August 9, 2021
Gonna Make You Sweat
Sure, that piece of technical gear breathes, wicks, or insulates. But how do garment and gear manufacturers back up those claims? By testing the pieces on a sweating thermal manikin (YT). Meet Newton, Liz, and Baby Ruth, several members of a growing family (.pdf, see Table 2) working to keep firefighters, bomb disposal experts, and soldiers safer, and performance gear users more comfortable. [more inside]
Anti-Racist Graphics Research (SIGGRAPH 2021)
Theodore Kim's SIGGRAPH 2021 keynote on anti-racist graphics research: Computer graphics research has a race problem. (SLYT) [more inside]
Making Photography in a Surveillance State
Last summer’s uprisings were likely the most photographed in history, with not only mainstream press in attendance, but near-every attendee equipped with their own networked camera, live-streaming and hashtagging the protests, creating layers upon layers of unquantifiable documentation. The rampant circulation of these images—often shared in real-time— propelled the movement on and offline, allowing the summer’s events to swell into a global uprising. When these images were quickly co-opted by the state, with law enforcement using them to retaliate against BLM activists, photographers online began to employ a variety of visual answers to the problem of privacy, blotting out the faces of protestors with digital ink.
"... the sort of things that alter your soul."
For many of us who teach, "Teaching during the pandemic has been an exercise in balancing the utterly mundane with the profoundly traumatic—the sort of things that alter your soul." Sarah E. Smith responds to her student evaluations. [content warning: suicide]
45 minutes of Funky Old Japanese Soundtracks to chill out to
Voice Above Water
"Voice Above Water is the story of a 90-year-old Balinese fisherman who can no longer fish because of the amount of plastic pollution in the ocean, instead he collects trash in hopes of being able to fish again. The story is a glimpse into how one human is using his resources to make a difference and a reminder that if we all play our part we can accomplish something much greater than ourselves." [via]
Americans live on 30 mph streets, not on the set of Fast and Furious.
What if car companies were banned from boasting their trucks can “conquer,” “intimidate” and “thrill”? [more inside]
Don't let it be forgot
So... you're a fan of obscure, not-very-successful SF TV series, huh? Never mind your Star Treks, your Farscapes, even your Red Dwarves or Blake's Sevens, we're talking about series that are so lost to time and syndication that they sound like parodies of the space opera genre. Well, have you ever even heard of, let alone seen, Excalibur? Ran for two seasons on the BBC in the mid-seventies, ran for two seasons, combined Arthurian myth with Crowleyan mysticism, and was lost forever when the BBC, as was its custom, erased the videotapes to reuse them. Ring a bell? (Difficulty level: never actually existed.) [more inside]
IPCC's sixth assessment on Climate Change is out
Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis.
The Guardian: "IPCC report’s verdict on climate crimes of humanity: guilty as hell"
New York Times: "Even if nations started sharply cutting emissions today, total global warming is likely to rise around 1.5 degrees Celsius within the next two decades, a hotter future that is now essentially locked in." (archive).
Time: "'Widespread and Severe.' The climate crisis Is here, but there’s still time to limit the damage."
(previously)
The Guardian: "IPCC report’s verdict on climate crimes of humanity: guilty as hell"
New York Times: "Even if nations started sharply cutting emissions today, total global warming is likely to rise around 1.5 degrees Celsius within the next two decades, a hotter future that is now essentially locked in." (archive).
Time: "'Widespread and Severe.' The climate crisis Is here, but there’s still time to limit the damage."
(previously)
Making a list, checking it twice
Hundreds of Ways to Get S#!+ Done—and We Still Don’t : "The question is, why? Not just why it’s so hard to make a to-do app that works, but why people often feel so distraught by their hunt for the perfect organizational system. I’ve written about software for years, and I can tell you that people often have surprisingly deep feelings about their apps. But rarely is a category of software linked to such vistas of despair." By Clive Thompson in Wired.
When a family meal means something else
Baby sea stars may look innocent and adorable, but they're teensy little cannibals and eat their own siblings for their own survival, according to a new study. Two researchers discovered this behavior among baby Forbes' sea stars (Asterias forbesi) by accident. They were originally trying to understand how baby sea stars reacted when introduced to ferocious crab predators in the lab. "But they all started eating each other before we even introduced the crabs. So we had to scrap that experiment," Jon Allen, associate professor in William & Mary's Department of Biology, said in a statement. So Allen and his team shifted gears to observe this previously unknown phenomenon among the baby sea stars. [more inside]
Camp Halen
"start with questions of maleness and masculinity and go on from there"
In 2015, seven men discussed navigating masculinity in a roundtable discussion for the WisCon Chronicles (WisCon is a feminist scifi/fantasy convention they attend). "For me, my own maleness feels like an axiom, a defining property that I can’t prove or justify with analysis — and yet most of the traits that I associate with masculinity are things I’m uncomfortable with, whether or not I see those traits in myself." Participants included scifi/fantasy authors Na’amen Gobert Tilahun, David Moles, Jim Hines, and Benjamin Rosenbaum (conversation facilitated by Mary Anne Mohanraj). [more inside]
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