Just Like Heaven The Cure – Laura Cortese Acoustic Project.

Do It Yourself: Homemade Natural Hair Gel with Flaxseeds.

Announcing Outreach Program for Women Internships for the Linux Kernel: Please Apply

How One Tweet Almost Broke US Financial Markets | Mother Jones.

Robotraders read twitter now?

How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity

via Meghan J

These kinds of experiences are difficult to narrativize. There is no story arc. In “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf writes:

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light…it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia… But no; … literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear.

This is, of course, the romantic view. Sometimes it’s not true; sometimes I’m the same asshole I was before I got sick. But as Susan Sontag once wrote, “illness exacerbates consciousness.” As such, my life has been irrevocably changed by the experience of illness. There is a lot of shame associated with disease. Disease is not polite conversation, and at my age, a career—not wellness—is the expected goal.

I give voice to this period of my life not as an inconvenient period, but as a profound one worthy of being shared. I want to valorize my time in ways that have nothing to do with work, to say a big “fuck you” to every person at a dinner party who has ever pointedly asked me, “So…what do you do?” because I haven’t “done” much in a long time. The story I’m telling here is equal parts a processing of the trauma of illness and an exploration of how the body is treated under the regime of capitalism. Stories of illness like mine should not be kept away in beds and in hospital wards. They should be written so that we can understand the body as something beyond a sheet of plain glass.

Basket stitch scarf, but actually some awesome pants.

Tech Stuff: Eulerian Trail. A recursive implementation of Hierholzer’s algorithm.

DjangoCon 2008 Keynote: Cal Henderson “Why I Hate Django”.

Disqus: Serving 400 million people with Python.

Django Deployment Workshop by Jacob Kaplan-Moss.

A Gentle Introduction to Algorithm Complexity Analysis.

Theoretical computer science has its uses and applications and can turn out to be quite practical. In this article, targeted at programmers who know their art but who don’t have any theoretical computer science background, I will present one of the most pragmatic tools of computer science: Big O notation and algorithm complexity analysis. As someone who has worked both in a computer science academic setting and in building production-level software in the industry, this is the tool I have found to be one of the truly useful ones in practice, so I hope after reading this article you can apply it in your own code to make it better. After reading this post, you should be able to understand all the common terms computer scientists use such as "big O", "asymptotic behavior" and "worst-case analysis".

Facial Awareness

Dating from the Margins: Desexualizing and Cultural Abuse

Understandably, who we are attracted to is a very sensitive topic for most of us. We want to believe our desires are our own, unshaped by the media, patriarchy, racism, ableism, transmisogyny, or other oppressive systems. This is even more challenging when one’s identity is based in ideas of activism, social justice and equality; We don’t want to feel like we’re upholding oppressive standards, or engaging in systems which sometimes violently desexualize marginalized identities.

Conversely, those who do not enjoy much dating capital face an incredibly challenging and vulnerable process when discussing desirability. You can’t help but wonder how much will be dismissed as sour grapes, or what judgements will be made about you to justify your undesirability in the minds of others.

suicidal ideation 2.0, queer community leadership, and staying alive anyway: part one of a work in progress. – brownstargirl.org.

Fun with toys

via Charlotte

Ironic noise complaint over Sto:lo drumming during Chilliwack music video shoot

Controlling Portions, Controlling Pregnancies: Race And Class Panic In New York City Public Health Campaigns

Sexism at the border: A personal account

Dave Ogilvie mixing ‘Call Me Maybe’

I was trying to get the same feel in ‘Call Me Maybe’ as in a Nine Inch Nails song, making sure it had a pop sensibility, but with people not even noticing how aggressive the kick drum is. It was the same thing with the strings…

Cyber-security: The digital arms trade

David Graeber in conversation with Rebecca Solnit – Live! From City Lights

Who will protect the land from reckless development? A thoughtful proposal for a moderate (to me) vision of decolonizing. I like the careful way the writer points out the nearness of military action against oil protestors in Australia and Canada. I like the way he names the denial and lies in the colonial “narrative” of Canada. I like that he centers indigenous people as leaders, decision-makers, and stewards of the land. I am very cautious about his proposal to forgive colonialism and move on to shared prosperity. We settlers are pretty hungry to be forgiven; it’s important to be careful there, not to jump ahead or assume we deserve that.

So in Canada, what if, instead, we decide not to ransack every last corner of our vast country in search of commodities that we can sell abroad or to ourselves, but we experiment in developing an economy that honours local culture and history, celebrates place, protects the environment, increases the resilience of local people, and provides them with the means to invest in a future of their own design? Why not attempt, while we still have the option, to pursue a natural model of development, to pursue what the late Jane Jacobs once so aptly called “reliable prosperity?”

In that regard, Indigenous people arguably offer not more despair, but hope. If we are to prepare ourselves for the inevitable shocks that the 21st Century still has in store, it might behoove us to seek lessons in resilience from people who have survived every imaginable assault, and are just now coming back into a position of prominence and eminence in a country that might yet come to see aboriginal people as powerful and visionary citizens with a capacity for forgiveness and an appetite for regeneration and renewal, whose unwillingness to assimilate may turn out to be their best defence against the boom that the rest of us seem powerless or unwilling to resist.

Talking Maps: Arctic atlas reads out Inuit names. Who was telling me about this? Lynne (Leah?) the puppeteer?

Fraser Taylor’s atlas of Canada’s high Arctic reads out the names of the towns to you. The real names.

Cape Strathcona is Arvaaqtuuq. Peter Richards Island is Qikiqtatannak

It is, the eminent Carleton University geographer explains, a decolonization of the Nunavut map and a repatriation of the Inuit names.

Rediscovered art by residential-school pupils paints a portrait of survival. “This weekend will see the artwork returned in a repatriation ceremony in Port Alberni that will elevate the children’s art to the level of cultural artifacts.”

Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision For All Our Families and Relationships. Yes! Glad to see this. Queer relationships and communities have so many more inspiring forms beyond marriage and nuclear families.

The time has come to reframe the narrow terms of the marriage debate in the United States. Conservatives are seeking to enshrine discrimination in the U.S. Constitution through the Federal Marriage Amendment. But their opposition to same-sex marriage is only one part of a broader pro-marriage, “family values” agenda that includes abstinence-only sex education, stringent divorce laws, coercive marriage promotion policies directed toward women on welfare, and attacks on reproductive freedom. Moreover, a thirty-year political assault on the social safety net has left households with more burdens and constraints and fewer resources.

Meanwhile, the LGBT movement has recently focused on marriage equality as a stand-alone issue. While this strategy may secure rights and benefits for some LGBT families, it has left us isolated and vulnerable to a virulent backlash. We must respond to the full scope of the conservative marriage agenda by building alliances across issues and constituencies. Our strategies must be visionary, creative, and practical to counter the right’s powerful and effective use of marriage as a “wedge” issue that pits one group against another. The struggle for marriage rights should be part of a larger effort to strengthen the stability and security of diverse households and families. To that end, we advocate:

• Legal recognition for a wide range of relationships, households and families – regardless of kinship or conjugal status.
• Access for all, regardless of marital or citizenship status, to vital government support programs including but not limited to health care, housing, Social Security and pension plans, disaster recovery assistance, unemployment insurance and welfare assistance.
• Separation of church and state in all matters, including regulation and recognition of relationships, households and families.
• Freedom from state regulation of our sexual lives and gender choices, identities and expression.

Marriage is not the only worthy form of family or relationship, and it should not be legally and economically privileged above all others. A majority of people – whatever their sexual and gender identities – do not live in traditional nuclear families. They stand to gain from alternative forms of household recognition beyond one-size-fits-all marriage.