As usual, readers are encouraged to post links to their own stuff, or even links to other folks’ stuff, or whatever the heck else you’re thinking.
Abyss2Hope presents: The Sixth Carnival Against Sexual Violence
The 2006 Black Weblog Awards – Winners Announced!
Moziltov to Blac(k)ademic for her much-deserved win in the “Best Topical Blog” category!
Language Log’s Critique Of Leonard Sax’s Why Gender Matters
Excellent series of critiques contrasting the studies Sax cites to support his arguments, to what those studies actually say. 1) David Brooks, Cognitive Neuroscientist. 2) Are Men Emotional Children? 3) Neuroscience In The Service Of Sexual Stereotypes (critique of Louann Brizendine’s book The Female Brain), 4) Of Rats And (Wo)Men, 5) Leonard Sax On Hearing, and 6) More On Rats And Men And Women. (Curtsy: Echidne).
My Amusement Park: British Government Discriminates Against Fat Women Who Need Fertility Treatment
The News Blog: If Bob Herbert Wrote About Whites The Way He Writes About Blacks
Bitch|Lab: The USA Is Not Family-Friendly
Impressive collection of statistics comparing policies in the USA to policies in most of the rest of the world.
Capitalism Bad, Tree Pretty: On Fat Girls, Obesity Studies, and Terrible Reporting
Keithboykin.com: So are you a Black Gay or a Gay Black?
I refuse to participate in your Oppression Olympics. While homophobia and racism are not the same, it is at their intersection where I am forced to live. I am a Black Gay and a Gay Black. The blood of my peoples was shed at both Selma and Stonewall.
Hit and Run: Why Higher-Nicotine Cigarettes May Be Healthier
Big Fat Blog: Diet Industry Attempts To Co-opt Fat Acceptance Language
Ultimately, the goal of fat acceptance can’t be to lose weight. That’s “fat acceptance lite”, which the diet industry would love to push now: a twisted, co-opted version of fat acceptance that still promotes weight loss in the context of “loving one’s body”, even though weight loss tends to be harmful. The truth of the matter is that if you accept yourself, you’ve already won. If you don’t buy in to the diet industry, you’ve already won.
Angry Black Woman: Stop Touching My Hair, White People!
Capitalism Bad, Tree Pretty: New Zealand Judge Goes Easy On Rapist Because “Complainant Was Clearly Flirtatious”
If you’re a feminist, and you want to know which one post to read that’ll make you feel very pissed off – I think this is the one.
Credit Slips: Bankrupcy Judge Keeps Executive Bonuses Secret To Avoid Morale Problem
Bitch|Lab: Comment on the “Porn Does Not Reduce Rape” Thread At “Alas”
It looks innocent, accidental except he does it again and again, and again. All your life you’ve been told it doesn’t mean anything, it was an accident, just let it go, why do you let it bother you?, why don’t you just move away?, while your instincts tell you something entirely different. He did that deliberately. He just copped a feel. That’s not enough, though; he wants to get away with it. Not only that, if you speak up, you’ll look bad. You’re the woman who made a fuss.
Language Log: A Medalist In The Bad Ad Placement Olympics
Lawyers Guns And Money: Sex Discrimination At The Supreme Court
You may be surprised to find out that Thomas has a good record of hiring female clerks. Scalia, on the other hand…
BlackProf.com: On The Recent Study Finding That Kids Learn Best From Same-Sex Teachers
My Amusement Park: Isn’t It Good If Teens Are Avoiding Unsafe Sex In Favor Of Oral Sex?
Plus, it seems that girls are receiving as often as they’re giving, which is certainly an improvement over years past.
Faux Real: On Watching “Paris Is Burning” In Indiana
New To The Blogroll: C.N.Le
Well-written and -researched blog by a sociology professor, mostly focusing on race and class issues.
Chatham House: Iran, Its Neighbours, And The Regional Crises (.pdf file)
I know that linking to a fifty page report by a British think tank may seem like a bit much, but it’s actually very interesting material, and reads quite well. This is, as the title says, a background report on Iran and Iran’s place in the region and in the Iraq war. Maybe there won’t be anything new there for foreign policy wonks, but for me it was enlightening. Read this and despair at what a lousy job American news organizations (and blogs) are doing at providing a background understanding. Curtsy: The Washington Note.
Blackfolks: Photographs of Some African Women
One or two of these photos may not be “worksafe,” although they’re not at all salacious.
Law and Letters: Male Bloggers In Stiletto Drag
David Lat and Libertarian Man of Mystery do no favors to women (and especially women bloggers) when they pose as women or caricature “female triviality” to suit their own ends. Even as they continue this “cheeky” style of writing with their genders and identities open, it never fails to be a nudge nudge wink wink at how salacious and saucy writing can be if done in the “female voice.”
BlackFeminism.org: Livish-blogging “Out Of Control: AIDS In Black America
Riba Rambles: Hebrew Hammer 2: The Hebrew Hammer Versus Mel Gibson
Oh, and versus Hitler, too.
White Man Arrested For Stealing Own Car; Cops Sell Car At Auction
Just kidding – of course he wasn’t white. Curtsy: Angry Black Woman .
Electoral Math: Regarding The False Charge That Progressive Blacks Ignore African Issues
Theology & Geometry: Man Puns Save Men From Turning Into Women!
Good post on the emergence of “man” puns: Manbag, Manties, Manwash, and so on.
Campus Progress.org: America’s Next Top Model Is A Union-Busting Show
If you watch this show, maybe you should email the advertisers expressing your dismay.
Roger L. Simon: Homophobia At The National Review? What a shock!
Positive Liberty: Weird Optical Trick For Nearsighted People
If you make a tiny, tiny hole to look through, things through the hole are suddenly in focus. I tried this and it works for me, and I have no idea why.
Pharyngula: Gorgeous, psychedelic photo of a cephalopod
Cocktail Party Physics: Upcoming Book Announcement – Physics of the Buffyverse
Curtsy: Pharyngula.
The Economist’s View: No, Worker Insecurity Is Not A Myth
Brad Delong: Overview Of The Internet Debate Over The Causes Of Increasing Income Inequality
I think I agree with this comment from Graydon:
The kicker is what kinds of corporate organization are permitted, not tax policy. The relentless push for de-regulation and for restructuring law related to markets has converted a machine intended to secure the general prosperity into a machine to concentrate wealth. (This started around 1970, with the creation of the formal obligation for a corporation to maximize monetary returns to the exclusion of all other considerations.)
Organizational patterns and structures matter. Tax policy is not even vaguely important compared to, frex, what banks are allowed to do, and that is often both governmental and policy set by non-legislative means.
Lawyers Guns and Money: My Sock Puppet Says I’m Witty, Brilliant and Handsome
Recently fired New Republic writer Lee Siegel’s self-love via sock-puppet is, frankly, spectacular.
The Countess: The Stupidity Awards and The Bulwar-Lytton Awards
God, I love the Bulwar-Lytton Awards.
Best. Headline. Ever.: “ICE arrests 15 aliens in Roswell working for U.S. military contractor”
Via Riba and Daran.
[Crossposted at Creative Destruction, a.k.a. yet to be decided. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]
Pingback: The Angry Black Woman
This is just a post to test the hyperlink formatting plug-in I just installed. What this plug-in does is, when people post long URLs into comments, it makes them appear in a shortened fashion, so that long URLs don’t mess up the layout.
If you’re interested in the details, check out: http://www.coffee2code.com/archives/2004/07/08/plugin-auto-hyperlink-urls/
Yay! It works! :D
Well, I guess I’ll keep using this post to test plug-ins… this comment is to test Ajax Comments.
Edited to add: Hey, that looked pretty neat!
If you make a tiny, tiny hole to look through, things through the hole are suddenly in focus. I tried this and it works for me, and I have no idea why.
Ha! I’ve known this since I first needed glasses and so I thought all myopic folk knew this. Also, the more near-sighted you are, the tinier the hole needs to be for things to be in focus. That should give you a hint as to why this works.
I wrote a post entitled The Truth About Black People and Interracial Dating for anyone that is interested.
Go visit The Truth About Black People and Interracial Dating
Jake and Amp: Jeez, you guys are just rubbing it in about how nearsighted I am. It took me many tries to get a hole small enough that I could see even a tiny improvement, and then it was such a tiny hole that I could barely see anything.
The “tiny hole” thing is a miracle of optics called the aperture effect. Small apertures have large depth of field. Pinhole cameras (with the theoretical minimum aperture) have essentially infinite depth of field.
Just fyi ;)
When you focus a lens on a given object, it’s in the field of focus. Objects at a different distance from the lens than that object are going to be out of focus; they are out of the field. The less out of focus they are, the greater the “depth of field”. You can increase the depth of field by shrinking the aperture you gather light through.
This is what an “f-stop” comes from. You take the focal length of the lens (the distance from the lens at which parallel light rays entering into it focus at) and divide it by the diameter of the part of the lens you are running light through. So, if a 6 inch wide lens focuses light rays entering into it at a point 30 inches away from the lens (measured from the center of the lens), it’s an f/5 lens. If the point was 12 inches away, it would be an f/2 lens. This effect can also be obtained by putting an iris in front of the lens. If you take that 6-inch f/6 lens (that focuses light 36 inches away) and put an iris in front of it so that only the central 1-inch of the lens has light hitting it, you’ve made it into a f/36 lens, and the resultant image shows a lot more of the objects in it in focus than the image formed without the 1-inch restriction on the lens.
If you are into telescopes, then it’s the diameter of the primary lens or mirror divided by the focal length.
Of course, what you trade off for this is the amount of light that you get though. If you use a higher f-stop, you need to have more light or else the image will be too dim. In photography, you can overcome this by using either a faster film (with larger grain size, which loses some detail in the image), or you can use a longer exposure time (which is fine as long as you have the time and the object isn’t moving).
At this point, you can see that a pinhole aperature would give an infinite depth of field (the ratio of focal length to aperature diameter is infinite) and everything in the image is in focus. In fact, you may not even need a lens in that aperature. But, you need one hell of a lot of light or a very long exposure time to make it work.
BTW, even if you do have a lot of light, very fast lenses have other problems; they are very curved and are thus hard to make accurately, and you get something called “chromatic abberation”. Consider that a convex lens can be simulated by putting two prisms together base to base (one triangle on top of another, with the bottom one upside down). The light entering into these will be split into it’s component colors. If you now curve the surfaces to make a convex lens, you will still get an image, but the edges of the image will have some colored fringes to them. If the lens is slow (f-stop above, say f/6 or f/8), then the effect is minimized, as the prisms are thin and the effect is lessened. But if the lens if fast (f/6 or below), then the prisms are fat and spread the colors out more quickly. This caused problems for the earliest telescope makers; they would look at images and see lots of color fringes. They solved this by making the focal lengths of the lenses they used very long (10 or 20 or 40 feet, sometimes greater), and thus had very high f numbers. The largest refracting telescope (with a 40-inch across lens in Yerkes Observatory near Chicago) ever made has a focal length over 60 feet, IIRC. This gets unwieldy. The problem is minimized when you use a reflecting telescope, since the light reflects off of it instead of going through it and there are no “prisms” to cause the abberation (there’s still the lenses in the eyepieces, so it doesn’t go away entirely in visual observing).
“abberation” = aberration. Sigh.