Friday Ephemera

The Suits of James Bond

“Don’t push the button.”
As an educational endeavor for auslander types wandering my lab, we rigged up a button equipped with variable illuminated labels (what one would call, this century, a “soft button”.)
At rest, the button (an attractive pale blue thing) glowed benignly with “Press to Reset”. An amazing percentage of lab invaders pressed it, without asking first “reset what?”.
When pressed, the illuminated label changed to a scarlet red, “Release to Detonate”.
(I suppose it’s relevant to the story that we built microcomputers for weapons systems.)
Voila: another trapped HR person. Too bad there was no ear-bonus for them.

I have gone swimming with Sea Monkeys in the wild. The Great Salt Lake is lousy with them: thicker than gnats in the summer air.
They’ve a lovely, rhythmic motion to their multi-leg swim and their tiny-dot black eyes stand out against their nearly transparent bodies. (The only videos I could find are shown all sped-up, for no earthy reason [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYE4Y6p-Lf4%5D.)
Brine shrimp feed on brine algae, which is also consumed by brine flies. Hundreds of Northern Shovelers spend the winter on the GSL, fattening up on the shrimp.
All of Utah is home to a whole slew of critters that survive cycles of desiccation and hydration. They live in “vernal potholes,” which the wind scoured out of the sandstone.

I so want this to be real.

How did they not know?
It’s a bafflingly catastrophic oversight. Still, it’s good to know that you can enjoy spunk at the gym.

WHERE ARE ALL THE ANIMALS?!
You will, occasionally, see things like this. Oh, and bears.

I can see deer in my own back garden, thank you. I’ll grant you that I’m unlikely to see a raccoon. Maybe the Fen Tiger though.

I thought cats were hedonistic?
Cats like to be cozy. All curled up in a neat little ball is some cats’ definition of cozy. Like Asperger’s kids, they like being physically hemmed in a bit because it feels safe.
Also, All Cats Have Asperger Syndrome.

Maru…
Perfectly teed up.
I think I might take up golf.

And finally, their first mistake was marketing the drink as “bottled spunk.” Then things went downhill.
Fly-tipping Christmas crackdown by councils
. . . ‘k so I’ve read references to tipping cows, where I rather expect one does need some certain finesse when it comes to tipping flys . . .

Also, via Mark Steyn: Is your hair a Nazi?

Nikw211, I think conservatives and such need to seize this opportunity to highlight Fake Education. We definitely need to stop supporting it with our tax dollars and “loan” guarantees.

@WTP
I don’t think this is just an issue for the politically conservative. My issue is not so much that Perez Stable Cox expressed an opinion – bizarre in its extremity and paranoid as it is – but two things:

First, that the kind of person who expresses that kind of polemic with that kind of zeal is one who gives every indication that they would very likely be fiercely intolerant of students expressing any opinions alternative to hers (let alone ones that were directly contrary) – when she has authority over those students and has the ability to pass or fail them that kind of intolerance is slightly worrying;
Second, that the kind of bizarre and paranoid statement that she made is not only not far from being all that unusual in some quarters, but is actually a fairly orthodox expression of theories of society widely held across social science departments all over the West.

As it’s been said here before, sociology has an average ratio of 44 Democrat voting lecturers to every one Republican. That cannot be healthy for students, for staff, or for the discipline, surely? (Perez Stable Cox is, almost inevitably, a sociology major, now teaching the psychology of human sexuality – the content of which I think I can hazard a reasonable guess at.)
And while their voting intentions may lean Democrat at the ballot box, I think their actual politics quite likely lean much, much farther over to the Left. So much so that they seem to have dropped off the regular political scale altogether. This is not so much the political horseshoe as the existence of a political parallel universe along the lines of Bizarro World from the Superman comics.
This is a parallel universe in which ‘democracy’ is not only undemocratic, but actually a machine designed by rich, long-dead white male slave owners to perpetually manufacture privilege and oppression; one where prisons are the new slave plantations and where leafy suburban college campuses are nothing short of a Joy Division-like barracks for the pleasure of aggressive and entitled males to prey on young women; one where the US Electoral College system has produced “an act of terrorism” – rather than actually functioning in the way it was designed to do – to favour the candidate with marginal victories across many different states rather than a huge wins concentrated in just a handful.
Ironically, given the political tenor of the average sociology department, it’s apparently also a universe in which even Sociology departments themselves are riddled with racist discrimination, such as sociologist Dr Kehinde Andrews notes here :

“Outside of [Birmingham City University] you’re very unlikely to see a black sociologist anywhere in the UK and that must be caused by institutional racism: I don’t have any other explanation,”

And where Dr Henry Parada of Ryerson University’s School of Social Work has had to resign as director there for what has been described here as:

“a violent act of anti-Blackness, misogyny and misogynoir (a newish term for misogyny directed at black women)” [in which] [a]ccording to the Black Liberation Collective Ryerson branch, Parada walked out of the meeting “at a time when Black folks were giving praise to a young Black woman professor at a critical and vulnerable time …”

And this in spite of his being an editor of, amongst other things, Reimagining anti-oppression social work: Reflecting on Research.
Really, at some point, something is absolutely going to have to give – before the whole thing snaps from the strain.

Much of my reading of this has been to simply skim headlines, where an early prediction of mine was that the origin of the fire itself was A) someone tossing a cigarette into plywood, B) a short circuit in apparently a cobbled together collection of extension cords—especially with an apparently electronics heavy concert taking place in the middle of that electrical system, C) both.
Currently, how things got that way is getting rather thoroughly combed over . . . .

dicentra,
I took the plunge. After exploring a dozen entries or so, I’d say it’s real. Or at least as real as such a thing is capable of being.

Christmas is approaching, and assorted occurrences, everyone sing along . . . !