Medical imaging firm EIZO released a pinup calendar a couple years ago. But they’re a medical imaging firm… so the pinups all look like this:
Miss March
I’m sure most people only read it for the clavicles.
(via Geekosystem)
The Internet makes for at once a terrifying and wonderful community.
Jessica Ahlquist made headlines this week when she (with the American Civil Liberties Union) won a lawsuit against Cranston High School West asking the school to remove a banner from the auditorium. Most of the news coverage doesn’t get specific, but here’s the complete text of the offending banner:
Our Heavenly Father,
Grant us each day the desire to do our best, to grow mentally and morally as well as physically, to be kind and helpful to our classmates and teachers, to be honest with ourselves as well as with others.
Help us to be good sports and smile when we lose as well as when we win. Teach us the value of true friendship.
Help us always to conduct ourselves so as to bring credit to Cranston High School West.Amen
Jessica Ahlquist
Ahlquist suggests this is a prayer and thus doesn’t belong in a public school. The school board saw the banner as purely historical (a gift from the class of 1962-1963) and secular anyway. The eagle-eyed judge deciding the case managed to spot the ”Our Heavenly Father” at the top, the “Amen” at the bottom, and the fact that the text calls upon a higher power to grant these various laudable attributes.
Also, the title on the banner is “School Prayer”. That was probably a useful clue. Judge Ronald Lageux ruled (in a 40 page decision worth reading in full):
No amount of debate can make the School Prayer anything other than a prayer, and a Christian one at that. … While all agree that some traditions should be honored, others must be put to rest as our national values and notions of tolerance and diversity evolve. At any rate, no amount of history and tradition can cure a constitutional infraction.
Bringing the suit did nothing positive for Ahlquist’s social standing, and winning it didn’t help. Police have been investigating threats from social media (read the most wretched if you’re brave) and stepping up patrols around the school and her home. The court’s decision notes:
After Plaintiff’s public comments before the School Committee, and particularly after the lawsuit was filed, Plaintiff was subject to frequent taunting and threats at school, as well as a virtual on-line hate campaign via Facebook.
When the mayor spoke in the very auditorium and told students the banner should stay, Ahlquist reported feeling devalued, “horrible very uncomfortable, alone and isolated.”
Maybe we can help with that. Public tweets @JessicaAhlquist are now overwhelmingly positive. That’s a start. But wait, there’s more! Hemant Mehta, blogger at FriendlyAthiest.com, started a campaign to give Ahlquist a small college scholarship. This tangible show of support compensates someone who has suffered the hatred of ignorant religionists while standing up firmly for her beliefs. That must be taxing in a way we (who have not done it) can’t imagine. But I like MarcoVincenzo’s answer on Reddit best. Why give?
Because rewarding merit is the best way I know of to encourage others to emulate it. And, in a world of limited resources it’s better to focus those resources where they’ll do the most good rather than dilute them to the point where they can’t even be detected.
The American Humanist Association will keep the donated money in a trust fund. When I began researching this piece, the donated amount stood at $8,200. It climbed to $10,000 within hours and topped $12,000 by this morning. Would you care to give a dollar (via PayPal) to support the courage of a 16 year old high school student?
As one Redditor put it, “I was going to buy beer. I decided to spend $10 for this cause … I’m still going to buy beer.”
A teenaged Girl Scout is calling for a boycott on buying cookies this year upon learning that Girl Scouts of the USA admits transgender boys — i.e., admits anyone who identifies herself as a girl regardless of the child’s anatomical gender.
I expected a vitriolic rant on the evils of minorities here. What you’ll hear instead, while still tragically misguided, is a calm, well-researched position:
Of course, what this actually does is increase immensely my respect for Girl Scouts of the USA. I’ll order extra cookies this year as soon as our local troops start selling (in just ten more days).
Whereas Boy Scouts of America openly and thoughtlessly discriminates against its membership (which it can legally do as a private organization), I’ve learned from this news that Girl Scouts of the USA is more accepting. Girl Scouts of Colorado in particular made headlines when a local troop leader initially denied admission to a transgender boy prompting the state organization to intervene with a reminder that “Girl Scouts is an inclusive organization”. Anyone who identifies herself as a girl (regardless of their physical anatomy) may join.
Girl Scouts are also a bit more tolerant toward religious differences. Although the Girl Scout Promise calls for girls to try “to serve God and my country”, after a lawsuit in 1993 they now allow individuals to substitute other phrasing for “God” if that word does not describe their beliefs. (This establishes those who deviate as exceptions to be tolerated rather than equals, but is still an important positive step.)
Ultimately, why would we want to shelter our children from others who are different? At a young age children are already accustomed to discovering that much about the world is different than they had imagined and they will take those differences in stride. A girl in Kindergarten meeting a transgender boy will almost certainly respond by saying, “Well that’s nice; can we go down the slide again now?” An adult meeting the same individual in the workplace for the first time may react less favorably. Even if you cruelly characterize someone’s beliefs as “abnormal” or “wrong”, whom do you serve by pretending that they do not exist in the world? Certainly not your children.
The teen in this video advocates boycotting cookie sales since more than half of those proceeds go to the council, with only 10% to 15% staying with the local troop. She advocates sending cash donations specifically to local troops — presumably those deemed sufficiently intolerant and bigoted. For the rest of us, this is a great excuse to eat more cookies, since funding the council is funding the same organization that’s willing to intervene when it sees intolerance in local troops.
The website behind the video also provides a form letter to send to Girl Scouts of the USA administration to protest the decision. I’ll be sending a letter of support.
The Bicycle Lift
Have you ever been enjoying a pleasant bike ride when an enormous, unconquerable hill ruined the entire outing? Norway has solved this problem with Trampe: The Bicycle Lift.
Position your bicycle beside the rail and stand on the metal footplate, which when the machine is activated will propel you (and your bicycle along with you) up the hill. The website gives some instructions:
While standing astride the bicycle, put your left foot on the left pedal. Furthermore, place your right foot in the start slot of the start station. Stretch your right leg backwards determinedly while still keeping your right foot in the start slot. Remember, you are preparing for the coming push from the soft start mechanism.
From now on, the lift will carry you.
This is a brilliant if not entirely practical idea. Norway’s is one of only two bicycle lifts in the world.
Doritos, as they have in years past, invited ordinary citizens to make Doritos commercials, with the most popular commercial chosen by voters to air during the 2012 Super Bowl.
I’ll save you a little time: the five finalists are all mediocre. But this submission from David Ward (“Make Your Own“) is just great:
He also submitted an entry for the same contest in 2010 titled Forget Everything Else, which is also funny.
Like most Americans, I sat glued to the television screen in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The most vivid clip I remember showed a group of pedestrians fleeing down a Manhattan street as a cloud of dust closed in behind them.
My immediate thought was: “Those special effects are so fake!”
Having never seen a building actually collapse upon a city full of people before, the only way my mind knew how to judge the event was against special effects from fiction depicting alien attacks and super-earthquakes. Against that yardstick, they looked at once both unreal and more terrifying.
Michal Kosakowski created a short film called Just Like the Movies that depicts the September 11 attacks using scenes from films. Some of the clips feature alien ships and other obvious anachronisms, but the timeline of events and the overall visual recall dramatically what really happened that day.
Supposedly an actual message from a school answering machine:
File this under “if it’s not real, it should be”.
Countdown to 25 Days of Christmas
ABC Family is advertising (honestly) a “Countdown to 25 Days of Christmas”.
So, they have a 25 Days of Christmas event, effectively counting down to Christmas. But since that’s not here yet, for the last ten days of November they’re having a countdown for when they can have their Christmas countdown. But even that isn’t here yet, so all they’re doing right now is advertising that they’re going to have a countdown until the other countdown.
And what will really eat at you if you think about this is that somewhere at ABC there had to have been a meeting where someone said, “So, how many days until we can start airing the promos for the Countdown to 25 Days of Christmas?”
Finnish designer Jirka Vinse Jonatan Väätäinen (pronounced “Yirka” and “Vah-tay-nen”) has pieced together some “real life” portraits of Disney princesses in Photoshop. Here’s Princess Aurora:
Princess Aurora
The first time I saw the end of this TV advertisement from Google, I had to rewind TiVo in order to watch the whole thing again. (I think that was the first time I ever used TiVo to not skip commercials.) The same ad was on again last night, and it’s still just as touching.
There’s a similar ad recognizing Dan Savage’s It Gets Better project, and I find both very reminiscent of the ad Google ran during last year’s Superbowl: Parisian Love.
Remember when Apple’s “Hello, I’m a Mac” ads were the ones people actually wanted to watch? Now Google’s even taking that away.
