“Where Am I?” – a brief, personal look at LGBT in geek culture - Ms. In The Biz →

What if, in each thing all of us made, we did one thing that broke a prejudice barrier?

Hyper Mode: Anita Sarkeesian And The Trouble With Magic Bullets :: Games :: Features :: Paste →

She’s not going to save the world, nor cover every nuance and facet perfectly, nor convince every last hater of the error of their ways. Not all by herself. There won’t be one magic publication that saves games journalism, nor one magic game that proves games are art, nor one magic feminist who convinces all of the misogynists. There will be many, many, many voices, and it will be a long, slow grind.

I still support Anita Sarkeesian! If you disagree with what she said, or if you think she doesn’t go far enough, add your voice. That’s all it takes.

Advice for Travel and Life: Founding Father Benjamin Rush’s 14 Rules for His Young Son, 1796 →

Be sober and vigilant. Remember at all times that while you are seeing the world, the world will see you. Recollect further that you are always under the eye of the Supreme Being. One more consideration shall close this parting testimony of our affection. Whenever you are tempted to do an improper thing, fancy that you see your father and mother kneeling before you and imploring you with tears in their eyes to refrain from yielding to the temptation, and assuring you at the same time that your yielding to it will be the means of hurrying them to a premature grave.

List: Phrases I May or May Not Have Used in an Attempt to Teach High School English. →

“This idea to this idea? Is like going from hockey to prom with no shower in between.”

Briliant.

Ball lightning: the coolest thing you've never heard of →

Don’t have enough worries keeping you awake at night? How about worrying about being woken up by a glowing floating ball of light barging into your bedroom in the middle of the night? At 1:36 a.m. …

"Roast me a wren to start with.
Then, Brisket of Basilisk Treat.
My breakfast is “on the house”?
What a curious place to eat!"

Nancy Willard, The King of Cats Orders An Early Breakfast, via Maria Popova on BrainPickings

"The woman on the road then ceases to be human, as with many on the margins, and instead becomes a barometer, a tool by which the onlooker’s (or reader’s) humanity can be measured or determined. She is an object fetishized by their compassion (rather than, say, the “male gaze”) and the onlooker can choose to save her, choose to watch, or choose to ignore her as her fate plays out; these choices become the heart of the drama."

Vanessa Veselka, The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why It Matters, TheAmericanReader.com, via Rookie
Mag

(Source: rookiemag.com)

USA: Leading Language Spoken at Home other than English →

At first I thought the beige color was “none,” but of course it’s actually “Spanish.” Does this make it more or less ridiculous to force immigrants to learn English in order to be eligible for citizenship?

The Rhetoric in Our Two-Party System is Broken →

Everything is a War, and we are at an impasse.

"How pessimistic the participants revealed themselves to be, through the survey, was a more accurate predictor of five-year mortality than income, education, having a disability, being a man (a strike against longevity), or self-rated health. “Foreseeing a dark future,” the researchers concluded, “is beneficial for survival."

Lindsay Abrams, A Case for Pessimism, The Atlantic

6th-Grader Hands Out Wads of Cash to Friends from Backpack Stuffed With $20,000 →

School administrators confiscated the backpack and the money the student had already given away.

Principles for Living in the 21st Century →

1. Resilience over strength
2. Pull over push
3. Risk over safety
4. Systems over objects
5. Compasses over maps
6. Practice over theory
7. Disobedience over compliance
8. Emergence over authority
9. Learning over education

The page includes a little description/explanation of each principle.

View high resolution

Excellent photos of NYC from above, by Navid Baraty

(Source: abduzeedo.com)

Predictive Policing Technology Uses Crime Data To Make Decisions On Where To Send Police →

Predictive Policing technology, developed in LA, is about analyzing data from previous crimes in order to direct where and when to send police officers, and what types of crimes they should look for when they get there.

DNA is Flame-Retardant →

The current study was conducting with DNA extracted from herring sperm, but that might be a difficult crop to harvest. Where could we get a bunch of unused sperm to extract DNA from and coat things with? I have no idea. I just have no idea.