His behavior during imprisonment convinced the authorities that [he]…was no longer to be feared. – The New York Times, December 20th, 1924
This week’s videos need a little more explanation than usual. The first, provided by Mike Siegel, is an extremely moving Thai television commercial based on an urban legend which proves once again that the best way to ensure people watch your ad is to make it interesting and memorable. The second, via Brooke Magnanti, shows what happens when metronomes are placed on a movable surface so they can transfer kinetic energy to one another (trust me, it’s a lot more interesting than it sounds). The links above the first video were provided by Radley Balko, and those between the two by my cat, Nun Ya, Jesse Walker, Aspasia, Mike Riggs, Franklin Harris, Popehat, Ally Fogg, Mistress Matisse and Dean Clark, in that order.
- I like God better when He says to feed strippers and not harass them.
- Officials call cops “heroic” for burning innocent man to death.
- A demonstration of the rehabilitative power of prison.
- Hello Kitty beer.
- Strangers in our bodies.
- Calvin and Hobbes and Muad’Dib.
- How to recognize the artists of paintings.
- Welcome to our world, victims of “stop and frisk”.
- Don’t approach the cops in any way whatsoever, either.
- Cops murder 96-year-old man for refusing a medical test.
- Clown wrecks clown car; oversized shoes are not to blame.
- In other clown news, one of them is terrorizing an English town.
- New York cops shoot wildly into Broadway crowd, injuring two women.
- Cops harass pregnant epileptic woman to “protect her from abduction”.
From the Archives
- Horses, dogs, gulls, video, cops, kids, boyfriends, Obama, censorship, strippers, nuns, grass, Twinkies, surveillance and science.
- The CASE Act is so bad, even bona fide coerced prostitutes are against it.
- You can tell a legitimate scientific argument by its quotation of Genesis.
- Cops’ and journalists’ unwholesome obsession with underage whores.
- Why do some people ask questions but refuse to accept the answers?
- While bureaucrats have power over people, this will keep happening.
- Women who want their choices respected need to have 14 kids first.
- Illustrative examples of clueless neofeminist whining and Poe’s Law.
- Charlotte Shane on journalists who pester non-activist sex workers.
- Most women are more sexually open when they’re very turned on.
- Most women pick bigger implants after wearing a padded bra first.
- Another pervert “helping” teenage runaways by molesting them.
- An elderly harlot tells her granddaughter about a favorite client.
- A short biography of the late founder of SWOP-US, Robyn Few.
- On sex workers who waste energy in internecine squabbles.
- What are so many economists so stupid about sex work?
- Another rescue industry group exposed as frauds.
- Aspasia on the hypocrisy of Jezebel readers.
- Susannah Breslin on the war against porn.
- Guest columnist: Norma Jean Almodovar.
- Switzerland’s first sex workers’ union.
- Brooke Magnanti on The New Rules.
- How the Swiss deal with sex work.
- When a man meets a donkey.
Love the sub-headline of the Hello Kitty beer story:
“A colorful new ploy to turn Chinese women into alcoholics.”
Sigh.
Fruity beer with half the alcohol of normal beer. I’d buy it! 🙂
Don’t discount the power of the Kitty to adult Asian women. The shop I used to manage, a high-end collectibles and jewelry boutique, came out with a line of HK merchandise. It sold out within a week, and not one of the customers was under 20.
The whole “kawai” (cuteness) aesthetic for East Asians is incredibly strong. When I shop for cosmetics at the Asian malls in Sydney, it’s not the least bit unusual to find cartoon faces and animal-shaped packaging on products targeted at older adult women, like wrinkle creams and firming masks. The acne products, presumably marketed toward teenagers and younger women, actually have a serious, sober, medical/clinical look to them.
The opposite of what I’d expect, but I’m only an “honorary Asian”– a title bestowed on me by my Asian employees, btw.
How dare you post this sort of thing without a trigger warning!!
Some of us are coulrophobic you know.
I consider that “frank commentary” line beneath the title to be a sort of general trigger warning for the whole blog. 🙂
You should change it to read “frank commentary – WARNING: MAY CONTAIN CLOWNS”.
EEK! I typed ‘clowns’!
OMG!! I did it again!
“Hello Kitty beer.”
No. If you want to REALLY lose your mind consider that there exist legitimate, licensed, Hello Kitty VIBRATORS…..
I have one of those. It was given to me as a joke.
(The thing is so tiny, though…)
The metronomes are an example of “forced resonance” – and, as cute as it is … there’s a headache-load of science and mechanical resonance theory behind it. I had an issue with a geological sensor I sometimes use. It was a “one-off” designed for special purpose. Data on it was shit and I couldn’t figure it out – neither could the electrical engineers because … it wasn’t an electrical problem.
Told a mechanical engineer about the problem – just in passing. He says … “Fuck! I know what that is!” He grabbed the sensor drawings and a calculator – and came back with this complicated explanation of “forced resonance”. I’m like … “Are you fucking shitting me?” I thought he was smoking dope.
The other engineers though – where all … “ohhh … ohhhh … OHHHH!!!”
Magic, man.
Here’s another pretty interesting example of mechanical resonance using a single-degree of freedom system setup. This was also important in submarine design. The “moveable table” in this example is roughly equivalent to the “floating decks” that many subs use. Decks for each level inside a submarine were not “hard mounted” to the pressure hull – but “floated” to account hull compressibility at various depths …
If you can imagine all of these submarine mechanical systems (pumps, generators, etc) working at one time – all on a floating platform – you can see how design gets pretty complex because vibration = noise in the submarine world and noise=detectablitity. Throw in some MULTI Degree of freedom systems and the shit gets real deep real fast.
But – in this example – you’ll see the different platforms oscillate wildly at certain “resonant” frequencies. The longer the support for each platform – the lower resonate frequency it osciallates at …
Yup, that’s why you want your various parts to all resonate at different frequencies and be damped so you aren’t going to get wildly erratic behavior based on what pitch you’re dealing with…
Yup.
Which can be pretty damned hard to sus out as each part will have multiple resonant frequencies and not all of them can be practically damped.
When I was studying this stuff in the 70s about the only effective way to do it was trial and error, sometimes repeatedly tweaking different parts to produce slightly different resonant frequencies, but I’d guess you can probably do it with computer modelling these days.
On a related note, who has seen that film of a suspension bridge with vehicles on it shaking itself apart after the wind gusts up a canyon found it’s resonant frequency?
I particularly liked the bit where the driver sprints up the centre line of the bridge, which is undergoing a slow wave along its length, while avoiding the edges, which are rocking insanely in a much faster transverse wave.
That was the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, AKA Galloping Gertie:
The London Millennium Bridge (for pedestrians) had similar problems when it was opened — and had to be closed soon afterwards for modifications.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Bridge,_London
Hence the military order to ‘break step’ when crossing such bridges.
The first video will only happen in a homegeneous society. In a diverse society that modern liberals adore, it will require massive government interference at at least 100 times the cost.
And to put it in Buddhist terms: There is great merit in charity, there is none in welfare.
They don’t “adore” a diverse society. They believe that all those “diverse” peoples are inferior to them – and therefore will be willing to be led by liberals so that they can be cared for by liberals.
All my friends loved that video. Thai people are funny, I believe they would think a show called “Breaking Good” about a helpful chemistry teacher would be a wonderful idea.
Listening to the Pippi song and skipping LINKS, which I leave as I came, and God willing as I shall return, with peace and in hope for all mankind.