This New Yorker article is one that makes me happy. Social psychology, for better or worse, is my discipline, and it seems like it’s finally sorting out one of its ongoing weaknesses. There’s a problem across all sciences around replication – the most prestigious journals demand new research, and academic careers demand publication in prestigious journals, so there’s a strong incentive against spending time on double-checking previous findings. The replication problem has always been particularly acute in social psychology, because it’s so hard to zoom down into fuzzy social complexity and figure out exactly what’s going on in a situation. Bring it on, folks. Also contains some other fascinating stuff – I didn’t know the famous Milgram electric shocks experiment was replicated in 2008!
For the last few years, Philip Sandifer has been writing amazing, fascinating essays about Doctor Who, tracking it across its history from the 60s on, linking it to social movements and literary criticism and alchemy and more. He has just reached the new series, and begins with an incredible close reading of the first episode for Chris Eccleston and Billie Piper. It’s lovely stuff, thoroughly readable and full of great little jokes and insightful turns of phrase, but adding up to something even greater than the sum of its considerable parts. If you are interested in Doctor Who at all you need to read this, but if you care at all about television as a medium then you’ll get something out of it. You probably do need to have watched the episode though. Jump in: Rose
Tea is the fashion! Stunning 60s marketing campaign by the NZ Tea Council to get the Yoof drinking tea. (via the Pikitia Press NZ/Aus comics blog)
Also at Pikitia: a UK girls comic story about a British orphan who inherits a sheep farm in New Zealand. Fascinating!
Holy cow, there’s someone who is so passionate in their defence of Alien3 that even I think they’re going a bit far.
Making sense of Syria’s conflict: six separate things are going on there
A writer at games site Kotaku records every instance of sexism she encounters for a month.
Going viral for all the right reasons: Reddit users discuss which Muppet would be best placed to assassinate Hitler.
Those beautiful bootleg movie posters from Ghana have been turning up all over the place again; there’s a bunch in the new selection that I hadn’t seen before (via Luke W). Here’s another site that finds other, similarly wonderful movie posters from other places. (via Andrew S)
Also all over the place right now: great behind-the-scenes pics from Empire Strikes Back, again most of these are new to me.
Sexy pool party! This has also been going viral for good reason. The woman in the bikini really commits to the bit.
Not safe for work, or for my mum: 8 other animal-style sex positions (Isabella Rossellini did the bug ones better though)
Also NSFW: Milo Manara’s history of humanity – quite breathtaking, but full of the stylised sexy nakedness Manara is known for.
Bertrand Russell writes to Oswald Mosley (via RodgerD)
Mapping New Zealand by where people live. Gosh, my country has a lot of uninhabited space.
Via felicia day: One tiny hand
Ooh, linguists gonna love this. The punctuation mark “slash” is being verbalised in speech. You hear it the same way you’d expect e.g. “Can she visit slash stay over?” which is the same as “visit/stay over”. But language is always changing, and changing fast – and the meaning and use of “slash” has already drifted in some fascinating new directions. How invigorating!
Teaching intersectionality through the game Halo (via Jamie)
Four sisters take a group photo every year for over three decades.
A couple of things I really liked at The Ruminator: vintage photos of creepy window displays and a piece about the flak you get when you’re taking meds for mental health
A profile of my friend Warren, who is a full-time professional maker of Lego structures. (He has a book out.)
The best anti-piracy measure ever taken?
And finally, via Hugh Dingwall: cut me off mid-funk. (Freaks & Geeks people should definitely click.)