March 2012
2 tags
2 tags
ANIMALS IN COSTUME
from a series of emails sent to my fellow students as our thesis deadline approached.
Let’s start with a classic: wiener dogs in hot dog buns. Some are in costumes, some are in literal hot dog buns. Don’t get confused and eat them!
Here is my all-time favorite dog costume, a dog dressed up as cerberus. Here’s a little black dog, a Harry Potter-themed bonanza, and even this...
WTF
from a series of emails sent to my fellow students as our thesis deadline approached.
So, here - this is just some weird shit. Who knows why people make these videos, who knows why people watch them. The world is large and contains many wonders, I guess. Be careful not to fall out of any chairs you’re in when the slightly hysterical laughter starts!!
Here is a guy riding a buffalo, whose...
CORGIS
from a series of emails sent to my fellow students as our thesis deadline approached.
Let’s just get some pure, unmitigated cuteness going here. before I started compiling these emails, I was not especially familiar with the corgi as a dog breed. Since then, I have learned many important things:
how to induce a group of corgi puppies to stampede;
british corgis are pretty well organized...
SPIKE JONZE VIDEOS
from a series of emails sent to my fellow students as our thesis deadline approached.
TIME FOR A DANCE BREAK.
Here is a selected list of music videos directed by Spike Jonez. (Most of them are preceded by ads. Sorry!)
‘Otis’ - Jay-Z & Kanye West (you just missed your chance to buy the car from the video…)
‘The Suburbs’ - Arcade Fire
‘Get Back’...
CATS CATS CATS
from a series of emails sent to my fellow students as our thesis deadline approached.
Cats. Who rules the internet? Cats! What is the internet really made of? Tubes and tubes of cats! Let’s examine more closely.
After working so hard for so long, you may now feel like you resemble this adorable kitten falling asleep. It’s so sudden! It cannot be resisted! But watching this ten minute...
CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER
from a series of emails sent to my fellow students as our thesis deadline approached.
The only thing cuter than animal love is interspecies animal love. Two different kinds of animals together loving each other! It defies description.
Here are some videos: Look! It is a German Shepard nursing a baby goat!! And a cat and a dolphin playing together!! And a dog and a little chicken! And a dog who...
IT COULD BE WORSE
from a series of emails sent to my fellow students as our thesis deadline approached.
Just remember, it could be worse. Really! There are things that are worse than this. Let’s review some of them so we feel better about ourselves and our lot in life!
You could be going on these dates with people from internet dating sites and experiencing these catastrophes, which are legion. Wow. Or what...
THEY THINK THEY'RE PEOPLE
from a series of emails sent to my fellow students as our thesis deadline approached.
Let’s focus on something else. Like, for example, they’re animals! But they think they’re people! They’re doing people things, even though they’re animals! Maybe there is an animal who wants to write a thesis for us? Let’s find it! And harness its magical animal powers!
What...
OTTERS
from a series of emails sent to my fellow students as our thesis deadline approached.
I know I said sloths were cool, but otters are totally the new sloths. They are so awesome! They are native to California so they are not exotic animals but actually things we might be able to see near us without extensive travels!
You know when otters are super duper ultra cute? When they are babies. Baby...
TIME LAPSE
from a series of emails sent to my fellow students as our thesis deadline approached.
Maybe some time lapse videos can help us make sense of things.
Here is a nice one of various nature things, including several “above the clouds looking down like they are waves or boiling in a mountain valley” segments, which I find to be particularly soothing. And here’s a kind of trippy one...
ROBOTS
from a series of emails sent to my fellow students as our thesis deadline approached.
Wonder at the power of human technology!
DARPA just made a robot that set the new land speed record for legged robots, so it can run super fast (like 18 miles an hour fast.) Also watching a robot cheetah run on a treadmill is pretty funny.
Robots also do super important things - watch this fleet of flying...
FOOD
from a series of emails sent to my fellow students as our thesis deadline approached.
Food! I have found myself having dinners consisting solely of tortilla chips and ginger snaps, so it is nice to think about a time when I will be able to actually make something fancy and nutritious, like a bowl of cereal!
Did you know that in Japan, you can buy a Cup o Noodles that is “taco”...
SLOTHS
from a series of emails sent to my fellow students as our thesis deadline approached.
Sloths are SO HOT right now. It seems like things started when Kristin Bell went on the Ellen Degeneres show and talked about how her love of sloths was so intense it provoked a literal meltdown, and then everyone else was like, I love sloths too!
Which is frankly understandable, because they are pretty cute....
2 tags
FUCK YEAH KANSAS JAYHAWKS
how you feel about those life choices now, roy williams?
3 tags
U.N. asked to investigate solitary confinement as... →
Calling solitary confinement “torture,” California prisoners and advocates are asking the United Nations to investigate the segregated housing of gang members at prisons throughout the state. “We have California treating several thousand prisoners in much the same way the U.S. government treats enemy combatants held in Guantanamo,” said Peter Schey, an attorney...
Popular Support for Muslim Profiling →
One reason we find the NYPD explicitly profiling Muslims and spying on them in colleges up and down the eastern sea-board is because it’s what the public actually wants:
According to the poll, conducted by Quinnipiac University, 58 percent of voters said the department acted appropriately in its efforts to fight terrorism and did not unfairly target Muslims; 29 percent disagreed. The...
Using Election Law to Counteract Voter Ignorance →
A new paper on the topic by Christopher Elmendorf andDavid Schleicher:
This paper examines what law can do to enable an electorate comprised of mostly ignorant voters to obtain meaningful representation and to hold elected officials accountable for the government’s performance. Drawing on a half century of research by political scientists, we argue that political parties are both the key to good...
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who just sent their thesis to the printer.
Justice for Trayvon... but how?
lowendtheory:
wordsandsteel:
Reading about Trayvon Martin’s killing and am beyond saddened, sickened, and outraged at the continuation of state-sanctioned killing of black and brown youth. I wonder, however, if there another way to push for justice for Trayvon, without appealing to the prison-industrial complex as a means of retribution. Even if the state does prosecute his killer, what does...
do you want to get compliments on your nail...
from, like, multiple strangers? if so, then i have two color recommendations for you!
1) Sally Hansen Hard as Nails Xtreme Wear in Lacey Lilac. it’s very spring-like.
2) China Glaze in Aquadelic. like, robin’s egg, kind of tiffany’s color blue?
2 tags
Are motorways rational from slime mould's point of... →
We analyse the results of our experimental laboratory approximation of motorways networks with slime mould Physarum polycephalum. Motorway networks of fourteen geographical areas are considered: Australia, Africa, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Iberia, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, The Netherlands, UK, USA. For each geographical entity we represented major urban areas by oat flakes and...
Unemployment by Job Category - NYTimes.com →
Depending on the industry, unemployment rates are all over the map.
Despite continuing layoffs at all levels of government, the unemployment rate among government workers was just 3.9 percent in February, down from 4.2 percent a year ago, not adjusted for seasonal factors.
At the other end of the spectrum, agricultural workers suffer from an unemployment rate of 19.5 percent, compared with...
Shifting Students Out of Community Colleges and... →
Perhaps the biggest beneficiaries of state cutbacks for higher education are the private for-profit schools, like the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University.
John Aubrey Douglass, a research fellow at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, actually wrote a paper last month about this shift from public colleges to for-profits, which has...
Is charity a major source of deadweight loss? →
From the excellent Stefano DellaVigna, John List, and Ulrike Malmendier:
Every year, 90% of Americans give money to charities. Is such generosity necessarily welfare enhancing for the giver? We present a theoretical framework that distinguishes two types of motivation: individuals like to give, for example, due to altruism or warm glow, and individuals would rather not give but dislike saying...
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i can't believe how many of you would choose to go...
signed, the girl who has seen the shining like 7 times and has still never seen the last 15 minutes due to an urgent need to be in another room.
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The Hidden Majority of for-Profit Colleges -... →
A new study by the economists Stephanie Riegg Cellini of George Washington University and Claudia Goldin of Harvard concludes that the estimated number of for-profit institutions in the United States would more than double – to more than 7,500 from 2,944 – if official statistics included institutions that do not receive federal student aid.
Since accreditation is a prerequisite for Title IV...
Chimpanzees have police officers →
Anthropologists now reveal that chimpanzees mediate conflicts between other group members, not for their own direct benefit, but rather to preserve the peace within the group. Their impartial intervention in a conflict — so-called “policing” — can be regarded as an early evolutionary form of moral behavior. …primatologists from the University of Zurich can now confirm that chimpanzees intervene...
The facts and the truth →
NPR has changed its rules for journalists [HTs and more discussion: DK, James Fallows] from reporting “both sides” of any issue to including expert judgment about the sides’ relative weight. This is a very big deal. Print journalism used to be quite partisan, but around the turn of the 20th century, wire services started to market a product designed to be attractive to all newspapers, and...
2 tags
FUCK YEAH KANSAS JAYHAWKS
one step closer to total eradication
me: just no pie charts! :)
E: really? i thought everyone loved pie charts?
me: they are evil and the devil's work
E: lol why?
me: the eye can't gauge the relative size/area of pie chunks, so it misrepresents relative size
E: really?
hm, interesting
me: http://lilt.ilstu.edu/gmklass/pos138/datadisplay/badchart.htm
look at the comparison of data displayed in pie charts v bar graphs
infinitely easier to see relative sizes with bar graphs
E: yeah
k cool, decided
me: WOO my quest to rid the earth of them is furthered
what is time
why are the egg coloring kits on prominent display in the grocery store when is easter am i supposed to be dying eggs am i hopelessly behind or are they just really excited i need my marketing cues to make sense.
1 tag
i just watched an entire episode of fashion star and i still don’t understand what it’s about or how it works or most importantly why on earth anyone would watch it. what do you think will happen next week?
“I like Abby, she’s always ready to fight the good fight.”
– Erin (via lamanda)
aww… these girls are the sweetest.
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