Category — News

Merry Christmas Happy Holidays from BlogDH.  See y’all in 2012!

Libby Kimzey may not have her undergraduate degree yet, but she could be on her way to a seat in Rhode Island’s House of Representatives. As of today, she is officially a candidate for the District 8 seat where Representative Mike Tarro, a first-termer, currently resides.

Originally admitted in the class of ’09, Kimzey has since taken off several semesters to lobby and organize for political groups in the state.

Kimzey started lobbying for Rhode Islanders for Fair Elections in Spring ’09. At the time, “there were certainly some people that didn’t take me seriously because…I was 19 years old,” Kimzey said. Later, when she worked as campaign manager for Teresa A. Tanzi (D-34, Narragansett, South Kingstown), she helped unseat one of those representatives, David Caprio.

Working on the Tanzi campaign has taught Kimzey to effectively communicate the issues, even to people who might not agree with her, she said. “She’s been my role model in a lot of ways,” Kimzey said. Tanzi’s campaign proved that to take on an incumbent, “You have to work in coalition and you have to start early and you have to think about your resources.” [Read more →]

Possibly the greatest cameo duo ever. Fact-checked by IMDB. More enlightening than that breakthrough on your philosophy final.

Image via.

Type “let it snow” into our favorite search engine and watch as your wishes come true!

Were you planning on visiting a friend at another school during our irrationally fantastically long winter break?  If so, you may be able to bypass the mild inconvenience of accessing their school’s wireless network!

According to a submission in this morning’s depressingly sparse Morning Mail, Brown has joined a new service cleverly called eduroam (education roaming — ohhhhh), which allows students of participating universities to get internet access across a number of schools in the US and abroad.  For more information on the service, you can consult their website, which has a map of participating schools, or watch the terrible promotional cartoon above, which has a joke about the difficulty of nailing jelly to a tree (?) and is narrated by someone who appears to be (poorly) imitating Mark Blyth.

If RISD decides to opt in to this service, it would solve the only problem with studying at the RISD Library — the terrible service provided by the dreaded “RISD-Guest” network.

If studying for the Physics 3 final isn’t exactly what floats you boat, perhaps you should take a break by … watching physics lectures?

Walter Lewin is a professor of physics emeritus at MIT.  He is known for (among other things) his introductory physics lectures that are all available on YouTube thanks to MIT OpenCourseWare.

If you pay attention, you will notice one neat trick of his that has fascinated many of his videos’ viewers: drawing dotted lines. Very, very quickly. Also, as an added bonus, it makes arguably the coolest sound ever!  Thankfully, some enterprising person has decided to make a short mashup of Lewin’s best dotted lines. Enjoy.

As you look around the reading room or FriSC on a given day/night(/does it matter?) during finals, you’ll realize that many people don’t like studying with music. Yet there seem to be two camps of musicless studiers. For some, any noise is bad noise. But for others, they opt out of musical study sessions solely because the lyrics tend to distract from the words on the page. With pop lyrics these days as sophisticated and poetic as, “my b*** s*** d*** like she s*** d***,” this comes as no surprise. But in all seriousness, even those who can’t bear to fully focus on two separate sources of information deserve some study tunes—that’s why Brian Eno developed modern ambient music.

But we aren’t here to recommend Brian Eno for the distracted studier (in fact we did that in last semester’s post). Instead, we fully recommend the album we had relegated to an afterthought in last year’s Survival Guide: Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Vrioon. For those with MUSC200 experience, this album will be familiar—a perfect mix of ambient, glitch and minimalism that makes Todd Winkler excited in its appropriation of musical ideas. For the easily distracted studier, this album will be a welcome mix of beautiful piano lines and synthesized sound that lacks the lyrics and distracting melodies of modern pop music. The nearly 60-minute composition is perfect for putting on repeat for ten times that long, because no matter how many times one listens, it will still sound beautifully empty and surprisingly new. Find the album for only $5.99 on iTunes, find the tracks on YouTube or [insert illegal downloading means here].

Yes, that's a cat giving another cat a massage.

There’s no record of anyone dying from an OD of cuteness (yet), but if anyone’s feeling up to the task, there’s Cute Roulette. Joining the plethora of websites featuring the distracting adorableness of the animal kingdom, Cute Roulette brings you and a puppy falling asleep (oh boy can we sympathize), a panda playing soccer (it’s like watching two fat black and white fluffballs roll each other around), and a cat trying to fit into a water bottle (because the internet isn’t complete without a healthy dose of feline).

Not to be confused for that other roulette, which is probably definitely NSFW.

Goodbye productivity, hello adorable hugging cats.

Disclaimer: Almost none of the links in this post are safe for work studying in the FriSC. Click through at your own discretion.

If you, like us, have been wasting time perusing Spotted at Brown during the last few days, you might be aware of a new subreddit heating up the Brown cyberscene. The site, punnily titled BrownBares, serves as a space for Brown students to post revealing or nude photos of themselves. As of yesterday, the URL www.brownbares.com redirects to the site.

To date, 27 posts have gone up on the subreddit, the vast majority of which feature nude or semi-nude photos of students. While most of the photos seem to have been taken in dorm rooms or bathrooms, one brave poster (deemed “Salomon” by his Spotted at Brown following) fully embraced the spirit of the subreddit and took to the 500-seat Salomon DeCiccio Auditorium to take naked pictures. Another female poster hints at having taken pictures of herself in a library bathroom. (Though no photos have featured donuts yet…)

Brunonians aren’t the only college students who like being nekkid on the Internet. Boobs@Bard, for example, is a tumblr that showcases topless photos of the women of Bard College, while its counterpart, Bard Cocks on Campus, features bottomless photos of men. Once those two sites gained traction, copycats quickly arose in WesBreasts/Westacles at Wesleyan, Titties at Tulane/Cocks on Campus at Tulane and Vag@Vassar — the men at Vassar apparently haven’t risen to the challenge.

BlogDailyHerald recently caught up with the moderator and founder of BrownBares and direct messaged him (yup, he’s male, we asked) a few of the questions we’ve all been wondering:

[Read more →]