Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘hollow Earth

Friday Links!

leave a comment »

* Deadline this weekend! Suvin Today?, A Roundtable Discussion, The Society for Utopian Studies (November 9-12, 2017 in Memphis, TN).

People Are Sharing Photos of Real-Life Places That Belong in a Wes Anderson Film. Below: a conference room in North Korea.

* What the stock market’s rise under Trump should teach Democrats. Great piece from the great Rortybomb.

First, Democrats need to reevaluate their idea of themselves as disinterested stewards of the economy — as a party that accepts the current economic arrangements largely as a given. Second, they need to understand what their coalition looks like if they can’t peel off moderate Republicans, as they predicted they would throughout 2016. Third, they also need to decide if the economy requires structural changes, or merely some tinkering around the edges. And finally, they must decide whether social programs should target narrow populations or lean towards universalism.

* It’s a bit premature for Democrats to start planning what they’ll do with their domination once they have it, but I agree with Jack Balkin that they need to start fighting fire with fire.

* Study claims Clinton lost because of ravaged communities sick of war. I’m sure her hawkishness was a factor at some level, but the last few months have made it crystal clear that people pick their team first and then select some reason why.

* DFW vs. Twitter.

* A History of American Comics.

* Mars Trilogy –> Aurora: “Mars covered in toxic chemicals that can wipe out living organisms, tests reveal.”

* Stories of a Hollow Earth.

* The best SF going is being printed at SBnation.

Hackers are Targeting Nuclear Facilities, Homeland Security Dept. and F.B.I. Say.

The Police State Can Come After Trump Protesters, But It Can’t Make Them Cooperate.

A judge said these kids get a green card. ICE says they get deported.

Internal memo reveals ICE officers have free rein to detain any undocumented immigrant.

* Republican lawmakers buy health insurance stocks as repeal effort moves forward. Tillerson Considered Central Figure In ExxonMobil Investigation. Accessory after the fact (at best). GOP source of fraud allegation vs. Bernie Sanders’ wife admits info was hearsay.

* How long till Michael Flynn is a #hero of #TheResistance?

* 2020 watch: Kamala Harris.

Self-appointed ‘King’ Macron is no antidote to Trump.

The House Has a ‘No Sleeveless’ Dress Code for Women.

* How CNN Made Its Own Reporting Sound Like Blackmail.

* The Alt-Right 2.0. The Dirtbag Left. On SWATting.

Hundreds dress like zombies at ‘Welcome to hell’ protest ahead of G20 summit in Hamburg.

Progressives have long viewed Penn with deep skepticism, noting that he has repeatedly used his close ties to Democratic officials as a vehicle for promoting his corporate clients. But there’s another wrinkle to Penn’s advice: He now invests in Republican advocacy firms — and profits from the electoral defeat of Democrats.

Hollywood Has a Bad-Movie Problem. Fan Fiction Is a Bad Television Show’s Best Friend. I Would Totally Read the Harry Potter Fan Fiction Written by a Neural Network.

An anthropologist who had the unenviable task of sitting through academics’ meetings and reading their email chains to find out why they fail to change their teaching styles has come to a surprising conclusion: lecturers are simply too afraid of looking stupid in front of their students to try something new.

* AIs: artificial intelligence vs academic integrity.

* Drug addiction as learning disorder.

* Oh baby: Homebrewers Find An NES Emulator Inside The Nintendo Switch.

Brand New Book By Maurice Sendak Has Been Found in the Late Author’s Archives.

* Encryption by destruction. Social media. Gimme all your money.

So Many Weekend Links!

with 4 comments

* I’ve seen this movie: Marquette working with firm to humanely manage seagulls.

* Best game I’ve played in a really long time: Rymdkapsel.

* The Milwaukee Experiment: What can one prosecutor do about the mass incarceration of African-Americans?

* The academic community has talked itself into a very strange corner with regards to adjunctification. “Respect” is just not a good rallying point: unquantifiable, unsatisfiable, turns political struggle into emotional one. The focus should stay on the system that produces adjunct jobs instead of full-time permanent ones.

* This report that administration and construction are not significant factors in rising tuition seems totally off to me. You’re dividing by different denominators in 2001 and 2011; that masks the magnitude of the change, but also hides new spending in real terms. The last student you add should be your cheapest student: all the infrastructure is in place, you’re just adding one more. But these numbers show the opposite trend: spending at colleges is increasing even given efficiencies gained by adding more students.

* CFP: The Superhero Project.

‘The Game Done Changed’: Reconsidering ‘The Wire’ Amidst the Baltimore Uprising.

* If you, like us, lusted after the art deco tiling and rose-colored lighting of the Grand Budapest Hotel lobby, or drooled over the yellow Parisian hotel room in Hotel Chevalier, here’s some enchanting news: Wes Anderson has designed a bar.

Bardolatry as Idolatry.

NSA mass phone surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden ruled illegal.

* Andrew Cuomo, pretty corrupt.

* So are the Patriots.

An Atlas of Upward Mobility Shows Paths Out of Poverty.

The Poverty Capitalism Creates.

As investigation enters fifth month, Tamir Rice’s mother has moved into a homeless shelter. Online activists raised $60K for Tamir Rice’s family — so where did all that money go?

* The End of LSU.

* If you want a vision of the future.

Some of the people ostensibly turning in those 80- or 90-hour workweeks, particularly men, may just be faking it.

The Secret Lives of Homeless Students.

Ten percent of you were meant to be police officers. You have it in your blood and bones and you will excel in this profession. For 80% of you, this is a job. It’s a job you will do well and honorably for your career with the NYPD. Ten percent of you should never have made it this far. You are too dumb, too damaged, or too criminal to be police officers and you very well will be hurt, killed, or arrested in the years to come.

The Hater’s Guide To Avengers: Age of Ultron. Are you Over the Avengers Yet? Ultron Has Always Been a Dumb Character, and That’s Okay. Even Whedon isn’t into it.

Leaked Email From Marvel CEO Is A Listicle About Why Women Can’t Be Superheroes.

* Reading the Black Captain America (both of them).

Joss Whedon Didn’t Quit Twitter Because of All the Mean Feminists.

In defense of the Mommy Track.

Urban fiction, or street lit, has been snubbed by the publishing industry and scorned by black intellectuals. Yet these authors may just be the most successful literary couple in America.

‘Comedy Bang-Bang’s’ Scott Aukerman: From ‘Screwing Around’ to a Podcast Empire.

Parents call cops on teen for giving away banned book; it backfires predictably.

The Pink and Blue Projects: Exploring the Genderization of Color.

* I really liked TNI’s “Trash” issue, though it gets Oscar the Grouch all wrong.

* Did a study find men’s beards are filled with poop?

We Accidentally Turned The Entire Statue Of Liberty Into A Battery.

Halo Players Spent Five Years Trying To Get Into An Empty Room.

* I’m glad that Facebook is choosing to publish such findings, but I cannot but shake my head about how the real findings are buried, and irrelevant comparisons take up the conclusion.

* A comics Kickstarter some of you might be interested in: Bizarre New World.

Lawmakers drop Walker’s plan to spin off UW governance.

Art Institute of Wisconsin to stop enrolling new students.

Remember when Gerber tried to market “baby food for teens?”

* What Was the Venus de Milo Doing With Her Arms?

Joan Would Have Lost Her Sexual Harassment Suit Against McCann Erickson. Assholes of Mad Men’s McCann pay dividends for real-life McCann.

Q: What do the US, Somalia, and South Sudan have in common? A: It’s totally cool to put kids in jail forever.

Academic Freedom and Tenure: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Health Insurance Companies Are Illegally Charging for Birth Control.

Report: Most College Football Concussions Happen in Practice.

* Nothing gold can stay be allowed to just be a good thing that happened one time.

Essential Reading: “I Am Error” Brings New Insight to the History of the NES.

From graduation to garbage job (literally): One twentysomething’s struggle.

The source of strange radio signals that have left astronomers at Australia’s most famous radio telescope scratching their heads for 17 years has finally been discovered. It turns out that it was a microwave oven.

“My father felt the U.S.S.R. treated him better than America,” said Tynes-Mensah, a former university chemistry instructor who was born in the Russian town of Krasnodar and now lives mainly in the United States, spending summers in Russia. “He was happy here.”

* How to lie with statistics, Nicholas Kristof edition.

* Portrait of a suicide at UPenn.

* You Oughta Know Dave Coulier Will Be On Fuller House.

Woman Who Tweeted ‘2 Drunk 2 Care’ Before Fatal Crash Gets 24 Years.

Galadriel, Witch-Queen of Lórien.

In “Let Us Now Praise Famous Orcs,” I suggested that the basic humanity of Tolkien’s inhuman creatures proved them to be more worthy of our sympathy than the elves, “whose near-perfection marks them with a profound otherness.” As immortals, elves are always playing a long game in which we finite beings cannot ever hope to be much more than pawns. The characters who seem most aware of this fact in The Lord of the Rings are, in fact, the orcs, as is tellingly revealed in the dialogue between Gorbag and Shagrat. They lament having to work for “Big Bosses,” remember the “bad old times” when elves besieged them, and make hopeful plans for a postwar future in which there are “no big bosses.” In their fear and loathing of aristocrats and high powers, these orcs express thoroughly modern, even vaguely democratic sentiments. The Witch-Queen of Lórien, much like the dark Lord of Mordor, champions a different social order entirely. I am not entirely sure that Galadriel’s vision for how the world system should be organized is necessarily the better one. For those of us who are in favor of changing the world, Galadriel and her coterie of hereditary aristocrats represent the enemy, a power to be overcome, and her “long defeat” cannot come soon enough.

* The Magicians is coming to SyFy.

Sheriffs Threaten Retaliation If The Price Of Prisoner Phone Calls Is Regulated.

* Starving the beast: The UNC system in 2015.

* There are no tough choices.

Meet the outsider who accidentally solved chronic homelessness.

* Meet the original patent troll.

* The vanishing of Molly Norris.

* Empty, Lonely Nothingness. Forever: Understanding the Fermi Paradox.

A Cancer Survivor Designs the Cards She Wishes She’d Received From Friends and Family.

* Get my checkbook! Original drawings depicting iconic Martians from HG Wells’s sci-fi masterpiece The War of the Worlds are on sale for £350,000.

Edit of the Day: Footloose Without the Music Turns Kevin Bacon Into a Maniac.

* Deleted Scenes of Women in Disaster Movies Written by Men.

* Get me Thomas Pynchon: Aide to Kamala Harris arrested for pretending to run 3,000-year-old rogue police force.

* Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot.

Fracking Chemicals Detected in Pennsylvania Drinking Water. More North Carolina Residents Warned Of Contaminated Drinking Water. Horribly bleak study sees ‘empty landscape’ as large herbivores vanish at startling rate. A future without chocolate.

* Only the super-rich can save us now.

McDonald’s to reverse declining sales with more attractive Hamburglar.

These Suburban Preppers Are Ready for Anything.

* Bill Clinton has an exciting new greatest regret of his presidency.

Someone made Game of Thrones into a Google map, and it’s amazing.

Native Americans Say This Man Enslaved Them. Pope Francis Wants To Call Him A Saint.

Which President Greenlit A Trip To The Center Of The Earth?

* The LEGO sublime.

* And a dark, gritty Sliders I wish had gone to series: Parallels. By one of the creators of The Lost Room, which I also wish had gone to series!

Written by gerrycanavan

May 8, 2015 at 8:08 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday Morning Links!

with 4 comments

* Fear of Stigma Lingers About Use of Family-Friendly Policies. Should You Have a Baby in Grad School?

* Don’t Drink Starbucks Free College PR Stunt, Full of Bees. Some details.

* Sun Ra: jazz’s interstellar voyager.

* The trouble with trustees.

The remaining 5 percent are my greatest concern. These trustees can cause real damage to the institutions they serve by acting in dysfunctional ways. They play petty politics with almost everything; try to micromanage the institution; attempt to go around the president and lead from the shadows; they tend to be critical of faculty but not knowledgeable or curious about faculty life and offer simple solutions to complex and sticky challenges.

Over the past several years, I have talked with many presidents who believe this small group of toxic boards is growing in size and impact and migrating north towards 10 percent of all boards. We simply cannot afford this.

In my defense, though, anyone following the humanities death watch for the last 600 years would be struck both by its recurring characters and its disconnect from objective fact. Burton wrote in the age of Shakespeare, when the remarkable growth of literacy drove the first golden age of vernacular literature. Whittemore wrote while English as an academic discipline was in the midst of a meteoric rise, climbing from 17,240 BA degrees granted in 1950 to 64,342 in 1971. After a steep drop in the 1980s, English is now back to a robust 53,767 degrees granted per year, and 295,221 students per year graduate with humanities degreesmore than any field except business.

* NLRB revises Columbia College Chicago decision to the benefit of administration, by a factor of about 30X.

* Austin and segregation. Milwaukee and Scott Walker.

Over the past few decades, Walker’s home turf of metropolitan Milwaukee has developed into the most bitterly divided political ground in the country“the most polarized part of a polarized state in a polarized nation,” as a recent series by Craig Gilbert in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel put it. Thanks to a quirk of twentieth-century history, the region encompasses a heavily Democratic and African American urban center, and suburbs that are far more uniformly white and Republican than those in any other Northern city, with a moat of resentment running between the two zones. As a result, the area has given rise to some of the most worrisome trends in American political life in supercharged form: profound racial inequality, extreme political segregation, a parallel-universe news media. These trends predate Walker, but they have enabled his ascent, and his tenure in government has only served to intensify them. Anyone who believes that he is the Republican to save his partylet alone win a presidential electionneeds to understand the toxic and ruptured landscape he will leave behind.

In Milwaukee and U.S., hospitals follow money to suburbs.

* World Cup minute! Crunching the US’s chances of advancing out of its group. Meanwhile: Ghana has to ration electricity just so everyone can watch the World Cup.

* Louie, creep. Game of Thrones and the female gaze. HBO Explains Why They Failed To Make An American Gods TV Show. Read George R. R. Martin’s 1963 Letter To Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

* How Marquette brought in its first lay president.

* Totally outrageous: Indiana Punished Inmate With More Time Behind Bars For Doing What Prison Staff Told Him To Do.

California Prison’s ‘Pay-To-Stay’ Option Offers ‘Quieter’ Rooms For $155 A Day. Prison labor’s new frontier: Artisanal foods. When Brooklyn juries gentrify, defendants lose.

Father Of The Bride sequel about gay marriage reportedly in the works.

* A team of Harvard scientists believe the remnants of an ancient Earth, dating to the time another planet collided with ours to produce the moon, may still be lodged deep within the Earth’s mantle. Earth may have underground ‘ocean’ three times that on surface. Dibs on the screenplay.

* Circles within circles, rings within rings: I was told you are interested in my group’s (Codename: Lollipop) ongoing operation against the PoOs (People of Oppression). My group poses as feminists on twitter. We bait other PoOs into agreeing with us as we subtly move them more and more to the extreme. The purpose is to make moderate feminists turned off with the movement, as well as cause infighting within the group. As some of our operatives have been compromised, my commander has given me permission to make some of their conversations on twitter public. We want to let the PoOs know that we have infiltrated them so that they begin to accuse each other of being Lollipop operatives.

* Our long national nightmare &c: Duke will rename Aycock.

* Gasp! Missile defense still a giant boondoggle!

* The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth, warns New York Times. Meanwhile, Chelsea Manning has an op-ed.

* Understanding commencement speakers at SMBC.

* American meritocracy, Chelsea Clinton edition.

The Story of One Whale Who Tried to Bridge the Linguistic Divide Between Animals and Humans.

* The Grand Budapest Hotel, as it was always meant to be seen.

* The end of TV.

* We’re never going to get to Mars.

* A new report shows nuclear weapons almost detonated in North Carolina in 1961.

* And Greenpeace lost 5 million dollars gambling. FFS.

a_940x1381

Tekeli-Li

leave a comment »

Written by gerrycanavan

July 26, 2012 at 8:01 am

Three More for Sunday

leave a comment »

Thank you for signing the petition asking the Obama Administration to acknowledge an extraterrestrial presence here on Earth. The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race.

This is as close a confirmation that the lizard people originate from inside the Hollow Earth that we’re ever going to get. I always knew it.

* io9 has your life on other planets primer.

* Happy climate change denial season!

‘"The Cognomi Theory of the Antarctic Interior’

with one comment

More than 300 years ago, a man thought lost at sea re-appeared in Italy with accounts of a civilization inhabiting the interior sea of an undiscovered southern continent. Giuseppe Cognomi composed numerous volumes on this advanced and isolated culture – which he called The Linians – and the singular environment they inhabited at the bottom of the world. Though widely disregarded by the scientific community, the tradition of Linian scholarship has been kept alive through the years by a devoted few. The Society for Linian Studies is the first organized attempt to preserve Cognomi’s legacy and progress his research.

Via Boing Boing. These guys sure are going to be pissed that we messed up all their ice.

Written by gerrycanavan

April 8, 2009 at 6:16 pm

leave a comment »

Strange Maps is just about exactly what it sounds like, but it’s also the most fun specialty blog I’ve visited in a good while. Where else are you going to find the the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World, which proves Sweden’s status as secular paradise in graph form, plus a mapping of Middle-Earth onto Regular-Europe, a mapping of how evolution is taught in the U.S., the world as seen from 9th Avenue, Tatooine, and the most generic country ever? At right: Inside the Hollow Earth.

Via Cynical-C, which this morning also brings us “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as performed by choir.

Written by gerrycanavan

June 6, 2007 at 3:19 pm

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,