Off-topic: at 8:17 this morning, it’s a boy. (Or at least AMAB, if that’s better stated.)
6 pounds 14 ounces, 19.25 inches, 22 hours of back labor by a mom who demonstrated unbelievable guts and stamina in 3 hours of grueling pushing. Then he wrecked the Apgar curve.
Now bedtime. Explaining how rape culture is nasty bullshit that all us XYs have a responsibility to resist will come soon enough.
(Not snark.)
Yeah. I’m spent and unable to get all the blogosphere things written that I want to write, and I just travelled. I just don’t have an experiential framework in which to empathize properly with how spent your family must be.
I’m going to try to write about a few of the thousands of little interactions I had while attending the SkepchickCON science/skepticism track at Minnesota’s annual CONvergence — the continent’s largest entirely fan-run sci-fi/fantasy/fandom convention. This year’s convention had just shy of six thousand attendees, and practically every panel in the Skepchick track, in convention rooms that seated ~125-150, was packed and in many cases standing-room-only.
During a convention of this size, you overhear lots of conversations about lots of different things, most mundane, but some truly interesting. During a group lunch, I learned the tale of a man who, eighteen years ago, missed a chance to meet Sophie Aldred — Ace, one of the Doctor Who companions of the 7th Doctor. He had gotten an aluminum baseball bat of the same style as Ace’s signature, and though he had it at a convention where Aldred was doing signings, was too shy to ask. Continue reading “CONvergence: Doctor Who fan repairs his timeline”→
I was on a panel at SkepchickCON (the mini-con within CONvergence), about misogynist trolls. Here’s the video, taken by Cristina Rad’s friend and hosted on her Youtube channel. She also posted it at her blog.
On its way to the Gale Crater, right now, is NASA’s Curiosity rover, the most sophisticated robot in the history of space science: a dune buggy equipped with a set of tools and instruments to shame Inspector Gadget. Curiosity can vaporize rock, analyze soil samples, gauge the weather, and film in HD. It’s due to touch down in the Gale Crater on August 5, completing an eight-month journey through the local solar system. Once it lands, the rover will begin a slow ascent up Aeolis Mons, the mountain in the crater’s center, probing its layers for signs that Mars once supported life. It will also collect new data about the surface of Mars, which NASA will use to determine the feasibility of future manned missions there.
A few weeks ago I visited NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, to talk with Michael Mischna, a planetary scientist who works on the Curiosity team. What follows is our conversation about Curiosity’s mind-blowing technologies and what those technologies might tell us about the history of Mars.
Think about what we’re actually doing this for: to find water on Mars. To find, potentially, evidence that life once existed — or exists now — on Mars. Because we’re CURIOUS.
I’m sure you’ve seen all the sturm und drang over Freethought Blogs being a cesspool of bullying and thought-policing hive-mindery. Despite this, a few people outside the network have voiced their support of people inside the network, and are picking off the worst lines of argumentation that people are using to try claim that we’re dogmatic bullies who do not tolerate dissent. What catalyzed this show of support? Why no less than Paula Kirby calling us all Feminazis and Femistasi (Ophelia’s take on that nonsense).
And where the hell is Orac to shout down this particular Godwinning?
According to The Atlantic Wire, San Diego’s entire 18 minute show got compressed (via time dilation, rogue Hobbits, or a misfire — we may never know!) into a mere 15 seconds.
I’m on three panels at CONvergence this weekend, in the Science/Skepticism track. I have no idea what panels I’ll be attending outside of these three, which I have to attend by virtue of having a spot on them. So this is all I can confirm right now.
This… this. A thousand times this. Hilarious. Badger decided to watch Thunderf00t’s attempt at strawmanning the entire harassment policy campaign and react in realtime for our viewing pleasure. You know, the video he made for his now-infamous “MISOGYNIST!!!!” post. This is clearly someone who knows the humour value of whargarbl, to put his own whargarbl on display for others’ consumption.
Badger blogs at Stealth Badger, which appears to have been bullied RIGHT OFF THE INTERNET. By the #FTBullies, no doubt.
Frankly, I’d be surprised if I was half as eloquent mere seconds after watching T-Footy stick his namesake in his mouth.
Like the bullies we are, we FtB bloggers (and our friends and readers) crashed a hashtag originally started by a few people who just absolutely hate that we talk about social justice so much and dare to moderate the comments sections on those posts. Hilarity ensued.
This is a snapshot of some of the funniest tweets from when I was participating yesterday. It is probably not representative of all the best tweets, so much as the ones that caught my eye (or that I said and therefore think are hilarious).
I had to wonder: Why have these sex-devaluing surveys become so popular?
In part, it’s good business. Take a survey finding that 43 percent of Canadians would choose bacon over sex – it was conducted by Maple Leaf Foods Inc., a bacon producer. Then there’s the one sponsored by the Better Sleep Council, a creation of the mattress industry, which found that 61 percent of American adults would choose a good night’s sleep over sex. See also: a survey by mobile app company Telenav which found that — surprise, surprise – one-third of Americans would rather go without sex than their cellphone. (On a related note, Gazelle, an electronics trade-in site, found that 15 percent of respondents would rather “give up sex than go for even a weekend without their iPhone.”) Sex is the ultimate measure of desire — so why wouldn’t a company try to position its product as shockingly even more desirable?
