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Video: As The Pope Tweets

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 15:32:31 +0000

The His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI sends his very first tweet, on an iPad.

He accidentally deleted his first actual tweet, but I screengrabbed it.

Outstanding accounts

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 21:29:57 +0000

Phil Plait — who writes the Bad Astronomy blog — still has not been paid for his contributions to the Great Global Warming Conspiracy. For such an organized cabal, you think they would have a better accounting department.

Bob Dylan’s “Titanic” by Tim Heidecker (music video)

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 17:39:15 +0000

[Video Link]

Comic genius Tim Heidecker, who is roughly 50% of Tim and Eric (also behind "Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie," and "Check it Out! with Dr. Steve Brule"), has yet again created something I find very funny.

"Recently, I read that Bob Dylan’s new album Tempest will feature a 14 minute song about the Titanic," he writes, "So I wrote this song to see if I could beat the Master to it. I can’t wait to see how close I got to the real thing!"

Above, a preview. The entire opus is fifteen minutes long, and you can purchase it here.

National Review: supreme court "pretended" mandate was constitutional

Rob Beschizza — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 06:06:57 +0000

As a Brit in the US, I landed on a left-leaning limb of the tree. This is not unusual—our conservatives are often more liberal than your liberals, after all. That said, I often found myself enjoying conservative writing on this side of the pond. Especially The National Review.

NR offered a pleasing critical distance, a political culture suffused with observational subtleties and literary aspirations. Reactionary waves broke often over the sandcastles of reason, but this only enhanced its charm, at least for this foreigner.

By the time of Obama's election, however, the charm had worn off. As political failure sank in, sententious contempt oozed out. When Christopher Buckley endorsed the Democrat and was canned for apostasy, an editor there called him "cretinous". (Added Buckley: "I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal.")

It only got worse. At one point, editor Rich Lowry wrote a shamelessly infantile mash note for Sarah Palin, a posting whose power to amuse will only grow as the seasons pass. By the time one contributor's racist screeds forced it to fire him, the Review's post announcing his departure was notable mostly for its regretful tone, clouded further by his colleagues' unendurable handwringing over it.

Still, I'd often find myself back there for one reason or another (i.e. Jonah Goldberg). Every time, I'd putter around only to chance across something hot, and want to leap on it and write this very post: "This is why I had to stop reading these scoundrels!" But the urge would always pass, because it hardly matters.

Today, however, a single word finally gets it out of me. In the wake of today's Supreme Court ruling upholding The Affordable Care Act's insurance mandates, The Review offered a collective editorial that began like so:

The Court, by a 5–4 margin, refused to join all the august legal experts who insisted that of course it granted that authorization, that only yahoos and Republican partisans could possibly doubt it. It then pretended that this requirement is constitutional anyway, because it is merely an application of the taxing authority. Rarely has the maxim that the power to tax is the power to destroy been so apt, a portion of liberty being the direct object in this case.

Now, leave aside the magical thinking here, as if it were enough to stock a sentence with certain words for it to attain salience. Instead, let me just repeat the key phrase in it, to make it clear.

The supreme court pretended that the requirement is constitutional.

They pretended.

This is American conservatism's immune system going into anaphylactic shock. Fun to watch, while it lasts!

Pronunciation Guide: extremely funny videos on how to pronounce things

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 02:05:09 +0000

[Video Link], via Sean Bonner. I LOL'd, then cried, then hit play again and LOL'd some more. CONTAINS HELVETICA.

Conclusion to "Existential Dread" - a history of Anonymous's activities in 2011

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:05:34 +0000

Quinn Norton has completed her triumphant history of Anonymous's actions in 2011 for Wired and this installment is amazing, containing real insight into how the world sees Anon, how Anon sees itself, and how those two mix. I was really taken with the following section, which reminds me a lot of Clay Shirky's idea that the pre-Internet world was one of "select, then publish" but that now we live in the world of "publish, then select":

The Freedom Ops are useful in explaining how Anonymous ops work. At any time on IRC there were ops for any number of countries, not just Middle Eastern ones. There were channels for Britain, Italy, Ireland, the USA, Venezuela, Brazil, and many more, as well as Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, and most of the rest of the Middle East. Most of the ops had few participants, so those who were there linked to a press release or video about problems in that country with a bold call to action, but, for long stretches, nothing would happen.
That was OK; that is how Anonymous proposes ideas to itself. This reverses the order that the media was used to. In most of the world, the bold proclamation comes after the decision to act. In Anonymous, hyperbolic manifestos and calls to apocalyptic action show you want to talk about an issue. For many people reporting on Anonymous, it often looked like Anonymous was all bluster and no action.
But that’s the wrong way to look at it. For the lulzy hive mind, bluster can be the point itself. Other times, quieter, less dramatic actions would spring up and fill the channel, only for it to go quiet again when anons had moved on to another action. For the Freedom Ops, lying fallow was no shame, and dormant ops often sparked up in response to news events from the relevant region.

Quinn notes that this installment is "longer than the first two parts [part 1, part 2] put together, and only covers 2011-- a doozy of a year! ...I think 2012 may be an even crazier year with the hive mind."

2011: The Year Anonymous Took On Cops, Dictators and Existential Dread (Thanks, Quinn!)

(Photo: Quinn Norton)

An open letter to Minnesota state senator Amy Koch

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 21:13:51 +0000

It doesn't appear to count toward the tally at GayHomophobe.com (where it's now been 6 days since the last time a homophobic public figure turned out to be queer), but Minnesota state senator Amy Koch has joined the vaunted ranks of politicians who are deeply concerned about the sanctity of all marriages except their own. The married Koch recently resigned as Senate majority leader after word got out that she'd had an "inappropriate relationship" with a male staffer.

Koch is a major force behind the attempt to enshrine special rights for straight people into Minnesota's constitution, so you might have thought she'd treat her own magical straight marriage with the respect it deserves. John Medeiros, co-curator of Minneapolis' Intermedia Arts' Queer Voices reading series, can only conclude that lapse into blatant hypocrisy must, somehow, be the fault of queer people. So, he's written an open letter, apologizing to Senator Koch, on behalf of queer Minnesotans, for forcing her to betray the sanctity of straight marriage.

Dear Ms. Koch,

On behalf of all gays and lesbians living in Minnesota, I would like to wholeheartedly apologize for our community's successful efforts to threaten your traditional marriage. We are ashamed of ourselves for causing you to have what the media refers to as an "illicit affair" with your staffer, and we also extend our deepest apologies to him and to his wife. These recent events have made it quite clear that our gay and lesbian tactics have gone too far, affecting even the most respectful of our society.

We apologize that our selfish requests to marry those we love has cheapened and degraded traditional marriage so much that we caused you to stray from your own holy union for something more cheap and tawdry. And we are doubly remorseful in knowing that many will see this as a form of sexual harassment of a subordinate.

It is now clear to us that if we were not so self-focused and myopic, we would have been able to see that the time you wasted diligently writing legislation that would forever seal the definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman, could have been more usefully spent reshaping the legal definition of "adultery."

Forgive us. As you know, we are not church-going people, so we are unable to fully appreciate that "gay marriage" is incompatible with Christian values, despite the fact that those values carry a biblical tradition of adultery such as yours. We applaud you for keeping that tradition going.

And finally, shame on us for thinking that marriage is a private affair, and that our marriage would have little impact on anyone's family. We now see that marriage is more than that. It is an agreement with society. We should listen to the Minnesota Family Council when it tells us that marriage is about being public, which explains why marriages are public ceremonies. Never did we realize that it is exactly because of this societal agreement that the entire world is looking at you in shame and disappointment instead of minding its own business.

From the bottom of our hearts, we ask that you please accept our apology.

Thank you.
John Medeiros
Minneapolis MN

Thank you, City Pages!/p>

Occupy Lulz

Xeni Jardin — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 21:49:59 +0000

Everything becomes a meme, eventually: Occupy Lulz. Here's a direct link to the photo collection. More "greatest hits" below.

Recycling in Antarctica

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 14:00:29 +0000

When I recycle, I have to separate out metal, plastic, chipboard, glass, plain paper, glossy paper, and newsprint. That sounds like a lot of separating, until you compare it to the recycling protocol at McMurdo Scientific Research Station, Antarctica.

There is nothing at McMurdo that wasn't flown or shipped there from far away. That costs a lot money. And, almost as importantly, it costs space. A crate of Ramen means less room for people, scientific instruments, etc. Nothing arrives in Antarctica without a purpose.

On the flip side of that coin: Everything that is brought to McMurdo must leave, in one way or another. There aren't any landfills in Antarctica. All the trash produced must be either burned, reused there, or flown back to civilization.

All of that means McMurdo has developed what is probably the most elaborate recycling program in the entire world. The trash matrix you see above is just half of the full list. You can see the other half after the jump — as well as a few extra recycling bins that turned up mysteriously one night.

The following bins are not officially part of the McMurdo Station recycling program. But they are pretty wonderful.

Among the things that can now be recycled at McMurdo: Your dreams.

Glitter is also a limited resource. Please re-use and recycle.

Not all recycling is fun recycling.

And, finally, another view of the Glitter recycling container, as a Unicorn Chaser. On the left, an actual recycling container.

You all owe Henry Kaiser a huge round of applause for taking these photographs and sending them to me. Alternately, you can show your appreciation by visiting his YouTube site, which is full of amazing videos of life beneath the Antarctic sea ice.