Quantcast

Funeral for La Contessa

La Contessa was destroyed by arson in December. Here are some videos of her wake I shot on a tiny digicam.

She was a great ship, and shall be missed!

Police slash tents of homeless people in St. Petersburg

This is a pretty sick video of police in St. Petersburg slashing and destroying tents used by homeless people in St. Petersburg. It’s hard to imagine something like this happening in the United States and not somewhere like Zimbabwe.

I’m glad that San Francisco Values don’t include hating poor people so much that we demolish their homes..

Tricia Wang: Search Algorithms as Revealing of Social Stereotypes

There is not other “RACE” or groups that are as sexualized as the generic “Asian woman.” Latina comes the closest. You can see for “Arab women” you can plenty of images of the stereotypes veiled woman. Then other during the presentation prompted me to type in “Korean, Japanese, black, African American, and etc.” = and as you can see “Asian women” win the most sexualized google image search. When you perform the search based on more specific cultures – like “Dominican” - it’s not as sexualized as “Latina.” Same for when you search “Japanese” - it’s not as sexualized as “Asian.” Sometimes sweeping stereotypes are easier for mass groupings of people – differences can be dropped as common denominators can be promoted.

Link

TASERed at UCLA

This one’s for bobslobster, who is at UCLA and happens to be the same shade of brown..

via mefi

How Americans hear Indian accents

This guy apparently made a PBX application to trap telemarketers and posted an audio file that he claimed was an Indian telemarketer interacting with his system. The thing is, the person playing the telemarketer has a horrible Apu-style accent that is quite obviously fake. Maybe it only sounds fake to a macaca, because it’s being linked to as real by Boing Boing, Waxy, Daring Fireball, Coudal Partners, and it’s got 2800 diggs. Can’t blame ‘em though, all those injuns look sound alike!

Addendum: the original post has been updated to clairfy that the audio clip isn’t real. I was surprised how many people couldn’t tell. The story now has 3000+ diggs, with comments from diggers like “All you people who say it sounds like a fake accent have obviously never spoken to Dell customer support. I’ve talked to guys that sound just like that.” Meh.. Let’s go to brunch!