I’m off to Europe this summer to spend 3 weeks apiece in two different countries doing some sciency type things. I have about four months to reach a level of fluency in two different languages that will allow me to identify food, find bathrooms, and use public transportation with a minimum of tears. These are not overly common languages (Portuguese and Hungarian), so I won’t be finding private lessons in my area any time soon. Does anyone have any recommendations for language learning software or CDs?
Need some advice
Saturday, January 19th, 2008Happy Links and Dear Diary
Thursday, January 17th, 2008I’ve had a good week, so let’s spread some joy:
Stephen Colbert gets his picture into the National Portrait Gallery.
The museum agreed to give him a limited six-week showing — right between the bathrooms near the “America’s Presidents” exhibit. Museum officials say that’s an “appropriate place.”
Japan makes strawberry-covered chocolates.
Take for example one of FCOM’s products, a strawberry infused with white chocolate. On the outside it’s an everyday garden-variety dried strawberry, but break the surface and it looks like the fruit contains white chocolate in its fibers.
The trick is to first freeze-dry the strawberry to remove the water, and then infuse the white chocolate into the spaces left behind.
Over at Penny Arcade, Tycho addresses Townhall’s recent foray into wadding their panties over an imaginary, alternate-universe version of Mass Effect:
After breathless prose in the original piece about orgies and sodomy, acts which are manifested nowhere in the product he’s discussing, he literally begins to fantasize in the body of the text about a machine that can rape people – and rape them “orgasmically” – at a distance. He does not warrant our time, but I will speak in the clear manner that one must when managing animals: these things are not simulated by this or any other piece of entertainment software available at retail. Indeed, it was precisely the lack of sodomy that created a stir before release.
The first week of the last semester of classes has started well enough. I’m taking Jackson E&M this semester, for those out there who know what that means, and a nanobiotechnology class that might result in a post about MEMS and transistors and how your computer chips get made.
I have my first turn at one of our student leadership positions; not the one I wanted because I never asked for that one, but the one no one else wanted. It is the hot potato of student governance and it’s all mine.
And finally, a middle school teacher used the daughter of a guy in another department to launch his dream of a University-Middle School collaborative project being run by a woman who hopes that our introduction to a couple of gifted classes will ‘spontaneously organize’ into a science fair in May. At this point, I’m in it for the laughter – we’re supposed to list our ‘research interests’ so that the kids can pick an appropriate mentor. If the introduction sessions are any indication, the guy who does cryptography and the guy who writes video games will be mentoring 25 kids a piece, while the rest of us in materials science, math and biology will get our afternoons back. I certainly don’t want to work with any 12 year old who already has an interest in ‘semi-conductive nanoparticles or ink jet printing non-standard materials’, both things I am/have working/ed on. Get that kid some sports or something, because there is plenty of time for that shit later. So far, the only definite mentor-mentee relationship that has blossomed is between an Israeli math student and a young girl, united by their love of shopping and the color pink.
Nature writer reaches new audiences with “Hot-loving polecats do[ing] it in prairie dog holes.”
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008Plagiarism is wrong; especially plagiarism this bad:
On page 195, after several false starts to stoke the furnaces of readers, Bramlett and Shadow Bear finally get down to business. They have sex in his teepee on some animal pelts. Hungrily, their sinuous bodies rock and quake until both explode in rapturous pleasure. When the teepee flaps are rocking, don’t come a-knocking.
Bramlett hears something rustling in the bushes and recoils in fear. Could it be the evil Jack Thunder Horse, come to steal the map that reveals the secret location of the gold discovered by her late father?
No!
It’s just a family of ferrets….
“They are so named because of their dark legs,” Shadow Bear says, to which Shiona responds: “They are so small, surely weighing only about two pounds and measuring two feet from tip to tail.”
Shiona then tells Shadow Bear how she once read about ferrets in a book she took from the study of her father. “I discovered they are related to minks and otters. It is said their closest relations are European ferrets and Siberian polecats,” she says. “Researchers theorize that polecats crossed the land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska, to establish the New World population.”
The nature writer whose purely not-prurient article on the endangered black-footed ferret (Note from Author: Since I have your attention, please be aware of the plight of the black-footed ferret) became pillow talk for the “shirtless, dark-haired hunk in a loin cloth” Shadow Bear and “pioneer hottie, Shiona Bramlett” isn’t terribly upset, but Cassie Edwards’ readers are. As well they should be – Christ on a crutch, Cassie, you were paid for that crap. The least you could do was change enough of Tolme’s words to make that conversation less like it was being held by a couple of horny androids.
Required reading
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008But for some reason, the hunting trips and codpieces and brush clearing and all that metaphorical crotch measuring isn’t considered playing “the gender card.” It’s just considered the normal political pander to an aggrieved minority vote: the poor white males who’ve been treated terribly by all those powerful women and minorities and gays. What could be wrong with that?
I’m sorry, but this is truly sexist crap. Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney are out there one upping each other on who will be the most macho sadists among the crowd of warring GOP thugs. Hillary goes to her alma mater and says that her education at the women’s college prepared her to do battle with the political boys club and the gasbags’ eyes roll back in their heads and they start drooling and whining that she’s broken the rules.
Everything’s more delicious when it’s seasoned with Privilege
Saturday, January 12th, 2008My salt shaker has corroded shut, and should I break it tomorrow in a last attempt to open it with some help from a vise, I may need a new salt and pepper shaker set. Maybe this time I’d like a cute one, so off to ebay I go.
And, oh, my god.
First off, there was apparently a time, post-WWII, when the whole of occupied Japan was forced to make ceramic novelty condiment sets to satiate America’s apparent post-war frenzy for kitchy salt and pepper sets. This must be a big deal for current salt and pepper set collectors, with JAPAN being in many auction titles and occasionally, more helpfully, OCCUPIED JAPAN.
Secondly, WTF?
No, really. What. The. Fuck.
“Black Mammy” (or “Black Americana”) is still a shockingly popular motif – there are several salt shakers and I also ran into it while looking for vegetable bins. Which, OK, maybe they have some collector’s value even if you’d have to be insane to actually put them on your table, but that doesn’t explain the times people describe them as “cute.”
As for the salty ta-tas… Well, I wish I could say I was surprised, but after Melissa’s Boobie Product Parade, I’m not.
MSN finally buys into the radical notion that women are people.
Thursday, January 10th, 2008Coming home to a loving spouse and a good marriage helps working women shake off the stress of the day, new research confirms.
Slightly less duh, but still kind of duh.
Men, on the other hand, often drop their stress at the door when they come home, regardless of the state of their union, reported psychology researchers.
What a strange and mystifying difference. Why could this be? Where does it come from?
The researchers suggested that people in happy marriages may have a more even balance of household responsibilities and may generally welcome an evening retreat from the world more than women in unhappy marriages.
Hmm, Ok. But wait…something about that paragraph is odd. I can’t put my finger on it, but it seems like…
Coming home to a loving spouse and a good marriage helps working women shake off the stress of the day…
Men, on the other hand, often drop their stress at the door when they come home…
At least as far as women are concerned, being happily married appears to bolster physiological recovery from work…
Less happily married women also showed a flatter daily pattern of cortisol release…
The researchers found that women in marriages who felt they were happily married saw a greater reduction in cortisol levels when they came home at the end of the work day than women who were less happily married. Cortisol levels in men dropped at the end of the day regardless of their satisfaction with their marriage…
The researchers suggested that people in happy marriages may have a more even balance of household responsibilities and may generally welcome an evening retreat from the world more than women in unhappy marriages.
Just fucking say it, MSN. It’s right there. Don’t be so dodgy.
The 9 Most Racist Disney Characters
Saturday, January 5th, 2008
I really don’t remember this scene from Fantasia.
You may have already seen this, but if you haven’t, do take a moment and check out Cracked.com’s rundown of Disney’s most shameful moments. I mean, not that it’s surprising that a massive corporation run by a right-wing snitch has some skanky race issues, but wow.
Most parents show their kids these cartoons. Mine did, and no, I didn’t get the cultural and historical context that makes a character like Uncle Remus so very, very disturbing. This is the sort of thing that makes explaining systemic racism to white people so terribly frustrating. (On a related note, don’t read the comments unless you have a stronger stomach than I do.)
I’m surprised that this didn’t get a mention. Though I guess nameless slaves don’t really count as “characters.”
Third Reich to Fortune 500 is also funny/disturbing.
Hat tip: rantipole6
Suffering from being a patronizing, paternalistic ass? That’s just what organized religion was designed to combat!
Saturday, January 5th, 2008Over at Boundless Webzine, Focus on the Family’s source of hip, Candice Watters is reminded by the New York Times to warn science to beware, bee–waaarrreeeeeee!!!!!!!! That is, beware to continue to be aware that scientific ethics are a good thing.
Also, did you know that in the past, scientists were sometimes wrong? And other times, science-sounding words were used by people in authoritative positions to maintain the status quo, even when the status quo conflicted with the interests of the people these learned men were trying to serve? Really, it’s true.
In a culture where everything is relative, it’s hard to defend anything as true. Few trust anything that isn’t supportable by science. But science without truth is barbarism. The standard evidence of this point is Auschwitz, the concentration camp now decried for it’s “scientific” experiments.
Let’s go through this paragraph slowly:
1. Candice, LOTS of people trust plenty that ain’t supported by science. And LOTS MORE trust things that they think are supported scientifically, but in fact they are being scammed by people who are taking advantage of the fact that a lot of people are very hazy about what exactly counts as science. A few examples pulled just from blogs I’ve read recently:
2. So now we’ve established that ‘science’ is frequently used as a wishy-washy word at best. Are we talking pure research here, or application, or the way data is used to justify things that may or may not be accurate, or are we including instances where data is deliberately misconstrued to support an unfair or irrational policy, or sell something? In your case, you seem to be claiming it’s ‘science’ whenever a guy with an advanced degree does something. Ok, we’ll work with that. But now you say “But science without truth is barbarism” so what is truth? Truth is beauty, beauty truth, I suppose but that’s not actually helpful. By the end of your article it is clear you mean “biblical truth” and ohhh, baby, there’s a can of worms.
3. I’m not going to declare a Godwin violation here, I’m just going to chastise you for your improper use of scare quotes. The Nazi experiments on concentration camp prisoners were vile beyond all possible imagining, but they were actually pretty scientific; as in, they resulted in usable data. And many of their scientists were top-notch, which is why we took them and their data at the end of the war. And we used them to beat the Russians to the moon.
It’s important to note the the Nazis also had a sizable pseudo-scientific crazy person science department, that, for example, funded rocket experiments designed to prove we lived in a hollow earth.
However, you can’t blame a lack of religion for Nazi atrocities, although you can certainly argue with their version of the ‘truth’ until you are blue in the face. So to wrap up everything that’s wrong with the final sentence of your opening paragraph: a) the Nazis are not the best example of science going amok because there was no religious philosophy to restrain their greed for knowledge, if anything, they managed to make a religious philosophy that was entirely consistent with their justifications for torturing concentration camp prisoners with ghastly experiments; b) if America’s Protestant religious underpinnings are a superior ethical guide to science policy than Nazi Making-Hateful-Shit-Up Christianity, then our leaders would have had a lot more qualms letting the captured scientists use and build upon the data obtained by experimenting on prisoners; c) I can’t believe you just invoked the freaking Nazis, the motherfucking Nazis, for the love of all that is holy, to set up an article about how doctors in the past were wrong to be so restrictive about parental visiting hours in pediatric wards.
Could we please show a least an inkling of a sense of perspective? Ok, then, let’s blow through the rest of this trainwreck a bit faster.
(more…)
I ain’t saying she’s a gold-digger
Friday, January 4th, 2008There’s no shortage of misguided notions to be found in MRA/pick-up artist/MSN-Lifestyle-reading/Craigslist-rant-posting circles (which all seem to overlap, surprisingly). But one common meme that seems to always crop up is the scenario of a man and a woman, out on a date. He buys dinner and movie tickets and perhaps some flowers, and then acts gobsmacked when she doesn’t repay him with sex. He immediately goes on the internet and complains about gold-digging women.
Here’s an excerpt from an article recently mocked on Pandagon:
As I mentioned earlier, women often have an imagined ideal for a date. This may involve many things I’d rather not do (and pay for) with a complete stranger: dinner at Daniel, drinks in the Rainbow Room, the opera — all of this is fine if I really enjoy the person. But with a woman I hardly know this an unacceptable risk to wallet and watch. Not to mention the slim chance of either party wanting to get physical after such a marathon night. In addition, women often say they “want to go out (on the town) so they can get to know me,” which is contradictory. Spending time with me in my apartment will show them more about who I am than cavorting about town. And in my experience, young women often brag to their girlfriends about where they went and what they ate, rather than who they were with. That’s a lousy deal for the sap who funds the night.
Now, misogynist slime oozes out of every corner of these sorts of articles, as the post and comments point out, but one assumption that often goes unremarked-upon is that the man is always paying for the date. It made me wonder whether it’s just my own group of friends that assumes that the couple (het or homo, platonic or romantic) splits the bill evenly, unless there’s a good reason (a birthday, for example, or one party being flat broke). Granted, I mostly hang out with, and date, other Canuckistani-based leftists, so it occurred to me that I just might be living in a social bubble. Seriously, who are these men who drop hundreds of dollars on dinner? And who are these women who are getting free meals all the time? Is it a geography thing, a class thing, a this-is-what-non-feminist-couples-are-actually-like thing?
Fortunately, I live with someone who keeps etiquette books in our library (awesome), so I was able to consult the 1950 edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, Publishers). This was what Post had to say about who pays on a date:
In this modern day, when women are competing with men in politics, in business, and in every profession, it is really senseless to cling to that one obsolete convention—no matter what the circumstances—that the man must buy the tickets, pay the check, pay the taxi, or else be branded a gigolo or a parasite. The modern point of view has changed in every particular save this one! Certainly it does not seem logical that an otherwise modern man-and-girl situation should still be depicted as that of a Victorian lady dependent for her safety in public upon the protection of a chivalrous gentleman, instead of the modern one of girl friend and boy friend—or one business associate and another.
Ethically this subject comes down to a question of underlying motive. The man who is deliberately “out for what he can get” from a woman is a type of parasite that is not even mentionable. And it is natural that every man of decent impulse shun the faintest likeness to one of these pariahs. Therefore, it is very hard to say how the various angles of a man’s self-respect are to be reckoned with, and at the same time solve the typical situation of Mary who is wondering what has changed Jim, who used to be the life of the party, but who never wants to go anywhere any more! In other words, what can the girl, who likes Jim better than any other man, do about it except to make believe that above everything she likes to cook and stay home and to listen to the radio?
The only real advice to be offered is, first of all, to take whatever the situation may be, frankly and unself-consciously.
Wait, so in the 50s, the time period that anti-feminists consider ideal in regard to courtship and gender relations, the etiquette experts were recommending dividing up the bill on an egalitarian, or at least case-by-case, basis? You’d think that nearly 60 years later, this arrangement would have been adopted into common practice. And I think that it probably has been, if only because there can’t be that many men wealthy enough to regularly pay at fancy restaurants.
So what’s the deal, Punkasses? Are the MRAs lying again, or am I just dating cheapskates?
It took 26 years, but I finally had the eventful NYE you always see people having on TV.
Tuesday, January 1st, 2008New Year’s Eve Wrap-Up:
1: Karma points for the new year. I successfully prevented my roommate from dressing up by taking his normal “baggy jeans and seven-year-old Rancid concert t-shirt” and simply throwing a perfectly good tailored blue pin-stripe jacket over it. If he got laid last night instead of mocked to death, he can thank me.
2: A sparsely attended concert of well-established local bands is the perfect NYE party. Sample conversation: Kyso: Oh? So what did you do before deciding to go back to school for tapestry weaving? Old Man: I was a paranoid schizophrenic for 30 years. How come I can handle that conversation with perfect grace but ordinary human interaction leaves me bewildered and upset?
3: In the most blatant street harassment I’ve ever seen on an American street, as we were leaving the bar a drunk kid reached out and grabbed my friend’s boob like it was a goddamn stress ball. The look on his face after she slapped the taste out of his mouth was quite satisfying. Losing yet another of the modicum of respect that I had for the guy with us (“It looked like he was just trying to push her away and aimed badly” STFU) was just a bonus.
Punkasses, how was your evening?
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