What I've Been Reading: 8/5/2013
First off, in case you missed it, my last RL update is here in case you're curious as to how I'm doing. ^_^;
Also, one of my cousins recently opened up a jewelry shop on Etsy! I think some of you on my f-list would be interested, so if you'd like to support her (which would be awesome! :D) or just see the kind of work she's doing, feel free to check out her store. ;-)
Because I haven't done a linkdump in a while, it's another REALLY REALLY long one, so it's under a cut. Obviously I don't expect you to read all of it -- or any of it, for that matter -- but I've bolded the ones I recommend the most for your convenience. Enjoy!
POLITICS
--Are You Smart Enough to Be a U.S. Citizen? Take Our Quiz (I got a 47 on this)
--6 Reasons Why Kim Jong Un Is Screwed
--Supreme Court acknowledges that sex workers are human beings
--How the Music Industry Explains Inequality, Globalization, Middle-Class Decline ... Basically Everything
--Rethinking Gun Control: Surprising findings from a comprehensive report on gun violence
--The Majority of Military Sexual Assault Victims Are Men. Maybe Now We Can Fix This?
--The Humiliating Fundraising Existence of a Member of Congress (or, a reason why you should have some sympathy for members of Congress)
--Ending Poverty By Giving the Poor Money (on finding new ways to aid development in poor countries)
--The Banality of Butter: What Hannah Arendt Can Tell Us About Paula Deen (picking apart the mentality of the people who rushed to defend Deen when news of her racism came out)
--If You're Poor and You Live in Texas, Your Right to Vote Has Been Taken Away
--Israel's new political face on Palestinian refugees: 'we have been waiting... for more and more of them to die' (I admit I don't know much about Israel's internal politics, so I can't say for certain if what this woman said is representative of what her party stands for, but what she said was still really disturbing, especially if she's supposed to represent Israelis critical of occupying the West Bank and Gaza)
--Drones: For Or Against? Time for Everyone on the Left to Decide
--Bradley Manning Lives in a Nation of Laws, and, Hero or Not, He Broke 20 of Those Laws
--You Say You Want a Revolution?
--No, It's Not Sexist to Describe Women Politicians' Clothes (...wait, what?!)
--How Big Money Created the Most Polarized Congress in a Century: 5 Charts
--The 6 Most Misguided Causes Ever Made Famous by Celebrities
--Trayvon Martin and the Irony of American Justice
--A cop's take on the George Zimmerman verdict (an attempt to get into George Zimmerman's head to explain how his racism translated into him killing Trayvon Martin)
--The Banality of Richard Cohen and Racist Profiling
--Is it possible to have morality in a free market? (as much as I'm critical of laissez-faire capitalism and a lack of government regulation of business, I'm not entirely convinced that capitalism itself is "evil"/a problem, so I found myself sympathizing with this piece, even if I need to read it again to really understand it)
--Anthony Weiner and Liberal Morality
--Heroes, Villains, and Victims (on myths regarding the military)
--Flood, Rebuild, Repeat: Are We Ready for a Superstorm Sandy Every Other Year? (even though it gets a bit wonky, this piece does a good job explaining how hard it is to change policies regarding natural disasters, namely funding preventative measures)
--The Charitable-Industrial Complex
--The Problem With the Marissa Alexander-George Zimmerman Comparison
--The ABCs of Strategy (when talking about the Indian Wars, the author called the Native Americans as "Stone Age peoples," which I don't think was necessary, but otherwise it seemed pretty interesting)
--Why Americans All Believe They Are 'Middle Class'
--English Is a Dialect With an Army
NSA SPYING CONTROVERSY
--Why Should We Even Care If the Government Is Collecting Our Data?
--The Real Reason You're Mad at the NSA (on the split between the U.S. intelligence community and the rest of the country)
--Whistleblowers: Thanks for nothing, Snowden
--Greenwald, Snowden, and the Art of Hero Worship (I'm finally glad there are some people on the left who are as uncomfortable as I am with the sensationalism, righteous indignation, and "outrage porn" some people have been expressing re: the NSA scandal -- it's why, despite me agreeing just as much as anyone else that privacy is important and that there needs to be more transparency and accountability when it comes to these things, I just can't get behind the paranoia people like Greenwald are expressing, and in fact I don't even think it's that big of a deal)
--The NSA Story Exposed a Deepening Schism on the Left
--Have We All Been Fooled By Edward Snowden? (obviously we shouldn't judge why people do what they do now based on stuff they've said in the past, because you never know if they've had a change of heart or opinion, but still, this is pretty fishy)
--Big Brother Doesn't Scare Me
SCIENCE
--Scientists may have discovered how cancer spreads around the body
--Why Is Exercise Such a Chore?
--Scientists have figured out why naked mole rats don't get cancer
--The Problem With the Neuroscience Backlash
--Scientists Clone a Mouse From a Single Drop of Blood
--Why Your Memory Sucks (and What You Can Do About It)
--Just one week without artificial lights can magically make you a morning person (I can't go that long without the Internet though >_<;)
--North America's fastest land animal can outrun a cheetah
--Confirmed: Spiders Are Even More Terrifying Than Previously Thought
--Nobel Laureates Doodle Their Discoveries
--How Spontaneous Combustion Really Happens
--Is human super-intelligence a bad idea?
--What is the evolutionary advantage of death?
--Watch a Levitating Magnet Sail Around a Möbius Strip!
--Parents work to prevent the next Newtown
--Newly discovered "Pandoravirus" could redefine life as we know it
--The Vitamin Myth: Why We Think We Need Supplements
--A Liberal's Defense of GMOs (another excellent takedown of well-intentioned but baseless paranoia)
--A weird new insight into how new species evolve
--10 theories that explain why we dream
--Memory implantation is now officially real (DDDDDDDDDDDDDDD:)
--'Fat shaming' actually increases risk of becoming or staying obese, new study says
--10 Bogus -- and Widely Believed -- Statistics
--How did monogamy evolve?
--The Earth breathes, and it is beautiful (GIFs of satellite images of how vegetation and snow cover changes on Earth over the course of a year)
ENVIRONMENT
--The Prozac in your pee makes fish anxious and aggressive (talk about unintended consequences O_o;)
--15-year-old creates flashlight that runs on body heat
--Technology can turn waste heat into electricity at temperature as low as 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30°C)
--Scientists discover another cause of bee deaths, and it's really bad news
--This boat circled the globe on sun power alone
--How one community brought these cute penguins back from extinction
--Peru's poorest will soon have solar power
--Why coal has a hit on "America's Got Talent"
--The future is a desert, but we can make it bloom (on improving agriculture in a post-climate change world)
--Mexico City Building Exterior Eats Smog
--How the Polar Bear Lost Its Power, and Other Animal Tales (on how redonkulously complex efforts at conserving endangered species are, especially in their unforeseen consequences and how it's just another form of humans messing with nature)
SPACE/ASTRONOMY
--6 Astronaut Questions: An Astrodad's Perspective
--We Can Make It to the Edge of the Observable Universe in a Few Decades
--In Space, No One Can Hear Your Takeout Order (on making food for astronauts better)
--A New Equation Reveals Our Exact Odds of Finding Alien Life
--Europe Testing Prototype Mini-Shuttle
--In Lopsided Map of the Cosmos, a Glimmer of Its Origins
--Confirmed: A Star System With Three Potentially Habitable Planets!
--How does spacetime get bent?
--Ask a Physicist: Would a gravitron work in deep space?
--Watch as SpaceX's Grasshopper sets a new record by 'hopping' over 1,000 feet
--Astronomers have discovered a blue planet beyond our solar system
--Why aliens might understand the universe very differently than we do (if nothing else, it should provide good fodder for ideas in case anyone out there wants to write a sci-fi story)
--It's Easier for Aliens to Visit Us Than Previously Thought
--Bill Nye explains how to stop an asteroid
--NASA Scientist to Scour Kepler Data in Search of Alien Technologies
--What shape is the Universe?
--The Disgusting Side of Space: What Happens to Dead Skin in Microgravity
--Could We Move the Sun?
MATHEMATICS
--How to Use Math to Crush Your Friends at Monopoly Like You've Never Done Before
TECHNOLOGY
--This is what it's like to shake hands with the future
--Portraits in Posthumanity: Claudia Mitchell
--This Glove Could Help Deaf-Blind People Communicate With Anyone, Anywhere (so this is actually really creative; I'm just curious as to whether or not deaf-blind people will actually accept it)
--10 mindblowingly futuristic technologies that will appear by the 2030s
--The Rainmakers: How Human Beings Control the Weather
--Watch this robot perform a perfect quadruple backflip
--Sound waves have brought us closer to a levitation machine
--72 Hours of YouTube Uploads Every Minute, and More Internet Stats
--The Last Text You'll Ever Send: Why new driving safety technologies are really dangerous
--With this device, you can control a rat using the power of your mind (cool, but also totally D:-inducing)
--The Machine Zone: This Is Where You Go When You Just Can't Stop Looking at Pictures on Facebook (or Tumblr, or YouTube, or on TV, or anywhere else, really)
EDUCATION
--RIP, American Dream: Why It's So Hard For the Poor to Get Ahead Today
--The Power of Talking to Your Baby
--And Martians Shall Save the University: Why do we need the liberal arts? Because it gives us sci-fi
HISTORY
--The lost city (on the recent discovery of an ancient Khmer city in Cambodia; WARNING: autoplay)
--Archaeologists Uncover Hundreds of Mysterious Orbs in Ancient Temple in Mexico
--What Happened to the Mysterious Humans of the Sahara 7,000 Years Ago?
--A pristine 'temple of the dead' has been uncovered in Peru
--Jack Baker and Michael McConnell: Gay Americans who married in 1971
--5 Ridiculous Lies You Believe About Ancient Civilizations
--Preserved loaf of bread discovered at Pompeii
--Gay marriage in the year 100 AD
SOCIETY
--Why Wanting Expensive Things Makes Us So Much Happier Than Buying Them
--The Greatest Science Fiction-Themed Bars and Restaurants on Earth
--10 of the Geekiest Restaurants of All Time
--These Unresolved Ethical Questions Are About to Get Real
--Teenage Pregnancy as Moral Panic
--Is the Tide Finally Turning on Rape Jokes?
--How the World's Newest 'Mixed' Language Was Invented
--Don Draper Was Raped (on how male rape victims are treated)
--How could we engineer humans to have more empathy?
--What Cop T-Shirts Tell Us About Police Culture (I wish this article would go more into the mentality behind why these T-shirts are created in the first place)
--The Paris Time Capsule Apartment
--The Myth of the Cool Office (on how "cool offices," like the kind Google has a reputation of having, actually increase social control and manipulate workers to better serve the needs of the company)
--Study: People With a Lot of Self-Control Are Happier
--Why Do Firefighters Take Such Risky Jobs?
--What Happened When My Son Wore a Pink Headband to Walmart (this is really disturbing, but serves as a useful reminder of how pervasive homophobia and sexism still are, and the lessons we inadvertently teach 2-year-old boys)
--The Science of Breaking Out of Your Comfort Zone (and Why You Should) (so I think I and a few others would find this really useful)
--"Umami" Was Coined By the Inventor of MSG to Describe Its Taste (on how MSG might not be so bad for you)
--No Rape Victim, Male or Female, Deserves to Be Blamed
--On the stupidity of "People Are Stupid" (one of my biggest pet peeves is when people make such sweeping, misanthropic statements as "people are stupid," and this post succintly shows why it's such a gross thing to say -- also, many of the comments provide good food for thought)
--How Power Corrupts the Mind
--6 Mental Illness Myths Hollywood Wants You to Believe
--Your Sedentary Lifestyle Is Turning You Into a Nervous Wreck
--"I was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl"
--What Comes After the Twink? (on the toxicity of gay male "scenes" and communities)
--Young People Who Sacrifice Romance for 'Unencumbered Striving'
--What Does It Mean to Kill for a Cause?
--On Getting Drunk in Antarctica
--Millennial medium chill: What the screwed generation can teach us about happiness (this article probably assumes a bit too much about the people it's profiling, namely that they're from families that are at least somewhat well-off, but it still gives good points about how the economic downturn is creating a new "real world" with different values and assumption, and the challenge for young people today is how to navigate it)
--Why It Matters What Other People Think of You (it's always pissed me off greatly when people go on about how much they REALLY don't care what other people think of them and what they do, because it just reeks of teenage selfishness and immaturity, and this blog post does a good job in breaking that down)
--Why Do Brits and Americans Spell Words Differently?
--You Are Not So Smart: Procrastination
--Superstar Sports Players More Likely to Cheat (on why there aren't many incentives for pro athletes to play clean)
--The Circumcision Wars: What's a Parent to Do?
--The Stupidity of the Crowd (but only when the choice is really, really obvious)
--Is It Ever Okay to Spank a Child?
--Social Guides for the Socially Awkward Part I: Making New Friends (this might also be helpful for some of you out there)
--Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness
GEOGRAPHY
--This is the totally bonkers story of the US/Canada border
--A map of all the rivers in the United States, and nothing else
--China's Culinary Diversity in One Map
SEX
--Why Don't Women Masturbate More? Logistics.
--Coming Out As a Porn Addict
--"This Misterie of Fucking": A Sex Manual From 1680 (on how people talked about sex during times when most people tend to think nobody actually ever talked about sex)
--Porn v. reality: with food! (I wish they cited their sources for their statistics, but this was still pretty fun)
MEDIA
--How KKK rally image found new life 20 years after it was published
--At the Movies, the Women Are Gone
--"Inside the United States": What if journalists covered us like they cover world news?
--How Sex Scenes in Films/TV Really Work
--Why Are There So Few Female Antiheroes on Film?
--4 Ways Hollywood Is Completely Imploding
--7 Reasons Child Stars Go Crazy (An Insider's Perspective)
--Why You Believe Most Everything You Read or Watch on TV
--Pixies: Just the Latest Rockers to Make Violence Against Women Look Cool
--5 Depressing Realities Behind Popular Reality TV Shows (and they're not the ones that seem obvious to most of us)
--Empathy-Free Entertainment (this does an excellent job getting at why I don't find myself wanting to watch superhero movies and summer blockbusters all that often -- and at why superhero stories tend to suck in general)
--Save the Movie! The 2005 screenwriting book that's taken over Hollywood -- and made every movie feel the same
--Television on the Spectrum: The Best (and Worst) Depictions of Asperger Syndrome on TV
--Dead Girlfriends' "On Fraternity": When Male Musicians Write About Rape (they interviewed the guy behind Dead Girlfriends later on as a response to the controversy surrounding this song, which you can read here -- in fact, you really should listen to the EP as well, as it's REALLY good)
--The Problem of Premature Nerdgasms (another excellent piece about how much of the media that's popular in fandom and nerd culture is just a series of "cool" moments strung together, with no buildup or any attempts whatsoever to write effective, engaging stories)
VIDEO GAMES
--Indigenous-owned game company making titles on culture
--Video Games' Obsession With Winning Is Killing Them
--The Problem With Trash Talk (another reason why the thought of playing multiplayer games makes me uncomfortable :PPP)
--The Psychology Behind Steam's Summer Sale
--In the future, astronauts might play MMORPGs to fend off boredom
--Nobody Wins When Horror Games Stigmatize Mental Illness
ART/CREATIVITY
--Pirate Bay User Downloads Visualized in Real-Time Art Installation
--Short film: "Mirage" -- "A young Inuit boy reaches waters no one has ever reached before while trying to fish in the Arctic wilderness"
--"Cover the Cover" -- mashing up cartoons with famous album covers
--Poignant Photos of Animals Contemplating Life in Zoos
--Yang Yionglang: Ancient Chinese Art for the 21st Century
--Found at Auction: The Unseen Photographs of a Legend That Never Was
--"Dr. Easy": One of the past decade's most underrated novels is now a short film
--Short film "Metamorphosis": A haunting, wordless retelling of the myth of Artemis and Actaeon
--7 Bio-Artists Who Are Transforming the Fabric of Life Itself
--Naomi Harris: Capturing Canada Like You've Never Seen It Before
--If Woody Allen directed "Wolverine," it would look like this (this is absolutely hilarious, and I would totally go see this movie if it existed!)
--Artists Reimagine Norman Rockwell's Boy Scouts
--The monument to lab mice in Novosibirsk, Russia (here's another photo of it from a different angle)
--Short film: "The Flying Man" is the creepiest superhero
--Well, Thank God, Someone's Finally Making the Sequel to Chess (yes, someone has actually taken it upon themselves to update the game of chess)
--"Rape Joke," a poem by Patricia Lockwood (I know this has made the rounds on Twitter and Tumblr, but it's worth bringing up again, despite its obviously trigger-y subject matter)
--This 97-Year-Old Makes Amazing Art Exclusively With Microsoft Paint
--Randall Munroe finishes "Time," the 3,099-panel XKCD serial (Wired interviewed Munroe as well, offering some more insight into the thought that went behind it)
--The Strangest Installations and Art Projects on Earth
--A Rare Glimpse of City Life in North Korea
--"The Final Moments of Karl Brant": A Dark, Brilliant Short Film... Starring Pee-Wee Herman (one of the better short films I've seen in a while, and yes, Paul Reubens does an amazing job)
Originally posted at http://quadruplify.dreamwidth.org/138861.html || Comments on original post:
Also, one of my cousins recently opened up a jewelry shop on Etsy! I think some of you on my f-list would be interested, so if you'd like to support her (which would be awesome! :D) or just see the kind of work she's doing, feel free to check out her store. ;-)
Because I haven't done a linkdump in a while, it's another REALLY REALLY long one, so it's under a cut. Obviously I don't expect you to read all of it -- or any of it, for that matter -- but I've bolded the ones I recommend the most for your convenience. Enjoy!
POLITICS
--Are You Smart Enough to Be a U.S. Citizen? Take Our Quiz (I got a 47 on this)
--6 Reasons Why Kim Jong Un Is Screwed
--Supreme Court acknowledges that sex workers are human beings
--How the Music Industry Explains Inequality, Globalization, Middle-Class Decline ... Basically Everything
--Rethinking Gun Control: Surprising findings from a comprehensive report on gun violence
--The Majority of Military Sexual Assault Victims Are Men. Maybe Now We Can Fix This?
--The Humiliating Fundraising Existence of a Member of Congress (or, a reason why you should have some sympathy for members of Congress)
--Ending Poverty By Giving the Poor Money (on finding new ways to aid development in poor countries)
--The Banality of Butter: What Hannah Arendt Can Tell Us About Paula Deen (picking apart the mentality of the people who rushed to defend Deen when news of her racism came out)
--If You're Poor and You Live in Texas, Your Right to Vote Has Been Taken Away
--Israel's new political face on Palestinian refugees: 'we have been waiting... for more and more of them to die' (I admit I don't know much about Israel's internal politics, so I can't say for certain if what this woman said is representative of what her party stands for, but what she said was still really disturbing, especially if she's supposed to represent Israelis critical of occupying the West Bank and Gaza)
--Drones: For Or Against? Time for Everyone on the Left to Decide
--Bradley Manning Lives in a Nation of Laws, and, Hero or Not, He Broke 20 of Those Laws
--You Say You Want a Revolution?
--No, It's Not Sexist to Describe Women Politicians' Clothes (...wait, what?!)
--How Big Money Created the Most Polarized Congress in a Century: 5 Charts
--The 6 Most Misguided Causes Ever Made Famous by Celebrities
--Trayvon Martin and the Irony of American Justice
--A cop's take on the George Zimmerman verdict (an attempt to get into George Zimmerman's head to explain how his racism translated into him killing Trayvon Martin)
--The Banality of Richard Cohen and Racist Profiling
--Is it possible to have morality in a free market? (as much as I'm critical of laissez-faire capitalism and a lack of government regulation of business, I'm not entirely convinced that capitalism itself is "evil"/a problem, so I found myself sympathizing with this piece, even if I need to read it again to really understand it)
--Anthony Weiner and Liberal Morality
--Heroes, Villains, and Victims (on myths regarding the military)
--Flood, Rebuild, Repeat: Are We Ready for a Superstorm Sandy Every Other Year? (even though it gets a bit wonky, this piece does a good job explaining how hard it is to change policies regarding natural disasters, namely funding preventative measures)
--The Charitable-Industrial Complex
--The Problem With the Marissa Alexander-George Zimmerman Comparison
--The ABCs of Strategy (when talking about the Indian Wars, the author called the Native Americans as "Stone Age peoples," which I don't think was necessary, but otherwise it seemed pretty interesting)
--Why Americans All Believe They Are 'Middle Class'
--English Is a Dialect With an Army
NSA SPYING CONTROVERSY
--Why Should We Even Care If the Government Is Collecting Our Data?
--The Real Reason You're Mad at the NSA (on the split between the U.S. intelligence community and the rest of the country)
--Whistleblowers: Thanks for nothing, Snowden
--Greenwald, Snowden, and the Art of Hero Worship (I'm finally glad there are some people on the left who are as uncomfortable as I am with the sensationalism, righteous indignation, and "outrage porn" some people have been expressing re: the NSA scandal -- it's why, despite me agreeing just as much as anyone else that privacy is important and that there needs to be more transparency and accountability when it comes to these things, I just can't get behind the paranoia people like Greenwald are expressing, and in fact I don't even think it's that big of a deal)
--The NSA Story Exposed a Deepening Schism on the Left
--Have We All Been Fooled By Edward Snowden? (obviously we shouldn't judge why people do what they do now based on stuff they've said in the past, because you never know if they've had a change of heart or opinion, but still, this is pretty fishy)
--Big Brother Doesn't Scare Me
SCIENCE
--Scientists may have discovered how cancer spreads around the body
--Why Is Exercise Such a Chore?
--Scientists have figured out why naked mole rats don't get cancer
--The Problem With the Neuroscience Backlash
--Scientists Clone a Mouse From a Single Drop of Blood
--Why Your Memory Sucks (and What You Can Do About It)
--Just one week without artificial lights can magically make you a morning person (I can't go that long without the Internet though >_<;)
--North America's fastest land animal can outrun a cheetah
--Confirmed: Spiders Are Even More Terrifying Than Previously Thought
--Nobel Laureates Doodle Their Discoveries
--How Spontaneous Combustion Really Happens
--Is human super-intelligence a bad idea?
--What is the evolutionary advantage of death?
--Watch a Levitating Magnet Sail Around a Möbius Strip!
--Parents work to prevent the next Newtown
--Newly discovered "Pandoravirus" could redefine life as we know it
--The Vitamin Myth: Why We Think We Need Supplements
--A Liberal's Defense of GMOs (another excellent takedown of well-intentioned but baseless paranoia)
--A weird new insight into how new species evolve
--10 theories that explain why we dream
--Memory implantation is now officially real (DDDDDDDDDDDDDDD:)
--'Fat shaming' actually increases risk of becoming or staying obese, new study says
--10 Bogus -- and Widely Believed -- Statistics
--How did monogamy evolve?
--The Earth breathes, and it is beautiful (GIFs of satellite images of how vegetation and snow cover changes on Earth over the course of a year)
ENVIRONMENT
--The Prozac in your pee makes fish anxious and aggressive (talk about unintended consequences O_o;)
--15-year-old creates flashlight that runs on body heat
--Technology can turn waste heat into electricity at temperature as low as 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30°C)
--Scientists discover another cause of bee deaths, and it's really bad news
--This boat circled the globe on sun power alone
--How one community brought these cute penguins back from extinction
--Peru's poorest will soon have solar power
--Why coal has a hit on "America's Got Talent"
--The future is a desert, but we can make it bloom (on improving agriculture in a post-climate change world)
--Mexico City Building Exterior Eats Smog
--How the Polar Bear Lost Its Power, and Other Animal Tales (on how redonkulously complex efforts at conserving endangered species are, especially in their unforeseen consequences and how it's just another form of humans messing with nature)
SPACE/ASTRONOMY
--6 Astronaut Questions: An Astrodad's Perspective
--We Can Make It to the Edge of the Observable Universe in a Few Decades
--In Space, No One Can Hear Your Takeout Order (on making food for astronauts better)
--A New Equation Reveals Our Exact Odds of Finding Alien Life
--Europe Testing Prototype Mini-Shuttle
--In Lopsided Map of the Cosmos, a Glimmer of Its Origins
--Confirmed: A Star System With Three Potentially Habitable Planets!
--How does spacetime get bent?
--Ask a Physicist: Would a gravitron work in deep space?
--Watch as SpaceX's Grasshopper sets a new record by 'hopping' over 1,000 feet
--Astronomers have discovered a blue planet beyond our solar system
--Why aliens might understand the universe very differently than we do (if nothing else, it should provide good fodder for ideas in case anyone out there wants to write a sci-fi story)
--It's Easier for Aliens to Visit Us Than Previously Thought
--Bill Nye explains how to stop an asteroid
--NASA Scientist to Scour Kepler Data in Search of Alien Technologies
--What shape is the Universe?
--The Disgusting Side of Space: What Happens to Dead Skin in Microgravity
--Could We Move the Sun?
MATHEMATICS
--How to Use Math to Crush Your Friends at Monopoly Like You've Never Done Before
TECHNOLOGY
--This is what it's like to shake hands with the future
--Portraits in Posthumanity: Claudia Mitchell
--This Glove Could Help Deaf-Blind People Communicate With Anyone, Anywhere (so this is actually really creative; I'm just curious as to whether or not deaf-blind people will actually accept it)
--10 mindblowingly futuristic technologies that will appear by the 2030s
--The Rainmakers: How Human Beings Control the Weather
--Watch this robot perform a perfect quadruple backflip
--Sound waves have brought us closer to a levitation machine
--72 Hours of YouTube Uploads Every Minute, and More Internet Stats
--The Last Text You'll Ever Send: Why new driving safety technologies are really dangerous
--With this device, you can control a rat using the power of your mind (cool, but also totally D:-inducing)
--The Machine Zone: This Is Where You Go When You Just Can't Stop Looking at Pictures on Facebook (or Tumblr, or YouTube, or on TV, or anywhere else, really)
EDUCATION
--RIP, American Dream: Why It's So Hard For the Poor to Get Ahead Today
--The Power of Talking to Your Baby
--And Martians Shall Save the University: Why do we need the liberal arts? Because it gives us sci-fi
HISTORY
--The lost city (on the recent discovery of an ancient Khmer city in Cambodia; WARNING: autoplay)
--Archaeologists Uncover Hundreds of Mysterious Orbs in Ancient Temple in Mexico
--What Happened to the Mysterious Humans of the Sahara 7,000 Years Ago?
--A pristine 'temple of the dead' has been uncovered in Peru
--Jack Baker and Michael McConnell: Gay Americans who married in 1971
--5 Ridiculous Lies You Believe About Ancient Civilizations
--Preserved loaf of bread discovered at Pompeii
--Gay marriage in the year 100 AD
SOCIETY
--Why Wanting Expensive Things Makes Us So Much Happier Than Buying Them
--The Greatest Science Fiction-Themed Bars and Restaurants on Earth
--10 of the Geekiest Restaurants of All Time
--These Unresolved Ethical Questions Are About to Get Real
--Teenage Pregnancy as Moral Panic
--Is the Tide Finally Turning on Rape Jokes?
--How the World's Newest 'Mixed' Language Was Invented
--Don Draper Was Raped (on how male rape victims are treated)
--How could we engineer humans to have more empathy?
--What Cop T-Shirts Tell Us About Police Culture (I wish this article would go more into the mentality behind why these T-shirts are created in the first place)
--The Paris Time Capsule Apartment
--The Myth of the Cool Office (on how "cool offices," like the kind Google has a reputation of having, actually increase social control and manipulate workers to better serve the needs of the company)
--Study: People With a Lot of Self-Control Are Happier
--Why Do Firefighters Take Such Risky Jobs?
--What Happened When My Son Wore a Pink Headband to Walmart (this is really disturbing, but serves as a useful reminder of how pervasive homophobia and sexism still are, and the lessons we inadvertently teach 2-year-old boys)
--The Science of Breaking Out of Your Comfort Zone (and Why You Should) (so I think I and a few others would find this really useful)
--"Umami" Was Coined By the Inventor of MSG to Describe Its Taste (on how MSG might not be so bad for you)
--No Rape Victim, Male or Female, Deserves to Be Blamed
--On the stupidity of "People Are Stupid" (one of my biggest pet peeves is when people make such sweeping, misanthropic statements as "people are stupid," and this post succintly shows why it's such a gross thing to say -- also, many of the comments provide good food for thought)
--How Power Corrupts the Mind
--6 Mental Illness Myths Hollywood Wants You to Believe
--Your Sedentary Lifestyle Is Turning You Into a Nervous Wreck
--"I was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl"
--What Comes After the Twink? (on the toxicity of gay male "scenes" and communities)
--Young People Who Sacrifice Romance for 'Unencumbered Striving'
--What Does It Mean to Kill for a Cause?
--On Getting Drunk in Antarctica
--Millennial medium chill: What the screwed generation can teach us about happiness (this article probably assumes a bit too much about the people it's profiling, namely that they're from families that are at least somewhat well-off, but it still gives good points about how the economic downturn is creating a new "real world" with different values and assumption, and the challenge for young people today is how to navigate it)
--Why It Matters What Other People Think of You (it's always pissed me off greatly when people go on about how much they REALLY don't care what other people think of them and what they do, because it just reeks of teenage selfishness and immaturity, and this blog post does a good job in breaking that down)
--Why Do Brits and Americans Spell Words Differently?
--You Are Not So Smart: Procrastination
--Superstar Sports Players More Likely to Cheat (on why there aren't many incentives for pro athletes to play clean)
--The Circumcision Wars: What's a Parent to Do?
--The Stupidity of the Crowd (but only when the choice is really, really obvious)
--Is It Ever Okay to Spank a Child?
--Social Guides for the Socially Awkward Part I: Making New Friends (this might also be helpful for some of you out there)
--Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness
GEOGRAPHY
--This is the totally bonkers story of the US/Canada border
--A map of all the rivers in the United States, and nothing else
--China's Culinary Diversity in One Map
SEX
--Why Don't Women Masturbate More? Logistics.
--Coming Out As a Porn Addict
--"This Misterie of Fucking": A Sex Manual From 1680 (on how people talked about sex during times when most people tend to think nobody actually ever talked about sex)
--Porn v. reality: with food! (I wish they cited their sources for their statistics, but this was still pretty fun)
MEDIA
--How KKK rally image found new life 20 years after it was published
--At the Movies, the Women Are Gone
--"Inside the United States": What if journalists covered us like they cover world news?
--How Sex Scenes in Films/TV Really Work
--Why Are There So Few Female Antiheroes on Film?
--4 Ways Hollywood Is Completely Imploding
--7 Reasons Child Stars Go Crazy (An Insider's Perspective)
--Why You Believe Most Everything You Read or Watch on TV
--Pixies: Just the Latest Rockers to Make Violence Against Women Look Cool
--5 Depressing Realities Behind Popular Reality TV Shows (and they're not the ones that seem obvious to most of us)
--Empathy-Free Entertainment (this does an excellent job getting at why I don't find myself wanting to watch superhero movies and summer blockbusters all that often -- and at why superhero stories tend to suck in general)
--Save the Movie! The 2005 screenwriting book that's taken over Hollywood -- and made every movie feel the same
--Television on the Spectrum: The Best (and Worst) Depictions of Asperger Syndrome on TV
--Dead Girlfriends' "On Fraternity": When Male Musicians Write About Rape (they interviewed the guy behind Dead Girlfriends later on as a response to the controversy surrounding this song, which you can read here -- in fact, you really should listen to the EP as well, as it's REALLY good)
--The Problem of Premature Nerdgasms (another excellent piece about how much of the media that's popular in fandom and nerd culture is just a series of "cool" moments strung together, with no buildup or any attempts whatsoever to write effective, engaging stories)
VIDEO GAMES
--Indigenous-owned game company making titles on culture
--Video Games' Obsession With Winning Is Killing Them
--The Problem With Trash Talk (another reason why the thought of playing multiplayer games makes me uncomfortable :PPP)
--The Psychology Behind Steam's Summer Sale
--In the future, astronauts might play MMORPGs to fend off boredom
--Nobody Wins When Horror Games Stigmatize Mental Illness
ART/CREATIVITY
--Pirate Bay User Downloads Visualized in Real-Time Art Installation
--Short film: "Mirage" -- "A young Inuit boy reaches waters no one has ever reached before while trying to fish in the Arctic wilderness"
--"Cover the Cover" -- mashing up cartoons with famous album covers
--Poignant Photos of Animals Contemplating Life in Zoos
--Yang Yionglang: Ancient Chinese Art for the 21st Century
--Found at Auction: The Unseen Photographs of a Legend That Never Was
--"Dr. Easy": One of the past decade's most underrated novels is now a short film
--Short film "Metamorphosis": A haunting, wordless retelling of the myth of Artemis and Actaeon
--7 Bio-Artists Who Are Transforming the Fabric of Life Itself
--Naomi Harris: Capturing Canada Like You've Never Seen It Before
--If Woody Allen directed "Wolverine," it would look like this (this is absolutely hilarious, and I would totally go see this movie if it existed!)
--Artists Reimagine Norman Rockwell's Boy Scouts
--The monument to lab mice in Novosibirsk, Russia (here's another photo of it from a different angle)
--Short film: "The Flying Man" is the creepiest superhero
--Well, Thank God, Someone's Finally Making the Sequel to Chess (yes, someone has actually taken it upon themselves to update the game of chess)
--"Rape Joke," a poem by Patricia Lockwood (I know this has made the rounds on Twitter and Tumblr, but it's worth bringing up again, despite its obviously trigger-y subject matter)
--This 97-Year-Old Makes Amazing Art Exclusively With Microsoft Paint
--Randall Munroe finishes "Time," the 3,099-panel XKCD serial (Wired interviewed Munroe as well, offering some more insight into the thought that went behind it)
--The Strangest Installations and Art Projects on Earth
--A Rare Glimpse of City Life in North Korea
--"The Final Moments of Karl Brant": A Dark, Brilliant Short Film... Starring Pee-Wee Herman (one of the better short films I've seen in a while, and yes, Paul Reubens does an amazing job)
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