Quickies
Quickies: How GPS changes your salad, toxic masculinity, and game developer Barbie
- How a GPS glitch can change the taste of your salad – “Even space weather—such as solar flares—can have strange, indirect effects on our everyday world. The next beets you buy could bear subtle traces of this astral influence, by being just slightly under-fertilized or drastically over-watered. You could blame a bad beet salad on satellites.” From Donna.
- Judge in Stanford sexual assault case removed from new case – “Santa Clara District Attorney Jeff Rosen filed a peremptory challenge Tuesday against Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky preventing him from deciding whether a former Kaiser Permanente surgical nurse should be tried for the alleged sexual assault of a sedated patient.”
- Overcompensation nation: It’s time to admit that toxic masculinity drives gun violence – “The examples are endless: Donald Trump flipping out when someone teases him about his small fingers. (Or about anything, really.) The ludicrously long and shaggy beards on “Duck Dynasty,” meant to stave off any association with the dreaded feminine with a thicket of hair. The emergence of the term “cuckservative,” flung around by hardline right wingers to suggest that insufficient racism is somwho emasculating. Conservatives absolutely melting down about an Obamacare ad that suggested that, gasp, sometimes men wear pajamas.” From Amy.
- Game developer Barbie can actually code – “With some help from my colleagues as well as the Twitter hive mind, we were able to just barely make out the code on Barbie’s laptop. The interface appears to be Alice, an educational programming environment, and the code it’s outputting is ActionScript (or maybe Haxe). Basically, she seems to be making a Bejeweled clone in Flash. And whatever you think about that choice, it’s a huge step up from Computer Engineer Barbie’s laptop showing nothing but ones and zeros.” From Mindy.
That Barbie doll is awesome! Yeah, it’s a Bejeweled clone, but have you seen how many microtransactions Bejeweled clones make? Those things are designed to be addictive. Mission accomplished.