Photographed by Mike Lavoie.

Apparently it’s a thing and it’s called “female masking.” // Christmas Island crab migration. // The computer code used on film and TV and what it actually is. // Specimen portraits. // Dolphins get high on puffer fish toxin. // Very cold rod meets soapy film. // Pointless diagrams. // Dig that crazy zero-gravity space art, man. // Sand, magnified. // Somewhat unexpected. // Times Square, accelerated. // How to cure a headache, how to select flour and other useful knowledge. (h/t, MeFi) // Ice music. // And half a million fireworks. 

Brace yourselves, dear readers. Colette is positively trembling with feminist rage.

What, you ask, could make a person so upset, so swollen with indignation? I fear we need a trigger warning before you click below.

Via Herb Deutsch, Heather Mac Donald on the self-destruction of the humanities: 

Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton — the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the “Empire,” UCLA junked these individual author requirements. It replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing. In other words, the UCLA faculty was now officially indifferent to whether an English major had ever read a word of Chaucer, Milton or Shakespeare, but the department was determined to expose students, according to the course catalogue, to “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.”

The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics. Sitting atop an entire civilisation of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his or her own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin.[…] [Consider] the resentment of a Columbia University undergraduate, who had been required by the school’s core curriculum to study Mozart. She happens to be black, but her views are widely shared, to borrow a phrase, “across gender, sexuality, race and class.” “Why did I have to listen in music humanities to this Mozart?” she groused… “My problem with the core is that it upholds the premises of white supremacy and racism. It’s a racist core. Who is this Mozart, this Haydn, these superior white men? There are no women, no people of colour.” These are not the idiosyncratic thoughts of one disgruntled student; they represent the dominant ideology in the humanities today.

Yes, what could the music of Mozart possibly have to offer a black woman, any black woman? After all, he was a composer of pallor, and male, and therefore, apparently, in the service of evil. Mozart ain’t for dark folk. Nothing to learn or enjoy there.*

That isn’t pubic hair. It’s a big ball of spiders. // Parrots in flight. // The museum of Spam and other “spiced pork artefacts.” // Sculpted hybrids. // A lesson in sign language. // If babies kept on growing. // On oddball baby names. // Neglected trees. // It’s all there in the eyes. // An interactive atlas of US historical geography. // Regular ice. // Origami masks. // Motorised camera stabiliser. // How to move a drink from one glass to another. // Frozen. // And finally, an impressive display of 3-dimensional mid-air acoustic manipulation.