Latest Posts by nisiablog - Page 2
Original image by Diana Walker for Time.
Original image by Diana Walker for Time.
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DorcFBk4sf8)
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SySZdvsFYt4)
It could be key to more common brain diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayj4p3WFxGk)
(via New Galactic Supercluster Map Shows Milky Way's 'Heavenly' Home )
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQhbhpU9Wrg)
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvmFhcGCRzA)
I have nothing more to say.
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51_TXnerpRE)
As dangerous as explosions are in air, they are even more destructive in water. Because air is a compressible fluid, some part of an explosion’s energy is directed into air compression. Water, on the other hand, is incompressible, which makes it an excellent conductor of shock waves. In the video above we see some simple underwater explosions using water bottles filled with dry ice or liquid nitrogen. The explosions pulsate after detonation due to the interplay between the expanding gases and the surrounding water. When the gases expand too quickly, the water pressure is able to compress the gases back down. When the water pushes too far, the gases re-expand and the cycle repeats until the explosion’s energy is expended. This pulsating change in pressure is part of what makes underwater explosions so dangerous, especially to humans. Note in the video how the balloons ripple and distort due to the changing pressure. Those same changes in pressure can cause major internal damage to people. (Video credit: The Backyard Scientist; submitted by logicalamaze)
Homemade spaghetti noodles exhibit a roughened surface that’s the result of viscoelastic behavior known as the sharkskin instability. It’s usually observed in the industrial extrusion of polymer plastics. In the case of spaghetti, the long, complex polymer molecules necessary for the instability come from the proteins in eggs. The characteristically rough surface of the extruded material is caused by the transition from flow through the die to air. Inside the die, friction from the walls exerts a strong shear force on the outer part of the fluid while the inner portion flows freely. When the material exits the die, the sudden lack of friction on the outer portion of the fluid causes it to accelerate to the same velocity as the middle of the flow. This acceleration stretches the polymers until they snap free of the die; after the strained polymers relax, the material keeps a rough, saw-tooth pattern. In industry, the sharkskin instability can be prevented by regulating temperature or flow speed. In the case of spaghetti, though, Modernist Cuisine suggests the roughness is desirable because it helps trap the pasta sauce. Bon appetit! (Image credit: Modernist Cuisine)
A falling stream of water will break into droplets due to the Plateau-Rayleigh instability. Small disturbances can create a wavy perturbation in the falling jet. Under the right conditions, the pressure caused by surface tension will be larger in the narrower regions and smaller in the wider ones. This imbalance will drive flow toward the wider regions and away from the narrower ones, thereby increasing the waviness in the jet. Eventually, the wavy jet breaks into droplets, which enclose the same volume of water with less surface area than the perturbed jet did. The instability is named for Joseph Plateau and Lord Rayleigh, who studied it in the late 19th century and showed that a falling jet of a non-viscous fluid would break into droplets if the wavelength of its disturbance was larger than the jet’s circumference. (Image credit: N. Morberg)
SubmissionFriday:
Giles Clarke
‘The Recyclers of Port-Au-Prince’ is an image that is emblematic of man’s current struggle in dealing with the hundreds of millions of tons of waste created annually. The men in the image live in the vast un-regulated waste dump on the outskirts of Haiti’s capital, Port-Au-Prince. Thousands of these ’re-cyclers’ pick through everything from discarded electronic goods to disease-ridden medical waste. On a good day, these men will earn $12-15 a day collecting then re-selling plastics, aluminum and other recyclable products. Many of the dump inhabitants live in crude tin shacks that line the smokey landscape.
(photograph taken in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. Jan2015)
what Old Married Spirk really is
Spock and Jim growing old together. Spock getting more lines in his face, Jim getting a tummy. graying hair, walking more slowly, taking more time to have sex, Spock getting cold more easily, Jim forgetting where he set his house keys. numerous kisses with familiar lips, celebrating anniversaries quietly, hands aging, muscles fading, planting gardens and stargazing together, attending the funerals of enemies and friends, becoming distant to the action of the world, spooning in bed for hours, new and different forms of sadness, new and different forms of happiness, same smiles, same hearts, same minds.
what Old Married Spirk really is
Spock and Jim growing old together. Spock getting more lines in his face, Jim getting a tummy. graying hair, walking more slowly, taking more time to have sex, Spock getting cold more easily, Jim forgetting where he set his house keys. numerous kisses with familiar lips, celebrating anniversaries quietly, hands aging, muscles fading, planting gardens and stargazing together, attending the funerals of enemies and friends, becoming distant to the action of the world, spooning in bed for hours, new and different forms of sadness, new and different forms of happiness, same smiles, same hearts, same minds.
‘I’m No Longer Afraid’: 35 Women Tell Their Stories About Being Assaulted by Bill Cosby, and the Culture That Wouldn’t Listen
By Noreen Malone and Portfolio By Amanda Demme
More has changed in the past few years for women who allege rape than in all the decades since the women’s movement began. Consider the evidence of October 2014, when an audience member at a Hannibal Buress show in Philadelphia uploaded a clip of the comedian talking about Bill Cosby: “He gets on TV, ‘Pull your pants up, black people … I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom.’ Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches … I guess I want to just at least make it weird for you to watch Cosby Showreruns. Dude’s image, for the most part, it’s fucking public Teflon image. I’ve done this bit onstage and people think I’m making it up … That shit is upsetting.” The bit went viral swiftly, with irreversible, calamitous consequences for Cosby’s reputation.
Perhaps the most shocking thing wasn’t that Buress had called Cosby a rapist; it was that the world had actually heard him. A decade earlier, 14 women had accused Cosby of rape. In 2005, a former basketball star named Andrea Constand, who met Cosby when she was working in the athletic department at Temple University, where he served on the board of trustees, alleged to authorities that he had drugged her to a state of semi-consciousness and then groped and digitally penetrated her. After her allegations were made public, a California lawyer named Tamara Green appeared on the Today show and said that, 30 years earlier, Cosby had drugged and assaulted her as well. Eventually, 12 Jane Does signed up to tell their own stories of being assaulted by Cosby in support of Constand’s case. Several of them eventually made their names public. But they were met, mostly, with skepticism, threats, and attacks on their character.
In Cosby’s deposition for the Constand case, revealed to the public just last week, the comedian admitted pursuing sex with young women with the aid of Quaaludes, which can render a person functionally immobile. “I used them,” he said, “the same as a person would say, ‘Have a drink.’ ” He asked a modeling agent to connect him with young women who were new in town and “financially not doing well.” In the deposition, Cosby seemed confident that his behavior did not constitute rape; he apparently saw little difference between buying someone dinner in pursuit of sex and drugging them to reach the same goal. As for consent, he said, “I think that I’m a pretty decent reader of people and their emotions in these romantic sexual things.” If these women agreed to meet up, his deposition suggested, he felt that he had a right to them. And part of what took the accusations against Cosby so long to surface is that this belief extended to many of the women themselves (as well as the staff and lawyers and friends and others who helped keep the incidents secret).
Months after his depositions, Cosby settled the case with Constand. The accusations quickly faded from the public’s memory, if they registered at all. No one wanted to believe the TV dad in a cardigan was capable of such things, and so they didn’t. The National Enquirer had planned to run a big story detailing one of the women’s accounts, but the magazine pulled it when Cosby agreed to give them a two-page exclusive telling his side (essentially that these were instances that had been “misinterpreted”).People ran a story alleging that several of the women had taken money in exchange for their silence, implying that this was nothing more than an elaborate shakedown. Cosby’s career rolled on: In 2014 alone, there was a stand-up special, plans for a new family comedy on NBC, and a high-profile biography by Mark Whitaker that glossed over the accusations.
The group of women Cosby allegedly assaulted functions almost as a longitudinal study — both for how an individual woman, on her own, deals with such trauma over the decades and for how the culture at large has grappled with rape over the same time period. In the ’60s, when the first alleged assault by Cosby occurred, rape was considered to be something violent committed by a stranger; acquaintance rape didn’t register as such, even for the women experiencing it. A few of Cosby’s accusers claim that he molested or raped them multiple times; one remained in his orbit, in and out of a drugged state, for years. In the ’70s and ’80s, campus movements like Take Back the Night and “No Means No” helped raise awareness of the reality that 80 to 90 percent of victims know their attacker. Still, the culture of silence and shame lingered, especially when the men accused had any kind of status. The first assumption was that women who accused famous men were after money or attention. As Cosby allegedly told some of his victims: No one would believe you. So why speak up?
But among younger women, and particularly online, there is a strong sense now that speaking up is the only thing to do, that a woman claiming her own victimhood is more powerful than any other weapon in the fight against rape. Emma Sulkowicz, carrying her mattress around Columbia in a performance-art protest of her alleged rape, is an extreme practitioner of this idea. This is a generation that’s been radicalized, in just the past few years, by horrific examples of rape and reactions to rape — like the 2012 Steubenville incident, in which high-school football players brutally violated a passed-out teenage girl at a party and photographed and braggingly circulated the evidence. That same year, when a 14-year-old Missouri cheerleader accused a popular older boy at her school of sexual assault, her classmates shamed her on social media and the family’s house was burned down. The whole world watched online. How could this kind of thing still be happening? These cases felt unignorable, unforgettable, Old Testament biblical. Would anyone have believed the girls, or cared, had the evidence not been digitizable? And: How could you be a young woman and not care deeply about trying to fix this?
This generation will probably be further galvanized by the allegations that a national cultural icon may have been allowed to drug and rape women for decades, with no repercussions. But these younger women have given something to Cosby’s accusers as well: a model for how to speak up, and a megaphone in the form of social media.
Facebook and Twitter, the forums that helped circulate the Buress clip, were full of rage at Cosby’s perceived cruelty. Barbara Bowman, who’d come forward during the Constand case, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about her frustration that no one had believed her for all those years. Three days after Bowman’s op-ed, another woman, Joan Tarshis, came forward to say Cosby had drugged and raped her in 1969. By the end of November, 16 more women had come forward. Cosby resigned from Temple’s board of trustees and sought monetary damages from one of his accusers; he also told “Page Six” that he wanted “the black media to uphold the standards of excellence in journalism [and] go in with a neutral mind.” (Cosby, through representatives, has consistently denied any wrongdoing, and hasn’t been charged with any crimes. Emails to four of his lawyers and press reps went unanswered, although his team has begun a media tour to deny that his admission of offering Quaaludes to women was tantamount to admitting he’d raped anyone.) By February, there were another 12 accusers. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler joked about it at the Golden Globes: “Sleeping Beauty just thought she was getting coffee with Bill Cosby.” Attorney Gloria Allred got involved, representing more than a dozen of the women. Even President Obama said it was clear to him: “If you give a woman — or a man, for that matter — without his or her knowledge a drug, and then have sex with that person without consent, that’s rape.”
There are now 46 women who have come forward publicly to accuse Cosby of rape or sexual assault; the 35 women here are the accusers who were willing to be photographed and interviewed by New York. The group, at present, ranges in age from early 20s to 80 and includes supermodels Beverly Johnson and Janice Dickinson alongside waitresses and Playboy bunnies and journalists and a host of women who formerly worked in show business. Many of the women say they know of others still out there who’ve chosen to remain silent.
This project began six months ago, when we started contacting the then-30 women who had publicly claimed Cosby assaulted them, and it snowballed in the same way that the initial accusations did: First two women signed on, then others heard about it and joined in, and so on. Just a few days before the story was published, we photographed the final two women, bringing our total to 35. “I’m no longer afraid,” said Chelan Lasha, who came forward late last year to say that Cosby had drugged her when she was 17. “I feel more powerful than him.”
Accompanying this photo essay is a compilation of the interviews with these women, a record of trauma and survival — the memories that remain of the decades-old incidents. All 35 were interviewed separately, and yet their stories have remarkable similarities, in everything from their descriptions of the incidents to the way they felt in the aftermath. Each story is awful in its own right. But the horror is multiplied by the sheer volume of seeing them together, reading them together, considering their shared experience. The women have found solace in their number — discovering that they hadn’t been alone, that there were others out there who believed them implicitly, with whom they didn’t need to be afraid of sharing the darkest details of their lives. They are scattered all over the country — ten different states are represented — and most of them had no contact with their fellow accusers until recently. But since reading about each other’s stories in the news, or finding one another on social media, or meeting in person at the photo shoots arranged by New York, many of the women have forged a bond. It is, as Tarshis calls it, “a sorrowful sisterhood.” ■
Their stories, in their own words:
Rebecca Lynn Neal Barbara Bowman Beth Ferrier Helen Hayes Chelan Lasha Margie Shapiro Patricia Leary Steuer Marcella Tate Heidi Thomas Sunni Welles Jewel Allison Linda Brown Sarita Butterfield Helen Gumpel “Kacey" PJ Masten Joan Tarshis Kaya Thompson Sammie Mays Victoria Valentino Kathy McKee Lise-Lotte Lublin Linda Kirkpatrick Autumn Burns Louisa Moritz Lili Bernard Therese Serignese Janice Dickinson Linda Joy Traitz Janice Baker-Kinney Joyce Emmons Tamara Green Beverly Johnson Carla Ferrigno Cindra Ladd
In Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? Susannah Gibson argues that, for millennia, humans have tried to classify and categorise the world around them. One of the oldest, and most enduring, classifications is the simple troika of “animal, vegetable, mineral”. Though scientists are no longer completely reliant on this simple three-part system to divide the natural world into workable groups, it has become an essential part of our pop culture and is referenced everywhere from art to games, comic books to computer programming, literature to hip hop.
For example, it is mentioned in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There:
The Lion had joined …‘What’s this!’ he said, blinking lazily at Alice, and speaking in a deep hollow tone that sounded like the tolling of a great bell.
'Ah, what is it, now?’ the Unicorn cried eagerly. 'You’ll never guess! I couldn’t.’
The Lion looked at Alice wearily. 'Are you animal — or vegetable — or mineral?’ he said, yawning at every other word.
'It’s a fabulous monster!’ the Unicorn cried out, before Alice could reply.
Image: Alice, the Lion, and the Unicorn, by John Tenniel. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Watching rain drops hit a puddle or lake is remarkably fascinating. Each drop creates a little cavity in the water surface when it impacts. Large, energetic drops will create a crown-shaped splash, like the ones in the upper animation. When the cavity below the surface collapses, the water rebounds into a pillar known as a Worthington jet. Look carefully and you’ll see some of those jets are energetic enough to produce a little satellite droplet that falls back and coalesces. Altogether it’s a beautifully complex process to watch happen over and over again. (Image credit: K. Weiner, source)
——————
Help us do some science! I’ve teamed up with researcher Paige Brown Jarreau to create a survey of FYFD readers. By participating, you’ll be helping me improve FYFD and contributing to novel academic research on the readers of science blogs. It should only take 10-15 minutes to complete. You can find the survey here.
King Arthur - paleography
"...divers men hold opinion that there was no such Arthur; and that all such books as be made of him be but feigned and fables, because that some chronicles make of him no mention nor remember him nothing nor of his knights....And for the pass the time this book shall be pleasant to read in; but for to give faith and belief that all is true that is contained herein, ye be at your liberty."
Caxton, Preface to Le Morte Darthur
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSiehK2asbI)
Roland Fischer photographs building facades
Fluid dynamical behaviors are often the result of competing forces. Here paint flung from a spinning rod illustrates the effects of adhesion, surface tension, and centrifugal force. In general, surface tension tries to hold a fluid together, and adhesion allows it to stay attached to a surface. Centrifugal force, on the other hand, tends to push the fluid outward. As the spinning rod accelerates, centrifugal force wins over adhesion and the paint spirals outward. For awhile, surface tension manages to hold the paint together, stretching it into spiraling ligaments of fluid. But when centrifugal force overpowers surface tension as well, the ligaments of paint snap into smaller droplets, still flying outward. Check out the full video for more great slow motion shots, and be sure to look at photographer Fabian Oefner’s “Black Hole“ series, which inspired the video. (Image credit: BBC Earth Unplugged, source video)
A NY Times essay says "What Makes a Woman" is being born one — but a feminism of exclusion is no kind of revolution