hold me. hold you

"Aging Barbie" from: Next Nature

"I know what you’re thinking, so don’t even say it. Buying that thing won’t make you happy, is what you’re thinking. Buying things never makes you happy, so why would you buy this thing? It won’t make you happy.
     But you haven’t seen this thing.
     It’s really cool. They just started making it and not many people have one yet. It does all sorts of stuff and can fit in my pocket, but it can also get bigger than that if I want it to. Plus it’s made by a company I trust to put out things that will make me happy.
     (Not that I wouldn’t consider buying this thing even if it weren’t made by a familiar company—that’s how cool this thing is—but the fact that I know and trust the company makes it even better.)
     It comes in both black and white, but I can also buy an affordable cover for it in a different color if I want. For example, if I buy it in black but decide I want it to be red today, I just buy the red cover and slide it on."
— River Clegg, Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency
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"[...] It was her curves.
     Although anatomically incorrect, Barbie was still somehow alluring. She had stunning breasts and slim hips topped off by luminous eyes and lustrous hair. More to the point, Barbie was the only woman whose naked body I could study closely without risking humiliation or punishment.
     I was probably too young to be feeling lust, but I was certainly old enough to be interested in the differences between men and women. And though Barbie didn’t define those differences—even then I knew that Barbie dolls were lacking some essential female equipment—she hinted at the possibilities and inspired a few healthy boyhood fantasies."
— Larry West, About.com
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" [...] They are an expression of purest kitsch, sentimentality, and ornamentation for its own sake. In Milan Kundera's brilliant defintion, kitsch is 'the absolute denial of shit.' These are Disney-like apps, sinister in their mendacity.
     The newly popular word for this type of design is 'skeuomorphism.' Strictly speaking it means retaining design features from earlier designs when those features previously had a specific reason for being that way, but do not any longer. A good example would be iPad synthesizer apps that include 'knobs' that you can 'turn,' or 'cables' that you can 'plug in.'"
— James Higgs, MADE BY MANY
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the new dark ages (part 2)

"High School Science Class, c. 1889" from: Images of Woburn

"[...] in 1974, people who identified as conservatives were among the most confident in science as an institution, with liberals trailing slightly behind, and moderates bringing up the rear. Liberals have remained fairly steady in their opinion of the scientific community over the interim, while conservative trust in science has plummeted.
     Interestingly, the most educated conservatives have led that charge. Conservatives with college degrees began distrusting science earlier and more forcefully than other conservatives, upending assumptions that less educated people on the whole are more distrustful of science.
     [University of North Carolina postdoctoral fellow Gordon] Gauchat attributes the changes to two forces: Both science and conservatives have changed a lot in 40 years. In the post-WWII period, research was largely wedded to the Defense Department and NASA—think the space race and the development of the atomic bomb. Now the scientific institution 'has come out from behind those institutions and been its own cultural force.' That has meant it is increasingly viewed as a catalyst of government regulation, as in the failed Democratic proposal to institute cap-and-trade as a way to reduce carbon emissions and stave off climate change."
— Liz Goodwin, Yahoo
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"American students finish near dead last among developed countries in math and science testing, and they’re turned off at an early age. Foreign students now earn six out of every 10 engineering doctorates at U.S. universities. Just one-third of U.S. undergraduates earn a degree in science and engineering, while nearly two-thirds of Chinese and Japanese students do so.
     A recent report on U.S. economic prospects in the 21st century, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, concluded that leadership in scientific endeavors was crucial to success. By extension, the report found it was necessary to 'vastly improve' America’s talent pool through science, math and technology education."
— Eric Berger, Houston Chronicle
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untamed

From: Cover Browser

"Now go to the front page of any mostly male discussion site like Reddit.com and see how many inches you can browse before finding several thousand men bemoaning how all women are gold-digging whores (7,500 upvotes) and how crazy and irrational women are (9,659 upvotes) and how horrible and gross and fat women are (4,000 upvotes). Or browse the 'Men's Rights' section and see weird fantasies about alpha males defeating all the hot women who try to control them with their vaginas.
     This current of white-hot rage has to come as a surprise to some of you, because we tend to think 'sexism' is being dismissive toward women, or paying them lower salaries -- we don't think of it as frenzied 'burn the witch!' hatred. Yet occasionally something like this Limbaugh thing will come along to prick that balloon, and out it pours. Like it's always waiting there, a millimeter below the surface."
— David Wong, cracked.com
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dirt cheap

From: Cover Browser

"A new result from ESO's [European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere] HARPS [The High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher] planet finder shows that rocky planets not much bigger than Earth are very common in the habitable zones around faint red stars. [...] This is the first direct measurement of the frequency of super-Earths around red dwarfs, which account for 80% of the stars in the Milky Way. [...]
     Our new observations with HARPS mean that about 40% of all red dwarf stars have a super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone where liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet," says Xavier Bonfils (IPAG, Observatoire des Sciences de l'Univers de Grenoble, France), the leader of the team. "Because red dwarfs are so common — there are about 160 billion of them in the Milky Way — this leads us to the astonishing result that there are tens of billions of these planets in our galaxy alone."
— Science Daily
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"'The more we learn about life, the more we learn about its ability to grow and survive and prosper in environments that we formerly thought were too inhospitable,' said David Morrison, a senior scientist at NASA's Astrobiology Institute.
     University of Colorado scientist Ted Scambos is sure there will be microbes found in [Antarctica's] Lake Vostok when the long process of examining samples starts — something that may be months away because of logistical problems. He said ice many feet above the lake had bacteria, so it makes sense that the lake does.
     Still, what makes Lake Vostok more important than other extreme environments is its incredible isolation.
     For example, in Atacama, life probably blew in from elsewhere, NASA astrobiologist Chris McKay said. But Lake Vostok microbes, if found, could not have blown in.
     More than 10 million years ago there was little or no ice there, so life could easily have existed then. But with no heat or sunlight after the ice set in, life there now would have had to find another way of getting energy, said molecular chemist and astrobiologist Steve Benner. And that's key.
     If life finds a way to adapt to strange conditions in this awful place, why couldn't it live on Jupiter's moon Europa or Saturn's moon Enceladus, scientists ask. Both bodies have water trapped under crusts of ice, just like Lake Vostok, and are both prime targets in the search for life beyond Earth. The big disagreement among scientists is not about the potential for life on those two moons, but which one has the most potential and should be explored first."
— Associated Press (via KATC.com)
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Sea a related article here...

turnkey corporatization

"[...] language virtually identical to Florida’s [Stand Your Ground] law is featured in a template supplied to legislators in other states by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-backed organization that has managed to keep a low profile even as it exerts vast influence (only recently, thanks to yeoman work by the Center for Media and Democracy, has a clear picture of ALEC’s activities emerged). And if there is any silver lining to Trayvon Martin’s killing, it is that it might finally place a spotlight on what ALEC is doing to our society — and our democracy.
     What is ALEC? Despite claims that it’s nonpartisan, it’s very much a movement-conservative organization, funded by the usual suspects: the Kochs, Exxon Mobil, and so on. Unlike other such groups, however, it doesn’t just influence laws, it literally writes them, supplying fully drafted bills to state legislators. In Virginia, for example, more than 50 ALEC-written bills have been introduced, many almost word for word. And these bills often become law."
— Paul Krugman, The New York Times
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"Let’s say you’re a state lawmaker, passionate about charter schools, and you want to turn this passion into laws that create social change. What you need are bills. And you want them fast — ready-made, just add water, written in language that can withstand partisan debate and legal scrutiny.
     There is a place that has just what you want.
     It’s called the American Legislative Exchange Council, a little-known conservative group headquartered in Washington, D.C., and funded by some of the biggest corporations in the United States — most with a business interest in state legislation.
     ALEC has quietly made its mark on the political landscape by providing state governments with mock-up bills that academic and political experts say are, for the most part, tailored to fit a conservative agenda. In recent years, states — particularly those with new Republican governors and legislatures — have been flooded with ALEC’s model bills. Nearly 1,000 of them are introduced every year, and roughly one-fifth of those become law, according to ALEC’s own count. ALEC’s bills are especially attractive because they are written so they can virtually be copied and pasted onto legislative proposals across the land."
— Salvador Rizzo, nj.com
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bits of stuff people want to keep

"Fragment of Fender Stratocaster electric guitar burned and smashed
by Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey International Pop Festival, June 18, 1967. Experience Music Project permanent collection. 1992.7.2."
— Seymour Duncan

"Helena knew how to get what she wanted. She convened a group of Rabbin from various places throughout Palestine and demanded they tell her where the cross was hidden, under threat of torture. These men either could not or would not tell and she ordered them burned alive. After that, they delivered up a man whom they promised could take her to where the 'True Cross' lay hidden. This man, named Judas, also refused to cooperate, so the lady who became known as 'Saint Helena' sentenced him to death by starvation. After only six days without food, Judas took her to the place where he said the cross which had borne the dying Jesus was hidden - on the site of a pagan temple dedicated to Venus."
— The True Cross by Ron Loeffler
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"According to the exhibit's description, scientific tests on the UFO materials revealed bizarre behavior: "Three Soviet academic centers and 11 research institutes analyzed the objects from this UFO crash. The distance between atoms is different from ordinary iron. Radar cannot be reflected from the material. Elements in the material may disappear and new ones appear after heating. One piece disappeared completely in front of four witnesses. The core of the material is composed of a substance with anti-gravitational properties."
— Lee Speigel, Huffington Post
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"What these views reveal, is a polished black stone of which less than two feet is visible… This stone is set in large solid silver mountings. The whole resembles, quite deliberately, for reasons which will emerge, ‘the vulva of the goddess!' There is severe damage to the stone, as it was taken away by the sacrilegious Qarmatians in 930 CE and broken into a number of pieces before returning the pieces for a great price. The Stone pieces are held together by a silver frame, which is fastened by silver nails to the Stone. The Stone is roughly 30 cm (12 in.) in diameter, and 1.5 meters (5 ft.) above the ground. When pilgrims circle the Kaaba as part of the Tawaf ritual of the Hajj, many of them try, if possible, to stop and kiss the Black Stone, ‘emulating the kiss that it received from Prophet Muhammad.’ If they cannot reach it, then they are to point to it on each of their seven circuits around the Kaaba. [...]
     Secular historians point to the history of stone worship, and especially meteorite worship, in pre-Islamic Arabia, and say that ‘it is likely that the Stone is a meteorite.' There is no way to test this hypothesis without removing and examining the Stone, which would not be permitted by its guardians. There is no indication as to where this stone originated, but since it predates the revelation of the Holy Quran and Muhammad's prophethood, and even being kissed, it must stem from the time of Abraham since the Hajj traditions are traceable to the patriarch of monotheism by the pre-islamic pagans."
— Lennard James, Islam Watch
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sucking at the teat of the public purse

From Terry Gilliam's eerily prophetic masterpiece Brazil (1985)


"Before yottabytes of data from the deep web and elsewhere can begin piling up inside the servers of the NSA’s new center, they must be collected. To better accomplish that, the agency has undergone the largest building boom in its history, including installing secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities. Controlled by the NSA, these highly secured spaces are where the agency taps into the US communications networks, a practice that came to light during the Bush years but was never acknowledged by the agency. The broad outlines of the so-called warrantless-wiretapping program have long been exposed—how the NSA secretly and illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was supposed to oversee and authorize highly targeted domestic eavesdropping; how the program allowed wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and email. In the wake of the program’s exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. What wasn’t revealed until now, however, was the enormity of this ongoing domestic spying program. [...]
     That, he notes, is where the value of Bluffdale, and its mountains of long-stored data, will come in. What can’t be broken today may be broken tomorrow. 'Then you can see what they were saying in the past,' he says. 'By extrapolating the way they did business, it gives us an indication of how they may do things now.' The danger, the former official says, is that it’s not only foreign government information that is locked in weaker algorithms, it’s also a great deal of personal domestic communications, such as Americans’ email intercepted by the NSA in the past decade. [...]
     In the meantime Cray is working on the next step for the NSA, funded in part by a $250 million contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It’s a massively parallel supercomputer called Cascade, a prototype of which is due at the end of 2012. Its development will run largely in parallel with the unclassified effort for the DOE and other partner agencies. That project, due in 2013, will upgrade the Jaguar XT5 into an XK6, codenamed Titan, upping its speed to 10 to 20 petaflops.
     Yottabytes and exaflops, septillions and undecillions—the race for computing speed and data storage goes on. In his 1941 story The Library of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges imagined a collection of information where the entire world’s knowledge is stored but barely a single word is understood. In Bluffdale the NSA is constructing a library on a scale that even Borges might not have contemplated. And to hear the masters of the agency tell it, it’s only a matter of time until every word is illuminated."
— James Bamford, Wired
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