I think I have finally figured out why flying foxes, the large bats with adorable faces, freak me out so much.
When they wrap their wings up like this…
Via Facebook / Frans de Waal – Public Page
…they remind me of the “winged devourers” from the 1982 classic The Beastmaster: Continue reading
Dehumanization is one of the most important tactics used to justify the denial of rights, of freedoms, and of life itself. We dehumanize people to rationalize killing them in warfare, exploiting them in sweatshops, stealing their land and their natural resources. We dehumanize people to rationalize, withholding services or assistance, discriminating and segregating and limiting freedoms. We dehumanize to rationalize the denial of justice.
Garbage doesn’t deserve protection. People, though, people do. And people, no matter how troubled or unpleasant they are, are not garbage. They are human beings.
– Elizabeth Wood, “Dehumanization In A Nutshell: ‘We Work With The Garbage Of New York'”
It’s not quite “six degrees of separation” (or Kevin Bacon) but the Washington Post has an interesting piece on how the entire 239-year history of the U.S. covers the lifetimes of just three former presidents and President Obama:
When President Obama was born (1961), President Herbert Hoover was still alive (1874-1964). When Hoover was born, President Andrew Johnson (1808-1875) was still alive. When President Johnson was born, President John Adams (1735-1826) was still alive. And just like that, we’ve connected present day to the Founding Fathers.
Not to say that any of these people knew each other, of course. I just find this sort of thing interesting, in a terribly geeky way.
This tidbit was also intriguing: Continue reading
Today we explore the world of cute owl Vines.
Putting a hat on an owl (h/t @tef):
Luring an owl with a strawberry (h/t @tef): Continue reading
See Part 1 here.
If South by Southwest Interactive (or SXSWi, for those in the know) is good for anything, it’s breaking news that makes no freaking sense whatsoever if you don’t already know the names of the companies and apps at issue.
I was thinking about sending gibberish tweets involving SXSW-style jargon using the #SXSWi hashtag, just for fun and because I’m kind of a snarky ass. My Twitter handle is @wellslawoffice, though, so it doesn’t look all that credible coming from me.
Via lemmetweetthatforyou.com
I could start a @BreakingInteractiveNews account, I suppose….
Most of my ideas are pretty mean, could possibly lead to at least some civil suits, and really just need to remain ideas in my twisted brain…… Not that I’ve ever let that stop me before.
Location-based apps seem to be all the rage right now. Hmmmmmm……. Continue reading
South by Southwest, or SXSW, as it is more commonly known these days (or #SXSW, as it more commonly appears in online references these days) is now underway, with the Interactive portion of the festival, or #SXSWi, having begun this past Thursday. I attended this part of the event as a full-fledged badge holder in 2012 and 2013, and I may do so again some day, but there is also some value in observing the festivities from afar.
One aspect of SXSWi that particularly jumps out at me is the near-total inscrutability of much of its news and gossip, especially with regard to the quest to be this year’s “it” app. Take this headline, posted to Facebook by my friend Jen: “Twitter cuts Meerkat off from its social graph just as SXSW gets started.”
Literally nothing in that headline, or the comments to Jen’s post, makes any sense at all without heaping amounts of context. I initially just assumed that Meerkat and Periscope are companies, or apps, or websites, or programming languages, or something else tech-y. It’s just funny how the tech world has normalized jargon so much. Continue reading
There. 9:26 a.m. on March 14, 2015 has come and gone (at least in my time zone—sorry, Hawaii), and we never have to see this stupid meme again in our lifetimes:
March 14, 2115 will probably be even more insipid, I fear.
There’s quite a bit to catch y’all up on here.
– For the Buffalo Bill in us all: If you’ve ever wanted furniture upholstered with human skin, but are squeamish about the whole murder/butchery thing, science has developed “a leather chair with a pheromone-impregnated silicone base that makes it feel (and smell!) like you’re lounging in the fleshy, comforting folds of a man’s belly.” Just what humanity needs, right? (h/t Laura)
– This version of the Constitution is shielded by several layers of tin foil: Did you know that the original U.S. Constitution was secretly suspended in 1871 and replaced with something that places us under the jurisdiction of the Vatican? Or the lizard people, maybe? No one else with any knowledge of U.S. history or a scrap of sanity did, either! (h/t Jason) (BTW, I think the site I linked just now—not Facebook, the other one—might have just tried to put malware on my computer. Proceed with caution.) Continue reading
I was doing a Google image search for someone giving the “middle finger gesture,” as I’ll call it, for professional purposes. (Yes, I have the greatest job in the universe.) Google allows you to narrow your search to images that are labeled as “free to use or share, even commercially,” which is handy if you know how to confirm that they really are free to use or share.
Anyway, amongst the search results, I noticed an image at Wikimedia Commons simply entitled “Middle finger gesture.jpg.” This title fails to account for two features of the image that seem important: Continue reading
