I’m really behind on almost all the blogs and news sites I read. This is partially due to the trips I’ve taken, where I’ve not had as much access to the internets as I would like. Every now and then I’ll read about three or four days’ worth of posts to try to catch up a bit, but my backlog remains. Every now and then I’ll laugh out loud and say some thing like “WTF! PK put cheese in his nose?” and Jake will stare at me and say “wow, you really are behind.”

So today I read about two weeks of RSS feeds. I have pretty much had the second half of May’s news and ranting crammed into my head in one day, and I’ve got a feeling of being outside of time, like watching a TV show a season at a time. It’s a weird feeling.

LOfuckinL!

I know this is a couple of weeks old, but fuck is it ever funny. The Ten Commandments mashed up with Ten Things I Hate About You.

[cross-posted at Feminist Allies. If you would like to comment, please do it there.]

I was about to comment on a recent post by Jeff, but I realized I had a whole post in the works on this subject. Jeff was talking, in part, about some criticism Q Grrl had of a post by Hugo Schwyzer.

Q Grrl says: [...] Don’t kid yourself that a man challenging other men is brave or exceptionally impressive. It’s not even virtuous. More precisely, it’s a base-level human reaction to injustice — and no man should be given kudos for simply rising to the least common denominator.

Jeff says: [...] the common denominator is sexism, so to the degree that he’s not being sexist, he’s rising above the common denominator.

I’ve come across this issue before, the so-called “no cookie” issue. I think Jeff is basically on the right track, but I also think that he and Q Grrl are using “common denominator” to mean two different things.

If I understand Q Grrl correctly, she is saying that the base level of decency that anyone ought to display is to treat everyone justly and speak out against injustice, and so to do so means you’re only doing the bare minimum that you ought.

Jeff seems to be saying that since the default attitude of men is a sexist one, then to be better than that average is commendable. That is false. To be at that average is deplorable. An acceptable level of behaviour is well above the average male attitude. And to acheive a level of “acceptable” in your actions is not commendable.

The difference here is between what behaviours the average man exhibits and what behaviours he ought to exhibit.
(Read more …)

This would have made me snarf my Cheerios if I were eating at the time. It’s a mod of the classic FPS game Castle Wolfenstein, done up to look like Gitmo. Your character has a black bag over its head tied hands. You don’t have any weapons so you just run around getting mauled by dogs and beaten by guards until you die.

It’s really bad of me to laugh at this, but I’m a sucker for political satire.

But will they surpass LEDs for lighting applications? That’s one of the questions posed in this WorldChanging article. OLEDs are hanging out at the lower end of LED efficiency for now (still twice as efficient as incandescents, and nowhere near as efficient as fluorescents), and it’s difficult to predict which technology will advance further.

The exciting thing about OLEDS is that they are used by sandwiching a layer of phosphorescent material between two conductors. This means that the whole device could take the form of a flexible sheet or a special paint — they can even be printed using modified inkjet printers. And since a display made of OLEDs both produces a better picture than an LCD screen and changes its image faster, it seems like just a matter of price before they replace laptop screens.

Best of all, OLEDs are greener to produce than either LEDs or fluorescents.

A cancer-resistant mouse was discovered in 1999. It is not yet known why, but this mouse’s immune system hunted down and destroyed cancerous cells, pretty much irrespective of the type of cancer. The same trait was passed down to the mouse’s descendants, of which there currently are about 2000.

Not only that, but scientists have recently discovered that injecting white blood cells from resistant mice into ordinary cancer-infected mice cures their cancer. This is startling and exciting news: if we figure out how this is happening and develop a human analog for this process curing cancer — or getting permanently vaccinated against it — could be as simple as getting an injection of white blood cells.