Token Lady Scientist

isthisfeminist: This woman is doing science. IS THIS...

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 14:15:27 -0400

This woman is doing science. IS THIS FEMINIST?

“Science,” as a narrative of knowledge, prizes a phallocentric adherence to logic and mastery, breaking things down into discrete parts and seeking to name and control their interactions, rather than viewing them as an intuitively connected, interdisciplinary, feminine whole. This woman is adopting and reinforcing a masculine-supremacist view of intelligence which encourages women to rely on externally defined “facts” and academic credentials, rather than heeding their own inner wisdom. A true feminist simply knows the cure for Alzheimer’s disease, possibly because it’s yoga. PROBLEMATIC.

From the Health Care Debates: In which Rand Paul makes some...

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 12:51:00 -0400

From the Health Care Debates:

In which Rand Paul makes some bizarre “philosophical” comments on health care rights and slavery.

Brain Tree

Wed, 30 May 2012 16:37:13 -0400

Brain Tree

"Hey, Men, I’m Funnier Than You"

Wed, 30 May 2012 15:28:38 -0400

"Hey, Men, I’m Funnier Than You":

“Oh, great! Let’s talk some more about how women aren’t funny. Science has performed yet another study of terrible people, and—surprise!—unearthed terrible results: Apparently women in the workplace are incapable of making funny jokes. Men’s jokes, on the other hand, receive laughs 90% of the time. The reason? Well, science checked with conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom explained that “Men in general are the ‘funnier sex.’” COOL STORY, BROS. TELL IT AGAIN.”

"I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim,..."

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 10:04:16 -0500

“I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.”

- Harper, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America

Photo

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 08:11:05 -0500

Photo

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:18:56 -0500

Photo

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 08:28:05 -0400

Photo

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 21:41:33 -0400

wearethe99percent: I am 28 years old. I have an undiagnosed,...

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 21:41:02 -0400

wearethe99percent:

I am 28 years old. I have an undiagnosed, debilitating, neurological disorder. I haven’t been able to work in 3 years. I’ve barely been able to get out of bed for 10 months. After fighting tooth & nail, I received medicaid only to lose it right before my diagnosis. I just got it back but the doctors here quit taking it because they weren’t getting paid. I am back at square one and it is taking months to get in to a new doctor. I don’t qualify for disability (because I don’t have a solid diagnosis). I’ve been homeless for 3 years. I’m afraid I will die before I get treatment. I’m afraid I will die on the street. I’m a favor away from living in an alley. Mom can’t help, she’s severely disabled too. Step-dad finally found a job, after a year of looking. He’s getting laid off tomorrow. This isn’t just about the bailout, this isn’t just about justice for those who put us in and are keeping us in this situation. This is about survival, being able to provide for our families, being able to find a job, being able to eat and have a place to live. We are only as strong as our weakest link. I am the 99%

-occupywallst.org

-occupystl.org

mogget: An image’s better than a thousand words. That’s the...

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 20:24:55 -0400

mogget:

An image’s better than a thousand words.

That’s the spirit of WWF campaigns: images must not just attract the attention but tell the whole story.

Great examples of this thought, they strike at first sight.

The “Would you care more if I was a panda?” image is particularly striking. I love these.

geneticist: These images are part of a series of remarkable...

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 15:14:19 -0400

geneticist:

These images are part of a series of remarkable patterns that bacteria form when grown in a petri dish. The colony structures form as adaptive responses to laboratory-imposed stresses that mimic hostile environments faced in nature. (via)

The Lives of the Heart

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 19:32:06 -0400

Are ligneous, muscular, chemical.
Wear birch-colored feathers,
green tunnels of horse-tail reed.
Wear calcified spirals, Fibonaccian spheres.
Are edible; are glassy; are clay; blue schist.
Can be burned as tallow, as coal,
can be skinned for garnets, for shoes.
Cast shadows or light;
shuffled: snort: cry out in passion.
Are salt, are bitter,
tear sweet grass with their teeth.
Step silently into blue needle-fall at dawn.
Thrash in the net until hit.
Rise up as cities, as serpentined magma, as maples,
hiss lava-red into the sea.
Leave the strange kiss of their bodies
in Burgess Shale. Can be found, can be lost,
can be carried, broken, sung.
Lie dormant until they are opened by ice,
by drought. Go blind in the service of lace.
Are starving, are sated, indifferent, curious, mad.
Are stamped out in plastic, in tin.
Are stubborn, are careful, are slipshod,
are strung on the blue backs of flies
on the black backs of cows.
Wander the vacant whale-roads, the white thickets
heavy with slaughter.
Wander the fragrant carpets of alpine flowers.
Not one is not held in the arms of the rest, to blossom.
Not one is not given to ecstasy’s lions.
Not one does not grieve.
Each of them opens and closes, closes and opens
the heavy gate- violent, serene, consenting, suffering it all.

-Jane Hirshfield

On a cloudy evening in Vancouver I stood on a busy street corner...

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 19:53:36 -0400

On a cloudy evening in Vancouver I stood on a busy street corner and pointed my iPhone to the sky. Through the eyes of my recent app purchase, Star Walk, 2.99 plus tax, I peered confidently through the white noise into the darkness like never before. The view beyond twinkled and moved, animated with women wearing crowns, Romans carrying swords, children and wolves playing … and crabs and serpents, satellites, nebulas and planets all connected together by a series of green lines between the dots. The sky has never been so alive with answers.

This got me thinking.

A society that sells a pocket universe for the cost of bus fare makes a bold statement: that whatever little mystery there is left comes cheap. I pointed the phone to the concrete at my feet. Below me was Leo on the screen, in full cosmological glory, gnawing on a cigarette butt and an oval-shaped piece of gum turned black. Her stiff grin said society is a know-it-all. Leo, with rib cage frail and exposed, hungers for mystery. So do we.

Modern cosmologists are now hypothesizing something that only a few years ago was considered laughable – the same laugh showered on heretics throughout the ages when they said everything might be wrong. As Big Bang absolutism and ensuing hubris gobbled up the grant money, a minority of scientists lamented rationality’s killing of the universal mystic. How human indeed they thought, to pinpoint the origin of it all to an exact event at an exact time. In turn they asked from their labs of dissent, what if the Big Bang was just a cosmic blip? What if it was merely one universe shedding its skin for another or a single heartbeat in a much larger and incomprehensible and cyclical process? That the universe as it can be observed is 13.75 billion years old from the Big Bang onward, this new crop still agrees, but what before, what parallel, what beyond and what now is anyone’s guess. It used to be that the one thing you could trust other than the certainty of death was that it all started sometime and somewhere. What these cosmologists are saying is that those concepts no longer apply.

I looked to the device in my hand for a morsel to satisfy Leo’s hunger. The light dimmed, the battery died, and Leo darted like a harpoon to the bottom of the abyss. The languages of science and religion may change but the questions remain the same. They are still two sides of the same coin asking the wrong question.

I can point to a star without seeing it but I can’t tell you what that means. I know the names of the stars but on a long enough continuum these names will all change. I was told Earth was a planet when I was born but it might be an asteroid when I die. I know the coordinates of the farthest corners of the abyss but I still get lost in my city. Today, the Big Bang, that rock of our existence, might just be an outer ring cast by an infinite stone-thrower reincarnated from a dead star. Never doubt that even the most absolute of absolute truths can fall away. There is a world so far beyond and there is a world so far behind. Don’t tell me there is no more mystery. Dear Star Walk, I’m still waiting for the app update.

Darren Fleet

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/96/science.html

"It is owing to wonder that people began to philosophize, and wonder remains the beginning of..."

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 22:58:04 -0400

“It is owing to wonder that people began to philosophize, and wonder remains the
beginning of knowledge.”

- Aristotle

Darwin

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 09:09:37 -0400

Darwin

Photo

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 20:32:11 -0400

rainbowsandwitheringwinters: | distant realm | (by...

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 20:31:12 -0400

rainbowsandwitheringwinters:

| distant realm | (by oNe.SwEeT.wOrLd)

"Cities & Eyes 3 After a seven days’ march through woodland, the traveler directed toward..."

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 20:28:14 -0400

“

Cities & Eyes 3

After a seven days’ march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city . You climb them with ladders. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foliage.

There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.

”

- “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino

mangle: (by celestecacc)

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 02:44:54 -0400

mangle:

(by celestecacc)