Colosseum made of illuminated ice at the International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival, Harbin, northeastern China, January 3.

A chessboxing pictorial. Above: Andy “The Rock” Costello v Gianluca “Il Dottore” Sirci, October 2009. More chessboxing. Via.

Here’s an archive of classic films by the late Harold “Doc” Edgerton, the pioneer of stroboscopic high-speed photography. The collection includes early experiments featuring hummingbirds, fan blades and falling cats. Though Edgerton’s most ambitious work was done for the Atomic Energy Commission, for which he filmed and photographed early nuclear tests using his own Rapatronic camera system. With exposure times measured in nanoseconds, the results were often eerie and surreal, as when capturing the first milliseconds of atomic fireballs in Nevada.

Also archived, Edgerton’s photographs and notebooks. Via MetaFilter. 

Stuart Taylor takes another look at Duke University, where its infamous far left faculty has dug in even deeper.

Duke’s rules define sexual misconduct so broadly and vaguely as to include any sexual activity without explicit “verbal or nonverbal” consent, which must be so “clear” as to dispel “real or perceived power differentials between individuals [that] may create an unintentional atmosphere of coercion.” The disciplinary rules deny the accused any right to have an attorney at the hearing panel or to confront his accuser. The rules also give her – but not him – the right to be treated with “sensitivity”; to make opening and closing statements; and to receive copies of investigative documents.

Jeff Goldstein notes why Duke’s infestation will persist. 

The fact is, the people who make up these activist identity groups need their “isms.” And because fighting a particular “ism” is what gives them their identity to begin with, they cannot allow the “ism” ever to be stamped out without, in effect, obviating their own identities.

As Jeff, myself and others have pointed out, the relevance and power of identity politics advocates requires a cultivation of grievance among those ostensibly being championed. The grievance narrative must never be allowed to go away, whatever the actual situation, since grievance (or professed grievance) is the principal source of leverage, influence and funding. Even if this entails exaggerating minor slights or distorting statistics, or framing the issue so tendentiously that almost any kind of dissent can be deemed oppressive and malign. See, for instance, the ludicrous campus rape claims of Barbara Barnett, formerly of Duke, or the reactions of many feminists to factual correction by Christina Hoff Sommers, or the outrageous treatment of Keith John Sampson and Thomas Thibeault.

And Ophelia Benson notes some routine moral flummery at the BBC.

It had to report on this al-Shabab guy trying to kill Kurt Westergaard so therefore it had to make sure you didn’t get the wrong idea and think it, the BBC, didn’t think Kurt Westergaard deserved it, at least a little bit.

Indeed. Yesterday morning, the BBC’s Today programme performed much the same manoeuvre, suggesting the attempt to murder the 75-year-old cartoonist with an axe showed the strength of “feeling” on the issue and the “anger that still exists over what he did.” A more realistic response might stress instead a psychotic sense of vanity and barbarous presumption – one that validates the point of Westergaard’s cartoon.

Feel free to share your own items of interest.

Spork. (nsfw) // Asteroids and diplomacy. // Dolphin boats. // A breakthrough in gingerbread. // Fly pepper. // What gulls will eat. // Grow mushrooms at home. // Dental tattoos. // Space as seen on television. // Planets forming in the Orion Nebula. // The Known Universe. // Kraftwerk live in Buenos Aires, 1998. // DJ desks. // A fondness for drum machines. // Nuclear reactor wall charts. // Original Alien script, formerly titled Starbeast. // Last suppers. // Toys of extinct animals. // The art of green screen. // To be or not to be. (h/t, Anna)

Two galleries of snakes photographed by Guido Mocafico. Click to embiggen.

Mocafico’s book, Serpens, is available here and here.

Bearing in mind the recent seasonal gorging, here’s another Classic Sentence from the Guardian. This time courtesy of Neel Mukherjee and his deep ruminations on vegetarianism.

It slowly dawned on me that there were no rational, intellectual or moral arguments to be made for carnivorousness.

Heavens, he’s bold. There simply isn’t a good reason to partake of the flesh. None whatsoever. I do hope there’s a devastating argument to support such a claim.

The meat-eaters had always already lost. This is not the place to rehearse all those arguments.

Ah. Not the place. Isn’t it wonderful when arguments can be won entirely in your own head, with none of that messy business with evidence, logic and stuff you hadn’t thought of? Mr Mukherjee does, however, indulge us with one attempt at reasoning:

Far more convincing for me than all kinds of shocking exposés of the meat industry and the way a piece of steak makes it way on to our plates… was the unimpeachable moral argument against speciesism: because we are the most powerful animals in the animal kingdom, because all animals are at our mercy and we can choose to do whatever we want with them, it is our moral duty not to decimate, factory farm and eat them. It is an argument of such majesty and generosity that its force is almost emotional.

Note the invention of an entirely new prejudice for those so inclined to feel guilty about – speciesism. Note too the sly conflation of meat eating with factory farming and decimation. This “unimpeachable moral argument” could of course be expressed a little less tendentiously,

Because we can eat animals it’s our duty not to.

But then – amazingly – it loses much of its persuasive force. To say nothing of its majesty.

Here’s a star made of ice.

To you and yours, a very good one.

A cautionary animation by Rodrigo Blaas. 

Because you will at some point need a briefcase full of sausage. // The Möbius bagel. // The LED menorah. // 10 long tracking shots. // On comic book colouring. // “I’ve successfully privatised world peace.” // Demon lamp. // Local globes. // World toilet info. // At last, a pram with firepower. // Artificial eyes. // Change blindness. // Jellyfish. // Snowflakes. // Alice. // The Uppsala Analogue Synthesizer Orchestra. // A brief history of video games. // The golden age of board games. // A scale model of the solar system. It’s over half a mile wide, so some scrolling is involved.