browsing

[sam]

Critics never had much patience for Styx. They were the apotheosis of late 70s prog-pop mediocrity, and so forth. Nor has history been kind. Styx has become the mullet of bands. The band's real crime is not that they were too eager to please -- though they were certainly that -- but that they were too effective at pleasing. They got people to sing along. We all have a Styx in our closet,* at least one. (Supertramp, anyone? Hootie & the Blowfish?) They're reminders of who we used to be, as surely as the feathered hair and Lycra bodysuits that haunt our old photo albums.

But my larger point is that there's no angle in hating on a particular song or band or genre. Our species is adaptable. That's our evolutionary trump card. If the human ear is given a chance, not cowed into snobbery, it can find rewards in almost any form of music...

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5MAg_yWsq8" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5MAg_yWsq8</a>

* raises hand

[sam]

I have also come to see that my body is not really mine. Its atoms existed before me and will continue to exist long after I am gone. My body belongs not only to me but also to those I love. It is merely on loan to me, temporarily assembled, and if it becomes ill, the people who rely on it, who rely on me, suffer, too. In this sense, we are all bridges to one another, stretched out tip to toe, sometimes colliding but undoubtedly joined, each one of us a possible point of communion, in happiness, in sadness, in sickness and, hopefully, in health.

from Rather be fat and happy or thin and sad?, browsed upon via shakesville via Fat Fu

[sam]

It's OK for vegans to eat oysters
Eating ethically is not a purity pissing contest, and the more vegans or vegetarians pretend that it is, the more their diets start to resemble mere fashion—and thus risk being dismissed as such. Emerson wrote, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." A foolish consistency: If you resolve to give up foods that begin with the letter B, and if you stick to that for the rest of your life, you'll be mighty consistent.


You can ride us, too

[sam]

from here

[sam]

Is this what everyone was so afraid of?
What I love about being married isn't the idea of it being special or different. It's the idea of it being just ordinary.

And honestly, I think this is what scares opponents of same-sex marriage more than anything else. They want to call it "special" rights. They want to call it an attack on traditional marriage. But the fact of it is that it's just what it is: two people who made a choice for themselves. In our case, it was two people who made a choice for themselves, had a nice quiet ceremony and had a surprisingly uneventfully pleasant party.

So let me just say this: pretty much everyone I know, even people I know who are really conservative, seem genuinely happy for us.

I think this is where the people who oppose same-sex marriage will, in the long run, fail: not because they're wrong (which they are) but because when ordinary people know same sex couples who are married, they can see exactly what is there: people who care for one another in the quiet, dull, and ordinary ways everyone else does.

[sam]

The Boston Molasses Disaster
A huge molasses tank 50 ft tall, 90 ft in diameter and containing as much as 2,300,000 US gal collapsed. Witnesses stated that as it collapsed, there was a loud rumbling sound, like a machine gun as the rivets shot out of the tank, and that the ground shook as if a train were passing by.

The collapse unleashed an immense wave of molasses between 8 and 15 ft high, moving at 35 mph, and exerting a pressure of 2 ton/ft². The molasses wave was of sufficient force to break the girders of the adjacent Boston Elevated Railway's Atlantic Avenue structure and lift a train off the tracks. Nearby, buildings were swept off their foundations and crushed. Several blocks were flooded to a depth of 2 to 3 feet.



The dangers of starting down the road of googling the nutritional qualities of molasses.

[sam]

They reckon it is between 29 and 35 million light years away - Sombrero Galaxy. Staggeringly beautiful.

I wonder how many great civilisations have come and gone there before we even existed here?



If I'm honest, I think something even more miraculous is occuring - we are first and we are 'it' so to speak.

That's because I think we will reach a technological singularity, likely within the next century, at which point (assuming that hints of FTL effects in physics can be technologically utilised to allow instantaneous travel) we will probably turn the entire Universe into some sort of superintelligent machine, reaching an Omega point - whatever the Universe is actually for.

(It explains the Fermi paradox as well. We have to be first or we would have already been consumed in another world's Universe-spanning singularity.)



I still amuses me that Douglas Adams thought of that and had already taken the piss out of it before Kurzweil did with Deep Thought rumbling that he was the second most greatest machine in the universe...and he was going to design the greatest. Then again, maybe it will be like that old Issac Asimov story where the character arrives at the monastery where they are finishing stating all the names of God. "Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."

[sam]

.do fat bottomed girls make the world go round?
jeremy, luton

The Earth spins as a result of asymmetry of gravitational accretion during the formation of the solar system and the planets. The presence or absence of women generously endowed in the saddlebag department makes no difference to a planet's angular momentum. If this were not the case then ours would be the only planet in the solar system to spin, as I doubt that there is a significant population of larger ladies on any of the others.

That being said, if you are someone who enjoys the company of a curvaceous companion I have no doubt that a fat-bottomed girl most certainly could make your world go round.



From the penultimate issue of .citycycling, an online mag coming to a full stop after five years. I sympathize with the editor's unconsummated desire to move from pixels to a "real-life genuine 'buy at the newsagent' magazine", having sacrificed a few trees myself in pursuit of that dream.

Whilst sourcing an image of Queen Victoria for this post (I could've just used the one accompanying the Q&A, but where's the fun in that?), I came across this little-known history of the Victorian Triathalon:

...After the dip, the athletes would undergo an extensive costume change into their running outfits. Gear for the run consisted of a bustle, which was available in numerous forms and sizes, a floor-length skirt, puffed taffeta sleeves for lift, and a parasol (indispensable for the stretches where the runner was exposed to direct sunlight; when closed, the parasol could be used to trip, stab, or poke other competitors).



Below: An array of bustle varieties. Each discrete breed performed a unique function, much like the modern running shoe in its many styles.

[sam]

An interest in the tallest buildings in the world led me to google the shortest building in the world, which led to crazy escalators, which reminded me of an old family joke about getting stuck on the escalator...

[sam]

Public Strategist, working to make government work better

[sam]

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAQrsA3m8Bg" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAQrsA3m8Bg</a>.

[sam]

From the Language Log:
Well, I wasn't going to blog this, because it's got nothing directly to do with speech and language. But it does have to do with rhetoric, and with the use of authoritative-sounding assertions backed up by empty references to scientific studies, a topic that we've been featuring recently. And several readers have asked me about it, based on my earlier posts about the "emerging science of sex differences". So here goes.

On page 91 of The Female Brain, Dr. Louann Brizendine writes (emphasis added):

Males have double the brain space and processing power devoted to sex as females. Just as women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion while men have a small country road, men have O'Hare Airport as a hub of processing thoughts about sex whereas women have the airfield nearby that lands small and private planes. That probably explains why 85 percent of twenty- to thirty-year-old males think about sex every fifty-two seconds and women think about it once a day -- or up to three or four times on their most fertile days.

This striking different in rates of sexual thoughts is also one of the bullet points on the book's jacket blurb -- but there, female sex-thought frequency is downgraded from "once a day" to "once every couple of days":

• Thoughts about sex enter a woman's brain once every couple of days but enter a man's brain about once every minute

Whatever the exact numbers, it's an impressive-sounding difference -- scientific validation for a widespread opinion about what men and women are like. And this is interesting stuff, right at the center of social and personal life, so you're probably wondering about the details of the studies that produced these estimates....

[sam]

Production companies use prop newspapers instead of real ones because getting clearance from an actual publication is usually more work than it's worth in potential fees and bureaucracy. (There are exceptions. When Tony Soprano picked up his paper each morning, it was always the Newark Star Ledger.) Rather than battle the legal department at the New York Times for that perfunctory breakfast shot, prop masters buy a stack of Earl Hays fake papers, which cost just $15 each. Sometimes if they have some left over they'll recycle them for another job.

[sam]

One of the pinups at Busted Carbon

[sam]

This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post
This sentence contains a provocative statement that attracts the readers’ attention, but really only has very little to do with the topic of the blog post. This sentence claims to follow logically from the first sentence, though the connection is actually rather tenuous. This sentence claims that very few people are willing to admit the obvious inference of the last two sentences, with an implication that the reader is not one of those very few people. This sentence expresses the unwillingness of the writer to be silenced despite going against the popular wisdom. This sentence is a sort of drum roll, preparing the reader for the shocking truth to be contained in the next sentence...

See also This is a news website article about a scientific paper

and Doonesbury of yore

[sam]

This ACF not doing it for you? Here are some others



Australian Cat Federation. A World Cat Congress is all very well, but can they play poker like dogs can? Lolcats don't count.

Amands Charles Films. Welcome to the casting couch.

Army Cadet Force. Sir Yes Sir.

American Checker Federation. Beats 11 Dimensional Chess.

Austrian Cultural Forum. Events, 10-25 September 2010 - The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra performs music solely on instruments made of vegetables. Using carrot flutes, pumpkin basses, leek violins, leek-zucchini-vibrators, cucumberophones and celery bongos, the orchestra creates its own extraordinary vegetable sound universe. The ensemble overcomes preserved and marinated sound conceptions and puts its focus on expanding the variety of vegetable instruments, developing novel musical ideas and exploring fresh vegetable sound gardens.



Automobile Club de France. My french is rusty, but I'm guessing that's an automobile club.

Aberdeen Cycling Forum. Busman's holiday.