Idiosyncratic Routine

Hope you got your tickets for the gun show!

Tue, 22 May 2012 13:41:03 -0400

Hope you got your tickets for the gun show!

Proof that cats use tools

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 12:48:29 -0400

Proof that cats use tools

One of the best eps., hands down.

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 22:10:24 -0400

One of the best eps., hands down.

swoon

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 14:45:26 -0400

swoon

via aloria

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 14:35:50 -0400

via aloria

thedailywhat: Pay Gap Acknowledgment of the Day: Hey girl, it’s...

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 18:54:27 -0400

thedailywhat:

Pay Gap Acknowledgment of the Day: Hey girl, it’s been nearly 50 years since JFK signed the Equal Pay Act of 1963, and women STILL earn 77 cents for each dollar earned annually by men.

[ncpe]

Mamie Van Doren | Marilyn Monroe | ...

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 18:50:00 -0400

Mamie Van Doren

Marilyn Monroe

Jayne Mansfield

Mamie Van Doren | Marilyn Monroe | Jayne Mansfield

Know your bombshells.

Photo

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 15:29:00 -0400

Women’s Half Marathon in Central Park. Finished in...

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 19:57:07 -0400

Women’s Half Marathon in Central Park. Finished in 02:07:20, 17.5 mins better than the NYC Half last month. (Something about not having a recently torn knee ligament might have helped.) Next month: Brooklyn Half!

azspot via NYTimes: A Feynman diagram of an encounter between a...

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 15:52:53 -0400

azspot via NYTimes:

A Feynman diagram of an encounter between a Romney and an anti-Romney. The resulting collision annihilates both, leaving behind a single electron and a $20 bill

(via stfuconservatives) …ASP.NET? Really? But srsly, full...

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 17:42:39 -0400

(via stfuconservatives)

…ASP.NET? Really?

But srsly, full of win.

Etsy wants to know: Are you a woman looking to become a better developer?

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 17:31:27 -0400

nycdigital:

New York City startup Etsy, in conjunction with New York-based Hacker School, just announced a new scholarship and sponsorship program, including $50,000 in Etsy Hacker Grants, for women in tech. The program plans to welcome 20 women pursuing engineering jobs to New York and is focused on bringing more women into engineering positions at Etsy and across the industry.

Learn more about the program and apply here.

D’AWWWWW

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 16:35:20 -0400

D’AWWWWW

Neil deGrasse Tyson is behind the only major technical change in the Titanic re-release

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 15:06:04 -0400

Neil deGrasse Tyson is behind the only major technical change in the Titanic re-release:

io9:

It took James Cameron 60 weeks to prepare Titanic for its rerelease, but apart from remastering the original at 4k resolution and converting it to stereoscopic 3D, nothing about the movie has really changed.

Well, almost nothing.

According to Cameron: “Neil deGrasse Tyson sent me quite a snarky email saying that, at that time of year [April 15, at 4:20 am], in that position in the Atlantic in 1912, when Rose is lying on the piece of driftwood and staring up at the stars, that is not the star field she would have seen.”

“And with my reputation as a perfectionist, I should have known that and I should have put the right star field in. So I said ‘All right, send me the right stars for that exact time and I’ll put it in the movie.’”

So Tyson did just that, and Cameron re-shot the scene. According to the Telegraph, it is the only major technical change in the film’s re-release.

adorable.

Eat it Don’t Tweet It

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 18:22:03 -0400

Eat it Don’t Tweet It

Photo

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 12:30:57 -0400

In Which I Waste My Breath Replying to a Chain Letter

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 10:04:00 -0400

This morning the ol’ “Common Sense Obit” chain letter was sent to me by a teacher. (Do click the link if you are not familiar, so the rest of this makes sense.)

Usually, I reply with a Snopes link and call it a day. However, as I walk to work wearing my black hoodie as a rather ineffectual protest for Trayvon Martin today — I think we all know this white girl in business pants is not in danger of being called out as “suspicious” — I have been thinking about what was considered “suspicious” in the upper middle class, gated community where I spent much of my childhood, and the gritty-but-gentrifying part of Manhattan in which I now live. And I got pissed off. So here, my email response:

This chain email is a perfect example of a Slippery Slope fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

It begins with some inoffensive things we can all agree on (“know when to come in out of the rain!”), then builds authority by tacking on some shadier headlines we vaguely remember, but which support ideas to which we are amenable (“charging a six year old with sexual assault?!”). Now that you’re in an agreeable mindset, it throws in some blatant lies to foster your sense of outrage (“you couldn’t defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault” - this is simply not true) and finally tacks on the real payload: An argument with which we would normally find fault and disagree with outright, were we not already in the motion of saying “Yes, haha, yes, that!”

> It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent
> to administer sun lotion or an aspirin to a student; but could not inform
> parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.

First, no one should administer aspirin to children. It can cause Reye’s Syndrome (http://www.reyessyndrome.org/aspirin.html). Additionally, 5.7% of the population is intolerant to aspirin. How many students do you teach in a day? If that number is around 150, then around 9 of the kids may suffer violent reactions to aspirin ingestion. By high school, they probably know who they are. Are children under 12 responsible for accurately stating their medical history? Similar things apply to sun lotion. “Common Sense” fails here because teachers aren’t doctors, and rules have been set in place so they don’t have to be.

But that’s just clever distraction.

The real argument being presented here is that your hands are tied by Big Government. Not only can’t you help a sick child, you can’t help a pregnant one. Wait … “help”? The statement isn’t “could not inform parents when a student became pregnant” (though that has enough horrible side effects as it is - from creating homeless teens by being kicked out of the house, to inciting abuse after incest, etc…please remember that not all neighborhoods are relatively affluent, “progressive” ones…). No, the statement is ”could not inform parents when a student became pregnant AND WANTED TO HAVE AN ABORTION.”

Which statement is really being made here? That you have a chance to help a child secure access to a safely performed medical procedure as overseen by the child’s parents (an ideal situation), or that the parents have the choice of how to handle it (possibly denying access based on religious or other grounds, forcing adoption, or pulling the child out of school)? You may set out to Do Good, but end up in a terrible situation. Laws around medical privacy are there to protect women who can’t get access to the medical care they want safely, not to enforce the morality of a family confronting pregnancy together.

Finally - I am wearing a black hoodie to work today as part of a protest for Trayvon Martin, the black teenager who was shot by a Hispanic man (George Zimmerman) on the neighborhood watch of his gated community. Common Sense told George that this outsider did not belong in his neighborhood, that he was “suspicious.” When he called the police and they said not to engage Trayvon, his sense of “my home turf, my justice” (remember from earlier in this email - we aren’t safe to defend our homes anymore?) told him to take matters into his own hands. He shot Trayvon, who ended up being a kid carrying Skittles and iced tea on the way to his grandmother’s house. Because of the terrible state of race relations in the part of Florida where this crime occurred — or rather, a lot of Good Old Fashioned Local Common Sense — the police did not even intend to investigate the matter until Trayvon’s family and friends got viral support on the Internet.

To top it off, pundits like Geraldo Rivera are now on TV saying that Trayvon looked like a thug because of his hoodie, and he should have known better. Sounds a lot like “she was wearing a short skirt when she was raped, she should have known better” doesn’t it? Do we really live in a culture of “I’m a Victim” as the email purports, or do we live in one where often we Blame the Victim - assuming the victim is not a white male. Instead of teaching kids not to wear hoodies and women to ALWAYS WATCH OUT, perhaps we should teach people not to rape and kill.

We could use less Common Sense and more Compassion.

Trickle-down consumption

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 13:23:59 -0400

Trickle-down consumption:

Reuters:

Rising income inequality, he notes, isn’t just about the gap between the 99 percent and the 1 percent; it is also about growing differences across the income distribution, including at the very top. The result is that all of us see people we think of as our peers earning – and spending – a lot more. As a consequence, we find ourselves spending more, too.

‘‘The main idea is that frames of reference are very local,’’ Frank said. ‘‘Bertrand Russell said beggars don’t envy millionaires, they envy other beggars who have a few more coins than they do. Expenditure cascades aren’t because the poor want to emulate the rich.’

The concepts of ‘‘trickle-down consumption’’ and ‘‘expenditure cascades’’ help to explain one of the great mysteries of the past decade in U.S. politics and society. Income inequality has been on the rise since the late 1970s, but it is only since the financial crisis that it has gained any real traction in public life. That may be because increased consumption masked growing inequality. Retail therapy meant the 99 percent didn’t notice that the 1 percent was pulling away.

Bertrand and Morse offer empirical evidence of an important explanation for why that was possible. In areas with higher income inequality, politicians were more likely to support measures to make consumer credit cheaper and more available. People weren’t talking about inequality much before 2009, but they felt it. And, America being a democracy, the political system worked to soften it. Interestingly, because inequality grew at a time when overt redistribution was falling out of favor, politicians made it easier to borrow.

It’s the first day of Real Spring in NYC, and I’ve...

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 12:16:00 -0400

It’s the first day of Real Spring in NYC, and I’ve got the windows wide open as I do some spring cleaning. This is my fridge right now. It’s also why I’m not on pinterest.

I weep for mankind. (via @attritionorg)

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 20:16:31 -0400

I weep for mankind.

(via @attritionorg)