Quick Hits

Things on the Internet that I have recently enjoyed and/or learned from:

•  A cappella prep version Bitches Ain't Shit by Dr Dre. It's technically a version of the Ben Folds cover, but this one made me laugh so hard the first time I saw it.
• An excellent post on Crooked Timber about hyperlinks, research, and cognition. Has me thinking about the relationship between footnotes and links as both references and content-carriers.
• Canadian retailer Jacob announces that its ads will not longer feature retouched models. Hooray for a  semblance of body positivity! Next step: getting some body diversity in there too.
• Margaret Atwood is one of my favourite writers -- particularly her short stories and poetry. This Recording reposted a 1976 essay from her on the subject of women and writing. It reminded me of Joanna Russ' brilliant and oft-cited (by me) How to Suppress Women's Writing. Both highly recommended.
• Hipster Shrugged: The Twitter Meme. Probably the only worthwhile thing to come out of Ayn Rand.
• From the always enjoyable Big Picture: Russia, in colour, a century ago. Beyond being utterly cool, this got me thinking about the way we relate images to time. Because they look like photos that could have been taken now, the pictures were, for me, difficult to place in their historical context.  Colour serves not only as a representation of what was, but also as a temporal marker. You can see this with the contemporary obsession with sepia tone, with black and white, and now with Polaroid-style shots and disposable cameras. The images themselves aren't nostalgic, but the colour makes them so.
• Copyright and booze. An incongruous match, both for studying and for drinking.
• And finally -- Take a look at the following image. You get three guesses as to what it represents:

...if you guess a high school sexual network, you were right! The link is way old, but the information is still relevant -- because teenagers use the "don't date the ex-boyfriend of the current girlfriend of your own ex" rule in choosing their partners, they end up forming chain where they're linked to almost every other sexually active member of the school. Implications for STI-transmission (and major drama) are obvious.