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The Guardian examines the Furry Fandom
The Guardian: It's not about sex, it's about identity: why furries are unique among fan cultures: Furries tend to get a bad rap as perverse fetishists when in reality, the subculture is about playful escapism and a fascination with what links humans to animals
The precogs were right
St. Louis turns to predictive policing software: "At a time when communities are crying out for justice," Crockford told me, "I never heard anyone in one of these communities say, ‘I think police need to use more computers!’"
Happy Porcupine Day!
On February 3rd, 2016, after more than 14 years, the Free State Project -- an ambitious plan to move 20,000 freedom-loving, law-hating people into New Hampshire to upend its political system and bring about a libertarian utopia -- has reached its 20K threshold of pledges to move, thereby "triggering the move" for the 90-plus percent of FSPers who declared their intention to relocate but haven't yet.
An anti-Valentine's Day Valentine's Day
After months of trying to make a relationship work (and scouring previous AskMes for situations similar to mine), I have started that all-important no contact phase. But what to do on Valentine’s Day? Truth be told, this holiday has always been a disappointment but I feel that given my current situation, the usual feeling of dread I’ve associated with it will escalate to a full-blown breakdown. It’s hard enough to prevent myself from weeping at the barrage of flowers and displays of affection and celebrations I have to witness/participate in as friends and colleagues get married or engaged one after the other. I do not begrudge anybody’s happiness, but seeing other people happily in love feels just a tad self-torturous at this time. I know that I canNOT stay at home on February 14 as that could only mean a day of self-pity and wallowing in my sadness. However, I also do not fancy finding myself in restaurants, the theater, museums, etc. surrounded by couples celebrating the day. Again, I normally take delight in seeing people in love but I’d like to take a wee break from all that. So what could I do in or around NYC in lieu of both scenarios?
The science of Resting Bitch Face
“We wanted this to be fun and kind of tongue-in-cheek, but also to have legitimate scientific data backing it up,
"Why are some faces seen as truly expressionless, but others are inexplicably off-putting? What, exactly, makes us register a seemingly neutral expression as RBF?" (Washington Post link.)
Are you a female between the ages of 18 and 26?
Army and Marine Corps chiefs: It’s time for women to register for the draft
The top officers in the Army and Marine Corps testified on Tuesday that they believe it is time for women to register for future military drafts, following the Pentagon’s recent decision to open all jobs in combat units to female service members.
"I never met Bill Cosby. But I knew Cliff Huxtable."
Trying to Separate Bill Cosby From Cliff Huxtable by Rachel L. Swarns [The New York Times]
"It was hard then to know where Dr. Huxtable ended and Mr. Cosby began. Mr. Cosby inhabited the role so completely that for a long time I thought character and creator were pretty much one and the same, at least until the allegations of rape began surfacing with increasing frequency. Then I went from feeling certain that Mr. Cosby was just like Dr. Huxtable, to wondering whether Mr. Cosby was like Dr. Huxtable, to desperately hoping that Mr. Cosby was the devoted family man I once thought he had been."
Too poor to retire, too young to die
America's retirement crisis: 29% of people 55 or older lack savings or pensions, says the Government Accountability Office (GAO). 1 in 4 people aged 65 or older is still working, many because they have no choice but to keep working as Social Security cannot cover their living costs. These working seniors find themselves too poor to retire, too young to die.
This list is great if you like to laugh and want 100 of something
In chronological order from Bert Williams to Amy Schumer, Vulture lists the 100 jokes that shaped modern comedy.
Your P-value is in another castle
Guess the Correlation:
The aim of the game is simple. Try to guess how correlated the two variables in a scatter plot are. The closer your guess is to the true correlation, the better.
What pen (not fountain!) do you like to draw with?
I'm in the market for an every day drawing pen. Details inside.
Guardian restricts commentary on contentious topics
Going forward, the Guardian will refrain from allowing comments on articles discussing sensitive issues such as "race, immigration, and Islam".
Per Mary Hamilton, executive editor, this move is necessary in order to address "a change in mainstream public opinion and language that we do not wish to see reflected or supported on the site".
Dawn of a new era
For the first time, the UCI has discovered a motor in a cyclist's bike. Femke Van den Driessche dropped out of the under 23 Women's World Cyclo-Cross Championship race with apparent mechanical problems, the bike was taken away for investigations. The Clinic started speculating right away about a previous performance at Koppenberg Cross. I believe this is a video of that event.
Oregon Under Attack: And then there were four
The FBI negotiated further with four armed occupants at a remote federal wildlife refuge in Oregon on Saturday while the holdouts in a video posted online expressed their mistrust of the government and reluctance to leave.
(Mega) Previous.
The "Guilty Mind" principle eliminates a lot of "crimes"
Everyone commits crimes.
There are so many laws out there making what's relatively banal behavior criminal if looked at in that light. Apparently a longstanding legal principle tho has been the idea of a "guilty mind," which has gotten somewhat lost recently.
The idea is that if you can't write a law where it's possible for a person to commit a crime without meaning to commit a crime. More in the link.
I may be bad, but I'm perfectly good at it.
What are your favorite songs with explicit references to kink, BDSM, or power exchange dynamics?
Radishes, Celery, and Finger Bowls upon request!
The unusual foods Americans loved a century ago.
A massive collection of historical menus at the New York Public Library has been digitised for your perusal.
Eureka! I've invented the road trip!
From 1914 to 1924, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, and nature writer John Burroughs took off every summer to "rough it" (shaving was forbidden), camp on the roadside, and visit the country's most beautiful places by automobile, creating a media sensation and kicking off the tradition of the Great American Road Trip.
Emergency/EoL Digital Asset Planning
I'm trying to manage my emergency/end-of-life planning in an intelligent, secure and, hopefully, convenient way. What are the best tools and practices for digital asset planning?
The X-Files: My Struggle
This 2016 pilot reintroduces "The X-Files" and reunites Agent Mulder with Dana Scully after the collapse of their relationship when Mulder is engaged by a TV host. Mulder proclaims new evidence that alien abductions have been faked.
someone needs a semiotic square
How to Be an Anticapitalist Today
, Erik Olin Wright at Jacobin: Tame, Smash, Escape, Erode.
Any energizer bunnies out there?
Did you used to be a low-energy person, and then changed something and you're now a high-energy person? What did you change to get more energy?
My Fitness Frenemy
I have started and quit My Fitness Pal so many times, but this time I am determined to make it work for me. Please help me use it without so much aggravation! Questions inside...
. . . . . . ...:..:.:.::.:::.::::.:::.::.:.:..:... . .
Planning a romantic evening, a night of meteor watching or taking pictures of the milky way or auroras? Want to know the closest, darkest place to observe the night sky? Consult the Light Pollution Atlas for the darkest viewing areas near you. Yes, even those of us residing outside the borders of the USA.
Chill Communication
Netflix and Thrill - does the streaming TV company face a rocky future, or are its traditional competitors, desperatly trying to pin down its ratings, just suffering from jealously?
"It's not a single process, it's 1,095 days of little decisions."
What It's Really Like to Transition, via Cosmopolitan
“Your house is a crime scene and you two are persons of interest"
Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?
Lost mobile phones are reporting that they're at a suburban Atlanta address, but they're not there. "The missing phones don’t seem to have anything in common. Some are iPhones. Some are Androids. They’re on different carriers: AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, Boost Mobile."
The Grief Police
The rise of grief policing. The notion that there is but one way to grieve, and that deviation from that way is wrong.
Grief policing was on display recently, during the aftermath of David Bowie’s death. Camilla Long, the film critic for The Sunday Times, witnessed the outpouring of emotion posted online as people learned, and tried to make sense, of Bowie’s passing. She did not like the way they mourned. Their grieving, she suggested—or, well, “grieving”—was self-indulgent, and, like so much else on social media, purely performative. “Bowie Blubberers,” she called the grievers.
Adults just know these things, I guess
What kinds of not-regular-but-important things for lifestyle maintenance should I, as a theoretically-responsible adult, be tracking? I'm talking about things like changing filters on air conditioners, getting dental checkups, cleaning gutters, and so forth. In theory I am an actual grown-up, but I keep getting blindsided by things I should have known about doing but utterly failed to do.
Flint Water Crisis Runs Deeper and Wider
Last month, Flint, Michigan, declared a state of emergency as a result of serious contamination of the municipal water supply. Since then, the issue has expanded from a municipal problem to a scandal reaching the Governor's office and the White House. The situation in Flint took up much of the annual State of the State address this week.
The Columbus Zoo should have asked The Green for naming advice.
The Columbus Zoo and Aquarium has a polar bear cub (previously.) Now she's three months old and you can vote on her name (or just squee at the pictures.) Be an informed voter with these bonus videos of the cub: 1, 2, 3.
Whiteness History Month
Portland Community College to launch a "Whiteness History Month."
(April to be specific) The American Conservative disapproves: "... plainly designed to convince white students to despise themselves and their culture." The Washington Post hits the ground running with a listicle: Whiteness History Month is a great idea. Here are 7 ways to observe it.
"Everyone puts them inside their ears, but no one should."
"Plenty of consumer products are widely used in ways other than their core function — books for leveling tables, newspapers for keeping fires aflame, seltzer for removing stains, coffee tables for resting legs — but these cotton swabs are distinct. Q-tips are one of the only, if not the only, major consumer products whose main purpose is precisely the one the manufacturer explicitly warns against." Roberto A. Ferdman of the Washington Post takes a detailed look at what he calls "one of the most perplexing things for sale in America," including a look at the bureaucratic tangle which makes it difficult to quantify annual Q-tip related injuries. (previously)
Sports person did a sports thing!
“the eleven most boring conversations i can’t stop overhearing”
(in which a liberal white male american san francisco bay area resident possessive of the auditory acuity of a baby chihuahua learns to scream).
This Professor Fell In Love With His Grad Student, Then Fired Her For It
Christian Ott, a young astrophysics professor at the California Institute of Technology, fell in love with one of his graduate students and then fired her because of his feelings, according to a recent university investigation. Twenty-one months of intimate online chats, obtained by BuzzFeed News, confirm that he confessed his actions to another female graduate student.
A Story of a Fuck Off Fund
If any man ever hit you, if anyone ever sexually harassed you, you’d tell him to fuck right off. You want to be, no, you will be the kind of woman who can tell anyone to fuck off if a fuck off is deserved, so naturally you start a Fuck Off Fund.
Hi, I'm a digital junkie, and I suffer from infomania
Infomania, defined by the Oxford dictionary as “the compulsive desire to check or accumulate news and information, typically via mobile phone or computer.”
"I was recently described, to my face, as a 'modern digital junkie.' This diagnosis was given to me, half in jest, by Dr. Dimitrios Tsivrikos, consumer psychologist at University College London, when I described my symptoms to him. After spending my workday tapping, swiping and emailing, I come home and — despite my exhaustion and twitching eyes — I want to consume more online. But I’m not even absorbing the articles, tweets and posts that I peruse. I’m just skipping from page to page, jumping from link to link."
Academic Hiring Is Broken
At Brandeis University, students are petitioning the school to take well regarded adjunct sociology professor Jillian Powers on as a tenure-track professor, after learning how tenuous her status is. A Slate article on the matter discusses why the student petition will most likely fail, and the incredibly broken system used to hire new tenure-track professors without any real consideration for their ability to teach.
What do you mean I already watched every NOVA show on Netflix?
I want to watch more nature and documentary shows, and the well at Netflix is running dry. Trying to figure out what combination of hardware/subscriptions to get that will give me the biggest number of good shows.
We are still living in Moynihan’s moment.
Coates sees the mass incarceration of African Americans as the “national action” that America chose to undertake to address the problems Moynihan described. Moynihan’s framing of poverty as a problem of black families—of black people—has enabled political leaders for half a century to look away from restitution and towards punishment as a way to address social problems. We are still living in Moynihan’s moment.The Moynihan Report Resurrected, by Sam Klug