Link Archive 12/1/13 – 12/24/13

 Uncategorized  1 Response »
Dec 242013
 

Murca BibleHey, people have been doing it for 2000 years, why stop now? Right-Wing Group Seeks Help Rewriting the Bible Because It’s Not Conservative Enough. As an aside, I love Conservapedia. It’s the physical incarnation of Poe’s Law.

“I can spank this kid. That will teach him to stop.
It sure might.
Just like if I want a woman to shut up, I might smack her across the mouth.
Just like if I don’t like what some guy is saying to me, maybe I punch him in the throat.”

“Bilbo, it turns out, makes a terrific heroine. She’s tough, resourceful, humble, funny, and uses her wits to make off with a spectacular piece of jewelry. Perhaps most importantly, she never makes an issue of her gender—and neither does anyone else.”

1995 says the internet is a fad. (He does make some good and depressing points near the end)

Stross wants BitCoin to die – “BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions”

Twisted. This is good. It’s the Aladdin story, told from Jafar’s point of view (much like Wicked). It is a musical, and is in turns hilarious and sad and touching. This is one of the best things we’ve seen this year. It is better than any Hollywood movie we’ve paid to see in the past 12 months. We’re buying the DVD just because we feel these people deserve some money for what they’ve done.
You can watch it free. Next time you’re going to stream a movie from Netflix, or pop in a DVD, consider pulling up this instead. It’s a wonderful way to spend an evening.

The true story of why NORAD tracks Santa.
“Suddenly, on Christmas Eve, phone calls intended for St. Nick were being received on a top-secret NORAD line […]
“Sir?” Shoup was probably, at this point, trying not to panic. Silence on the crisis line. “Can you read me alright?” ”

Let’s Ban Weddings (and Baby Showers)
“Try to make the life decisions your 37-year-old self would want you to make, not the ones the seven-year-old you fantasized about.”

All the arguments for getting rid of pennies, summed up in handy 4-minute YouTube form.

The only good BuzzFeed article ever. :) 25 Animated GIFs That Are Actually Just The Same JPEG Of Carrot Top. Seriously.

Medieval combat. I guess those suits of armor were actually fairly mobile. And looks like a lot of combat was more about physically overpowering your opponent than fancy sword work.

Anaea Lay on the Michigan Cuddle House, which I didn’t know was a thing. (As in, a professional service. I am aware of cuddle parties). Looks like we have one in Boulder too. And ours appears to still be in business.

“To be a PC, you’ve got to involve yourself in the Plot of the Story. […] Sometimes I don’t really understand why so few people try to get involved in the Plot. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s that the important things are accomplished not by those best suited to do them, or by those who ought to be responsible for doing them, but by whoever actually shows up.”— Eliezer Yudkowsky

A video smearing low-wage protesters and unions, created by ex-lobbyists for Walmart and Darden Restaurants. It’s bizarre, I suspected it was a satire at first. It feels like the sort of thing The Onion would put out… it perfectly matches their editorial cartoon.

Godzilla Haiku. Some good stuff here.
“Do you not yet see?
The city is your prison
I grant you freedom”

A six-part post by a restaurant owner who eliminated tipping in his establishment explaining why tipping makes all restaurants worse, makes the business harder to run, and why it’s borderline immoral. (part 5 is particularly interesting)
“I’ve become convinced that thoughtful cultures who value civil rights will make tipping not just optional but illegal.”
…In time I drew the conclusion that our tipping ritual is only nominally a business arrangement. Under the surface, it is much more a convention about sex and power.
…But when attention-for-payment is removed, and the female server transforms from a kind of imitation sex worker to a fellow person with her own robust sexuality — this is now a moment of vulnerability for everyone involved. It’s a threat to the male patron who no longer has the prospect of withholding income to protect himself from rejection.

Quoting Brienne:
“This baby seal makes me extremely uncomfortable.
… It learns which activities increase the odds of being pet, so it becomes cuter over time.
Additionally, it makes distressed sounds if you hit it or hold it upside down. Makes sense, because we want to discourage the patients from being violent, right?
…I imagine it would learn to pretend to be injured when you aren’t paying it enough attention. It would have no qualms about that whatsoever, nor would it be trying to make you feel bad, because it doesn’t have any concept of “guilt”. It just knows what does and doesn’t cause pets […] if I’m right, this is a very concrete example of the sort of thing that happens when an apparently benevolent intelligence has totally alien values”

All the best people are trekkies. Like MLK Jr.

What it Was Really Like to Fly in The Golden Age of Travel. Every so often I’m reminded that the past was horrible, and we should never go back.

Thorium-Fueled Automobile Engine Needs Refueling Once a Century

That oft-cited study that mice fed GMO corn got cancer at an increased rate? It’s being retracted.
“a treatment group of male rats receiving 33% GM corn and Roundup had no difference to the control group, and two treatment groups receiving Roundup (A and C) had the same or less incidence of cancer compared with the control group.”

Christian Swingers Site. Yes, even Christians deserve fulfilling sex lives. Not surprisingly, all the christian news sites are outraged.

Lawsuit Filed Today on Behalf of Chimpanzee Seeking Legal Personhood (Technically some humans are seeking legal personhood for the chimpanzee, I don’t think he’s seeking it himself)

Move early, move often

 Personal  No Responses »
Dec 202013
 

almost everything I ownI’ve moved five times in the last six years. The first two times it was forced on me by circumstance, but I’ve come to enjoy it. Nowadays I try to move every 1-2 years. I recommend it to everyone.

You learn a lot about yourself when you’re forced to move often. One of the early things you learn is just how worthless most physical possessions are. I used to accumulate stuff, like everyone else. Just because it was the thing to do. But when you move often you become conscious of how much it costs simply to have things, even if you don’t use them. This cost becomes most clear on moving day.

Helping your friends move is the go-to example of things friends do for each other just because they’re friends. But it’s still quite an imposition, and it’s assumed that you won’t impose on your friends in this way more than once every five or six years – if that. When you start requesting help every 12 months, you start to really feel the social capital that consumes. When you see a friend moving the same box that they moved last year AND the year before that, and which hasn’t even been opened in the time between any of these three moves, you feel on a gut level that those THINGS are costing you a lot. The time and energy of your friends is expensive, you don’t want to squander that social capital. Whatever is in that box has not been even slightly useful to you – it certainly has not paid for the social capital it’s consuming with utility to you. Your belongings must pay rent. If they aren’t paying rent they are wasting your life. It was at this point that I started throwing things away very liberally. Last time I moved the entire operation (from first item being picked up to move to the truck to last item being taken out of the truck – including drive time) took only four hours, with a grand total of four people working (one of them being myself).

Nowadays before I buy anything I always think “Will this bring enough enjoyment/utility to my life to be worth moving in 6 months, and then every 12 months for decades?” The answer is often no. I recently came across TNG action figures – still in the original packaging! – going for $3 each at a thrift store. God do I love TNG. And the entire crew was there! But was it worth that? After a couple minutes I decided no… this was one more thing that was extremely cool right now, and would end up in a box and never see the light of day again after my next move. So I passed.

I know it’s a cliché, but your possessions really do end up weighing you down. Move often, find out what is actually important. Jettison the rest.

New Year’s Resolutions are for Suckers

 Personal  No Responses »
Dec 182013
 


I don’t understand the point of New Year’s Resolutions. They seem specifically engineered to prevent people from accomplishing things, and feel bad about it.

If you want to do something – do it. Don’t set artificial limits on yourself. Do you want to start working out? Why put it off for another three weeks until some magical date has passed? What better day than today?

I mean that seriously. If there IS a better day, then do it that day. Are you are a point where you are extremely stressed for time, or very low on energy (perhaps due to sickness)? Then it makes sense to wait. But if there is no compelling reason to delay then you should not delay. You have an advantage in the present moment because your attention is already on your goal, and it might not be later. Exploit that advantage. Doing so, you’ll also gain the benefits of reaching your goal sooner than you otherwise would have.

It seems that New Year’s Resolutions are just ways for people to signal that they WANT to want something. But they don’t ACTUALLY want it. If you ACTUALLY want to get in shape, or write a book, an arbitrary date will not stop you. You’ll start now, even if the day you switched to actually wanting it was three days before New Year’s Day. Fuck waiting three more days, why the hell should I? I want to start making progress now.

Making a resolution, on the other hand, is a way to signal to others “I want to want to be in shape. So I’ll pretend to act like someone who actually wants that. For a few weeks.”

Unfortunately, afterwards people abandon their resolutions, because they never really wanted them in the first place. And they are hit with a crushing dissappointment – they often feel like failures or dropouts. This is a mistake – they did not fail at their goal, because they were never really persuing it. You should not feel bad for not doing something you didn’t want to do anyway. In fact, you shouldn’t have wasted your time and effort pretending to want it. Spend that on your actual goals.

Be honest with yourself. Persue what you want. Ignore the rest. If you’re setting a goal at an arbitrary time defined by someone else, this is a good sign that you don’t actually want that. Don’t make New Years Resolutions. They’re a sucker’s game.

SF/F Review – Auraria

 Book Club Review  No Responses »
Dec 132013
 

Auraria Tim WestoverAuraria, by Tim Westover

Synopsis: A land developer buys up property in a quirky, haunted valley in late 1800’s small-town Georgia

Book Review: This book came to our club’s attention via the 2012 Fall Battle of the Books, where it made it to the final round. I was very excited, as this is a self-published book, and I’m always very much in support of screwing The Man. Self-published works that garner critical acclaim while bypassing the old dinosaur gatekeepers make me all warm and fuzzy inside. So I really wanted to like this book. And I will say that the prose is beautiful. Excellently crafted; the imagery is extremely evocative. The sense of place is palpable, every page immerses one deeply into the old south. The writing is witty and charming. But… nothing happens. I like for things to happen in my books, and this wasn’t that sort of book. No one grows, there’s no excitement, nothing changes very much. It’s hard to care about any of the characters. This didn’t deter several of our book club members, who still enjoyed it anyway, but I was bored to tears and had to struggle to get through it. If you listen to Welcome to Night Vale you are familiar with this type of story. Neat quirky things happen, the end. It’s perfect and very entertaining in 20 minute doses every two weeks. To have to plow through 400 pages of that non-stop is awful. It goes from being enjoyable to boring to downright annoying. I feel that this would have worked better as a collection of shorts? In any case – Not Recommended.

Book Club Review: The lack of any plot gives book club discussions a very clear thing to focus on: the writing craft. That’s clearly a good thing for the author, because the writing itself is exquisite. But Auraria is unlikely to spark any deep conversation. It doesn’t take any strong positions and doesn’t seem to have much to say. There’s not much there to provoke further comments or inflame the passions. Not Recommended.

Because I’m a goddamn citizen

 Musings On Present Day  No Responses »
Dec 102013
 

kevinmckiddSome friends have been deriding the recent ruling that ordered a local cake-maker to serve gay couples, saying it is against the principles of the country. It is anti-freedom, or anti-liberty, or something similar. These are fairly liberal friends. I believe they are wrong.

In the legal sense, this falls in line with the Federal Civil Rights Act. It guarantees all people the right to “full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.“ And now society is expanding that to include sexual orientation. If you want to discriminate you get to make your business a private members-only affair.

One of the main functions of government is to protect its citizen’s rights. Part of the social contract as most people understand it is the right to walk into a public business and exchange your money for whatever they’re selling without discrimination (within reason). You have the arbitrary and unlimited right to not deal with anyone you don’t want to on a personal or private basis. But if you’re running a public-facing business, you get to treat all Americans equally.

For random Joe Baker to refuse to serve an orderly customer is for him to announce that he is above the government. He refuses to recognize whom the government has designated as a citizen. He will, using his own metric, decide who he deems worthy of citizenship regardless of what the government has decided.

This is a challenge to government power which the government cannot let pass. The government demands a lot from its citizens – taxes, military service, adherence to laws – and in exchange it provides certain benefits. A major one being the assurance that all citizens will be treated equally. If someone has made the sacrifices and met the conditions that citizenship requires, and then the government fails to enforce these rights, there will be much less incentive to be an American citizen. The title must be worth something, and this random schmuck is trying to degrade its value. No strong government can let this sort of challenge go if it wishes to keep people interested in being a part of it.

Comes The Huntsman – Rachael Acks

 Personal  2 Responses »
Dec 082013
 

Poison_Apple_by_CuteEmo6923This started out as a reply to Anaea Lay’s deconstruction of Comes The Huntsman (by Rachael Acks). It got too long to be a comment, so I turned it into a blog post. As the old adage says – “If you have more than a couple of lines to say, don’t clog up someone else’s comments section. Get your own blog and post it there, where it can be ignored properly.” :)

I think the direct-metaphor approach is too literal for a story like this. It didn’t occur to me until Anaea mentioned it that this could be read as two intertwined narratives. I read it much like I read Vellum – something happened, but the enormity of the event can never be put into words. So instead the event is repeated and re-examined, over and over, from countless different angles. Every story is a separate story, not a continuing narrative, with separate characters. But every story is the same story, and the characters are always the same – in essence if not in flesh. And if the story, the event, could be put into words, it would be a simple two-word story: people die.

The apples are, if one had to assign them a meaning, deep personal connections with other people. The heart, along with the drawing hand, is the willingness to feel and be vulnerable. The Huntsman is people you care about. But… never directly. Only in a vague “gesturing at the emotions underlying the concepts” way, so they’re fluid. Sometimes they’re literal.

i. “it was that same urge we all feel for the split second we look out over the railing of a bridge and wonder what it would be like to jump and fly away. I was never brave or mad enough to fly from a bridge. I should never have been mad enough to eat that apple.” – taking a chance on somone is scary. Connecting with someone, caring about them, makes you able to be hurt by them.

ii. see, told ya so

iii. you can be hurt simply by accident. No malice intended. And there was no way this could have been prevented – the hurt comes about by the very nature of who you are, and who the other person is. The only way this could have been avoided would be to never have formed a connection at all.

iv. you can be hurt beyond all reason by someone else acting to stop their own pain. How could this have been prevented? Too many knots, too many reasons, one cannot untangle the messes these humans make of their lives. But it happened right after the protagonist of iv lashed out and intentionally(?) hurt her friend, and it feels like an in-kind retributive strike. But one completely out of proportion to the crime, unimaginable in severity. The truth of fact may be different, but the truth of feeling says she’s to blame, and she cuts off her hand in penance. And she cuts off her vulnerability to others in defense.

v. A safe life. Prevent the hurt.

vi. A safe life also hurts. But not as much as the pain you’re defending against. It could never hurt as much as that pain did.

vii. A safe life. Is it living at all?

viii. Maybe the dull pain of a safe life isn’t worth it. Step outside, try again… Wait. No. Pain. Ow. God. Pain.

ix. So much pain. But different from the dull safe pain. Better. It is shared. This makes it tolerable.

x. The truth of feeling is altered. Time passed, the hurt heals. The defenses are now worse that what was being defended against, and the defender leaves her stronghold/prison. Normally this section would make up 98% of an Oprah bookclub book, and it would be boring and tedious and we’d all roll our eyes. That’s the difference between literary fiction and really good speculative fiction. A good SF writer makes it beautiful, and poetic, and cuts right inside you with words that say exactly what is needed and never a single letter beyond that. But never leaving out a single word that’s needed to get there. The end.

xi. And it was good. Or… better, at least.

God this is a good story. I’m again struck by it in the re-reading.

And I take it back, I guess there is a bit of a narrative. But it is, as Anaea said, emotional, not chronological. I think my only quibble with Anaea’s take on the story is that I feel it was being analyzed too literally. The friend/lover/Hunstman distinction shouldn’t be there… they all blend together into “person that I care about/can hurt me”. I don’t feel there is a breakthrough, only a passing of time. The sadness is always there, but it grows distant – and that is both awful and beautiful. Because people die, even though they shouldn’t.

Of course Rachael probably is shaking her head at how badly we misread everything she was trying to say. But that’s ok, that’s why we have death of the author. So everyone can get exactly what they most need from a piece of art, regardless of intentions. :)

 

Subverting the Christmas Tree – The Tree of Knowledge

 Musings On Present Day, Personal  2 Responses »
Dec 042013
 

Tree of KnowledgeAs most people already know, the Christmas Tree doesn’t have anything to do with Christianity. It was a pagan symbol for a pagan holiday, and when the Christian church appropriated the holiday they simply took many of its traditional customs and decorations along for the ride without question. I dunno if they were being clever or lazy, but it clearly worked.

It does make for a delicious point of irony however, which I exploit to multiply my enjoyment of the holiday immensely.

The early church fathers obviously never stopped to think about how this symbolism would be interpreted by someone unfamiliar with Christmas’s pagan origins, AND unfamiliar with Christian holiday traditions, but who IS very familiar with the Christian holy scriptures. Granted, such a combination would be very unusual back in their day. And, given that I haven’t heard what I’m about to say before, probably this day as well.

Assume no previous knowledge of Christmas at all, but a decent knowledge of one of the popular protestant bibles. If someone were to ask you about the most famous tree in the Christian myths, what would you say? Almost invariably – the Tree in the Garden of Eden which Adam & Eve ate from. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Some might mention the almost-as-famous Tree of Life, but that one didn’t get any screen time in the stories. More esoteric answers might include Daniel’s giant tree or Jesus’s cursed fig tree, but neither of those is as well known.

Furthermore, the fruit of those trees is inconsequential. When one observes an actual Christmas Tree as most people decorate it, there is great importance placed upon the fruits of the tree. Spherical glass ornaments, often elaborately decorated, are placed all over the tree. The resemblance to idealized, exaggerated fruits is striking. Lights are also hung from the tree, perhaps supernatural berries, glowing and enticing. Both are designed to catch the attention of the viewer. What biblical fruit is as important as the one which Adam and Eve ate in Genesis?

This seems somewhat odd though, because this Tree and its Fruit are not pleasing to the Christian God. As we read in the Genesis story, he instructed the humans to avoid this Tree, warning that it would kill them. When they did eat of its fruit he flew into a fearful rage and banished them from the Garden – setting angelic guards and burning swords at the entrance – to ensure they couldn’t get their hands on the Tree of Life as well. Why would a Christian be venerating the Tree of Knowledge?

Ah, but eating of the Fruit did bring benefits to mankind. First, it exposed the lies of Yahweh – they did not die. But far more importantly – it opened their eyes, bringing them knowledge and making them wise. In fact it made them as wise as God himself, thus his panic. (Gen 3:22 – And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”) In this way the tale is similar to that of Prometheus stealing fire from the Gods and giving it to Man. By their sacrifice all of humanity was uplifted, and we are now better, stronger, smarter than we were before. Enough so to be a  threat.

And this is why I love the Christmas Tree so much. It is a celebration of Mankind’s first steps forward into seizing our own destiny. Showing gratitude to those who came before us and paid the price so their children could aspire to greater. And giving the finger to a god who would keep us ignorant. The Christmas Tree of Knowledge says “We remember. You tried to keep us weak and servile, and you failed. We’re still growing in power and in knowledge, and we’re coming for you next.”

I love that most Christians don’t seem to realize this is what their holiday centerpiece implies, and it makes me smile every time I see one being raised. So put up your own Tree of Knowledge and celebrate humanity. And if you want to really drive the point home, put some educational books around the base, or replacing the star on top. Just so no one mistakes you for one who doesn’t grasp the significance of what we celebrate to this day.

The Dick Punch

 Musings On Present Day, Personal  1 Response »
Dec 022013
 

dick punchBack in the early days of my current relationship, before we were officially together, my SO punched me in the dick. We were at the Renaissance Festival, drinking a  bit, and she grabbed something from my hand and ran off with it. I took off after her, caught up, and grabbed at her shoulder. On instinct she spun right around, fist swinging in low, and socked me right in the junk. I collapsed to my knees. About a minute later the nearest security guy came by and said “That was the funniest damn thing I’ve seen this month, but you really need to clear the path for others.” That was the point I realized this girl was awesome, and this relationship could be going places.

I try hard to respect people. Part of respecting people is not hitting on them inappropriately. Unfortunately there are few clear rules on this matter. Be friendly, flirt, read cues, back off if the other party isn’t interested. Don’t hit on people at work (yours or theirs). Feel free to hit on people at bars and parties. But things in real life are fuzzy. For example – how do conventions fit in to this? Some people think of them more as work, others as more of a party. Not too long ago an open couple propositioned someone in a very ham-handed way, as recounted in this blog post. They approached a speaker at a con, whom they’d had some cursory contact with previously, and handed her a card with a topless photo as an invitation. They probably felt they were being honest and non-threatening, but the speaker was mortified and felt sexually harassed.

I’m especially wary of this as I call myself a feminist, and making women feel less safe is antithetical to what I’m working towards. I’m also very sex-positive; and so I only want to approach women/couples who are open to such an approach, and remain platonic friends and colleagues with those who aren’t. It can be difficult to determine who is receptive and who isn’t, as there’s no way to ask without implying your intent (yes, I know about Down (formerly Bang With Friends), but haven’t used it). Due to social custom it generally befalls the man to initiate these interactions, so even when you’re fairly confident the feeling is mutual, the guy is the one who has to take the risk of looking like a creep and making the women feel unsafe. It’s possible to misjudge a person or situation, maybe falling for wishful thinking. There is an omnipresent danger of crossing lines you didn’t mean to cross.

What’s worse – sometimes you won’t even know you’re doing it. Social pressures are so fucked up that – flying in the face of all reason – women are strongly discouraged from letting men know when they’re being creepers or assholes! The term “strongly discouraged” is a massive understatement. Take ElevatorGate. Rebecca Watson (who is fucking awesome!) was at a con, drinking into the wee hours. She went to retire to her hotel room, and a guy who’d been lurking around followed her into the elevator, and when they were alone and trapped together propositioned her. She said that this was uncomfortable/creepy, and mentioned in a video “Guys, don’t do that.” This was GREAT advice, given with a smile. It is good knowledge to have, and is particularly useful for young geeky males who don’t have a lot of experience with women and need to know these sorts of things. It should have gotten nods from the experienced and thanks from the inexperienced. Instead Rebecca was subjected to a months-long intimidation and harassment campaign, including daily rape threats and death threats. The words “ElevatorGate” still live in infamy. Because a woman dared to make the world a slightly better place for everyone who isn’t an enormous asshole.

I try to err on the side of caution, but there’s always some doubt. My now-SO had already demonstrated assertiveness/self-possession/honesty. But we’d only known each other a couple months and I was still wary. The dick-punch was like an exclamation point. It drove home that yes – she really was willing to assert her agency in all aspects. I would never have to worry that I was doing something to irritate or hurt her which she wasn’t letting me know about. I could trust her to look after her own interests, I could let go of always second-guessing my actions. She was an equal, not a thing to be protected.

It was the best start I can imagine for a relationship. :)

Link Archive 11/8/13 – 11/30/13

 Uncategorized  3 Responses »
Nov 302013
 

different-body-types-olympic-athletes-howard-schatz-14Ack, didn’t realize how long I’d let this go!

Thanksgiving is a Sci-Fi story. This post is both historically accurate and epic.
“Mr. S heads to the alien settlement […] What if he could use these aliens as a tool to unite the warring bands of survivors? Break the ex-governor’s stranglehold on the region? Start rebuilding civilization? What if he could make something completely new, a merger of American ingenuity and alien technology?”

The Body Shapes Of The World’s Best Athletes Compared Side By Side

Today I’m thankful for Death Metal. :)
Normal English: “You have to mow the lawn”
Death Metal English: “BRING DOWN THE SCYTHE OF GODS UPON THE NECKS OF THE GREEN-RIBBED LEGIONS AND SWEEP AWAY THEIR WRETCHED BODIES; THOU ART IMPLORED BY ME”

Hidden Treasure – Hard drive with $7M in BitCoins is buried in a landfill. This kinda thing makes me wonder. Obviously I’m not going to go digging in a landfill… What sort of calculation did my brain do to decide “the risk, cost, and effort is not likely to be worth it”? Was it in any way a rational decision, or just laziness/contentment?

If Harry Potter Was Made By Disney. Made me smile. :)

Y’all know I love me some Scott Anderson. His letter to the FDA.
…As a doctor, I am well aware of both the importance of genetic testing in medicine and of the difficulty in getting these tests through the normal medical system
…In contrast, 23andMe has raised awareness of genetics among the general population and given them questions and concerns, usually appropriate, which they can discuss with their doctor.
… I am distressed by the likely effects of this decision on genetic research. Many of the most promising medical advances in the pipeline are based on genetics, but one major bottleneck to genetic discovery is the absence of good genomes to work with. […] 23andMe has amassed what may be the largest database of such information anywhere in the world and is making it available to researchers (with appropriate privacy protection), an amazing public service for a for-profit company. Restricting their ability to provide this service will almost certainly delay life-saving genetic discoveries.
…In contrast to these important services provided by 23andMe, your stated worries about the company are, with all due respect, somewhat bizarre.

Cookie Monster’s I Love It parody – Me Want It (But Me Wait)

“the government is torturing my father until he dies … If you’re a politician who has ever voted against doctor-assisted suicide, or you would vote against it in the future, I hate your fucking guts and I would like you to die a long, horrible death.”
I hear very similar sentiments from people who work in the medical profession. A lot of end-of-life “care” is right out of horror novels/movies. And we’re letting it happen because we don’t care about the dying.

YouTube comments, acted out dramatically and with great gravitas. Awesome.

OK. Guess I’m going to buy a bidet. Only $36? To The Future!
“Medical Breakthrough: After 200 years of use by millions of people around the world and 20 years of widespread adoption in Japan, two medical researchers in the US finally checked to see if bidet-style toilets were more sanitary. What were their findings? handling your own feces with little tuffs of white paper turns out to be a bad long-term health strategy.
1.7 million Americans contract hospital acquired infections every year. Turns out 36% are urinary tract infections. US medical professional must have noticed that their Japanese counterparts only have a 5% rate of UTIs for their hospital acquired infections. Surely they connected these dots and started saving the extra 31,000 people / year dying in the US of these preventable infections? Nope. They aren’t even studying it. People don’t sue hospitals for the kinds of infections that they “give themselves” through “poor hygiene”.
Maybe a few generations from now, doctors will begin learning germ theory… or how to read medical literature from 2005… or how to notice when an entire other country just doesn’t have some problem that they do.
Here’s a quick thought experiment that can help. Imagine you had feces *anywhere* else on your body. Would you even briefly consider the solution of wiping it off with a piece of paper and going back to whatever you were doing?

Holy shit guys. Boba Fett killed Luke Skywalker’s Aunt and Uncle. Holy fucking shit.

WOAH! Vermont approves single-payer healthcare! Goes live in 2017. Are we finally going to join the rest of the developed world? I’m actually hopeful for once!

Since I first saw this I’ve been very amused by claims that god had to “dumb it down” for the pre-scientific peoples. It rewrites the genesis creation story so that it is 1) Scientifically Accurate, 2) Easily Comprehensible to Ancient Pre-Industrial Nomads, and 3) Very Poetic and Pretty Sounding. If we had something like THIS in the holy books, (“and I tell you this – light can become solid, and solid can become light”) then as we learned more about how reality really works we really WOULD be blown away. That would be pretty good evidence that something much more advanced than ancient humans had talked with our ancestors.


If you get antibiotics, take ALL of them. Don’t use antibiotic soap regularly. And support legislation to reform factory farming (80% of antibiotic use is in industrial food production, and those resistances spread).
The Post-Antibiotic Future.
“Before antibiotics, five women died out of every 1,000 who gave birth. One out of nine people who got a skin infection died, even from something as simple as a scrape or an insect bite. Three out of ten people who contracted pneumonia died from it. Ear infections caused deafness; sore throats were followed by heart failure. In a post-antibiotic era, would you mess around with power tools? Let your kid climb a tree? Have another child?”

State Rep. Uses Sledgehammer To Destroy Homeless People’s Possessions I was hoping he’d get a shank in the kidney soon (consequences – the only way to motivate change!), but it turns out he stopped after lots of public outrage. Which I guess is good. It’s a non-violent type of consequence, and violence is bad. Still… the less civilized part of me bemoans a lost opportunity.

I did laugh when I watched the Kimmel “Taking Candy” bit, but I also felt bad about it. Sam Harris on just how nasty this is.
“he can learn that his parents will lie to him for the purpose of making him miserable. He can also learn that they will find his suffering hilarious and that, at any moment, he might be shamed by those closest to him.”

This is the music they play on the other side of the singularity in Event Horizon. Wrecking Ball G-Major.

Trans-Pacific Partnership: It’s SOPA all over again, this time in secret. Yes – internet censorship, extreme copyright extension, imposition of insane pro-corporate doctrine on other countries… the works. Take particular note of the “Contact your congress person” links in the right side-bar. The EFF makes the process extremely painless.

Tetanus shots now come with adult whooping cough boosters, and I got mine two years ago, so I’m OK. Make sure you’re current too. Three months of extremely painful coughing fits sounds horrid. I’ve Got Whooping Cough. Thanks a Lot, Jenny McCarthy.

Nova on cryonics. It’s extremely preliminary, you really couldn’t get much less deep into the topic if you tried. It is only 4min after all. But it’s a reasonable portrayal without all the usual “OMG WTF?!?!” that pop media usually slings at it, and maybe it’ll expose some people to the concept who’d never heard of it before. So… I like it.

:) 20 Movie Stills Hilariously Replacing Guns With Thumbs-Ups

Dan Savage at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Paraphrasing: There are times when cheating is the lesser sin. I get letters: ‘We have small children. I do love my spouse. They are ill and dependant on me for health insurance.’ They haven’t had sex in years, and I am supposed to tell that person to get a divorce. According to the standard sex-advice. Sometimes staying married and staying sane means cheating. (he does clarify that many cheaters are pieces of shit, and this is not an excuse that applies often)
Of course it’d better if it didn’t have to be “cheating”, if the spouse could just say “I love you and value our relationship, and its OK to get sex elsewhere.” But since we live in a crappy world, sometimes cheating is the lesser wrong.

Young Singles, Seth Adam Smith’s Marriage Advice Isn’t for You
“Together, two happy people can create an even happier couple, but if you make someone else’s happiness your mission in life, you give them the power to make your life a failure.”
&
“See, “marriage is for others” is exactly what women have been told for centuries, and it’s done a lot of harm. “Marriage is for the family” kept women ashamed of their marriage problems and too scared to divorce their husbands. “Marriage is for children” has kept multitudes of women locked in abusive marriages “until the kids are grown.””

The paralyzing guilt of being good at math “(And then this traitorous voice in your head asks, do I not like doing math because I don’t actually like doing it, or because the patriarchy has convinced me in its horrid, insidious way that I shouldn’t, just like I’m still deep down emotionally convinced that I hate my body?) […] It feels almost like, if you can prove people wrong, then you should.”

This band is great a making a supposedly jauntly melody sound really creepy

Didn’t know 3D printing could be done with metal. *Now* we’re getting somewhere interesting… World’s First 3D Printed Metal Gun 

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