What I've Been Reading: 8/24/2013
Another RL update is coming up, but for now here's another linkdump. It's long, so it's behind a cut, and the ones I recommend are bolded. ;-)
POLITICS
--Abortion Is Different in Europe Because Religion Is Different in Europe
--Norway's Prime Minister Spends Afternoon Working as Taxi Driver to Hear From Voters
--The White Man's Continent (on reading about European history from the perspective of a black man, and debunking the belief held by Tumblr SJWs and the like that "white history" consists of nothing more than barbarism and isn't worth knowing)
--The Real Cost of Segregation - in 1 Big Chart
--Just How Wrong Is Conventional Wisdom About Government Fraud? (answer: a lot more wrong than you might think)
--Colbert Takes On Out Mayor Johnny Cummings in Amazing 'People Who Are Destroying America' Segment (on a gay mayor in rural Kentucky, and upending stereotypes about the "Deep South")
--The Case for Unconditional Handouts to the Poor
--Someone Finally Called Out Oprah For Buying a $38,000 Handbag
--I'm From America. Stop Complaining, South America. (FINALLY, someone wrote a defense on why it's okay to call the U.S. "America")
--A Model of American Opacity
--Assange: Our Only Hope Is Ron and Rand Paul, Drudge Report (so apparently, Julian Assange has said that the "only hope" that can save the United States is the "libertarian wing" of the Republican party. WELP.)
--Drones: Actually the Most Humane Form of Warfare Ever (another interesting counterpoint to drone criticism)
--Why We're Still Not Intervening in Syria
--A Convicted Murderer's Case For Gun Control
--The Endless Drone of David Sirota and Glenn Greenwald (I've always thought Greenwald was a hack "journalist," and this is an excellent takedown of his work, and the left's tendency for alarmism and self-serving public outrage in general)
--Trans Treason: Why Chelsea Manning is no hero for trans soldiers
--Antoinette Tuff Had Empathy For the Georgia School Gunman. We Can Learn a Lot From Her.
NSA SPYING CONTROVERSY
--New Snowden Bombshell Reveals Surveillance Errors Via Internal NSA Oversight (on how recent revelations about the NSA's mistakes aren't as bad as they first seem)
--The Top 10 Most Inaccurate and Exaggerated NSA Stories (So Far)
--What Snowden and Manning Don't Understand About Secrecy
ECONOMICS
--Why Is Bottled Water So Expensive?
--What Is Money?
SCIENCE
--Why Freud Still Matters, When He Was Wrong About Almost Everything
--15 million-year-old whale skull found on banks of Potomac River
--NASA to Test Life's Origin on Earth Theory
--Why We Can't Count on the Test-Tube Burger to Solve World Hunger
--What's Tylenol Doing to Our Minds?
--On being 'right' in science
--For the First Time in 35 Years, a New Carnivorous Mammal Species Is Discovered in the Americas
--Why Insects Have Gay Sex
--That's one miraculous conception (on how a woman born without a vagina managed to get pregnant and give birth)
--Why Are We Obsessed With Celebrities? Our DNA Provides a Clue
--Is Lab-Grown Meat Good for Us?
--Would it be boring if we could live forever?
--What Happens When You Stick Your Head Into a Particle Accelerator
--A Book That Will Make You Question Everything You Know About Dinosaurs
--New research suggests women can make sperm, and men can make eggs
--The Subtle Mysteries of Dinosaur Sex
--How Consciousness Works
--The Obesity Era (a must-read about how animals other than humans are getting fatter, and some of the unexpected reasons as to why we have an "obesity epidemic," none of which have to do with laziness, poor exercise, etc.)
ENVIRONMENT
--Why US power companies don't want you putting a solar panel on your roof
--Your iPhone uses more electricity than your fridge
--59% of the 'Tuna' Americans Eat Is Not Tuna
SPACE/ASTRONOMY
--Why Do Astronauts Appear Weightless in Space? (it's a little more complicated than you'd think)
--Interstellar Travel Is Hard, Why Bother? (note: the title is slightly sarcastic ~_^)
--How Often Do Astronauts Wash Their Clothes in Space?
--An Ode to Kepler, the Planet Hunter
--Here's What the Two Moons of Mars Look Like From the Planet's Surface
--Is Earth Really a Planet?
--NASA shows off a prototype of its new xenon-ion engine
--You Can Survive Being Exposed to the Near Vacuum of Space For About 90 Seconds With No Long-Term Damage
--The Difference Between an Asteroid and a Comet
--What does it take to discover an earth-like exoplanet?
--An Asteroid Field Would Actually Be Quite Safe to Fly Through
--The Ethics of Interstellar Alien Encounters
--Exoskeleton Could Make Astronauts Super Strong
--Quantum Thrusters to Give Warp Drives a Boost?
TECHNOLOGY
--How Close Are We to Elysium-Style Exosuits?
--Groundbreaking New Particle Could Make Hard Drives 20 Times Smaller
--Kids Can't Use Computers... And This Is Why It Should Worry You (the author of this piece is REALLY FUCKING ANNOYING and has his self-important head deep in his own ass, BUT it does make a salient point about the importance of technological literacy, and how many of us are sorely lacking in it)
--No, The Internet Is Not Ruining Childhood
--This App Will Not Harm Your Baby: An advocacy group's absurd war on technology for kids
--This Software Won't Let You Look Away
--Why You Used to Have to Use #2 Pencils With Scantron Forms
--Scientists Just Figured Out How to Make Lightning-Fast Graphene CPUs
--The First Website Ever Made (has some good basics about how the Internet works)
--The Future Is Not Accelerating
HISTORY
--5 Dumb Myths About Prehistoric Times That Everyone Believes
--What 7 million skulls look like - the Paris Catacombs
--The First Legal Slave Owner in What Would Become the United States Was a Black Man
--Where the Dollar Sign Comes From
--The History of French Fries
SOCIETY
--Talking to Men Who Are Abortion Clinic Escorts
--The Loneliness Loop: Why Feeling Sad Makes Us Shop and Shopping Makes Us Sad
--How Well Do We Really Understand Mental Illness?
--Dating on the Autism Spectrum
--Please be quiet, Richard Dawkins, I'm begging, as a fan
--How Upvote/Downvote Sites Like Reddit Breed Irrational Herd Behavior
--Understanding Deafness: Not Everyone Wants to Be 'Fixed'
--Growing Up Gay in Russia
--After I banned tipping at my restaurant, the service got better and we made more money
--How Many Gentrification Critics Are Gentrifiers Themselves?
--Good Charity, Bad Charity (on trying to determine what kinds of charities to which you'd want to give your money)
--Why Home-Cooking From Total Strangers May Be the Future of Food
--How America's 'Culture of Hustling' Is Dark and Empty (a LOT to chew on with this one)
--My Molesters: I was sexually assaulted three times before I was 20. Here's why I never told my family or the police. (CONTENT WARNING: graphic descriptions of sexual assault)
--Marriage Is the New Middle-Class Luxury Item (I really think a lot of the criticisms of same-sex marriage coming from the left and ~radical queers~ are stupid, but I think the information in this article could be used to actually make a good case)
--What does it feel like to have schizophrenia?
--The Tyranny of Buffness (on problems with body image among gay men)
--Science Explains Why People Don't Believe Rape Victims
--Modern Loneliness, Explained
--How Your Biased Brain Makes You a Jerk Online (and How to Stop It)
--The Real Reason Why So Many People Overshare on Facebook
--Isolated Peruviuan tribe attempts to make contact, asks for food
--Germany is the first European country to recognize a third gender
--10 Things You Didn't Know About Lying
--How Deaf People Think
--"Dirty secrets" about the funeral home industry in the U.S.
--Can Science Deliver the Benefits of Religion? (on why people still cling to creationism and other beliefs that science has disproven)
GEOGRAPHY
--40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World
--A Map of Gender-Diverse Cultures
SEX
--Punditry of the penis: Let's see this simple, elegant organ for what it is
MEDIA
--"The Spectacular Now": Meet the "Nerdy Doormat Dream Girl"
--Elysium: Everything that sucks about movies these days
--How Twitter has changed the way that television is made
--Shit Book Snobs Say: Translations
--Our Science Fiction Movies Hate Science Fiction
--The Moment When Science Fiction Split Off From Competence Porn
--You Can Do Anything: Must Every Kids' Movie Reinforce the Cult of Self-Esteem? (this also touches on why you hear a lot of people say things like, "I wish I could do/accomplish all those cool things at a young age like those characters did!", "Why can't I live in the world of those characters, with all that magic and wonder and cool stuff?", "Why must real life be so boring compared to these movies," and the like -- it has a lot to do with our media inadvertently teaching us instant gratification and unrealistic expectations)
--Whimsical Branding Obscures Apple's Troubled Supply Chain (on why Apple continues to be popular despite controversies over how it treats workers and the environment, evades taxes, etc.)
--Do villains have to commit "taboo" acts for us to hate them?
--How to Identify Popular Japanese Character Types (this only deals with the "dere" character types in anime, but I do get them mixed up, so this is helpful XD)
--Give us a Gay 'Sleeping Beauty': Why We Need More LGBT Characters in Kids' Movies
--This Tedious Video Game Will Make You Hate Yourself. You Should Play It.
ART/CREATIVITY
--Winners of the 2013 National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest (The Atlantic also has selected entries they've enjoyed here and here)
--Intimate National Geographic Portraits of the Serengeti Lion
--Why Poetry Should Be More Playful
--'Lust in Uniform' Exhibit Takes Look Back at Gay Men in the U.S. Military Through the Years
--The music created by your brain waves could score a horror film
--A Day in the Life of the Ku Klux Klan, Uncensored
--Short film "AMP": District 9 animator spins a short about a man and his father's robot
--These Adorable Animal Pics May Be Fake -- and Cruel
--When Does Photography Become an Invasion of Privacy? Perhaps Never
--"Deathigner": An animated short about the school all Avatars of Death attend
Originally posted at http://quadruplify.dreamwidth.org/139252.html || Comments on original post:
POLITICS
--Abortion Is Different in Europe Because Religion Is Different in Europe
--Norway's Prime Minister Spends Afternoon Working as Taxi Driver to Hear From Voters
--The White Man's Continent (on reading about European history from the perspective of a black man, and debunking the belief held by Tumblr SJWs and the like that "white history" consists of nothing more than barbarism and isn't worth knowing)
--The Real Cost of Segregation - in 1 Big Chart
--Just How Wrong Is Conventional Wisdom About Government Fraud? (answer: a lot more wrong than you might think)
--Colbert Takes On Out Mayor Johnny Cummings in Amazing 'People Who Are Destroying America' Segment (on a gay mayor in rural Kentucky, and upending stereotypes about the "Deep South")
--The Case for Unconditional Handouts to the Poor
--Someone Finally Called Out Oprah For Buying a $38,000 Handbag
--I'm From America. Stop Complaining, South America. (FINALLY, someone wrote a defense on why it's okay to call the U.S. "America")
--A Model of American Opacity
--Assange: Our Only Hope Is Ron and Rand Paul, Drudge Report (so apparently, Julian Assange has said that the "only hope" that can save the United States is the "libertarian wing" of the Republican party. WELP.)
--Drones: Actually the Most Humane Form of Warfare Ever (another interesting counterpoint to drone criticism)
--Why We're Still Not Intervening in Syria
--A Convicted Murderer's Case For Gun Control
--The Endless Drone of David Sirota and Glenn Greenwald (I've always thought Greenwald was a hack "journalist," and this is an excellent takedown of his work, and the left's tendency for alarmism and self-serving public outrage in general)
--Trans Treason: Why Chelsea Manning is no hero for trans soldiers
--Antoinette Tuff Had Empathy For the Georgia School Gunman. We Can Learn a Lot From Her.
NSA SPYING CONTROVERSY
--New Snowden Bombshell Reveals Surveillance Errors Via Internal NSA Oversight (on how recent revelations about the NSA's mistakes aren't as bad as they first seem)
--The Top 10 Most Inaccurate and Exaggerated NSA Stories (So Far)
--What Snowden and Manning Don't Understand About Secrecy
ECONOMICS
--Why Is Bottled Water So Expensive?
--What Is Money?
SCIENCE
--Why Freud Still Matters, When He Was Wrong About Almost Everything
--15 million-year-old whale skull found on banks of Potomac River
--NASA to Test Life's Origin on Earth Theory
--Why We Can't Count on the Test-Tube Burger to Solve World Hunger
--What's Tylenol Doing to Our Minds?
--On being 'right' in science
--For the First Time in 35 Years, a New Carnivorous Mammal Species Is Discovered in the Americas
--Why Insects Have Gay Sex
--That's one miraculous conception (on how a woman born without a vagina managed to get pregnant and give birth)
--Why Are We Obsessed With Celebrities? Our DNA Provides a Clue
--Is Lab-Grown Meat Good for Us?
--Would it be boring if we could live forever?
--What Happens When You Stick Your Head Into a Particle Accelerator
--A Book That Will Make You Question Everything You Know About Dinosaurs
--New research suggests women can make sperm, and men can make eggs
--The Subtle Mysteries of Dinosaur Sex
--How Consciousness Works
--The Obesity Era (a must-read about how animals other than humans are getting fatter, and some of the unexpected reasons as to why we have an "obesity epidemic," none of which have to do with laziness, poor exercise, etc.)
ENVIRONMENT
--Why US power companies don't want you putting a solar panel on your roof
--Your iPhone uses more electricity than your fridge
--59% of the 'Tuna' Americans Eat Is Not Tuna
SPACE/ASTRONOMY
--Why Do Astronauts Appear Weightless in Space? (it's a little more complicated than you'd think)
--Interstellar Travel Is Hard, Why Bother? (note: the title is slightly sarcastic ~_^)
--How Often Do Astronauts Wash Their Clothes in Space?
--An Ode to Kepler, the Planet Hunter
--Here's What the Two Moons of Mars Look Like From the Planet's Surface
--Is Earth Really a Planet?
--NASA shows off a prototype of its new xenon-ion engine
--You Can Survive Being Exposed to the Near Vacuum of Space For About 90 Seconds With No Long-Term Damage
--The Difference Between an Asteroid and a Comet
--What does it take to discover an earth-like exoplanet?
--An Asteroid Field Would Actually Be Quite Safe to Fly Through
--The Ethics of Interstellar Alien Encounters
--Exoskeleton Could Make Astronauts Super Strong
--Quantum Thrusters to Give Warp Drives a Boost?
TECHNOLOGY
--How Close Are We to Elysium-Style Exosuits?
--Groundbreaking New Particle Could Make Hard Drives 20 Times Smaller
--Kids Can't Use Computers... And This Is Why It Should Worry You (the author of this piece is REALLY FUCKING ANNOYING and has his self-important head deep in his own ass, BUT it does make a salient point about the importance of technological literacy, and how many of us are sorely lacking in it)
--No, The Internet Is Not Ruining Childhood
--This App Will Not Harm Your Baby: An advocacy group's absurd war on technology for kids
--This Software Won't Let You Look Away
--Why You Used to Have to Use #2 Pencils With Scantron Forms
--Scientists Just Figured Out How to Make Lightning-Fast Graphene CPUs
--The First Website Ever Made (has some good basics about how the Internet works)
--The Future Is Not Accelerating
HISTORY
--5 Dumb Myths About Prehistoric Times That Everyone Believes
--What 7 million skulls look like - the Paris Catacombs
--The First Legal Slave Owner in What Would Become the United States Was a Black Man
--Where the Dollar Sign Comes From
--The History of French Fries
SOCIETY
--Talking to Men Who Are Abortion Clinic Escorts
--The Loneliness Loop: Why Feeling Sad Makes Us Shop and Shopping Makes Us Sad
--How Well Do We Really Understand Mental Illness?
--Dating on the Autism Spectrum
--Please be quiet, Richard Dawkins, I'm begging, as a fan
--How Upvote/Downvote Sites Like Reddit Breed Irrational Herd Behavior
--Understanding Deafness: Not Everyone Wants to Be 'Fixed'
--Growing Up Gay in Russia
--After I banned tipping at my restaurant, the service got better and we made more money
--How Many Gentrification Critics Are Gentrifiers Themselves?
--Good Charity, Bad Charity (on trying to determine what kinds of charities to which you'd want to give your money)
--Why Home-Cooking From Total Strangers May Be the Future of Food
--How America's 'Culture of Hustling' Is Dark and Empty (a LOT to chew on with this one)
--My Molesters: I was sexually assaulted three times before I was 20. Here's why I never told my family or the police. (CONTENT WARNING: graphic descriptions of sexual assault)
--Marriage Is the New Middle-Class Luxury Item (I really think a lot of the criticisms of same-sex marriage coming from the left and ~radical queers~ are stupid, but I think the information in this article could be used to actually make a good case)
--What does it feel like to have schizophrenia?
--The Tyranny of Buffness (on problems with body image among gay men)
--Science Explains Why People Don't Believe Rape Victims
--Modern Loneliness, Explained
--How Your Biased Brain Makes You a Jerk Online (and How to Stop It)
--The Real Reason Why So Many People Overshare on Facebook
--Isolated Peruviuan tribe attempts to make contact, asks for food
--Germany is the first European country to recognize a third gender
--10 Things You Didn't Know About Lying
--How Deaf People Think
--"Dirty secrets" about the funeral home industry in the U.S.
--Can Science Deliver the Benefits of Religion? (on why people still cling to creationism and other beliefs that science has disproven)
GEOGRAPHY
--40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World
--A Map of Gender-Diverse Cultures
SEX
--Punditry of the penis: Let's see this simple, elegant organ for what it is
MEDIA
--"The Spectacular Now": Meet the "Nerdy Doormat Dream Girl"
--Elysium: Everything that sucks about movies these days
--How Twitter has changed the way that television is made
--Shit Book Snobs Say: Translations
--Our Science Fiction Movies Hate Science Fiction
--The Moment When Science Fiction Split Off From Competence Porn
--You Can Do Anything: Must Every Kids' Movie Reinforce the Cult of Self-Esteem? (this also touches on why you hear a lot of people say things like, "I wish I could do/accomplish all those cool things at a young age like those characters did!", "Why can't I live in the world of those characters, with all that magic and wonder and cool stuff?", "Why must real life be so boring compared to these movies," and the like -- it has a lot to do with our media inadvertently teaching us instant gratification and unrealistic expectations)
--Whimsical Branding Obscures Apple's Troubled Supply Chain (on why Apple continues to be popular despite controversies over how it treats workers and the environment, evades taxes, etc.)
--Do villains have to commit "taboo" acts for us to hate them?
--How to Identify Popular Japanese Character Types (this only deals with the "dere" character types in anime, but I do get them mixed up, so this is helpful XD)
--Give us a Gay 'Sleeping Beauty': Why We Need More LGBT Characters in Kids' Movies
--This Tedious Video Game Will Make You Hate Yourself. You Should Play It.
ART/CREATIVITY
--Winners of the 2013 National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest (The Atlantic also has selected entries they've enjoyed here and here)
--Intimate National Geographic Portraits of the Serengeti Lion
--Why Poetry Should Be More Playful
--'Lust in Uniform' Exhibit Takes Look Back at Gay Men in the U.S. Military Through the Years
--The music created by your brain waves could score a horror film
--A Day in the Life of the Ku Klux Klan, Uncensored
--Short film "AMP": District 9 animator spins a short about a man and his father's robot
--These Adorable Animal Pics May Be Fake -- and Cruel
--When Does Photography Become an Invasion of Privacy? Perhaps Never
--"Deathigner": An animated short about the school all Avatars of Death attend
Originally posted at http://quadruplify.dreamwidth.org/139252.html || Comments on original post: