OK so consider this a tentative link. There are a lot of great statistics in this article about how women view themselves vs. how men view them, and a lot more too. Unfortunately it is also full of a lot of bonkers evolutionary biology stuff some of which really doesn’t sit right with me. I recommend trying to make it through the whole article, switching to “skim” briefly if you can’t hold your nose any longer.
A daily miasma of frivolity by two wanna-be cultural critics. Or: just, like, some good links, dude.
Author Archives: Mark Twain, probably
Lately I’ve been getting into Houston rap, specifically DJ Screw. Screw is the originator of the “Chopped & Screwed” style characterized by slowed vocals with chopped up beats. Here’s a 35 minute (!) freestyle from DJ Screw’s crew, the Screwed Up Click. The beat is a remix of Kris Kross’s Da Streets Aint Right in Screw’s signature style.
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
Wikipedia: Chiune Sugihara
Chiune Sugihara was an awesome guy who was a Japanese diplomat to Lithuania during World War II.
Sympathetic to Jews who were trying to leave Lithuania after it was occupied by the Soviet Union, he took it upon himself to write thousand of exit visas for refugees, despite having orders from the Japanese Foreign Ministry to the contrary.
Sugihara continued to hand write visas, reportedly spending 18–20 hours a day on them, producing a normal month’s worth of visas each day, until 4 September, when he had to leave his post before the consulate was closed. By that time he had granted thousands of visas to Jews, many of whom were heads of households and thus permitted to take their families with them. On the night before their scheduled departure, Sugihara and his wife stayed awake writing out visa approvals. According to witnesses, he was still writing visas while in transit from his hotel and after boarding the train at the Kaunas Railway Station, throwing visas into the crowd of desperate refugees out of the train’s window even as the train pulled out.
In final desperation, blank sheets of paper with only the consulate seal and his signature (that could be later written over into a visa) were hurriedly prepared and flung out from the train.
What a badass.
Laser strikes against airplanes now an “epidemic,” says FBI
Laser strikes against airplanes now an “epidemic,” says FBI
Nate Anderson, Ars Technica:
You may not be the kind of person who gets his kicks by standing at the end of a runway and firing a small laser into the cockpit of jets during their takeoffs and landings—but plenty of other people are. In 2005, the FBI only heard about 283 such incidents; this year, it expects to record 3,700.
In an official blog post about the topic, the FBI quotes federal air marshal George Johnson saying that the laser attacks have reached an “epidemic level.” Things have gotten so bad that the FBI has created a special group to address the issue, one with the unwieldy name “Laser Strike Working Group National Initiative” (which could use a laser strike of its own).
Some things about this story:
- 3,700 in one year. Wow. I knew about this awful thing before, but that is beyond awful. Who does this?
- LASER STRIKE WORKING GROUP NATIONAL INITIATIVE
- The story also includes a video released by the FBI of a guy shining a green laser at a helicopter. The helicopter crew proceeds to track the guy and give directions to police, who arrest him. It’s pretty great.
It seems that I have never posted anything by Massimo Carnevale here before. This is unfortunate.
To remedy this unfortunateness, I will now post a piece he did for the game Skullmonkeys. He usually takes inspiration from films, but this is fine too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntQ7qGilqZE
I have discovered the purpose of the International Space Station. It exists so that we can do silly things in zero gravity, as shown in this NASA video.
Surface tension is awesome.
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
How Companies Learn Your Secrets
How Companies Learn Your Secrets
I missed this New York Times piece by Charles Duhigg back in February about Target’s tracking of customers. Which was probably for the best, because reading it caused my head to spin around with rage so fast that it created a tornado and destroyed my house.
It starts with the following:
Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that?”
Which is one of the slimiest things I’ve read all year.
It was outslimed later:
“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.
“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”
I basically just hate everything. Literally every single thing. This is the fury I have.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f20vDLw2pp0
Donald F. Glut is a writer, director, etc. of films, comics, TV, etc. He also made a bunch of amateur films in his teens and twenties, including one based on Spider-Man in 1969.
This is how I’m reading newspapers from now on.
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
A band I’ve never heard of before, the Australian jazz fusion group Pyramid, performed at the 1983 Montreux Jazz Festival. This video of them performing “The Odyssey” was introduced to me on IRC in the following way:
< lunar> hey here’s a video that contains moustaches, beards, mullets, aviators and a lot of synth brass
This description is highly accurate.
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
The Myth of Male Decline
Really good op ed in The New York Times by Stephanie Coontz on gender equality and how we’re not there yet:
Scroll through the titles and subtitles of recent books, and you will read that women have become “The Richer Sex,” that “The Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys,” and that we may even be seeing “The End of Men.” Several of the authors of these books posit that we are on the verge of a “new majority of female breadwinners,” where middle-class wives lord over their husbands while demoralized single men take refuge in perpetual adolescence.
How is it, then, that men still control the most important industries, especially technology, occupy most of the positions on the lists of the richest Americans, and continue to make more money than women who have similar skills and education? And why do women make up only 17 percent of Congress?
This reactive response to progressing gender equality in this country as having exalted women over men is pretty much hogwash, and Coontz has loads of numbers to back that up:
… the median wages of female managers are just 73 percent of what male managers earn.
… the percentage of female electrical engineers doubled in each decade in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. But in the two decades since 1990 it has increased by only a single percentage point, leaving women at just 10 percent of the total.
… a 2010 Catalyst survey found that female M.B.A.’s were paid an average of $4,600 less than men in starting salaries and continue to be outpaced by men in rank and salary growth throughout their careers, even if they remain childless.
And there’s a lot more, including a bit on the “masculine mystique” and how gender expectations harm men as well as women. Feminism is for everyone.
A must-read.