[Hey grownups! Do YOU know a gender-variant kid? You’ve got an excellent opportunity not to be an asshole! -egg]
What’s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress? – NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/magazine/whats-so-bad-about-a-boy-who-wants-to-wear-a-dress.html?_r=2&hp&pagewanted=all
(via Instapaper)
IUDs are the weird form of birth control. We don’t really know exactly how they work, for instance. And they’ve been largely unpopular my entire lifetime—really, ever since a couple of poorly designed IUDs set off a mini-panic in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But IUDs are effective birth control. The ones that you can buy today are safe. And, more importantly, they represent birth control that you don’t have to think about, and birth control that is really hard to get wrong.
If you’ve ever done research on the effectiveness of various methods of birth control, you’ll notice that the statistics usually come with a little asterisk. That * represents a concept that few of the people who rely on birth control ever think about—perfect use. Let’s use condoms as an example. With perfect use, 2 out of 100 women will get pregnant over the course of a year’s worth of condom-protected sex. Without perfect use—maybe you don’t use a condom every time, maybe you don’t put it on right when you both get naked—the number of accidental pregnancies jumps to 18 out of 100. The same basic problem affects birth control pills, as well. Ladies, did you know you’re supposed to take those things at the same time of day every day? That’s the kind of use error that can make a difference between 1 out of 100 women getting pregnant in a year, and 9 out of 100 getting pregnant.
In contrast, IUDs represent a fit-it-and-forget-it method of birth control. Which is a big part about why they’re up there with outright sterilization as the most effective means of birth control available. Bonus: Depending on which kind you use, you can avoid hormonal side effects. This, experts say, is why IUDs are experiencing something of a resurgence in popularity. In an article at Wired, Jennifer Couzin-Frankel writes that 5.5 percent of American women who use birth control use IUDs. That’s up from only 1.3 percent in 1995.
Somewhat unbelievably, no one is quite sure how they work, but the theory goes like this: The human uterus has one overriding purpose, which is to protect and sustain a fetus for nine months. If you stick a poker-chip-sized bit of plastic in there, the body reacts the way it does to any foreign object, releasing white blood cells to chase after the invader. Once those white blood cells are set free in the uterus, they start killing foreign cells with efficient zeal. And sperm, it turns out, are very, very foreign. White blood cells scavenge them mercilessly, preventing pregnancy. In copper- containing IUDs, metal ions dissolving from the device add another layer of sper…
Bruce Conner’s “Mea Culpa” film for Eno and Byrne:
At Saturday’s “This Must Be The Place” post-punk film festival in San Francisco, I was bowled over by Beat filmmaker/photographer/assemblage artist Bruce Conner‘s short film for the song “Mea Culpa” from Brian Eno and David Byrne’s “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.” Among dozens of other films, Conner created “America is Waiting” for another Eno/Byrne song and, before those, “Mongoloid” for Devo in 1978.
[Excellent. Answer: you can take pictures. -egg]
[BoingBoing]
DC police chief issues extremely excellent guidelines on citizens taking pictures of cops: 
As part of a settlement with Jerome Vorus, who was ordered to stop taking pictures by DC cops, DC chief of police Cathy Lanier has issued guidelines to her officers on citizen photography of police activities. They are extremely excellent guidelines, too, as Timothy Lee writes in Ars Technica:
“A bystander has the same right to take photographs or make recordings as a member of the media,” Chief Lanier writes. The First Amendment protects the right to record the activities of police officers, not only in public places such as parks and sidewalks, but also in “an individual’s home or business, common areas of public and private facilities and buildings, and any other public or private facility at which the individual has a legal right to be present.”
Lanier says that if an officer sees an individual recording his or her actions, the officer may not use that as a basis to ask the citizen for ID, demand an explanation for the recording, deliberately obstruct the camera, or arrest the citizen. And she stresses that under no circumstances should the citizen be asked to stop recording.
That applies even in cases where the citizen is recording “from a position that impedes or interferes with the safety of members or their ability to perform their duties.” In that situation, she says, the officer may ask the person to move out of the way, but the officer “shall not order the person to stop photographing or recording.”
She also notes that “a person has the right to express criticism of the police activity being
observed.”
There is more, and it’s all excellent. We have the good folks at the ACLU to thank for helping Mr Vorus win his settlement with the DC police.
DC police chief announces shockingly reasonable cell camera policy
(Thanks, Ben!)
(Image: 12.MPDC.HorseMounted.SE.WDC.23March2012, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from perspective’s photostream)
[A lovely, difficult piece of writing. -egg]
My Father’s Fashion Tips: Grooming: GQ
http://www.gq.com/style/grooming/200706/fashion-generation-tips-national-magazine-award?printable=true
(via Instapaper)
[Wow. This is kind of hard for me to even watch. The sheer awkwardness makes me wince. -egg]
[BoingBoing]
Holding hands with strangers (video):
[Video Link] Andrew Hales of LAHWF (“Losing All Hope Was Freedom”, a Fight Club reference) walks around in public trying to get strangers to hold his hand. Below, part two (via Joe Sabia).
[This is mighty awesome. -egg]
[BB]
Yelp reviews, read by real actors (video):
[Video Link] Chris Kipiniak, who is a working actor, puts all those many years of training and practice to work in a dramatic interpretation of an online restaurant review for the Stratford Diner. This appears to be the first in a series, to which you can subscribe. (video by Joe Plummer; thanks Joe Sabia!)
[Only the tiniest bare beginning of the legal and ethical conundra, folks. -egg]
[BoingBoing]
Report of working 3D printed gun: 
Popular Science‘s John Robb reports on a person who claims that his 3D-printed pistol can successfully fire live ammunition, though not with total reliability. The same person then went on to print a working AR-15 rifle (this is a substantial advance on last year’s account of a 3D printable AR-15 automatic conversion kit. This event has raised something of a crisis for Thingiverse, the online repository for 3D printable meshes, which is contemplating whether it will host files that can be printed into “weapons.”
An amateur gunsmith, operating under the handle of “HaveBlue” (incidentally, “Have Blue” is the codename that was used for the prototype stealth fighter that became the Lockheed F-117), announced recently in online forums that he had successfully printed a serviceable .22 caliber pistol.
Despite predictions of disaster, the pistol worked. It successfully fired 200 rounds in testing.
HaveBlue then decided to push the limits of what was possible and use his printer to make an AR-15 rifle. To do this, he downloaded plans for an AR-15 in the Solidworks file format from a site called CNCGunsmith.com. After some small modifications to the design, he fed about $30 of ABS plastic feedstock into his late-model Stratasys printer. The result was a functional AR-15 rifle. Early testing shows that it works, although it still has some minor feed and extraction problems to be worked out.
A Working Assault Rifle Made With a 3-D Printer
“When I was young there were beatniks. Hippies. Punks….: 
“When I was young there were beatniks. Hippies. Punks. Gangsters. Now you’re a hacktivist. Which I would probably be if I was 20. Shuttin’ down MasterCard. But there’s no look to that lifestyle! Besides just wearing a bad outfit with bad posture. Has WikiLeaks caused a look? No! I’m mad about that. If your kid comes out of the bedroom and says he just shut down the government, it seems to me he should at least have an outfit for that.”
– John Waters on the sorry style of today’s rebels (emphasis mine)
Banksy Goes to the Olympics: 
It looks like a potential crackdown on graffiti artists prior to the 2012 Olympics in London didn’t involve the world’s most famous street artist. Two new pieces by Banksy were posted to his website this morning featuring his personal take on the games. I feel the same as Bobby over at The Fox is Black in hoping there’s more to come.
Update: There’s a great article over at The Atlantic Wire about Banksy and the politics of street art during the 2012 Olympic Games.