In tribute to Aaron Schwartz, who committed suicide this week during what friends and family say was an overzealous investigation into his downloading and sharing millions of academic documents from database Jstor, many have taken to Twitter to share academic work to which they may or may not hold intellectual property rights, with the tag #PDFTribute.
According to the NYT, Wu Tang’s GZA has been meeting with scientists at Harvard and MIT to discuss an album about astrophysics and the universe, to be tentatively titled “Dark Matter.”
David Kaiser, a physicist at M.I.T. who met with GZA in December and again this spring, said he was impressed. “He’s read a lot of books and asked really well-informed questions,” said Dr. Kaiser, 41, who is not a fan of rap. “It was fun to see how excited he was about science.”
Clint Eastwood’s spectacle at the RNC seemed a little too perfectly bizarre to be unintentional. Could the Fistful of Dollars and Dirty Harry star, who has identified with varied political positions during his career, have been channeling Antony during his memorable (and, it seems fair to say, poorly-vetted) appearance — maybe even intentionally trying to cast a shadow Romney’s moment in the sun?
A few moments seemed particularly double-edged, like when Eastwood leaned forward over the podium and growled conspiratorially that “we own this country” to thunderous applause from the affluent audience.
Yes, he talked to a chair, but he also characterized Romney as “quote unquote, a stellar businessman,” and criticized the war in Afghanistan and the failure to close the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay — which, while compelling, are usually progressive complaints about the Obama administration, since both are Bush-era relics.
And, intentionally or not, he certainly touched a nerve when he admonished the convention not to vote for someone they didn’t particularly like.
“What I’m saying is we don’t have to be mental masochists and vote for somebody that we don’t even really want in office, just because they seem to be nice guys, or maybe not such nice guys, if you look at some of the recent ads going out there,” he said.
As the crowd’s enthusiasm dimmed — with Ryan looking increasingly non-plussed, some audience members withholding applause, and at least one attendee visibly checking her phone on camera — another of Eastwood’s snipes seemed like it could have been aimed either at the invisible Obama or at an offstage organizer gesturing at him to wrap it up.
“I’m not gonna shut up,” he rasped. “It’s my turn.”
The need in August has been record breaking at the Kitchen Cupboard. It’s a long month, in terms of the food stamp cycle, but the beginning of the school year is also taxing.
“Families are getting ready to send their kids back to school and there are extra expenses with going back to school that are not in the regular family budget,” explains Sue Andrews, Kitchen Cupboard Director.
Barack Obama took to social news service Reddit today to answer questions posed by the site’s user base, but the event ended up taking on a more scripted feel than when other high-profile figures have fielded questions there.
Responses during the session — which began late — were spaced out by many minutes, as if they were being carefully vetted on the other end, yet contained frequent typos. Two possibilities seem likely: Either the President insisted on little oversight, and made a handful of errors — or a zealously calculating PR team inserted usage and capitalization mistakes in order to humanize an Obama sock puppet.
Disappointingly, Obama (or perhaps his writing staff) stuck primarily to “safe” topics including space exploration and internet freedom, both of which received his broad but vaguely-worded support.
The President dug into less-voted-for questions to opine about beer, sports, and support for his campaign staff. He eventually took time to answer questions about money in politics and student debt.
In general, Redditors were enthusiastic about the IAMA, joshing the President (who remained aloof) and each other (resulting in perhaps my favorite Reddit comment ever.)
“For proof, did he send you a picture of him holding a dated index card?” asked a participant during a separate exchange. “Or did the Secret Service land a helicopter on your house?”
“He faxed a copy of his birth certificate,” answered another.
Writing for The New Yorker, Andrew Solomon draws on a book he is researching to pen a dark but illuminating piece on children conceived during sexual assault — and their relationships with their mothers.
In working on my book, I went to Rwanda in 2004 to interview women who had borne children of rape conceived during the genocide. At the end of my interviews, I asked interviewees whether they had any questions for me, in hopes that the reversal would help them to feel less disenfranchised in the microcosmic world of our interview. The questions tended to be the same: How long are you spending in the country? How many people are you interviewing? When will your research be published? Who will read these stories? Why are you interested in me? At the end of my final interview, I asked the woman I was interviewing whether she had any questions. She paused shyly for a moment. “Well,” she said, a little hesitantly. “You work in this field of psychology.” I nodded. She took a deep breath. “Can you tell me how to love my daughter more?” she asked. “I want to love her so much, and I try my best, but when I look at her I see what happened to me and it interferes.” A tear rolled down her cheek, but her tone turned almost fierce, challenging. “Can you tell me how to love my daughter more?” she repeated.
BoingBoing OG Xeni Jardin, who is being treated for breast cancer, has yet another excellent post on her experiences, this time directed at the magical thinking behind “alternative medicine.” She draws on a pair of posts by ScienceBlogs’ Orac, one on bunk cancer cures and one on the broader mentality behind snake oil. All are excellent reading, but Jardin is poignant:
In alternative healing parlance, ND stands for naturopathic doctor. I like Orac’s definition better: “not a doctor.”
Let me be blunt: I think people who sell fake cancer cures are murderers.
I spoke about the content of that blog post with my radiation oncologist yesterday, after I lay down under the linear accelerator for another daily (yep, daily) blast of rays to kill any remaining lurking cells that might want to off me a few years down the road.
I hate radiation treatment, by the way. HATE IT. But I hate cancer more.
I have friends who fall into this sort of conspiratorial thinking on a range of issues, but medicine is among the most prominent. The fact that there are (serious) problems with the pharmaceutical and health industries lends itself to anti-scientific narratives that endanger lives.
Tea Party darling Samuel “Joe The Plummer” Wurzelbacher, who is now running for congress, is stirring up trouble with a unique-sounding campaign advert.
The Ohio congressional candidate known as “Joe the Plumber” is running a campaign video in which he suggests that Nazi gun controls contributed to deaths during the Holocaust because Jews didn’t have firearms to defend themselves.
The ad drew strong rebukes from Democrats and Jewish organizations.
In the video, Samuel Wurzelbacher loads a shotgun and fires at lemons and tomatoes placed on wooden posts. “In 1939, Germany established gun control,” he says. “From 1939 to 1945, six million Jews and seven million others, unable to defend themselves, were exterminated,” he says before ending the video by saying “I love America.”
