Items of interest come across recently in my feed-reader. What did I miss? Leave your own interesting links in comments. Shameless self-promotion entirely welcome!
n.b. Comments threads have not necessarily been read. Some may be NSFW or triggering, so please report back any problems you encounter so the post can be marked.

• Open Thread: Sigourney Weaver’s Aliens costume choice–
  “The 62-year-old actress still scoffs at how the costume designers tried to dress her in a light blue shirt with pink embroidery. Fortunately, she uncovered a closet full of old NASA uniforms at Pinewood Studios in England and found an asexual flight suit that “fit me like a glove,” she recalls. “I feel sad for other women who are playing action heroes in these [skimpy] costumes. [snip to get to the rest of the quote] They need to wear what’s practical. Yes, Ripley’s a woman, and women are always underestimated as hysterical people with no courage. But Ripley has tremendous strength and determination.””
• Slut shaming: it’s not about how much sex you’ve had
  – “When I hear the word “slut” bandied about, it usually has less to do with the number of partners a girl has or what she wears, than with her perceived threat to the Girl Code.”
• From yesterday at #occupysydney
  – “It’s a surreal serendipity that as we gather in Martin Place, we are flanked by colourful flags strung from the light poles with some ‘what if’ questions gathered as part of a City of Sydney public art program.”
• Deceptively valuable
  – word-nerdery on ambiguous phraseology
• AI: Cleaning your penguin
  – “Should cleanup efforts be prioritized with the knowledge that we can’t save everything? Or do we have an ethical duty to make right what humans have harmed? Should animals be euthanized rather than undergo the trauma of rehabilitation? Which ones?”
• On Funny Women: From Typecast to Transformed
  – Part 1 of 3 posts on women navigating gender roles in comedy
• Researchers Find That Popular Assumptions About Gender Difference Are Incredibly Easily Disproved
  – “Well, turns out that a lot of what everybody knows, and what everybody thought was supported by some statistical or scientific evidence, is actually pretty sparsely supported by facts, and the evidence gets pretty flimsy when you reframe those experiments to work better with the data and human nature.”
• Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street
  – “The one upside is that the Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street tumblr is like Steven Greenstreet’s very own I’m A Creep bat-signal”
• So the House Passed HR358 Last Night…
  – “This is not hyperbole: The Republican Party—and a sizable portion of the male contingent of the Democratic Party—believes that it is morally acceptable to let a woman die rather than give her a life-saving abortion.”
• Going After Disabled Adults Just Wasn’t Enough: The US Right Threatens Disability Services for Children
  – “It’s hard to miss apparent physical disabilities (although it does happen). It’s easy to miss so-called ‘invisible’ disabilities, which means that an increase in awareness can result in a spike in the diagnosis and treatment of such disabilities. Naysayers are always eager to claim that people are pathologising normal childhood behaviour or making up nonsense diagnoses to access government funds, even when children with such diagnoses experience improvement with treatment, which suggests that something is going on.”
• Young? Chest pain? Fat? It’s your weight, it can’t be your gallbladder (even if tests say otherwise).<
  – Ragemaking recount of medical negligence
• Oi, Writers No!
  – ye irresistible Harry Enfield reference (plus super useful advice for writers)

Categories: linkfest

Tags: Read-ems