Uniqlo Grid. Play on the grid. Go quietly insane. (h/t, Coudal.) // The worst fight scene in film history. // Originals versus remakes. Spartans, spooks, body snatchers. // Airplane prangs. // Cowscapes. (h/t, 1+1=3) // Supervillains of the Old West. // Jack Kirby on gods and monsters. // Could Thor kick Superman’s ass? Kryptonian do-gooder versus bombastic Viking with magic hammer. // Chris O’Shea’s X-ray torch. Video. // Via Norm, the hidden genitals of the NHS. // The 1907 Breguet-Richet gyroplane. (h/t, Things.) // Project Echo. // Apollo 17 panorama. (1972) // Biodegradable cutlery. Made from potatoes. // Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens. // Michael Weiss on Ibn Warraq. // Norman Geras on John Pilger. // Julie Burchill on Tesco. // Aaiii!! It’s the Zionist earthquake machine. According to Hamas. // A map of this week’s earthquakes. Most not caused by Jews. // A map of the Lost island. // Virtual Lego. // Modelling the brain may take some time. // Arthur Benjamin and his feats of mental calculation. // Scared of Santa. He knows if you’ve been naughty. // A festive ensemble. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Big Joe Turner.

Incidentally, TypePad now has a new, and more zealous, spam filter. If anyone has problems posting comments let me know by email. I may have to train the software not to bite everything that approaches. Bad dog.

A few weeks ago, I wrote,

The “dialogue” [Tariq] Ramadan forever alludes to, somewhat vaguely, is by implication a dialogue on strictly Islamic terms – which is to say, on terms that are censorious, often circular and profoundly unrealistic. In this, Ramadan is far from alone. I’ve lost count of how many people seem to imagine that it’s somehow possible to challenge jihadist ideology and related horrors without mentioning Muhammad’s rather central role in the origination, sanctioning and perpetuation of those horrors, and without offending an apparently endless menu of other ‘sensitivities’.

Robert Spencer – he of superhuman patience – also wonders why a debate in good faith is so hard to find.

It remains true that Islamic spokesmen, while denigrating and dismissing my work, have never actually refuted it… And this is a much larger issue than simply who will or will not debate me, because it highlights the fact that peaceful Muslims have never formulated an Islamic response to the jihadists’ claim to represent pure and true Islam – and as long as they do not and apparently cannot do so, the jihadists will continue to hold the intellectual initiative within Islamic communities worldwide. “Moderate” Muslim spokesmen such as those above have not just not answered me; they’ve done nothing to seize that intellectual initiative and blunt the force of jihadist recruitment among Muslims.

But funny, I think.

Men who look like old lesbians.

Among them, Tony Curtis, Roger Ebert, Kyle MacLachlan, Mick Hucknall and, of course, Mark Wallinger.    

It’s beneath me, I know. Yet I cannot look away.

Via. 

Infrared landscapes by Gary Robertshaw.   

More infrared photography by Andy Finney. (h/t, Dark Roasted Blend.) 

Further to recent comments on the curious overlap of ecological hysteria and authoritarian urges, here’s another example. Via Kate, from Local Transport Today:

Transport policy-makers should start preparing now for a dramatic reduction in motorised travel that will be brought about by carbon rationing, one of the country’s leading environmental thinkers told LTT this week. “Just start reading the runes because what’s going to happen is the demand for road, rail and air travel is going to start falling away just as soon as we have rationing,” says Mayer Hillman in an interview with the magazine.

Hillman, senior fellow emeritus at the Policy Studies Institute, says carbon rationing is the only way to ensure that the world avoids the worst effects of climate change. And he says that the problems caused by burning fossil fuels are so serious that governments might have to implement rationing against the will of the people. “When the chips are down I think democracy is a less important goal than is the protection of the planet from the death of life, the end of life on it,” he says. “This has got to be imposed on people whether they like it or not.”

Hillman’s anticipated Tyranny That Cares™ will, reassuringly, also apply to its author, as reported in a glowing Guardian profile from 2002:

He and [wife] Heidi have an old Citroën 16 in which they’ve driven 150 miles so far this year. Yet still he exceeds the carbon ration he expects to be allocated, and says that they ought to consider sharing their family home with others because, despite its solar panels and low heating levels, it now accommodates only the two of them.

According to his own publicity material, Mayer Hillman is a “thorn in the side of the political establishment” and is noted for his willingness to “speak truth to power.” Mr Hillman’s stated areas of expertise include “walking and cycling”.

Related.

The HTV-3X hypersonic Scramjet could travel from New York to Tokyo in two hours. “If it works.”

The world’s fastest jet, the Air Force’s SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, set a speed record of Mach 3.3 in 1990 when it flew from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., in just over an hour. That’s about the limit for jet engines; the fastest fighter planes barely crack Mach 1.6. Scramjets, on the other hand, can theoretically fly as fast as Mach 15 — nearly 10,000 mph.

More. And. Also. Plus.

Behold the oddly resilient Japanese pig toy.

$2.50. More. And. Via.

Evil Dead: the Musical. // Wheelbarrow racing. Wait for the cunning manoeuvre. // Human marvels. Including Stefan Bibrowski and the two-headed boy of Bengal. // Natural phenomena of note. The Catatumbo lightning and the rain of fish. // The big-eared thingamajig. Video. // Photographs of the Iron Curtain. (h/t, Things.) // Fareed Zakaria interviews Ayaan Hirsi Ali. “In Europe, when radical Islamic movements use freedoms to destroy freedom, they seem to get away with it.” (h/t, Cookslaw.) // Efraim Karsh and Rory Miller on Edward Said. “Said’s substitution of politics for scholarship in the name of ‘speaking truth to power’ has spawned scores of students, professors, and journalists who seek to emulate his path to fame.” // Oliver Kamm on Stockhausen. // Deogolwulf on the Feminist Association of Iceland. // Radioactive condoms and beauty cream laced with radium. // Pepsi: Ice Cucumber. The goodness of Pepsi with the taste of cucumber. // “Sometimes a cigar is [not] just a cigar.” (h/t, Maggie’s Farm.) // How to spot a cylon. // Concealed hearing devices of the 19th century. Canes, hair-bands, the acoustic beard. // Aaron Duffy’s film of wool and forbidden love. (h/t, 30gms.) // Chris Cunningham’s video for Aphex Twin’s Monkey Drummer. Looks fun, sounds like a pile of arse. // The design work of Kashiwa Sato. (h/t, Coudal.) // More Japanese vending machines. Beetles, porn, toilet paper. // Shaolin: Temple of Zen. // How to be a ninja. // Superman and Jesus. Together at last. // The good bit of Superman Returns. // Map of space in Star Trek. Some dimensions not shown. // How to explode a star. // Ray guns we have known and loved. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Mr Ray Anthony.

What’s the word for something that’s impressive and disgusting?

Via.

In light of the recent thought policing of students at Delaware University, and similar efforts elsewhere, Robert Maranto’s article on academic monoculture may help explain how such absurdities come about, and persist, apparently unchallenged from within these institutions. 

At many of the colleges I’ve taught at or consulted for, a perusal of the speakers list and the required readings in the campus bookstore convinced me that a student could probably go through four years without ever encountering a right-of-centre view portrayed in a positive light… Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University looked at all the reliable published studies of professors’ political and ideological attachments. They found that conservatives and libertarians are outnumbered by liberals and Marxists by roughly two to one in economics, more than five to one in political science, and by 20 to one or more in anthropology and sociology…

I believe that for the most part the biases conservative academics face are subtle, even unintentional. When making hiring decisions and confronted with several good candidates, we college professors, like anyone else, tend to select people like ourselves. Unfortunately, subtle biases in how conservative students and professors are treated in the classroom and in the job market have very unsubtle effects on the ideological makeup of the professoriate. The resulting lack of intellectual diversity harms academia by limiting the questions academics ask, the phenomena we study, and ultimately the conclusions we reach… A leftist ideological monoculture is bad for universities, rendering them intellectually dull places imbued with careerism rather than the energy of contending ideas.

In an environment supposedly geared to the cultivation of critical thinking contending ideas should be grist to the mill. Responding to dissent, even outlandish or ill-informed dissent, may prompt us to revisit our own ideas about the world and our own political assumptions – assumptions that are not infrequently arrived at by unconscious imitation or a kind of peer group osmosis. It generally helps to know why we think whatever we think, especially if claims of unassailable righteousness are being staked upon it – and disagreement is, very often, how that insight comes about. And yet, as we’ve seen, great efforts are being made, often successfully, to eliminate debate and the testing of ideas.

Update:

KC Johnson asks whether events at Duke, Colorado, Delaware and Columbia are merely shameful anomalies or evidence of something more systemic.

Related. And. Also.