Month: August 2011

Watch This: The Most Realistic Simulation of Spiral Galaxy Formation to Date | 80beats | Discover Magazine

via blogs.discovermagazine.com

This is just pretty damn cool. Thirteen billion years compressed into less than three minutes of video, and it supports some interesting theories of how the universe got to be the way it is.

Science rocks.

A Victory for Recording in Public! | Citizen Media Law Project

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via citmedialaw.org

So this is really good news. A First Circuit federal appeals court has stated clearly and unequivocally that citizens have a right to videotape police officers conducting police activities in public. I hope the word of this spreads so that others refuse to be intimidated by police. (Actually, I would hope that police departments around the country would instruct their officers not to bother people who are videotaping public police activity unless they are actually interfering.)

Feminist Media Criticism, George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire, And That Sady Doyle Piece | ThinkProgress

I’ve written a great deal lately about the way that nerds can be less than progressive, whether by failing to establish anti-harassment policies and ethos at conventions or by relying on continuity and fidelity to text as a way to disguise an antipathy to diversity. But if we want the nerdosphere to be a more progressive place, I think it’s important to mount critiques that will actually be effective, rather than ones that can make the critics feel self-righteous, which is why I’m so dismayed by Sady Doyle’s condescending and willfully misleading critique of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series and the people who read it.

via thinkprogress.org

This is a fascinating piece. Click the pic for the column, and be sure to click the link in it to see the “Sady Doyle piece” it refers to.

NOTE: I originaly and unintentionally posted the entire column. I have shortened it and made the picture actually link to the whole thing.