Month: March 2015

by liberal japonicus
Been on a little vacation and was planning on writing a post about how interesting it was that Trevor Noah was going to be the new host of the Daily Show. More below the break

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by russell

as anyone who hasn't sworn off of TV, the internet, social media, print, and water cooler conversation knows, the state of Indiana passed their own version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).

lots of religious conservatives are applauding it, lots of liberal / progressive folks are decrying it.

the feds already have an RFRA of long standing, many other states also have RFRA's, so why is this a big deal?

folks who are against it say it's a thinly disguised pretext for discrimination against gays, Mike Pence says it's a simple matter of extending the protections against federal overreach that are provided by the federal RFRA to the state level.

who's right? 

more after the jump….

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by Doctor Science

This picture has been going around tumblr:

sparking a discussion of “how do sculptors even *do* that?” and many pictures of Bernini works. Along the way, someone labeled this one “a Vestal Virgin, carved during the Roman Empire”. I immediately recognized that this was wrong.

The work is by Raffaelle Monti, a 19th-century Italian sculptor who created it in 1846-47.

I’m not sure what, exactly, makes me say the Monti sculpture is obviously 19th-C, while the Louvre statue of Aphrodite aka Venus Genetrix, also discussed in the thread, looks more authentically ancient.

Cut for images containing classical and artistic nudity — very likely to be NSFW.

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by Doctor Science

Mister Doctor and I were driving down a winding road the other day, and he asked me what the beautiful shade trees along it were. “Sycamores”, I said, “what in Europe are called plane trees.” He confessed that when he was young and heard of “plane trees” he was befuddled, not knowing if the grownups were talking about “just plain trees”, or trees that had something to do with airplanes, or if they were flat, or grew on the plains, or what. We also talked about how confusing it can be when British and American English have two different words for the same thing, and I said I was confused for years by British books that referred to “limes” as large European shade trees. Mister Doctor had just assumed they meant citrus trees, but I said no, they’re actually linden trees.

I promised him I’d look up why sycamores are called “plane” trees, and how linden trees got to be “limes” — and so I did, and now I shall share with you.

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