December 2011
7 posts
Settled, I WILL see this movie in Scotland
- Interviewer: Tell us about your relationship with Robert Downey Jr.
- Jude Law: Oh, I love him.
- Interviewer: You have a bit of a bromance going on there.
- Jude Law: What is this new term everybody's using? That's a horrible term. What about just a 'romance'?
- Interviewer: No, that's not the same, 'cos then you'd have to star in a romantic comedy together or something.
- Jude Law: We just have! Have you not seen it?
“[TW: CISSEXISM & MISGENDERING]
Private Manning has endured horrendous treatment in prison waiting for trial. But listen again to what she had to say, in chats whose validity would seem to have been proved over the weekend: ‘I wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much, if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me… plastered all over the world press… as boy.’
This kind of ‘ungendering,’ as trans theorist Julia Serano has argued in her landmark book Whipping Girl, is itself harmful, an act of violence by a world that has little inclination for respecting the self-identification of transgender people and exposes them to violence in every sphere of society.
Now that we have entered the trial stage and the facts are being confirmed, it is mindboggling that her supporters continue to engage in this, in the very act of ‘support’–and it says everything about how we on the Left see transgender women.
” —Emily Manuel, Why does the media still refer to “Bradley” Manning? The Curious Silence Around A Transgender Hero (Global Comment)
If you really want to show support for a trans woman, you can start by gendering her properly.
(via kiriamaya)
wow i didn’t know any of this. i haven’t been following this story, but still. :/
(via chebec)
I had no idea either! Wow.
Someone please tell me
… why the “treatment” for knee pain brought on by cold weather involves ice packs? Can it really be true that after all that walking around in the cold, I am supposed to add MORE COLD?
t__t
Amsterdam is a lot of fun so far! Minor gripes aside XD. I will probably post a report to Dreamwidth later.
Put your address in the ask box if you want a postcard! Choice of Amsterdam, Seville, Lisbon or Glasgow.
November 2011
22 posts
“The article doesn’t quite come out and say it explicitly but I think it’s fair to read this as claiming that there’s a causal relationship between director’s gender and the number of female characters, and that’s really not feasible… Gender of characters with speaking roles (which seem to be the ones we’re talking about) are specified in the screenplay and, despite a widely held opinion to the contrary, directors don’t write screenplays. This leaves us with two possibilities: writer/directors are confounding the data or the causal relationship runs the other way — a screenplay with more female characters is more likely to be directed by a woman.”
—
From Observational Epidemiology. I’d feel bad about reblogging them all the time but the content is good so whatever. :p
The original L.A. Times article is also worth reading. Less than a third of the characters with speaking lines in blockbuster films are women! I wonder how this would change if you widened the scope from “blockbuster films” to “all films”.
“
During the expansion of the housing bubble, lenders felt protected because they could repackage risky loans as mortgage-backed securities, which sold briskly to a pious market that believed housing prices could only increase… the education sector has its equivalent: the Student Loan Asset-Backed Security (or, as they’re known in the industry, SLABS)…
But the rapid growth in tuition is mystifying in value terms; no one could argue convincingly the quality of instruction or the market value of a degree has increased ten-fold in the past four decades (though this hasn’t stopped some from trying). So why would universities raise tuition so high so quickly?
” —Or, the Higher Education bubble. Something from April I just discovered now. From N+1: Bad Education.
More on why tuition costs have risen.
Occupy protest taps anger at US campuses →
ft.com
Apologies for the FT link (if you register you get 30 articles a month free). What’s really been amazing me about the Occupy newspaper coverage is that the reporters are consistently finding good people to quote (or more likely, being found by those people). Anyway, they haven’t been discrediting nearly as much as they usually do.
Also, I kind of wish I was in a US school right now…!
Image Recognition Software Can Help Cops ID Gang Graffiti Automatically | Popular Science →
popsci.com
Like other image-recognition programs, the graffiti matching system searches for matches based on commonalities, according to Jain and his colleagues. This helps filter different graffiti that depicts the same logo or tag, but may look dramatically different based on the person or gang who created it. First, the system extracts visual features from a new image, and then letters, numbers and symbols are manually annotated. Then, the system finds candidate images that share similarities with this new image.
It would be nice to have a system that automatically recognizes numbers and letters, but this is too difficult with existing technology because graffiti is so variable, Jain and his colleagues say. Instead, Jain uses crowdsourcing to identify words, using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, according to New Scientist.
In the march toward our ubiquitous automated surveillance future…
“Indeed, emerging neuroimaging-based evidence indicates that adolescence may also be a special time for learning from social experiences and this hints at the opening and closing of periods of increased sensitivity to environmental influence (Nelson and Guyer, in press). For example, while most other regions of the brain are influenced by atypical adversity in early in life, the prefrontal cortex appears more vulnerable to such experiences when they occur during adolescence (Andersen et al., 2008).”
—
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878929311001113#sec2
Middle school is when people learn social skills: the neuroscientific explanation and its implications for education policy interventions.
...But they let the protesters back in. →
nydailynews.com
AND the NY Daily News wrote a sympathetic article, so I’d call this a win for the Occupiers.
Hero's Adventure - FREE online game - Jay is Games →
jayisgames.com
A v. short game. Play it, it only takes one min. (space to interact w/ things or choose menu items, arrow keys to move around)
Caught up on Homestuck
In one heroic, probably not very advisable marathon session from Sunday to Monday. This comic has probably over 5,000 separate images, many of which are animated, and is 326,796 words long, only counting page titles and captions.
Anyway, I put my overall impressions on Dreamwidth because they’re a big wall of text and <span> tags (for hiding spoilers) don’t work properly on tumblr.
So I started reading Homestuck
Thanks to fuckyeahfandomderp’s constant fanart bombing, and it’s amazing. Anything I say will only take away from the comic (which also includes music, flash animation, short flash games, and coding puzzles), so really, you should just check it out for yourself.
One thing I wonder, though - and I’m not in the fandom so I don’t know whether this has occurred to anyone else - is whether Dave Strider and his super amazing and cool, but actually kind of weird and dorky, older brother are based on Neil and Tim Finn. You know, from Split Enz/Crowded House? Because Neil admires Tim, for excellent reasons, but his big brother’s band was a bit strange (note that puppetry was also a theme for the band).
Anyway, this speculation is tangential to the main point, which is that Homestuck is very good.
Why Are So Many Literary Writers Switching to Genre? →
themillions.com
It will probably always be open to debate whether these innovations are the result of writers seeking creative expression and wider audiences or a calculated move on the part of publishers who are simply trying to sell more product, even if it means slightly misrepresenting a book to its potential audience. But either way, the future seems to be stories which combine the pacing and plots of genre with the themes and style of literary writing.
In other words, this crappy market may actually end up producing better books. Because hybrids, bastards, and half-breeds tend to be heartier than those delicate offspring that result from too much careful inbreeding.
This trend is awesome and should continue!
Why You Should Be Drinking Cheap Wine →
slate.com
THIS IS FOR KARA. Except she is even further ahead of the curve than this Salon writer, and wisely drinks box wine. :p
Should I Make a New Tumblr
…for the stuff I was sharing on Google Reader, or should I post it to G+ the way Google wants me to do?
It’s mostly economics, statistics, public policy stuff. In my mind, the “audience” for it is R’s college friends in NYC (this is just my mental image as I dunno who actually would be reading) and they’re all on G+, so I suppose I should go there.
But… my family is on G+! And it’s no fun to argue politics with your family (or in my case, to defend cryptic (lazy) notes on links to posts on Marginal Revolution, just in case they are interpreted as endorsements).
Plus, G+ is designed to be a timesuck like Facebook, and it doesn’t look nice when all your posts are lined up. What I liked about Reader, even if no one read it, was that it generated this nice clean blog-looking thing of all your notes.
It’s only fair to read other people’s items if you want them to read yours. But I kind of liked just putting stuff out there in public without expecting any kind of feedback, knowing other people would see it as a bold link until they marked it as read, and having other people’s stuff waiting for me to read until I marked it as read. Maybe I should just make another wordpress blog.
October 2011
4 posts
Happy Halloween '11
Halloween mix as promised to Kara and Sabina. I also have a longer (probably not better) version here: http://8tracks.com/subdee/happy-halloween.
Things About England
When I took the train into York on Saturday, it was the hottest October 1 ever on record. I thought I’d get to wear my summer clothes and was excited.
Then the temperature returned to normal on Sunday. It’s supposed to snow by the end of the month.
Prices for processed items such as cereal are the same as in the US. Prices for fresh fruits and vegetables are higher, because - get this - everything is plastic-wrapped in individually sized portions. It’s like looking into the future.
Zumba is big in England and only just catching on in the US. (The future!)
Related to point three above, at least it’s easy to shop for just one person. There is no buying in bulk - at least not at the city supermarket - but this is fine because I don’t have anywhere to put bulk anyway. (I am sharing a minifridge with three other people.)
To buy a knife at the Sainsbury’s in York, I had to show ID proving I was over 25. Is this why no one cooks in England?? (Joke, it’s because England is an advanced postindustrial society.)
On the up side, my English ID doesn’t have my birthdate or anything else on it to indicate my actual age - it just says “over 25” (there is also an “over 18” version for people over 18 but younger than 25).
My Chinese suitemates shared their dinner with me. They know how to make the Chinese bachelor dishes: rice, fried egg, and egg-pork-tomato soup. I contributed by “cooking” sweet green peas, which are sweeter than Chinese peas, apparently.
Mushy peas aren’t just mashed green peas???
Met an Indian guy from Delhi named Kush, after the sacred plant.
Met a Peruvian girl from Lima who complained that salsa is much more casual in Peru and that she can’t keep up with European “salsa dancers”.
Met two actual English people!!!
My knowledge of (London) British accents acquired by listening to British indie music does not help me here.
September 2011
6 posts
What Shall I Read? →
box.net
NPR uses a flowchart to tell us which SFF books to read.
Pouring Rain at Dawn
The Jayhawks
Pouring Rain at Dawn - The Jayhawks
Going to a radio taping on the 19th, am super excited because I thought I’d miss the new album tour on account of being out of the country.
August 2011
7 posts
Never the Same Song Twice, For 100 Days: Why a lot of music sucks, but I'm happy with that →
norepeats.tumblr.com
My friend Chris’s personal growth project wherein he doesn’t listen to any song more than one time for the next 100 days. If I had the musical know-how to instantly appreciate each song the first time I heard it, and I didn’t think the “cure” was worse than the disease, and my memory wasn’t so terrible, I might try to do the same thing. As it stands… yeah, interesting idea, but Imma have to pass. Good luck Chris!
A lot of great writing has been lavished in praise of music and how it speaks to our souls. A well played performance of Mozart’s Requiem or Jimi Hendrix has the ability to hold us prisoner, fixate us with total wonderfulness. We speak of the inherent beauty of music.
I’m talking about - everybody getting crunk, crunk
Boys trying to touch my junk, junk
Gonna smack him if he getting too drunk, drunk
Maybe not all music. I’m sure there are quite a few of us who, in the back of our minds, wonder why songs like this exist, or wonder if it would be possible to simply get rid of them.
After a lot of thought, I’ve decided: I don’t think so, and I have an explanation which involves some backstory.
P.S. This is the article I sent Chris about why dance music is so popular right now.
Observations on the Korean Bar →
rjkoehler.com
Five year old blog post, came up in a recent metafilter thread on exam villages in South Korea. Some good stuff in the comments, but OMG, so much colonialist language. Take this sentence:
“Few Korean lawyers are threatened by Uncle B, but the prospect of either “Koreatown Mike” or Chulsoo the yuhaksaeng calling themselves “lawyer” after US law school (Mike’s case) or, worse yet, some patty-cake nine-month LL.M./state bar exam combo (Chulsoo’s case) has them quite exercised.”
When I did my History thesis on the Philippine-American War (well, outlined it at least…) there was this same kind of slangy insider status display + dismissive slotting people into their place in the hierarchy thing going on.
An interview with the Language of Happiness Guy →
scientificamerican.com
More things you can find out about people via how often they use pronouns.
Categories in which consumer spending has risen →
innovationandgrowth.wordpress.com
3 out of 4 for me. I wanna point out, though, that clothes and personal care products *give you a competitive advantage* in the job market, especially if you are a woman. We’ve been sloppy in the US for a long time I think, due to general prosperity.
3. Televisions Consumption: 287.4% since 2006 No, that’s not a misprint. The government adjusts for the size of the television, among other things, and the average size screen has soared since 2006. If we don’t adjust for size and other variables, Americans are spending 12.7% more on televisions today compared to 2006. Total personal consumption outlays on televisions, according to the BEA: About $40 billion, pretty much all imported. Do you really need an even bigger TV?
Interesting. So is the rest of his list of categories where consumer spending has gone up since 2006.
Also I must note that I mused about the possibility of measuring the aggregate square footage of American television sets in the Consumed Newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.
This link via Marginal Revolution.
Amazon.co.uk's biggest movers and shakers in the last 24 hours →
amazon.co.uk
For posterity, they are:
- Gelert Folding Shovel
- Aluminium Alloy Baseball Bat 30” 32” and 34” Sizes (34”)
- Cimac Telescopic Chrim Steel With Case Nunchaku (Colour : Chrome Plated)
- Highlander Glenderry Four Man Tent
- BB-1 baseball bat in aluminium
- Rucanor Aluminium Baseball Bat, Silver - 60 cm
- Pocket Shark
- Kubotan [Misc.]
- Metal Training Kubotan, Black
- Midwest Adult Slugger Wood Bat
- Bronx Baseball Bat & Ball Set
- Midwest American ash Wodden Ba
- Aresson Image Rounders Bat Green
- Bronx 32” Wooden Baseball Bat
- RDX Gel Weight lifting Fitness Training Gloves Gym White/Black
- Midwest Adult Aluminium Bat - Silver/Black, 34 inch
- Omron Walking Style Pro Pedometer
- Jansport SuperBreak Daypack / Super Break Daypack
Also, http://pitchfork.com/news/43474-sonypias-warehouse-burns-in-uk-riots/
The Language of Happiness →
economist.com
You can predict how much two writers admire each other by how similarly they use “functional” words in their writing. Freud and Jung were on very good terms; Sylvia Plath’s writing style changed to match Ted Hughes’ more than the other way around.
Really cool paper, and you can read the whole thing if you click the link in the last paragraph.
July 2011
3 posts
Alan Quatermain: My Review of the Kobo App →
quatermain.tumblr.com
Folks at Apple doing their bit to keep the walled garden walled.
Given the immense amount of vitriol in the iTunes Store reviews against Kobo’s “decision” to remove the store from our app, I posted a ‘review’ of my own, explaining the decision. I felt this was about the only way I could let people know that we haven’t just decided, capriciously, to yank…
Apple is playing hardball.
June 2011
3 posts
Why film schools teach screenwriters not to pass the Bechdel test →
thehathorlegacy.com
And in a similar vein…. old but good.
