In the video below, filmed at the University of Cape Town, members of the science faculty meet with student protestors who wish to “decolonise” the university and not pay their bills. During the meeting, one of the staff, one of the “science people,” points out that, contrary to claims being made by a student protestor, witchcraft doesn’t in fact allow Africans to throw lightning at their enemies.

He is promptly scolded for “disrespecting the sacredness of the space,” which is a “progressive space,” and is told either to apologise or leave. Repeated cowed apologies ensue. The offended speaker, the one claiming that Africans can in fact throw lightning at each other – and who disdains “Western knowledge” as “very pathetic” – then uses the apparently scandalous reference to reality as the sole explanation for why she is “not in the science faculty.”

There being no other, perhaps more obvious, reason.

Joy Pullmann on when feminist feelings collide with science: 

Throughout her dissertation, [doctoral candidate, Laura] Parson asserts that women and minorities are uniquely challenged by the idea that science can provide objective information about the natural world. This is an unfair assumption, she says, because the concept of objectivity is too hard for women and minorities to understand. “Notions of absolute truth and a single reality” are “masculine,” she says, referring to poststructuralist feminist theory… Rather than rejecting this insulting view of women and minorities’ intellectual capacities, Parson uses it as a pretext to advocate that science classes abandon the scientific method itself… and all other “male” forms of oppression, such as “weed-out courses, courses that grade on a curve, a competitive environment, reliance on lecture as a teaching method, an individualistic culture, and comprehensive exams.”

Feminism is of course famed for its intellectual rigour. 

And in other, utterly unrelated news: 

Many elite universities relegate Women’s Studies degree programmes to second-class status.

Nick Gillespie interviews Instapundit himself, Professor Glenn Reynolds:  

It’s a small number of companies that really control almost all social media, and they all kind of lean left. Facebook has been accused, and I think credibly, of a lot of political bias, and there are experiments that suggest they could swing an election by manipulating their flow of news and views. At some level, you say that’s just private enterprise and they can do what they want, but at another level, it’s a little more troubling that they are kind of a monopoly and they’re politically in the tank with an administration that is doing them a lot of favours… I’m not so sure we aren’t approaching the point where people might want to think about anti-trust. And I know we’re past the point where, if these were companies that operated with a slant towards Republicans, everyone would be calling for anti-trust regulation right away.

And at Claremont College, your “extremely toxic” masculinity is being discussed:  

Miles Robinson, who attended the event, told the Claremont Independent that among attendees there was “a common consensus that masculinity is harmful both to those who express it and those affected by it.” Robinson added that all of the organisers, as well most of the attendees, are female.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

In her last couple of weeks, when my mother’s mind seemed to be floating off somewhere else most of the time, she would sometimes lift her arms into the air, plucking at invisible objects with her fingers. Once, I captured her hands in mine and asked what she’d been doing. “Putting things away,” she answered, smiling dreamily. 

This half-dreaming, half-waking state is common in dying people. In fact, researchers led by Christopher Kerr at a hospice centre outside Buffalo, New York, conducted a study of dying people’s dreams. Most of the patients interviewed, 88 percent, had at least one dream or vision. And those dreams usually felt different to them from normal dreams. For one thing, the dreams seemed clearer, more real. The “patients’ pre-death dreams were frequently so intense that the dream carried into wakefulness and the dying often experienced them as waking reality,” the researchers write in the Journal of Palliative Medicine. Seventy-two percent of the patients dreamed about reuniting with people who had already died. Fifty-nine percent said they dreamed about getting ready to travel somewhere.

Jennie Dear on what it feels like to die. 

Building a scale model of the planets and their orbits is harder than you’d think. 

Via sH2. 

Because 3D-printing with Easy Cheese isn’t as easy as you might think.