Timmy the Tooth

'We landed in Vietnam very early in the morning but there were 2,000 people who were waiting for us and cheering us on'

Happiness is a choice. Like stealing. Almost as satisfying, too.

I am the rock. I shall not falter. I shall not tolerate jabronis.

I do not have the ability to change the actions of others, in the same way that jet fuel does not have the ability to melt steel beams.

My failure does not block me. My failure is not like an opposing basketball player standing in my way of the basket. But if it were, I’d be dunking over said player totally shattering his self-esteem and working the entire stadium into an erotic frenzy.

I deserve success; I deserve to be surrounded by gilded trinkets like some excellent pharaoh.

My marriage is becoming stronger each day, its beastly back rippling with new muscles, angry muscles, muscles with an agenda all their own.

I am horny as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore.

Business is the child’s sport of t-ball and I am a grown man completely owning everyone else, beer in hand, my son embarrassed.

I forgive those who have harmed me in my past and wish them luck boning 2s for the rest of their lives.

I am not sadder than a magician.

Peace and serenity surround me and I don’t think it’s paranoid to assume they are scheming.

Tomorrow is a new day — it has yet to exist. LOL, that’s pretty wild to think about.

I am powerful and large. I am huge. I am, just, so fucking huge.

Friends and family cherish me, they create a sturdy web of reinforcement, and trap the invading insects.

I am in my sexual prime and everyone can tell. It frightens them.

The world is my canvas; I decide which flavor of Mad Dog 20/20 to painfully regurgitate upon its landscape.

I could make up a better Scientology than that.

There is at least one person on this earth whom I can convince that I am legitimately a wizard.

I am my own master, I am in a dominant/submissive relationship with my destiny.

Women's World Cup 2015: USA may have won the tournament, but the hero treatment of one player, Hope Solo, who has been arrested on domestic violence charges, exposes a double standard

FA delete welcome home message to Lionesses on Twitter which said England women "go back to being mothers, daughters and partners"

Via Reddit.

Women's World Cup 2015: The outpouring of support after Laura Bassett's own goal is only right, says Claire Cohen. But can you imagine the men's team getting anywhere near the same level of commiseration?

I love all kinds of fried seafood, from oysters to Ipswich clams and fish and chips, but if I had to pick a favorite, Peruvian jalea would be one of the frontrunners. A platter of mixed fried seafood including fish, shrimp, and calamari, it's topped with a bright, refreshing, slightly spicy salad of red onions, tomato, and cilantro marinated in lime juice. Read More

Sepp Blatter has fuelled suspicions of a renewed attempt to cling to the Fifa presidency by insisting that he has...

[ By Steph in Gaming & Computing & Technology. ]

Those of us working in creative fields have often consoled ourselves that although automation may claim many other jobs, at least robots can’t make art. That’s not exactly true for a variety of reasons (depending on how you define ‘art’), but it really goes out the window when you look at these astonishing images released recently by Google. The landscapes produced on the company’s image recognition neural network reveal the answer to the question, “Can artificial intelligence dream?”

It turns out that it can – sort of. Google created a method to ‘teach’ its neural network to identify features like animals, buildings and objects in photographs. The computer highlights the features it recognizes. When that modified image is fed back to the network again and again, it’s repeatedly altered until it produces bizarre mashups that belong in a gallery of surreal art.

Suddenly, an image of a knight on a horse is filled with ghostly impressions of frogs, fish, dogs and flowers. The knight’s arm seems to have sprouted a koala head, while the head of another unrecognizable animal emerges from beneath the horse’s tail. In another image, a tree and field turn cotton candy pink, and the clouds transform into conjoined sheep monsters.

Technically, it’s more like the computers were fed psychedelics and asked to paint, rather than capturing random images that might flash through their artificial ‘minds’ when they’re idle. The computers look for patterns and edges within the photos and paintings when they’re trying to identify objects and shapes, leading to those strange ghostly images scattered randomly throughout. Those edges are brought out more in each successive layer until the network starts thinking it sees all sorts of things within them.

Google describes it as “inceptionism,” saying “We know that after training, each  layer progressively extracts higher and higher-level features of the image, until the final layer essentially makes a decision on what the image shows.”

“So here’s one surprise: neural networks that were trained to discriminate between different kinds of images have quite a bit of the information needed to generate images too. Why is this important? Well, we train networks by simply showing them many examples of what we want them to learn, hoping they extract the essence of the matter at hand (e.g., a fork needs a handle and 2-4 tines), and learn to ignore what doesn’t matter (a fork can be any shape, size, color or orientation).”

“If we choose higher-level layers, which identify more sophisticated features in images, complex features or even whole objects tend to emerge. Again, we just start with an existing image and give it to our neural net. We ask the network: “Whatever you see there, I want more of it!” This creates a feedback loop: if a cloud looks a little bit like a bird, the network will make it look more like a bird. This in turn will make the network recognize the bird even more strongly on the next pass and so forth, until a highly detailed bird appears, seemingly out of nowhere.”

Check out lots more examples on Google’s research blog.

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[ By Steph in Gaming & Computing & Technology. ]

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[ By Steph in Art & Photography & Video. ]

Tiny bolts of lightning are captured on camera as they shoot off an antique electrotherapy medical device, turning the discharge of electricity into a form of art. Germany-based photographer Marc Simon Frei purchased the 1920 violet ray, invented by Nikola Tesla, on eBay and began to experiment with visual effects.

The device is basically a portable tesla coil, an electrical resonant transformer circuit used to produce alternating-current electricity. Frei used various methods to create sparks and caught them at just the right split-second with his Nikon Df, 50mm f/1.8 lens and a macro extension tube.

He has also played around with wiring, and creating miniature storms within tufts of wool stuffing taken from a teddy bear. Frei notes that if you want to try it yourself, you’d better be prepared for possible equipment damage from the high frequency voltage; the LCD screen on his camera flickered whenever it came too close to the coil.

Nikola Tesla would likely be disappointed that his ingenious creations are mostly relegated to exhibits and experiments these days, rather than becoming a viable wide scale source of energy, but it seems likely he’d approve of this project.

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[ By Steph in Art & Photography & Video. ]

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Project Babb: It's like a mascot but more haunted

[ By WebUrbanist in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

Nestled in the hills on a remote island at the mouth of the Yangtze River in China and full of rich foliage, one could imagine this small fishing hamlet to be an idyllic place, at least for nature if not for people – it has been abandoned by humans now for nearly half a century.

Ivy has become the dominant and defining feature of both the natural and built environments of this place, slowly but surely creeping over sidewalks and streets, up walls and roofs, and ultimately taking over the town.

In some cases, collapsed portions of structures have made it all the more easy for the greenery to work its way over the sides of buildings and into their empty floors.

Set on Gouqi Island, one of hundreds of small islands in the area, the Houtou Wan Village was a victim of changing times and circumstances, a combination of urbanization and depleted fish populations that drove its inhabitants to seek work elsewhere.

Today, it is enjoyed only by visitors who seek it out explicitly, like photographer Jane Qing, chartering boats to travel to its shores and document the decay as well as the rebirth the place is now home to in its second life.

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[ By WebUrbanist in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

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Clip thought to show Chile and Juventus midfielder immediately after crash surfaces online

'I sometimes see spaces to pass into because I've already thought about where my team-mates could run'

Casey, Riley, Jessie and Jackie. Peyton, Jody, Kerry and Pat. Are these men or women? It can be hard to say because these names are pretty much unisex.

Take Riley, for example. Nearly 155,000 living Americans are named Riley, and the male-to-female ratio is pretty balanced, with a 51 percent to 49 percent split.

If Riley rings a bell, it may be because you saw a recent video of Riley Curry, the adorable 2-year-old daughter of NBA MVP Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors, at a post-game press conference. Or perhaps you’re thinking of Riley Cooper, the wide receiver for the Philadelphia Eagles. That’s the thing: Riley is neither a man’s name nor a woman’s. It’s both.

It turns out that nearly 1 percent of Americans (or 1 in 109) have a unisex name, which means that at least one-third of newborns given that name were male and at least one-third were female. It’s hard to say what the “most” unisex name is, but the chart below lists the 20 most common unisex names, ranked by the total number of people with that name.

Building off work done with my colleague Mona Chalabi, I used over 100 years of data from the Social Security Administration to create this list of the most androgynous names. (The SSA has data on names given to at least five people, but I set my minimum threshold at 100 people to make sure that a name was prevalent enough to determine whether it was actually unisex.) Using actuarial tables, also from the SSA, I adjusted the names data to approximate the number of people currently living with each name. (This was similar to a method my colleagues Allison McCann and Nate Silver used in a previous story.)

For a name to make the top 20 cut, at least 25,000 people currently alive in America had to have it.

Nearly 3 million people have one of the more than 900 names in the searchable table below. The “gap” column shows the difference in the male and female shares. The lower the number, the more evenly balanced the name is between the sexes (with a minimum value of zero and maximum of about 33.33).

The SSA does not edit its list of names and as a result records a number of what are most likely placeholder names. We were able to identify five of these (Unknown, Unnamed, Infant, Infantof and Notnamed) and removed them from the data. Others, like Baby and Child, we thought were more ambiguous and so left them in.

 

You can explore the code behind this analysis, as well as the full data set, at GitHub.

CLARIFICATION (June 10, 2:27 p.m.): An earlier version of the searchable table of unisex names in this article excluded two likely placeholder names (Unknown and Unnamed) but should have excluded three more (Infant, Infantof and Notnamed). We’ve now taken those out of the data, too, and added an explanation.

On Monday, the Guardian launched “The Counted,” an impressive interactive database of Americans killed by police since the start of the year. As of Tuesday, the database had 467 entries; the Guardian plans to add to it going forward.

As we’ve written repeatedly, official statistics on police killings are deeply flawed. So the Guardian is building its data set by combining media coverage, reader submissions and open-sourced efforts like Fatal Encounters and Killed by Police, which we’ve previously found to be reliable. The Guardian then verifies those incidents with its own reporting; it calls its data “verified crowdsourced.” Wherever possible, it includes demographic information on those killed, such as age, sex and race,⁷³ as well as basic details on the incidents themselves.

The Guardian data set also includes the addresses where the killings took place. My colleague Reuben Fischer-Baum converted those addresses into census tracts, which allows us to look at demographic and economic information on the neighborhoods where these deaths occurred. (The Guardian is making its full data set available for download, which gives us, as well as other researchers, journalists and the public at large, a chance to build on its work.)

The table below gives some basic information on race⁷⁴ and income by census tract.⁷⁵

 

One thing that’s clear from the data: Police killings tend to take place in neighborhoods that are poorer and blacker than the U.S. as a whole. About 30 percent of the killings — 139 of the 467 — took place in census tracts that are in the bottom 20 percent nationally in terms of household income.⁷⁶ A quarter of those killed by police died in tracts with majority-black populations; nationally, just 7 percent of the population lives in majority-black tracts.

Black Americans were especially likely to be killed in poorer neighborhoods. Of the 136 African-Americans killed by police who are in the Guardian’s database, 56 — more than 40 percent — died in tracts in the poorest 20 percent nationally. But that may say more about overall racial inequality than about policing per se: African-Americans were killed in low-income areas at roughly the same rate that they live in them.⁷⁷

Those numbers fit a narrative that emerged after the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and of Freddie Gray in Baltimore. Both occurred in poor, predominantly black neighborhoods with few jobs and limited educational opportunities. Protesters who took to the streets after those deaths often cited economic conditions — along with police tactics they saw as discriminatory — as an underlying cause of their anger.

But by no means do all police killings fit this pattern. Take one example: In February, Vincent Cordaro, a 57-year-old white man, was fatally shot in his home in Rockland County, New York – a New York City suburb where the median household income is more than $140,000.

Like most of the people in the Guardian’s database, Cordaro was armed when he died: According to news reports, he threatened his family with a shotgun and was killed after a seven-hour standoff with police.

But incidents that look more like ones that have been in the news — unarmed black men shot by police — can happen anywhere. Frank Shephard III, for example, was shot in a census tract in Houston with a median household income of more than $80,000; police said he had fled a traffic stop.

The numbers in the table above are based on where people died, not where they lived. In some cases, that can yield some strange results. Natasha McKenna, for example, died in a county jail in Fairfax, Virginia, that happens to be in one of the richest census tracts in the country.

In other words, interpret the numbers with caution. But thanks to the Guardian, and the groups whose data-collection efforts it relies on, we at least have some numbers to work with.

We’ve posted more data on GitHub. The GitHub data also includes codes for the census tracts, which makes it easy to link it up to other census statistics. We’d love to know what you find.

[ By Steph in Architecture & Houses & Residential. ]

Why stay tethered to the grid in a fixed location when you could live in a compact mobile pod that can be transported to the location of your choice? These modern capsules are what 21st-century off-grid dreams are made of, ranging from spacious self-sustaining retreats to accordion-like expanding shelters that are lightweight enough to tow behind a bicycle.

Tricycle House

Made mostly out of folded polypropylene, ‘Tricycle House’ by People’s Industrial Design Office is lightweight enough to be towed around like a bike trailer. The house can be expanded like an accordion to increase the space inside or make it more compact for travel. Translucent walls let in daylight and all amenities within – including a sink, stove, bath tub, water tank and transforming furniture – is manually powered. The firm also makes ‘tricycle gardens’ to tow alongside the house.

Egg-Like Ecocapsule

Shaped like a massive egg, the Ecocapsule by Nice Architects is a tiny off-grid living pod that’s equipped with all the comforts of home, including a bed, hot showers, flushing toilets and the capability to cook. Powered by solar panels and a built-in turbine, with a back-up battery for cloudy and still days, it can be shipped, air-lifted or towed and fits into a standard shipping container.

Diogene Hut by Renzo Piano

Designed by architect Renzo Piano for the Vitra campus in Weil-am-Rhein, Germany, the Diogene cabin offers 80 square feet for an individual occupant as a “voluntary place of retreat.” Photovoltaic panels and a rainwater retention tank make it self-sufficient, and it’s highly portable. There’s just enough room inside for a bed, table and chair.

Portable Retreat with a Roof Hatch

Three hinged panels open this two-level off-grid retreat to the sky on both the top and bottom floors, enhancing the occupant’s connection to whatever environment they’ve chosen. This mobile wooden shelter by Allergutendinge features a bunch of fold-down elements, hidden storage and a bed that doubles as a staircase to the loft.

Camouflage Stacked Wood Cabin

This ‘invisible hut’ looks like no more than a stack of logs when it’s all closed up, but a hatch on one side drops down to become the terrace for a rustic cabin. The Yeta Log Cabin by Lab Zero can be set up virtually anywhere, and as small and minimal as it is, it comes complete with a kitchen, shower, toilet and solar panels.

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Mobile Modern Modular 15 Capsules For Off Grid Living

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[ By Steph in Architecture & Houses & Residential. ]

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Everything you need to know about the former Fifa president who is under investigation by Swiss police

As California residents are forced to cut back their water use, some are outraged that companies bottling water there aren't asked to do the same.

The Telegraph looks back at the history of deception in Fifa, the World football's governing body that has been dogged by allegations of corruption

The Lee Test

Does it show women with huge bazooms, one, who prance around in skin-tight costumes, two, yet somehow the creator, three, still gets credit for empowering women?

The Schultz Test

Does it have a dog, one, who has a bird sidekick that participates in his World War I fantasies, two, while, three, his owner is unaware of the complicated mental processes said dog is capable of because of his own obsessions with psychiatry, football and grief?

The Breathed Test

Does it have a penguin, one, who suffers from internal anxiety about his inability to fly but also comments drily on the antics of a disturbingly unhinged cat, two, both of whom have, three, somehow crossed over to become beloved children’s book characters even though the source material references the Republican agenda in some fairly uncomplimentary ways?

The Keane Test

Does it focus on a bunch of suspiciously round children, one, who engage in unrealistic antics and malapropisms, two, that, three, only your grand-pop finds funny?

The Trudeau Test

Does it feature a beloved and socially diverse group of people, one, who exist in a world that might somehow be more complex than the social obligations of many of the readers of the strip, which was, two, created by a man who used to be considered slightly less well-known than his very famous wife, and whose name, three, inevitably makes you feel guilty for not listening to NPR more often?

The Watterson Test

Does it portray a young boy, one, who along with his stuffed tiger, two, seems to be having, three, much more fun than you’ve ever had in your life?

The Groenig Test

Does it show a family who, one, still appear weekly on your television, two, which still causes you to sit down to watch it and chortle, three, despite your avowals at work the next day that the show’s not as funny as it used to be?

The Larson Test

Does it often feature a woman with a beehive, one, who gets herself into some sort of strange crisis, two, involving a cow, three, which is amusing but also somehow unnervingly linked to your own mortality?

The Davis Test

Does it include a fat cat, one, who engages in the same banter, two, with his owner, three, over and over again and over again, so much so that you feel nostalgic for “Cathy”?

The Disney Test

Does it show, one, a young woman, who, two, is minor royalty as well as possessing a serious set of pipes and a tiny waist, and, three, doesn’t eat a thing that’s not poisoned or enchanted for the entire length of the film?

Who ever said American pancakes have to be sweet? What's stopping us from savory-ing them up? These start with a basic American-style pancake recipe, but they come stuffed with crisp bacon, sautéed corn, jalapeño peppers, scallions, and—the kicker—pockets of gooey melted cheddar cheese. These are pancakes that I can really get behind (or perhaps more precisely, get my mouth around). Read More

By Nick Harris

20 May 2015

Paris Saint-Germain are the best paid team in global sport according to Sportingintelligence’s Global Sports Salaries Survey (GSSS) for 2015, compiled in association with ESPN The Magazine and published today.

Many of the best-paying teams have super-rich owners with multiple interests in sport. Stan Kroenke, worth $6.3bn, is the major stakeholder in Arsenal and his other teams include a second top-20 payer, the Denver Nuggets. John W Henry, worth $1.61bn, also owns two top-20 teams, Liverpool and the Red Sox, via his Fenway Sports Group.

The Glazer family, worth $4.4bn, own Manchester United of the EPL and the Tampa Bay Bucs of the NFL, at No131 on this year’s list. Mike Ilitch, worth $5bn, owns the Detroit Tigers at No12 and the Detroit Red Wings of the NHL at No92. James L Dolan, whose family wealth is estimated at $4.5bn, owns the New York Knicks at No15 and the New York Rangers of the NHL at No74. Russian billionaires Roman Abramovich and Mikhail Prokhorov also own ‘big’, rich teams in Chelsea and the Brooklyn Nets respectively.

Yet all of these mega-wealthy people look like financial small fry against the owners of PSG and Manchester City. Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, which draws from the same resources that fund PSG’s owners QSI, has an estimated $304bn under investment. The sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi, which includes City’s owner Sheikh Mansour on its board of directors, has assets estimated at $773bn. The richest sports teams in the world are increasingly running on oil.

As well as having Qatari owners, PSG’s shirt sponsor is a U.A.E airline, Emirates, which also sponsors Real Madrid and Arsenal. Another of Real Madrid’s major sponsors is Abu Dhabi’s International Petroleum Investment company (IPIC), where Sheikh Mansour is chairman of the board.The New York Yankees are now part of a commercial partnership with Mansour through their joint ownership of an MLS team, New York City FC.

City’s other sponsors include Etihad Airways, telecoms company Etisalat and investment company Aabar, all based in the U.A.E, while Etisalat is also a sponsor of Barcelona, who have a shirt deal with Qatar Airways.

This is the sixth Sportingintelligence salaries survey and the starting point for the first one was to compare wages in the world’s most popular sports leagues, with MLS and SPL football included as examples of smaller leagues from the world’s most popular sport, football.

The report has expanded to include CSL football from China, J-League football from Japan, and Ligue 1 football from France. PSG’s wealth now makes that Ligue 1 hard to leave out. Had PSG been included last year, they would have been no higher than No10 in pay terms, and a year before that would have struggled to make the top 70.

The methodology and full listings are all available in the report, which has expanded this year to 120 pages to include three special studies linked to the wages and popularity of specific teams and players, plus a league-by-league analysis that considers pay, popularity, success and attendance, and how these intersect in each league.

One of the in-depth studies looks at the pay levels of different nationalities across Europe’s ‘Big 5′ football leagues, and finds that Belgians are best paid. The same study reveals the biggest payers at last summer’s World Cup. The full details and an analytical essay by Ian Herbert are in the report.

Another of the studies looks at the ‘origins’ of the sportsmen playing in North America’s ‘Big 4′ leagues -the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL. The study reveals which educational establishments, which states and which foreign countries deliver the most players, and the best paid, to each league. The data is mapped for each league, as in the examples above. Click to enlarge.

There is also a piece in the report by Roger Pielke Jr, asking to what extent we can identify the world’s ‘super clubs’ solely by social media. New to this year’s GSSS is a league-by-league breakdown of social media ‘fans’ for each of the 333 teams, and a comparison against the all-time title success of each team in their league.

Is it the most successful teams who have the most fans? Generally, but not always. The world is full of glory hunters. If your success was too long ago it might as well not have happened for Generation Internet.

Do the best paid teams generally perform better? Yes, but not always, and it depends how much the championship in question is ‘randomised’ with play-offs.

Is it possible to look at the salary distribution and social media share within leagues and tell whether they are ‘fair’ and promote competitive balance? See right. One of these leagues has a salary cap and an official competitive balance strategy, as well as huge crowds and a variation in the title winners. The other doesn’t.

Neither of these leagues is Ligue 1 of France, where the world’s best paid sports team reside. Not yet.

Ex-Hammer Julian Dicks never wanted to manage a women's team, but he's changing the fortunes of West Ham Ladies.

In the latest in our series of tactical analysis videos, Rory Smith assesses the rebirth of Christian Benteke under Tim...

A few weeks back I showed you that you can make fresh ricotta gnocchi in less time than it takes to boil a pot of water. With a little practice, I've gotten it down to under ten minutes (8 minutes 53 seconds, to be precise). But the great part about this recipe is that it serves as a suitable base for a huge variety of sauces and flavors. For instance, last week a friend of mine brought over some delicious first-of-the-season fresh asparagus which we combined with prosciutto and an easy cream sauce to make a delicious impromptu (and fast!) meal on the spot. Read More

All the rules you've heard about how to make polenta—the water must be boiling, you must stir continuously, use only a wooden spoon, and stir in one direction only—are basically not true. So what does matter? From the ratio to the cooking time and choice of liquid, we look at what really goes into making excellent polenta at home. Read More

Saskia avoids being dumped by passing the Arsenal test