Posts Tagged ‘kung fu’
Happy First Day of School Links!
* The Japanese have a word for blogs that have fallen into neglect or are altogether abandoned: ishikoro, or pebbles. We live in a world of pebbles now. They litter the internet, each one a marker of writing dreams and energies that have dissipated or moved elsewhere. What Were Blogs?
* Phew, that was a close one: In a new book, conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith argues there’s no such thing as time wasted online.
* …successful universities – surely including the University of Chicago – are congeries of safe spaces that factions of scholars have carved out to protect themselves from their intellectual enemies. More concretely – the University of Chicago has both a very well recognized economics department and a very well recognized sociology department. There is furthermore some overlap in the topics that they study. Yet the professors in these two departments protect themselves from each other – they do not, for example, vote on each other’s tenure decisions. They furthermore have quite different notions (though again, perhaps with some overlap) of what constitutes legitimate and appropriate research. In real life, academics only are able to exercise academic freedom because they have safe spaces that they can be free in.
* Graduate Students Are Workers: The Decades-Long Fight for Graduate Unions, and the Path Forward.
* Median income vs. public university tuition, 2000-2016.
* What Colleges Can Do Right Now to Help Low-Income Students Succeed.
* Secrets of my success: Yes, Students Do Learn More From Attractive Teachers.
* Health Experts Recommend Standing Up At Desk, Leaving Office, Never Coming Back.
* The long, strange history of John Podesta’s space alien obsession.
* With a shift in martial arts preferences, the rise of video games — more teenagers play Pokémon Go in parks here than practice a roundhouse kick — and a perception among young people that kung fu just isn’t cool, longtime martial artists worry that kung fu’s future is bleak.
* The Rebel Virgins and Desert Mothers Who Have Been Written Out of Christianity’s Early History.
* All Mixed Up: What Do We Call People Of Multiple Backgrounds?
* Paris Is Redesigning Its Major Intersections For Pedestrians, Not Cars.
* Vice: All the Evidence We Could Find About Fred Trump’s Alleged Involvement with the KKK.
* Louisiana, for instance, made headlines earlier this summer when it was revealed that the state had spent more than $1 million of public funds on legal fees in an attempt to defend its refusal to install air conditioning on death row at Angola prison — even though the air conditioning would cost only about $225,000, plus operating costs, according to expert testimony. That astonished U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson. “Is this really what the state wants to do?” Jackson asked, calling the bill “stunning.” “It just seems so unnecessary.”
* The deep story of Trump support. The New York Times And Trump’s Loopy Note From His Doctor. Donald Trump has a massive Catholic problem. Trump might already be out of time. It’s Too Soon For Clinton To Run Out The Clock.
* When Steve Bannon ran BioDome.
* The Welfare Reform Disaster.
* Obama the Monument Maker. Obama Just Quadrupled The World’s Largest Natural Sanctuary.
* Tumblr of the year: The Grad Student. Keep scrolling! School hasn’t started yet.
* The Average Joe Accused of Trying to Sell Russia Secrets.
* The short, unhappy life of the Soviet Jet Train.
* The first theory of evolution is 600 years older than Darwin.
* Forget about drones, forget about dystopian sci-fi — a terrifying new generation of autonomous weapons is already here. Meet the small band of dedicated optimists battling nefarious governments and bureaucratic tedium to stop the proliferation of killer robots and, just maybe, save humanity from itself.
* They say the best revenge is a life well-lived. There’s a study out this year that suggests Frenchmen can feel pain. I don’t wanna be one of those people who think everything got worse around the time he hit his mid-twenties.
* My statement of teaching philosophy.
* Happy 101st, Alice Sheldon. Kirby’s 99th.
* Ursula Nordstrom and the Queer History of the Children’s Book.
* “No Man’s Sky is an existential crisis simulator disguised as a space exploration game.”
* Great moments in FOIA requests.
* Colin Kaepernick Is Righter Than You Know: The National Anthem Is a Celebration of Slavery.
* Big data, Google and the end of free will.
* The logistical sublime: A Map Showing Every Single Cargo Ship In The World.
* Why There’s a Media Blackout on the Native American Dakota Oil Pipeline Blockade.
* Year-Long Simulation of Humans Living on Mars Comes To an End.
* Replication projects have had a way of turning into train wrecks. When researchers tried to replicate 100 psychology experimentsfrom 2008, they interpreted just 39 of the attempts as successful. In the last few years, Perspectives on Psychological Science has been publishing “Registered Replication Reports,” the gold standard for this type of work, in which lots of different researchers try to re-create a single study so the data from their labs can be combined and analyzed in aggregate. Of the first four of these to be completed, three ended up in failure.
* Under pressure to perform, Silicon Valley champions are taking tiny hits of LSD before heading to work. Are they risking their health or optimising it? I reject the premise of the question.
* A special issue of Transatlantic devoted to “Exploiting Exploitation Cinema.”
* So last night, on a whim, I started collecting links to doctoral dissertations written by members of the House of Commons, and posting them on the Twitter.
* The Guardian reviews the new edition of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the New Millennium.
* Missed this somehow in June: rumors of the four-point shot in the NBA. I’m not much of a sports person, but this fascinates me just as a lover of games.
* Le Guin honored by the Library of America (while still alive).
* King Camp Gillette introduced his safety razor, with disposable double-edge blades, around the turn of the 20th century. But before he was an inventor, Gillette was a starry-eyed utopian socialist. In 1894, he published “The Human Drift,” a book that, among other things, envisioned most of the population of North America living in a huge metropolis powered by Niagara Falls. Production would be fully centralized, making for the greatest efficiency, while all goods would be free to everyone. That’s the only way Gillette saw to ensure that the benefits of technological development would be shared. “No system can ever be a perfect system, and free from incentive for crime,” he wrote, employing a prescient metaphor, “until money and all representative value of material is swept from the face of the earth.” His blade was a model socialist innovation: Gillette replaced toilsome sharpening labor with the smallest, most easily produced part imaginable. The very existence of the Gillette Fusion is an insult to his memory.
* The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies.
* Soviet sci-fi movies in English online.
* Your one-shot comic of the week: Ark.
* And, finally, my story can be told.
Monday Morning Links!
* The first cut of ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ was over 3 hours long. I’m sure that would have solved all the problems.
* Science Fiction and the Urban Crisis.
* In short, riots aren’t counterproductive because they do not achieve their goals. They are counterproductive because they are an expression of those who are already-counterproductive, those “individuals committing the violence,” those ever-ready to riot.
* Starfleet as the Federation’s “Dumping Ground for Orphans.”
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 18.5: “Peaceful Protest.”
* Wow: Rebuilt slave sites being unveiled at Jefferson’s Monticello.
* The U.S. Civil War ended 150 years ago, but once a year, deep in the sugar cane fields of southern Brazil, the Confederate battle flag rises again.
* Parents call cops on teen for giving away banned book; it backfires predictably. They’re banning Sherman Alexie? Come on.
* Salvage Accumulation, or the Structural Effects of Capitalist Generativity.
* Executive Who Presided Over Nonprofit’s Fall Seeks $1.2 Million Payday.
* The names of the chemical elements in Chinese. More links below the chart.
* The Washington Post‘s Police Problem.
* Judith Butler’s talents are wasted on a “What’s Wrong With ‘All Lives Matter’?” piece that really should be obvious to everyone.
* The most amazing thing about this exchange is that Sam Harris thinks he won this argument so completely he needed everyone in the world to see.
* The headline reads, “Nepal’s Kung Fu Nuns Have Refused To Be Evacuated – They’re Staying Back To Help Victims.”
* “Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things: Disability in Game of Thrones.”
* Porn data: visualising fetish space.
* Ideology at its cutest (hat tip: Justin I.): Vermont Teddy Bear introduces Bernie Bear.
* Big Bird Actor: I Almost Died on the Challenger and I Cry in the Suit.
* Report: Cop Dismissed Freddie Gray’s Pleas for Help as “Jailitis.”
* Christie signs law greenlighting fast track sale of N.J. public water systems.
* The Great Victoria’s Secret Bra Heist of Pennsylvania.
* Behind the scenes of the Game of Thrones map.
* It’s always worse than you think: The CIA has been organizing clandestine TED Talks.
* “Cool” is a bit of a moving target. Sixty years ago it was James Dean, nonchalantly smoking a cigarette as he sat on a motorbike, glaring down 1950s conformity with brooding disapproval. Five years ago it was Zooey Deschanel holding a cupcake.
* “Social media trend sees men ditching sit-ups for snack cakes.” My moment has arrived!
* Tesla unveils a battery to power your home, completely off grid.
* I hate to link to an SNL bit, but their parody of a Black Widow movie was really pretty good.
* Area X novella coming… eventually. I liked the first book in the trilogy much, much more than the latter two, but I’m still in.
* Can 3D printing save the rhino? Seattle-based bioengineering start-up Pembient believes it can. The company plans to flood the market with synthetic 3D printed rhino horn in an effort to stem the number of rhinos killed for their horns. But conservationists fear that the plan may backfire, undermining their own efforts to cut the demand for such products in China and Vietnam, the main black markets for rhino horns.
* The coming DC Cinematic Universe trainwreck, Suicide Squad edition.
* A University Is Not Walmart.
* Trustees are basically heroes, and the Chronicle is ON IT.
* And LLAP, Grace Lee Whitney.
NYE
* The GOP is very eager to raise money off the attempted Detroit terror plot, despite GOP opposition to TSA funding and GOP holds on TSA appointments. Spencer Ackerman explains why this was a policy failure more than an intelligence failure. Glenn Greenwald considers the media failure. Bruce Schneier still hates security theater. A majority of Americans favor waterboarding Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. And Chris Matthews thinks we need to finally get serious about terrorism and think about what happens if a terrorist ever learns kung fu.
* Rachel Maddow is your president now.
* Senate 2010 previews from FiveThirtyEight and CQ.
* A medical marijuana dispenser in California will be using an entrapment by estoppel defense against federal prosecution, claiming DOJ statements about new Obama administration policy led him to believe his actions were legal. Via MeFi.
* ‘How American Health Care Killed My Father.’ Via Eric Barker.
* Nietzsche and Marx fare surprisingly poorly in this nonscientific poll of the 20 Most Important Philosophers of All Time, discrediting the whole endeavor.
* ‘Outrun Global Warming By Moving 5 Miles North in the 2010s.’
* And io9 has your cities of the future.
Shaolin Everything
Over the past eight years, photographer Justin Guariglia has slowly but surely won the trust of the notoriously secretive warrior monks of the Shaolin Temple, a unique Chinese Buddhist sect dedicated to preserving a form of kung fu referred to as the “vehicle of Zen.” With the blessing of the main abbot, Shi Yong Xin, Guariglia has earned the full collaboration of the monks to create an astonishing, empathic record of the Shaolin art forms and the individuals who consider themselves the keepers of these traditions. Via Kottke.
Gerry Canavan 