Yes. Obviously.
Although, if we want to be pedantic about it, it’s less clear that she’s African American. In the US, “Black” is split into two groups: Black African and Black Caribbean. Harris is mixed race—Indian on her mother’s side, and Jamaican on her father’s side—which would classify her as Black Caribbean.
I mostly ignore the Olympics, but my husband purchased access, and I sat down with him to watch one thing: the women’s breakdancing quarterfinals (see final battle). I didn’t know anything about breaking, but it was impressive to watch nonetheless. It was only later that I heard about the Aussie competitor Rachael Gunn (“Raygun”), whose earlier performance got memeified, and went viral on TikTok.
It’s hard to find publicly available “neutral” clips of her performance, but some options are provided here. Or, if you just want the meme version, I put a couple gifs below.
This month, I wrote an in-depth article about asexuality in the DSM. There are still problems in the current edition–but the root problem is in the hearts and minds of psychologists, not in a reference book.
Concluding thoughts on “The Great Sex Rescue” | Tell me why the world is weird – Perfect Number has been doing a chapter-by-chapter review of The Great Sex Rescue, a book intended to identify and correct the many problems with sexual attitudes among evangelical Christians. Perfect Number also supplies a perspective missing from the book–the queer and ace perspective. It’s an insightful series, but if you only read one article, it should be the concluding overview.
Gentrification is a distraction and Your Comprehensive Guide to Homelessness Grift | Streeter Sweeper (videos, 57 and 99 min) – Some good videos on housing politics. I learned a lot, for example that there are many homeless kids, but you usually don’t see them because they’re prioritized for shelter. Homelessness is not correlated with weather or better homeless services (as many people have told me), but is correlated with bad housing markets.
In January 6th, 2021, Donald Trump incited a riot on the US Capitol to try to overturn the US presidential election. Most people know that. But for those who missed it, I’d like to highlight the worst part. Prior to the riots, the Trump campaign deliberately tried to counterfeit the election results. The purpose of the riot was to demand that congress to accept the counterfeit.
In an obscure step of the US election process, each state submits a “certificate of ascertainment” that declares the final vote count and winner of the election. The Trump team submitted fraudulent certificates of ascertainment in seven states. Nobody was fooled by the fraudulent certificates, but the Trump team argued that Trump’s vice president Mike Pence had the power to accept the counterfeit certificates anyway. All they had to do was pressure Mike Pence to do so.
Therefore, the primary target of the January 6 riot was not democrats, but rather Mike Pence. Thus, the “Hang Mike Pence” chants from rioters.
Reutersvärd Triangle, designed by me
Many years ago, I designed the origami Arrow Illusion–an arrow that points in the opposite direction when viewed in a mirror. It’s probably the biggest “hit” among my designs. Recently, CFC (an Origami community) had a monthly challenge to create optical illusions, and it featured Arrow Illusion as an example. So, I thought I’d design another.
I went through several ideas, but ultimately settled on the Reutersvärd Triangle. It’s similar to the better-known Penrose triangle, but was actually created independently by Oscar Reutersvärd in 1934–before the Penrose triangle.
Like the Penrose triangle, the Reutersvärd Triangle is just an illustration–it’s impossible to actually make something shaped that way. And yet, you can find many very convincing 3D-printed implementations of the Reutersvärd Triangle. I felt this was a sign that I needed to origamize it. (Note that the Arrow Illusion, too, was inspired by 3D printing!)
Actually designing the thing was fairly challenging, and I went through over half a dozen prototypes. Even once I got the basic form down, I tried many ideas to optimize for simplicity and stability. The end result is so elegant that its instructions fit on a single page. Note: if you try to fold this, I suggest trying the “easy” version first, and make one with just 6 pieces of paper. It will look like this:
How does the illusion work? The cubes are actually inverted. Although it pretends to be a collection of cubes pointing outwards towards the camera, they’re actually internal corners pointing inwards. It’s… not very convincing when you have the physical object right in front of you. It’s most convincing when you take a photo in ambiguous lighting, and then sometimes it helps to turn the photo upside-down. The lighting of the cubes doesn’t match the shadows behind the model, which may have caused some of you to see through the illusion already. But in case you don’t see it, here’s a photo from the side:
