Sound Braid (by Vihart)
time for me to get lit
Wang Yaping
This is the face of the soon to be second Chinese woman in space. Wang Yaping was born on 27 January 1980 in Yantai (Shandong, China). Yantai is a coastal city on the Bohai Strait. She grew up on a cherry farm together with her younger sister. After she graduated from middle school she insisted on college, air force college (Changchun Flight Academy) to be precise. In 1998 she was qualified for solo flying and she graduated in 2001. Since she has flown several missions on transport aircraft, helping among others during the May 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. At the moment she is a major in the Chinese air force.
She was selected for astronaut training in may 2010. She was a second for the Shenzhou 9 flight of last year. This hear she is honoured with her own spaceflight. Not only that, China portraits her as the first Chinese teacher in space, since she will teach several lessons from orbit.
In her space time major Wang enjoys photography, music and basketball. She has also done long distance running in the past. In the news articles about her she is described as being eager to excel and hard working.
“They take care of me as their own younger sister in life, but I wish to be their comrade-in-arms.”
— Wang Yaping (x), commenting on how she is treated by her fellow astronauts. (via womeninspace)
(via womeninspace)
Justin sent me an email this morning with the subject line “CRITICAL INFORMATION” that just contained a link to this story of a pipe-cleaning ferret named Felicia from Fermilab.
Back in the ’70s, the scientists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory were looking for a way to clear the tubes of their newly built particle accelerator of the bits of dust that could derail a high-energy beam of particles whipping around at the speed of light.
Some ingenious scientist remembered that ferrets were used on English estates to go down rabbit burrows and scare the critters out (hence the phrase “ferret out”) and so, Felicia the ferret was employed by Fermilab to clean out the atom smasher. They tied a piece of string with a cotton swab to her tail, set her in the tubes, and then banked on her natural curiosity to lead her around the four-mile particle collider.
Felicia is now officially my favorite animal in science history.
(via wnycradiolab)
Ever since there have been graphical operating systems on the market, we’ve been buying them, along with the underlying assumption that metaphors are a good way to deal with the world. Computers themselves have no use for metaphor, and their inclusion—in the form of skeuomorphic objects and larger systemic metaphors—has always been a concession to their human operators, from whom, at least at the dawn of the digital age, the brute force of computing needed to be veiled.
From A Eulogy for Skeuomorphism, onMotherboard
totally relate to feeling these symbols were for someone else. i never had a filing cabinet either. but i love the sentiment of a eulogy.
Last night, the Obama Administration dropped their appeal to increase age and point of sale restrictions on emergency contraception! This safe and effective form of birth control will now be made available on store shelves, just like condoms, and people of all ages will be able to get it quickly in order to prevent unintended pregnancy.
This is a huge breakthrough for access to birth control and a historic moment for reproductive health and equity. Reblog to spread the good news!
woo!
Food Stamp Foodie #3 will be debuting at CAKE in Chicago! #3 collects the DIY and recipe comics I’ve done for Sadie Magazine.
Please join me & Sparkplug at CAKE June 15th and 16th! This show was great last year and I’m really looking forward to it this year.
new food stamp foodie, y’all!
Long-exposure firefly photos by Yume Cyan
found via Colossal (with more from the artist’s page on 500px)
via Colossal: For the last month or so photographer Yume Cyan has been shooting some magical long exposure photographs of fireflies in a forested area around Nagoya City, Japan. By keeping the camera’s shutter open at a low aperture Cyan captures every bioluminescent flash of each insect resulting in dotted light trails that criss-cross the frame.
OH DEAR ME
“A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement, and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many other ways difficult to enumerate — these are the folks who reap the largest rewards. The only way for even a putative meritocracy to hope to pass ethical muster, to be considered fair, is if those who are the luckiest in all of those respects also have the greatest responsibility to work hard, to contribute to the betterment of the world, and to share their luck with others.”
—
Ben Bernanke’s commencement address at Princeton University. (via theatlantic)
damn, ben! i thought you were part of the problem.
(via theatlantic)
Single Strip Chair by Droop Street Studio.
Threaded with one strip of webbing.
“
There’s no doubt those are stereotypes that need unpacking. Sociologists have long noted that homophobia is a fundamental ingredient of masculinity in modern American culture. In his seminal 1994 article “Masculinity as Homophobia,” sociologist Michael Kimmel, author of Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, argued that “homophobia is a central organizing principle of our cultural definition of manhood.” Since homosexuality is associated with femininity, feminizing and anti-gay comments are the primary mechanism for enforcing the boundaries of masculinity. If a guy steps ever so slightly outside of gender norms, his peers will bring him back into line by calling his heterosexuality into question (which implicitly challenges his gender). The pressure to prove and re-prove hetereosexuality is part of what it means to “be a man”—and it pushes men to embrace both homophobia and hypermasculinity. “Homophobia, the fear of being perceived as gay, as not a real man, keeps men exaggerating all the traditional rules of masculinity, including sexual predation with women,” Kimmel wrote. “Homophobia and sexism go hand-in-hand.”
Homophobia, then, is not simply social disapproval and discrimination against gay people, but an entire cultural structure that disqualifying all but the “most virulent repudiators of femininity” from “real manhood”—in the process upholding gender inequality and maintaining a hierarchy of men based on sexuality, race, class, ability, and so on.
It’s entirely understandable, then, why Collins took pains to highlight his masculinity in his Sports Illustrated article announcing the news. “I go against the gay stereotype, which is why I think a lot of players will be shocked: That guy is gay? But I’ve always been an aggressive player, even in high school. Am I so physical to prove that being gay doesn’t make you soft? Who knows? That’s something for a psychologist to unravel.”
But where does that leave the guys who do fit the “gay stereotype”?
After all, while it’s certainly true that not all gay men are “soft,” it’s also true that some of them are. The gay guy who would rather be belting out some Barbra Streisand than shooting hoops is not just a stereotype. He exists, too. He’s probably been spared the awful loneliness and anxiety of living for 34 years without being open about his sexuality to those closest to him, as Collins did, but he probably had less of a choice in the matter. The first time he had an anti-gay slur hurled at him may have happened before he even came out to himself. In fact, like 11-year-old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, he may only be perceived as gay.
”— I wrote this piece in The Atlantic on gay male athletes, masculinity, and homophobia. (via mayadusenbery)
Maya this is really good!
