There's battle lines being drawn.
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong.
Young people speaking their minds
getting so much resistance from behind

Sunday, June 7, 2015

Linkee-poo, baby needs some protection, but I'm a kid like everyone else

Tie a yellow ribbon round the old, oak tree. I wonder if all those people and all their yellow (and now purple) ribbons realize they're continuing a long held pagan ritual? Probably not.

John Scalzi wants your happy puppy… photos. And for every one posted to his blog, he'll donate a $1 to Con-or-Bust up to $1000. Good cause, good fun.

"As part of a photo series by employment law firm Thomas Mansfield, university graduates were asked to reveal the weirdest and most offensive questions they’ve been asked while interviewing for jobs. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the women’s responses proved just how prevalent gender discrimination in the workplace continues to be." (Grokked from Janiece)

"In papers published last month in Physics of Plasmas and Nature Communications, the Tri Alpha team reveals how fast ions, edge biasing, and other improvements have enabled them to produce FRCs lasting 5 milliseconds, a more than 10-fold improvement in lifetime, and reduced heat loss." Fusion, baby! (Grokked from Dan)

In search of the Red Cross's $500 million in Haiti relief. Hmm, not here. Not over there. I wonder where it did go?

The "Malice of Alice" collection. Using cosplay and photography to help bond a new family, and work through issues. You go, girl! Oh and screw the detractors. They just don't want you to remind them that life for little girls isn't all peaches and cream (and it makes them uncomfortable because they never faced those problems in their own lives if they've lived through it themselves, or never even had exposure to them). (Grokked from Janiece)

Screw transplants of foreign tissue or robotic arms, we'll grow you a brand new limb that is made of you. Okay, anyone else digging the Frankenstein vibe of this? (Grokked from Chuck Wendig)

Days of future past, the 'risto'. (Grokked from John)

"To be fair, European companies have more restrictions on how much they can give than U.S.-based companies do. But not only are the biggest U.S. companies spending far more to influence U.S. politics, their money is going to politicians who are actively fighting efforts to price carbon in the United States." Some perspective on the oil companies' letter asking for a carbon-tax. Also note, a carbon tax allows the companies to drill and burn as much as they want, they just have to pay a little bit of the true costs (decreased health, air pollution, etc). This is different from a cap-and-trade deal which would limit the amount of carbon being put into the atmosphere. (Grokked from Paolo Bacigalupi)

"(A) new paper has been published showing that the global warming 'hiatus' or 'pause' or whatever you want to call it doesn’t exist." This is how science works (when it works well). "Oh, you think this is true, okay, I don't. Let's check the actual data." That's the difference between wild-ass speculation and actual fucking-science. This is what science gets right. Oh, and we're boned. (Grokked from Morgan J Locke)

It's like Cleveland Police Officer Michael Brelo has anger management issues. Who could have known?

"When feelings become more important than issues" in higher education. Just in case you thought I was being hyperbolic in my response to that "open letter to my freshman class" I linked to earlier. Note that the fear this professor is telling you about is exactly the problem that tenure was meant to address (also, why teacher unions have strict rules on how and whom can be fired and for what reasons, every time I hear a conservative, or liberal, talk about how we need to remove those rules I always come back to this argument, they just want to get rid of the teachers the students and their parents find troubling because they're being made to think). Also note that this is actually an article on political discourse of which Stephen Colbert so ability demonstrated in the character he played in his now defunct show (no, I don't expect that character will be the one that replaces Letterman, which will disappoint a large percentage of his followers), where "truthiness" and his feeling something is right was more important that actual facts. "Teachers and academics are the best candidates to foster this discussion, but most of us are too scared and economically disempowered to say anything." As the left adopts this strategy of the right, this doesn't do us any credit or any good. (Grokked from Ferrett Steinmetz)

A liberal professor responds to that other liberal professor and outlines what the problem really is. (Note it's not liberalism) (Grokked from N. K. Jemisin)

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