- The British Library Releases A Million Free Images – These were uploaded to Flickr by the Mechanical Curator, which randomly chooses public domain images from books.
- Beatrix Potter: Mycologist – More old images. Before she drew Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter mostly drew fungi. She even submitted a paper to the Linnean Society, which was blocked by the group’s sexist director.
- Tarkovsky Films Free Online – Includes links to Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Solaris, The Mirror, Stalker, Nostalghia, and some student films.
- The TWA terminal at JFK – Designed in 1962, untouched since 2001.
- Everybody – The most memorably disturbing 26.5 meter puppet show you’ll ever see.
- The Ovipositor by Primal Hardware – A silicone sex toy for people who fantasize about aliens laying gelatin eggs in their bodies.
Tag: tabclosing
Reuters/Jim Young
- “Officer Darren Wilson’s Grand Jury Testimony” – The New York Times with relevant excerpts from the released testimony. It is, unsurprisingly, full of dehumanizing imagery right in line with the racist stereotype of the monstrous black man.
And when I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan.
[…]
The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked. He comes back towards me again with his hands up.
[…]
At this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him. - “On Being a Black Male, Six Feet Four Inches Tall, in America in 2014” – W. Kamau Bell on the lengths men in big, black bodies have to go to seem unthreatening. Notable is that, at 6’4″, Bell is the same height as Michael Brown was. And Darren Wilson is.
- “Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the Evidence of Things Unsaid” – The always-crucial Ta-Nehisi Coates on the historical trends evident in the President’s response to the grand jury’s failure to indict. The subtitle of the piece is “Violence works. Nonviolence does to.” Which leads me to…
- “In Defense of Looting” – Willie Osterweil writing for New Inquiry, and making many important points. I don’t know that I agree with all of them, but I agree with a lot. My position on looting was best captured by someone on twitter who, in linking to this same article, said she was “anti-anti-looting.” (And the article itself has a footnote about the clunky yet necessary phrase, “not-non-violent.”) That’s where I am. When systemic protections have failed a community as profoundly as the police have failed the citizens of Ferguson, there should be a severe cost and a varied response. Nelson Mandela was, by his own admission, a saboteur and a terrorist. After the cops get away with killing and demonizing an unarmed child of your community, I understand the desire to set flame to a squad car, or smash a window. I’m not for it, but I get it, and I’m deeply suspicious of the motives of those in power who hand-wring about how terrible looting is while police seem able to kill with impunity.
- “Ferguson Shows How the Police Can Kill and Get Away With It” – Molly Crabapple on just how severe this problem is, and how the people marching in protests “are too clear-eyed to accept courts rigged in favor of murderers. They do not believe that victims must only respond with passive grace.”
- Finally, when something makes me as angry as this does, I try to give money to people I believe might know better than I do how to take action against it. I’ve donated to the NAACP, the ACLU, and Amnesty International, and would encourage others to do the same.
A few (how many?) articles and sites that I want to save.
- “The $9 Billion Witness” – An article about the woman who was willing to whistleblow on J.P. Morgan-Chase’s misconduct during the financial crisis. I just keep reading these articles. I want to remember, always, that these people are crooks, and that they own us. A fun excerpt about former Attorney General Eric Holder:
In September, at a speech at NYU, Holder defended the lack of prosecutions of top executives on the grounds that, in the corporate context, sometimes bad things just happen without actual people being responsible. “Responsibility remains so diffuse, and top executives so insulated,” Holder said, “that any misconduct could again be considered more a symptom of the institution’s culture than a result of the willful actions of any single individual.”
In other words, people don’t commit crimes, corporate culture commits crimes! It’s probably fortunate that Holder is quitting before he has time to apply the same logic to Mafia or terrorism cases.
- “War of the Words” – Long article about the conflict between Amazon and the Hachette group, incorporating more context than those articles usually do.
- “Tabletop Whale” – A Seattle designer’s tumblr, where he posts some very impressive infographics in animated .gif format.
- “Scientists Have Discovered How Common Different Sexual Fantasies Are” – There’s an article, but the interesting bit is the table at the bottom, where all the fantasies in the survey have their responses broken down by percentage.
- “These Are The Movies Recommended By The Church of Satan” – I have a real soft spot for the Church of Satan. Part of that is because, despite the words of reactionary Christians who want to use them as a rhetorical cudgel, it’s members are very open in not believing Satan exists, which tickles me. Another part is that they serve as a weird, fifth column force in support of separation of church and state, as in this recent example, where schools were handing out bibles and not letting atheists hand out books–until the Church of Satan started handing out coloring books. Then, suddenly, it was decided that maybe religious proselytization on school grounds was a bad idea. “Lucien’s Law. It’s like the nuclear option of church/state separation cases. When nothing else works, count on Satanists to settle the matter!” Anyway. I kind of like the Church of Satan, and found this interview in io9 delightful. I didn’t bother to count how many movies are discussed, but it’s some integer.
- Greg Egan’s Foundations – A series of articles by the most rigorous hard science fiction writer who has ever lived on the topics of physics that most inform modern hard science fiction. “These articles are for the interested lay reader. No prior knowledge of mathematics beyond high school algebra and geometry is needed.” Though, as is always the case with Greg Egan, that doesn’t mean the reading will be easy. Egan, always, asks you to think.
- Theorem of the Day – Robin Whitty curating an online museum of mathematical theorems.
- “Molly Crabapple’s 15 Rules for Creative Success in the Internet Age” – Just what it says on the tin. Things like, “Be a mercenary towards people with money. Be generous and giving to good people without it.”
- Finally, a video of Anna-Maria Hefele, demonstrating the many ways she is able to sing two notes at once. I’d heard some examples of polyphonic singing before, but nothing like this.
I’m sort of locked in to using the tabclosing tag for these entries now, but the name has become a pleasant fiction. These days when I want to save something for later reading, I just send it to my Pocket queue. I’ve neglected actually looking at that queue the last couple of months, though, and so my Pocket is stuffed to bursting. Let’s change that a bit. (And pretend we didn’t.)
- A Brief History of Romantic Friendship – Maria Popova writes about an era when homosocial romance was considered innocuous or laudable, and how growing “sophistication” about sex in the 20th century curtailed the practice.
- This Is What Gentrification Really Is – Annalee Newitz offers a nuanced, historical view of gentrification as a form of immigration, and examines how (as with other forms of immigration) opinions of it are largely shaped by narrative.
- ‘Human Props’ stay in luxury homes but live like ghosts – an article that is, more than anything, about companies monetizing the desire to pretend nothing has changed.
- “Why Did You Shoot Me, I Was Reading A Book?” – Article in Salon by Radley Balko from last year about the militarization of America’s police forces. This has been linked a lot since all the horribleness in Ferguson started.
- The San Antonio Spurs hired Stars star Becky Hammon to be the first woman employed full-time as an assistant NBA coach. This is historic, but, in typical Spurs fashion, they never mentioned it. In their press release about the signing, they talked exclusively about Hammon’s qualifications and didn’t refer to her gender once. Which, in a Finkbeiner test sense, is exactly what they should do. Here are a bunch of articles about it: from the New York Times, from Esquire, from Rolling Stone, from Pounding The Rock.
- And finally, “Happy Fun Room,” a science fiction short film by Greg Pak, about a woman who’s gone through a change so severe, she’s blind to things changing again:
My tabs have gotten so extensive that I’ve outsourced the problem and started banishing them to my Pocket queue rather than keep them in the browser. Time to start recording this stuff again. There will be much more of this to come.
- “Zac Efron and Michelle Rodriguez, Romantic Human Couple” – To start off with something amusing, a brief photoessay from Mallory Ortberg at The Toast. Includes rumination on the placement of the human carapace and the line, “I can love you better from up here, alone.”
- “40 plus 5” (NSFW) – Following up with something raw and occasionally harrowing, a long photoessay from Ruth Fowler about the birth of her son Nye. She had a complicated home birth, and her photographer husband Jared Iorio captured the whole thing though his lens. The photos are graphic and powerful, and Ruth writes about the experience of giving birth with taught, unsentimental description, which I found incredibly affecting. I’ve also been reading the other essays on Fowler’s site.
- “On Turning 30” – Molly Crabapple writing in Vice about age and gendered expectations. She and I are the same age. Our experience getting here has been different in important ways.
- “When Hitting ‘Find My iPhone’ Takes You to a Thief’s Doorstep” – Article in the New York Times that was sent to me by many people. They sent it to me because they know I did this. When my iPad was stolen, I tracked the thief’s location and used some social engineering to spook his roommates into revealing him, then sent the police to his door. I got the iPad back, and the thief was arrested. At no time did I ever consider bringing a weapon with me.
- “The Myth of the Veneer” – Ursula Le Guin, at the Book View Cafe, writes about the myth that civilized, prosocial behavior is a superficial mask for an anarchic human nature.
- “The Teaching Class” – Rachel Reiderer writing for Guernica Magazine about the corporatization of higher education and the current state of the things where the janitors make more than the professors. Basically, a long essay about why I’m bailing out of the sad, sucker’s game that is modern humanities academia.
- And finally, an excellent video about patterns of discourse on the internet: “This Is Phil Fish”
I suppose the tabclosing posts are often a miscellany, but the last couple have been kind of thematic. This one isn’t.
- Your Logical Fallacy Is – A pretty website that lets you easily reference and link to a specific logical fallacy, with definitions and examples.
- The 12 Cognitive Biases that Prevent You from Being Rational – io9 article about twelve distinct cognitive biases.
- Spiral Into Horror: A Review of Uzumaki by Junji Ito – I want to read this book.
- The Peshtigo Fire – Devastating fire that has been largely forgotten because it took place on the same day as the Great Chicago Fire.
- How Not to Talk to Your Kids – New York magazine article about the psychological research which shows that children should be praised for effort and not intelligence.
- Amazing Rope Trick – A demonstration using a rope linked with carabiners that, among other surprising things, shows the difference between abelian and non-abelian groups.
- The Willow that Wasn’t – Moebius’s unused designs for the movie Willow.
- Robert Hooke’s London – A blog about the history and science of Restoration London
- First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature – Just what it says.
- Blockbuster Video was a Thing that Existed – Snarktastic rant about how terrible Blockbuster was.
- And this delightful video in which Steve Almond spends ten minutes dissecting the “manifest wretchedness” of Toto’s “Africa.”
Today’s links are a heavy bunch.
- I Married A Jew – A 1939 article in The Atlantic in which Gertrude, a Christian women of German descent, writes at length about her “mixed race” marriage to a Jew. She’s not just using race as a metaphor; she, her husband, and their respective families view their union as a risky crossing of racial lines. While professing love for her husband, she explains how if the Jews ever really want to be accepted they need to sensibly abandon any cultural distinctions and assimilate. My friend Carmen aptly compares it to a Modern Love column, calling it “affable apologetics for an odious position, but told in a way that implies balance/consideration because of the relationship (plus ‘my Jewish husband’ in the way someone says ‘my black friend.’)” Her tone of condescending moderation leads to a surreal, inverse-Godwin’s Law moment when she gets around to sharing her views on Hitler:
But it is hard for Ben to take the long view. He looks upon Hitler as something malignantly unique, and it is no use trying to tell him that a hundred years hence the world will no more call Hitler a swine for expelling the Jews than it does Edward I of England, who did the same thing in the thirteenth century—an expulsion that remained in strict effect until the time of Cromwell, because a hundred years hence another country will be having its Jewish problem, unless…
- ‘I Wish I Were Black’ And Other Tales of Privilege – Angela Onwauchi-Willing writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the growing phenomenon of white students who view being a racial minority as nothing but an unfair advantage for scholarships and admissions. This isn’t quite the same pathology of racism as the previous link. Whereas Gertrude above sees racism as inherently benign, these students presumably do view racism negatively. Certainly they are willing to inveigh against perceived racial discrimination against themselves. But they see racism as a fixed thing; both in the sense of “racism is when black people have to stand at the back of the bus,” and in the sense of “racism is not a problem anymore.” As the article points out, this blindness to one’s own privilege is, itself, a kind of privilege.
- The Logic Of Stupid Poor People – And, of course, privilege blinds people to issues of class just as much as issues of race. Here Tressie McMillan Cottom explodes the notion that poor people who use their money to buy status symbols do so because they are vain or stupid. Rather, they are making the rational choice to assume the trappings of wealth in an attempt to be taken seriously by people who actually have it.
- Why Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment Isn’t In My Textbook – And then we have the famous Stanford prison study, which shows that if you create a system where one group has power over another group, they will naturally turn into monsters and toadies respectively. Except, it doesn’t. Dr. Susan Krauss Whitbourne explains how the experiment was methodologically flawed in a way that trivially undermines its so-called conclusions.
- I Met A Convicted Serial Killer, And He Made Me Feel More Loved Than Anyone Else In My Life – Which is not to say that monsters don’t exists. Here we have former Marine sniper Jay Roberts reviewing his harrowing encounter with a man he would, years later, discover was serial killer Randy Kraft. In retrospect he realizes that the techniques Kraft used on him were not dissimilar to those he was taught to use as a sniper in identifying and isolating targets. He is, decades later, still emotionally shaken by how effectively a psychopath was able to gain his complete trust. I also find this story interesting because I’d never heard of Randy Kraft before. I’ve heard of and would recognize by name maybe a dozen other American serial killers who killed fewer people, but they all preyed on women or children. It’s hard not to suspect the reason Randy Kraft doesn’t get talked about as much as, say, Ted Bundy is that his story doesn’t serve an easy narrative of the strong preying on the weak nor the heteronormativity of the armed forces.
- Women Raping Women – Autostraddle article about the under-reported and under-recognized incidence of sexual violence between women. Violence and abuse within same-sex relationships doesn’t fit common social narratives, and so gets largely ignored. I’ve seen friends hurt by that. It needs to change.
- Cockblocked by Redistribution – On a happier note, an article from Dissent about a sexual tourist from the PUA community who goes to Denmark and discovers that a social welfare system that values gender equality and reinforces the idea that women are people totally fucks up his game.
- Bad Words: depicting female arousal in your fiction – Switching from turned off women to those turned on, here’s a post from SF novelist Madeline Ashby on ditching chaste cliches of female arousal and writing realistically randy women.
- Lucha Libro – And, finally, the coolest writing link I’ve ever posted. Y’know Lucha Libre, masked Mexican wrestling? Well in Peru they’ve made the writing version of that. Lucha Libro is masked, public, competitive fiction writing, with the tournament winner getting a book contract. Cancel your workshops and fire your agents, everyone. This is the future of all publishing.
- “You Are What You Tweet” – Tony Tulathimutte writes for The New Yorker about the pernicious culture of personal branding with his characteristic intelligence and cutting irony. Mark Zuckerberg, Paula Deen, and Jean Baudrillard all get name-checks.
- “9 Questions About Britain You Were Too Embarrassed to Ask” – Overview of Teju Cole’s twitter parody of the current rhetoric around US intervention in the Syrian civil war.
- A petition to name the San Francisco Bay Bridge after Emperor Norton. Come on, San Francisco. If anyplace is cool enough to get this done, it’s you. This particular opportunity is made all the more perfect by Norton himself having called for the construction of that very bridge. Let’s win one for whimsy.
- “The Ecuadorian Library” – Bruce Sterling on Snowden, Assange, and the NSA.
- “Mused: A Day at the Park” – A lovely little comic by Kostas Kiriakakis.
- “Three Gray Fandoms” – Ursula Vernon writes, in the aftermath of WorldCon, about fandoms other than SF that skew old, and how they don’t actively drive away young people as SF does.
- Edith Margaret Garrud – In one of my most satisfying internet research rabbit hole jaunts ever, I’ve discovered this 4’11” suffragette who spent 14 years studying bartitsu and jiujitsu, starred in the UK’s first martial arts film, and as the head of Emmeline Pankhurst’s bodyguard unit made a career out of training women to beat up cops who tried to disrupt Women’s Suffrage rallies. She’s a featured entry on a website called Badass of the Week, which offers the wonderful quotation, “Physical force seems to be the only thing in which women have not demonstrated their equality to men, and whilst we are waiting for the evolution which is slowly taking place and bringing about that equality, we might just as well take time by the forelock and use ju-jitsu.”
- “As Black As We Want To Be” – Engrossing episode of the fairly new radio show State of the Re:Union, which profiles a pair of towns in Ohio that are subject to deep and abiding racial tensions despite there not being visible racial differentiation between the relevant populations. As stark an example as you could ever need that race is a social construct.
- Rick Bowes on Stonewall at 40 – an account of the Stonewall riot from someone who was there.
- Third Sound – a description of a type of sound that only occurs in superfluids.
- Imgur photo set of less well-known animals.
- Little Nemo – The Internet Archive has a complete set of the 1905-1914 run of Windsor McCay’s Little Nemo comics.
- “This Happens: Sexual Assault Between Queer Women” – Important article on Autostraddle.
- Technique for including the mitochondria of a third party in an in-vitro fertilization.
- Collection of Scrivener Templates – I haven’t looked at these yet, but want to remember to check them out.
- Why Is Kink Fun? – An article by Greta Christina on what people get out of kinky sex.
- How To Use a Hot Spoon to Instantly Relieve Itchy Bug Bites – It works. I tried it, and it works. This article is life-changing. I feel like a great secret of the universe had been kept from me until now.
- I don’t know what this gif is, but I can’t stop watching it.
- The Finkbeiner Test – Like the Bechdel Test, but for articles about female scientists.
- And, finally, a fascinating lecture in which Ken Ono discusses his discovery of a fractal structure for partition numbers, which has allowed him to derive an exact formula for the partition function.
