Via the edifying Twitter account How Things Work :
This is how eyes are put into dolls pic.twitter.com/xNd4CPYxhy
— How Things Work (@ThingsWork) October 14, 2015 I guess, if you’d asked me before I saw this, I wouldn’t have this process was going to be pretty. But I wouldn’t have imagined a worse-than- Clockwork-Orange -level horror.
More Notes From The Atlantic The One Thing to Read Before Hillary Clinton's Benghazi T... 1:35 AM ET Coming Out to Your Parents as Tattooed, Cont'd Oct 21, 2015 Next Up: First Contact Day Oct 21, 2015 He Didn't Build a Clock Oct 21, 2015 Quoted Oct 21, 2015 Notes Home Most Popular On The Atlantic He Didn't Build a Clock Chris Bodenner None
Many readers are noting that fact in response to the news that Ahmed Mohamed is moving to Qatar , where he was awarded a full scholarship from the Qatar Foundation to “follow their aspirations in education while fostering a culture of innovation and creativity”:
The kid didn’t “make” anything; he just pulled an old clock apart and put the remains in a box and brought it to school.
Bill Maher tackled the homemade clock myth in the segment seen above. A blogger first exposed it a month ago. And Ian Tuttle pointed out :
Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan, is something of a self-appointed Islamic activist. After he debated Koran-burning Florida pastor Terry Jones in 2011, the Washington Post wrote:
Continue Reading Marion Doss / Flickr History Class and the Fictions About Race in America Alia Wong High-school textbooks too often gloss over the American government’s oppression of racial minorities.
Earlier this month, McGraw Hill found itself at the center of some rather embarrassing press after a photo showing a page from one of its high-school world-geography textbooks was disseminated on social media. The page features a seemingly innocuous polychromatic map of the United States, broken up into thousands of counties, as part of a lesson on the country’s immigration patterns: Different colors correspond with various ancestral groups, and the color assigned to each county indicates its largest ethnic representation. The page is scarce on words aside from an introductory summary and three text bubbles explaining specific trends—for example, that Mexico accounts for the largest share of U.S. immigrants today.
Continue Reading Ronen Zvulun / Reuters Germany Clarifies: We’re Responsible for the Holocaust Adam Chandler Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s remark that a 1920s Palestinian leader inspired Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” has set off a firestorm of criticism.
In the surreal course of less than 24 hours, a controversy featuring the leaders of Israel and Germany over the history of the Holocaust has gone full circle.
On Tuesday evening, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ignited a firestorm with comments made at a Zionist Congress meeting suggesting that Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Palestinian religious leader who held the title of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the 1920s and 1930s, had inspired Hitler to enact the Final Solution , a policy that led to the deaths of more than 6 million Jews during World War II. Here is the remark in question:
Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, “If you expel them, they’ll all come here.” “So what should I do with them?” he asked. He said, “Burn them.”
Continue Reading Apple Music / OVO ... ‘Hotline Bling’ Had Me Like ‘Hotline Bling’ Had Me Like ‘Hotline Bling’ Had Me Like ... Spencer Kornhaber Drake, dancing, devours the Internet.
On the lyrics site Genius.com, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page about any song gaining some attention, you’re likely to find a certain kind of user comment. Comments that say things like “this song had me like,” or “that beat got me like,” and then maybe this image—
Or this one—
Or this one—
The “had me like”/“got me like” formulation isn’t just for music reactions. Adderall can have you like the guy from A Clockwork Orange , Game of Thrones can have you like the stunned Fresh Prince , and most commonly, booty can have you like any number of things—an airman facing off against gravity , someone possessed by the devil , or Nelly marveling, “Goodness gracious ass is bodacious.”
But whether the cause is a beat or a body part, the object of the typical had-me-like sentence—the thing to which you’re comparing yourself—is someone or something that has lost its chill . People resort to had-me-like when they’re overwhelmed with emotion, when whatever they’re feeling can only be expressed physically. No wonder that dance, mankind’s greatest and least-chill mode of physical expression, shows up a lot.
Continue Reading Wang Song / Xinhua Press / Corbis The Dramatic Landscape of China's Gansu Province Alan Taylor Gansu Province, in northwestern China, is about the same size as California, with a population of about 26 million people. Gansu’s diverse landscapes include parts of the Gobi Desert, the Yellow River, numerous mountain formations, and remnants of the Silk Road and the Great Wall of China.
Gansu Province, in northwestern China, is about the same size as California, with a population of about 26 million people. Most of its inhabitants are Han Chinese, with some ethnic Hui and Tibetans. Gansu’s diverse landscapes include parts of the Gobi Desert, the Yellow River, numerous mountain formations, and remnants of the Silk Road and the Great Wall of China. The mostly arid lands range in elevation from about 3,000 feet above sea level to mountains more than 19,000 feet tall. Gathered here are recent images from across China’s Gansu Province.
Continue Reading Stephen Voss ‘We Need an Energy Miracle’ James Bennet Bill Gates has committed his fortune to moving the world beyond fossil fuels and mitigating climate change.
In his offices overlooking Lake Washington, just east of Seattle, Bill Gates grabbed a legal pad recently and began covering it in his left-handed scrawl. He scribbled arrows by each margin of the pad, both pointing inward. The arrow near the left margin, he said, represented how governments worldwide could stimulate ingenuity to combat climate change by dramatically increasing spending on research and development. “The push is the R&D,” he said, before indicating the arrow on the right. “The pull is the carbon tax.” Between the arrows he sketched boxes to represent areas, such as deployment of new technology, where, he argued, private investors should foot the bill. He has pledged to commit $2 billion himself.
Continue Reading Kevin Morefield The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy Ross Andersen Astronomers have spotted a strange mess of objects whirling around a distant star. Scientists who search for extraterrestrial civilizations are scrambling to get a closer look.
In the Northern hemisphere’s sky, hovering above the Milky Way, there are two constellations—Cygnus the swan, her wings outstretched in full flight, and Lyra, the harp that accompanied poetry in ancient Greece, from which we take our word “lyric.”
Between these constellations sits an unusual star, invisible to the naked eye, but visible to the Kepler Space Telescope , which stared at it for more than four years, beginning in 2009.
“We’d never seen anything like this star,” says Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”
Kepler was looking for tiny dips in the light emitted by this star. Indeed, it was looking for these dips in more than 150,000 stars, simultaneously, because these dips are often shadows cast by transiting planets. Especially when they repeat, periodically, as you’d expect if they were caused by orbiting objects.
Continue Reading Gary Cameron / Reuters How Wikipedia Is Hostile to Women Emma Paling Some female editors have been the target of harassment from their male colleagues—and the gender bias has spilled over into the site’s content, too.
She got into the habit of Googling her username, just in case. That’s how, earlier this year, a Wikipedia editor who goes by the username Lightbreather discovered that someone was posting images on a pornographic website and falsely claiming they were her. (The images were linked to her username; Lightbreather has been careful to make sure that no one on Wikipedia knows her real name.) A Google search of the poster’s username led her back to one of her fellow editors.
The photos were only the latest of several incidents of harassment. In 2014, Lightbreather made a request to the Wikipedia administrators: a space on the site to discuss ways to enforce Wikipedia’s civility policy, one of the site’s “ five pillars ” which says editors should always “treat each other with respect and civility.” In a page set up to discuss Lightbreather’s request, the user Eric Corbett, who was then an administrator, told her , “The easiest way to avoid being called a cunt is not to act like one.”
Continue Reading AP/The Atlantic What ISIS Really Wants Graeme Wood The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.
What is the Islamic State ?
Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.
Continue Reading Jeff Christensen / Reuters Trump Is Right About 9/11 Peter Beinart George W. Bush didn’t do all he could to prevent the attack—and it’s time Republicans confronted that fact.
Donald Trump utters plenty of ugly untruths: that undocumented Mexican immigrants are “ rapists ,” that Syrian refugees are committing “ all sorts of attacks ” in Germany and represent a “Trojan Horse” for ISIS. But he tells ugly truths too: that “ when you give [politicians money], they do whatever the hell you want them to do .” And that “ the Middle East would be safer ” if Saddam Hussein and Muammer Qaddafi were still in power.
His latest ugly truth came during a Bloomberg TV interview last Friday, when he said George W. Bush deserves responsibility for the fact that “the World Trade Center came down during his time.” Politicians and journalists erupted in indignation. Jeb Bush called Trump’s comments “pathetic.” Ben Carson dubbed them “ridiculous.”
Continue Reading Latest Notes The One Thing to Read Before Hillary Clinton's Benghazi Testimony ... Coming Out to Your Parents as Tattooed, Cont'd Next Up: First Contact Day He Didn't Build a Clock Quoted More Most Popular On The Atlantic He Didn't Build a Clock Chris Bodenner None
Many readers are noting that fact in response to the news that Ahmed Mohamed is moving to Qatar , where he was awarded a full scholarship from the Qatar Foundation to “follow their aspirations in education while fostering a culture of innovation and creativity”:
The kid didn’t “make” anything; he just pulled an old clock apart and put the remains in a box and brought it to school.
Bill Maher tackled the homemade clock myth in the segment seen above. A blogger first exposed it a month ago. And Ian Tuttle pointed out :
Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan, is something of a self-appointed Islamic activist. After he debated Koran-burning Florida pastor Terry Jones in 2011, the Washington Post wrote:
Continue Reading Marion Doss / Flickr History Class and the Fictions About Race in America Alia Wong High-school textbooks too often gloss over the American government’s oppression of racial minorities.
Earlier this month, McGraw Hill found itself at the center of some rather embarrassing press after a photo showing a page from one of its high-school world-geography textbooks was disseminated on social media. The page features a seemingly innocuous polychromatic map of the United States, broken up into thousands of counties, as part of a lesson on the country’s immigration patterns: Different colors correspond with various ancestral groups, and the color assigned to each county indicates its largest ethnic representation. The page is scarce on words aside from an introductory summary and three text bubbles explaining specific trends—for example, that Mexico accounts for the largest share of U.S. immigrants today.
Continue Reading Ronen Zvulun / Reuters Germany Clarifies: We’re Responsible for the Holocaust Adam Chandler Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s remark that a 1920s Palestinian leader inspired Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” has set off a firestorm of criticism.
In the surreal course of less than 24 hours, a controversy featuring the leaders of Israel and Germany over the history of the Holocaust has gone full circle.
On Tuesday evening, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ignited a firestorm with comments made at a Zionist Congress meeting suggesting that Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Palestinian religious leader who held the title of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the 1920s and 1930s, had inspired Hitler to enact the Final Solution , a policy that led to the deaths of more than 6 million Jews during World War II. Here is the remark in question:
Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, “If you expel them, they’ll all come here.” “So what should I do with them?” he asked. He said, “Burn them.”
Continue Reading Apple Music / OVO ... ‘Hotline Bling’ Had Me Like ‘Hotline Bling’ Had Me Like ‘Hotline Bling’ Had Me Like ... Spencer Kornhaber Drake, dancing, devours the Internet.
On the lyrics site Genius.com, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page about any song gaining some attention, you’re likely to find a certain kind of user comment. Comments that say things like “this song had me like,” or “that beat got me like,” and then maybe this image—
Or this one—
Or this one—
The “had me like”/“got me like” formulation isn’t just for music reactions. Adderall can have you like the guy from A Clockwork Orange , Game of Thrones can have you like the stunned Fresh Prince , and most commonly, booty can have you like any number of things—an airman facing off against gravity , someone possessed by the devil , or Nelly marveling, “Goodness gracious ass is bodacious.”
But whether the cause is a beat or a body part, the object of the typical had-me-like sentence—the thing to which you’re comparing yourself—is someone or something that has lost its chill . People resort to had-me-like when they’re overwhelmed with emotion, when whatever they’re feeling can only be expressed physically. No wonder that dance, mankind’s greatest and least-chill mode of physical expression, shows up a lot.
Continue Reading Wang Song / Xinhua Press / Corbis The Dramatic Landscape of China's Gansu Province Alan Taylor Gansu Province, in northwestern China, is about the same size as California, with a population of about 26 million people. Gansu’s diverse landscapes include parts of the Gobi Desert, the Yellow River, numerous mountain formations, and remnants of the Silk Road and the Great Wall of China.
Gansu Province, in northwestern China, is about the same size as California, with a population of about 26 million people. Most of its inhabitants are Han Chinese, with some ethnic Hui and Tibetans. Gansu’s diverse landscapes include parts of the Gobi Desert, the Yellow River, numerous mountain formations, and remnants of the Silk Road and the Great Wall of China. The mostly arid lands range in elevation from about 3,000 feet above sea level to mountains more than 19,000 feet tall. Gathered here are recent images from across China’s Gansu Province.
Continue Reading Stephen Voss ‘We Need an Energy Miracle’ James Bennet Bill Gates has committed his fortune to moving the world beyond fossil fuels and mitigating climate change.
In his offices overlooking Lake Washington, just east of Seattle, Bill Gates grabbed a legal pad recently and began covering it in his left-handed scrawl. He scribbled arrows by each margin of the pad, both pointing inward. The arrow near the left margin, he said, represented how governments worldwide could stimulate ingenuity to combat climate change by dramatically increasing spending on research and development. “The push is the R&D,” he said, before indicating the arrow on the right. “The pull is the carbon tax.” Between the arrows he sketched boxes to represent areas, such as deployment of new technology, where, he argued, private investors should foot the bill. He has pledged to commit $2 billion himself.
Continue Reading Kevin Morefield The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy Ross Andersen Astronomers have spotted a strange mess of objects whirling around a distant star. Scientists who search for extraterrestrial civilizations are scrambling to get a closer look.
In the Northern hemisphere’s sky, hovering above the Milky Way, there are two constellations—Cygnus the swan, her wings outstretched in full flight, and Lyra, the harp that accompanied poetry in ancient Greece, from which we take our word “lyric.”
Between these constellations sits an unusual star, invisible to the naked eye, but visible to the Kepler Space Telescope , which stared at it for more than four years, beginning in 2009.
“We’d never seen anything like this star,” says Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”
Kepler was looking for tiny dips in the light emitted by this star. Indeed, it was looking for these dips in more than 150,000 stars, simultaneously, because these dips are often shadows cast by transiting planets. Especially when they repeat, periodically, as you’d expect if they were caused by orbiting objects.
Continue Reading Gary Cameron / Reuters How Wikipedia Is Hostile to Women Emma Paling Some female editors have been the target of harassment from their male colleagues—and the gender bias has spilled over into the site’s content, too.
She got into the habit of Googling her username, just in case. That’s how, earlier this year, a Wikipedia editor who goes by the username Lightbreather discovered that someone was posting images on a pornographic website and falsely claiming they were her. (The images were linked to her username; Lightbreather has been careful to make sure that no one on Wikipedia knows her real name.) A Google search of the poster’s username led her back to one of her fellow editors.
The photos were only the latest of several incidents of harassment. In 2014, Lightbreather made a request to the Wikipedia administrators: a space on the site to discuss ways to enforce Wikipedia’s civility policy, one of the site’s “ five pillars ” which says editors should always “treat each other with respect and civility.” In a page set up to discuss Lightbreather’s request, the user Eric Corbett, who was then an administrator, told her , “The easiest way to avoid being called a cunt is not to act like one.”
Continue Reading AP/The Atlantic What ISIS Really Wants Graeme Wood The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.
What is the Islamic State ?
Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.
Continue Reading Jeff Christensen / Reuters Trump Is Right About 9/11 Peter Beinart George W. Bush didn’t do all he could to prevent the attack—and it’s time Republicans confronted that fact.
Donald Trump utters plenty of ugly untruths: that undocumented Mexican immigrants are “ rapists ,” that Syrian refugees are committing “ all sorts of attacks ” in Germany and represent a “Trojan Horse” for ISIS. But he tells ugly truths too: that “ when you give [politicians money], they do whatever the hell you want them to do .” And that “ the Middle East would be safer ” if Saddam Hussein and Muammer Qaddafi were still in power.
His latest ugly truth came during a Bloomberg TV interview last Friday, when he said George W. Bush deserves responsibility for the fact that “the World Trade Center came down during his time.” Politicians and journalists erupted in indignation. Jeb Bush called Trump’s comments “pathetic.” Ben Carson dubbed them “ridiculous.”
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