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Okie Dokie…
Okie Dokie…
THIS DAY IN HISTORY: MAY 29TH- AIN’T I A WOMAN?
This Day In History: May 29, 1851
Sojourner Truth, abolitionist, orator, and women’s rights activist, delivered a ground-breaking speech on May 29, 1851, one of the first and most memorable of the fledgling suffragist movement. An emancipated slave, Sojourner believed the wrongs committed against both blacks and women by the US were “inextricably intertwined.” She never learned to read or write, but that didn’t stop her from spreading her message.
Sojourner believed God did not condone the cruel treatment of women. She fought tirelessly for women’s rights, reasoning, “Was not Christ born of a woman?” She answered her own question with “Through God who created him and woman who bore him. Man, where is your part?”
Additionally, Sojourner Truth had firsthand experience with the inherent evil of slavery, and believed God had called her to crusade against it. She said, “The lord has made me a sign unto this nation, an’ I go round a-testifyin’, an’ showin’ on ’em their sins agin my people.” …
Remembering America’s Fallen Soldiers—Before They’ve Fallen
How the design of a Virginia war memorial enshrines the inevitability of conflict.
An hour south of Washington, D.C., in the heart of historical downtown of Fredericksburg, Virginia, there is a war memorial composed of six massive granite pillars, topped with a slab bearing strong gold letters that read “Our Fallen Heroes.” The face of each pillar is reserved for the names of the area’s fallen soldiers—just over half of the pillars are for wars stretching from WWI to the current “Global War on Terror,” and the rest—to the shock and infinite interpretations of passersby—for wars that haven’t been fought yet.
Constructed in 2008, the memorial was a collaboration between the city of Fredericksburg and the Fredericksburg Area Veteran’s Council (FAVC). The goal was for the city to have one place where they could honor the city’s fallen, but to allow for the potential to accommodate for future conflicts. When asked about the significance of these blank slates, secretary of the executive board of the FAVC Golda T. Eldridge said that they were incorporated to fit with the aesthetic design of the memorial and that there was “no specific intent for any symbolism in mind” when including them. And yet to many, a memorial with nearly half of its space reserved for upcoming conflicts is an eerie statement that such conflicts and casualties are an inevitable wave on the horizon. …
What You Need to Know About the Cellphone and Cancer Study
Federal researchers have rushed out results from a study that shows cellphone radiation might cause brain and heart tumors in rats.
It’s a worrisome finding that seems to validate suspicions that have been brushed off by many mainstream scientists for years. Here are some answers to questions about the study:
Do I Need to Throw Away My Cellphone?
Here’s a hint: John Bucher, who is associate director of the National Toxicology Program, which did the study, isn’t changing his cellphone habits. But he’s not a heavy user — chatting on his phone for an hour a day or less.
“I don’t use a cellphone very often. People don’t seem to call me much,” Bucher told reporters in a telephone briefing. “I use a cellphone next to my head or with earbuds, depending on what I am doing.”
The rats in the study got high levels of cellphone signal, mostly above the legal limits set by the Federal Communications Commission for mobile phones, and were exposed for nine hours a day, every day, from the time they were in their mothers’ wombs until they died about two years later. …
10 Bizarre Anonymous Tips That Shook Up Unsolved Crimes
Whenever authorities deal with an unsolved murder or disappearance, they always hope to receive tips from the public that could help them crack the case. If the tipsters fear repercussions for coming forward, the police will often encourage them to remain anonymous. However, this can add further complications to the case.
While it’s common for the authorities to receive anonymous tips that turn out false, they can sometimes receive a letter or phone call from an unknown individual who provides important information that sounds credible. In fact, the tipster can even create the impression that they were responsible for the crime. However, since they choose to remain anonymous and refuse to come forward, their information cannot be substantiated. As a result, the mystery continues to remain unsolved.
10. The Murder Of Tracey Ann Patien
In 1976, 13-year-old Tracey Ann Patient resided with her family in the Henderson suburb of Auckland, New Zealand. One day in January, Tracey was spending the evening at a friend’s house. She headed home at approximately 9:30 PM but never arrived. The following day, Tracey’s body was discovered in some bushes in the Waitakere Ranges. She had been strangled to death with her own pantyhose.
Two months later, Youthline, a telephone counseling helpline for young people, received an anonymous phone call from a woman who thought she had seen Tracey climbing into a brown car with a man in a brown suit on the night she disappeared. The female caller was never identified, but a much more chilling anonymous phone call was still to come. …
The Downside of Democracy
A 1979 book on presidential selection inadvertently predicted the rise of Trump—and the weakness of a popular primary system.
Predictions are dangerous business, especially in the hall of mirrors that American politics has become. Suffice it to say, no one called this U.S. presidential election cycle—not Trump, not Sanders, not any of it.
Except, perhaps, in a round-about way, a 1979 book about the presidential-primary system. James Ceaser, a University of Virginia professor, outlined the history and potential weaknesses of various nomination processes, including one that largely relies on popular primaries. Starting in the early 1970s, Democrats and Republicans began reforming their primary-election processes, transferring influence over nominations away from party leaders to voters. This kind of system is theoretically more democratic, but it also has weaknesses—some of which have been on display in 2016. When I spoke with a couple of conservative political-science professors about their field last month, one of them remarked, with just a hint of jealousy, “I expect Jim Ceaser to take a victory lap around the country saying I told you so.”
I spoke with Ceaser about Trump and the unintended effects of trying to make democracy more democratic. When I asked him if I could turn on my recorder, he said, “You’re not working for the CIA, are you?” This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity, but not by any government officials, to my knowledge. …
How To Fix A Graduation Rate Of 1 In 10? Ask The Dropouts
On San Jose State University’s lush inner-city campus, students in their graduation gowns pose with their families in front of ivy-covered buildings.
They’re the lucky ones.
Just 10 percent of students graduate from this public university in four years. After six years, it’s only a bit more than half.
Think about that — of 100 students who enrolled four years ago, only 10 will walk across the stage this year.
That sounds low, but you can find these kind of numbers at lots of universities in the U.S.
What’s not typical is how San Jose State is tackling the problem. …
10 Innocent Words And Their Unbelievably Dirty Origins
Do you ever wonder where the words you use in your day-to-day life came from? The answer may disappoint you. At some point, someone just sort of made them up.
But it should surprise exactly no one to learn that human beings are pretty perverse creatures, and occasionally, we allow our minds to slither out of the gutter long enough to influence our methods of communication. Sometimes, though, generations of use wash away the sleaze, leaving a seemingly squeaky-clean term behind.
10. Fundamental
What we think it means: Forming a necessary base or core; of central importance.
What it really means: Things to do with the ass.
We’ve got the ancient Romans to thank for this one. The Latin word fundamentum means “a foundation, groundwork; support; beginning.” So we’re talking about building houses here, right? Nothing dirty so far.
But once the French got their hands on the term, they tweaked it into fondement and added a curious new usage—to describe the anus. And sometime in the 13th century, the English made it into “fundament,” adding buttocks to the official definition. …
Mystery of Forest Grove, Oregon, Noise May Never Be Solved
A piercing noise that plagued an Oregon city earlier this year, drawing comparisons to “Satan’s teakettle” and hypothesized to be everything from a defective water valve to aliens or a signal for the end of times, stopped as suddenly as it started.
In the silence left behind, it appears the mystery may live on forever.
The sound, akin to a bad one-note violin solo broadcast over a microphone with nonstop feedback, began seemingly out of nowhere in February in Forest Grove. Residents of the Portland suburb reported that the sound would usually occur, inconveniently, after dark and last up to a few minutes, according to The Oregonian.
Mystery sound frustrates people in a west Forest Grove neighborhood. Where it could be coming from? #LiveOnK2 @ 11pm pic.twitter.com/p0inj5TBr2
— Chris Liedle (@chrisliedle) February 16, 2016
Initially considered just an annoyance, the sound became something of a local celebrity as the story went national, and determining the origin of the notorious noise quickly became a pastime for residents of the city of about 22,000. …
Racist ad row: Chinese company blames foreign media
Shanghai Leishang Cosmetics says sorry for harm caused by foreign media’s “over-amplification” of ad.
This racist laundry detergent ad from China will leave you speechless.https://t.co/Y4W5W5Wwoq
— AJ+ (@ajplus) May 27, 2016
A Chinese detergent maker has blamed foreign media for whipping up controversy over an ad in which a black man “washed” by its product was transformed into an Asian man.
Shanghai Leishang Cosmetics apologised and said it strongly condemned racial discrimination but it pointed the finger at news reports for overblowing the ad, which first appeared on Chinese social media in March.
The company pulled it, though, after the clip went viral this week and drew both outrage and scores of media reports outside the country. …
THIS DAY IN HISTORY: MAY 29TH- THE STAMP ACT
This Day In History: May 29, 1765
Patrick Henry was a lawyer, orator and statesmen whose career, mostly in the service of the state of Virginia, spanned from the earliest calls for independence through the founding of the United States of America. He’s probably best known for his “give me liberty, or give me death” speech delivered a decade later, but it was his opposition to the Stamp Act that led his contemporaries to recognize him as “the man who gave the first impulse to the ball of revolution.”
Things escalated quickly after Henry was elected to the House of Burgesses by his neighbors in Louisa County, Virginia. He was already the House’s most anti-British member when he was sworn in on May 20, 1765, but just a few weeks later when word reached Williamsburg that Parliament had passed the Stamp Act, Henry became even more radical in his views.
The Stamp Act required specific stamped paper be purchased for virtually everything printed in America, with prices varying based on what the paper was for: legal documents, newspapers, pamphlets, playing cards – you name it. The colonists, who had long felt their tax burden was unduly high, were growing weary of being nothing but a source of revenue for the mother country. …
Could Thinking Positively About Aging Be The Secret Of Health?
The dictionary defines ageism as the “tendency to regard older persons as debilitated, unworthy of attention, or unsuitable for employment.” But research indicates that ageism may not just be ill-informed or hurtful. It may also be a matter of life and death.
Not that it’s literally killing people. Researcher Becca Levy, a professor of epidemiology and psychology at the Yale School of Public Health, says it depends on how much a given individual takes those negative ideas to heart.
In one study, Levy looked at people’s attitudes about aging when they were in late middle age and then followed them over time. Some of these people thought of older people as weak or dependent. Others thought of them as experienced or wise. What she found was that the people who had a positive view of aging lived about 7 and half years longer than the people who saw aging in a negative light.
Now that doesn’t mean that if you think positive thoughts about aging, it’s OK to sit on the couch in front of the TV and eat a pound of bacon. …
Apple Store’s worst feature? Customers, says ex-employee
Technically Incorrect: The customers are awful, workers get death threats, and the Apple Watch could use some work, a former Apple retail staffer tells Business Insider.
You’ve always wondered what life is like at an Apple store, haven’t you?
Behind the scenes and in an employee’s heart and mind, what’s really happening? What’s he or she really thinking?
On Saturday, Business Insider published an interview with a woman who says she worked at a UK Apple store between 2011 and 2015.
She says a lot. Or, at least, uses many words.
At heart, though, she suggests that the very worst thing about the stores isn’t the management, the products or even the cultlike nature of the Apple brand.
Instead, she said, it’s the fact that you’re simply a retail worker who usually gets treated poorly, “not necessarily by the store, but by the customers. It is an incredibly disheartening job.”
Apple fanpersons are, it seems, not the most charming. She said people come in just to complain. …
A Theory That Will Change How You See SpongeBob SquarePants
We all know that SpongeBob SquarePants is filled with some really dark shit, like suicide jokes and a possible allegory for nuclear testing. But what if I told you that one of the most popular children’s characters of the modern era is nothing more than a used feminine hygiene product? ARE YOU READY, KIDS?!
SpongeBob Is A Tampon
It’s only because of Nickelodeon censors that kids haven’t been delighted by the antics of TamponBob OhDearGodNoPants for nine seasons and two movies. He is, after all, an absorbent sponge residing in Bikini Bottom.
According to his backstory, SpongeBob moved away from home at the tender age of 13 (a typical age for a young woman to begin requiring tampons), to pursue a lucrative career as a fry cook at The Krusty Krab … which suddenly sounds super fucking gross. We’ll talk more about that in a bit.
What may appear to be a violation of both truancy and child labor laws is actually the coming-of-age tale of a young tampon’s journey into a discreet new environment named Bikini Bottom. That may sound like the pun-filled observations of a middle school child, but hold on, because the connections don’t stop there. Not even close.
Kind of makes you see this image in a whole new light, huh?
…
The False Stereotypes About Millennials Who Live at Home
They’re not really spoiled, affluent, white kids.
It’s easy to make fun of Millennials. They’ve been labeled spoiled, entitled, and lazy, and the fact that so many of them—nearly one in three, according to a recent Pew Research Center report—live at home with their parents only fuels the portrayal of the generation as a bunch of bratty kids.
But while it’s easy to hurl insults at 20-somethings (and 30-somethings) still crashing with their parents, the image of a spoiled upper-middle class adult spending all day on the couch playing video games is pretty far from the reality of most Millennials who wind up back home.
In fact, the very same data from Pew’s recent report doesn’t support that portrayal. Instead, the Millennials who are most likely to wind up living with their relatives are those who come from already marginalized groups that are plagued with low employment, low incomes, and low prospects for moving up the economic ladder. Millennials who live at home are also more likely to be minorities, more likely to be unemployed, and less likely to have a college degree. Living at home is particularly understandable for those who started school and took out loans, but didn’t finish their bachelor’s degree. These Millennials shoulder the burden of student-loan debt without the added benefits of increased job prospects, which can make living with a parent the most viable option. …
Boston Dynamics employees were frustrated with Google’s plan for a household robot
When Boston Dynamics posted a video of its humanoid robot, Atlas, walking in the snow and recovering from getting kicked, Google was not happy.
Boston Dynamics and its Atlas robot
As one former employee told Tech Insider, it “soured the soup” of a relationship that was already heading south.
Bloomberg first reported the issues surrounding the video when it obtained an email posted on an internal Google forum.
“There’s excitement from the tech press, but we’re also starting to see some negative threads about it being terrifying, ready to take humans’ jobs,” Courtney Hohne, a director of communications at Google and the spokeswoman for Google X, wrote in that email.
Hohne asked her colleagues at Google to “distance X from this video,” writing, “we don’t want to trigger a whole separate media cycle about where BD really is at Google.” …
10 Coolest Employee Perks Offered By Tech Companies
A happy employee is worth a lot to a company. These days, opportunities abound for talented members of the tech workforce, and many employers are pulling out the big guns in order to secure the best and brightest talent out there. No perk seems too far out of reach. As millennials continue to enter the tech scene in droves, who knows what will be offered next . . . Perhaps sponsored space travel?
10. On-Site Chefs
Feeding your body well is essential to maintaining mental stamina, and tech companies are beginning to realize more and more that vending machines filled with junk aren’t the best way to ensure employee performance. They’re also realizing that free food results in a lot of happy people. At Airbnb, employees are treated to healthy, home-cooked meals and signature beverages free of charge. The kitchen provides three meals per day, and the menu is constantly changing.
Some tech giants like Google offer full-blown restaurants for their employees, and some of them become so packed that they even require reservations! The restaurants and cafes at Google vary, but Indian food, sushi, and smoothie bars are just a few of the options. SAS Institute, Inc., a software company based in North Carolina, has a 1-acre sustainable farm on-site, which supplies all of the produce for its employee cafeterias. Staff who want to take the farm-fresh food home after work can even request a “leftover” meal, which SAS chefs will pack up specially for them. …
The Economic Lessons of Star Trek’s Money-Free Society
A few years ago Manu Saadia, a longtime Star Trek fan, went looking for a book about the economics of Star Trek. When he couldn’t find one, he decided to write his own. The result, Trekonomics, has drawn praise from economists such as Brad DeLong and Joshua Gans. Saadia says that Star Trek is one of the few science fiction universes that grapple with the idea that money may someday become obsolete.
“It’s made clear and emphasized several times in the course of the show that the Federation does not have money,” Saadia says in Episode 205 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “You have Captain Picard saying, ‘We’ve overcome hunger and greed, and we’re no longer interested in the accumulation of things.’”
Saadia is fascinated by the idea of a society in which material wealth has become so abundant that possessing it no longer holds any appeal. In such a world the only way to gain status would be by cultivating talent and intellect. …
How Long Would It Take to Fall Through The Earth?
You might not want to check this out for yourself, but do you know how long it would take for a person to fall through the Earth? Around 42 minutes.
That’s according to MinutePhysics, which uploaded a video to YouTube in response to a recent collaboration between the science channel and Vsauce on the effects of a hollow Earth.
Basically, the physics behind this fall is similar to that of a moving pendulum. …
FRENCH CONNECTION UK AND THEIR INFAMOUS “FCUK FASHION” CAMPAIGN
Back in the mid 1990s, the UK based clothing company, French Connection caused a quite a stir in Britain when a keen eyed marketer noticed that the company’s initials bore a striking resemblance to a certain four letter word and suggested they begin using it in their advertising. The CEO of French Connection, Stephen Marks, thought this was a brilliant idea and the “fcuk fashion” campaign was born propelling the company to new heights.
At this point, you might be wondering how a company based in the UK came to be known as “French Connection” in the first place. According to Marks, who continues to serve as the company’s CEO to this day, the reason the company is called French Connection is actually because one of the first contacts he had when he was running another business selling coats and suits in the late 1960s was a French designer called, Pierre D’Alby. D’Alby himself had contacts in Hong Kong who could produce t-shirts in bulk, which he then sold to Marks who sold them for an obscene profit to a number of high-end London retailers like Selfridges and Harrods. …
Video Goodnesses
(and not-so-goodnesses)
(and not-so-goodnesses)
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
A judge tells a prisoner that he will be executed within the next 5 days. The flawless deductions of the prisoner about the exact day make his sudden death all the more surprising.