Posts Tagged ‘polar bears’
Weekend Links!
* New journal: Series: The International Journal of TV Serial Narratives.
* The full syllabus for my upcoming summer science fiction course is finished, if you’re interested. I’ve also updated the “online articles” section of my website with a link to Marquette’s online repository of my articles, which has some stuff people have been asking for (like my Snowpiercer essay).
* So why is TPP the only thing Obama has ever bothered to fight for?
* “The hardest things are the title and the name of the girl.” Oh, so it’s ridiculously easy.
* Judge finds probable cause for murder charge against officer who killed Tamir Rice.
* Judge orders University of Illinois to release Steven Salaita emails.
* The only thing anyone can talk about.
* Every Single Federal Employee’s Social Security Number Was Hacked: Report. Incredible. I almost wonder if this breach could actually be so large that the government has to shift responsibility for fraud away from individual consumers.
* At its worst, however, Left Forum is Comic Con for Marxists—Commie Con, if you will—and an absolute shitshow of nerds and social rejects.
* On the heels of last week’s shocking news that the Transportation Security Administration has a whopping 95 percent failure rate at finding bombs and weapons, we are now learning that the TSA further failed to identify 73 airport workers with links to terrorism.
* ‘Debt-Free College’ Is Democrats’ New Rallying Cry.
* The Milwaukee Bucks bailout and Gov. Scott Walker’s questionable math.
* Why are so many companies spending record sums of money buying back their shares instead of reinvesting more of their profits in their business and their workers? What could possibly explain it?
* I thought homeschooling my kids would be simple. I was wrong.
* “If she disobeyed, they had told her, they’d cut off her hair.”
* Barbasol’s inclusion was mostly a fluke — the movie’s art director, John Bell, said he grabbed it off a prop shelf with little thought; in the book, smugglers used Gillette — but the shaving-cream maker now calls it one of its biggest victories: John Price, a marketing vice president for parent company Perio, called it “one of the most recognized brand integrations of all time.”
* Here’s how much it would cost to build Jurassic Park.
* One phenomenon that has so far flown under the radar in discussions of peer-to-peer production and the sharing economy but that demands recognition on its own is one for which I think an apt name would be crowdforcing. Crowdforcing in the sense I am using it refers to practices in which one or more persons decides for one or more others whether he or she will share his or her resources, without the other person’s consent or even, perhaps more worryingly, knowledge. While this process has analogs and has even itself occurred prior to the digital revolution and the widespread use of computational tools, it has positively exploded thanks to them, and thus in the digital age may well constitute a difference in kind as well as amount.
* I know Reason is the enemy and all, but their report on this mishandled sex assault case at Amherst is genuinely stunning.
* New, large study confirms that approximately 1 in 5 women suffer sexual assault at college.
* A program designed to help female college freshmen resist sexual assault is creating a lot of buzz among victims’ advocates and college educators. Most were encouraged to learn that incidents of rape had been cut in half among participants in a Canadian study of the program, which involved four three-hour sessions in which the women learned to recognize the danger of coercive situations and to fight back, verbally and physically.
* Scenes from the class struggle at god Reddit is awful.
* Counterpoint: Anne Frank’s Diary Should Have Been Burned.
* RT @SaintRPh: Guy lives next to airport. Painted this on roof to confuse passengers as they fly overhead. He lives in Milwaukee.
* Secrets of the Milwaukee Accent.
* Reality is weird: Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron hated each other, but their stunt doubles got married.
* 22 Incredible Facts About The Life and Career Of Sir Christopher Lee.
* Thanks, global warming: Now polar bears are devouring dolphins.
* Nearly Half of Senior Tenured Professors Want to Delay Retirement. Yeah, you’ll never get rid of me.
* Some people just want to watch the world burn.
* Future really getting weird now.
* But sometimes the future gets it all right.
Thursday 2
* Why Dollhouse failed: an interview with Joss Whedon.
“The problems that the show encountered weren’t standalone versus mythology [episodes],” Whedon said. “Basically, the show didn’t really get off the ground because the network pretty much wanted to back away from the concept five minutes after they bought it. And then ultimately, the show itself is also kind of odd and difficult to market. I actually think they did a good job, but it’s just not a slam-dunk concept.”
* Continuity: a game that combines all the fun of low-res platforming with those sliding box puzzles we had when we were kids.
* Good news from places I have lived: Cleveland has passed a transgender protection law, while NJ may vote on marriage equality next week. “Democratic officials previously said they would not put the legislation to a vote unless they had the support needed to pass it.” So it’s as good as done.
* And close enough: Hundreds of New Yorkers rally in Times Square for marriage equality.
* Bad news from places I have lived: MTV’s The Shore premieres tonight.
* The headline reads, “Hungry polar bears resorting to cannibalism.” (Thanks Leah. But Canada is still on notice.)
* Of course, as we all know, polar bears are just early adopters.
* Actually existing media bias: The Dallas Morning News has saved journalism by ordering its section editors to report directly to its advertising staff. Via MeFi.
* A University of Montreal study on the effects of watching pornography ran into trouble when it couldn’t find any men who didn’t watch porn. Also spotted at Pharyngula. But won’t somebody think of the children?
* Amanda Marcotte: You’ll notice that entire categories of women are being redefined as so disgusting that any man who touches them should be ashamed. First it was over 40 (cougar), then over 30 (puma), and now over 25 (cheetah), and soon it will be anyone over the age of legal consent. And those below it? Illegal. Exactly zero women will be acceptable for fucking.
* Nate Silver continues his quixotic efforts to handicap the 2012 GOP field.
* And hairy chests are back. I have come prepared.
Methane Apocalypse
For the first time, climate scientists have discovered evidence that methane from melting undersea permafrost is being released into the atmosphere. This is very bad.
It’s no wonder polar bears are turning to cannibalism.
TGITuesday
Thank God it’s Tuesday.
* Were you watching the time-travel show Journeyman on NBC this year? You’ll never get another episode, but at least you can find out how it all would have ended.
* Bush ‘antagonizing environmentalists’ on his way out of office.
Just months before President Bush leaves office, his administration is antagonizing environmentalists by proposing changes that would allow federal agencies to decide for themselves whether subdivisions, dams, highways and other projects have the potential to harm endangered animals and plants.
The proposal, first reported by The Associated Press, would cut out the advice of government scientists who have been weighing in on such decisions for 35 years. Agencies also could not consider a project’s contribution to global warming in their analysis.
This is nothing we haven’t seen before.
* Honda to debut hydrogen-fuel cell car in 2008. We’re saved! Unless, you know, the debunkers turn out to be right about hydrogen…
* Fraggmented’s John Seavey makes one his storytelling engine posts about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, explaining why the show was never the same (and could never have been the same) after the characters graduated high school.
* A Mac utility that automatically shuts down your Internet connectivity for any length of time you specify. I wouldn’t be attracted to something like this if I had any willpower at all.
* Fred Pearce argues the Neo-Malthusian “population bomb” has been defused. We’re saved!
Why then is the world’s population still rising? Currently at around 6.7 billion, it is 70 million higher every year. The problem is that the delivery wards are being visited by the huge numbers of young women born during the earlier baby boom. They may only have one or two children each. But that is still a lot of babies. Probably nothing will stop humanity reaching 8 billion by about 2040 and many demographers predict that world population will peak at around 9 billion by the end of the 21st century. But once those baby boomers have had their babies, the falling fertility rate will be translated into a real decline in the world’s population — the first since the Black Death of the 14th century.
The question remains, I think, whether 9 billion will be a Malthusian crisis all by itself.
* And it may be time to rethink climate change in the face of the polar bear menace.
Gerry Canavan 