[Probably my favorite of Stross’ Laundry stories yet, free to read online. Anyone who thinks unicorns are cute should probably be forced at gunpoint to read this…-egg]
“To paraphrase the stern & terrible Oliver, I beseech you, Robert, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken about unicorns. They are an antique horror that surpasses human understanding, a nightmarish reminder that we are but swimmers in the sunlit upper waters of an abyss…”
[danah boyd, as usual, bringing exceptional subtlety to questions about privacy, surveillance, and teens. Her work never fails to be amazing. -egg]
Urban theorist Jane Jacobs used to argue that the safest societies are those where there are “eyes on the street.” What she meant by this was that healthy communities looked out for each other, were attentive to when others were hurting, and were generally present when things went haywire. How do we create eyes on the digital street? How do we do so in a way that’s not creepy? When is proactive monitoring valuable for making a difference in teens’ lives? How do we make sure that these same tools aren’t abused for more malicious purposes?
What matters is who is doing the looking and for what purposes. When the looking is done by police, the frame is punitive. But when the looking is done by caring, concerned, compassionate people – even authority figures like social workers – the outcome can be quite different. However well-intended, law enforcement’s role is to uphold the law and people perceive their presence as oppressive even when they’re trying to help. And, sadly, when law enforcement is involved, it’s all too likely that someone will find something wrong. And then we end up with the kinds of surveillance that punishes.
If there’s infrastructure put into place for people to look out for youth who are in deep trouble, I’m all for it. But the intention behind the looking matters the most. When you’re looking for kids who are in trouble in order to help them, you look for cries for help that are public. If you’re looking to punish, you’ll misinterpret content, take what’s intended to be private and publicly punish, and otherwise abuse youth in a new way.
via danah boyd | apophenia » eyes on the street or creepy surveillance?.
These stunning flowers might look like they have been created using lace or delicately cut from paper but they are actually made from the skeletons of dead animals.
Sculptor Hideki Tokushige purchases rats and mice from pet shops in frozen batches that are normally used to feed reptiles.
He then defrosts the small creatures and cuts away the flesh until he has collected hundreds of miniscule bones.
Because of the delicate nature of the work it can often take up to a month to carefully dissect the small animals.
via Artist Hideki Tokushige creates flowers from the bones of dead mice and rats | Mail Online.
[Too cool. -egg]
The bacterium Vibrio fischeri is a squid terraformer. Although it can live independently in seawater, it also colonises the body of the adorable Hawaiian bobtail squid. The squid nourishes the bacteria with nutrients and the bacteria, in turn, act as an invisibility cloak. They produce a dim light that matches the moonlight shining down from above, masking the squid’s silhouette from predators watching from below. With its light-emitting microbes, the squid becomes less visible.
via How To Terraform A Squid – Phenomena: Not Exactly Rocket Science.
[Great essay on writers’ last words. 1977. -egg]
It occurred to me that writers traditionally do seem to come to dramatic ends themselves, as if they deserved the same ironic or bizarre conclusions they so often gave the characters in their books.
The Russian writers: Tolstoy, packing his knapsack and setting off from home on that last strange journey of his that ended up at the railroad station at Astapovo, where he died in the stationmaster’s room; or Gogol, with leeches on his great nose, the bishops filing slowly by, as he lay thinking how he could destroy all extant copies of Dead Souls; or Chekhov, packed in a box labeled OYSTERS, being transported back home on a bed of ice from the Black Forest where he died.
It was not only the manner in which certain writers died that was interesting: often they managed to push out a memorable last word or two which seemed too studied even to put into fiction: Goethe’s “More light!” or Henry James’s “Ah, it is here, that distinguished thing”—now discounted by Leon Edel. Some of the words which one would like to have overheard were lost, of course. Aeschylus must have had a final comment on being conked by the turtle which an eagle, trying to break it on the rocks below for a meal, dropped on the dramatist’s bald pate. In my notes I imagined Aeschylus regaining consciousness briefly:
“What happened?”
“Well, sire, you were hit on top of the head.”
“By what? It felt awful.”
“A turtle.”
Then the memorable phrase must have come, just a faint, unheard murmur, before the dramatist’s eyes clouded over.
via The Last Laugh by George Plimpton | The New York Review of Books.
[So beautiful <3 <3 <3 <3. Lots more pics on the Colossal page. -egg]
The Negative Space of a House Cut Inside a 908-Page Book | Colossal.
[Furries in depth. -egg]
Welcome to the world of “furries”: the thousands of Americans who’ve gotten in touch with their inner raccoon, or wolf, or fox. Judging from the Midwest FurFest, this is no hobby. It’s sex; it’s religion; it’s a whole new way of life.
via Pleasures of the Fur: The Animalistic, Sexy World of Furries and Fetishes | Vanity Fair.
[Hey, this is really cool. Also the visual representation of the amplituhedron is pretty damn beautiful. -egg]
Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.
via Physicists Discover Geometry Underlying Particle Physics | Simons Foundation.
[Novelist Nicholson Baker plays video games:]
Mostly I glided up and down ramps and stairs shooting at enemies, listening to chilly electronica. I played the game in “easy” mode, as opposed to “normal,” “heroic,” or “legendary”—the menu option reads “Laugh as helpless victims flee in terror from their inevitable slaughter”—but it didn’t seem all that easy to me. Short-statured, stocky aliens called Grunts popped up frequently, and with hostile intent—they had munchkin voices and cackled nastily and they said things like “Die, heretic!” I had to kill many of these. Other alien enemies, called Brutes, said, “I will split your bones.” They sounded as if they had ripped up their vocal cords by popping steroids. I used several different weapons to kill them, including the needler, which shot explosive needles, and I plundered dead alien bodies for more guns and ammunition. The Grunts and the Brutes jeered and tried to end my life. I got lost and hit cul-de-sacs and said bad words and hopped up and down near a burning car. Sometimes I died.
via Video games for Xbox and Playstation : The New Yorker.
[Sad, although perhaps unsurprising, facts about the last six years:]
Those were the headlines. But the really interesting stuff was in the body of report, which contains data on incomes going back half a century. What these numbers show, or rather confirm, is that in economic terms much of middle America has experienced four lost decades. Since its founding, the United States has been a country based on enterprise, hard work, and material progress. But for forty years now, the engine that generates across-the-board rises in living standards has been stalled, with incomes stagnating at the bottom and in the middle while growing rapidly at the top.
via Four Lost Decades: Why American Politics Is All Messed Up : The New Yorker.
[More info, with good charts, about the last six years:]
On a day when President Obama talked about the economy and the financial system five years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, it’s worth being reminded about what has transpired in those years, taking into account the many revisions that have been made to the official statistics since that fateful day in September, 2008. For ease of exposition, I’ll list them individually.
via The Uneven Economic Recovery: Eleven Things We've Learned and Six Charts : The New Yorker.
