August 9, 2015
Why would a tiny dose of estrogen derivative cause infertility, anyway?
Catholic Bishops In Kenya Call For A Boycott Of Polio Vaccines Fearing a UN plot to sterilize the populace with vaccines containing estrogen derivatives, Bishop Philip Anyolo and others have been encouraging others not to immunize their children. [more inside]
"The men in this town have a serious case of pussy affluenza"
"I call it the Dating Apocalypse,” says a woman in New York, aged 29. “Guys view everything as a competition,” [Alex] elaborates with his deep, reassuring voice. “Who’s slept with the best, hottest girls?” With these dating apps, he says, “you’re always sort of prowling. You could talk to two or three girls at a bar and pick the best one, or you can swipe a couple hundred people a day—the sample size is so much larger. It’s setting up two or three Tinder dates a week and, chances are, sleeping with all of them, so you could rack up 100 girls you’ve slept with in a year.”
White God
How did they get those dogs to do that? "Hundreds of dogs rise up against their oppressors in this visually stunning, one-metaphor-fits-all Hungarian drama... a film featuring 274 dogs, no CGI, and a pair of canine protagonists who consistently out-emote their human co-stars."
ArchiveReady: website archivability evaluation tool
ArchiveReady is a free (for personal use) online tool which evaluates if a website will be archived correctly by web archives, such as the Internet Archive. [more inside]
"You're so sadly neglected And often ignored A poor second to Belgium"
"Welcome to the nerve-wracking reality of being Finland. To a casual visitor, it seems like yet another Western European country, a placid paradise with its abundance of bicycles, its obsession with its own mid-twentieth-century design, and stores that close punctually at six in the evening. The Finns feel otherwise. When they go to neighboring Sweden, they say they are “going to Europe.” As it happens, neither country is a member of NATO, but only Finland has a long land border with Russia—and a living memory of having been invaded by the Soviet Union." [more inside]
CLEVER URL IS CLEVER
In their defense, standards were lower back then
What do the poor need? Try asking them.
To improve poor neighborhoods, the people who live there must have a hand in deciding their own fate. That approach works well in Houston, where one program has enabled hundreds of thousands of poor residents, many of them immigrants, to move up the ladder of economic and educational opportunity each year. It’s a strategy that can — and should — be implemented nationwide. [more inside]
Lips Like Sugar: The dangerous diet of the checkout aisle
One of the biggest offenders in promoting unhealthy eating, facilitating diet-related disease, and exploiting decision fatigue in Americans is hidden in plain sight: the checkout aisle. And it's all according to plan. The Center for Science in the Public Interest's recent report, Temptation at Checkout: The Food Industry's Sneaky Strategy for Selling More (executive summary) takes a critical look at how the retail environment maximizes sales of snacks and candy at the cash register. [more inside]
"It feels good to know there are other people like me in the world."
A: What was it like when you finally got to talk to Laverne? M: It was real exciting; I was the first one to get a hug from her. I was the only one because she wasn’t going to hug people because she didn’t want to get sick, but I was like, ‘Laverne, I love you!’ and she was just like, ‘How could I say no, you’re so cute!’ And then she hugged me! And it was really, really super really great!...I can relate to her because she’s transgender and I like to relate to people who are like me. It feels good to know there are other people like me in the world. An interview with M. and Marlo [previously] on Amy Poehler's Smartgirls blog. Marlo's gendermom blog post and podcast on the day her 7-year-old trans daughter met Orange is the New Black's Laverne Cox.
“If that’s your definition of a romantic hero… I have no words for you."
For Such a Time, the first work by author Kate Breslin was an obscure romance novel..until it was nominated for two RITA awards by the Romance Writers of America. The ensuing publicity storm has exposed serious rifts in the industry group, and has started a major discussion about problematic themes in romance fiction. This is because the story, a retelling of the Story of Esther, set durng the Holocaust, is part of a subgere of romances set in concentration camps. In brief, a young woman is saved by a concentration camp commandant, and uses her relationship with him to try to save some people, while drawing faith from the New Testament. The controversy centers of over the sympathetic portrayal of the Nazi commandant, and the conversion of the heroine to Christianity. [more inside]
Their mission is far from over.
Check Your Location Before Your Assignation
Ferguson Remembers
One year later:
- A year after Michael Brown’s fatal shooting, unarmed black men are seven times more likely than whites to die by police gunfire
- Ferguson and beyond: how a new civil rights movement began – and won't end.
- In Ferguson, Anniversary of Killing Begins Mostly Quietly
- 11 Striking Photos That Show A Forever-Changed Ferguson.
- A Year After Ferguson: Obama Tells NPR He Feels 'Great Urgency'.
- 'Things will never be the same': the oral history of a new civil rights movement.
A Clock That Tics Once A Year
"Erik, photojournalist, and I have come here to try and get the measure of this place. Nevada is the uncanny locus of disparate monuments all concerned with charting deep time, leaving messages for future generations of human beings to puzzle over the meaning of: a star map, a nuclear waste repository and a clock able to keep time for 10,000 years—all of them within a few hours drive of Las Vegas through the harsh desert." -- Built For Eternity, Elmo Keep on structures designed to potentially outlast human civilization. (Motherboard)
Remembering Bobbi Campbell
Thirty two years ago this weekend, Bobbi Campbell and his partner, Bobby Hilliard appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine, most notable because the two men, embracing, were living with AIDS. [more inside]
A Ridiculous Logical Language
Fractran (previously) is a Turing Complete language invented by John Conway (yes that John Conway) that uses only a simple list of fractions to form each program. Astonishingly it takes only a list of 14 fractions to form a program to generate all the primes. Here's the man himself explaining how it all works. [more inside]
Sunday Funnies from Moose Kid and Friends
"Moose Kid Comics is a glorious 36-page, free to read, digital children’s comic. It features over 40 of the best comic artists working today. No-one involved makes any profit, all artists have given their time for free.
We created Moose Kids Comics for three main reasons: 1. To entertain comic readers and win new audiences. 2. To show how fantastic a children’s comic can be when artists create it themselves. 3. To open up the discussion about how we can make children’s comics great again."
[for children of all ages... if you enjoy the 'non-children's' comics of any of these artists, you'll likely enjoy these] [more inside]
We created Moose Kids Comics for three main reasons: 1. To entertain comic readers and win new audiences. 2. To show how fantastic a children’s comic can be when artists create it themselves. 3. To open up the discussion about how we can make children’s comics great again."
[for children of all ages... if you enjoy the 'non-children's' comics of any of these artists, you'll likely enjoy these] [more inside]
“Turtles are allowed, but no photography.”
What do an alpaca, a turtle, a snake, a pig, and a turkey have in common? They're all animals that New Yorker writer Patricia Marx passed off as emotional support animals, with varying results.
The network is the music
Here's how to create and train your very own neural networks to compose classical music! Technical background, cool illustrations and music samples included.
No family is safe when I sashay
Perfume Genius is Seattle-based solo artist Mike Hadreas. In 2014 Slate magazine named his song Queen the gay anthem of the year. Per Hadreas, it addresses gay panic and the power that he feels over how people react to him in public. It is also achingly beautiful. Speaking on gay rights Hadreas has stated "I'm glad things are getting better, but I'm going to push and be pissed off until they're perfect. That will probably never happen, but I feel some weird duty nonetheless. Even though I can get married in Seattle, I could go to another country and get the death penalty just for being myself—I'm not making music just for fiancés in Seattle."
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