Dan Q

Month: January 2018

Note #8450

Early start: @3RingsCIC are sending me to visit @WakefieldSams this morning to talk about #technology and #volunteering. Looking forward to meeting everybody there!

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Misogyny is a Human Pyramid

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Misogyny is a Human Pyramid (Meanjin)

The last six months have been remarkable. At this point, I can simply text the name of a powerful man to a friend, and they know—another has been accused, outed, exposed. The context is so present …

The last six months have been remarkable. At this point, I can simply text the name of a powerful man to a friend, and they know—another has been accused, outed, exposed.

The context is so present in our minds, partly because it always has been, but largely because the public conversation that’s erupted has been so thorough and—for the most part— wonderfully persistent in both condemning predatory behaviour and upholding the testimony of victims. New precedents are being established. Where we would once discuss these crimes with beleaguered resignation about the consequences, we can now be quietly confident that we’re entering a new era. Finally, retribution is being inflicted on the perpetrator and not the victim.

It feels different even from a year ago. Would Casey Affleck have won the Oscar in this climate, we ask? Probably not, we think. I bet he’s relieved, we say. Public opinion has swung: the Weinstein Company didn’t fire Harvey Weinstein because they found out he was a sexual predator, they fired him because we found out. It’s good to see that the house is finally burning down around him and men of his ilk, but we need to talk about that house— who built it, who lived there, and why it was allowed to stand for so long.

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Review of Oxford University Babylab

This review of Oxford University Babylab originally appeared on Google Maps. See more reviews by Dan.

Oxford University Babylab, Anna Watts Building, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Rd, Oxford OX2 6GG, United Kingdom.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Not only are the team here doing fascinating and important research… they’re great at engaging and supporting the kids they use as the subjects of their experiments, too! They ‘borrowed’ one of ours for research on language development and the experiments seemed as stimulating and interesting to the little tot as they were useful to the understanding of the human brain, we were kept informed about everything all the way along, and our kid even got to choose a toy at the end of it (which, three years on, she still has and loves).

If you’re willing to volunteer your baby’s time for the betterment of science but were concerned about the environment in which you’d be doing so, let this review dispel that.

Review of Sainsbury’s Bank ATM

This review of Sainsbury's Bank ATM originally appeared on Google Maps. See more reviews by Dan.

Sainsbury's Bank ATM, 362 Oxford Rd, Kidlington OX5 1DA, United Kingdom.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

2 cash machines. Not much queuing space (occupied by trolley park) but at least it’s under cover. “Pick up/drop off” spaces adjacent useful, if free, but often occupied during store opening hours so you’re likely to need to use the main car park if you’re flying-by. Been targetted by card skimmers at least once (a friend had his card cloned by one that was later traced to here); not good CCTV coverage.

The 1969 Easter Mass Incident

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http://gallusrostromegalus.tumblr.com/post/169723347468/the-1969-easter-mass-incident (gallusrostromegalus)

The 1969 Easter Mass Incident Content Warnings: Religion, food, symbolic cannibalism, symbolic gore, penis mention, Blasphemy, SO MUCH BLASPHEMY, weapons, war mention. Mind the warnings and your…

When my dad was a young man and still a practicing catholic, he participated in a small church communion that nearly got him and six other people excommunicated.

Father Patrick ran a small church outside of California Polytechnical and tended to be… rather more liberal in his interpretations of scripture than most of the church was, which made him something of a hit with the local students and liberally-inclined populace.  Pat went to all manner of civil demonstrations, condemned the shit out of the vietnam war and the politics that lead to it and so on.  In January of 1969 a series of incidents lead him to start exploring “nontraditional” means of holding Mass as a means of reaching out to his community and exploring his own faith, which ultimately culminated in the 1969 Easter Mass Incident.

For those of you who weren’t raised catholic, Communion is this ritual where you become one with Jesus by eating a really horrible bland wafer cookie and taking a shot of wine (called hosts), which then *literally* become the flesh and blood of jesus in your mouth, allowing him to become one with you.  It’s big McFucking deal, and you have the opportunity to take communion at every mass.  All this had to be explained to me second-hand because after this and Dad’s 51 days in the army, Dad decided he wouldn’t inflict religion on any children he might have in the future.

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Is everything you think you know about depression wrong?

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Is everything you think you know about depression wrong? (the Guardian)

In this extract from his new book, Johann Hari, who took antidepressants for 14 years, calls for a new approach

In the 1970s, a truth was accidentally discovered about depression – one that was quickly swept aside, because its implications were too inconvenient, and too explosive. American psychiatrists had produced a book that would lay out, in detail, all the symptoms of different mental illnesses, so they could be identified and treated in the same way across the United States. It was called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. In the latest edition, they laid out nine symptoms that a patient has to show to be diagnosed with depression – like, for example, decreased interest in pleasure or persistent low mood. For a doctor to conclude you were depressed, you had to show five of these symptoms over several weeks.

The manual was sent out to doctors across the US and they began to use it to diagnose people. However, after a while they came back to the authors and pointed out something that was bothering them. If they followed this guide, they had to diagnose every grieving person who came to them as depressed and start giving them medical treatment. If you lose someone, it turns out that these symptoms will come to you automatically. So, the doctors wanted to know, are we supposed to start drugging all the bereaved people in America?

The authors conferred, and they decided that there would be a special clause added to the list of symptoms of depression. None of this applies, they said, if you have lost somebody you love in the past year. In that situation, all these symptoms are natural, and not a disorder. It was called “the grief exception”, and it seemed to resolve the problem.

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Under river, outside time: The Woolwich Foot Tunnel Anomaly

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Under river, outside time: The Woolwich Foot Tunnel Anomaly (Portals of London)

When the Woolwich foot tunnel closed for repairs in 2011, it should have been a routine job. The pathway had been providing pedestrians with a quick route beneath the Thames since 1912. A century o…

When the Woolwich foot tunnel closed for repairs in 2011, it should have been a routine job. The pathway had been providing pedestrians with a quick route beneath the Thames since 1912. A century on, a few minor improvements were necessary. Contractors were hired to plug holes, improve access and bring communications capabilities into the 21st Century: swapping leaky tiles for a leaky feeder.

But Woolwich residents will recall that the refurb of this much loved and much used walkway did not go according to plan. When it finally re-opened it was 8 months behind schedule, having been closed for more than a year and a half. What the average Woolwich dweller doesn’t know, however, are the unusual circumstances behind this delay.

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Sarah Silverman’s powerful response to a sexist troll

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Sarah Silverman’s response to a sexist tweet is a much-needed ray of hope (Quartzy)

In the brutal, self-centered bash-fest that social media often becomes, a moment of simple kindness and connection stands out.

American comedian Sarah Silverman is unapologetically blunt in her fight against misogyny. But Silverman has also made a point of exploring the depths of her own empathy.

“I just keep asking myself, can you love someone who did bad things?” she said, after her dear friend and fellow comedian, Louis CK, was accused of sexual harassment. “I can mull that over later, certainly, because the only people that matter right now are the victims.”

Last week, Silverman demonstrated similar level-headed compassion when subjected to sexism and harassment herself. After tweeting about an article describing her honest attempts to understand Trump supporters, Silverman received a crude response from a Twitter follower:

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I’m harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from your site. Here’s how.

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I’m harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from your site. Here’s how. (hackernoon.com)

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It’s been a frantic week of security scares — it seems like every day there’s a new vulnerability. It’s been a real struggle for me personally to pretend like I understand what’s going on when asked about it by family members.

Seeing people close to me get all flustered at the prospect of being “powned” has really put things in perspective for me.

So, it is with a heavy heart that I’ve decided to come clean and tell you all how I’ve been stealing usernames, passwords and credit card numbers from your sites for the past few years.

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What is a “Bag of Choppy”?

dobegood posted to Reddit:

My mum just used the phrase “we’d be in for a bucket of custard.” I’m not sure if this is a real phrase or she’s having a stroke. Please advise.

My mother once described her new cat, which was very skinny when she got it, as looking “like a bag of choppy”. I asked her what “choppy” was and she admitted that she didn’t actually know – all she knew is that her mother used to describe things that looked like that cat did as looking “like a bag of choppy”. We tried to look it up or work it out but we couldn’t get to the bottom of it – what is “choppy” except for something that comes in a bag and looks like a scrawny cat? – and so we decided to ask her mother, who was then still alive.

My gran was a proper Hartlepudlian, the kind that you could genuinely imagine hanging a monkey, and she was full of old phrases that defied definition. If you ate with your mouth open she’d tell you off for “clacking”, babies were “baens”, and we were always told not to sit on cold doorsteps or else we’d get “chin cough” (I’ve no idea to this day what chin cough is; all I know about it is the mechanism of transmission, and I’m skeptical of that!). Anyway, on our next visit to the North East we resolved to ask my grandmother what exactly was a “bag of choppy”.

Turns out she didn’t know either; it was just a phrase her mother had used.

tl;dr: what is a “bag of choppy”?

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