Well, the spin for me is making light of his actions at a state funeral using a non-journalistic idiot nobody as a skyped commentator-Major news corps are owned by those who placed him in power-I have no respect for this president whatsoever anyway, and watching him behave like a middle-school girl is to me, about as ridiculous as letting a schizophrenic African within 5 feet of him on worldwide television.


I agree that it's a complete nothing news item, ninety percent of so-called news is non-news anyhow-It's programming gullible minds to believe everything they hear.

I've been waiting for this since middle school. Too bad it wasn't funny.

You have been awarded 1 Power Point for fixing the embed code for Dead Pool video Middle School Wrestler wins his first match. Thank you for helping maintain VideoSift's reliability.

This is a resource officer, we have them here in Indiana as well. Here they only really show up at larger schools and are doing double duty as a security officer/truancy officer who also directs traffic and dismissal after school hours to ensure that students make it home safely. The schools around my area also have guidelines for students up through middle school (8th grade I believe) who do not ride a school bus. These guideline determine who can pick them up and if they can walk home. We also have rules (at my daughters school at least) that determine picking up the child at the end of the day. Nothing here says that you cant walk to get your child but that they are released in batches and you have to wait for them to be released to pick them up. All of this seems reasonable to me as i would rather have my daughters safety ensured than have something overlooked in the confusion and find out my daughter went home with a complete stranger because the school didn't follow policy. I would not want my child to go to a school that makes any effort to avoid responsibility of my child without making an effort to ensure their safety

Not to mention parts of your middle school education.

@ChaosEngine, again, I don't entirely disagree with you. I think allowing the law to protect the rights of the individual makes total sense. Whether that individual is a minor or adult.

Where we definitely will have our disagreement is, as you mentioned, to the extent of the laws' reach.

I think laws should protect the minority, not impose the majority's will. I also believe children should have a voice in their personal choices that supersedes the will of the parents or the will of society.

I understand a seven-year-old child who was homeschooled that God will cure his cancer may not be the most qualified mind to make complex medical decisions, but, in the end, we either give people control over their lives or we pretend to know best.

Just because you and I don't believe God will cure little Jimmy's cancer doesn't mean we should have a right to tell little Jimmy he has to go to the hospital and receive care. Otherwise we end up with these kinds of stories.

The war on drugs is a perfect example of the majority, or community, knowing best how we should all run our lives. So was prohibition in the States. So are seatbelt laws, soda bans, sin taxes, prostitution bans, Tennessee's baggy pants law, bans on rain collection, fines for muddy tires, gambling laws, private establishment smoking bans, and even NJ going as far as to ban hugs in a middle school.

People know best how to run their own lives. Families at least have an interest in the well-being of their members. But the community doesn't always make the best legislative decisions when trying to do good.

Now, I don't know why I have so much trouble explaining this but I still really want you to understand that I'm not excusing this mom's actions.

The only thing I'm saying by suggesting her reaction is normal is this:

If I was skating through a public park, not watching where I was going, and I ran directly into someone's kid with a fucking weapon made of wood and steel, knocking them to the ground (except of course for their gravity-defying head), the first thing I would expect is for that parent to come at me.

I would be apologetic, just like the guy in the video because I would know it was ENTIRELY my fault. What I wouldn't do is try to explain to them that I actually bear only seventy-percent of the responsibility and that they shouldn't let their kid stray out of arm's reach in a park.

Sure, I would defend myself because I wouldn't expect that they were just going to immediately forgive me and think only about their shortcomings as a parent. I would defend myself because I still have the right to be safe in a public place, regardless of my actions.

What would I not do though? I wouldn't hit them with a fucking skateboard. Especially not the one I just hurt their child with. I wouldn't do that because I would know the only excuse I had was the petulant, middle-school refrain of "she hit me first!" I wouldn't do that because it would escalate the situation even more and I don't like to use violence to solve my problems. I'm perfectly capable of defending myself without hitting someone's irrational mother.

And then there's the question of pressing charges. Which for some reason to me is just laughable.

Was the lady wrong? Yeah, absolutely. Was she crazy? Maybe temporarily, it might have had something to do with someone running into her kid. I know a lot of people might not have acted the way she did (I would certainly have been more concerned about my own kid than the skater) but I know a lot of people might have FELT the way she did.

I just still don't think her actions were so far from what a person could expect after being a dumbass and skating directly into a little kid.

Maybe I don't get it because I'm an overprotective, irrational parent. Judging by how many times you referred to the child in the video as "it" however, maybe I just shouldn't expect you to understand my side either.

Maybe this is an answer in itself, but I have a hard time figuring that out.

Detecting the motion in the introductory stuff is very easy and obvious, but then right after it says "Here we go!" (35 seconds in), there are several flashes in a row where I couldn't detect any motion at all because they flash on and off the screen extremely quickly. Frustration with that threw off my ability to catch some later, particularly on the first viewing. Some are still easy after that, but many were just plain too fast.

I though "OK, that is a result -- too fast for me to catch", but then I decided to cheat. Downloaded the video (1080p version) and played it back in VLC at very slow speeds and finally frame by frame. In VLC, it appears that the first three flashes are literally *one single frame*, so obviously there can't be any motion there. The fourth is two frames. Good luck.

Spoiler alert? -- Between "Here we go!" (35 seconds) and "Which is easier for seeing motion?" (49 seconds), frame by frame checking tells me that 1-3 are one frame (no motion), then they all go left except for the final 2, which are 3 frames going right. I think that I could see the final 2 moving right in my original viewing, but I doubt I saw any of the 2 frame sets moving left.

Between "Which is easier? ..." and the end of the video, I now find it easy to detect the direction in full-speed playback for all of them. I don't think it was *as* easy in my first viewing, but I do think that I correctly got most of them. Frustration with the middle section made it much more difficult though.

Spoilers again, during that final session they go L L R R L L L L (I think, I didn't actually frame-by-frame analyze it but they all seem clear).

The link provided (and the video itself) suggests that detecting the motion should be more or less difficult based on the size of the view area. Maybe my view area is too large (I was playing it fullscreen on a 40 inch LED TV that I use for a monitor), but I didn't really notice much of a difference in difficulty across the various sizes -- I just concentrate on a spot in the middle of the screen and I didn't even notice that they were different sizes until the video mentioned it.

I have no idea what those results are supposed to reveal about my IQ. Back in Middle School, I tested into the "gifted" program with an IQ between 130-140. I thought that the *real* IQ test was rather weird, but at least it made more sense than this...

These weapons are designed to be easily stripped down and reassembled in the field, so it doesn't take much skill. Do it 3 or 4 times and you could do it that fast. I don't understand why they need to do this... (especially the part where they just pull the tool-kit out of the stock). is it just a manual dexterity thing for gym class? (card shuffling tricks would be harder and more impressive) Or is there a 'military skills' class in middle school?

Yeah it's funny and all. Sort of.

I just watched the original. The kid is actually delighted at getting a giant "monster truck" poster. You know, the kind of oversized car crusher with huge wheels that they show off at county fair tractor pulls.

I have kids this age. And looking at this kid - buzz cut, track pants, burly dad with a Steelers jersey - I can't help but cringe when I think what his Monday morning will be like at his likely rural U.S. public middle school. If I had to make an educated guess, he's going to get bullied. For weeks.

So down vote for me. De-viral this one. And it's not that funny anyway.

If anyone wants to read more about Stephen and LGBTQIA youth, here is the NYT article.

The New York Time's

Generation LGBTQIA

By MICHAEL SCHULMAN

Published: January 10, 2013

STEPHEN IRA, a junior at Sarah Lawrence College, uploaded a video last March on We Happy Trans, a site that shares "positive perspectives" on being transgender.

In the breakneck six-and-a-half-minute monologue - hair tousled, sitting in a wood-paneled dorm room - Stephen exuberantly declared himself "a queer, a nerd fighter, a writer, an artist and a guy who needs a haircut," and held forth on everything from his style icons (Truman Capote and "any male-identified person who wears thigh-highs or garters") to his toy zebra.

Because Stephen, who was born Kathlyn, is the 21-year-old child of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, the video went viral, garnering nearly half a million views. But that was not the only reason for its appeal. With its adrenalized, freewheeling eloquence, the video seemed like a battle cry for a new generation of post-gay gender activists, for whom Stephen represents a rare public face.

Armed with the millennial generation's defining traits - Web savvy, boundless confidence and social networks that extend online and off - Stephen and his peers are forging a political identity all their own, often at odds with mainstream gay culture.

If the gay-rights movement today seems to revolve around same-sex marriage, this generation is seeking something more radical: an upending of gender roles beyond the binary of male/female. The core question isn't whom they love, but who they are - that is, identity as distinct from sexual orientation.

But what to call this movement? Whereas "gay and lesbian" was once used to lump together various sexual minorities - and more recently "L.G.B.T." to include bisexual and transgender - the new vanguard wants a broader, more inclusive abbreviation. "Youth today do not define themselves on the spectrum of L.G.B.T.," said Shane Windmeyer, a founder of Campus Pride, a national student advocacy group based in Charlotte, N.C.

Part of the solution has been to add more letters, and in recent years the post-post-post-gay-rights banner has gotten significantly longer, some might say unwieldy. The emerging rubric is "L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," which stands for different things, depending on whom you ask.

"Q" can mean "questioning" or "queer," an umbrella term itself, formerly derogatory before it was appropriated by gay activists in the 1990s. "I" is for "intersex," someone whose anatomy is not exclusively male or female. And "A" stands for "ally" (a friend of the cause) or "asexual," characterized by the absence of sexual attraction.

It may be a mouthful, but it's catching on, especially on liberal-arts campuses.

The University of Missouri, Kansas City, for example, has an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Resource Center that, among other things, helps student locate "gender-neutral" restrooms on campus. Vassar College offers an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Discussion Group on Thursday afternoons. Lehigh University will be hosting its second annual L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Intercollegiate Conference next month, followed by a Queer Prom. Amherst College even has an L.G.B.T.Q.Q.I.A.A. center, where every group gets its own letter.

The term is also gaining traction on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr, where posts tagged with "lgbtqia" suggest a younger, more progressive outlook than posts that are merely labeled "lgbt."

"There's a very different generation of people coming of age, with completely different conceptions of gender and sexuality," said Jack Halberstam (formerly Judith), a transgender professor at the University of Southern California and the author, most recently, of "Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal."

"When you see terms like L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," Professor Halberstam added, "it's because people are seeing all the things that fall out of the binary, and demanding that a name come into being."

And with a plethora of ever-expanding categories like "genderqueer" and "androgyne" to choose from, each with an online subculture, piecing together a gender identity can be as D.I.Y. as making a Pinterest board.

BUT sometimes L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. is not enough. At the University of Pennsylvania last fall, eight freshmen united in the frustration that no campus group represented them.

Sure, Penn already had some two dozen gay student groups, including Queer People of Color, Lambda Alliance and J-Bagel, which bills itself as the university's "Jewish L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Community." But none focused on gender identity (the closest, Trans Penn, mostly catered to faculty members and graduate students).

Richard Parsons, an 18-year-old transgender male, discovered that when he attended a student mixer called the Gay Affair, sponsored by Penn's L.G.B.T. Center. "I left thoroughly disappointed," said Richard, a garrulous freshman with close-cropped hair, wire-framed glasses and preppy clothes, who added, "This is the L.G.B.T. Center, and it's all gay guys."

Through Facebook, Richard and others started a group called Penn Non-Cis, which is short for "non-cisgender." For those not fluent in gender-studies speak, "cis" means "on the same side as" and "cisgender" denotes someone whose gender identity matches his or her biology, which describes most of the student body. The group seeks to represent everyone else. "This is a freshman uprising," Richard said.

On a brisk Tuesday night in November, about 40 students crowded into the L.G.B.T. Center, a converted 19th-century carriage house, for the group's inaugural open mike. The organizers had lured students by handing out fliers on campus while barking: "Free condoms! Free ChapStick!"

"There's a really vibrant L.G.B.T. scene," Kate Campbell, one of the M.C.'s, began. "However, that mostly encompasses the L.G.B. and not too much of the T. So we're aiming to change that."

Students read poems and diary entries, and sang guitar ballads. Then Britt Gilbert - a punky-looking freshman with a blond bob, chunky glasses and a rock band T-shirt - took the stage. She wanted to talk about the concept of "bi-gender."

"Does anyone want to share what they think it is?"

Silence.

She explained that being bi-gender is like manifesting both masculine and feminine personas, almost as if one had a "detachable penis." "Some days I wake up and think, 'Why am I in this body?' " she said. "Most days I wake up and think, 'What was I thinking yesterday?' 

"Britt's grunginess belies a warm matter-of-factness, at least when describing her journey. As she elaborated afterward, she first heard the term "bi-gender" from Kate, who found it on Tumblr. The two met at freshman orientation and bonded. In high school, Kate identified as "agender" and used the singular pronoun "they"; she now sees her gender as an "amorphous blob."

By contrast, Britt's evolution was more linear. She grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and never took to gender norms. As a child, she worshiped Cher and thought boy bands were icky. Playing video games, she dreaded having to choose male or female avatars.

In middle school, she started calling herself bisexual and dated boys. By 10th grade, she had come out as a lesbian. Her parents thought it was a phase - until she brought home a girlfriend, Ash. But she still wasn't settled.

"While I definitely knew that I liked girls, I didn't know that I was one," Britt said. Sometimes she would leave the house in a dress and feel uncomfortable, as if she were wearing a Halloween costume. Other days, she felt fine. She wasn't "trapped in the wrong body," as the cliché has it - she just didn't know which body she wanted.

When Kate told her about the term "bi-gender," it clicked instantly. "I knew what it was, before I knew what it was," Britt said, adding that it is more fluid than "transgender" but less vague than "genderqueer" - a catchall term for nontraditional gender identities.

At first, the only person she told was Ash, who responded, "It took you this long to figure it out?" For others, the concept was not so easy to grasp. Coming out as a lesbian had been relatively simple, Britt said, "since people know what that is." But when she got to Penn, she was relieved to find a small community of freshmen who had gone through similar awakenings.

Among them was Richard Parsons, the group's most politically lucid member. Raised female, Richard grew up in Orlando, Fla., and realized he was transgender in high school. One summer, he wanted to room with a transgender friend at camp, but his mother objected. "She's like, 'Well, if you say that he's a guy, then I don't want you rooming with a guy,' " he recalled. "We were in a car and I basically blurted out, 'I think I might be a guy, too!' "

After much door-slamming and tears, Richard and his mother reconciled. But when she asked what to call him, he had no idea. He chose "Richard" on a whim, and later added a middle name, Matthew, because it means "gift of God."

By the time he got to Penn, he had been binding his breasts for more than two years and had developed back pain. At the open mike, he told a harrowing story about visiting the university health center for numbness and having a panic attack when he was escorted into a women's changing room.

Nevertheless, he praised the university for offering gender-neutral housing. The college's medical program also covers sexual reassignment surgery, which, he added, "has heavily influenced my decision to probably go under the Penn insurance plan next year."

PENN has not always been so forward-thinking; a decade ago, the L.G.B.T. Center (nestled amid fraternity houses) was barely used. But in 2010, the university began reaching out to applicants whose essays raised gay themes. Last year, the gay newsmagazine The Advocate ranked Penn among the top 10 trans-friendly universities, alongside liberal standbys like New York University.

More and more colleges, mostly in the Northeast, are catering to gender-nonconforming students. According to a survey by Campus Pride, at least 203 campuses now allow transgender students to room with their preferred gender; 49 have a process to change one's name and gender in university records; and 57 cover hormone therapy. In December, the University of Iowa became the first to add a "transgender" checkbox to its college application.

"I wrote about an experience I had with a drag queen as my application essay for all the Ivy Leagues I applied to," said Santiago Cortes, one of the Penn students. "And I got into a few of the Ivy Leagues - Dartmouth, Columbia and Penn. Strangely not Brown.

"But even these measures cannot keep pace with the demands of incoming students, who are challenging the curriculum much as gay activists did in the '80s and '90s. Rather than protest the lack of gay studies classes, they are critiquing existing ones for being too narrow.

Several members of Penn Non-Cis had been complaining among themselves about a writing seminar they were taking called "Beyond 'Will & Grace,' " which examined gay characters on shows like "Ellen," "Glee" and "Modern Family." The professor, Gail Shister, who is a lesbian, had criticized several students for using "L.G.B.T.Q." in their essays, saying it was clunky, and proposed using "queer" instead. Some students found the suggestion offensive, including Britt Gilbert, who described Ms. Shister as "unaccepting of things that she doesn't understand."

Ms. Shister, reached by phone, said the criticism was strictly grammatical. "I am all about economy of expression," she said. "L.G.B.T.Q. doesn't exactly flow off the tongue. So I tell the students, 'Don't put in an acronym with five or six letters.' "

One thing is clear. Ms. Shister, who is 60 and in 1979 became The Philadelphia Inquirer's first female sportswriter, is of a different generation, a fact she acknowledges freely, even gratefully. "Frankly, I'm both proud and envious that these young people are growing up in an age where they're free to love who they want," she said.

If history is any guide, the age gap won't be so easy to overcome. As liberated gay men in the 1970s once baffled their pre-Stonewall forebears, the new gender outlaws, to borrow a phrase from the transgender writer Kate Bornstein, may soon be running ideological circles around their elders.

Still, the alphabet soup of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. may be difficult to sustain. "In the next 10 or 20 years, the various categories heaped under the umbrella of L.G.B.T. will become quite quotidian," Professor Halberstam said.

Even at the open mike, as students picked at potato chips and pineapple slices, the bounds of identity politics were spilling over and becoming blurry.

At one point, Santiago, a curly-haired freshman from Colombia, stood before the crowd. He and a friend had been pondering the limits of what he calls "L.G.B.T.Q. plus."

"Why do only certain letters get to be in the full acronym?" he asked.

Then he rattled off a list of gender identities, many culled from Wikipedia. "We have our lesbians, our gays," he said, before adding, "bisexual, transsexual, queer, homosexual, asexual." He took a breath and continued. "Pansexual. Omnisexual. Trisexual. Agender. Bi-gender. Third gender. Transgender. Transvestite. Intersexual. Two-spirit. Hijra. Polyamorous."

By now, the list had turned into free verse. He ended: "Undecided. Questioning. Other. Human."

The room burst into applause.

Correction: January 10, 2013, Thursday

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article and a picture caption referred incorrectly to a Sarah Lawrence College student who uploaded a video online about being transgender. He says he is Stephen Ira, not Stephen Ira Beatty.

Source NYT

Fair Use

I've seen a lot of people flaunting story since it happened, but they fail to read the whole article:

There were six similar attacks in just seven months in 2010 that killed nearly 20 people and wounded more than 50.

The most recent such attack took place in August, when a knife-wielding man broke into a middle school in the southern city of Nanchang and stabbed two students before fleeing.

In one of the worst incidents, a man described as an unemployed, middle-aged doctor killed eight children with a knife in March 2010 to vent his anger over a thwarted romantic relationship.

Tight controls mean that gun crimes are rare in China and make knives and sometimes explosives the weapons used in mass attacks in China.

There's plenty of intentionally blurred faces in the ones I've taken part in (elementary and middle school)-Once kids figured out that when they shook their heads back and forth rapidly that they would look like paranormal ghouls everyone was twitching and wiggling the next year!

There used to be good money in these student body long-exposure pans. Analog kicks ASS!

I'm not sure why people seem to think this is an elementary problem. I seriously doubt that most people in this discussion studied anywhere near the math and physics required in the calculation in middle school, or even high school, or college for that matter. Having studied physics and math at all those levels, I know that wind turbines were NEVER part of the discussion. After looking up the relevant equations, I can see why -- they're certainly not trivial, and would probably required significant calculus to understand (derive). In university my physics courses were directed towards electricity, so I didn't get a chance to play with wind tunnels -- although I'd still love to!

Applying the oversimplified version of laws that you learned in early physics classes to reality can often leave you in stunned silence when reality seems to defy them. Things like the dimples on golf balls or sailing ships moving upwind are classic examples of things that you wouldn't expect to even be conceivable unless you saw it in action.

The only way something like this would work is a device that captures waste heat and turns it back into usable energy. BMW made a system like this that took waste heat from the exhaust and put it back into the crank.

Also some of you need to go back to high school (middle school perhaps)