November 2011
Is sex a human right? - the Conversation →
Lauren Rosewarne:
Thinking of sex as a human right, of touch, of pleasure, of orgasm as a human right and our concept of rights get blurry; our passion and advocacy for rights becomes much less fervent when we need to initiate dialogue about arousal and pleasure and satisfaction.
[…]
I am instead, going to contend that for many people a quality life necessitates sexual contact and...
mailstrom -Word Spy →
mailstrom n. An overwhelming amount of email; an email deluge. Also: e-mailstrom, mail-strom. [(e-)mail+maelstrom.]
“People don’t get fired for measuring things. People don’t often get fired for...”
– Brent Simmons, The Readable Future
Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time |... →
10) A lifespan is a billion heartbeats.
Complex organisms die. Sad though it is in individual cases, it’s a necessary part of the bigger picture; life pushes out the old to make way for the new. Remarkably, there exist simple scaling laws relating animal metabolism to body mass. Larger animals live longer; but they also metabolize slower, as manifested in slower heart rates. These effects...
The Quantum Universe: (And Why Anything That Can... →
Loved Why E=mc² so just started the latest from Brian Cox:
These curiosities-led voyages of discovery across all scientific disciplines have delivered increased life expectancy, intercontinental air travel, modern telecommunications, freedom from the drudgery of subsistence farming and a sweeping, inspiring and humbling vision of our place within an infinite sea of stars.
But these are...
Lumpy Junk: Aaron Sorkin's trilogy of biopics →
Jeff Pollard on Charlie Wilson’s War, The Social Network and Moneyball:
at the heart of each film is a simple conceit: the main character is living irony. This is important when writing a film. Even if you’re making a simple bio-pic, you need a conceit or a “guiding principle” as Truby would call it. Once you know this conceit, or the irony of the character in...
Intervention without responsibility - Opinion - Al... →
Tarak Barkawi:
Airpower offers the illusion that a “clean” war can be fought. Only the “bad guys” are hit by precision guided munitions. The complexities and moral ambiguities of intervention on the ground are seemingly avoided.
Airpower, however, remains subject to the vicissitudes of war and the diabolical dilemmas of armed intervention. Its use - and withdrawal...
Prolost - Red Scarlet, Canon C300, and the Paradox... →
Stu Maschwitz:
Cunningly, Red announced their price after Canon. Negotiators know that whoever mentions money first, loses. Apple knows that “cheaper” only means something if you have a point of comparison. Regardless of the realities of building a functional kit, the gut-level takeaway for many on November 3 was that Red announced a camera that shoots four times the resolution of Canon’s at...
“The adverb sic—meaning “intentionally so written”—first appeared in...”
– Sic - Wikipedia
WatchRaiding the Lost Ark: A Filmumentary - Part 1 by Jamie Benning
17 minutes of commentaries on one of the greatest movies ever shot/boarded/blocked.
Frank Marshall :
[Steven] called me over and he said “look, I need to find a mountain, I need you to find a mountain that looks like the Paramount logo. Where we can shoot. “
Yaeba: Culture and Cosmetic Infantilization »... →
Lisa Wade:
a new trend in Japan: yaeba. Some young Japanese women are now having dentists artificially enlarge their incisors so as to achieve a look associated with a small mouth crowded with teeth.
Communication Studies professor Dr. Emilie Zaslow […] argued that the trend represented a fixation with youth, the sexualization of girls, and pressure on women to infantilize...
“I had a friend who was a heavy drinker. If somebody asked him if he’d been drunk...”
– Kurt Vonnegut
Schumpeter: Land of the wasted talent -The... →
Japanese firms face a demographic catastrophe. The solution is to treat women better
Japanese firms are careful to recycle paper but careless about wasting female talent. Some 66% of highly educated Japanese women who quit their jobs say they would not have done so if their employers had allowed flexible working arrangements. The vast majority (77%) of women who take time off work want to...
WatchKeep On Walking shot montage by Brian Carroll
Ballet Shoes and Ballerinas as Technology: A... →
via Jason Kottke:
In the 1840s, when Marie Taglioni went on pointe for a few seconds in La Sylphide, her momentary weightlessness became an icon of the transcendent power of ballet. A pair of her shoes sold for 200 rubles and was cooked and eaten by her admirers.
“Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being...”
– David Quammen, on survival.
The Medical Sleuth: Scientific American →
I suspect a House-like tv series on this man pretty soon, à la Lie to Me with Ekman.
As a disease detective at the NIH, William A. Gahl unravels the cause of illnesses that have stumped other doctors
William A. Gahl:
Rare diseases as individual diseases are really uncommon, but as a group they are not. I would venture to say that practically everybody in the country either has someone...
