Asu, que tal chanchote?!

Kind of a schaudenfraude video, but I can't get enough of this video of catcallers getting called out after catcalling their own moms, especially the mom who says that "she doesn't care about [his] boss"

Getting a Haircut

As evidenced by the very first two videos on this blog, I know I have the ASMR. I'm not sure exactly what triggers it, but usually women with a certain kind of touch can do something. Though it's mostly women that can arouse this feeling, I find that this Minecraft video does something as well.

A New Twist on Archery

Lars Andersen, re-discovering the ancient practices of archery, where you could fire 3 arrows within 0.6 seconds.

From Digg.

My Name's Ibra, Holmes

And I'm from PSG-10.

Reppin' the 805 million people in the world, ese.

Whatchu doin' for the world, bro?

Chicagoans Talk about Gun Violence

Given my past post about a group of Chicagoans attempting to intervene in the city's violence and Derrick Rose, posting this mini-documentary by Bulls Center Joakim Noah was only appropo

Fart Loading

A really good sense of humor.

A New Philosophy on Breakage and Repair

Breakage and repair are part of a history, not things to disguise.

How Trouble Starts

"A lot of trouble comes from when people try to be important" - I forgot! Sorry!

A Joke about the Technopoly We Live In

Bill Gates is trying to make text (from books, magazines, pieces of paper) more interesting by creating a device that can generate video from strings of text.

http://www.geekwire.com/2013/gates-myhrvold-crazy-idea-autogenerating-video-text/

The news earned this set of responses:

johncdvorak

12 hours ago

This is ludicrous. Next: turning farts into text then into video.

Dmitry Kirsanov johncdvorak 5 hours ago There is a prior art for that. Twilight book and the movie.

Things to Keep in Mind While Training to Run

Some people might run just for exercise.  But once you reach milestones like running a 5K or a Marathon, you begin to think about running races for times.

I ran into a Reddit conversation with elite mile runner David Torrence, and he offered some ideas about training and running.

• "forget everything else and just focus on winning no matter what kind of race it is"

• "There have been days where I run 10min per mile for 40minutes, because I was just that tired, and I knew I had to let my body recover.  I really suggest not getting caught up in the pace of your runs, and rather just letting your body dictate what pace you should run. Some days you feel good, then let your body go faster; some days you feel terrible, and you should let your body run slow. Forcing things is a great way to get yourself hurt or burnt out."

• "The longer the race the shorter the warmup"

Chiding People to be Decent

Read this article about the pay of adjunct professors in comparison to tenured and tenure-track professors.

Not that positive.

I read the comments.

Less positivity.  Some lamented how academia was becoming a playground only for the socially elite. Some decried market logic.

What bothers me is that the brainless construct called market, as if it was the Oracle of Delphi, is simply and without any criticism accepted to be the rightful force that drives ultimately all value judgements and decisions in all areas including what counts as valuable profession and what contributes to society's progress. 

I'll be honest: In my personal value system, anthropology, human sciences, ecological sciences rank quite high, right there with earth science and physics (my own training), but also including non-neocon macro-economics, while I see little use in all those many law schools and business schools. Sorry, Jenifer.  

What is new information? The neocons tell us that the market should decide in which direction all economic activity, including learning, research, and teaching should be directed. The market (model) is a big stochastic machine that operates as the "invisible hand" which assigns value by trial and error, and controls the flow of economic activity by allocating money here and pulling it out there. The word free market is misleading because it is constraint to not go against the interests of few owners and members of the so-called meritocracy. But especially with regards to academic research, learning and discovery of new knowledge, most people are lead to accept the idea that freedom means to give the market all control about the direction we are supposed to be searching for new information and improvements in all aspects of living. It means that we put the control to a blind, barely understood "thing out there" which can give rise to all kinds of value judgments about professions. So for example, anthropology may be considered more or less a worthless market glut, while what law schools and business schools produce is seen as The information to tap the sources of wealth production. (Easy - it serves those in control). The problem is, this system is by principle bound to have tunnel vision. If all the sensors of a complex system (which includes our minds) are biased and focused only towards preselected potential sources of new information, and accept from those only what it expects according to its own biases, then what it gains as new information is very likely to be actually just old information, which is no information at all. That system begins to optimize its efficiency to the death. As they like to say: "The market has already accounted for it" (what it perceives that is). In other words, it is by design that we are just drifting and may not even know when we go over the cliff - While a few anthropologists may be trying very hard to prevent this from happening.

Some were chiding the article writer for her career choice as an Anthropologist.

A commenter named Bulldog710 had this to say about the freshly made Ph.D Anthropologist article writer:

Bottom line: (for example) There are 10,000 PhDs with degrees in Anthropology. There are only 1,000 professorships in the U.S. available, and all those positions are filled with tenured PhDs.

Poor Sarah feels defrauded because, as the 10,000 + 1 with a doctorate in Anthropology, she didn't get offered the Red Carpet at Harvard like she feels she deserves. So now, in her world view, the entire educational system in America is headed for the sewer.
I suggest Sarah grow up first, then after a few years of maturity, try again. Such incredible pity pot.

There were a lot more comments that this particular poster made, but this one was one of the most vitriolic because of the attack he/she laid upon a person he/she only apparently knows through means of this article.  The comment just inflated the article writer with characteristics such as entitlement and immaturity.

The arrogance was answered.

Bottom line: Despite the fact that more and more students are going to college and therefore there is more demand for classes and resources, the fact that university bureaucracies are growing exponentially with the upper ranks getting larger and larger salaries, and the fact that the expectations for research output has not changed, it apparently somehow totally makes sense that the number of tenured professor positions in the USA have been steadily decreasing while cheap adjunct positions have become more common. 

Yes, let the system arbitrarily take away gainful employment opportunities proportionate to the years of unpaid work and student loan debt you've gone through to get the job you've always wanted and were willing to work for, in favor of shackling you into "permanently temporary" adjunct positions without any job security or benefits simply because they can get away with extracting the work out of you without the oh so terribly inconvenient price tag of paying you an appropriate living wage. 

We are supposed to live in a world where a small handful of extremely greedy people hoard money hand over fist, while the rest of us should grovel and beg and just be grateful when one of these people occasionally tosses one of us a bone.  Don't dare step out of line and point out that things could work better another way, or that there are better ways to distribute wages.

Bless you, Bulldog710, for unleashing a completely vicious and unfounded character assassination toward someone you've never met simply because she is pointing out very real and completely arbitrary inequities in a system that are really devastating some peoples lives unnecessarily.  Putting effort into fixing things and making things work better (or like they're supposed to) is for bratty little children; instead, lets be mature adults and mindlessly defend a broken system by conveniently finding a way to place blame on people arbitrarily screwed over because that's the path of least resistance and most morally simplistic.  Roll over and just accept your fate because that's what's convenient for the worldview of the Bulldog710's of the world, who are far too preoccupied with their reprehensibly lazy and unfounded misanthropy to be bothered to extend any effort beyond that of a banana slug.

Studs Terkel

Telling common people's stories. Listening.

Believing in Tim Tebow

"Every week, Tebow picks out someone who is suffering, or who is dying, or who is injured. He flies these people and their families to the Broncos game, rents them a car, puts them up in a nice hotel, buys them dinner (usually at a Dave & Buster's), gets them and their families pregame passes, visits with them just before kickoff (!), gets them 30-yard-line tickets down low, visits with them after the game (sometimes for an hour), has them walk him to his car, and sends them off with a basket of gifts.

Home or road, win or lose, hero or goat."

http://espn.go.com/espn/story/_/id/7455943/believing-tim-tebow

Transgressing Boundaries: Hines Ward

NFL Player Giving 79 Students His Base Salary

As I was reading this story of Braylon Edwards, I was wondering how we make this type of giving the norm rather than the exception.

From Yahoo

As a Cleveland Browns rookie in 2005, Edwards announced he'd give $10,000 in scholarships to 100 area eighth-graders if they could graduate high school with over a 2.5 GPA and 15 hours community service. Of the 100 who were afforded the opportunity, 79 met the criteria and have begun their first year of college.

He barely made enough money to support these children.

The 79 students were provided with laptops and other supplies to help them out when they arrived on campus.

"I'm supposed to give people a chance like I was given a chance," Edwards said.

Edwards hasn't played for the Browns in two years. He's a member of the San Francisco 49ers this season and is earning a $1 million base salary for the year, just about what he'll pay those 79 students he promised to help years ago.

Students Confronting Intolerance

Young, Inexperienced...Confident.

“You are young and inexperienced, but you should somehow create an aura of confidence and authority” - Esa-Pekka Salonen, L.A. Philharmonic on Gustavo Dudamel at 23, in his first time conducting a professional orchestra

Stefan.

Jaaack Stephan!



My grade school friend Fred used to repeat the line from this classic LA area commercial every time he came across this tall white kid named Stefan.

My first memory of Stefan was him singing "oh bladee oh bladdah..." Every time I encountered him, he would be full of these noises; I always thought it was weird, but nifty.

He was the older brother of one of my grade school classmates, and I kept thinking that if I was his height, I'd surely be on my way to basketball stardom.

I later would go to the same all-boys Catholic high school that he went to. High school being a place of hierarchies and cliquey associations, we didn't talk much, but he was always a reminder of a slice of home.

Every once in a while I see him at our elementary school's functions, and we chat it up a little. He's been a winner on jeopardy. He worked as a video game tester. Occasionally, he checks my grammar on Facebook.

But if there's one thing I know this guy for, it'll usually come back to this man's talent for soundmaking:

You Can Feel it All Over

Sharing this video because I just like the song. The actual shots...some of them seem real, others, not so sure. But the song drives it and the shots are a great complement to the emotion of the song.

Subway Dance Party

Since I've been Metro rider, and I've listened to Joe Metro from Blue Scholars over and over, and have posted on public space in Los Angeles...