And I thought, how crude, how cruel, how ignorant, how disrespectful of these children. What a set-up. Who would do that to kids?

This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.

I told him he should ask his friend to come over for pizza and play video games but his new friend always had an excuse.

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Brownian motion. Recording random movement as a continuous line. (via Brownian Examples Processing.org)

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misterjt:

A new poster from the National Congress of American Indians makes its post. Here’s some background from Native Appropriations on the push to end the use of Native mascots.

(via bitch-media)

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laryngealprominence:

Came across this site full of high-resolution scans of public domain posters and decided to make iPhone wallpapers out of a few of my favorites. You can grab them here.

Obamacare, as the Affordable Care Act is popularly known, could fundamentally change the relationship between working Americans and their government. This could pose an existential threat to the small-government credo that has defined the G.O.P. for four decades.

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"Things in nature often move in complicated ways."

Rather than think of ourselves as isolated islands of microbes, the Hadza teach us that we are better thought of as an archipelago of islands, once seamlessly connected to one another and to a larger metacommunity of microbes via a microbial super highway that runs through the gut and skin/feathers of every animal and water source on the landscape (for those of you keeping up with your homework, this is Macroecology 101). The same can be said for plants and their extraordinary diversity of microbes above (phyllosphere) and below ground (rhizosphere) that the Hadza, and once all humans, interact with on a nearly continues basis.

The boys played endlessly at tracking and hunting, and both boys and girls played at finding and digging up edible roots. They played at tree climbing, cooking, building huts, and building other artefacts crucial to their culture, such as dugout canoes. They played at arguing and debating, sometimes mimicking their elders or trying to see if they could reason things out better than the adults had the night before around the fire. They playfully danced the traditional dances of their culture and sang the traditional songs, but they also made up new ones. They made and played musical instruments similar to those that adults in their group made. Even little children played with dangerous things, such as knives and fire, and the adults let them do it, because ‘How else will they learn to use these things?’ They did all this, and more, not because any adult required or even encouraged them to, but because they wanted to. They did it because it was fun and because something deep inside them, the result of aeons of natural selection, urged them to play at culturally appropriate activities so they would become skilled and knowledgeable adults.

Libraries aren’t free. And the work that goes into keeping them running (which is a lot more than keeping a bookshelf stocked) is complicated, sometimes thankless and under attack from people who think somehow that libraries are not fashionable enough, not hip or current enough, that our day has passed.

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new-aesthetic:

Designed Conflict Territories- Tobias Revell

The thing we have to consider is who and what we are protesting against. I won’t regurgitate the stacktivism or infrastructure fictions ideas. Chances are, that if you’re here, you know them already but there’s a general idea that the very shape of global geopolitics has changed in the last 20 years or so and the people in charge are not who we thought they were. To re-word a great Dylan Moran gag: While we were talking, Google very, very gradually built a future around us. (Please replace Google with whatever or whoever you like to satisfy your own biases.) The point stands that the entities constructing and steering our futures, or what they often like to call the future - with all the baggage of powerlessness and inevitability that that wording brings - aren’t states, and they work on a completely different geopolitical strata: There is no town square for Google.

When Edward Snowden leaked the details of the PRISM program to the world press, he wasn’t revealing anything. We already knew, at some very fundamental level that a vast apparatus existed to observe and harvest us and our ‘data’. Whether through decades of dystopic training or the simple maths of adding ruthless western capitalism and it’s history of paranoia to enabling technology we knew that these things were happening. I wrote some time ago about the fact that the rebalance of power enacted by the PRISM revelations is different to what is easily read - they forced us to react. Snowden issued a call for action, and the world failed to respond. I now have a term for this retreating reaction - shocked acquiescence. When faced with something so large and unfathomable as PRISM or climate change, the most common reaction is to accept or pretend it’s not happening and move on.

So why this response? ‘There’s no town square for Google’ wasn’t just a tweetable bite. We have no space in which we can protest, in which we can occupy and configure a conflict besides or in front of the thing we wish to protest and air our grievances against. For both the new geopolitics and the threat of climate change, there is no common language, no common space, no commons.

Read the full essay.

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chartier:

Siri can flip coins, roll dice

finerios:

So far, I can’t figure out how to make Siri roll a d20. However, Siri’s coin might occasionally fall into a crack.

I’m not sure how far back Siri’s been able to do this, but it’s not an iOS 7 addition. Siri can do it on my iOS 6 test device, too.

[via Jerrod H]

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secret-dollhouse:

“I always get asked, ‘Where do you get your confidence?’ I think people are well meaning, but it’s pretty insulting. Because what it means to me is, ‘You, Mindy Kaling, have all the trappings of a very marginalized person. You’re not skinny, you’re not white, you’re a woman. Why on earth would you feel like you’re worth anything?’ There are little Indian girls out there who look up to me, and I never want to belittle the honor of being an inspiration to them. But while I’m talking about why I’m so different, white male show runners get to talk about their art.”

—Mindy Kaling for the win, ladies and gentlemen.

There is no post-Civil War precedent for what the House GOP is doing now. It is radical, and dangerous for the economy and our process of government, and its departure from past political disagreements can’t be buffed away or ignored.

Larry Page is not going to go to jail. Marissa Mayer is not going to jail - she’s already said she thinks it’s tantamount to treason! The large corporations - whose own business model, after all, is surveillance - have folded their hands and said “we’ve done everything we can within the law to fight this”.

Smashing our smartphones is not a solution. If only it were that simple. That promise of simplicity, in fact, might be why it is so tempting to causally link personal and social problems to certain technologies. It offers a certain comfort to us because we don’t have to look to our own crooked hearts for the source of our problems, and it holds out the promise of a relatively painless and straightforward solution.

The assumption the media makes is that something is not important unless a familiar, male white face does it. So, when Dave Eggers decided to rewrite my book as his own novel about a young woman working her way up through Facebook, the Wall Street Journal called it a treatment of “the essential issues of the day.”

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horreure:

Rick Owens S/S 2014

Paris, 26th September 2013. Rick Owens has raised the bar.

White chicks? Skinny models? Walk-pose-exit-straightface runway show? Forget those. We got something better for you: Rick Owens Spring/Summer 2014 show.

The show was a step dance performance. As if the show wasn’t unusual enough, the cast is truly something different from hundreds of shows we’ve been seeing from New York, London, Milan and Paris in this fashion month. It was performed by step dancer girls, and what makes it different is, the majority of them are black, and all of them are plus sizes.

Of course, there’s definitely debates about the presentation. Some love it. Some hate it. Some confused. Of course, when you see the runway pictures in Style.com you won’t see the usual thing. You’ll be confused, especially if you don’t watch the video of the show. But surely, you can tell something is going on.

I think the message is crystal clear. Fashion is an interpretation of visual beauty. And most of the time, fashion didn’t represent universal beauty. Fashion often represent only one form of beauty: White and skinny. Which is a shame, because fashion should be representing universal beauty. And when you’re not in on of the “white” or “skinny” category, people valued your self less. You, valued your self less.

Even if it’s not the best collection, this is the best show, best casting of Spring/Summer 2014 for me.

Rick Owens is breaking all rules, murdering all stereotypes of fashion with this show. The message is crystal clear here: DIVERSITY

This is a “FUCK YOU” in the face for all stereotyping in fashion industry.

My most positive association with Whole Foods is that it was the place I used to steal tea-tree oil toothpicks from when I was quitting smoking. It worked! So thank you, Whole Foods, for having lousy security guards! What goes on in there otherwise has always been pretty offensive to me. A kind of lifestyle-porn orgy, carefully calibrated to make the affluent feel better about themselves and their place in the world.

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blah blah blah, garbage.

Whether our teens will eventually regret the things they post online is the wrong debate to have—or at least, it’s a debate we should have later on. Instead, we should be asking ourselves why we, as a society, discourage the real teachers, counselors, and principals from seeing a full picture of what their students are up to and what can be done to help.

While gentrification is inevitable, its character is not. Small, personal decisions, like buying your coffee at the local place instead of at Starbucks, can give gentrification in your neighborhood a more organic, human character. So will voting for liberal candidates, who support subsidies for the poor and the elderly, and also donating to and volunteering with charities that support these groups. Don’t be a destructive transient: the future of your neighborhood, and your city, is in your hands.