At last, a paper calculator. // Starring the computer. As seen in film and television. // Fun with grammar. // Flexils, like pencils but flexible. // Hippo table of note. // Hamster Mario. // The horsemen of Semonkong. (h/t, Coudal) // On the origins of Dick. // Arthur C Clarke reads extracts from 2001: A Space Odyssey. // Ruben really likes his job. // No, you fool. The other red one. // At last, your very own remote-controlled tugboat. // In 120 years, sprinters have gotten faster. (h/t, Things) // Tall and twisted buildings. // Well, it’s one way to do it, I suppose. // Umwelt. // Visiting cousin. // Shadow sculptures of note. // Sshh. Don’t tell them. (h/t, Ace) // Hornet turban. // Sliding doors of note. // Caterpillar excursion, Perth. // And finally, a near-perfect display of crashing very slowly.

For newcomers, more items from the archives. A ladies-of-the-left edition:

Do Not Date Bedlamites.

Melissa Fabello, managing editor of Everyday Feminism, shares her interracial dating advice with those less enlightened: 

If you’re creasing the sheets with someone and you’re continually fretting about pseudo-sociology and imagined racial power dynamics, and about who’s being “marginalised” by virtue of their melanin levels, and thinking about sex “in relation to social power,” then it doesn’t sound like a relationship so much as an elaborate fetish. Seemingly oblivious, Ms Fabello goes on to stress the wickedness of “racial fetishization” and of “exotifying” sex with “people of colour.” “It’s never appropriate to stereotype people,” says she. And yet her own article is premised on “othering” and “exotifying” people with browner skin than hers. Chiefly by viewing them as eternal victims of some all-pervasive “white supremacy,” which apparently renders them “marginalised” and powerless, and in need of endless, neurotic accommodation by immensely sensitive white people, even in the bedroom. 

The Mouthing of Bollocks. 

“Racial justice educator” Rachel Kuo tells us how to order takeaway in a suitably agonised and intersectional manner: 

For Ms Kuo, neurotic fretting is, and should be, a staple of eating out: “Food can be used as a tool of marginalisation and oppression… It’s critical for us to reflect on how we perceive the cultures that we’re consuming and think about the relationships between food, people, and power.” And yet the family running my local Chinese takeaway actively encourages heathen white folk to sample their wares, regardless of whether those paying customers are intimately familiar with All Of Chinese History. And I very much doubt that they expect their patrons to acquaint themselves with “the complex relationships and power dynamics between Asian countries” and issues of “labour equity and immigration policy” as a precondition of buying hot tossed chicken. No. What they want is custom. Pretentiously agonised pseudo-sensitivity is, alas, not billable.

In case you missed it in the comments yesterday… 

…where it was followed, quite promptly, by this.

Via Tom J and Muldoon. 

Careful, children. It smells like human. // Tweet of note. (h/t, Damian) // Nosulus Rift. // HDR rocket test. // He wants all the oranges. // Puny Godzilla. // Keep very still. Their vision is based on movement. // A Firing Line compilation. // Kings Road punks, 1978. // Kings Road punks and New Romantics, 1981. // Classical mash-up. // At last, a rotating house. // Jihad interrupted. // The effects of Aliens. // Arrival. // His charcoal drawings are better than yours. // Hardcore victimology: “The idea of health is ableist.” (h/t, Julia) // Face for the paranoid. // And finally, uncannily, a stroboscopic picture frame of note.

Heather Mac Donald on race hustlers and riots: 

For the last two years, President Barack Obama has seized every opportunity to advise blacks that they are the victims of a racist criminal justice system. We should not be surprised when that belief, so constantly inflamed, erupts into violence. Even in his remarks at the memorial service for the five murdered Dallas cops, Obama had the gall to trot out his usual racial vendetta against the police, even though he was fully on notice that cops were being killed because of it… Obama’s indictment ignored, as usual, the astronomically higher rates of black crime that fully explain racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Meanwhile, Obama hasn’t uttered a word in condemnation of the lawless behaviour in Milwaukee, two days into the events. […]

And as important as the political stoking of that hatred is the academic race industry that keeps black victimology at a fever pitch. The 2015–2016 school year saw an outbreak of delusional self-pity among black college students across the country. They claimed to be discriminated against by faculty, administrators, fellow students, and academic standards. Never mind that many allegedly disparaged students were attending the colleges in question only because of racial preferences, despite having test scores that would automatically disqualify white or Asian applicants. Never mind that nearly every waking hour of a college administrator is devoted to the cultivation of a separatist racial consciousness among black students and to dreaming up new racial sinecures for faculty and other administrators.

For an example of that victimology, and the behaviour being excused by faculty and staff, see this surreal episode. Note the impunity and inversion of reality. And note the description, by the university’s vice provost for student affairs, of blatant racial thuggery as “a wonderful, beautiful thing.”