Oh Hey There

Mar 12

Fellow Crackers

sexartandpolitics:

We’re all racist, white ladies and dudes. This isn’t, initially, our fault. Society is one racist mother fucker and we leech off its cultural teat from the day we’re born. It is impossible… IMPOSSIBLE… for you to grow up white and not have some racist bullshit diffuse into your brain. We are treated differently than people of color and most of us don’t notice because we don’t spend time with people of color. We end up thinking, when we isolate ourselves like that, that how we are treated is how -everybody- is treated. White folks are rude to people of color, white folks are dismissive of people of color. White folks don’t have to learn a god damn thing about people of color but you’re damn certain people of color know about white folks. They have to. We run this shit. Our cultural palette is the de facto norm for pretty much everything that isn’t niche marketed.

If we don’t confront our racial bullshit, like how racial epithets are in our heads and we THINK THEM, then we’re the racist assholes we are afraid we are. But if you confront this shit and understand that you are fucking racist and there’s not a thing you can do to make that go away, you can start ameliorating this problem. You can see what behaviors, ideologies, and thoughts are examples of the particular racism you’ve absorbed and you can work on them! It’s a wonderful thing!

But I like all music, except rap and country.

(via fuckyeahhipsterkitty)

(via fuckyeahhipsterkitty)

slaughterhouse90210: “People see everything through the lens of their obsessions.” — Francine Prose, Goldengrove

slaughterhouse90210:

“People see everything through the lens of their obsessions.”
— Francine Prose, Goldengrove

thediscography: A 63-minute aural exploration of Daft Punk’s 2001 masterpiece, “Digital Love.” What started out as a simple idea for a podcast with a few interviews and a few music clips evolved into a pseudo-documentary, before finally taking shape as a sort of critical mashup. Give it a listen! (Available as an MP3.) By Scott Woods, featuring myself, Nate Patrin, and Brian MacDonald. Turned out well, I think, and I normally don’t like hearing my own voice played back at all. Cool! (We all know how I feel about “Digital Love”.)

thediscography:

A 63-minute aural exploration of Daft Punk’s 2001 masterpiece, “Digital Love.” What started out as a simple idea for a podcast with a few interviews and a few music clips evolved into a pseudo-documentary, before finally taking shape as a sort of critical mashup. Give it a listen! (Available as an MP3.)

By Scott Woods, featuring myself, Nate Patrin, and Brian MacDonald. Turned out well, I think, and I normally don’t like hearing my own voice played back at all.

Cool! (We all know how I feel about “Digital Love”.)

Mar 11

loscheiner: I think we cracked the case. After 5 hours of diagnostic testing, I think my co-clinician and I have figured out what’s going on with our client.  He exhibited difficulties in several aspects of language processing, like word-finding and sentence repetition, but had completely normal vocabulary scores.  His reading was poor, despite normal phonemic awareness and phonics skills.  His phonological processing was normal except some scores that were skewed due to poor phonological memory.  This made us think that maybe all of the issues were memory-related.  If you don’t have a good working memory, you won’t be able to do things like repeat sentences, or nonwords, or digit strings (three areas that were especially challenging for him).  Working memory could also affect reading: if you’ve already forgotten the words at the beginning of the line, you’re going to have a shaky grasp on the material, resulting in extremely low comprehension, even if you have a vocabulary that would allow you to understand all the words. Tests administered: KBIT (Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test)CTOPP (Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing)CELF-4 (Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals)TOWRE (Test of Word Reading Ability)TERA-3 (Test of Early Reading Ability-3)TOSWRF (Test of Silent Word Reading Fluency)TAPS-3 (Test of Auditory Processing Skills-3)TORC-4 (Test of Reading Comprehension-4)DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Early Literacy Skills)PPVT (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test)EVT (Expressive Vocabulary Test) I like my diagnostic clinic.  Actually, it might be the clinic that I like the most: fitting together scraps of evidence, and putting together a puzzle.  The bad part is that the puzzle is a living, breathing person, and at the end, we have to tell the parents that there is a piece missing.  In this case, it appears to be a cognitive piece.  Parents don’t want to hear this.  They want their child to have 10 fingers, and 10 toes, the right number of chromosomes, and a functional working memory.  They don’t want to hear that their kid has a problem, let alone one that is beyond the clinician’s scope. I don’t know how to fix a working memory problem; it’s unclear that anyone can.  If it was an attention problem, then maybe we could work on that, or get the kid some meds that would help.  But his attention is fine: he’s not ADD, he’s not spaced out.  He just doesn’t have the cognitive desk space available to hold things he’s hearing and seeing in his mind long enough to work on them.  Other than teaching a kid strategies to compensate for the deficit, there really isn’t anything that can be done. I can make your kid segment and blend the sounds in words, I can get him to read, and spell, and I can get him to produce all of the sounds of the English language.  I can help kids who stutter and kids who have poor eye contact and kids with swallowing disorders.  But I can’t change this kid’s brain, and that makes me feel shitty. Lolo’s been pacing around with her cane and poppin’ vicodin all week.

loscheiner:

I think we cracked the case.

After 5 hours of diagnostic testing, I think my co-clinician and I have figured out what’s going on with our client.  He exhibited difficulties in several aspects of language processing, like word-finding and sentence repetition, but had completely normal vocabulary scores.  His reading was poor, despite normal phonemic awareness and phonics skills.  His phonological processing was normal except some scores that were skewed due to poor phonological memory.  This made us think that maybe all of the issues were memory-related.  If you don’t have a good working memory, you won’t be able to do things like repeat sentences, or nonwords, or digit strings (three areas that were especially challenging for him).  Working memory could also affect reading: if you’ve already forgotten the words at the beginning of the line, you’re going to have a shaky grasp on the material, resulting in extremely low comprehension, even if you have a vocabulary that would allow you to understand all the words.

Tests administered:

KBIT (Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test)
CTOPP (Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing)
CELF-4 (Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals)
TOWRE (Test of Word Reading Ability)
TERA-3 (Test of Early Reading Ability-3)
TOSWRF (Test of Silent Word Reading Fluency)
TAPS-3 (Test of Auditory Processing Skills-3)
TORC-4 (Test of Reading Comprehension-4)
DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Early Literacy Skills)
PPVT (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test)
EVT (Expressive Vocabulary Test)

I like my diagnostic clinic.  Actually, it might be the clinic that I like the most: fitting together scraps of evidence, and putting together a puzzle.  The bad part is that the puzzle is a living, breathing person, and at the end, we have to tell the parents that there is a piece missing.  In this case, it appears to be a cognitive piece.  Parents don’t want to hear this.  They want their child to have 10 fingers, and 10 toes, the right number of chromosomes, and a functional working memory.  They don’t want to hear that their kid has a problem, let alone one that is beyond the clinician’s scope.

I don’t know how to fix a working memory problem; it’s unclear that anyone can.  If it was an attention problem, then maybe we could work on that, or get the kid some meds that would help.  But his attention is fine: he’s not ADD, he’s not spaced out.  He just doesn’t have the cognitive desk space available to hold things he’s hearing and seeing in his mind long enough to work on them.  Other than teaching a kid strategies to compensate for the deficit, there really isn’t anything that can be done.

I can make your kid segment and blend the sounds in words, I can get him to read, and spell, and I can get him to produce all of the sounds of the English language.  I can help kids who stutter and kids who have poor eye contact and kids with swallowing disorders.  But I can’t change this kid’s brain, and that makes me feel shitty.

Lolo’s been pacing around with her cane and poppin’ vicodin all week.

aaaaaaaand last animal pic [via deathlord, dogfromspace]

aaaaaaaand last animal pic [via deathlord, dogfromspace]

via deathlord, mesialdrift

via deathlord, mesialdrift

via deathlord, curlywhirl

via deathlord, curlywhirl

Pushing Back Against the Methane Tipping Point -

via azspot:

A piece in the latest issue of Science shows that there’s a considerable amount of methane (CH4) coming from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, where it had been trapped under the permafrost. There’s as much coming out from one small section of the Arctic ocean as from all the rest of the oceans combined. This is officially Not Good.

Here’s why: methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, significantly more powerful than carbon dioxide. There are billions of tons of methane trapped under the permafrost, and if that methane starts leaking quickly, it would have a strong feedback effect — warming the atmosphere and oceans, causing more methane to leak, and on and on. The melting of methane ice (aka “methane hydrates” and “methane clathrates”) is probably the most significant global warming tipping point event out there. If we see runaway methane from underneath the Siberian permafrost, we could see temperatures increasing far faster than even the most pessimistic CO2-driven scenarios — perhaps as much as 8-10° C, very much into the global catastrophe realm. To put it in context: rapid methane releases have been implicated in extinction events in Earth’s geologic past.

[video]