Whiteness was never about skin color or a natural inclination to stand with one’s own; it was designed to racialize power and conveniently dehumanize outsiders and the enslaved.
We have surveillance video from the hotels that shows people turn on the shower, direct the nozzle at the wall and then leave the room for the whole day.
Dmitry Kozak, deputy Prime Minister responsible for the Olympic preparations, assuring people that the Sochi failures have been exaggerated by western visitors.
(via ericcannedy)
As Americans have grown increasingly comfortable with traditional surveillance cameras, a new, far more powerful generation is being quietly deployed that can track every vehicle and person across an area the size of a small city, for several hours at a time. … A single camera mounted atop the Washington Monument, McNutt boasts, could deter crime all around the Mall.
It looks more and more as if high levels of extra antioxidants can actually give people cancer, or at the very least, help along any cancerous cells that might arise on their own. Evidence for this has been piling up for years now from multiple sources, but if you wander through a grocery or drug store, you’d never have the faintest idea that there could be anything wrong with scarfing up all the antioxidants you possibly can.
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Thanks for the submitting -Â See you on Friday for our 1840s GIF Party!Â
"Surfbort."
This goes perfectly with Outkast’s “Hey Ya”
Update: Also perfect with Shaggy’s “Boombastic”. Don’t take my word for it!
The key is to remember that the surveillance and the abuse doesn’t occur when people look at the data, it occurs when people gather the data in the first place.
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universalequalityisinevitable:
David Suzuki, from this video.
Much as we marvel at Babylonian clay tablets listing measures of grain, future generations will find just as much meaning in our log files as they will in the media we consume.
A Guide to White Privilege for White People Who Think They’ve Never Had Any
Talk a little to your delivery guys. Get to know them. Ask them if the credit card tips are getting to them, and if not, complain at the restaurant and at Seamless, because that shit ain’t right. But mostly, just tip in cash.
You want to make metro areas of 6 million people prepared for things like this? Stop subsidizing the automobile. Stop making it so damned easy for us to build a society that’s so fragile, that’s so close to the breaking point, that the world ends and we have to sleep in our offices when we’re seven whole miles from home (as one tale had it). This isn’t solved by various Atlanta area regional governments providing more services, more salt and plow trucks, or even more transit facilities. This is solved by not subsidizing a lifestyle that makes it completely impossible to have any sort of resilience.
The people who say that are idiots. Blogging was never alive. It’s the people that matter. There will always be a small number who are what I call “natural born bloggers.” They were blogging before there were blogs, they just didn’t know what it was called. Julia Child was a blogger as was Benjamin Franklin and Patti Smith.
I’ll break you in half. Like a boy.
So I was asked to be on Roger Ailes’ television program and the moment we sat down I said, “Mr. Ailes, I’m the most conservative person you’ve ever interviewed.” (laughs) And he was surprised, said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, most conservatives just want to turn the back the clock 100 years, but I’d like to turn back the clock thousands of years, to when we lived in small communities and took care of each other.” He said, “Well, isn’t that just romantic?” And I said, “No, I don’t think the human race will survive unless we do something like that.”
New Zealand School Find Less Structure Improves Children’s Behavior
Ripping up the playground rulebook is having incredible effects on children at an Auckland school.
Chaos may reign at Swanson Primary School with children climbing trees, riding skateboards and playing bullrush during playtime, but surprisingly the students don’t cause bedlam, the principal says.
The school is actually seeing a drop in bullying, serious injuries and vandalism, while concentration levels in class are increasing.
Principal Bruce McLachlan rid the school of playtime rules as part of a successful university experiment.
"We want kids to be safe and to look after them, but we end up wrapping them in cotton wool when in fact they should be able to fall over."
Letting children test themselves on a scooter during playtime could make them more aware of the dangers when getting behind the wheel of a car in high school, he said.
"When you look at our playground it looks chaotic. From an adult’s perspective, it looks like kids might get hurt, but they don’t."
Swanson School signed up to the study by AUT and Otago University just over two years ago, with the aim of encouraging active play.
However, the school took the experiment a step further by abandoning the rules completely, much to the horror of some teachers at the time, he said.
When the university study wrapped up at the end of last year the school and researchers were amazed by the results.
Mudslides, skateboarding, bullrush and tree climbing kept the children so occupied the school no longer needed a timeout area or as many teachers on patrol.
Instead of a playground, children used their imagination to play in a “loose parts pit” which contained junk such as wood, tyres and an old fire hose.
If I had revealed what I knew about these unconstitutional but classified programs to Congress, they could have charged me with a felony.
The choice is not whether to allow the NSA to spy. The choice is between a communications infrastructure that is vulnerable to attack at its core and one that, by default, is intrinsically secure for its users.
An Open Letter from US Researchers in Cryptography and Information Security
I’m almost surprised the stock market hasn’t crashed yet.
Roger said that he didn’t know if he could believe in God. He had his doubts. But toward the end, something really interesting happened. That week before Roger passed away, I would see him and he would talk about having visited this other place. I thought he was hallucinating. I thought they were giving him too much medication. But the day before he passed away, he wrote me a note: “This is all an elaborate hoax.”
Its About Time. A Victory - Unlawful Mass Arrests During 2004 RNC
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from  Holy Scrap.
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How the iPhone 5S replaced my Fitbit
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from  iPhone Atlas: Apple iPhone tips, how-tos, troubleshooting, and news - CNET Reviews.
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I’ve stopped carrying my Fitbit, now that the Fitbit app can track my steps using the iPhone 5S’s built-in motion tracker.
(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)I haven’t charged my Fitbit Ultra in over three weeks. And I doubt I ever will again.
Ever since I bought an iPhone 5S, I’ve kept an eye on how the embedded M7 motion coprocessor co-processor chip, which can track and store motion information, would be used. It wasn’t clear when the iPhone 5S was launched exactly how the M7’s data would be available, but after a few months, fitness apps like the Nike+ Move starting adding support for basic step-counting functionality.
While I started tracking my steps with both my Fitbit and Nike’s app at first, the clincher for me was when the Fitbit app for iOS was updated at the end of 2013, allowing the standard Fitbit app to track steps using the iPhone 5S’s internal hardware. Now I could get nearly the same activity tracking us… u… [Read more]
    
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Probability that computerisation will lead to job losses in next two decades, The Economist, 2013 (via Twitter / Malbonnington)
How to live like a king for very little
I totally screwed up #5, but this is some great advice.
PAPERMAG: New Documentary Perfectly Captures NYC In the 90s
I’ll always be drawn to New York like a moth to a flame.
An abridged history of Miss Officer and Mr. Truffles
A photo of a Canadian RCMP officer taking a pic of a young bear makes the news in 2011.
The photo gets famous on Tumblr in late 2013. Someone in the reblog suggests that it’d make a great cartoon:
An artist (lemonteaflower) creates single pane art of the imagined cartoon…
