theatlantic:

(Robot) Robyn is Here

When she’s not singing about being the other woman, Swedish electro-pop singer Robyn likes to sing about robots. On “The Girl and the Robot,” she tells the tale of a workaholic lover who leaves her feeling desperate and alone. On “Fembot,” a song about turning 30 and pondering having children, she opens with the declaration, “I’ve got some news for you / fembots have feelings too.”

Inspired by Robyn’s fascination with the non-human, a group of mechatronics students at Sweden’s KTH Institute of Royal Technology have spent much of the past year building a robot dedicated to her (and her furious, fist-swinging dance moves). Robyn finally met up with their creation, and while the video of her reaction is as adorable as Björk explaining television, it’s also—like Björk’s explanation—a little deep.

Read more.

(via theatlantic)

Source: The Atlantic

amandapalmer:

i was just answering a bunch of questions for a writer who’s working on a book about cyber-bullying, and i thought i’d share this one…it’s pithy right now.

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There’s a great buddhist saying: "Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.“

When things get really hot on my twitter feed, I always tweet that as a reminder to myself and to others. 

When the Boston Bombing and city lockdown happened in my neighborhood, I came under a lot of fire for posting a poem on my blog called “a poem for dzhokhar”, a quick stream-of-consciousness dash-off i wrote in a cafe after a yoga class in which i melded my own experiences with the idea of being a terrorist hiding in the bottom of a boat, waiting for the manhunt to end. Within hours of it being posted, I got death threats. My twitter feed exploded with more than 5,000 tweets from strangers telling me I was a un-american monster for “sympathizing with a terrorist”.

People wrote comments on my blog about how I should have my own legs blown off. It was terrible, and actually vaulted me into a legitimate depression for a few weeks…I just couldn’t withstand all the hatred without breaking down. But throughout it all I held my ground and defended my right to make art about whatever I wanted, as my own way of dealing with what had just happened blocks from my house.

I think people misunderstand, sometimes, the difference between “empathy” and “sympathy”, and this is getting us in trouble. Sympathy is closer to pity. Empathy, which is essential for being human, means that you can imagine yourself in some else’s situation, good or bad. And feeling *real* empathy, even empathy with “the enemy”, with the bottom of the barrel of humanity, with the suicide bombers, with the child molesters, with the hitlers and the osamas, is necessary. If you, as a human being, can’t stop and try to imagine what sort of pain and agony and darkness must have descended upon these people to twist them up so badly, you have no roadmap to untwist the circumstances under which they were created. And the thing that terrified me the most about that whole poem controversy was that the vast majority of the comments seemed to agree that there was “a limit to empathy”. There can be no limit to empathy. It’s like saying there should be a limit to how much you should love your child, or your spouse, or your brother. If you can’t go the final mile, you’re not there yet.