Administration
Happy birthday to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
moniqueleigh and oldmotherchaos!
Hello to new readerbombidol!
Medical
Still crazy stuffed up, weak, hacking cough, difficulty breathing. Blech. Adam feels better today, at least.
Yatta!
( 'Heroes' personality test )
Why I love Joss Whedon
Let's Watch A Girl Get Beaten To Death. This is not my blog, but I don’t have a blog, or a space, and I’d like to be heard for a bit.
Last month seventeen year old Dua Khalil was pulled into a crowd of young men, some of them (the instigators) family, who then kicked and stoned her to death. This is an example of the breath-taking oxymoron “honor killing”, in which a family member (almost always female) is murdered for some religious or ethical transgression. Dua Khalil, who was of the Yazidi faith, had been seen in the company of a Sunni Muslim, and possibly suspected of having married him or converted. That she was torturously murdered for this is not, in fact, a particularly uncommon story. But now you can watch the action up close on CNN. Because as the girl was on the ground trying to get up, her face nothing but red, the few in the group of more than twenty men who were not busy kicking her and hurling stones at her were filming the event with their camera-phones.
There were security officers standing outside the area doing nothing, but the footage of the murder was taken – by more than one phone – from the front row. Which means whoever shot it did so not to record the horror of the event, but to commemorate it. To share it. Because it was cool.
Continues at the link.
Cool!
The address book desk. Underneath the desk I have stuck a grid of RFID tags, and on the top surface, the same grid of post-it notes. With the standard Nokia Service Discovery application it is possible to call people, send pre-defined SMSes or load URLs by touching the phone to each post-it on the desk. On the post-its themselves I have hand-written the function, message and the recipient. This is somewhat like a cross between a phone-book, to-do list and temporary diary, with notes, scribbles and tea stains alongside names.
Initial ideas were to spraypaint or silkscreen some of the touch icons to the desk surface, and I may well do that at some point. But for quick prototyping it made sense to use address labels or post-it notes that can be stuck, re-positioned and layered with hand-written notes.
Hey, baby - is that Stilton you're wearing?
The makers of the famously pungent Stilton blue cheese have launched their own perfume... It claims to "recreate the earthy and fruity aroma" of the cheese "in an eminently wearable perfume". The perfume, blended by a Manchester-based aromatics company, features a "symphony of natural base notes including yarrow, angelica seed, clary sage and valerian". It was commissioned by the Stilton Cheesemakers' Association as part of a campaign to persuade more people to eat their product.
My partythingie.
Will be Friday. What's a good start time? 7? Give everyone time to get home from work?
Moms of girls!
http://www.girlsgotech.org/
Daily Science
Jellyfish Lake, on the island nation of Palau, was once connected to the ocean through an underwater tunnel. At some point the tunnel closed off, trapping jellyfish in the saltwater lake. With no natural predators, the jellyfish population exploded, leaving a breathtaking (if a bit scary) underwater ecology.
And that is all for now.
Happy birthday to
moniqueleigh and oldmotherchaos!Hello to new reader
bombidol!Medical
Still crazy stuffed up, weak, hacking cough, difficulty breathing. Blech. Adam feels better today, at least.
Yatta!
( 'Heroes' personality test )
Why I love Joss Whedon
Let's Watch A Girl Get Beaten To Death. This is not my blog, but I don’t have a blog, or a space, and I’d like to be heard for a bit.
Last month seventeen year old Dua Khalil was pulled into a crowd of young men, some of them (the instigators) family, who then kicked and stoned her to death. This is an example of the breath-taking oxymoron “honor killing”, in which a family member (almost always female) is murdered for some religious or ethical transgression. Dua Khalil, who was of the Yazidi faith, had been seen in the company of a Sunni Muslim, and possibly suspected of having married him or converted. That she was torturously murdered for this is not, in fact, a particularly uncommon story. But now you can watch the action up close on CNN. Because as the girl was on the ground trying to get up, her face nothing but red, the few in the group of more than twenty men who were not busy kicking her and hurling stones at her were filming the event with their camera-phones.
There were security officers standing outside the area doing nothing, but the footage of the murder was taken – by more than one phone – from the front row. Which means whoever shot it did so not to record the horror of the event, but to commemorate it. To share it. Because it was cool.
Continues at the link.
Cool!
The address book desk. Underneath the desk I have stuck a grid of RFID tags, and on the top surface, the same grid of post-it notes. With the standard Nokia Service Discovery application it is possible to call people, send pre-defined SMSes or load URLs by touching the phone to each post-it on the desk. On the post-its themselves I have hand-written the function, message and the recipient. This is somewhat like a cross between a phone-book, to-do list and temporary diary, with notes, scribbles and tea stains alongside names.
Initial ideas were to spraypaint or silkscreen some of the touch icons to the desk surface, and I may well do that at some point. But for quick prototyping it made sense to use address labels or post-it notes that can be stuck, re-positioned and layered with hand-written notes.
Hey, baby - is that Stilton you're wearing?
The makers of the famously pungent Stilton blue cheese have launched their own perfume... It claims to "recreate the earthy and fruity aroma" of the cheese "in an eminently wearable perfume". The perfume, blended by a Manchester-based aromatics company, features a "symphony of natural base notes including yarrow, angelica seed, clary sage and valerian". It was commissioned by the Stilton Cheesemakers' Association as part of a campaign to persuade more people to eat their product.
My partythingie.
Will be Friday. What's a good start time? 7? Give everyone time to get home from work?
Moms of girls!
http://www.girlsgotech.org/
Daily Science
Jellyfish Lake, on the island nation of Palau, was once connected to the ocean through an underwater tunnel. At some point the tunnel closed off, trapping jellyfish in the saltwater lake. With no natural predators, the jellyfish population exploded, leaving a breathtaking (if a bit scary) underwater ecology.
And that is all for now.
