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Let's start with a complementary model to spoons theory about energy and disability - the forks model which deals with scenarios where the payoff is great, and the more one does something, the greater the payoff, but one must first be able to muster the energy to do those things that have the great payoff.
The librarian says: If someone you encounter tells you you must finish books you have started, because it builds character, and you might be surprised (with, of course, the impossible caveat that you can avoid bad books by getting recommendations, asking around, and sampling a chapter or two before committing any further), you have my permission to laugh in their faces. Because chucking Atlas Shrugged at them would be assault. Seriously, unless some part of work or schooling, or your own desire to complete something rests on you reading a book you have determined you hate, there is no reason to continue with it. An author that spends a lot of book doing boring things or otherwise not keeping your attention had not earned the right to sitting their clever section on you later - their editor should have told them to start with the clever section. There is insufficient time in this universe to waste it on bad books. As one might guess, this means authors need to provide enough at the beginning of the story to draw the reader into wanting to finish it.
Also from the librarian: A school board in Gilbert, Arizona voted to excise textbook pages from biology textbooks because they mentioned the fact that abortion exists. They planned on simply cutting the page out, which would also cut out additional pages...that happened to also deal with sperm. After the school board that voted to do this were voted out in the elections, it's possible that the biology books will remain intact and no longer be slated for defacement and censorship.
The specific pages themselves are at arizonahonorsbiology.com
Recall that graffiti is timeless in what it talks about, so that you are no longer surprised by a preponderance of penises in an old and abandoned town.
If you like Holmes and are in London, The Museum of London has an exhibition on the detective, who benefits from having inconsistencies between his stories, as befits a character that quickly ascended to mythological proportions soon after his publication.
The human race has plenty of possible ways of dying off - here's nine known ways that an epidemic could kill us all.
Australia's constitution dies not provide rights that most other England-descended nations already have, and especially not for the indigenous peoples of Australia. It's time for the parliament and the citizenry to rectify the problems.
The publisher of a security researcher's book reported a breach in their payment processing system that made off with credit card data.
If you wonder about where green-skinned witches come from, blame the movie of The Wizard Of Oz. If, however, you want to see what people wanted to watch while war was going on, it's generally documentary-type footage of war going on. Which makes sense. Now, however, everyone wants to see the real footage of what's going on, if they're interested, and if they're not, they want to ignore that same footage and be ignorant of anything but the approved message of fear. Which can take on strange forms, like a pastor that claims Starbucks flavors their coffee with the semen of gay men...or at least anal sex fans. Anything to get in the news and push fear on the privileged.
A suggestion that the rise of the reactionary right in Europe is smaller than media coverage suggests. Which may be true. In the States, though, when you have the opposition claiming terror groups are entering the United States on the same paths as undocumented immigrants and that infectious diseases are able to cross into the country without control or a plan on dealing with them, you can make a strong case that the reactionary right is doing fine, thanks.
The GOP finally made good on their Obamacare threat...they're suing the President. Too bad that he's already moved on to an executive order changing the priorities of deportation so that many families have less worry of being broken up by deportation. Not that many people would know, as the major networks, excepting Univision, decided they had no interest in airing the speech.
a DuPont chemical plant responsible for the death of four plant workers has had a long string of safety violations in its past - just not big ones, and not even the biggest ones in the area. Which says a lot about chemical safety just by that.
Gentrification is the process of the rich sending those who want to be middle class to take over property and force out people whom the rich never want to be middle class - the poor and minorities. And since scared white people can call the police in the scary black men and the black men will go to jail (or to the grave), things only go one way. Our vehicle-centric transportation system also allows the rich to exercise control of the poor over their cars - by forcing people they consider unworthy of credit to accept a device that allows their lender to disable the vehicle if the borrower exceeds whatever arbitrary grace period the lender has on lateness, or if the car leaves the area the lender has deemed acceptable. And really, only those who are really poor understand what crushing poverty does to people. If your solution to poverty is for the poor to stop doing something, you do not understand. Similarly, blaming immigrants for the problems that the rich elite are forcing working people to deal with does nothing to fix any problems. Gentrification happens when biotech moves in, just as surely as when other things designed to raise the rent and push out the poor do.
In a wink-wink arrangement, candidates post b-roll footage of themselves to their websites, which PACs happily snap up and use for their own advertisements, skirting the rules requiring the candidates and the PACs to not coordinate, collaborate, or cooperate with each other. Because every defined rule always finds a rules-lawyer that can subvert it.
Modern medicine exhausts its practitioners to the point where they cannot empathize, provide care, or take care of themselves, especially in the hospital environment. The economics of medicine often sacrifice the well-being off those that need it.
One life, many identities - one as an up and coming writer, many more as a vitriolic and persistent harasser of people who are fans of certain writers or that talk about queer and other issues. When the identities were linked, so comes the public statements of those affected.
The federal government is deploying aerial devices that spoof legitimate cellular tower data and record data about any telephones that connect to them. Which gives them greater range, increased ease of finding targets, and the likelihood that they will collect personal and private data without warrants and use it without obtaining those warrants.
Alan Cumming, currently known for his role on the television show The Good Wife, talks about the abusive environment he grew up in, including a father that told him he was the product of an affair, beat him regularly, and set him with impossible tasks.
It is the way of the world for those who have gone before to complain about the decadence of those who follow them. Those complaining are still perpetually wrong. Some of them are getting smarter about how they conduct their complaints, though. Like the person in Tacoma, Washington, asking for the names and addresses of the dancers at a local strip club under open government records laws, so that he can pray for them. One would think that such a request would need justification beyond prayer, as that kind of request sounds like the prayer will be Westboro-style, or the large "prayer" demonstrations around facilities and providers of women's health services. It comes from people who believe they can police the behavior of others, but that they do not need to examine their own behavior. A better approach would be to understand that if you want to worship an entity you believe is composed of love, then love, and not dogma, should be your overriding principle.
Because there are lots of people with darker-skinned heritage than history wants them to have.
Also, women are on the Internet, doing great work, making excellent points and businesses and ideas. What we can do is stop the organized campaign that appears any time a woman starts to have people pay attention to her. And we can challenge the assumption that men find women contemptible by not perpetuating it. We could also stop assuming that all relationships are heterosexual.
Old ideas never die - they just wait to reappear in a new decade - Zero Population Growth returns. And, on the environmental side, visual representation of the severity of the California drought. Which, if you'd like to find something as the cause, hydraulic fracking is a really good candidate for contributing to the lack of available water, and for poisoning aquifers so as even less water is available for safe usage.
Retailers still believe the best way to protect their customers against unauthorized access to data is to not talk about anything they're doing or not doing to protect that data, so expect more compromised retailers to be exposed as having done nothing.
Having discovered that conventional ammunition places themselves undesirable stress on the weapon itself, an amateur gunsmith has created ammunition for printed weapons that contains most of the stresses inside the ammunition chamber itself, which could increase the lifetime of the weapons and make it possible to create a working semi-or fully-automatic printed weapon.
An exoskeletal device would allow workers to take a seat anywhere at the push of a button, after positioning themselves the way they would like to sit.
A Fort Lauderdale ordinance against feeding the homeless on public streets resulted in the arrest of a 90 year-old man who was feeding the hungry. Something about "the least of my people" surely applies here.
An application that purported to monitor Twitter streams for suicidal keywords has significant implementation flaws and chooses to make itself opt-out instead of opt-in. If we really want to make a difference in people's lives, we can do better than stalking their twitter streams. We can understand the way that the powerful instill prejudice in us to further their own pocketbooks, and we can understand the damage that we do, even at our youngest. (A video performance of To This Day, which helps even more to understand.)
The evolution of a young adult book cover, from concept, to concept, to concept, to concept, to finished product.
Last for tonight, a museum that interns to keep the curiosity in curiosities, failures of packaging and labeling, a roundup of resources on light therapy, the realization that writing what you want to write is ultimately the best option, wonderful animal moments, and animals in autumn.
And as the postscript, white supremacists gathering at a town known for having an honest-to-Hitler Nazi found their march turned into a fundraiser for a group that tries to get people out of neo-Nazi movements. They were also known for a rather neat shirt that started out with pro-Nazi slogans that would then shift into a message and information for getting out. The people who do these pranks are fucking geniuses.
Also, I'm still taking prompts for Baseball Tarot, if you're interested. Lots of available space.
The librarian says: If someone you encounter tells you you must finish books you have started, because it builds character, and you might be surprised (with, of course, the impossible caveat that you can avoid bad books by getting recommendations, asking around, and sampling a chapter or two before committing any further), you have my permission to laugh in their faces. Because chucking Atlas Shrugged at them would be assault. Seriously, unless some part of work or schooling, or your own desire to complete something rests on you reading a book you have determined you hate, there is no reason to continue with it. An author that spends a lot of book doing boring things or otherwise not keeping your attention had not earned the right to sitting their clever section on you later - their editor should have told them to start with the clever section. There is insufficient time in this universe to waste it on bad books. As one might guess, this means authors need to provide enough at the beginning of the story to draw the reader into wanting to finish it.
Also from the librarian: A school board in Gilbert, Arizona voted to excise textbook pages from biology textbooks because they mentioned the fact that abortion exists. They planned on simply cutting the page out, which would also cut out additional pages...that happened to also deal with sperm. After the school board that voted to do this were voted out in the elections, it's possible that the biology books will remain intact and no longer be slated for defacement and censorship.
The specific pages themselves are at arizonahonorsbiology.com
Recall that graffiti is timeless in what it talks about, so that you are no longer surprised by a preponderance of penises in an old and abandoned town.
If you like Holmes and are in London, The Museum of London has an exhibition on the detective, who benefits from having inconsistencies between his stories, as befits a character that quickly ascended to mythological proportions soon after his publication.
The human race has plenty of possible ways of dying off - here's nine known ways that an epidemic could kill us all.
Australia's constitution dies not provide rights that most other England-descended nations already have, and especially not for the indigenous peoples of Australia. It's time for the parliament and the citizenry to rectify the problems.
The publisher of a security researcher's book reported a breach in their payment processing system that made off with credit card data.
If you wonder about where green-skinned witches come from, blame the movie of The Wizard Of Oz. If, however, you want to see what people wanted to watch while war was going on, it's generally documentary-type footage of war going on. Which makes sense. Now, however, everyone wants to see the real footage of what's going on, if they're interested, and if they're not, they want to ignore that same footage and be ignorant of anything but the approved message of fear. Which can take on strange forms, like a pastor that claims Starbucks flavors their coffee with the semen of gay men...or at least anal sex fans. Anything to get in the news and push fear on the privileged.
A suggestion that the rise of the reactionary right in Europe is smaller than media coverage suggests. Which may be true. In the States, though, when you have the opposition claiming terror groups are entering the United States on the same paths as undocumented immigrants and that infectious diseases are able to cross into the country without control or a plan on dealing with them, you can make a strong case that the reactionary right is doing fine, thanks.
The GOP finally made good on their Obamacare threat...they're suing the President. Too bad that he's already moved on to an executive order changing the priorities of deportation so that many families have less worry of being broken up by deportation. Not that many people would know, as the major networks, excepting Univision, decided they had no interest in airing the speech.
a DuPont chemical plant responsible for the death of four plant workers has had a long string of safety violations in its past - just not big ones, and not even the biggest ones in the area. Which says a lot about chemical safety just by that.
Gentrification is the process of the rich sending those who want to be middle class to take over property and force out people whom the rich never want to be middle class - the poor and minorities. And since scared white people can call the police in the scary black men and the black men will go to jail (or to the grave), things only go one way. Our vehicle-centric transportation system also allows the rich to exercise control of the poor over their cars - by forcing people they consider unworthy of credit to accept a device that allows their lender to disable the vehicle if the borrower exceeds whatever arbitrary grace period the lender has on lateness, or if the car leaves the area the lender has deemed acceptable. And really, only those who are really poor understand what crushing poverty does to people. If your solution to poverty is for the poor to stop doing something, you do not understand. Similarly, blaming immigrants for the problems that the rich elite are forcing working people to deal with does nothing to fix any problems. Gentrification happens when biotech moves in, just as surely as when other things designed to raise the rent and push out the poor do.
In a wink-wink arrangement, candidates post b-roll footage of themselves to their websites, which PACs happily snap up and use for their own advertisements, skirting the rules requiring the candidates and the PACs to not coordinate, collaborate, or cooperate with each other. Because every defined rule always finds a rules-lawyer that can subvert it.
Modern medicine exhausts its practitioners to the point where they cannot empathize, provide care, or take care of themselves, especially in the hospital environment. The economics of medicine often sacrifice the well-being off those that need it.
One life, many identities - one as an up and coming writer, many more as a vitriolic and persistent harasser of people who are fans of certain writers or that talk about queer and other issues. When the identities were linked, so comes the public statements of those affected.
The federal government is deploying aerial devices that spoof legitimate cellular tower data and record data about any telephones that connect to them. Which gives them greater range, increased ease of finding targets, and the likelihood that they will collect personal and private data without warrants and use it without obtaining those warrants.
Alan Cumming, currently known for his role on the television show The Good Wife, talks about the abusive environment he grew up in, including a father that told him he was the product of an affair, beat him regularly, and set him with impossible tasks.
It is the way of the world for those who have gone before to complain about the decadence of those who follow them. Those complaining are still perpetually wrong. Some of them are getting smarter about how they conduct their complaints, though. Like the person in Tacoma, Washington, asking for the names and addresses of the dancers at a local strip club under open government records laws, so that he can pray for them. One would think that such a request would need justification beyond prayer, as that kind of request sounds like the prayer will be Westboro-style, or the large "prayer" demonstrations around facilities and providers of women's health services. It comes from people who believe they can police the behavior of others, but that they do not need to examine their own behavior. A better approach would be to understand that if you want to worship an entity you believe is composed of love, then love, and not dogma, should be your overriding principle.
Because there are lots of people with darker-skinned heritage than history wants them to have.
Also, women are on the Internet, doing great work, making excellent points and businesses and ideas. What we can do is stop the organized campaign that appears any time a woman starts to have people pay attention to her. And we can challenge the assumption that men find women contemptible by not perpetuating it. We could also stop assuming that all relationships are heterosexual.
Old ideas never die - they just wait to reappear in a new decade - Zero Population Growth returns. And, on the environmental side, visual representation of the severity of the California drought. Which, if you'd like to find something as the cause, hydraulic fracking is a really good candidate for contributing to the lack of available water, and for poisoning aquifers so as even less water is available for safe usage.
Retailers still believe the best way to protect their customers against unauthorized access to data is to not talk about anything they're doing or not doing to protect that data, so expect more compromised retailers to be exposed as having done nothing.
Having discovered that conventional ammunition places themselves undesirable stress on the weapon itself, an amateur gunsmith has created ammunition for printed weapons that contains most of the stresses inside the ammunition chamber itself, which could increase the lifetime of the weapons and make it possible to create a working semi-or fully-automatic printed weapon.
An exoskeletal device would allow workers to take a seat anywhere at the push of a button, after positioning themselves the way they would like to sit.
A Fort Lauderdale ordinance against feeding the homeless on public streets resulted in the arrest of a 90 year-old man who was feeding the hungry. Something about "the least of my people" surely applies here.
An application that purported to monitor Twitter streams for suicidal keywords has significant implementation flaws and chooses to make itself opt-out instead of opt-in. If we really want to make a difference in people's lives, we can do better than stalking their twitter streams. We can understand the way that the powerful instill prejudice in us to further their own pocketbooks, and we can understand the damage that we do, even at our youngest. (A video performance of To This Day, which helps even more to understand.)
The evolution of a young adult book cover, from concept, to concept, to concept, to concept, to finished product.
Last for tonight, a museum that interns to keep the curiosity in curiosities, failures of packaging and labeling, a roundup of resources on light therapy, the realization that writing what you want to write is ultimately the best option, wonderful animal moments, and animals in autumn.
And as the postscript, white supremacists gathering at a town known for having an honest-to-Hitler Nazi found their march turned into a fundraiser for a group that tries to get people out of neo-Nazi movements. They were also known for a rather neat shirt that started out with pro-Nazi slogans that would then shift into a message and information for getting out. The people who do these pranks are fucking geniuses.
Also, I'm still taking prompts for Baseball Tarot, if you're interested. Lots of available space.
