severnayazemlya:

geometryofthoughts:

thesublemon:

lambdaphagy:

davidsevera:

ABOUT ME: In college I had literally eight different professors (I counted) who explained the prisoner’s dilemma like we had never heard it before and were about to be initiated into some mind-blowing secret known only to a select elite.

The same thing happened to me with Kuhn.  I think I must have had it assigned at least five different times.

I was once talking to a film major about this very subject and I asked her if there was an equivalent in her department, some masterpiece that every professor thought relevant to their course.  She thought for a moment and replied, “Die Hard.”

“Die Hard?”

“Yeah, with Bruce Willis?  Everyone makes us watch it.”

in art history it’s “art in the age of mechanical reproduction.”

In math it’s Cantor and Godel and logical paradoxes, etc.

In philosophy, it’s Descartes, Hume, the social contract, and Kant, who each of my professors had a completely different interpretation of.

In American Studies it was the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the fact that theater audiences were traditionally expected to be loud and boisterous.

Sometimes I wonder how few years you would have to go back in time before The Discourse became completely incomprehensible.

ponderation:

Hurricane by Filip Molcan

blogontheweb:

emes:

i googled “what does lifetime supply mean” and ended up on this Reddit of people who have had to live with the aftermath of winning very large quantities of consumer goods

i’m reading this whole thread and i’m having a great time

Even at this early point in his career, Roosevelt fashioned himself as a take-no-prisoners reformer, a man who would sink his impressive teeth into any worthy cause. Among his rookie-term targets: railroad monopolies, police corruption, civil-service patronage, undertaxed saloon owners, cigar sweatshops, water pollution, and one particularly venal state supreme court justice, who only escaped Roosevelt’s impeachment campaign after three key Democratic politicians received $2,500 to vote for the judge. In one of his most celebrated campaigns, Roosevelt went after the robber baron Jay Gould’s Manhattan Elevated Railroad Company, which had a monopoly on building New York City train stations.

Gould had enough politicians in his pocket that Assemblyman Roosevelt felt compelled to bring reinforcements to a potentially hostile hearing in 1882. “There was a broken chair in the room, and I got a leg of it loose and put it down beside me where it was not visible, but where I might get at it in a hurry if necessary,” he said. “The riot did not come off; partly, I think, because the opportune production of the chairleg had a sedative effect, and partly owing to wise counsels from one or two of my opponents.”  TR wasn’t being metaphorical when he advocated speaking softly and carrying a big stick.

People be like “Jonathan Franzen considered adopting an Iraqi orphan, what was he thinking?”

Well, I’m guessing he was thinking by analogy to the fact that adopting Vietnam War orphans was a definite thing among the ‘70s literari/smart set.

Like, I definitely remember at least one writer reminiscing about the incongruity of going to majority-Asian bar mitzvahs in the ‘80s Upper West Side, and Doonesbury, the “adventures of Boomer elite archetypes” comic strip had a character with just such a backstory.

Of course what’s changed since then is the coastal “start a family in your 40s” types now have access to fertility treatments.

Apparently everyone in America knows a different “Josh Bowman” from high school but they’re all basically the same guy.

Whoever told me “the new Carly Rae Jepsen album is a lot better than you’d expect”, you were correct.

Whoever told me “the new Carly Rae Jepsen album is actually really good”, you were incorrect.

severnayazemlya:

nonternary:

wirehead-wannabe:

nonternary:

wirehead-wannabe:

You know, I just realized that pretty much all of the crackpots I hear about are male, for a particular definition of “crackpot.”

Mainstream anti-science stuff seems roughly even across gender; anti-vaxx, young earth creationism, climate change denial. But only men seem to get into truly weird stuff like thinking they’ve solved physics, or believing the government is hiding aliens, etc etc. Anything “fringe” i.e. stuff that a politician wouldn’t openly admit to believing, seems to be male-dominated.

Am I imagining this?

No, that’s definitely a Thing.

(they also seem to be disproportionately white, middle-aged, and electrical engineers, but I digress)

Maybe it’s actually engineering/physics/math/comp sci majors that are overrepresented, rather than men per se? I know I’ve heard people say that that cluster has a tendency towards crackpottery for one reason or another.

STEM fields are overrepresented, particularly engineering.

But I’ve never once heard of a female crackpot.

Could be small-sample-size bad luck, of course.

(I’ve had women aggressively push their uncle’s/husband’s/brother’s theory on me, though.)

Most of the crackpots I hear about are male, but most of the crackpots I run across are female. The gender ratio is probably different for aliens and physics vs. astrology, chemtrails, antivax shit, crystals, and odd diets – and men are probably more inclined toward self-promotion, at least in mostly-male circles.

But – you’ve never once heard of a female crackpot? What about Jenny McCarthy, Jasmuheen, Banana Girl, Savitri Devi, or, you know, Tumblr?

Mary Baker Eddy? Actually there were a lot of  a lot of prominent women in 19th century American Spiritualism, does that count?

That kind of fits into the “men do crackpot science, women do crackpot mysticism” thing. On the other hand it’s a little presentist to project the science/mysticism divide back onto Spiritualism, at the time a lot of people would have taken it as a science on par with electricity or magnetism.

“Here are some mysterious immaterial forces we don’t entirely understand and can’t quite explain but will attempt to harness anyway” was kind of the theme of the age.

kontextmaschine:

Whoever told me “the new Carly Rae Jepsen album is a lot better than you’d expect”, you were correct.

Whoever told me “the new Carly Rae Jepsen album is actually really good”, you were incorrect.

Like the first few songs sound like they could be on Top 40, yet were better than anything I remember when I was listening to Top 40 last week.

The album starts out banging as fuck. Run Away With Me is a great song. It doesn’t blaze any trails, but the footsteps in follows in are like, Annie, Tegan and Sara, CHVRCHES and happycore vocal anthems, a touch of that laser-wireframe Trapper Keeper ‘80s neo-neon-noir shit we’re about lately, all of which are EXTREMELY my jam.

The next two are solid - the title track puts some bouncy ‘90s anime BGM instrumentation over what are by all rights (and are delivered as) Jackson 5 lyrics, I Really Like You is simple as hell and fun as hell, with some instrumentation from back when they discovered synthesizers and polyrhythm at the same time and went wild.

But from there, eh, it gets grim and tryhard real quick, and the things it’s imitating start to get even more painfully obvious. Boy Problems is a Victorious Breakup Song (like WANEGBT) done as ersatz Lucky-era Daft Punk but the lyrics are way too on the nose, the one good memorable line is awkwardly deployed.

Sonically, Your Type rips CHVRCHES waaaaaay too hard and too directly, and lyrically it’s clear someone sat down to write A Friendzone Song in exactly the same sense you’d sit down to write A Book Report About The Giver

The rest of the album… there are some good bits, but half of them I’m like “man I wish this bit was in a better song” and the other half I’m like “man I remember when this bit was in a better song”.

The one thing I’ll say, compared to the other big ‘80s-throwback pop album of the year, Taylor Swift’s 1989, it draws on the dancier, more disco-influenced, diva-y and tbh gayer stuff of the period, and there’s a few tracks on here that are disposable trash as is but would make great fodder for club dance remixes.

argumate:

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

Whoever told me “the new Carly Rae Jepsen album is a lot better than you’d expect”, you were correct.

Whoever told me “the new Carly Rae Jepsen album is actually really good”, you were incorrect.

Like the first few songs sound like they could be on Top 40, yet were better than anything I remember when I was listening to Top 40 last week.

The album starts out banging as fuck. Run Away With Me is a great song. It doesn’t blaze any trails, but the footsteps in follows in are like, Annie, Tegan and Sara, CHVRCHES and happycore vocal anthems, a touch of that laser-wireframe Trapper Keeper ‘80s neo-neon-noir shit we’re about lately, all of which are EXTREMELY my jam.

The next two are solid - the title track puts some bouncy ‘90s anime BGM instrumentation over what are by all rights (and are delivered as) Jackson 5 lyrics, I Really Like You is simple as hell and fun as hell, with some instrumentation from back when they discovered synthesizers and polyrhythm at the same time and went wild.

But from there, eh, it gets grim and tryhard real quick, and the things it’s imitating start to get even more painfully obvious. Boy Problems is a Victorious Breakup Song (like WANEGBT) done as ersatz Lucky-era Daft Punk but the lyrics are way too on the nose, the one good memorable line is awkwardly deployed.

Sonically, Your Type rips CHVRCHES waaaaaay too hard and too directly, and lyrically it’s clear someone sat down to write A Friendzone Song in exactly the same sense you’d sit down to write A Book Report About The Giver

The rest of the album… there are some good bits, but half of them I’m like “man I wish this bit was in a better song” and the other half I’m like “man I remember when this bit was in a better song”.

The one thing I’ll say, compared to the other big ‘80s-throwback pop album of the year, Taylor Swift’s 1989, it draws on the dancier, more disco-influenced, diva-y and tbh gayer stuff of the period, and there’s a few tracks on here that are disposable trash as is but would make great fodder for club dance remixes.

Now imagine this review being spoken by someone who just straight up butchered someone with an axe.

radioactivemongoose:

the hotel has an on demand section called “mood” & these are the moods

Everyone got the significance of Donald Trump expelling Jorge Ramos from his presser the other day, right? The obviously intentional symbolism of Trump ejecting a Mexican guy from his domain, telling him to “go back to [where you came from]”?

Well have you thought about the symbolism of how he eventually let him back in and talk to him, after time had passed and he was willing to wait his turn and go through proper channels?

Or the significance of how a lot of the media didn’t even bother trying to ding him for that because they said “yeah, fair enough, that guy was arrogantly breaking the rules and that’s a reasonable response”.

I’m thinking Trump’s accepted a significant hit among hispanics, his messaging at this point - and honestly GOP messaging on race-adjacent issues in general - isn’t trying to win them. Only state that’s going to flip on overland hispanic votes this cycle is Colorado anyway (Florida’s a different demographic beast).

What it’s targeted at is places like my homeland, the “collar counties” around Philadelphia that determine which way the state swings. Places full of nice, comfortable, suburban whites who vote that identity and those interests, chief among them that they can keep thinking of themselves as nice (and ideally not have to think of themselves as white).

Their concern with immigration and racial policy isn’t with its effects but with its aesthetics - they recoil from deportation and interdiction only insofar as the attached adjectives are “malicious and hateful”, but if Trump can sell the exact same policy as “tough but fair”…

And it’s not like that’ll make him win them over with the issue, but it means he won’t lose them on it. He gets painted as “far-right” but it’s basically just immigration (which gives you a sense what our painters think counts in politics) and in any other respects he’s exactly the moderate-liberal Republicanism that kind of voter loves. Seriously, dude’s like a Aaron Sorkin wet dream, not even so much a Rockefeller as a Lindsay Republican.

In the AU where the New World colonized the Old, I bet lions would be called “bison cats”.

grimshelf:

Alt universe where everything is the same but the jazz age is replaced by the scene age

slartibartfastibast:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYwKtVApSlc