
This talking horse is a brutally honest and accurate portrayal of all of us, and the struggles and suffering we face in life. The Zen of Bojack Horseman
Earlier Life
Seven fossilized brains from the Cambrian. A complex animal skeleton from the pre-Cambrian. Oxygen made by photosynthesis a billion years before the Great Oxygenation Event. Carbon made by life from 4.1 billion years ago. (Okay, maybe not so fast on that last one.)
Somewhere in America
Three young women, part of a literacy project called Get Lit, drop a powerful message on Queen Latifah's talk show. (TW: mentions of sexual assault, racism, assault)
Kid Nation
Things That Can and Cannot Be Said
One morning as I scanned the news...I thought of Edward Snowden and wondered how he was holding up in Moscow. I began to imagine a conversation between him and Daniel Ellsberg... And then, interestingly, in my imagination a third person made her way into the room—the writer Arundhati Roy. It occurred to me that trying to get the three of them together would be a fine thing to do.John Cusack (yes, that John Cusack) asks Arundhati Roy to join him and Daniel Ellsberg on a trip to Moscow to have a conversation with Edward Snowden [more inside]
Hallowed be thy bane
The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism across the World A new study published in Cell shows that "Parents in religious households reported that their children expressed more empathy and sensitivity for justice in everyday life. However, religiousness was inversely predictive of children’s altruism and positively correlated with their punitive tendencies." [more inside]
Dear men: you should totally have close friends post-30 years of age
Three more years have passed in a blur of deadlines and I still don’t know anybody who isn’t connected to my work. If I nip out to buy wine on Saturday evening, I pass pubs full of people who look like they’re having fun. I see groups of men often catching up one-to-one, and I experience pangs for when my weekends were like that. Everybody except me has a fulfilling social life. Or does it only look like that?
The difficulty of forging friendships in your adulthood on MeFi, previously and previouslier.
the resulting rustle of zippers and thuds
That face — it isn't a face, but a mask!
At the recent World Fantasy Awards it was announced that the trophy will no longer be modeled on the head of horror writer HP Lovecraft. [more inside]
Regency Dances
March of the balloon animals
1929-1964, Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (SL Mashable)
Is this a joke? It feels like a joke.
Slate: Meet Our New Dear Prudence Columnist: After a glorious decade, Emily Yoffe is passing the advice-giving pen to Mallory Ortberg.
[more inside]
How First Nations kids built their own internet infrastructure
Three years ago, the people living in the Ochiichagwe'Babigo'Ining Ojibway Nation in Ontario would crowd in each other’s homes and outside the band office to access what little internet the community had. There was dial-up, there was expensive cellular data, and there was some service from an internet provider in a neighboring town; when the network went down, it would sometimes take weeks for a technician to come and fix the issue. The community’s kids—itching to get their gaming systems online and scroll through Facebook on their phones—weren’t having it. [more inside]
Never forget the tree from the first episode
After a successful kickstarter campaign, Muzzled the Musical has released it's promised three episodes (season one): episode 1, episode 2, episode 3.
An epic saga of mean girl princesses and bloody musical warfare, starring Ashly Burch (of HAWP) and created by Matthew Mercer.
"We may be tokens, but we're damn good-looking ones."
Phoebe Robinson, author of the the Blaria blog, writes about the meaning of her blog's name and how Daria Shaped a Generation of Women.
"It’s worth sacrificing... because I’m already not wanted here."
After several high-profile incidents of overt racism at the University of Missouri, the student organization Concerned Student 1950 (named after the first year that African-American students were allowed to enroll at UM) held protests and demanded the resignation of Tim Wolfe, president of the University of Missouri System. Graduate student Jonathan Butler started a hunger strike, and student members of the football team have boycotted all team activities until Wolfe resigns. [more inside]
Living and dying on Airbnb
'It’s only a matter of time until something terrible happens,' The New York Times’s Ron Lieber wrote in a 2012 piece examining Airbnb’s liability issues. My family’s story — a private matter until now — is that terrible something.Writer Zak Stone about a tragic family death and the lack of regulations and liability in the sharing economy at the example of Airbnb.
Cancer Survivors Talk About What It’s Really Like To Have Cancer
In this Buzzfeed video, young cancer survivors talk honestly about their experiences. (SLYT) We all spend our lives wondering what it would be like if the doctor told us we had cancer. How would we react? How would our lives change? In this video young cancer survivors talk with candor and some humor about the day they were diagnosed, and what happened after that. [more inside]
barbecued-tofu sandwiches, spinach salads and chocolate-covered bacon
certain football clubs have become symbols of football hipsterdom and many of them seem to have a lot in common: an almost blanket lack of on-field success, a history of anti-establishmentarianism, the status of plucky underdog, a nice away shirtThe Grauniad's regular football column, Joy of Six, presents hipsters' favourite football clubs.
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