Failed Idealism

Inside every cynic is a disappointed and failed idealist

  • The Web Means the End of Forgetting (New York Times article)

    • 30 Jul 2010
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    Media_httpgraphics8ny_eipcz
    via nytimes.com

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  • Lady Geek Tattoo

    • 28 Jul 2010
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    via smbc-comics.com

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  • Jack of Kent: The meaning of #StupidScientology

    • 23 Jul 2010
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    via jackofkent.blogspot.com

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  • Bikini body, anyone? - The Guardian

    • 21 Jul 2010
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    This summer, women of all ages are once more being exhorted to get the perfect "bikini body" by every tabloid, gossip circular and glossy magazine. Singer Katy Perry and heiresses the Kardashian sisters are among this week's "best bikini body" celebrities, and ordinary women everywhere are trying to emulate their fairytale lifestyles by purchasing a particular cellulite-busting body scrub or embarking on a bizarre starvation diet.

    But this is Britain, not Bangkok or Barbados. The vast majority of women in the UK aren't in any position to throw on a tiny swimsuit and stroll down to the beach. Even at the height of summer, last week was jumper weather across much of the country, and most British women cannot afford to go abroad – especially during this financial crisis, which has seen a 15% drop in overseas holidays. Overall, the amount of time the average British woman is likely to spend in a bikini this or any other summer is anywhere between small and nonexistent, so why go to such expense and effort to prepare ourselves for this sort of physical scrutiny?

    The bikini itself has a sinister semiotic history. It was invented by French lingerie salesman Louis Réard in 1946 as part of a competition to design the world's smallest swimsuit. That summer, a small clutch of coral islands in the Pacific called Bikini Atoll was in the news, because a series of nuclear weapons tests codenamed Operation Crossroads had been launched there, requiring the evacuation of the local population. Réard named his invention after the devastated test site because of its inference of danger and scandal, at a time when words like "atomic" were being used to describe momentous cultural events. Those with a stake in the mythology of the garment now focus on its namesake island as a tropical paradise, but bikini ideology is poisoned with the cultural fallout of the mid-20th century in more ways than one.

    When it finally became popular in the 1960s, the bikini was a symbol of physical liberation, of beautiful women reacting to the stern sexual prudery of previous decades by exposing as much skin to the sun as they pleased. Today, as with many iterations of the sexual emancipation rhetoric of the 1960s, wearing a bikini is no longer associated with pleasure and daring, but with anxiety, dieting rituals and joyless physical performance.

    Famous women whose "bikini bodies" are found to be acceptable are praised for the surgical procedures and "gruelling" diet and exercise regimes that have brought them to this point of transcendence. Those who fail, like Tyra Banks and Cherie Blair, must face down the big red circle of public opprobrium. The bikini body is not supposed to be naturally occurring: it is a quasi-religious state of myth and artifice to which only the truly virtuous can aspire.

    The rituals of the bikini body link the obsessive self-denial that has become a watchword for feminine social capital with a tragic aspirational escape fantasy. Women waste huge amounts of time and money and forgo countless meals for this fantasy, whereby we must be ready at a moment's notice to be whisked away to an exotic beach location where photographers will clamour to take pictures of us in our scanties.

    The bikini body has become cultural shorthand for a moral standard of female perfection whereby any physical flaw should be regarded as a source of shame, an obstacle to collective fantasies of glamour and happiness. The bikini was once a symbol of sexual emancipation, but for women in the 21st century its original connotations of personal empowerment have become just another set of rules for self-control.

    via guardian.co.uk

    Interesting article. I have of course no issue with the garment itself, it's an inert piece of cloth. But it is interesting – as the author says – how something once associated with freedom and liberality has now become a fairly repressive and potentially pejorative garment, with the freedom to wear it being reduced to the lucky few believing themselves worthy of being seen in one. Or the even fewer informed people that realise they have the freedom to wear whatever the hell they want, and that a sharp informed mind, and a dose of self confidence is a heap sexier than brown toned stomachs and cellulite free thighs.

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  • Rare Coincidences Are Very Common - The New York Times

    • 21 Jul 2010
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    By PRADEEP MUTALIK - THE NEW YORK TIMES
    Added: Wednesday, 21 July 2010 at 01:12 PM

    Thanks to Aseem for the link.
    Original link

    “Wow!” “Amazing!” “Unbelievable!” “What are the chances of that?” Most, if not all of you, have uttered words like this at some time in your life. The paradoxical title of today’s Numberplay, then, is true: rare coincidences are really common.

    Why should this be? After all, rare should be rare, shouldn’t it? People who are prone to magical thinking seize on such commonly experienced rare coincidences and ascribe cosmic significance to them, invoking Divine Providence or Pre-arranged Destiny or Synchronicity or some other favored pseudoscientific explanation. But if these coincidences are so common as to happen to everyone, then how significant can they be? It’s like that pearl of wisdom that I first heard from a treasured friend, The Talking Moose, on an old Mac computer over 20 years ago: “Remember that you are a unique individual — just like everyone else.”

    Today, we’ll see how the commonness of rare coincidences can be fully explained by nothing more than an interaction of mathematics and human psychology, creating a few distinct patterns of fallacious thinking, which I’ll give as label and problem.1 The first one is Too Many Targets.

    1. Suppose there are a thousand possible rare events, each of which can happen with the “unbelievable” probability of one in a million on a particular day. How likely is it that you will encounter one such unbelievable event in a year? In a lifetime of 80 years? How many such events will an average person see in his or her 80-year lifespan?

    In fact, the number of possible events that we would consider “rare” are much much more than a thousand. There are so many of them that it would be fruitless to try and list all of them before they happen, and so we don’t think about them. We just reserve our oohs and aahs for the ones that do happen. Gary’s graphic says it all. You throw a dart at random on to a dark wall, and shine a flashlight to see where it went. Wow, it hit a bull’s eye! Amazing! Very few of us bother to turn on the light switch. The flashlight of our selective attention blinds us to the underlying reality. It turns out that the whole wall is tiled with bull’s eyes! Moreover, throughout your life you take thousands of potshots at them.
    ... Continue reading

    TAGGED: MATH

    via richarddawkins.net

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