What I Found Today (2/23/11)

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Laughing Historically: How America was Founded on Drinking : A podcast covering my favorite genres–funny dudes, talking about drunk history, on a couch. Also, holy crap the founding fathers drank a hefty amount. Good to know that everyone who wrote the Constitution was probably hungover when they started it. Ah, history.

Why We All Need Planned Parenthood: My apologies for the new Gawker layout. But, this post–on Jezebel, from a woman who has been using Planned Parent for her main health care provider because she’s poor–is well worth a read in light of the recent cuts to the service.

Baen Free Library: Baen is a fantasy publisher that I read buckets and buckets of as a child. They published Mercedes Lackey’s books, and she was fabulous for both writing about gryphons (I was eight) and being from my stomping grounds of Tulsa, OK. The Free Library provides eBooks for tons of the authors Baen carries, with the authors’ consent and through the publisher. Very cool!

Homemade Flour Tortillas: In honor of my Spring Break trip to Texas (skulking around SXSWi with my internet coworks–here’s hoping I don’t wind up in a dumpster!), a recipe for homemade flour tortillas from the Homesick Texan. I want good tortillas so badly, you guys. Mmmm. (Dorm food Wednesday!) The article came via the fabulous folks at CRAFT, which publishes links to interesting crafts, delicious-looking food, and strange cocktails. Huzzah, the good life!

What I Found Today (2/11/11)

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DIY Twix Bars: There is nothing about these that I do not want. Just go look at the candy pictures. GO LOOK. I cannot wait until I have my own kitchen.

4-Hour Dentist: Found via kungfugrippe. For those who don’t know, this is a parody of the 4-Hour Workweek, which is a book that I am supposed to like as a life hacky person but do not in part because the author creeps me out (his second book has a section on 15-minute orgasms, which just makes me sad). 4-Hour Workweek talks about how Ferriss moved to spending much less time on his work by outsourcing things to India and being good at marketing. I’m “eh” on the book but all for parodies.

The Antichoice Suffering Agenda: Posted up on Yes Means Yes, my favorite blog about consent issues and the law (yes I read more than one shush), this is a great outline of what is wrong with the Protect Life Act as it currently stands. Basically, not only are individual practitioners now allowed to refuse to perform abortion services and then refer the patient to another doctor in the hospital, but entire hospitals are allowed to refuse. This is the case even for ectopic pregnancies, in which the best case scenario is that the fetus is aborted–the choice is between that and death of the woman and the fetus. American health care policy: it matters!

How Did Dinosaurs Do It?: Apparently scientists aren’t entirely sure, and it’s a valid field of inquiry (12-year-old me is pleased). Totally worth a read to see the various convoluted ways in which dinos may have gotten it on.

Professor’s Pen Point

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Fickle, High, or Strict: all three = rageI think I was in high school when I learned about the engineer’s/freelancer’s triangle. It’s the old joke about good, fast, and cheap–you can have two of the three but you give up control of the third. It has the distinction of being both funny and true. However, I think there’s an overlooked version of this for professors and their grading: to keep it thematic, I suppose you could call it the professor’s pen point.

You have three options: your grading can be strict, your grading scale can be high, or you can be capricious with what your questions mean. You can be two of the three, but if you pull all three your students will hate you. I know this because a professor who I normally love just managed to move from his typical pairing (strict decisions about what he’ll take and a high grading scale) into the dreaded all-three zone. In a class in which an A is a 94 or above, an A- is a 92-94, and a B+ is an 89-92, he just gave a test where the highest grade in the entire class was a 91. Literally no one got an A. No one got an A-. All of us are annoyed.

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What I Found Today (2/9/11)

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How Sarah Palin Tortures the Bible: A takedown of Palin’s use of scripture, using more scripture in that magic little thing called “context,” written by Chris Lehmann, the Awl’s religion columnist. The link was found via Ana Marie Cox‘s Twitter feed. She’s also a journalist, and founded The Wonkette, my favorite political site for its focus on politics through a lens of “gin and anal sex.”

Culture in the US vs. Europe: Found via Zadi Diaz’s Twitter stream. A discussion among several women (and the male moderator) about what it means to live in a country where culture is judged by its success at being exported. Also brought up is an interesting discussion about what it means to contain a multitude of cultures–to be Hispanic, East-cost-to-West-coast, southern, in addition to being American. I really liked the discussion of what it means to have a global Internet culture–on some level, what matters is that you’re from the web. Zadi hosts the truly excellent EpicFu video podcast, which is targeted towards teens/young adults and is sort of Rocketboom for teh youths.

Red Panda Video: It’s a group of red pandas, trying to undo a door knob. My ovaries grew three sizes, y’all.

A Vest Pocket Guide to Brothels in 19th-Century New York for a Gentleman on the Go: Found in some archive somewhere, and stuck up by the NYT. It is truly funny, and the commentary by the person who assembled it is just excellent. Worth a read next time one of your professors decides to claim that we are culturally dead because of our obsession with sex/worthless internet media (not that this has ever happened in my classes, golly).

Woodruff Library Undergraduate Research Competition: A totally cool example of what libraries can do well! Undergrads at Emory College can receive $500 for submitting the winning research paper/project. Unfortunately, it does not appear to be open to Oxford College students, which makes me sad because we have no similar contest and our library, though it is staffed by some excellent people, is tiny. All of my sources for my projects come from Woodruff…

What I Found Today (2/7/11)

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Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero Talk: I’ve been geeking around on 43folders.com, Mann’s main site. He writes about productivity, mostly through reclaiming your time by removing yourself from systems that constantly feed you information (like email, the subject of this speech). I think a lot of the points that he makes–particularly that non-personal email should be based on actions; you should be able to do something with your email and get out–are really valuable, particularly when emailing professors. Now, if only the people with access to the all-students email list at Oxford would learn this…

Poorly targeted Google Ad: From my inbox. If internships fail this summer…

Romance Novelists Uncover What Women Really Want: A Jezebel takedown (complete with Gawker’s new cracked-out layout–which on each of the affiliate sites has a different little explanation text because why not) of a USA Today column on how dudes should behave more like dudes in romance novels. “Please, men. Do not turn into a stone gargoyle while we are having sex.” Includes a link to the equally hilarious Tumblr Romance Club, a collection of ladies who do some truly excellent book summaries. “HOWEVER, since both of their names are on the back of the book, you know the drill (lol drill). SPOILER ALERT: FUCKING AHOY!”

Packers Won the Superbowl: Packers, woo!

Glenn Beck Loses His Shit About Spiderman: Why the hell is he a Jewish grandpa in the beginning? Who knows! (I want him saying “atheist, god-like scientist” over and over as my ringtone. It will soothe me to sleep.)

AOL Bought HuffPo and Paul Carr Wrote a Thing on It: For those who are not regular TechCrunch readers (avoid the comments, I’m warning you), the story so far is that a few months back, AOL bought TC. Commenters accused TC of selling out and were generally irritating because TC is where YouTube commenters go when they’ve been drinking. Today, AOL bought HuffPo, as part of an overarching strategy to eventually quit sucking quite so hard and become relevant again. Cue comments about teh leftists, worries about headlines moving towards Google bait, and several more months of jokes about AOL. Huzzah!

Reevaluating Facebook

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New Year's Eve

Seriously. They're awesome parties.

I removed my Facebook wall today. I’m going to try to avoid Facebook as much as I can, and see if that goes well. I think it will. Realistically, there are very few people I interact with regularly, and I have redundant systems–email for my friends who don’t got to school with me, phone for my family, and running into people at my little tiny school if they need me. My contact information is still up there, if someone needs to text me.

While my wall is gone, I’m going to reevaluate what I’m using Facebook for. I’m not one of those people who truly wants to delete my profile; for one, I have had useful and good things come of Facebook, and it is by far the thing that gets me the most hits on this site or on my HackCollege articles. It’s a great way to distribute content I find interesting or useful (or–to be honest–that I create). There are links that I routinely want to send to individuals, and I think it’s probably ruder and more intrusive to send those via email. The reusable K-cup that I found the other day is totally awesome for my friend with a Kurig, but that doesn’t make it worth an email. And, oftentimes, it’s the way that I find out about parties friends are throwing–real-life events that I want to attend because my friends throw awesome parties.

Perhaps the way to use it is to reevaluate the Facebook ettiquette. Currently, I’m like most people; I friend pretty much anyone who requests me, regardless of degree of intimacy. Perhaps if I knocked that back down to the 50 or so people I actually care about, Facebook would become useful for me again. It is difficult to go through the 500-ish friends I have accumulated, though, and rearrange my settings so that I’m back where I want to be. And, because I’m a worrier, I’m always somewhat afraid that I’ll unfriend someone who I really will want to get in touch with at some point. The fact that I possess about 800 ways to do this outside of Facebook (or, with Facebook messages, within Facebook) does not seem to appease my lizard brain. And, if I lost those contacts I would have difficulty keeping people up-to-date with things I write, which is something I want to do.

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Number Six

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This is the sixth-most-played song in my iTunes library (after, among other things, “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” and the Beastie Boys). It’s a cover of another song, which is number eight.

It’s weird to me that they’re both in my top ten. They’re both very much tied to strong emotional periods in my life, they way you have when you’re in high school freshman year of college, and you Feel with a capital “f.” The first song is a cover of the second, originally by The Knife, a weirdass Swedish band that wears bird masks and makes electronic music, which I was introduced to as a junior in high school by the boy who would later turn my heart into ground beef.

It was the summer after my junior year of high school, and it was one of those summers that actually mattered (and the last time I would have a free summer before being shunted off to Nerd Camp I, Nerd Camp II, and employment for different kinds of personal growth). Most of my friends were a year older than me, and I got sucked into their celebrations of having graduated in between being mad at my parents and brewing wine in a Nalgene in my closet (memories!). There was a lot of drinking Two Buck Chuck and finally feeling like I had people who liked me enough that they wouldn’t shun me if I danced around them, and taking long-exposure glowstick photos, and singing along to Kimya Dawson in the car without a whole lot to worry about.

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Emory Medical, Je T’Aime

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Baby moles in a nest.

These are much cuter than mine. Image courtesy of Flickr user Hillbraith.

Yesterday, I went to the dermatologist. I am, to use the scientific term, “moley,” so I go every year or so to have all my moles checked out and, if I’m lucky, numbed and lopped off. It’s very exciting, and has taught me just how much Novocaine stings when injected into not-your-jaw.

So, yesterday the PA is examining me, and we’re at the rather embarrassing part of the exam where this woman is looking at my ass for moles while asking me what major I am, and she started prodding one. She thought about it, measured it, examined it with something that appeared to be a cousin of those clip-on booklight magnifying glasses that old people buy, and stopped. “Well,” she said, “Either it’s grown bigger–which is bad–or it’s, er…. stretched.”

The woman was very diplomatically trying to tell me that I either had cancer or that my ass had gotten large. (I’m pretty sure it’s the latter. Thanks, Lil’s!) She then went on to proscribe me something for acne which I hadn’t actually asked for, which was entertaining. However, body image issues aside, it does seem that I’m cancer-free, so that’s nice.

This is the same PA who, when I first started visiting her at 13, told me I would probably be fine because the moles on my back were “covered with a fine, downy layer of hair.” Which is exactly what every body-conscious middle school girl needs to hear.

After the dermatologist, I went to the dentist. There, the dental hygienist made me watch my gums bleed heavily after she poked them will a metal toothpick in an attempt to, presumably, build character and/or scar me for the next six months.

It’s possible I need to find different doctors.

Global Warming FTW!

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Screenshot from Weather.com showing that it was 46 degrees in Tulsa, OK today.

This is freaking me out.

On Saturday, the family and I ventured up to Winslow, AR to stay with my grandparents for Christmas. After the 14-hour drive (complete with our very own simple dog) to my grandparents’ my family loaded back up into the car for the 2 1/2 hour drive to Tulsa, OK that we make every year in order to placate my sister and me. It may have been 8 years ago, but dammit, we are still bitter about being uprooted.

In Tulsa I got to see a few of my friends who were in town and eat some Mexican fusion, so it was good times all around. We spent part of the day wandering around Utica Square, in December, in Tulsa, without jackets. You guys, this is freaking me out. The first year we went back to Tulsa, my friends and I hung out at the zoo because we were 12 and what the hell else were we going to do. We had to cower inside the rain forest exhibit to restore feeling to our extremities. This weather is unseasonably nice, is what I’m saying.

Because I am from the Midwest, this mostly makes me idly wonder what God is going to do in order to even the karmic scales. I’m thinking a hail storm, tomorrow. Given that my grandparents’ power just went out (they live on a mountain in a town with 399 people), this may, in fact, be the route that He has chosen to go. Still not worse than a tornado! Continue reading →

Use Stereomood for Focused Study Music

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If you’re someone who has to have music to study to, preparing playlists can take up more time than the actual learning. Particularly if you want to have control over what kind of music you’re listening to, most music services require a great deal of fine-tuning.

Pandora, though excellent if you don’t need to focus, builds playlists on artist characteristics rather than moods. Because it’s curated automatically, it can sometimes wildly miss the mark–tossing up “Boy Named Sue” when you want unintrusive music for other activities.* Grooveshark‘s great, and its selection can’t be beat, but it requires time-consuming curation. It’s a fabulous option if you want control over a party playlist, but it’s too time-intensive for study background music–the same issue as iTunes playlists, which have the added downside of being confined to music you actually own. And, though Frat Music crosses over most of these issues, it isn’t quite what you want to study to.

Read the rest at HackCollege.