Tessenjutsu A solid iron tessen fan on display in Iwakuni Castle, Japan Tessenjutsu (鉄扇術?) is the martial art of the Japanese war fan (tessen). It is based on the use of the solid iron fan or the folding iron fan, which usually had eight or ten wood or iron ribs. The practitioners of tessenjutsu could acquire a high level of skill. Apart from using it in duels against enemies armed with swords and spears, the skilled wielder could also use it to fence and fend off knives and poisoned darts thrown at him. Tessenjutsu is still practiced by a few experts in Japan to this day. Behind the camera: How selfies bring authenticity into focus There’s a moment in Eddie Murphy’s legendary 1983 standup special, “Delirious,” when Murphy scans the front row of the crowd and asks if anybody has a camera. A hand reaches up to the stage to offer a quintessential 1980s point-and-shoot, one of those flattened rectangles that masks the photographer’s eyes like a censorship bar. Murphy proceeds to snap two photos of the audience. He then points the camera at himself, drops his arms to his sides, and takes a close-up of his fire-engine red-leather-clad crotch. “Let’s see you explain the last one to the guys at Fotomat,” Murphy jokes as he hands the camera back to its owner. How quaint. Thirty years later, Fotomat kiosks are but a distant memory and the mere question of whether someone in a 3,000-person audience might have a camera is dated to the point of surreality. Most American adults own smartphones, which means a staggering number of people have high-quality cameras with them at any given time. “Dear daily mail, Oh my God, nipple!”
Self-healing metal closes cracks when under stress | Science! A self-healing metal is one thing — in today’s wacky world of quantum computing and self-driving cars, why wouldn’t a metal be able to shore up any fractures it happens to acquire? A new study from MIT describes a substance for stranger than that, however; this new metal doesn’t just heal itself spontaneously, but closes micro-fractures in response to being pulled apart. This isn’t just amazing, it seemingly goes against our most basic understanding of how the world works. And yet, seems to be true. The research team itself did not initially trust their results, checking them several times before tentatively bringing them to the public’s attention. How this occurs seems to be related to the “grains” of metal that make up the alloy. The type of breakage seen above is called a “disclination,” or a fracture that enters a grain but doesn’t cleave all the way through it. Metal fatigue is the accumulation of tiny stress fractures, and it is the bane of structural engineers.
Article The Christian religion,” wrote Robert Louis Wilken, “is inescapably ritualistic (one is received into the Church by a solemn washing with water), uncompromisingly moral (‘be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,’ said Jesus), and unapologetically intellectual (be ready to give a ‘reason for the hope that is in you,’ in the words of 1 Peter). Like all the major religions of the world, Christianity is more than a set of devotional practices and a moral code: it is also a way of thinking about God, about human beings, about the world and history.” Ritualistic, moral, and intellectual: May these words, ones that Wilken uses to begin his beautiful book, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, be written on your soul as you begin college and mark your life—characterize and distinguish your life—for the next four years. Be uncompromisingly moral. The Christian fact is very straightforward: To be a student is a calling. It is an extraordinary gift. But you are a Christian.
Spider silk turned into electrical wire with carbon nanotubes | Science! Spiders are good for more than keeping insect populations in check and giving us all the creeps. A team of researchers at Florida State University has found a way to conduct electricity with spider silk. This advancement could bring spider silk wiring to the gadgets of the future. Spider silk has been of intense research interest for years due to its incredible properties. It is stronger than steel at the same thickness, and more impact resistant than kevlar. One of the few things spider silk isn’t naturally good for is conducting electricity. The silk was gathered from a golden silk orb-weaver spider (Nephila clavipes), which is found throughout the southern US. This super durable spider silk was used to create a proof-of-concept device to measure a person’s heart rate, thus proving that is was conductive. There are a few barriers between this experiment and conductive spider silk wiring. [Image credit: 'SandFlash]
When Schools Become Dead Zones of the Imagination: A Critical Pedagogy Manifesto (Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout) Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. Martin Luther King, Jr. If the right-wing billionaires and apostles of corporate power have their way, public schools will become “dead zones of the imagination,” reduced to anti-public spaces that wage an assault on critical thinking, civic literacy and historical memory.1 Since the 1980s, schools have increasingly become testing hubs that de-skill teachers and disempower students. Corporate school reform is not simply obsessed with measurements that degrade any viable understanding of the connection between schooling and educating critically engaged citizens. Policies and practices that are based on distrust of teachers and disrespect for them will fail. To read more articles by Henry A. . . .
Answers: Why is all life carbon-based? | Science! If you read any amount of science fiction, you’ll probably come up against the idea of alien life based on some element other than carbon. Almost universally, this element is silicon, but some writers have gone further afield in imagining totally novel forms of life — for instance, Carl Sagan once imagined life forms that could evolve and thrive in the gaseous sea that is Jupiter (aside from its core). Still, why do most writers consistently turn to silicon as the most likely carbon substitute? And why is carbon the basis of all life currently known? Basically, the answer is that life is complex, and more to the point that it must be complex. Probably not how silicon based life would actually look. The reason carbon has this property is somewhat complicated but can be boiled down to this: when bonding with other atoms due to its natural chemical properties, carbon will form four bonds. Now read: Geek Answers: Why aren’t we building a space elevator?
How the GOP Slowly Went Insane - Jon Lovett The current moment in politics came about slowly, not suddenly, but it doesn't make it any less of a national emergency. When I was a kid, all I knew about Michael Jackson was that he was crazy. He had a monkey named Bubbles and some kind of oxygen chamber and he used to be black but he made himself white and he was nuts. That was Michael Jackson in full. Wacko Jacko. After all, as a kid, you know you are changing, but the world seems static. This is what I was thinking about, anyway, when Michael Jackson died: not what he meant to me but what he became to us. We made it a joke because it became normal. Yes, there are two types of public insanity. But then there is the more insidious crazy. The same happens in our politics. These are events that stop us in our tracks. There are more serious examples we can argue about. And then the government shuts down. It happened slowly, didn’t it? Then it all changed. So the tiger ate its master and now here we are.
Emotional Wreck, A 17 year old Russian girl has a doll-like face but physique of a body builder. She is a powerlifter.