Big Man Japan. // Space Hoppers in Venice. // You Are Listening to Los Angeles. // Time lapse antennas. // Cassini meets Saturn. // Esoteric sausage. // Know your spiders. // Cells. // Water. // The world of pizza boxes. // Marmite products rated. Marmite cashews? Why was I not told? // Bridges seen from Google Earth. // Little street dramas. // Dogbrella. // 1920s Egypt, in colour. (h/t, Coudal) // National Public Radio, for people who are “more educated, fair and balanced than conservatives.” // All the cool kids will want one of these. // Big caves in Vietnam. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus) // Bill Bailey’s rather nifty guide to the orchestra.

John Rosenberg wonders whether female students really need “stereotype inoculation.”

New research summarised in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Online, People Learn Best from Virtual ‘Helpers’ That Resemble Them,” argues that women and minorities prefer instructors of their own race and gender even if those instructors are not real people but artificial, computer-generated “‘helpers’ or virtual agents that pop up on a screen and guide people through a program.” Most people might think it odd that one of the clearest effects of our mania for “diversity” is that people are increasingly race- and gender-conscious and thus estranged from people who don’t look like themselves, but it’s not odd at all. It’s entirely predictable.

As I noted here, there are some who seem to believe that the way to get past small differences in physiology is to continually fixate on small differences in physiology.

Speaking of which, John Leo spies a willingness to cater to other, less highbrow educational needs.

A course on sex taught by psychology Professor John Michael Bailey recently featured a naked woman being worked on by a man wielding a sex toy… The 600-student course, which for some reason is one of the largest at Northwestern, features all kinds of sexual expression and guests that include swingers and convicted sex offenders. The optional, after-class sex-toy demonstration, Bailey said, “helps us understand sexual diversity” – possibly the first time a state-of-the-art vibrator demonstration was stuffed in under the campus diversity umbrella.

Tom Paine quotes Oscar Wilde on socialism and selfishness.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live; it is asking others to live as one wishes them to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type… It is grossly selfish to require of one’s neighbour that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions.

Which reminded me of this from the Devil’s Kitchen: 

A racist is a stupid, ignorant bigot but at least he cannot, and will not, try to force me to believe what he believes and force me to pay for the implementations of his beliefs. Socialists do. So, socialism is worse than racism.

Update:

James Panero on the wrong kind of transgressive art.

For the administrators and students at Pratt, the problem isn’t political art itself, says DeQuattro, but the nature of his politics, which are conservative.

Update 2:

Russell Nieli on Jonathan Haidt and academic fiefdom.

We are a tribal moral community… We have sacred values other than truth; we have taboos that constrain our thinking; we have almost no moral/political diversity; and we have created a hostile climate for graduate students who don’t share those sacred values. 

Feel free to add your own.

200,000 creatures caught on automated cameras. (h/t, MeFi) // Octopus and hatchlings. // PewPewPewPewPew! // Opera house of note. // How to make a laser from a gin and tonic. // At last, the Battleship drinking game. // Kinetic sculptures by Anne Lilly. // Monster prominence, February 24 2011. // Bus passes of Milwaukee, 1930-1979. (h/t, Coudal) // Shanghai. // “This is not Sweden… This is our area.” And some French multiculturalism. // On “outgroups” and “ingroups.” (h/t, Franklin) // In three dee. // Nyiragongo Crater. (h/t, prm) //  Farmyard indecency. (h/t, Julia) // Which came first? // Infuse whole fruit with delicious gas.

Behold the Urban Downhill Mountain Bike Race in Valparaiso, Chile. It gets a little hairy.

Portraits made of screws. 

For newcomers, three more items from the archives.

I’m Other, Subsidise Me.

Omar Kholeif is professionally ethnic and terribly oppressed. Though by what he doesn’t say.

Mr Kholeif doesn’t mention any first-hand experience of vocational or artistic exclusion based on ethnicity, or any similar experience had by anyone known to him, which seems an odd omission as it might have made his argument a little more convincing. In fact, the only discernible obstacles he mentions are the limited market value of his chosen skills and the preferences of his own parents.

It Pays To Be Unobvious.

When clarity is “conservative” and evidence is unhip.

Occasionally, Judith Butler’s politics are aired relatively free of question-begging jargon, thus revealing her radicalism to the lower, uninitiated castes. As, for instance, at a 2006 UC Berkeley “Teach-In Against America’s Wars,” during which the professor claimed that it’s “extremely important” to “understand” Hamas and Hizballah as “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left” and so, by implication, deserving of support. Readers may find it odd that students are being encouraged to express solidarity with totalitarian terrorist movements that set booby traps in schools and boast of using children as human shields, and whose stated goals include the Islamic “conquest” of the free world, the “obliteration” of Israel and the annihilation of the Jewish people. However, such statements achieve a facsimile of sense if one understands that the object is to be both politically radical and morally unobvious.

At Last, Socialist Football.

Some kids play better than others. This simply will not do.

Note that “an opportunity to play” doesn’t seem to entail playing as well as you can. And I’m not quite clear how penalising competence squares with the professed ideals of sportsmanship. However, there is some encouraging news. The handbook helpfully urges talented teams to avoid the risk of forfeiture by “reducing the number of players on the field” and “kicking with the weaker foot.”

Take a big stick to the greatest hits.

Human towers teeter, Tarragona, Spain. // Coyote Falls. // DARPA’s robot hummingbird spies on ne’er-do-wells. // The relative sizes of moons, planets and stars. // Space suit of the week. // “Nobody wins a nuclear war.” But “success” is possible. // The 100 best British films? // Urban photography. // A not-so-brief history of house music. (h/t, MeFi) // Ode to the Eighties. // Onion ring mints. (h/t, Chastity Darling) // Bacon toothpaste. // Imposing bunkers of WWII. // Macro kingdom. // Dismal gigs. // Victimhood has advantages. // It’s a money clip, it’s a knife. // And via Peter Risdon: Muammar al-Gaddafi, man of fashion.

Jonathan Tobin on Wisconsin, double standards and the New York Times.

The portrayal of the unions and their Democratic Party allies, who have attempted not so much to defeat the Republican program but to prevent the legislature from even meeting to vote, as the progressive movement that represents the will of the people is absurd. […] Contrary to the Times, the governor of Wisconsin and the Republicans in the legislature there are not the moral equivalent of Tunisian or Egyptian autocrats. They were voted into office by the people and what they are doing is exactly what they promised the electorate they would do once they gained office. It is the unions and the Democrats who are the reactionary defenders of an untenable and frankly undemocratic status quo, not the Republicans who advocate change.

Heresy Corner on the statist ‘radicalism’ of UK Uncut.

In many English villages there was a tradition known as “rough music.” If a resident had offended against the suffocating norms of rural life – typically a local woman who had begun an irregular sexual liaison – the neighbours would gather night after night under her window banging pots and pans. People would blow horns and shout insults. Effigies of the guilty parties would be paraded through the streets and then burnt. Eventually they would be forced to leave. Rough music was anarchic, democratic (or at least demotic), legally dubious and, at least in appearance, had the spontaneity and anti-authoritarianism of a popular revolt. But the message was resolutely reactionary and conformist.

UK Uncut’s demonstrators share rough music’s self-righteousness and have equally “conservative” aims – shoring up a threatened social model based on high state spending in which the highest expression of morality consists in handing over your money to the government… By choosing tax-avoidance as its Big Issue, the group expresses an abiding and paradoxical attachment to the conventional political institutions, a belief that if the state is no longer central then at least it should be, that its irrelevance is something to be regretted, because the best way to restore balance to politics and to society is to make sure that politicians get More Of Our Money.

And Guido Fawkes has a question for Alan Rusbridger.

What Guido and many confused Guardian readers would like to know is how the use of these opaque investment vehicles is compatible with the public positions taken by the [Guardian Media Group] newspapers and even members of the board. Will Hutton for example is a former editor of the Observer who sits alongside Alan Rusbridger on the board of the Scott Trust Foundation. Is Hutton, a noted campaigner against hedge funds, comfortable with GMG having hundreds of millions in assets both offshore and invested in hedge funds? Are the perennially loss making Guardian newspaper’s columnists like Polly Toynbee happy to have their six-figure salaries paid out of the profits of hedge fund raids on the currencies of emerging market countries? Isn’t it about time the Guardian’s senior executives explained openly and honestly to its readers how it really survives despite losing money every year?

As usual, feel free to add your own.

Time for another classic sentence, care of Dea Birkett, who tells us, quite emphatically:

This is cultural apartheid.

And,

In another place, when one section of society was condemned to a different, less attractive, unseen entrance it was called apartheid.

What, you ask, has caused Ms Birkett’s lava stream of umbrage?

We used to be able to enter by the same door as every other visitor. But when work on the Tate’s £215m extension began last year, overnight all the disabled parking bays were removed. Instead, disabled visitors and their families can park at the rear and use the staff entrance.

Ah. A temporary inconvenience due to building work at Tate Modern. Which, I think you’ll agree, is just like the townships of 1970s South Africa. A quick call to the gallery reveals what Ms Birkett takes care not to disclose. On completion of the work, Tate Modern will be able to offer its disabled patrons enhanced parking facilities – double those available prior to building work – and swifter, more convenient access to the galleries. During the upgrade, provision is hardly threadbare. However, as regular readers will know, victimhood is a competitive business in the pages of the Guardian and wild overstatement is an art form in itself.

Update, via the comments:

Readers may wonder whether Ms Birkett is being sincere, albeit delusional, or just indulging in theatre and hoping no-one notices. She has, however, managed to avoid addressing any factual corrections from her readers and has instead turned on them, saying: “As so often is the case, it’s shocking to see such hatred against people with disabilities.” Despite being asked, repeatedly, to point to examples of this alleged “hatred” – none of which I could find – Ms Birkett has chosen not to oblige. Such is her righteousness.

I can’t help thinking the article tells us more about the author than any hardship she experiences while perusing art, let alone “cultural apartheid.” For instance, Ms Birkett tells us, “Building work is not an excuse to remove access – and that is what happened.” But as the gallery points out and as many of her readers have noted, that’s simply not true. Wheelchair access is temporarily less convenient, and when the building work is done it will be much more convenient than it previously has been. Shocking as it may sound, the Tate isn’t trying to discourage or belittle its disabled customers, whose needs are catered to rather admirably.

Casually contradicting herself, Ms Birkett adds, “Access isn’t only about getting in a building, it’s about feeling welcome. If you’re sent to the back door, you don’t feel welcome.”

Yes, it’s Bethlehem all over again.

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