Be prepared. (h/t, Damian) || Electrodeposition and other chemical reactions. || That time in 1972 when a quarter of a million hippies attended a festival sited on swamp land, with lots of bad acid, and only six toilets. || Marie Curie and her x-ray vehicles. || Marvel goes Afro-futurist. || Impress your houseguests with a towel elephant. || Why penguins’ feet don’t freeze. || Jordan Peterson on the temptations of activism. || Short trip. || This is one of these. || Drawing logos from memory is harder than you might think. (h/t, Coudal) || Giant robot duel. || This. || Today’s word is socialist. || Today’s other word is woke. || The punchline cometh. || It came out of their toilet. || And finally, via Obnoxio, let’s play a guessing game: Is this the work of toddlers, or college students racking up debt?

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a conservative student at a small, low-key meeting of College Republicans in a space you’ve booked in advance, in the campus library, when suddenly a crowd of indignant leftists force their way in and start shouting and behaving hysterically, and randomly calling you names, and who then blame you for the disruption that they themselves are causing.

Because, and I quote, “Your existence is a disturbance.”  

Heather Mac Donald on “diversity” voodoo’s encroachment on science and technology: 

Columbia’s vice provost for faculty diversity and inclusion regurgitates another classic of diversity boilerplate to justify this enormous waste of funds. “The reality is that you can’t really achieve excellence without diversity. It requires diverse thought to solve complex problems,” says vice provost Dennis Mitchell. Mitchell’s statement is ludicrous on multiple fronts. Aside from the fact that the one thing never sought in the academic diversity hustle is “diverse thought,” do Mitchell and his compatriots in the diversity industry believe that females and underrepresented minorities solve analytical problems differently from males, whites, and Asians? 

Somewhat related, this. It’s remarkable just how readily all of this “diversity” and wokeness boils down to a mental image of a teacher turning to one of his students and saying, “You, the brown boy. What’s the negro perspective on this engineering problem?”

See also this, added via the comments. 

Arthur Sakamoto on what happens when you challenge the racial assumptions entrenched in sociology departments: 

People are afraid to critique this paradigm [of “white privilege” and systemic racism] because it’s so ideologically popular. Privately, some people have told me that [by challenging it,] I’m, quote, “suicidal.” […] I’ll be frank with you — I’ve been submitting to the American Sociological Review on Asian Americans for the past 25 years and apparently there’s no data good enough to convince the reviewers that Asian Americans have reached parity with respect to white people. Every single one gets rejected. What happens is, when the paper doesn’t conform to the conventional wisdom [of “white privilege”], the methodological standards are raised. But if you argue that there is discrimination, then the methodological standards are relaxed. 

This is exactly how I do it. (h/t, Holborn) || A problem you’ll want to have: To span or to stack? (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Universal Paperclips is a game. Think of it as a test of endurance. (Remember this?) || Tiny paper plants. || Peepers. || Plucking. || The baby panda is a creature of great elegance. || Personality test. Use code 92556379. || An interview with Adam Perkins, author of The Welfare Trait. || Camp on water. || Catch. || Abandoned orphanage. || Ambling starfish. (h/t, Matthew) || Fan mail of note. (h/t, Tim) || A little Mercury. || Streets of Amsterdam, circa 1890. || Stampede of tumbleweed. || Danish treetop walk. || Tolstoy’s cooking tips. || He sells Slinkies. || Glass ruler, $30. || The great phone-box graveyard. (h/t, Simen) || And finally, he does this better than you do.

Heather Mac Donald on “diversity” pseudoscience: 

Few academic ideas have been as eagerly absorbed into public discourse in recent years as “implicit bias.” Embraced by a president, a would-be president, and the nation’s top law-enforcement official, the implicit-bias conceit has launched a movement to remove the concept of individual agency from the law and spawned a multi-million-dollar consulting industry. The statistical basis on which it rests is now crumbling, but don’t expect its influence to wane anytime soon… The need to plumb the unconscious to explain ongoing racial gaps arises for one reason: it is taboo in universities and mainstream society to acknowledge inter-group differences in interests, abilities, cultural values, or family structure that might produce socioeconomic disparities.

Needless to say, the Implicit Association Test, while very much in fashion, is wildly inconsistent in its results and utterly fails to predict actual behaviour, the latter a detail belatedly and reluctantly admitted by the originators of the conceit, whose methodology – one might say cheating – is quite laughable.  

If the IAT were valid, a high implicit-bias score would predict discriminatory behaviour, as [test creators Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji] asserted from the start. It turns out, however, that IAT scores have almost no connection to what ludicrously counts as “discriminatory behaviour” in IAT research — trivial nuances of body language during a mock interview in a college psychology laboratory, say, or a hypothetical choice to donate to children in Colombian, rather than South African, slums.

When the peddlers of a test, an alleged curative for unconscious racism, count practically any kind of behaviour, including the random positioning of a chair, as proof of “discrimination” and unjust inclinations, alarm bells should ring, quite loudly. This is the realm of “diversity” Scientology, and the kinds of leverage in play may well attract people whose own motives are not entirely benign.

And then of course there’s this:

Greenwald and his co-authors had counted opposite behaviours as validating the IAT. If test subjects scored high on implicit bias via the IAT but demonstrated better behaviour toward out-group members (such as blacks) than toward in-group members, that was a validation of the IAT on the theory that the subjects were overcompensating for their implicit bias. But studies that found a correlation between a high implicit-bias score and discriminatory behaviour toward out-group members also validated the IAT. In other words: heads, I win; tails, I win.

Do read the whole thing. It’s quite long, but there’s lots to chew on.

Very much related, Jordan Peterson here. From this longer video. 

Via Herb Deutsch.