if you ever think mythology is boring or serious business or whatever shit
just remember that cerberus, the hell-hound and guard dog of the underworld, comes from the root indo-european word ḱerberos, which evolved into the greek word kerberos, which got changed to cerberus when it went from greek to latin
ḱerberos means “spotted”
that’s right
hades, lord of the dead, literally fucking named his pet dog spot
wnyc:
Take a trip inside the magical world of….The Book of Clocks. This guide sits in the control rooms at WNYC and has the standard “clocks” for each show. How long the segments are, where the breaks come, when the network hands off to the local affiliate, etc… Without this, we’d be flying blind. Also makes for great bedtime reading.
-Jody, BL Show
Like many decisions that seem arbitrary at first, hurricane naming has unexpected practical consequences. In the mid-1980s, Belgian psychologist Jozef Nuttin showed that people like their initials more than they like other letters in the alphabet. For example, in one study Nuttin found that Europeans who spoke 12 different languages were 50% more likely to identify their own name letters among their top six favorite letters of the alphabet.
In a more recent twist on Nuttin’s basic result, psychologist Jesse Chandler and his colleaguesfound that people donate significantly more money to hurricanes that share their initials. So Roberts, Ralphs and Roses donated on average 260% more to the Hurricane Rita relief fund than did people without R initials. Also in 2005, people with K initials donated 150% more to the Katrina relief fund, and in 2004 people with I initials donated 100% more to the Ivan relief fund.
This information isn’t just idly interesting. Since we know that people are more likely to donate to hurricanes that share their first initials, the World Meteorological Organization has the power to increase charitable giving just by changing the composition of its hurricane name lists. In the United States, for example, more than 10% of all males have names that begin with the letter J—names like James and John (the two most common male names), Joseph and Jose, Jason, and Jeffrey. Instead of beginning just one hurricane name with the letter J each year (in 2013, that name will be Jerry), the World Meteorological Organization could introduce several J names each year. Similarly, more American female names begin with M than any other letter—most of them Marys, Marias, Margarets, Michelles, and Melissas—so the Organization could introduce several more M names to each list.
We also know that people tend to pay more attention to their own names, so hurricanes with popular names rather than uncommon names are likely to attract far more attention from possible donors. For example, the 2013 North Atlantic list features the name Joyce—the first name of approximately 6,000 American women—but it could just as easily feature the name Jennifer, which is shared by 1,500,000 American women. The name Dorian (the first name of 9,000 American males) will also be on the 2013 North Atlantic list, but a Hurricane David (a name shared by more than 3,500,000 American males) would attract far more attention. These are simple, inexpensive tweaks, but, since people donate upwards of 50% more when hurricanes share their first initials, they have the capacity to increase charitable giving by many millions of dollars over time. (According to one simple back-of-the-napkin calculation, aid agencies might have attracted up to $700 million more since 2000 had they named the hurricanes using this “optimal” approach.)
Brent Christensen constructs massive towers that he has coined Ice Castles. The monuments are made entirely out of ice with no supporting substructure. “Christensen’s series of Ice Castlesare unpredictably constructed towers of ice fortified by more ice. The enchantingly frosty structures start off with a pool of water, naturally frozen atop grass, as their foundation. From there, the artist attaches countless icicles, using water to cement them in place, with the help of about 20 crew members who work tirelessly to deliver Christensen’s self-made icicles from his personal rack, where water drips and forms 3,000 to 5,000 icicles per day. Millions of gallons of water are used for each castle’s assembly, allowing it to reach heights of 20 to 25 feet. Additionally, the interior design of the chilly architectural constructions include tunnels, archways, walls, and stairs. At night, they’re even illuminated from within by multi-colored LED lights, heightening the magical air of the setting.”
I am sick to death of everything frozen, snowy or wintry, but even I can admit this is pretty damn cool.
During oral argument last week in Shelby County v. Holder, the constitutional challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice Roberts asked, “[I]s it the government’s submission that the citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North?” Solicitor General Verrilli responded, “It is not, and I do not know the answer to that … .” This post offers a preliminary answer to the Chief Justice’s question, using recent data. Our initial results suggest that the coverage formula of Section 5 does a remarkably good job of differentiating states according to the racial attitudes of their nonblack citizens. There are essentially three schools of thought about how best to measure racial prejudice using survey questions. Some researchers favor explicit measures of prejudice (“old-fashioned racism” or stereotyping), based on agreement with statements like “blacks are less intelligent than whites” and “blacks are lazy.” Others favor symbolic measures of prejudice or “racial resentment,” based on questions about affirmative action and whether blacks have gotten “more than they deserve.” Still others favor measures of implicit or subconscious bias. For the results reported here we use explicit stereotyping, as it remains disputed whether racial resentment measures capture prejudice as opposed to conservatism, and it is uncertain whether implicit bias predicts political behavior. We created a binary measure of stereotyping that roughly captures whether a person is more prejudiced toward blacks than is typical of nonblack Americans. Our data source is the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES), which asked non-black respondents to rate their own racial group and blacks in terms of intelligence, trustworthiness, and work effort, on a scale of 0-100. On average respondents ranked their own group about 15 points above blacks on each trait. We coded respondents as holding “prejudiced” views with respect to blacks on a particular trait if the difference between their rating of their own racial group and their rating of blacks exceeded the national mean difference for the trait. To create an overall measure of prejudice for each respondent, we summed the number of traits on which the respondent was more prejudiced than the national mean. Finally, we converted this sum into a binary variable, coding as “prejudiced overall” those respondents who exceeded the national mean with respect to at least two of the three traits.[1] To be clear, a respondent whom we have coded as “not prejudiced overall” may well be quite prejudiced. But the Chief Justice’s question—whether “citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North”—is a question about relative prejudice, and this is what we are trying to capture. We provide two estimates of the proportion of adult, nonblack residents in each state who are “prejudiced overall.” The first is based on simple disaggregation of the large NAES dataset (N=19,325). This method should work pretty well for the largest states but may yield unreliable estimates for smaller states, which contribute relatively few respondents to the NAES sample. For the second estimate we use multilevel regression with post-stratification (MRP), a recently developed statistical technique that has been shown to yieldremarkably accurate estimates of state-level public opinion. We model prejudice as a function of individual-level covariates (sex, race, age, and education) and a set of state-level predictors (black population, percent of blacks in poverty, segregation, and income inequality).
Using either technique we find a strong positive correlation between Section 5 “covered status” and anti-black prejudice, but with MRP the correlation is truly stunning.
We are in fact witnessing a redefinition of reality. The Internet is a good example. While classic media are limited to showing what happens elsewhere, the Internet allows its users to virtually transport themselves to this elsewhere. The occupant of the McWorld system thus sees both everywhere and nowhere. The Internet inaugurates a new lifestyle that one could call electronic nomadism, but which is also an electronic colonialism. As Nelson Thall, Marshall McLuhan’s successor at the University of Toronto, points out, “in the end, the power of the Internet is … that it allows the entire world to think and to write like North Americans.
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| — | Alain de Benoist, Confronting Globalization (via nydwracu) |
Have you ever considered the internal anatomy of cartoon characters? Artist Michael Paulus clearly did and then he created an awesome series of illustrations entitled Character Study. After closely examining the designs of beloved cartoon characters, Michael drew these fascinating pieces exposing the characters’ truly unique skeletal systems.
Michael’s artwork is available as prints and panels over at his Etsy shop.
[via io9]
Infrared Landscapes by Richard Mosse
Taken in the Eastern Congo, Richard’s candy-coated landscapes were created through a combination of an obsolete wooden field camera and a rare technique produced by Kodak Aerochrome, a product developed for military use in the detection of aerial bombing targets, but used stunningly here, drawing out the dark crimsons and blood-red corals of the hidden spectrum within. These pieces are currently showing at The Armory Show through March 10th, 2013.
Artist: Website (via: Design Boom)
Megan Mosholder: A Tale of Two Bridges, Savannah GA, 2012, Interior/Exterior Installation, video, found objects, black light, braided mason line, screw eyes, acrylic, wood
Olafur Eliasson - The Weather Project (2003)
“Representations of the sun and sky dominate the expanse of Turbine Hall. A fine mist permeates the space, as if creeping in from the environment outside. Throughout the day, the mist accumulates into faint, cloud-like formations, before dissipating across the space.
At the far end of the hall is a giant semi-circular form made of hundreds of mono-frequency lamps.
Generally used in street lighting, mono-frequency lamps emit light at such a narrow frequency that colors other than yellow and black are invisible, thus transforming the visual field around the sun into a vast duotone landscape.”
