Gods forgive us

A friend asked me to help her with the visuals for a school assignment that involved making a Facebook page for Socrates, and here's what we came up with:

 

See the rest of it after the jump.

Meteor over Russia

Obviously this story has been covered pretty much all over the place today, and given that I'm no astronomy expert I don't really have anything new to contribute, but there's also pretty much no way I could let this pass without mentioning it.

I first heard about it this morning, when my friend Tim—an enthusiast of both astronomy and Russia, so this thing was basically made for him—awoke me with a text about it. When I was finally able to drag myself out of bed the first thing I did was check Bad Astronomy to see what Phil Plait had to say on the subject. He was of course right on top of things and his initial post included several amazing videos, including this one showing the contrail of the meteor forming:

And this one in which the shockwave from the sonic boom and/or explosion of the meteor reaches the ground and shatters nearby windows (the wave hits at around 12 seconds and it's loud, so for the sake of your eardrums make sure your volume isn't up too high):

And here's a hole in a lake that may be where one of the fragments made landfall:

The whole thing is stunning, and thanks to the insanity of Russia's roads we have plenty of dashcam footage of it happening. For an expert's analysis of the meteor head over to Bad Astronomy: here's his original post, and here's his follow-up.

"Masculism": The joke that writes itself

If you're not aware, there's a group of men out there who refer to themselves as Men's Rights Activists (MRAs) who appear to be genuinely under the impression that men are the oppressed sex in our society. If your immediate reaction is to laugh and shake your head in disbelief, that's because it's warranted. Their evidence for their oppression seems to come down to a bitterness over the fact that the tradition of men paying for dates still lingers in our society, resentment over their alimony payments, and a delusional paranoia that all women are really succubi that are after men's semen for some nefarious purpose. Of course what it really comes down to is a bunch of man-children who miss the "good old days" when sex was mandatory, beatings were expected, and women "respected" their man... it's just a bunch of assholes who think of women as objects and are upset that their objects are done taking their shit. And I assume it also involves a large dose of being convinced that that bitch told all her friends and now the whole world is laughing behind your back about your tiny penis. You're the only one obsessing over your penis, tiny or not, so get the hell over it; it's your tiny, bitter brain and dearth of personality that people find repulsive.

Now, it wasn't my intention to make this a Valentine's Day post but I'm fine that it turned out that way, since I imagine that today is a sort of anti-holy day for those in the MRA mindset. (I think Valentine's Day is a bit moronic myself because of the way it equates spending money with showing affection, which I see as a result of our petty and superficial society, and not indicative of an evil matriarchy.) Anyway, a couple days ago I came across this article on Jezebel. It's about the effort of MRAs to get a Twitter topic trending around the concept of "masculism," and how it immediately blew up in their faces. The MRA position is so hopeless that it's pretty much like shooting fish in a barrel, but I got a kick out of the responses from reasonable human beings anyway. Here are two of my favorites, and you can see some more great ones over at Jezebel, or you can browse the topic yourself on Twitter.