Hi there. // Nose job. // Places in Norway named after Hell. // Leech swallows worm. // This. // That. // How to send email, 1984. // Maglev spherical tyres. // Very small drawings. // Diving suits and submarines. // Romanian salt mine tourist attraction. // Teeny tiny micro-robots drag big car. // A brief history of rhythm-making machines. // A brief history of synthesized speech. // A brief history of Star Trek prop recycling. // Hard-to-kill plant. // Portuguese spillway. // And a pink one for the lady. // Big hair metal band publicity shots. // “My name’s David Rees and I have an artisanal pencil sharpening business.” (h/t, Coudal) // Potential snag with quantum teleportation. // And finally, what you probably didn’t know about Teflon-coated super-suction aeroplane toilets.

Via Tim Blair, who has an eye for these things, some momentous news from the land down under: 

A Yarra councillor wants to see more ‘green and red lady’ pedestrian signals installed across the inner city to promote gender equality.

Well, obviously. It’s what your taxes are for.

Yarra Council announced yesterday the silhouette of a woman would be installed at a new pedestrian crossing in Richmond. Greens Councillor Misha Coleman said the initiative was a “unique and rare” way to display gender equity and she would like to see Yarra known for its ‘green lady’ signals. “I’m a mother of two young children and we always talk about waiting for the ‘green man’,” Councillor Coleman said. “From when kids are young enough to walk they are given an instruction by a man and it has never occurred to any of us that that is inherently so biased.”

The suitably empowering and bias-free signal can be beheld here. Apparently, it depicts Mary Rogers, the second woman in Australia elected to local government, circa 1920. And clearly it’s a vast improvement over the heinously oppressive stick figure previously in use, and which no doubt crushed the spirits of small girls across Australia and steered them towards lives of grinding gender conformity.

After attending several International Women’s Day functions, Councillor Coleman said women were “blown away” by the ‘green lady’ initiative. “I think the main reason was because ‘why didn’t we think of that before and why have we accepted [that] the man tells us whether to walk or not’,” she said.

Those of you picturing aggrieved feminists expressing their defiance of the luminously oppressive male silhouette by randomly blundering into the road – and into oncoming traffic – are very bad people.

Stephen Beard on women in STEM, absent males and the Great Diversity Hustle: 

Most large organisations — certainly universities — now have Diversity Officers, Diversity Consultants and Women’s Officers. Many of these Officers and Consultants and the like have academic backgrounds in gender or women’s studies… Perhaps this is why diversity bosses have chosen to focus on the four areas in STEM [out of eight] where men still make up the majority, rather than education, where men make up less than 25% of undergraduate and post-graduate students. This is a much more alarming statistic, given that only one-in-four British primary schools have a single male teacher, and there are over a million children in the UK growing up without a father. With the possible detrimental effects of not having positive male role-models, this is a much more pressing issue than the concerns of middle-class academic women seeking special privileges in their career.

The STEM fields in which women outnumber men are, oddly enough, not deemed biased or bothersome. 

Kyle Brooks on competitive outrage on campus: 

The University of Wisconsin-Whitewater has been enmeshed in controversy over the last few weeks in the wake of its chancellor mistaking a photo of two white students donning beauty facial masks as blackface and falsely accusing the students of being “racist.” […] Since the incident – which one student activist labelled “Bloody Sunday” – the campus has hosted diversity forums at which students have accused the campus of being steeped in racism and suggested administrators are not doing enough about it. One Black Student Union member even told peers she missed several days of school because she was too distraught by the blackface picture to attend class.

Related, their failure to know stuff is entirely due to your racism: 

Protesters interrupted the University of Wisconsin system’s Board of Regents meeting for a third time last week, demanding the end of “blatantly oppressive” standardised testing.

You see, the student protestors are ethereal beings of exquisite sensitivity, such that they are emotionally crushed by any hint of mockery – say, when laughed at for gathering in a “healing circle” – and are rendered tearful and distraught by any testing of their abilities. Such as they might be.* 

And Andrew Follett on the “feminist glaciology” hokum recently doing the rounds: 

The University of Oregon historian who wrote a study claiming glaciers are sexist said in an interview on Friday that the general public isn’t educated enough about feminism to understand his research. In the interview, Dr Mark Carey claims that when his studies are “described to non-specialists, the research can be misunderstood and potentially misrepresented.” […] The research was financially supported by taxpayer dollars. The National Science Foundation (NSF) gave Carey a five-year grant to write his “feminist glaciology” paper. He has received a total of $709,125 in grants from the NSF, according to his curriculum vitae. Carey did not address the huge sum of money he received in the interview.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for. [*Added via the comments.] 

New Order’s Blue Monday, performed in an old-school style. // Space race remnants. // Orbits is a game. // For those who had fun with Ultraflow, there’s now Ultraflow 2. But beware the hardcore mode. // A brief history of the umlaut. // Bike bell of note. // These bees make cannabis honey. // It happens, apparently. // Ocus is a puzzle. // It’s scenic, yes, but not everyone’s cup of tea. // A collection of coffee lids. (h/t, Things) // Acrylic and ink. // A series of bad decisions. // Rock salt firearms. // Music made with stones. // An archive of Oz magazine. // It’s a job with a high staff turnover. // “The victim pulled the knife out of his own neck, and stabbed his attacker.” // Thanks, Mythbusters. // It’s Marvel time. // And finally, ambitiously, all this little boy needs is a bit of a morale boost.

Further to yesterday’s post (and any number of others), Arthur C Brooks on the consequences of competitive victimhood: 

Victimhood culture makes for worse citizens — people who are less helpful, more entitled, and more selfish. In 2010, four social psychologists from Stanford University published an article titled “Victim Entitlement to Behave Selfishly” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The researchers randomly assigned 104 human subjects to two groups. Members of one group were prompted to write a short essay about a time when they felt bored; the other to write about “a time when your life seemed unfair. Perhaps you felt wronged or slighted by someone.” After writing the essay, the participants were interviewed and asked if they wanted to help the scholars in a simple, easy task.

The results were stark. Those who wrote the essays about being wronged were 26 percent less likely to help the researchers, and were rated by the researchers as feeling 13 percent more entitled. In a separate experiment, the researchers found that members of the unfairness group were 11 percent more likely to express selfish attitudes. In a comical and telling aside, the researchers noted that the [self-defined] victims were more likely than the non-victims to leave trash behind on the desks and to steal the experimenters’ pens.

Imagine my surprise. Via Ace. 

I was excommunicated… from a religion that I didn’t know existed. 

Gad Saad chats with Christina Hoff Sommers. 

Victor Davis Hanson on the vulgarity, hypocrisy – and appeal – of Donald Trump: 

The children of Republican elites do not sit in classes where a quarter of the students do not speak English… Their children are not on buses where an altercation between squabbling eight-year-olds leads to a tattooed parent arriving at your home to challenge you to a fight over “disrespecting” his family name. The establishment Republicans… are rarely stopped in a Walmart parking lot by a gang-banger in the next parking stall who out of the blue says, “Hey essay, what the fuck are you looking at me for already? And what are you going to do about it, punk?” 

Much like our own Guardianistas, gripped as they are by the Simon Schama Tendency. 

John Daniel Davidson on mass immigration and cultural decline: 

In the long term, Europe can either prefer its own civilisation and culture, and defend it, or capitulate to another. But it cannot absorb masses of unassimilated members of another culture and expect to survive. It will be changed forever, and the change will be in the direction of the immigrants’ way of life, and away from that of the native-born. This is a difficult truth to accept in our egalitarian age.

And Mary Grabar on Melissa Click and her equally arrogant faculty supporters: 

When news of her firing came, supporters doubled down: at the faculty council meeting, no one supported her firing. In fact, faculty expressed concern about how the decision would impact “the ability of academics to participate in activism.” […] What we have is a group of employees assuming the right to use company time in any way they want. Their outrage at outside scrutiny shows a level of privilege that no other profession enjoys. Attorneys, doctors, engineers, or manufacturers, all can be sued, but a professor who cheats students preparing for communications careers by teaching Lady Gaga cannot.

As Grabar notes, many of Click’s supporters, chiefly from the worlds of sociology and gender studies, were featured in David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin’s 2009 book One-Party Classroom, an eye-widening catalogue of absurdly dogmatic and politicised courses often taught by educators of questionable competence.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

In which the students of Ms Sandrine Schaefer, a winner of the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art’s Foster Prize, stagger beneath the knee-buckling weight of their own immense talents. From Ms Phoebe Warner, an aspiring educator of children, and her exercise in gratuitous, somewhat masochistic thigh abuse, to the cryptically-named Fatty Spice, a Twitter poet and graduate of the Montserrat College of Art, who “makes shrines to her failed relationships” and dazzles us today with a pink ensemble and a gripping exercise in drooling, doomed horticulture and radical fatness. All captured for posterity at the Zeitgeist Gallery and Studios, Beverly, Massachusetts, May 2014: 

Readers will of course recall Ms Schaefer’s own, even more staggering contributions to the culture. A body of work perhaps best summarised by this video of the artist gnawing at a lettuce while slouching in her underpants. 

How cats and dogs differ. // 2,000 ball bearings and one of these. // An en caul birth. // When patience is tested on British roads. // “The laws would allow people to ‘bequeath’ their dead bodies for necrophilic intercourse.” // Pilea involucrata.// Pictures posted on social media accounts cause cancer in children, says Islamic cleric. // It’s not paint thinner, it’s moonshine. // Issues of If magazine, 1952-1974. // First world problem. // Janice Fiamengo on so-called “structural violence.” // Trek enthusiasts convene, 1976. // Gershwin plays Gershwin, 1924. // A guide to British industrial history. // I question the geography. // What happens to marshmallows in a vacuum? // Vienna. // I’m pretty sure a thing like that shouldn’t be in there. // And great scenery + toilet = good times.

Janice Fiamengo on complaints of “microaggression” and other recreational outrage:

Previously. And before that.