The Never-Before-Told Story of the World’s First Computer Art (It’s a Sexy Dame)
During a time when computing power was so scarce that it required a government-defense budget to finance it, a young man used a $238 million military computer, the largest such machine ever built, to render an image of a curvy woman on a glowing cathode ray tube screen. The year was 1956, and the creation was a landmark moment in computer graphics and cultural history that has gone unnoticed until now.
Using equipment designed to guard against the apocalypse, a pin-up girl had been drawn.
She was quite probably the first human likeness to ever appear on a computer screen.
Read more. [Images: Lawrence A. Tipton]
![Toward a Working Definition of ‘Bro’
The word “bro” has been around for a while now. Yet despite its longevity, there is no universally accepted definition the term. Are bros chill guys who just wanna have fun, or obnoxious dudes who can’t string a sentence together? Must they play lacrosse? Is membership in a fraternity required to be considered a bro?
This week, two residents of Washington, D.C. (possibly these guys?) offered their attempt to define the term.
Read more. [Image: HBO]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcvlq712vX1qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)
![China Has Hipsters, Too
It’s happened all over the world, and it’s happening in China, too. As the country’s middle class swells in number — and its people discover the pleasures and disappointments of a life spent pursuing material comfort — there has come the emergence of a distinct counter-culture. In Chinese, they are thewenyi qingnian (文艺青年), orwenqing for short, literally meaning “cultured youth.” It’s China’s closest equivalent to the alternately beloved and reviled English word, “hipster.”
What does a typical “cultured youth” look like? Baidu Baike, China’s version of Wikipedia, contains an entry on the term that quotes writer and musician Guo Xiaohan: “I’m a very typical wenyi qingnian. I like poetry, novels, indie music, European cinema, taking pictures, writing blogs, cats, gardening, quilting, making dessert and designing environmentally friendly bags.”
Read more. [Image: Weibo, Tea Leaf Nation]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mctp3aQByY1qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)
![How Rap Can Help End Rape Culture
We cannot reduce the ignorance of people like Mourdock and Akin to sound bites or place it in the category of election-season inanity. Their statements are the toxic runoff of our culture’s failure to prevent and address sexual violence in all its forms. The statistics stun: The high estimate of the number of women raped each year in the United States is 1.3 million, 54 percent of rapes are unreported, and a woman’s chance of being raped is one in five. The president’s elementary stance is nice but won’t fix anything on its own; what must change is the culture itself.
Given its well-documented and inexcusable problems with sexism, hip-hop might not seem a wise place to look to start making that change. But that fact actually makes the medium more ripe for reformers. Moreover, as one of the dominant, storytelling-driven art forms consumed and made by young people, rap provides a way for survivors and allies to testify, argue, and change hearts and minds. And as a song released this past week by the promising young rapper Angel Haze proves, rap’s potential as a weapon against rape culture isn’t merely academic.
Read more. [Image: Angel Haze]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mctkqehLGM1qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)
