August 23, 2019
The Woman With 200 Kids
Over the past 30 years, Cindy Stirling has fostered runaways, orphans, teen sex workers, abuse victims and cancer patients. Portrait of a supermom. (Luc Rinaldi, Toronto Life) [more inside]
Between cancer and diabetes
Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America (SLLATimes). "Police use of force accounted for 1.6% of all deaths of black men between the ages of 20 and 24"
The End of Agile
I knew the end of Agile was coming when we started using hockey sticks. Every morning, at precisely eight o'clock, the team of developers and architects would stand around a room paneled in white boards and would begin passing around a toy hockey stick. When you received the hockey stick, you were supposed to launch into the litany: Forgive Father, for I have sinned. I only wrote two modules yesterday, for it was a day of meetings and fasting, and I had a dependency upon Joe, who's out sick this week with pneumonia.
PostYourAnimal meets FeelGoodFilter
It took SPCA employee Carol O'Connell three years to get close enough to pet a stray cat that had been coming by her home every now and then. Then she borrowed a chip scanner from work and discovered Tiger had been missing for eleven years.
Quantum Radar is here
And it uses entangled Microwave photons. Almost all the advances in quantum computing, cryptography, teleportation, and so on have involved visible or near-visible light. This team has used entangled microwaves to create the world’s first quantum radar. [more inside]
The basic-to-horrible boyfriend as muse
“Here are some smitten, moony-eyed, genuine and heartfelt songs about men who just make you want to go . . . HER?“ An Oh No They Didn’t original post by user zazie_toujours, featuring Dave Coulier, Donald Trump Jr., and other . . . unexpected muses.
Pregnancy after an eating disorder: A story of two births
Some part of me craved pain as proof that I was already a good mother, long-suffering, while another part of me wanted to reject hardship as the only possible proof of devotion. (CW: disordered eating, pregnancy)
But as it turned out, pregnancy wasn’t a liberation from prior selves so much as a container holding every prior version of myself at once. I didn’t get to shed my ghosts so fully. It was easy to roll my eyes at people saying, “You don’t look pregnant at all,” and harder to admit the pride I felt when I heard it. It was easy to call my doctor absurd when she chided me for gaining five pounds in a month (rather than four!), and harder to admit that I’d honestly felt shamed by her in that moment.
On cooling the mark out
It is well known that persons protect themselves with all kinds of rationalizations when they have a buried image of themselves which the facts of their status do not support. [PDF] In this classic paper, Erving Goffman draws parallels between cooling the mark out -- providing fraud victims with "instruction in the philosophy of taking a loss" -- and other social situations in which one person is given the distasteful task of letting another down easy. It's the kind of structure you can see evidence for everywhere, from the sifting and winnowing of people in education to the techniques that psychics use to avoid scrutiny.
"time passes very slowly when you're in a hippo's mouth"
Experience: I was swallowed by a hippo [Paul Templer in The Guardian, 2013]
On the Hunt for Boston’s Signtronix Signs
Dave Hebb is on an epic quest to find all of Greater Boston's Signtronix signs. From Atlas Obscura, who joined Dave on his quest: Signtronix, a California-based sign manufacturer, caters to small businesses across the United States but as Boston continues to expand and build, these signs are increasingly being abandoned. [more inside]
“Press LT to prepare and RT to let loose.”
A Brief History of Peeing in Video Games [Slate] “Gamescom 2019 kicked off in Cologne, Germany on Monday night, and as usual, the annual trade fair has been full to bursting with announcements, trailers, and exciting new details about upcoming games. But one development is making a bigger splash than the rest: Visionary video game auteur Hideo Kojima’s next game, Death Stranding, will feature the kind of hyper-realistic urination gameplay action that gamers crave. Drench your eyeballs in this leaked footage from Gamescom’s opening night stream to see Death Stranding star Norman Reedus take the most lavishly digitized piss in video game history.” [Death Stranding - Extreme Peeing Action][YouTube]
Like any true polar adventurer, Bruno saw penguins as a kind of leitmotif
"Zehnder has been walking across the hard-packed snow for about 40 minutes, each step a small negotiation requiring delicacy, concentration, and luck—one can never tell when a hidden crevasse will snap your ankle or swallow you altogether....Forty-two hours later, when the Russians found him frozen to death nowhere near the penguins, the legend of Bruno was born. Never famous while he was alive, in death he became the latest in a long line of outsize polar adventurers whose obsession with the ends of the earth cost them their lives." The author investigates Zehnder’s secretive, playboy life in New York City; rumors of C.I.A. or K.G.B. ties; and the questions surrounding his icy grave.
What the Heck Is Crab Rangoon Anyway?
"I want it to look like a comebacker hit me in the nuts," I said.
Keith Comstock played on four major league clubs as a journeyman reliever, but his professional career is most often remembered for one thing: a ball to the crotch. Thirty years ago -- in what otherwise would have been a forgotten minor league set -- Comstock appeared on one of the most memorable baseball cards ever made. Here's the story of how it came together, in his words. 'You're the guy with the ball to the crotch': The inside story behind the funniest baseball card ever made (ESPN) [more inside]
I Didn't Count On This Package Deal
Back At It Again...This Time in Canada
Someone in Oxford County, ON has made off with $187,000 worth of cheese, after they used forged documents to steal the shipment. [more inside]
for quantum computing of course one would want tiddly winks
Matt "Numberphile" Parker builds logic gates out of dominos. Matt then builds (with much help) a 3- and then 4-bit adder out of dominoes at a science museum. Here's another persons' text-based explanation of binary domino logic; here's yet another written explanation, with interactive diagrams. (See also this 2008 MeFi post.)
The 2010 Chargers: A Study In Tragedy
Dorktown returns to video as Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein take a look at the 2010 San Diego Chargers, and show that a team that topped the league statistically can nevertheless find themselves out in the cold come playoff time. (SLYT) [more inside]
Reporting on the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in 1619
Breaking: Something Bad Is Happening in Virginia [Updated]. "To commemorate the quadricentennial anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans in America, we imagined what it would be like to cover that late August day when the first slave ship landed on the shores of the place now known as Hampton, Va." [more inside]
Because I Have All The Swords
Phil Jamesson is a comedian who makes short (between 30 seconds and two minutes) sketch comedy videos, like The Reward, Teaching a Board Game, Clue and The Genie.
You will never find a more expensive hive of scum and villainy
Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge opened in Disneyland earlier this year to rave reviews of its immersive theming, role-playing “cast members”, and, uh, $200 custom lightsabers. But fans have had a disturbing lack of faith in the new addition, leading to lower-than-expected attendance numbers. Disney blames high hotel prices and, surprisingly, its own even-higher ticket prices, while others find the rides underwhelming compared to the more ambitious original plans. [more inside]
David Koch has died at 79
David Koch, billionaire conservative, (previously, previously) has died at age 79. He is survived by his brother Charles.
Grounds for appeal
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