Sorry it’s a little late this week; I was out of town.

The New York Times has city-by-city details on the extent of the damage in Japan with embedded photos. (For Canadian readers, be careful, because this falls into your 20-articles-a-month limit.)

Matt Haughey has a couple of neat North America/Europe latitude equivalency maps up on his website. Some of the findings are pretty surprising – for example, the fact that Berlin is about the same latitude as Calgary, or that San Francisco is equivalent to the south of Spain.

A California teacher wrote an “S” on the hand of a straight student who supports LGBT rights and referred to her as a “Sinner” for the rest of that class. Good to see California is so determined in its regression.

An interesting YouTube video about the kind of stereotyping that Asian-American men face, featuring a panel with prominent Asian-American actors.

Less is More, a series of minimalist print ads.

Lori Nix is an artist who creates dioramas depicting what she calls “abandoned worlds”.

Move your mouse over the dot. And then keep moving. Created by friend-of-the-blog The Darling Budds. (Speaking of which, Chaper 51 is up.)

This young pianist born with no fingers on her right hand gives a moving and rousing concert. And you thought your life was hard.

I wrote about my disillusionment with the college experience. Take a look.

A quick follow-up to my previous analysis about Amy Chua, of Tiger Mother fame. One of her daughters, 18-year-old Sophia, has submitted a letter to the New York Post in defense of her mom entitled “Why I Love My Strict Chinese Mom“. This letter has been cited quite a bit on Twitter and otherwise as being proof that perhaps Chua isn’t as bad as her writing makes her out to be, but a few things in Sophia’s letter stood out to me as being alarming. Read more →

It seems almost like a rite of passage of blogging to hit a few key controversial topics. I’ve done racism and feminism and “why can’t we all just get along“, so I guess it’s time for religion. This is meant to be as much a point of reference for myself, as well as a statement of my starting position for others who want to engage in this conversation.

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I’m glad I took time off from blogging. I feel like my output since I’ve started back has been much higher, and of better quality. Anyway, here are the links from my Twitter account this week:

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QR codes are kind of like bar-codes. They’re small graphics encrypted with data that can be scanned by some sort of image-capturing device and then decrypted. A lot of smart-phones come equipped with the ability to decrypt QR codes. There’s now allegedly a company in Japan that will begin producing gravestones with QR codes embedded in them or displayed on them in some way, in order to offer visitors a sort of glimpse into the life of the deceased person.

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Last November, an 11-year-old girl was gang-raped in Texas. So far, 18 suspects have been arrested, their ages ranging from 12 to 27:

The affidavit said the assault started after a 19-year-old boy invited the victim to ride around in his car. He took her to a house on Travis Street where one of the other men charged, also 19, lived. There the girl was ordered to disrobe and was sexually assaulted by several boys in the bedroom and bathroom. She was told she would be beaten if she did not comply, the affidavit said.

– New York Times, March 9th, 2011

I want to talk about this, but the facts of the situation are so horrifying that I can’t talk about it without wanting to inflict bodily harm–eleven fucking years old, people–so I’m going to pick the cheap, meta route and look at media portrayals of the event.

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I was at a party a few weeks ago, meeting with people I hadn’t seen in a while. Shortly after my arrival, my phone buzzed and I looked down to see a text message from a friend who was also present at the party – he was asking me whether one of our mutual acquaintances had started dating someone. My friend was sitting in an armchair across the coffee table from me, nonchalantly dangling his phone in his hand and steadfastly not meeting my eye. The girl he was asking about was sitting on a couch to my left, squeezed between two others, one of whom was being very friendly with her.

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