Assembly point for my social media ramblings about data & life. I don't post much - check out my twitter feed instead. @carlystrasser
“I never thought of marriage as something only for men and women. But I’d never marry a guy I didn’t like.” Willie Nelson on gay marriage, read the whole exclusive interview on texasmonthly.com! #willie #gaymarriage #humanrights Photograph by Gary Miller (at Texas Monthly)
Willie Nelson’s marriage equality art!
Total Willie Nelson move.
Source: texasmonthly
Source: cineraria
Norma Jean (the cat) and Norma Jean (the legend).
#catsthatlooklikepinupgirls
Don’t underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back. One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don’t take it personally, but listen hard to what’s going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally. Understand: every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you. Underneath almost all those attacks are the words: get back, get back to where you once belonged. When Elizabeth Dole pretends that she isn’t serious about her career, that is an attack on you. The acquittal of O.J. Simpson is an attack on you. Any move to limit abortion rights is an attack on you — whether or not you believe in abortion. The fact that Clarence Thomas is sitting on the Supreme Court today is an attack on you.
—
Nora Ephron’s commencement speech at Wellesley College in 1996 (via rachelfershleiser)
RIP Nora Ephron.
(via motherjones)
(via motherjones)
Source: malindalo
Source: whatshouldwecallgradschool
Yes, I am the inventor of the sideways “smiley face” (sometimes called an “emoticon”) that is commonly used in E-mail, chat, and newsgroup posts. Or at least I’m one of the inventors. By the early 1980’s, the Computer Science community at Carnegie Mellon was making heavy use of online bulletin boards or “bboards”. These were a precursor of today’s newsgroups, and they were an important social mechanism in the department – a place where faculty, staff, and students could discuss the weighty matters of the day on an equal footing. Many of the posts were serious: talk announcements, requests for information, and things like “I’ve just found a ring in the fifth-floor men’s room. Who does it belong to?” Other posts discussed topics of general interest, ranging from politics to abortion to campus parking to keyboard layout (in increasing order of passion). Even in those days, extended “flame wars” were common.
Given the nature of the community, a good many of the posts were humorous (or attempted humor). The problem was that if someone made a sarcastic remark, a few readers would fail to get the joke, and each of them would post a lengthy diatribe in response. That would stir up more people with more responses, and soon the original thread of the discussion was buried. In at least one case, a humorous remark was interpreted by someone as a serious safety warning.
This problem caused some of us to suggest (only half seriously) that maybe it would be a good idea to explicitly mark posts that were not to be taken seriously. After all, when using text-based online communication, we lack the body language or tone-of-voice cues that convey this information when we talk in person or on the phone. Various “joke markers” were suggested, and in the midst of that discussion it occurred to me that the character sequence :-) would be an elegant solution – one that could be handled by the ASCII-based computer terminals of the day. So I suggested that. In the same post, I also suggested the use of :-( to indicate that a message was meant to be taken seriously, though that symbol quickly evolved into a marker for displeasure, frustration, or anger.
Within a few months, we started seeing the lists with dozens of “smilies”: open-mouthed surprise, person wearing glasses, Abraham Lincoln, Santa Claus, the pope, and so on. Producing such clever compilations has become a serious hobby for some people. But only my two original smilies, plus the “winky” ;-) and the “noseless” variants seem to be in common use for actual communication. It’s interesting to note that Microsoft and AOL now intercept these character strings and turn them into little pictures. Personally, I think this destroys the whimsical element of the original.
(via crookedindifference)
(via theatlantic)
Source: cs.cmu.edu
Are you qualified to talk about books for Fox News?
Source: bookriot.com
Watch 13 other hologram wins and fails. (Or watch video of Hologram Tupac here.)
(Also, “Snoop Dogg should be in every diagram” is a thing now.)
Source: superpunch2
Ernest Hemingway admires a catch aboard the Pilar, 1934. His understanding of the game fishes of the Atlantic, which he shared with the Academy of Natural Sciences, helped shape the field of ichthyology.
Nothing like a little Morning Hemingway.
Hemingway + marine science = awesome.
Source: explore-blog
Source: thelifeguardlibrarian
