the message in the bottle is the booze

Cleaning out my bookmarks.

Photographs of Kaiping. Most photos in this flickr set are of diaolou, residential towers built by wealthy Chinese who needed protection against bandits--and to show of their status. They're fascinating; many were built in the early part of the 20th century by merchants who had business abroad, and have a lot of Western influences. It's also interesting how the builders took the largely horizontal layout of traditional Chinese dwellings and made it vertical.

Neda Lives An article about another Neda, whose life was thrown into chaos because she had a similar name. Neda Agha-Soltan died, and Neda Soltani was eventually forced to leave the country.

Monkeys hate flying squirrels, report monkey-annoyance experts

Mila's Daydreams. Photographer has baby and lots of time.

Professor Newt's Distorted History Lesson. The medieval history blog, Got Medieval, takes on some of the misrepresentations of history being used to argue against the "ground zero mosque."

Colonialism, Soap, and the Cleansing Metaphor. Sociological images has some old advertisements for soap.

The most isolated man on the planet. His tribe was murdered for their land. Now he lives alone in the jungle, rebuffing all attempts at contact--sometimes violently--by outsiders. He's still a target for land developers, because according to the Brazilian government, the land he lives on is his own. The story is tragic in so many ways.

A Lifetime, Washed Away. A New York Times op ed by a Pakistani reflecting on the incomprehensible destruction there.

Linguistics Challenge Puzzles. Ranging from really easy and suitable for children to pretty difficult. Some of the pages seem to be broken, but most work for me.

Russia in color, a century ago. An amazing Big Picture post of pictures taken in Russia at the turn of the century. The colors are as vibrant as if they were taken yesterday... or maybe in 1980.

A Secret History. A New York Times article on the history of female Islamic scholars.

Via telophase: That "I write like?" meme? It turns out it's an advertising campaign for a scammy Vanity Press. I didn't do the meme so I didn't read all of the comments or anything, but I've seen it pop up on my friends list.

The internet's favorite cat finally speaks.

Mystery Group Claims to Spread Immigrants' Info: A mysterious hate group has released a list of 1,300 people with Hispanic names that they claim to be illegal immigrants, demanding that they be deported. The list includes their personal information, including SSN, workplace, address--and even more chillingly, the due dates of pregnant women. I sincerely hope that they don't succeed in provoking violence against these people. I can't believe that isn't one of their motivations, since it's such a predictable consequence.

South Korea targets Japanese collaborators' descendants. Colonialism: leaves a mess everywhere.

Via Sociological Images, New Beetle Gets a Sex Change:

New Beetle is about to get a testosterone injection. A mean-looking chopped top, 200 H.P. motor, widened stance, and a larger interior will transform the quintessential chick car into a rock-hard rock star.

...

Okay, I'm not a particular fan of the New Beetle, but this irks me, because it's a prime example of how companies panic when they find out that their product has become "girly." It happens to television shows and now, to cars.

And I suspect it will backfire.

The thing is, people really are truly gosh-darn sexist, and it's not easy to get rid of the stigma of being "girly." If you're a guy who cares about such things, you don't want to be the one at the party who says, "Mine's the blue Beetle--but it's the new one, not the old girly one, stop looking at me like that oh god I can see my penis shriveling before your eyes."

The people who might have bought the Beetle because it's cute, nostalgic, and different, no longer have the same reason to, because they've gone and made it look like a not particularly handsome hatchback. They've brought it straight into "Why don't I just buy a Mini Cooper?" territory. Or, even worse, "Why don't I buy a Golf?"

Upgrading the engine is a good idea, though. Buy a Mini Cooper is precisely what my mom did. She loves the looks of the "girly" New Beetle, but she likes fast things. Shove that up your stereotypes.

Via telophase, The Great Escape From Slavery: an article about a married couple who escaped from slavery by the wife posing as a white man, and her husband posing as her slave.

A few months ago, some researchers found that women who ate a lot of breakfast cereal were more likely to give birth to boys. It got brief mention in the media and the blogosphere, and a lot of people questioned how that could be possible.

It turns out that it was a basic methodological error.

The authors had performed 132 tests on the same data set, and by doing so, had increased the odds that they would get at least one strange result. You can read more about it here.

Statistics is a funny thing. And it matters.

DNA's Dirty Little Secret

A man named John Puckett is arrested for a murder committed decades earlier. He has no known connection to the victim apart from the DNA in her mouth, which was discovered to match his after law enforcement did a database search. The jury is told that the chance of a false match is less than one in a million.

Typically, law enforcement and prosecutors rely on FBI estimates for the rarity of a given DNA profile—a figure can be as remote as one in many trillions when investigators have all thirteen markers to work with. In Puckett’s case, where there were only five and a half markers available, the San Francisco crime lab put the figure at one in 1.1 million—still remote enough to erase any reasonable doubt of his guilt. The problem is that, according to most scientists, this statistic is only relevant when DNA material is used to link a crime directly to a suspect identified through eyewitness testimony or other evidence. In cases where a suspect is found by searching through large databases, the chances of accidentally hitting on the wrong person are orders of magnitude higher.

In fact, due to the age of the DNA evidence, and the method used to identify Puckett--searching a database for matches, rather than testing people already connected to the crime--the actual odds of a false match were closer to one in three.

Puckett's lawyers, one of whom has a master's degree in biology and molecular genetics, are barred from arguing this in court; the judge calls it "essentially irrelevant." The jury never hears their corrected statistic, about the high rate of coincidental matches in database searches, or even the fact that Puckett is identified through a cold hit. This is not unusual. Similar things happen in courts across the country.

Puckett is convicted for the murder.

Meanwhile, the agencies in charge of these databases, including the FBI, actively block academics and defense counsel from access to them, making it difficult to research the true odds of matches. The FBI cites privacy concerns, but many researchers believe that their real reason is that investigation might undermine faith in database matches using the FBI's figures.

The article has much more and is worth reading.

You Should Have Seen This & You Should Have Also Seen This: Greg Rutter's Definitive List of The 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet Unless You're a Loser or Old or Something & Greg Rutter's Second Definitive List of The 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet Unless You're A Loser or Old or Something

I'm tempted to start on a "You Should have Also Seen This Too" list, because I can think of some things that he clearly forgot!

Verizon Math Lesson

G: [big sigh] Okay, I think I have to do this again. Do you recognize that there's a difference between one dollar and one cent?
A: Definitely.
G: Do you recognize there's a difference between half a dollar and half a cent?
A: Definitely
G: Then, do you therefore recognize there's a difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents?
A: No.

A man tries to convince multiple Verizon service monkeys that there's a difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents after being overcharged for data coverage. Both hilarious and sad. This happened a long time ago, but I guess Consumerist decided to repost it because it's just that good.

Shanghai Photo Gallery

Boingoing has more updates on the laptop-webcam-candy pills story:
School spying: infected laptops mandatory
FBI investigating Lower Merion School District over laptop spying
ACLU and EFF on school where spy-laptops were mandatory

I would pay at least .002 dollars to know what actually happened, but it's certainly looking more and more like some people need to be kicked in the head until they realize students are people who deserve privacy and respect.

Brian Cox attempts to teach a toddler to recite Hamlet.

Beaker's cover of "Dust in the Wind" interrupted by mean Youtube comments.



(He looks so sad. But don't worry, it only gets worse!)

The last speaker of the Bo language has died. Bo was an Andamanese language. The Andamanese languages have evolved independently for as far back as we can know; most are extinct. Wikipedia has this interesting tidbit on their Andamanese languages article:

Possibly their most distinctive characteristic is a noun class system based largely on body parts, in which every noun and adjective may take a prefix according to which body part it is associated with (on the basis of shape, or functional association).

(They cite "Deep Linguistic Prehistory: with particular reference to Andamanese" by Niclas Burenhult, which I haven't had a chance to read yet. It's not that long and I plan to.)

The Metafilter post I linked to has links to pages with more information about Bo, including one that has sound files of Bo being spoken. You can probably ignore most of what's said about Bo in mainstream news sources, though.

Here are some colorful pictures from India during the last month. Everything from traditional Kathakali dancers to motorcycle stunts. And an escaped tiger. But my favorite is this one:



Queens girl Alexa Gonzalez hauled out of school in handcuffs after getting caught doodling on desk -- in erasable marker, no less. What the hell is wrong with people? This was the part of the article that really stood out for me: :

She and her mom went to family court on Tuesday, where Alexa was assigned eight hours of community service, a book report and an essay on what she learned from the experience.

I imagine myself as the twelve-year-old arrested for scribbling on a desk with erasable marker and asked to write an essay about what I learned:

"I learned that when people are given control over other people, it encourages their worst authoritarian impulses. Any infraction, no matter how minor in reality, becomes serious in their minds because they see it as a threat to their authority. This is why kids get arrested for drawing on desks or their wrists broken for dropping some cake."

"My experience has taught me if I actually turn in an essay that describes what I learned truthfully, it will also be seen as a threat to authority, and I'll probably be punished. It has taught me to toe the line. Fuck you all."

(Of course, when I was twelve, I wasn't that well-spoken, but it would have had a similar sentiment.)

North Korea's economic moves bring new misery:

At the heart of the turmoil is a series of dictates imposed late last year by Kim Jong Il's regime: revaluing the currency, closing down privately run markets in favor of state-owned shops and banning the use of foreign currency and the sale of many imports from China.

Someday, this regime will fail, but it seems as though the suffering of the people has no bearing on when. The government is simply not accountable to them; they only see themselves as accountable to their ideology.

Here's mostly the same information on the revaluation in another article.

Victim of child porn seeks damages: Now an adult, she has sued some of those convicted of possessing a copy for restitution, with mixed results.

Via just about everyone: One of the most trippy political ads I've ever seen. Demon sheep in loafers!

Americans' Role Seen In Uganda Anti-Gay Push (NYT)

The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

Of course, after portraying homosexuals as malicious predators who want to rape children and destroy society, the evangelicals played dumb: "We didn't mean to foment hate!" I'm sorry, assholes, but you're lying when you say you love homosexuals; your reprehensible slander betrays your real feelings. Whatever psychosexual issues are at the root of your obsession with homosexuals, it's a hateful obsession.

You are hateful.

Own up to it. Say "I hate homosexuals" and at least be honest men.