Link dump!

1. Wet dog

2. Interesting article series on the "Traditional City"

3. Time traveling rules

4. Now That's What I Call Songs Sung To The Tune Of "Two Princes" By The Spin Doctors 5

5. The '90s Alt-Rock Vocal Hook Supercut

and if you want beef then bring the ruckus

Execution

Frantz Schmidt hanged his first thief when he was 19, on a June day in 1573. Either his father or another master executioner pronounced the hanging “executed adroitly,” concluding Frantz’s apprenticeship and certifying him as a master in his own right. Over the next four decades, Frantz would hang, behead, or otherwise kill 394 people, and flog, maim, and torture confessions out of hundreds more. He began as a traveling freelancer around Bavaria, and then, from 1578 until his retirement in 1618, served as the full-time executioner of the jewel of the Holy Roman Empire, the populous, prosperous, and cosmopolitan city of Nuremberg. In elaborate sentencing rituals behind closed doors, the patrician judge and jurors of Nuremberg’s “blood court” pronounced who should die and by what means. Before crowds of hundreds, it was Frantz and his assistants who carried out the punishments, embodying the legal authority of empire. For Frantz, there was no special skill in hanging someone: just tie the noose and push. Beheading, by contrast, required an exact position of the feet, eagle eyes and a steady hand, a fluid swing of the arm. One blow must neatly and completely sever the head, lest the crowd erupt in anger: in a few instances, spectators had responded to a miscarried execution by stoning the executioner himself to death. Frantz, then, took pride in his near-flawless record. In almost 200 beheadings, he required a second stroke only four times.

More inexplicable than the persistence of capital punishment is the rest of America’s carceral iceberg. In the 1970s, the United States not only revived the death penalty but also embarked upon a penal experiment without world-historical precedent in a democracy. This complicated and interlocking array of state and federal laws, programs, and construction projects has vastly increased the number of prisons, the number of people sent there, and the number of years they stay. By 2008, for the first time in history, one in a hundred American adults was either in prison or jail. The numbers have since declined slightly, but remain very high in both historical and international perspective. With 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States holds 25 percent of its prisoners, often in brutal and sanity-threatening conditions that most Americans would not hesitate to label torture if they encountered them somewhere else.

Progress and Execution

I'll be trapped and here I'll have to stay

College-related links

1. A is for Adjunct Part 1 and Part 2

2. Toss out abusive college administrators

3.Why I Teach Plato to Plumbers

Crocodile Chop

Voluntourism

A voluntourist is someone like Jack, who wishes to combine exotic vacation travel with volunteer work. For anyone interested in being one, a dizzying array of choices awaits, from building schools in Uganda or houses in Haiti to hugging orphans in Bali. In all of them, the operational equation is the same: wealthy Westerners can do a little good, experience something that their affluent lives do not offer, and, as in Jack’s case, have a story to tell that places them in the ranks of the kindhearted and worldly wise.

As admirably altruistic as it sounds, the problem with voluntourism is its singular focus on the volunteer’s quest for experience, as opposed to the recipient community’s actual needs. There is a cost associated with such an endeavor. A 2010 report by the Human Sciences Research Council, based in Pretoria, South Africa, analyzed the thriving AIDS orphan tourism business in South Africa.

Under this program, well-to-do tourists sign up to build schools, clean and restore riverbanks, ring birds and act as caregivers to AIDS orphans for a few weeks. This led to the creation of a profitable industry catering to volunteer tourists. The orphans’ conditions are effectively transformed into a boutique package in which “saving” them yields profits from tourists. The foreigners’ ability to pay for the privilege of volunteering crowds out local workers.

The White Tourist's Burden

Monday link list

1. Can't remember if we linked GeoGuessr or not, but it owns.

2. Winnie the Pooh and Zombies

3. Schwarzenegger sound board prank friends

4. All of China, IL is online.

5.YouTube numbers stations. Here's my favorite.

MST3K history

When they told me, my only objection was that he was kind of like me—a white doughy guy from the Midwest. But it worked out great. They stuck with the formula really closely. I think they did a really good job.

It began getting difficult when USA Network started exercising more control over the Sci-Fi Channel. And then we picked up these fucking production executives from the network. We had these bitter, dry, humorless trolls in charge of our show. And they were giving us notes. And they were insisting on our having a story arc. What the hell do you want with a story arc? This is a puppet show.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Definitive Oral History of a TV Masterpiece

This is what it looks like when Tha Cap'n makes love

easily my favorite song on the Exit Wounds soundtrack

Surveillance and Language

To Orwell, this threat was not merely that loose and imprecise writing fails to convey one’s real meaning. His more immediate fear was more fundamental: that reliance on vague, “ready-made phrases” would, over time, conceal one’s real meaning even from oneself. Orwell understood that when a population stops “hunting about” for words—when it instead regurgitates the limited vocabulary of those in power—it stops truly thinking. “The fight against bad English,” Orwell wrote, “is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.” Far from it—it is “a necessary first step toward political regeneration.”

The government’s mass-surveillance apparatus, and the secret legal gymnastics that purportedly justify it, is a chilling expression of Orwell’s worst fears.

Dragnet Surveillance and the English Language

Metal Monday

Press statement

Tri Epsilon can neither confirm nor deny that the image reproduced below, among the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, portrays an invitation to induction in Tri Epsilon.

Here's me and Tha Captain hard at work

yes I am saying that this blog is run by Andrea Bocelli

friday stuff

1. Fun game: Luftrauser

2. Fun game: Mini Metro

3.

This is no time for confessing

I keep up with pop culture enough to know and like about four new songs a year, so I guess this is the first one for 2014.

Vegetarian ancestors

Most primates have the capacity for eating sugary fruit, the capacity for eating leaves and the capacity for eating meat. But meat is a rare treat, if eaten at all. Sure, chimpanzees sometimes kill and devour a baby monkey, but the proportion of the diet of the average chimpanzee composed of meat is small. And chimps eat more mammal meat than any of the other apes or any of the monkeys. The majority of the food consumed by primates today–and every indication is for the last thirty million years–is vegetable, not animal. Plants are what our apey and even earlier ancestors ate; they were our paleo diet for most of the last thirty million years during which our bodies, and our guts in particular, were evolving. In other words, there is very little evidence that our guts are terribly special and the job of a generalist primate gut is primarily to eat pieces of plants. We have special immune systems, special brains, even special hands, but our guts are ordinary and for tens of millions of years those ordinary guts have tended to be filled with fruit, leaves, and the occasional delicacy of a raw hummingbird.

Human Ancestors Were Nearly All Vegetarians

Monday links

1. Well Dressed Animals with Rap Quotes

2. Trees growing in weapons

3. Synthetic Household Population Viewer

4. I am against the Olympics but Olympics Medals per Capita

5. Congrats to Tha Cap'n on his new job

Barbershop Quartet's Ignition (Remix)

I am not really a fan of Jimmy Fallon, but I like him more as a host and a quasi-vaudevillian than as a comedian or actor.