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anonymous

Louis C.K. Stares at the Void - 0 views

www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx

comedy society

shared by anonymous on 26 Jul 10 - Cached
  • he dwells lavishly on his mortality
  • Louis C.K.—or, more precisely, the comic persona we see him deploy in segments of his consistently excellent stand-up act and in uneven short films amounting to blurts of surrealistic autobiography—isn't especially jaded or anxious.
  • The crux of the shtick is that he's free of illusions
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It is as if, beneath the anger that every good comedian must cultivate and cherish, he's achieved a kind of philosophical peace. Having meditated on the world's absurd injustices, he greets them with absurdity in kind. In all, the outlook qualifies him as a kind of existential hero.
  • anonymous on 26 Jul 10
     
    "His new show, Louie, displays a fine dark humor." By Troy Patterson at Slate on July 26, 2010.
anonymous

Political Cartoons: The Lowest Form of Communication (Part 2) - 0 views

www.cracked.com/est-form-communication_p2.html

visualization criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 13 Aug 10 - Cached
  • #2. Why Do You Need A Picture?
  • #1. A Child's Wisdom
  • sometimes these straight political speeches are put into the mouths of cute animals or small children, to try to give the vibe of wisdom coming from the mouths of babes.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • This strip appears to be implying that three major religious groups are retarded and naturally inclined to violence. Which religions I'm not entirely sure because I'm not clear what major religion wants to blow up the entire planet. Probably Presbyterians. Never trusted them.
  • anonymous on 13 Aug 10
     
    "In theory, political cartoons should be a means to get a controversial point across in a concise, effective and humorous way. In reality, most usually convey less information than, say, grunting or gesturing." By Christina H at Cracked.com on August 3, 2010.
anonymous

Political Cartoons: The Lowest Form of Communication (Part 1) - 0 views

www.cracked.com/lowest-form-communication.html

visualization criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 13 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Whether you agree or disagree with the message is irrelevant, as these cartoons are often shitty ass vehicles for any message. Taken on average, political cartoons are the least effective way of making a point aside from suicide bombing and Internet petitions.
  • #5. Pictures Requiring Excessive Labels
  • it doesn't matter whether you agree with the message. It's important that we not get caught up in that. The issue is that it's irritating no matter what message they're trying to convey.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • "Technology... uh... Exists"
  • #3. Straw Men
  • If you've spent time arguing with people on the Internet, you know that "straw man" is something you can yell at people arguing with you, and you might even know what it means. If not, it means you create a caricature of your opponent and put stupid arguments into its mouth that you can easily demolish; arguments they never made.
  • Let's put that aside for a second and apply the straw man technique to a less controversial subject, like that your son Tommy should eat his vegetables.
  • It will amuse other people who already agree with you, and that's it.
  • Is that the goal? If you want to make yourself a shiny trophy saying how smart you are compared to the other guy, just go order one. They have catalogs. Why disguise it as an argument?
  • anonymous on 13 Aug 10
     
    "In theory, political cartoons should be a means to get a controversial point across in a concise, effective and humorous way. In reality, most usually convey less information than, say, grunting or gesturing." By Christina H at Cracked.com on August 3, 2010.
anonymous

Animals & Humans: What's the Difference Infographic - 0 views

www.infographicsshowcase.com/ls-humans-whats-the-difference

visualizations

shared by anonymous on 01 Oct 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 01 Oct 10
     
    "Humans rule the world. There is no debate about that, but we certainly shouldn't think we are distinct in many area when comparing us with animals. Think we are the only creatures on the planet with a sense of humor, or have a culture, or show emotions such as love? Think again." | The Infographics Showcase
anonymous

Can Jared Loughner help us get beyond good and evil? - 0 views

www.boingboing.net/...can-jared-loughner-h.html

shared by anonymous on 20 Jan 11 - Cached
  • Feeney's piece is worth reading in its entirety, as is Beyond Good and Evil. It's a lot to sum up in a blog post, but Nietzsche basically says there are two types of moral systems: master-morality and slave-morality. His best summary is section 260. In master-morality, the ruling class makes the rules and thus considers itself noble, while in slave morality, there is a suspicion of those in power and in what they consider "good."
  • In other words, it's all a big misunderstanding based on your point of view, kind of like how you might see Palin as evil when your neighbor sees her as good.
  • What's interesting in relation to mass murders like the Tucson incident is that people can rationalize their way into an internally consistent logic that normalizes their thoughts and actions.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • When Giffords gave an apparently unacceptable response to Loughner's obtuse question about language not being real, she seems to have caused him some cognitive dissonance. He apparently expected her to recognize his intellectual superiority, and when she didn't, he became fixated on what he saw as a slight that threw his self-assessment into question.
  • Everyone, myself included, probably has a delusion or two in their belief system. Once in a while they combine with other factors in a person to create a lethal combination: anger, incompetence, rejection, isolation, lack of empathy, drug-induced hallucinations, participation in economies of violence, unthinking behavior, production of a flawed script. That's not evil. It's simply a tragic nexus of human flaws that can culminate in what is too easily dismissed as evil.
  • anonymous on 20 Jan 11
     
    "Nietzsche is frequently a fave of angry young men who might qualify as what Pesco called confident dumb people. Nietzsche works well for the modern kook with web-induced attention deficits: The fourth chapter of Beyond Good and Evil is a series of 122 Twitter-length aphorisms, and his work is snarky and occasionally humorous. Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good and Evil to criticize earlier philosophers who made assumptions about morality based on pre-Christian and Christian beliefs about "evil." Below I discuss why we need to steal Nietzsche back from these people, and I look at a couple of other writers who have examined what gets called "evil" and have attempted to explain it in more nuanced and rational terms."
anonymous

Compartmentalizing Versus Smooshing - 0 views

dilbert.com/...rtmentalizing_versus_smooshing

shared by anonymous on 04 May 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 04 May 11
     
    "Did you see the story of the respected surgeon who got in trouble for writing an editorial about the alleged benefits of semen exposure to women? His writing started out all science-like, and referred to an actual study, but concluded with an attempt at humor that went off the tracks. He closed his editorial with "So there's a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there's a better gift for that day than chocolates." Apparently the study he was discussing is in dispute. But that's not the real issue. Women saw his closing witticism as demeaning. The surgeon, who has a strong record as a mentor and advocate of women in a male-dominated profession, was asked to step down as editor in chief of the surgeon's newspaper. He apologized for his editorial, but that didn't help. "
anonymous

Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World - 0 views

www.psmag.com/...-up-psychology-economics-53135

shared by anonymous on 02 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • For instance, the different ways people perceive the Müller-Lyer illusion likely reflects lifetimes spent in different physical environments. American children, for the most part, grow up in box-shaped rooms of varying dimensions. Surrounded by carpentered corners, visual perception adapts to this strange new environment (strange and new in terms of human history, that is) by learning to perceive converging lines in three dimensions.
  • As the three continued their work, they noticed something else that was remarkable: again and again one group of people appeared to be particularly unusual when compared to other populations—with perceptions, behaviors, and motivations that were almost always sliding down one end of the human bell curve.
  • In the end they titled their paper “The Weirdest People in the World?” (pdf) By “weird” they meant both unusual and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It is not just our Western habits and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world, it appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others—and even the way we perceive reality—makes us distinct from other humans on the planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancestors. Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.”
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • The trio of researchers are young—as professors go—good-humored family men. They recalled that they were nervous as the publication time approached. The paper basically suggested that much of what social scientists thought they knew about fundamental aspects of human cognition was likely only true of one small slice of humanity. They were making such a broadside challenge to whole libraries of research that they steeled themselves to the possibility of becoming outcasts in their own fields.
  • “We were scared,” admitted Henrich. “We were warned that a lot of people were going to be upset.” “We were told we were going to get spit on,” interjected Norenzayan. “Yes,” Henrich said. “That we’d go to conferences and no one was going to sit next to us at lunchtime.”
  • Still, I had to wonder whether describing the Western mind, and the American mind in particular, as weird suggested that our cognition is not just different but somehow malformed or twisted. In their paper the trio pointed out cross-cultural studies that suggest that the “weird” Western mind is the most self-aggrandizing and egotistical on the planet: we are more likely to promote ourselves as individuals versus advancing as a group. WEIRD minds are also more analytic, possessing the tendency to telescope in on an object of interest rather than understanding that object in the context of what is around it.
  • The WEIRD mind also appears to be unique in terms of how it comes to understand and interact with the natural world. Studies show that Western urban children grow up so closed off in man-made environments that their brains never form a deep or complex connection to the natural world.
  • Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 02 Mar 13
       
      I did a shit ton of this. I was very internal, didn't have many friends, and came to identify with 'things' as though they were people.
  • Given that people living in WEIRD societies don’t routinely encounter or interact with animals other than humans or pets, it’s not surprising that they end up with a rather cartoonish understanding of the natural world. “Indeed,” the report concluded, “studying the cognitive development of folkbiology in urban children would seem the equivalent of studying ‘normal’ physical growth in malnourished children.”
  • The three insisted that their goal was not to say that one culturally shaped psychology was better or worse than another—only that we’ll never truly understand human behavior and cognition until we expand the sample pool beyond its current small slice of humanity.
  • Despite these assurances, however, I found it hard not to read a message between the lines of their research. When they write, for example, that weird children develop their understanding of the natural world in a “culturally and experientially impoverished environment” and that they are in this way the equivalent of “malnourished children,” it’s difficult to see this as a good thing.
  • THE TURN THAT HENRICH, Heine, and Norenzayan are asking social scientists to make is not an easy one: accounting for the influence of culture on cognition will be a herculean task. Cultures are not monolithic; they can be endlessly parsed. Ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs, economic status, parenting styles, rural upbringing versus urban or suburban—there are hundreds of cultural differences that individually and in endless combinations influence our conceptions of fairness, how we categorize things, our method of judging and decision making, and our deeply held beliefs about the nature of the self, among other aspects of our psychological makeup.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 02 Mar 13
       
      This is another place where my love of long-term thinking rears its head. So modern as we imagine ourselves, with all our fancy machines, we are still bareinfants when it comes to reckoning about ourselves.
  • Recent research has shown that people in “tight” cultures, those with strong norms and low tolerance for deviant behavior (think India, Malaysia, and Pakistan), develop higher impulse control and more self-monitoring abilities than those from other places.
  • Men raised in the honor culture of the American South have been shown to experience much larger surges of testosterone after insults than do Northerners.
  • As Norenzayan sees it, the last few generations of psychologists have suffered from “physics envy,” and they need to get over it.
  • The job, experimental psychologists often assumed, was to push past the content of people’s thoughts and see the underlying universal hardware at work. “This is a deeply flawed way of studying human nature,” Norenzayan told me, “because the content of our thoughts and their process are intertwined.” In other words, if human cognition is shaped by cultural ideas and behavior, it can’t be studied without taking into account what those ideas and behaviors are and how they are different from place to place.
  • This new approach suggests the possibility of reverse-engineering psychological research: look at cultural content first; cognition and behavior second. Norenzayan’s recent work on religious belief is perhaps the best example of the intellectual landscape that is now open for study.
  • “I remember opening textbook after textbook and turning to the index and looking for the word ‘religion,’ ” he told me, “Again and again the very word wouldn’t be listed. This was shocking. How could psychology be the science of human behavior and have nothing to say about religion? Where I grew up you’d have to be in a coma not to notice the importance of religion on how people perceive themselves and the world around them.”
  • He has suggested that there may be a connection between the growth of religions that believe in “morally concerned deities”—that is, a god or gods who care if people are good or bad—and the evolution of large cities and nations.
  • If religion was necessary in the development of large-scale societies, can large-scale societies survive without religion? Norenzayan points to parts of Scandinavia with atheist majorities that seem to be doing just fine. They may have climbed the ladder of religion and effectively kicked it away. Or perhaps, after a thousand years of religious belief, the idea of an unseen entity always watching your behavior remains in our culturally shaped thinking even after the belief in God dissipates or disappears.
  • almost every major theorist on human behavior in the last 100 years predicted that it was just a matter of time before religion was a vestige of the past. But the world persists in being a very religious place.
  • HENRICH, HEINE, AND NORENZAYAN’S FEAR of being ostracized after the publication of the WEIRD paper turned out to be misplaced. Response to the paper, both published and otherwise, has been nearly universally positive, with more than a few of their colleagues suggesting that the work will spark fundamental changes. “I have no doubt that this paper is going to change the social sciences,” said Richard Nisbett, an eminent psychologist at the University of Michigan. “It just puts it all in one place and makes such a bold statement.”
  • At its heart, the challenge of the WEIRD paper is not simply to the field of experimental human research (do more cross-cultural studies!); it is a challenge to our Western conception of human nature. For some time now, the most widely accepted answer to the question of why humans, among all animals, have so successfully adapted to environments across the globe is that we have big brains with the ability to learn, improvise, and problem-solve.
  • Henrich has challenged this “cognitive niche” hypothesis with the “cultural niche” hypothesis. He notes that the amount of knowledge in any culture is far greater than the capacity of individuals to learn or figure it all out on their own.
  • He suggests that individuals tap that cultural storehouse of knowledge simply by mimicking (often unconsciously) the behavior and ways of thinking of those around them. We shape a tool in a certain manner, adhere to a food taboo, or think about fairness in a particular way, not because we individually have figured out that behavior’s adaptive value, but because we instinctively trust our culture to show us the way.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 02 Mar 13
       
      Goodness, though! I'm in TOTAL control of everything! :P
  • The unique trick of human psychology, these researchers suggest, might be this: our big brains are evolved to let local culture lead us in life’s dance.
  • People are not “plug and play,” as he puts it, and you cannot expect to drop a Western court system or form of government into another culture and expect it to work as it does back home.
  • Because of our peculiarly Western way of thinking of ourselves as independent of others, this idea of the culturally shaped mind doesn’t go down very easily.
  • That we in the West develop brains that are wired to see ourselves as separate from others may also be connected to differences in how we reason, Heine argues. Unlike the vast majority of the world, Westerners (and Americans in particular) tend to reason analytically as opposed to holistically.
  • That is, the American mind strives to figure out the world by taking it apart and examining its pieces.
  • Shown another way, in a different test analytic Americans will do better on something called the “rod and frame” task, where one has to judge whether a line is vertical even though the frame around it is skewed. Americans see the line as apart from the frame, just as they see themselves as apart from the group.
  • Heine and others suggest that such differences may be the echoes of cultural activities and trends going back thousands of years. Whether you think of yourself as interdependent or independent may depend on whether your distant ancestors farmed rice (which required a great deal of shared labor and group cooperation) or herded animals (which rewarded individualism and aggression).
  • These psychological trends and tendencies may echo down generations, hundreds of years after the activity or situation that brought them into existence has disappeared or fundamentally changed.
  • And here is the rub: the culturally shaped analytic/individualistic mind-sets may partly explain why Western researchers have so dramatically failed to take into account the interplay between culture and cognition. In the end, the goal of boiling down human psychology to hardwiring is not surprising given the type of mind that has been designing the studies. Taking an object (in this case the human mind) out of its context is, after all, what distinguishes the analytic reasoning style prevalent in the West. Similarly, we may have underestimated the impact of culture because the very ideas of being subject to the will of larger historical currents and of unconsciously mimicking the cognition of those around us challenges our Western conception of the self as independent and self-determined. The historical missteps of Western researchers, in other words, have been the predictable consequences of the WEIRD mind doing the thinking.
  • anonymous on 02 Mar 13
     
    "The growing body of cross-cultural research that the three researchers were compiling suggested that the mind's capacity to mold itself to cultural and environmental settings was far greater than had been assumed. The most interesting thing about cultures may not be in the observable things they do-the rituals, eating preferences, codes of behavior, and the like-but in the way they mold our most fundamental conscious and unconscious thinking and perception."
anonymous

Parking rules raise your rent - 0 views

grist.org/...parking-rules-raise-your-rent

shared by anonymous on 26 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • What’s all the excavation for? It’s for parking. Underground parking. In most cities and in most soil conditions, the giant holes are only there to satisfy off-street parking rules, and to do that, you need a deep, deep hole. A hole like this one.
  • One Portland developer told me that each successive layer of excavation — each floor down in the garage — costs two to three times as much as the previous one.
  • City requirements for off-street parking spaces raise rents. They jack it up a lot at the bottom of the housing ladder. Proportionally speaking, the bigger the quota and the smaller the apartment, the larger the rent hike.
  • ...35 more annotations...
  • For one-bedroom apartments with two parking places, as is required in places including Bothell and Federal Way, Wash., as much as one-third of the rent may actually pay for parking.
  • a case study of residential real estate development may illuminate how critical parking is to the affordability of housing.
  • But there’s a problem, the architect points out. She reminds you that your city requires you to provide off-street parking on the property for each of the apartments you build. 
  • access ramps to the underground garage will subtract six apartments, and your general contractor estimates that excavating will cost $55,000 per parking space — almost as much as the $60,000 you’ve budgeted to build each apartment.
  • To make a 7 percent return on investment, you’ll have to raise the rent up to $1,300 a month on the remaining units. Will the market support that price?
  • You contemplate whether to dig a second subterranean level in the garage, but the deeper you go, the contractor explains, the more expensive it gets.
  • You’re now considering a building with 30 apartments, plus 19 spaces behind. That’s only 0.6 parking spaces apiece, so you’ll still be in trouble with the city. To get one space per apartment, you’ll need to drop down to 25 apartments or fewer and raise the rent again.
  • The whole situation is aggravating, because the area surrounding your building has vast, untapped reservoirs of parking: surface lots at grocery stores and movie theaters, underground spaces at shopping complexes and office buildings, and idle spots at nearby apartments.
  • You could even rent a group of overnight spaces at a nearby garage and sublet them to tenants, but such innovative solutions are not a legal substitute for on-site parking in your city.
  • You’re stuck with no good options: a long and risky waiver application, underground parking with extremely high rents, or a half-sized building with high rent and slots out back.
  • You now understand why architects, in moments of dark humor, change their discipline’s mantra of “form follows function” to “form follows parking.” And you’re starting to understand how parking requirements are such an enormous barrier to affordable housing.
  • How do parking requirements raise rents? They do it in five ways, some of which affect all of the housing market and some of which only affect parts of it.
  • More costly housing.
  •  Parking quotas drive up construction costs. (“But supply and demand, not cost, set prices,” I hear my Econ 101 professor Hirschel Kasper pointing out.
  • There’s no way you can legally build your no-parking $800-a-month apartments, nor can anyone else, anywhere in town. The whole apartment market will be missing its bottom end.
  • Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute has modeled a typical affordable housing development and concluded that including one parking space per dwelling raises the cost of each rental unit by 12.5 percent
  • adding a second parking space doubles that to 25 percent.
  • Less housing.
  • Parking quotas constrain the supply of dwelling units, particularly of modest, economical ones, which causes their price to rise.
  • Building conversions blocked.
  • Parking quotas often make it prohibitively expensive to adapt buildings for other uses. Developers cannot convert vacant warehouses into lofts, or aging office blocks into condos, unless they somehow shoehorn floors of parking into the historic structures.
  • Dispersed housing.
  • By suppressing the number of apartments on each city lot (see Nos. 2 and 3), quotas force housing demand to spread outward across the landscape.
  • Billing non-parkers.
  •  Parking quotas shift the cost of storing vehicles from those vehicles’ owners into the rent of non-owners. By flooding the market for parking, quotas make it impossible to recoup the full cost of parking by charging its users.
  • This effect does not raise the rent on average beyond what effects 1, 2, and 3 do, but it does shift the cost of storing vehicles from car owners to non-owners. Even tenants who do not use parking pay for it.
  • A forthcoming Sightline analysis will likely reach similar conclusions. If preliminary results hold up, it will show that, at actual apartment and condominium projects in Seattle, the cost of parking is as much as 35 percent of monthly rent.
  • The cost of parking, furthermore, exceeds its market price almost everywhere in King County, so even tenants who do not own cars end up paying for parking through their rent.
  • These five effects interact and reinforce one another. They knock the bottom off of the apartment market, pushing working-class people to double up or commute longer distances. They raise the rent for everyone, driving up the cost of living while lowering the price of parking. And they shift parking costs to those who don’t use it.
  • In 1961, Oakland introduced a quota of one space per new apartment. Immediately, as housing economist Brian Bertha has documented (see page 143), the construction cost per apartment jumped by 18 percent and typical apartment buildings shrank: The number of units per new building fell by 30 percent. Developers built fewer, larger apartments, and the rent rose.
  • A newer proof comes from urban planning professor Michael Manville of Cornell University. He described in the Journal of the American Planning Association what happened in downtown Los Angeles after 1999 when the city enacted an adaptive reuse ordinance (ARO).
  • Quickly, the deregulation of parking yielded more than 6,000 new apartments and condominiums, some of them in previously dilapidated historic office buildings that dated from the Art Deco era.
  • When parking requirements are removed, developers provide more housing and less parking, and also … developers provide different types of housing: housing in older buildings, in previously disinvested areas, and housing marketed toward non-drivers. This latter category of housing tends to sell for less than housing with parking spaces.
  • Minimum parking requirements do not jack the rent up much in the kinds of pricey buildings where the developer would have installed an abundance of parking anyway.
  • What’s more, half of the parking spaces developers provided to tenants were at neighboring or nearby properties. In fact, at 16 of the 57 ARO buildings, all the parking was off-site. These developers did what you wanted to do for your 50-unit building: They secured tenant parking not by pouring concrete but by sipping coffee with the owners of nearby garages.
  • anonymous on 26 Sep 13
     
    "Have you ever watched the excavation that precedes a tall building? It seems to take forever. Then, when the digging is finally done, construction rockets upward in no time. For the past few months, I've been watching a crew excavate the site of a new condo tower on Seattle's First Hill. It's on a route I walk three times a week, so I've had a ringside seat. And here's the thing that finally dawned on me, after years of not really thinking about these holes in the urban ground: What's all the excavation for?"
anonymous

Sentient Gardens - 0 views

amultiverse.com/...sentient-gardens

humor whimsy

shared by anonymous on 19 Jul 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 19 Jul 10
     
    By Jonathan Rosenberg at Scenes From A Multiverse on July 19, 2010.
anonymous

Man Already Knows Everything He Needs To Know About Muslims - 0 views

www.theonion.com/...ng-he-needs-to-know-abou,17990

humor whimsy politics

shared by anonymous on 30 Aug 10 - Cached
  • "I almost gave in and listened to that guy defend Islam with words I didn't want to hear," Gentries said. "But then I remembered how much easier it is to live in a world of black-and-white in which I can assign the label of 'other' to someone and use him as a vessel for all my fears and insecurities."
  • anonymous on 30 Aug 10
     
    "Local man Scott Gentries told reporters Wednesday that his deliberately limited grasp of Islamic history and culture was still more than sufficient to shape his views of the entire Muslim world." At The Onion on August 30, 2010.
anonymous

Securing The Funding - 0 views

amultiverse.com/...securing-the-funding

quickthoughts humor comics

shared by anonymous on 16 Jul 10 - Cached
  • This is our third visit with Sciencemaster Adler, I think you guys might have a crush on him! Let’s hope he manages to find some money soon, I am concerned for his organs and fluids at this rate. Slopes were a common thing on my college campus, I imagine all of academia must be plagued by them to some degree.
  • anonymous on 16 Jul 10
     
    I think we can all identify with underfunded alien professors, right? Under the heading "Campus bookstore, inner science rings, branes of curiosity." By Jonathan Rosenberg at Scenes from a Multiverse on July 16, 2010.
anonymous

Super Heroes vs. the Westboro Baptist Church - 0 views

www.comicsalliance.com/...vs-the-westboro-baptist-church

religion humor whimsy

shared by anonymous on 23 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Unbeknownst to the dastardly fanatics of the Westboro Baptist Church, the good folks of San Diego's Comic-Con were prepared for their arrival with their own special brand of superhuman counter protesting chanting "WHAT DO WE WANT" "GAY SEX" "WHEN DO WE WANT IT" "NOW!" while brandishing ironic (and some sincere) signs. Simply stated: The eclectic assembly of nerdom's finest stood and delivered.
  • anonymous on 23 Jul 10
     
    "They've faced down humans time and time again, but Fred Phelps and his minions from the Westboro Baptist Church were not ready for the cosplay action that awaited them today at Comic-Con." By the staff at ComicsAlliance on July 22, 2010.
anonymous

Why comedian Louis C.K.'s appearance and race talk matters - 0 views

theloop21.com/...why-louis-ck-matters

media racism

shared by anonymous on 14 Jul 10 - Cached
  • My friend Lilah has been encouraging me to listen to Louis C.K.'s stand up for months.
 "He talks about race all the time!"
 I could not, as when urged to do something someone says I will really like, I refuse to move (I pull on the leash like Lilah's dog does suddenly and for no apparent reason).
  • When a white man does something that black people have been doing for ages, he gets a lot of praise and overshadows the others. This is not news. Black comedians have been talking about race frankly and honestly for years. The attention Louis C.K. gets may anger some. He's doing the same thing we've been doing forever, he's just white. But his whiteness is exactly what's important. He is white. Blindingly white. Red headed and baldingly white. Everyday American white. One million of McCain/Palin supporters can even relate to. If this man, this man, talks about race and sexuality in a passionate, and unembarrassed way while maintaining his masculinity and humor all without a hint of self righteousness, maybe others will follow his lead. Maybe.
  • anonymous on 14 Jul 10
     
    "He makes race more easily palatable to white America." An interesting argument by Kartina Richardson at TheLoop21 on July 14, 2010.
anonymous

Ellis Weiner: What I Learned from Parodying Atlas Shrugged - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...arned-from-parod_b_852205.html

humor whimsy objectivism

shared by anonymous on 16 May 11 - Cached
  • Yeah, it's cheap fun, and I expected it going in. But what took me by surprise, and what still amazes me to this very day, is this: The novel's antagonists -- the bad guys, their pernicious "values," the ideas against which Rand's demi-god heroes and heroines do verbose, tedious battle -- they do not exist in real life. Of course, neither do Sauron or Voldemort. But Atlas Shrugged is a 1,000-page, 643,000-(I counted them)-word diatribe against an imaginary enemy that, unlike Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter books, insists it's about "reality."
  • the geo-political world in which Rand wants us to admire her heroes is not our own, or even (like that of 1984) a plausible, allegorical variant of our own, but a third-rate science fiction dystopian future, complete with imaginary technology, which, by definition, makes comparison to today's world impossible.
  • The U.S. of Atlas Shrugged is about as real and realistic as Narnia, and capitalism is to Atlas Shrugged what Quidditch is to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: a fictional construct, vaguely similar to something we have in real life, used for purposes of drama and entertainment.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Even Trekkies (do they still call themselves that?) who go to conventions in costume and speak fucking Klingon know that it's make believe.
  • So I wrote the parody. It was like shooting fish in a barrel, yes. But somebody has to shoot them.
  • anonymous on 16 May 11
     
    "In any case, it took me a while to realize what should have been perfectly obvious: that Atlas Shrugged (about which I've written several times in these "pages") was and is so ripe for parody, it's not even funny. It's not even necessary, either, in some ways, since, like all truly horrible books, it parodies itself, brimming and fit to bust as it is with excellent, excellent examples of awful, awful writing. "
anonymous

Ten Reasons We Are Seeing An Excess of Lists of Ten Things We Should Know - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...s-of-ten-things-we-should-know

shared by anonymous on 17 Jun 11 - Cached
  • Lately I’ve noticed lots of articles with titles that are variations of “Ten Things You Should Know About X.”
  • 1. We don’t have time to read anymore.
  • 2. Ten is close to the approximate size of our working memory.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • 3. Since writers can’t make a living any more, we are sliding into an era of bullet point-ism.
  • 4. In many cases, there’s more than ten things that you should know, or fewer than ten things that you should know.
  • 5. It’s a way for pentadactyl animals to feel superior to unidactyl animals.
  • 6. At this point in the list, with four more to go, we enter the fat and boring midsection of the list of top ten things you should know about lists of ten things. It’s basically not remembered, so there’s really no point in putting anything here. Ditto for 7, and 8.
  • 9. Because of the well documented recency effect, it’s time to start having content in our list of ten things again.
  • 10. If we’ve maintained our concentration to this point in the list, we will be rewarded with a bit of humorous fluff that helps bind some of our anxiety about the essential meaninglessness of our lives, and — especially — our time spent on reading yet another list of ten things we should know.
  • anonymous on 17 Jun 11
     
    Basically, we like numbers and bloggers have been told for years to create titles like that to generate hits. But, there's more. By Malcolm MacIver (at Science Not Fiction) in Discover Magazine.
anonymous

How to destroy the Earth - 0 views

qntm.org/destroy

humor science physics funny cool fun space docbadwrench

shared by anonymous on 11 Jul 11 - Cached
  • The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.
  • I will define our goal thus: by any means necessary, to change the Earth into something other than a planet or a dwarf planet.
  • anonymous on 11 Jul 11
     
    An internet classic. For all of you who want the earth "to not be there anymore" - it's much harder than you've been led to believe (S.D. Hughes, August 24 2006).
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