Idiosyncratic Routine

mollycrabapple: Cat and To Do List- Allegory for the Triumph of...

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:05:41 -0500

mollycrabapple:

Cat and To Do List- Allegory for the Triumph of Sloth over Effort

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:14:29 -0500

Photo

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:15:44 -0500

Tell the FDA: Label My Food

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:31:00 -0500

Tell the FDA: Label My Food:

Some genetically modified food is harmless, some could be significantly toxic in the long term. Either way, lets get some labels on our food so we can make informed choices.

Mother Jones:

Dow and Monsanto Team Up on the Mother of All Herbicide Marketing Plans

Dow has engineered a corn strain that withstands lashings of its herbicide, 2,4-D. The company’s pitch to farmers is simple: Your fields are becoming choked with weeds that have developed resistance to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. As soon as the USDA okays our product, all your problems will be solved.

As for its toxicity to people and animals, the study’s authors take at face value the EPA’s assessment that 2,4-D and other chemicals in its class have “low acute and chronic toxicities to mammalian, bird, and fish model organisms; degrade fairly rapidly in the soil; and are not known to bioaccumulate.”

However, as I’ve reported before, the advocacy group Beyond Pesticides points to both epidemiological and lab-based evidence linking it non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and other cancers. It’s also an endocrine disruptor, Beyond Pesticides reports, meaning it can “interfere with the body’s hormone messaging system and can alter many essential processes.” And in 2004, a coalition of more than a dozen environmental and social justice groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and Pesticide Action Network, wrote a letter to the EPA rebuking it for underestimating the health risks of 2,4-D—in particular, its carcinogenicity. The EPA, it goes without saying, brushed those concerns aside.

PS 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) is one of the two phenoxyl herbicides that composes Agent Orange, also developed by Monsanto.

What do we want? EVIDENCE BASED CHANGE!When do we want it? AFTER...

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 07:52:27 -0500

What do we want? EVIDENCE BASED CHANGE!
When do we want it? AFTER PEER REVIEW!!

Science… difficult to rhyme.

Our first attempt at taking Cat Breading to the next level was...

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 21:43:00 -0500

Our first attempt at taking Cat Breading to the next level was not a total success.

Platypus gonna plat. TIL There is no universally agreed plural...

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:53:00 -0500

Platypus gonna plat.

TIL There is no universally agreed plural of “platypus” in the English language. Scientists generally use “platypuses” or simply “platypus”. Colloquially, the term “platypi” is also used for the plural, although this is technically incorrect and a form of pseudo-Latin; the correct Greek plural would be “platypodes”.

Portland vs Brooklyn It was pointed out to me that Brooklyn also...

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:24:00 -0500

Portland vs Brooklyn

It was pointed out to me that Brooklyn also has non-white people, which Portland does not.

Old but still totally valid.

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:13:00 -0500

Old but still totally valid.

(via crookedindifference) Watch our expanding...

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 09:38:49 -0500

(via crookedindifference)

Watch our expanding universe

Australian Ph.D. student Florian Beutler has created the most accurate measurement yet of how fast the universe is expanding. Working at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), he used the Hubble constant and data from the 6dF Galaxy Survey, the most ambitious survey to date of over 120,000 galaxies across the southern sky, collected between 2001 and 2005. The result is a remarkable map of the expansion of universe, animated here to unfold before your very eyes.

why you so hot

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 11:15:07 -0500

I average 1-3 of these messages a year. I bet you thought it was more.

In Defense of Fake Beauty

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:31:00 -0500

In Defense of Fake Beauty:

the f word UK:

‘Natural’ beauty slyly requires us to use just enough makeup, spending just enough money and putting in just enough effort to convince people there was never any money or effort or makeup involved.

And, as it turns out, such an achievement doesn’t come particularly cheap, or particularly easy. The cult of natural beauty does not, in reality, ask us to strip away our feminine ‘fakery’, but rather to make our fakery more subtle and more convincing, which requires ever more expertise, ever more specialised products, and ever more anxiety about getting it wrong. A dress that doesn’t flatter her, an uneven streak of foundation, a dodgy hair dye job: signs of failure, mocked because they signal ineptness at mastering our image - the ultimate sin of womanhood.

We live in a culture where the natural is made synonymous with the real, the authentic, the true and, by implication, the good. We live in a culture that still persuasively naturalises inequality, and we live in a culture where deviations from ‘natural’ states of gender and sexuality are met with heavy penalties.

Society’s unnaturals are forced to constantly work at convincing it that they’re real enough and honest enough to be accepted into its fold: that they were “born this way”, that they have an authentic, immutable origin of identity (a gene, a brain structure, a hormone) and a doctor’s note to prove it. All this is demanded of them in order to validate their very existence, and still they are regarded with brutal suspicion.

What we have is not a war against fakery, it is a war against that which displays itself as fakery; we’re all supposed to be pretending that we’re naturally wide-eyed and soft-skinned and blushing and blemish-free. Women are expected to be photorealist portraits of femininity, not expressionist canvasses; lies are tolerated only in so far as they are told convincingly. But when we start being too overt about the fabricated status of natural femininity, there’s a lurking danger that we might start to question their absurdity, or realise that we can invent altogether new images in radical moulds.

Cats + Video Games = The perfect way to spend a long weekend

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 15:32:23 -0500

Cats + Video Games = The perfect way to spend a long weekend

Dear Customer Who Stuck Up For His Little Brother

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:26:45 -0500

Dear Customer Who Stuck Up For His Little Brother:

via Huffington Post

Big brother then leaned down, kissed little brother on the head, and said, “Don’t worry, dude.”

No no… just a little dust in my eye…

I don’t usually post the...

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 23:26:22 -0500

I don’t usually post the vintage-hipster-photos-with-text-on-them, but 2011 is almost over, so consider this my quota.

Photo

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 23:51:11 -0500

deafmuslimpunx: INDIAN VERSION OF “ROSIE THE RIVETER” I have...

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:59:29 -0500

deafmuslimpunx:

INDIAN VERSION OF “ROSIE THE RIVETER”

I have seen various photographic recreations of Rosie the Riveter - all modeled by white women. Yet I’d never seen an Indian version. And I thought to myself, “I’m gonna make one!” One of my family members, who lives in India, helped me with the translation of “We Can Do It!” in Hindi. The model is me, the photographer is me, and I wore a traditional polyester saree with a cotton choli (blouse). I modeled my look after my aunts and other working class Indian women in the home state where both my parents come from - I greatly admire them and their work ethics. I hope you guys enjoy my Indian version of Rosie the Riveter!

Please follow me on Twitter and Tumblr! Don’t forget to subscribe to The American Dream is Dead and my youtube channel!

Achievement Unlocked: Holiday party at the NASDAQ market site in...

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:58:35 -0500

Achievement Unlocked: Holiday party at the NASDAQ market site in Times Square. :D

Guys at DEFCON photoing my goon badge for assistance in solving...

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:23:24 -0500

Guys at DEFCON photoing my goon badge for assistance in solving the puzzle challenge. Just ran across this and was recalling how much fun Vegas was this past year. Good times. :)

EFF Deeplinks: Free Speech’s Weak Links Under Internet...

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:00:00 -0500

EFF Deeplinks:

Free Speech’s Weak Links Under Internet Blacklist Bills
The Internet Blacklist bills — the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate’s PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) — would have a disastrous effect on online freedom of speech. In order to understand the ways a site placed on the blacklist could be denied a chance to connect with an audience, we’ve used our Free Speech is Only as Strong as the Weakest Link chart.