Columbia University senior Emma Sulkowicz, 21, says she was raped in her own bed at the beginning of her sophomore year. This week, two years after the alleged assault, Sulkowicz, a visual-arts major, has made a promise to carry her mattress around campus every day as part of her senior thesis. It is, she says, a symbol of the burden sexual-assault survivors carry with them every day.

“The act of carrying the mattress from inside my room out into the light has mirrored the way my life has changed, as I’ve brought my personal story out into the light,” Sulkowicz told TIME. “This project is a way to heal one of the most difficult things that happened to me. As I will build muscle and get stronger, hopefully I will also build emotional strength.”

Sulkowicz started the performance-art project on Tuesday, and she said she is determined to continue carrying the mattress wherever she goes — to class, the library, the gym — as long as her alleged rapist is still on campus. That means her project could last until graduation day in May 2015 — unless her alleged assailant is either expelled or chooses to leave the school. Last year, Sulkowicz and two other women reported the same person to the university. All three cases were dismissed.

BASE is an acronym that stands for four categories of fixed objects from which one can jump: buildings, antennas (referring to radio masts), spans (bridges) and earth (cliffs).[1][2] Participants jump from a fixed object such as a cliff and, after an optional freefall delay, deploy a parachute to slow their descent and land. A popular form of BASE jumping is wingsuit BASE jumping.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASE_jumping

so, apparently california is (well, used to be) naturally rich in petroleum, that was so close to the surface that you could just stick your hand in the ground to reach it.

these photos are from 1910 - 1955, California, USA.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/35897819

source: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/oil-derricks-california-old-photos/

(Oil derricks line a road outside Los Angeles. 1930.)

there's many more pics on that website

I had seen the #zuzai tag on mastodon a few times and had no idea what it was, but discovered a whole site dedicated to the new word. It's pronounced like "zoo's eye." You might say an author uses a zuzai writing process, or a teacher requires a zuzai testing environment. Is it a little pretentious to set up a whole website to justify the weird, new retronym you just came up with in a fit of ennui? Maybe. But I like zuzai, it encapsulates something that currently takes a lot of words to otherwise explain, and I hope it worms its way into the public zeitgeist.

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/56933851

In a rather unsurprising twist, the pilot, porn actor Mitsuyasu Maeno, was an ultranationalist.

The attack was due to the bribery scandal after Kodama was exposed as lobbying in favor of Lockheed-Martin in Japan, which the ultranationalists loathed as they still saw the USA as an evil alien that should be expelled from their country.

Oh, he was also a CIA asset

The eagle sounds like a disappointed gull.

Edit: according to comments, it may not be true or maybe partially true.

*only in Brazil

Literally just stumbled upon it while trying to see if the PeerTube app had any recent updates. View-Verse has apps on both iOS and Android. The iOS app says no data collected.

Don't know much about it beyond that so far, but the more options we have to get away from the big corporations the better, so I figured I'd share.

33. Why does NIST state that a yellow stream of molten metal seen in some photographs pouring down the side of WTC2 was aluminum from the crashed plane, even though aluminum burns with a white glow?

NIST concluded that the source of the molten material was aluminum alloys from the aircraft, since these are known to melt between 475 degrees Celsius (900 degrees Fahrenheit) and 640 degrees Celsius (1,200 degrees Fahrenheit)—depending on the particular alloy—well below the expected temperatures (about 1,000 degrees Celsius or 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit) in the vicinity of the fires. Aluminum is not expected to ignite at normal fire temperatures and there is no visual indication that the material flowing from the tower was burning.

34. Why didn't the NIST investigation consider reports of molten steel in the wreckage from the WTC towers?

The condition of the steel in the wreckage of the WTC towers (i.e., whether it was in a molten state or not) was irrelevant to the investigation of the collapse since it does not provide any conclusive information on the condition of the steel when the WTC towers were standing.

this is a very cool physics phenomenon. i just became aware of this.

when light falls through a rippled surface, such as waves on the water, the light rays get refracted in different directions.

if these rays then meet, they make a very bright area. which is what we can see in the video, at the sea floor.

here's some more pics:

1. youtube as source: not every youtube is bad as a source. But so many get away with lenient standards than other text sources. Most of them lack evidence to support their claims, and use a hearsay as the sole source. So i suggest banning youtube as a source completely. Yes it'd prevent vids that provide sufficient evidence. But youtube is source, it doesn't take long before media outlets make news about it. e.g. 1) "Exposing The Solid State Donut Battery. It's Over." from Ziroth, 2) "216,000,000 Spy TVs | The LG Smart TV Problem" from Gamers Nexus, 3) "Statement by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell" from Federal Reserve. These vids gain attention and generated many articles. So the only downside is missing a niche fact whose popularity was so small that no one made an article about it. Compared to the upside, i will say it's worthy. P.S. Hearsay is not necessarily bad as long as the speaker has built the credibility over time. Youtube vids tend to have no enough credibility compared to news outlets.
2. Recent news: There are dedicated communities for news. i simply don't see the need to see news here. Also, recent facts tend to change, or be misleading or simply false. This place, to me, is a place for facts that will remain as facts and after hundred years. I know it's a subjective opinion but i'll venture to say people, including me, come here(and r/todayilearned) because of these unique and interesting facts from decades ago. I'm not saying they should be from Narnia, the point is the posted facts should be facts interesting as hell that a year later you'll still find interesting. News from last month is a hard no but from two years earlier is acceptable imo. the cutoff must be within them. It's up to debate. I'm here to just say we need a cutoff.

example posts for each problem:

1. TIL there's a secure underground tunnel for celebrities to get to the Oscars, https://lemmy.world/post/51657138 youtube as source, hearsay
2. TIL DJT Jr.’s recent wedding was bankrolled entirely by a Russian oligarch https://lemmy.world/post/51917499 literally a news article from this month; TIL that Elon Musk is buying ads on Instagram. He is urging US voters to check their registration status on his website https://lemmy.world/post/51684579 from this month, from substack but first half can be counted as news.

Lastly, i must confess i made this post after reading one particular post that annoyed me: TIL the name for one of Trump's distraction techniques https://lemmy.world/post/52012223. Thing is, it contains essentially zero new info in the title and it was an unacceptable post to me. Now i know that, unlike reddit, post contents are allowed as well as the link, which provided the info. So i have no problem with it. But i think posts should aim to put the main fact in the title so users can save time and move on. Ofc, who am i to force this.

"dead cat strategy" or "deadcatting" is when a shocking statement is made to divert media attention away from problems or failures in other areas.