Oh Hey There

Fellow Crackers

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:57:45 -0600

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)

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:32:11 -0600

(via fuckyeahhipsterkitty)

slaughterhouse90210: “People see everything through the lens of...

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:17:25 -0600

slaughterhouse90210:

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

thediscography: A 63-minute aural exploration of Daft Punk’s...

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:06:31 -0600

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”.)

loscheiner: I think we cracked the case. After 5 hours of...

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:20:49 -0600

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]

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:28:47 -0600

aaaaaaaand last animal pic [via deathlord, dogfromspace]

via deathlord, mesialdrift

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:27:40 -0600

via deathlord, mesialdrift

via deathlord, curlywhirl

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:26:02 -0600

via deathlord, curlywhirl

Pushing Back Against the Methane Tipping Point

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:02:06 -0600

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.

Super Mario Bros. 2 Lost Levels My roommate Peterson Jones and I...

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:00:51 -0600

Super Mario Bros. 2 Lost Levels

My roommate Peterson Jones and I downloaded this game on the Wii virtual console. The story goes that it never hit America because it was “too hard”—there are mushrooms that hurt you—which is bullshit, because we could have internalized the game’s many lessons and been a stronger nation for it.

Cluster - Sowiesoso (1976) OM NOM NOM NOM AMBIENT

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:21:14 -0600

Cluster - Sowiesoso (1976)

OM NOM NOM NOM AMBIENT

COLORS: “PACKET of SUNSHINE”

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:26:30 -0600

COLORS: “PACKET of SUNSHINE”

"The Chans [4chan and its sister sites, the other “Chans”—7chan, 420chan, 711chan, etc. al.] are like..."

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:50:30 -0600

“The Chans [4chan and its sister sites, the other “Chans”—7chan, 420chan, 711chan, etc. al.] are like a particularly huge toxin processor for human consciousness. They are also, I suspect, our best preview of where human consciousness is going.”

- Lost in the Filth Simulacrum | h+ Magazine (via elsi) — I dig the first half of that statement.

tristn: Our relationship is like the singing dog. Do you want me to finish this thought?

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:42:32 -0600

tristn: Our relationship is like the singing dog. Do you want me to finish this thought?
marykgo: ...sure.
tristn: It's not that it sings well, but that it sings at all.
marykgo: *closes eyes, obviously rolls closed eyes*

My own favourite garden path: http://bingoparaphernalia.tumblr.com/post/316210148/and-for-several-long-moments-i-wondered-who-the

and also this crash blossom: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2063

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:31:26 -0600

Thanks! I should have mentioned that when you get a garden-path in a headline, it’s called a crash blossom. The More You Know!☆

thebardsociety: tristn: bmichael: A garden path sentence is a...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:27:18 -0600

thebardsociety:

tristn:

bmichael:

A garden path sentence is a sentence for which the responder’s most intuitive interpretation is an incorrect one, ultimately luring them into an improper parse. (h/t @tjmahr)

It’s missing my favorite garden-path: The horse raced past the barn fell.

I’m pretty sure that many of these are not grammatically correct:

First one is okay;

Second one ought to be ‘The man, whistling, tunes pianos’ or ‘The whistling man tunes pianos’;

Third should be ‘The cotton that clothing is made of grows in Mississippi’ or ‘The cotton, of which clothing is made, grows in Mississippi’;

Fourth is surprisingly solid;

Fifth: ‘The author wrote that the novel was likely to be a best-seller’ or ‘The author wrote “the novel was likely to be a best-seller”’;

Sixth: ‘The tomcat, curled up on the cushion, seemed friendly’ or ‘The tomcat that was curled up on the cushion seemed friendly’;

Seventh: ‘The man, returned to his house, was happy’ or ‘The man that was returned to his house was happy’; and

Eighth is pretty solid (‘government plans’ is a reasonably common subject) but could be ‘The government’s plans to raise taxes were defeated’.

Nice to get some grammar exercise once in a while.

Orthography is not grammar. All of these sentences are perfectly grammatical and can be easily understood when said aloud with appropriate intonation.

bmichael: A garden path sentence is a sentence for which the...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:11:56 -0600

bmichael:

A garden path sentence is a sentence for which the responder’s most intuitive interpretation is an incorrect one, ultimately luring them into an improper parse. (h/t @tjmahr)

It’s missing my favorite garden-path: The horse raced past the barn fell.

Images for ESG - ESG Says Dance To The Beat Of Moody

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:33:50 -0600

Images for ESG - ESG Says Dance To The Beat Of Moody

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-3-7)

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:51:12 -0600

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-3-7):

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

natface: Ha. Ha. …Ha. No.

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:16:35 -0600

natface:

Ha. Ha. …Ha. No.

Oh Hey There

Fellow Crackers

(via fuckyeahhipsterkitty)

slaughterhouse90210: “People see everything through the lens of...

thediscography: A 63-minute aural exploration of Daft Punk’s...

loscheiner: I think we cracked the case. After 5 hours of...

aaaaaaaand last animal pic [via deathlord, dogfromspace]

via deathlord, mesialdrift

via deathlord, curlywhirl

Pushing Back Against the Methane Tipping Point

Super Mario Bros. 2 Lost Levels My roommate Peterson Jones and I...

Cluster - Sowiesoso (1976) OM NOM NOM NOM AMBIENT

COLORS: “PACKET of SUNSHINE”

"The Chans [4chan and its sister sites, the other “Chans”—7chan, 420chan, 711chan, etc. al.] are like..."

tristn: Our relationship is like the singing dog. Do you want me to finish this thought?

My own favourite garden path: http://bingoparaphernalia.tumblr.com/post/316210148/and-for-several-long-moments-i-wondered-who-the and also this crash blossom: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2063

thebardsociety: tristn: bmichael: A garden path sentence is a...

bmichael: A garden path sentence is a sentence for which the...

Images for ESG - ESG Says Dance To The Beat Of Moody

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-3-7)

natface: Ha. Ha. …Ha. No.

My own favourite garden path: http://bingoparaphernalia.tumblr.com/post/316210148/and-for-several-long-moments-i-wondered-who-the

and also this crash blossom: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2063