Month: June 2012

A very NSFW tumblr. Safe-for-work teaser:

Ruben Bolling appreciates how Groundhog Day rejects our normal assumptions about romance:

How will this movie end if not with the moral of Redemption Through Romantic Love? Not necessarily trying to win Rita's love, but trying to become a better person who would deserve her love, [Phil] resolves to improve himself and help others. He learns piano and ice sculpture. He does good deeds, saving people he knows are about to suffer mishaps, or worse. He talks to townspeople not out of desperate, aloof boredom, but because he genuinely likes them. … That a commercial movie like this could somehow flirt with and then explicitly reject the idea that romantic love alone is all you need — instead using its metaphor to show that a connection to community and service are critical components to a fulfilling life — was beyond a Twilight-Zone level shock for me. 

Previous Dish on the classic comedy here and here and a sweet interview with Bill Murray here.

"If Only We Had Taller Been," by the late Ray Bradbury. The intro is charming but the poem begins 2:20 in:

Dan Colman marvels:

In November, 1971, the Mariner 9 space orbiter was about to make history. It was rapidly approaching Mars, making it the first spacecraft to orbit another planet.  … Just days before the Mariner 9 reached Mars, two of our greatest sci-fi writers, the dearly departed Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke, shared the stage with two eminent scientists, Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray, at a symposium held at Caltech. At one point, Bradbury captivated the audience when he read his poem, “If Only We Had Taller Been,” and gave an almost spiritual inflection to the Mariner 9 mission, reminding us of something that Neil deGrasse Tyson once said: the line separating religious epiphany and feelings created by space exploration is awfully, awfully thin.

Pinar marvels at dedication required for Bence Máté's shots, for which he spends days, weeks or even months in hiding:

They say the the most difficult subjects to photograph are children and animals. Perhaps it can be a bit of a struggle to wrangle kids and household pets down for a picture, but capturing a stunning moment of an animal in its natural habitat is in its own league of difficulty. Somehow, 27-year-old Hungarian photographer Bence Máté has mastered this time-consuming art of wildlife photography, producing up-close visuals of some of the most animated creatures around.

It's a good thing our minds are slow to catch on:

It takes as long as 150 to 300 milliseconds (ms) to be aware of a collision after it happens. Other neuroscientists think it can take as much as 500 ms. Now this might not sound like a lot of time, but think of what happens during a car accident. At the 1 ms mark, the car's pressure sensor detects a collision, and at 8.5 ms the airbag system fires. At the 15 ms mark, the car starts to absorb the impact to a significant degree. It's not until the 17 ms mark that the occupant starts to make contact with the airbag, with the maximum force of the collision reaching its apex at the 30 ms point. At the 50 ms mark, the safety cell begins to rebound, and after 70 ms the passenger moves back towards the middle of car — the point at which crash-test engineers declare the event as "complete."

And then, around the 150 to 300 ms mark, the occupant finally becomes aware of the collision. That's assuming of course that an airbag was deployed or that the occupant was wearing a seatbelt. Otherwise, the person wouldn't have known that they were even in a car accident. Which, if the accident was fatal, is not necessarily a bad thing.

Frederick, Maryland, 9.29 am

Perhaps the only obscure drug the Dish hasn't covered:

[Drugs in Afghanistan author David Macdonald] notes that in Afghanistan even the ubiquitous scorpions can be used for intoxication. Tartars in Bamiyan province prepare scorpions by smashing them between stones and letting them dry. The main part of the tail, with the sting, is then crushed into a powder and smoked with tobacco and/or hashish (marijuana). … Scorpion has been reported to keep one awake, cause severe headaches, and rival the effects of a "strong mescaline trip." One Kabul man who had smoked between 20 and 30 times reported the effects to last three days. During these periods he had difficulty opening his eyes, his head spun, and he had constant visual hallucinations.

(Hat tip: Dangerous Minds)

Sit back and enjoy the tricks:

The great science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who died this week, never went to college and considered himself "completely library educated." In a Paris Review interview from a few years ago, he talked about his self-education:

I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.

Rita Rubin tracks the decline of nose jobs:

In 2011, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, 37 percent fewer Americans got nose jobs than in 2000. The economy surely played some role: Surgical cosmetic procedures across the board declined by 17 percent during that period, coinciding with the economic downturn, which left people with less money to spend on nonessential surgery. But rhinoplasty, or "nose reshaping," saw one of the sharpest drops among all procedures, from 389,000 in 2000 to 244,000 in 2011.

Greg Hanscom interviewed Florence Williams about why breast implants, despite a lot of side effects, are still so popular. She went to Houston, "ground zero for implants":

I learned that one of the most successful implant surgeons in Houston actually had a swimming pool with a Jacuzzi in the middle of it, and it was supposed to look like a breast. The Jacuzzi was the nipple. And he earned millions. You think of Houston as this hardened oil derrick city, but it’s a city that’s built up around breasts.

(Photo by Flickr user melohel)