Mammatus clouds forming over Squaw Valley ski resort, California, August 2010. Photographed by Matt Saal.

“Tanks, jeeps and other test vehicles litter the desert floor milliseconds before the force of the explosion destroys them. Just below the bottom of the fireball, a crescent-shaped shock wave has bounced off the desert floor and is merging into the expanding nuclear fire.” From the New York Times slideshow, Capturing the Atom Bomb on Film. Image taken from Peter Kuran’s book, How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb.

Related: Exposure and Atomica! 

Dicentra steers us to the musings of Melanie McDonagh and a feminist rationale for fraud, dishonesty and extortion.

It begins thus,

It’s a wise child, they say, that knows its own father.

The subject being pondered is DNA paternity testing and its consequences. Given what follows, you may want to bear that opening sentence in mind.

For the entire course of human history, men have nursed profound, troubling doubts about the fundamental question of whether or not they were fathers to their own children; women, by contrast, usually enjoyed a reasonable level of certainty about the matter. Now, a cotton-wool swab with a bit of saliva, plus a small fee, less than £200, can settle the matter. At a stroke, the one thing that women had going for them has been taken away,

The one thing?

the one respect in which they had the last laugh over their husbands and lovers.

I hadn’t realised parenthood was about having the last laugh. Clearly, I need to brush up on the etiquette of modern mating. But surely paternity tests merely level the playing field in a matter of some gravity? What mama knows (and doesn’t say), papa can now find out. In terms of paternity, is that really such a crushing injustice?

DNA tests are an anti-feminist appliance of science, a change in the balance of power between the sexes that we’ve hardly come to terms with. And that holds true even though many women have the economic potential to provide for their children themselves… In making paternity conditional on a test rather than the say-so of the mother, it has removed from women a powerful instrument of choice.

Choice that may include deception and extortion.

Uncertainty allows mothers to select for their children the father who would be best for them.

Suckering former lovers? Not a problem. Mama wants a selection box. Depriving a child and its actual father of a chance to know each other is also apparently fine. Because uncertainty allows it. Feminism, so conceived, seems to entail the right to a little moral sleight of hand. But hey, choice!

The old situation, in which women presented men with a child, and the man either did the decent thing and offered support, or made a run for it, allowed women a certain leeway… Paternity was ambiguous and it was effectively up to the mother to name her child’s father, or not… Many men have, of course, ended up raising children who were not genetically their own, but really, does it matter?

Answers on a postcard please.

For newcomers, some short films from the archives.

Temptation. Small children, marshmallows and delayed gratification.

Misremembered. Just whose memory is it?

Tempted by Sunlight. Two words. Goth Cruise.

500 Flavours of Soda. Carbonated pleasures.

The Whale That Exploded. It can happen, people.

Photograph of Jesus. Strange goings-on at the Hulton Photo Archive.

And by all means mosey through the greatest hits.

This, since you ask, is crystallised soy sauce, magnified 16 times. Imaged by Yanping Wang. One of these.

Jumping spiders photographed by Tomatito Rodriguez.

 
Euophrys frontalis (male). 

Most of her face was gone. There was just this gaping hole where her eyes and nose and most of her mouth had been. I thought she was dead. I just figured this was going to be another homicide scene. Then I saw her fingers start to move – ever so slightly. And it looked like she was trying to breathe through the wound in her face.

The story of Chrissy Steltz, whose face is held on by magnets. Via Metafilter.

Some rather fetching spiders photographed by Thomas Shahan.

Above: The anterior median eyes of an adult female Paraphidippus aurantius, seen here enjoying lunch.

The Tungurahua volcano, Ecuador, January 11, 2010. Photographed by Cecilia Puebla.

Marcus Winters on teachers’ unions versus educational standards. 

The premise underlying the policies favoured by the teachers’ unions, which govern so much of the relationship between public schools and teachers, is that all teachers are uniformly effective. Once we can objectively distinguish between effective and ineffective teachers, the system of uncritically granted tenure, a single salary schedule based on experience and credentials, and school placements based on seniority become untenable. The unions don’t want information about their members’ effectiveness to be available, let alone put to practical use.

TM Lutas on scientific scandals past and present.

So without any conspiracy we seem to be betting trillions on science that does not adequately coordinate to prevent control data from entering real data sets, has practices in the discipline that are inadequate to guard against undue weight, and is taking large chunks of its data from weather stations whose error bars far exceed the global warming signal we’re all supposed to be worried about. At this point a finding of “no conspiracy” would not reassure me. It should not reassure us at all.

Simon Scowl on James Cameron and his Avatar.

James “King of the World” Cameron is lecturing you about your unearned sense of entitlement. Isn’t that cute? […] Why is it okay for James Cameron to devote whole rooms full of energy-sucking computers – and the Red Bull-sucking nerds in front of them – to creating photorealistic cat people, but I get a lecture when I leave my cell phone charger plugged in? […] It’s not enough to be rich and famous if you’re not somehow “relevant.” Whether it’s Prince Charles or Al Gore or Leonardo DiCaprio or any of these other guys, they all have the same message: “Hey, I deserve to live like this. Now shut up and shiver in the dark, you peasants.”

Feel free to share your own items of interest.