Eggs Maledict

I am really not a GetUp fan, but this ad is good and they should feel good.

Has anyone read Mark Schroeder's Noncognitivism in Ethics or Aaron Zimmerman's Moral Epistemology? Both look interesting but are newish and lacking reviews.

Against my better instincts, I went to see Suckerpunch. It is without a doubt the most awful film I have ever seen.

( Warning: Lots of really gross rape-y stuff )

Since I last checked, the Wikipedia article on keratoconus has been updated! It's now really good! Everyone should go read about my pointy eyes!

Like this:

Elizabeth Farrelly wrote a weird, incoherent essay about...I don't know, how feminism is all mean to men, or something, at the SMH.

I can't be arsed to try and analyse the whole thing - it's in the 'not even wrong' category - but I can be arsed to get all righteous about a crappy understanding of history.

Specifically:

It caused me to think again about chivalry. We have traditionally regarded the chivalric tradition as returning with the Crusaders from the gracious Moorish cultures of the Middle East - implausible as that now seems. Many scholars now, however, argue that chivalry came to Europe via the Alans, who occupied what is now Georgia, Orleans and Galicia and continued the mounted, armoured, woman-respecting traditions of the Black Sea Sarmatians.

Regarding the Alans/Sarmatians theory, I think that Farrelly's "many scholars" means Howard Reid's Arthur the Dragon King. When I last read it, I was in high school, so I didn't check the sources particularly diligently, but it was certainly an interesting thesis (in short, the entire Arthur-and-knights business was the product of 5,500 mercenary cavalry soldiers - Sarmatians - brought to Britain by the Romans). The thing is, I'm pretty sure that no-one has suggested that the Sarmatians or Alans were especially "woman-respecting". The core of chivalry is the horse, the mounted warrior, not respect for teh womenz. The connotations of honour and respect and treating women in such-and-such a way don't appear until sometime around the 11th or 12th century (the Sarmatians were ~the 5th or 6th; the Alans in around the 6th or 7th, melding into the local peoples by or during the 8th). Those peoples were mounted, for sure, and armoured, yes, but we really don't know much about their attitude to women at all. What we do know is that as Europe moved into what we call the 'High Medieval' period there was a significant shift in the presentation of the many petty lords and warlords in Europe towards being honourable and gracious, from tyrants into the now-familiar image of honourable knights. It was then that chivalry came to mean respect for non-combatants, honour and daring-do.

The worst part of Farrelly's description is the gross over-simplification of some really interesting topics, which is a theme through her whole piece. She continually touches on interesting areas and then says something completely stupid about them.

1 - Go to Wikipedia and click "random article." The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2 - Go to quotationspage.com and hit "random quotes." The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days.” Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4 - Use Photoshop, PSP, the Gimp, or similar (pixlr.com is a free online photo editor) to put it all together.
5 - Post it your and add these instructions so your friends can join in.

Full quote:

Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture...Do not build up obstacles in your imagination.
-Norman Vincent Peale (1898 - 1993)

It's that kind of day...

Meet the alpheidae, better known as the pistol shrimp.

Now, at 3-5 cm in length, the pistol shrimp isn't a particularly large sea monster. It also doesn't have pincers. What it has is a biological death-ray which can create bubbles reaching temperatures of 4,700 degrees Celsius (the Sun being about 5,500).

It does this by cavitation; a bubble is produced which travels at around 97 km/hour and hits volumes of up to 218 decibels.

There you have it - the ocean's most hardcore creature is a 2-inch shrimp.

The world is awesome.