tlatoani

Oh, wow. Someone's done a set of images of modern movies as Russian folk art. Some of them are obvious from the images, some aren't. Thanks to naamah_darling for the link.

ETA: Warning; some of the ads on the site may be NSFW.

ETA, also: I've put my guesses as to what the movies are behind a cut, here...

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The stupidest political candidate in America.

Seriously. If you think you have a dumber one, please post in comments.

If they'd had that at the San Francisco Zoo, maybe those guys would have gone and molested the bison or something.

Via robin_d_laws, who found it here. I have no idea what the non-English writing says, so if someone out there does, please let me know.

Other people are covering the Tibet situation and the protests against the Beijing Olympics exhaustively, so I'm not going to duplicate that. Instead, here are some facts I was surprised to learn about the Torch itself. I'll ask the questions here so you can guess; answers are behind the cut:

1. Who originated the tradition of running the Torch from Athens to the site of the Olympics?

2. How many Torches do they actually make for each Olympics?

3. Who are those Chinese guys in the blue and white uniforms who run along with it?

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This is an unusual photo, but one reason it's unusual isn't immediately apparent. Ready?

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...it can always get older. Meet Pac-Txt.

Pac-Txt!
--------
You awaken in a large complex, slightly disoriented. Glowing dots hover mouth level near you in every direction. Off in the distance you hear the faint howling of what you can only imagine must be some sort of ghost or several ghosts.

> left
Umph! You walked into a wall.

> forward
You have moved.

> forward
You have moved.

> look
You are in a long corridor. You may go forward or backward and there are glowing dots in every direction. There is a glowing dot hovering near you.

> eat
You have eaten the glowing dot!

There's a meme going around right now called the Color Analysis Test. There have been other memes like it in the past. They tell you a lot of very insightful-seeming things about yourself, which may lead you to believe that they're really getting at some fundamental truths about your life. In a sense, they are -- but probably not in the sense you were thinking.

Check this video out. The performer in it is a UK-based magician named Derren Brown. Even if you know what he's doing, you won't be bored (it's safe for work, btw):



Psychics like Sylvia Browne and John Edward use the exact same techniques as Derren Brown to do their readings, or to "speak" to people's dead relatives. So do good tarot card readers. Some of them (Browne and Edward, for example) are doing it with full knowledge that they're running a scam. Others may have convinced themselves they really have psychic powers and may not consciously be cold reading. The difference between them and Derren Brown is that he admits he's a stage magician and they claim to have paranormal powers. For more on cold reading, go here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading

http://skepdic.com/coldread.html

Someday, we may find definitive evidence of people with actual psychic powers out there. Anything is possible. But anyone who looks like they might be using cold reading -- is. And internet memes that purport to make insightful statements about you based on colors you pick are doing the exact same thing Derren Brown did, but with worse production values.

Take a look at the word problem below, and make an attempt to answer it before you click the cut. If you suck at math, just go ahead and estimate an answer. If you're a physician, accountant, engineer, or anyone else whose job actually requires you to use math and consider probabilities, and where mistakes can actually harm people, take a genuine shot at it.

1% of women at age forty who participate in routine screening have breast cancer. 80% of women with breast cancer will get positive mammographies. 9.6% of women without breast cancer will also get positive mammographies. A woman in this age group had a positive mammography in a routine screening. What is the probability that she actually has breast cancer?

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I don't want to distract anyone from the serious business of, you know, leaving me anonymous Valentine's Day messages, but this was just too insane for me to hold off on. Someone found a set of blocks used to teach Chinese kids English. They start out okay:



Then they start to get a little off, then wrong, then blatantly wrong, and then everything just goes to hell. You have to see this to believe it. I am in awe. I don't even know how they managed this. It should not be possible.

Check them out here.

(Found a few really good China photos that we haven't shown around, so I figured I'd share. If you want to see previous China photos, search "Zhongguo" in my LiveJournal, or go back through the archives and look for posts starting with it.)

The visible Chinese security presence at Tiananmen Square.

We were there, as previously discussed, with the Canadian National Wushu team. Specifically, the Wu Style Tai Chi Chuan delegation.

Several of our fellow students started talking about how cool it would be to do tai chi right out in front of the Forbidden City, and the idea was getting some support. Me, I doubted that guy up there -- or his nearby but unseen colleagues -- could tell the difference between our 108-move long form and Falun Gong exercises. But I was happy to watch from a distance, so someone could carry the news to their families. They chickened out. ;-)

Cultural side note: that thing behind him that looks like a giant concrete tomahawk is a holdover from Imperial times. They used to have two big poles like that, made out of wood, flanking the gates to the Forbidden City. Anyone who wanted to could come up and nail a petition to one of the poles, as a way of pleading to the Emperor (realistically, to his bureauecracy) for redress of grievances. Now? They're made of concrete. Not so good for nailing petitions to, eh? Accidental, I'm sure.

Since this thing is spreading through my friends list like wildfire, a couple comments about how much it actually sucks, and how mystified I am that people are just filling this thing out without comment:

1. The final question of the meme should be "did you notice that the default assumption of this meme is that you are at least middle class", where if you answer no, you are flagged as privileged. Because to answer no to that question, you have to have blindly filled in this thing without noticing that it doesn't ask:

* whether you even knew who both of your parents were
* whether they're alive
* whether you received regular medical care as a child
* whether your family was on public assistance
* whether your parents even finished high school
* whether your parents have served time in prison
(and a lot more stuff)

Seriously, this meme looks like it was developed by a bunch of idealistic, probably white, upper-middle-class college students.

2. And... it was. It's actually designed for use as part of a university class exercise (by which I mean both "an exercise performed in a classroom" and "an exercise about social class") where each time you answer yes, you take one step forward, and at the end of the exercise the instructor leads a discussion about how some people had more help (i.e. more steps) getting to college than others did, but they're all in the same place now. In context, which would include discussion of why they left a bunch of stuff out (probably because they were afraid of stigmatizing people whose families don't fit the middle-class ideal or who ate the government cheese) and the fact that it's being used by current college students to pick out fine gradiations among themselves, it's a reasonable exercise. Taken out of context, as the entire world of LJ is now doing, it's complete crap. Here's the context:

http://wbarratt.indstate.edu/socialclass/social_class_on_campus.htm

3. And in addition to actually not being either (a) an actual indicator of class privilege, or (b) even designed as one, it's really unbelievably tedious and long, so please, pretty please, use an LJ cut?

To see the full story, and a picture of what "Stir-fried wikipedia with pimientos" looks like, go here. ("Pimientos" is a mistranslation too, btw.)

(The previous best menu screwup I've seen is here. But this one wins for being so surreal.)

UPDATE: The winter storm warning has been CANCELLED, though there's still an advisory in effect. There will still be some unpleasant weather between midnight and Sunday morning, and you won't want to stay until 4am, but it won't be as bad as originally expected.

Just a reminder -- our Giant Holiday Party is TONIGHT.

And yes, it will mark the return of the Chocolate Fountain!

P.S. Any bad weather will likely hit around midnight, so if you come earlier in the evening than that you should be fine.

UPDATE: The winter storm warning has been CANCELLED, though there's still an advisory in effect. There will still be some unpleasant weather between midnight and Sunday morning, and you won't want to stay until 4am, but it won't be as bad as originally expected.

This... is in remarkably poor taste, but I can't quite bring myself to condemn it because the elderly folks involved seem to be having so much fun. If you're not sure what's going on, the photo after the cut should help.

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Architecture is one of those things where you generally want to call a professional rather than attempting it yourself. And I'm not saying that just because I've got three architects on my friendslist, I'm saying it because of all the horror stories I read during my torts class in law school.

Every so often, though, a gifted (and obsessed) amateur comes up with something very cool by breaking that rule and lives through the experience. I recently ran into two of these things, and wanted to share them. Here's the first; since I've misplaced the link for the second, it will follow soon.

The picture above is from the Watts Towers, in the sadly infamous LA neighborhood of the same name. They were built by a construction worker named Sabalto "Sam" Rodia between 1921 and 1955. After he got sick of being hassled (mostly about the towers), he sold the property. The city of LA, predictably, wanted to tear the towers down. Preservationists negotiated a compromise: they would have the Towers tested for stability. They tried to pull the towers down using a crane, and failed. They broke the crane. The Towers still stand, and are now a historic landmark. Here's a website about them.

A surprising number of you knew what this was (what's surprising to me isn't that a lot of you knew, but that I hadn't run into them before), and some who didn't know managed to guess correctly. I've unscreened responses in the previous post, but if you want to know what it is, or just want to see some cool links, the answer is behind the cut.

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The device pictured was made obsolete by a technology all of you have used at one point or another, but it survived for some time in at least one specialized application where its properties gave it advantages over the newer tech. The last one was manufactured in 1970.

Because any good image of this device is going to give you guys the manufacturer's name, which you can easily run a Google search on, I'm going to use a slightly different format rather than the traditional "what the hell is this thing". I had never heard of these before, and have never handled one, so I'm really curious:


1. Did you know what this was (without googling it)?

2. Have you ever used one before, or even seen one in use?

3. Do you have one you want to get rid of? ;-)


For those of you who want to guess without spoilers, I'll hold off on posting more about it. I've got a link to a Flash demo of one in use.

Incidentally, all comments are screened. I'll unscreen in a while.

EDITED TO ADD: For newer readers of my LJ, the previous installments in this series are here and here. I should really do these more often...

I want to say that the wall to the left is actually the wall of the Kairouine Mosque, but I'm not sure. If anyone out there reads Arabic, we've got another version of this shot that shows more of that plaque and you might be able to tell.

Again, shot on Friday, thus the streets are relatively empty. L shot this one.

ETA: The enhanced image was good enough for a non-LJ colleague of mine, who was able to identify it as being the Mosque of Sidi Ahmed Al-Najani.

It turns out that Scott Fahlman was not, as reported, the inventor of the emoticon.

Ambrose Bierce was. (From Language Log, which is also currently engaged in tearing apart the press coverage of the "men are now happier than women" article for misleading use of statistically insignificant results. Seriously, look at the graphs.)