http://discodancerdonna.tumblr.com/

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Tue, 21 May 2013 21:07:44 -0400

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Tue, 21 May 2013 20:10:07 -0400

tawnyscostumesandcuriosities: 1750-1800 Germany

Tue, 21 May 2013 19:12:46 -0400

tawnyscostumesandcuriosities:

1750-1800 Germany

afeastforkings: In which the bear is tumblr

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:15:05 -0400

afeastforkings:

In which the bear is tumblr

"Justin Bieber has two options: He either has to laugh off all the crazy stuff that happens around..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 17:17:36 -0400

“Justin Bieber has two options: He either has to laugh off all the crazy stuff that happens around him, or he has to ignore it entirely and just be himself, without apologies or explanations or pleas to be “taken seriously.” There is no third option.”

- Our advice for The Biebs, post-Billboard booing. (via entertainmentweekly)

comedycentral: The next-gen Xbox is being revealed today, and...

Tue, 21 May 2013 16:19:51 -0400

comedycentral:

The next-gen Xbox is being revealed today, and Game Trailers will have a live-stream of the event!

Click here to watch the pre-show starting at noon EST, followed by the Xbox Reveal at 1pm EST.

archiemcphee: These awesome photos are from the 2013 Weston...

Tue, 21 May 2013 16:00:53 -0400

archiemcphee:

These awesome photos are from the 2013 Weston Sand Sculpture Festival on the sandy shores of Weston-super-Mare in Somerset, England. Each year the festival has a different theme and this year’s theme is Hollywood.

“Since the festival started in 2006, themes have included Fairy Tales, The Continents of the World, Under the Ocean, Great Britain, and The Jungle. What began with two Dutch sand sculptors building a giant King Kong from 30 tonnes of sand has now turned into a world famous get-together of some of the niftiest hands in sand sculpting.

More than 20 of the world’s greatest sculptors from nine different countries are working away using 4,000 tonnes of sand from the beach.”

The festival opened on Good Friday and runs through the end of September.

Visit Dailymail.co.uk to view more of the awesome sand sculptures from this year’s Weston Sand Sculpture Festival.

[via Free York and Dailymail.co.uk]

"The question is how we react to this great prejudice against women. The rule of law and social..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:44:23 -0400

“

The question is how we react to this great prejudice against women. The rule of law and social activism certainly are crucial. But no matter how strong the social structure, there is always that cheek-slapped moment when you are alone with the anti-woman prejudice: the joke, the leer, the disregard, the invisibility, the inescapable fact that the moment you walk through the door you are seen as lesser, no matter what your credentials.

I have no guidance for women who want to rise through the ranks into technical management. I have led a peripatetic life, moving on when a project was done or the next thing intrigued me.

And I am not advising younger women (or any woman) to tough it out. You can lash back, which I have done too often and which has rarely served me well. You can quit and look for other jobs, which is sometimes a very good idea.

But the prejudice will follow you. What will save you is tacking into the love of the work, into the desire that brought you there in the first place. This creates a suspension of time, opens a spacious room of your own in which you can walk around and consider your response. Staring prejudice in the face imposes a cruel discipline: to structure your anger, to achieve a certain dignity, an angry dignity.

”

- Pioneering software engineer Ellen Ullman, author of the fascinating Close to the Machine, on how to be a ‘woman programmer.’ Pair with Margaret Atwood on literature’s ‘woman problem’ and Caitlin Moran on how to be a woman. (via explore-blog)

"Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously."

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:37:25 -0400

“Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.”

- Hunter S. Thompson (via tattoolit)

soundonsight: Watch A New Trailer for Neil Jordan’s Vampire...

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:28:30 -0400

soundonsight:

Watch A New Trailer for Neil Jordan’s Vampire Drama, ‘Byzantium’

flavorpill: A little midday treat for you book lovers: The 20...

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:26:08 -0400

flavorpill:

A little midday treat for you book lovers:

The 20 Most Beautiful Libraries on Film and TV

38 Wonderful Foreign Words We Could Use in English

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:25:52 -0400

38 Wonderful Foreign Words We Could Use in English :

worldwideexplorers:

Tartle (Scots)
The nearly onomatopoeic word for that panicky hesitation just before you have to introduce someone whose name you can’t quite remember.

nerdology: Xbox One Microsoft just announced the Xbox One....

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:24:47 -0400

nerdology:

Xbox One

Microsoft just announced the Xbox One. Excited that they actually showed off their hardware *cough*sony*cough*

[via Major Nelson]

cephalopodsgonewild: via Debbie Merschen Harding

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:21:59 -0400

cephalopodsgonewild:

via Debbie Merschen Harding

thebeautifulmacabre: When you play the game of butts,...

Tue, 21 May 2013 14:24:42 -0400

thebeautifulmacabre:

When you play the game of butts, cheek is better than thigh. (x)

eataku: New Hello Kitty roll cakes… a face in every slice!

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:35:36 -0400

eataku:

New Hello Kitty roll cakes… a face in every slice!

neuromorphogenesis: Are mental illnesses such as PMS and...

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:26:56 -0400

neuromorphogenesis:

Are mental illnesses such as PMS and depression culturally determined?

A growing number of psychiatrists suspect mental conditions are ‘culture-bound syndromes’ rather than exclusively biological

The latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – DSM 5 – was published over the weekend. Produced by the American Psychiatric Association, it describes the symptoms of a vast range of mental illnesses and is intended as a guide to diagnosis.

Why should we in the UK care? Simple: the political dominance of the US means that as soon as a mental disorder is named in the DSM, that disorder becomes valid in the eyes of many.

But not everyone is a fan. The DSM committee has been accused of continually expanding the categories of mental illness, resulting in”diagnostic inflation” – with the result that increasing numbers of us are diagnosed with one condition or another.

The committee has also fallen foul of the US National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH), which dislikes the DSM’s symptom-based approach. The NIMH argues that laboratory tests for biomarkers are the only rational way to diagnose mental illness.

And two weeks ago the British Psychological Society released astatement claiming that there is no scientific validity to diagnostic labels such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Indeed, the DSM’s fondness for the categorisation of mental illness is a major reason for its unpopularity in many quarters. According to Gary Greenberg in the New Yorker, frustrated scientists believe its beloved categories “don’t correspond to biological reality”.

Is that a fair criticism? I would argue that the categorisation of mental illness based on symptoms can be useful. But – and it’s a big, fat, hairy but – we must accept that those diagnostic categories are cultural constructions, not global certainties.

Culture-bound syndromes are most often the preoccupation of anthropologists. Typically, the patient displays symptoms that are recognised as indicating a particular illness only by other members of that patient’s cultural group. The dhat syndrome observed in parts of India, characterised by fatigue, anxiety and guilt and usually experienced by men, is a well-documented example of a psychological culture-bound syndrome, as is the susto, or fright sickness, of Latin America.

In a recent editorial in the British Journal of General Practice, Professor Christopher Dowrick argues that depression could be a western culture-bound syndrome, rather than a universal disorder. In support of his case, Prof Dowrick notes the lack of consensus in psychiatry over what even constitutes depression: the endless shifting of diagnostic goalposts.

He points out that there is no discrete genetic variation known to cause depression. Rather, there is genetic overlap across a range of mental illness, including depressive disorder, autism and schizophrenia.

Prof Dowrick’s point is that as China and India become politically dominant, spreading different concepts of what constitutes mental illness, we will have to be more sceptical of our cherished diagnostic categories. “In western anglophone societies we have developed an ethic of happiness, in which aberrations … are assumed to indicate illness,” he writes.

Others have argued that pre-menstrual syndrome, too, is a Western culture-bound syndrome. In 1987, Thomas S Johnson claimed that the symptoms were an expression of ”conflicting societal expectations” on women. In 2012, a meta-analysis of published research failed to find evidence that negative mood correlates to the pre-menstrual phase of the menstrual cycle. And earlier this year, a qualitative study found that a “cognitive reframing” of the symptoms could reduce self-reported pre-menstrual distress.

Could depression and PMS really be culture-bound syndromes rather than biological entities? For sure, no one is arguing than they are not genuine illnesses – to the patient, the symptoms are real and painful. I used to be convinced by the biomedical model of depression, but now I’m not so sure. Could depression, and other familiar mental conditions, be interpreted as a kind of local language – our culturally established way of expressing distress and asking for help?

A DSM-style categorisation of illness based on symptoms could still be useful, provided we bear in mind that our local diagnostic categories are no more universal than our local language. We may also need to accept that treatments for mental disorder are not universally applicable. Culture-bound syndromes need culture-bound treatments: interventions recognised as “medicine” by both patient and practitioner.

It’s a very complex subject – not least because there may be crossover between the cultural and the biological; between the BPS’s dismissal of diagnostic labels and the NIMH’s desire to find a biomarker for every illness.

“I think the distinction between ‘biological’ and ‘social’ causes can get tricky. Lots of human practices that are clearly culturally patterned – child-rearing practices, diet, and sleep patterns, for example – affect our biology,” Dr Rachel Cooper, author of Classifying Madness, tells me in response to an email. “You could have cases where a ‘core’ biological disturbance is expressed differently in different cultures. Some have suggested that this might be the case with western-style depression and Chinese neurasthenia.”

And in the end, as Dr Cooper concludes, “A biomarker can only tell you that a person is different – not whether that difference should be considered pathological.” Much of mental pathology could be a consequence of culture.

nbcnews: Teen’s invention could charge your phone in 20...

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:22:03 -0400

nbcnews:

Teen’s invention could charge your phone in 20 seconds

(Photo: Intel)

Waiting hours for a cellphone to charge may become a thing of the past, thanks to an 18-year-old high-school student’s invention. She won a $50,000 prize Friday at an international science fair for creating an energy storage device that can be fully juiced in 20 to 30 seconds.

Read the complete story.

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Tue, 21 May 2013 13:18:33 -0400

adamflayman: my dashboard is 90% depressive posts but it should be 100% baby squid posts let get...

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:16:38 -0400

adamflayman:

my dashboard is 90% depressive posts but it should be 100% baby squid posts let get this squid party moving along