Chris Chandler

Third generation Texas judge Elizabeth E. Coker has resigned just ahead of being investigated for misconduct; she admits that she texted instructions to prosecutors in order to help them convict the defendants whose cases she heard. She also is accused of other indiscretions, including meeting with jurors and attempting to influence them to convict defendants. The State Commission on Judicial Conduct suggests that she lied to them as well, perjuring herself. She's out of a job, but apparently will face no criminal or civil sanctions for her crimes; nor will the victims whose trials she perverted be freed.

“…the Commission investigated claims that Judge Coker allegedly engaged in other improper ex parte communications and meetings with Jones, other members or the Polk County District Attorney’s Office, the San Jacinto County District Attorney, and certain defense attorneys regarding various cases pending in her court; Judge Coker allegedly exhibited a bias in favor of certain attorneys and a prejudice against others in both her judicial rulings and her court appointments: and .Judge Coker allegedly met with jurors in an inappropriate manner, outside the presence of counsel, while the jurors were deliberating in one or more criminal trials;”

The agreement, signed by Coker on October 19, further suggests the Committee believes she committed additional indiscretions during the course of their highly publicized investigation.

“…the Commission also expressed concerns that Judge Coker discussed the Commission’s investigation and Judge Coker’s written responses to the investigation with a material witness prior to that witness’ testimony before the Commission in an apparent attempt to influence that witness, and that the judge may not have been candid and truthful in her testimony before the Commission when questioned about her contact with the witness;”

Texting Judge Not LOL– Coker is OUT!

Okian Warrior writes "Hackaday brings us news about a continuation of the original Star Trek series. The Kickstarter-funded project is attempting to complete the original 5-year mission, which ended after only three seasons on the air. The fan-based and fan-supported reincarnation is cleverly titled Star Trek Continues and has CBS's consent. Check out the first episode, Pilgrim of Eternity. For being fan-made, it's actually pretty good." The attention to detail in the sets, costumes, and even lighting is incredible. It's far and away the most faithful re-creation of the original series I've ever seen.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Jellyfish born in space have "massive vertigo" when they are brought to Earth, and apparently lack the gravity-sensing capabilities that their terrestrial cousins develop early on. They display "abnormal pulsing and movement" in gravity, apparently due to a malfunctioning of a mechanism that uses small calcium sulfate crystals to sense up and down (similar to our own otoliths). This does not bode well for human babies born in space.

Plus, as JWZ notes, "Space-Born Jellyfish Hate Life On Earth" is the greatest science headline ever.

A warning for future space colonizers: Babies born in space might not ever figure out how to deal with gravity. Jellyfish babies, at least, have to deal with massive vertigo on Earth after spending their first few days in space.

NASA first started sending jellyfish to space aboard the Columbia space shuttle during the early '90s to test how space flight would affect their development. As cool as being an astronaut baby sounds, the jellies didn't develop the same gravity-sensing capabilities as their Earthly relatives.

Space-Born Jellyfish Hate Life On Earth [Shaunacy Ferro/Popular Science]

(via JWZ)

(Photos: Henry Kaiser/National Science Foundation)

vivIsel writes "Cyan, the company behind Myst, is taking another shot at an game in that vein — this time in a new game universe, with the Unreal 4 engine. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they haven't gotten a lot of traction with traditional game publishers, so they are turning to Kickstarter with a $1.1M total ask. The Kickstarter video also has some neat shots of the Cyan headquarters — which looks a bit like one of the buildings on Myst island itself."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists at Harvard have figured out how to create cybernetic flesh. That is, they can weave a lattice of transistors into living tissue, which is a stepping stone to things like heart cells that can transmit data about your heart to a computer and a smartphone app that releases adrenaline or endorphins into your system. They think they might even be able to grow entire cybernetic human organs, not for use in transplants but for testing potentially harmful drugs on without harming any people or animals. I'm telling you, it's only a matter of time before we start vat-growing replicants!

– Brian Engard

 

Warehouse 23 News: What Will You Find In The Land Of The Overpower?

Nyambe is a vast land of exotic creatures and wide expanses, where ancestral orishas cry for brave warriors to carve out the hearts of foul mchawi wizards, and where dragon-blooded sei sorcerers once joined the fierce Amazons of Nibomay in the bloody Rebelling Time to win their freedom.

Requires the use of the Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook.

The Power of PDF: Nyambe: African Adventures is also available as a digital download on our sister-site, e23!

Kerpow!

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Businessweek reports on some not-so-subtle commentary from China's official Xinhua News Agency on the U.S. budget showdown: 'It is perhaps a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanized world.' Key among its proposals: the creation of a new international reserve currency to replace the present reliance on U.S. dollars. 'The cyclical stagnation in Washington for a viable bipartisan solution over a federal budget and an approval for raising the debt ceiling has again left many nations' tremendous dollar assets in jeopardy and the international community highly agonized,' the authors write. 'The world is still crawling its way out of an economic disaster thanks to the voracious Wall Street elites.' The commentary calls for a greater role for developing-market economies in both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, adding 'the authority of the United Nations in handling global hot-spot issues has to be recognized. That means no one has the right to wage any form of military action against others without a UN mandate.' The commentary concludes that 'the purpose of promoting these changes is not to completely toss the United States aside, which is also impossible. Rather, it is to encourage Washington to play a much more constructive role in addressing global affairs.'" Meanwhile, U.S. Senate Leaders are claiming a deal is close to reopen the federal government until mid-January and defer the debt ceiling debate until mid-February.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ananyo writes "ITER, the multibillion-euro international nuclear-fusion experiment, is on track to generate power by 2028. But some of the science that was supposed to happen along the way is going to be dropped to keep the vision alive. The plans form the main thrust of recommendations by a 21-strong expert panel of international plasma scientists and ITER staff, convened to reassess the project's research plan in the light of the construction delays. The plans were discussed this week at a meeting of ITER's Science and Technology Advisory Committee. The meeting is the start of a year-long review by ITER to try to keep the experiment on track to generate 500 MW of power from an input of 50 MW by 2028, and so hit its target of attaining the so-called Q10, where power output is ten times input or more. ITER initially aims to produce a Q10 for a few seconds, and then for pulses of 300–500 seconds, and work up over the following decade to output ratios of 30 times more power out than in, with pulses lasting almost an hour. Eventually the aim is to develop steady-state plasmas, which will yield information relevant to industrial-scale fusion-power generation. It is experiments relating to the understanding of longer-pulse and steady-state ITER plasmas that are most likely to be delayed beyond 2028."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ananyo writes "Fusion unleashes vast amounts of energy that might one day be used to power giant electrical grids. But the laboratory systems that seem most promising produce radiation in the form of fast-moving neutrons, and these present a health hazard that requires heavy shielding and even degrades the walls of the fusion reactor. Physicists have now produced fusion at an accelerated rate in the laboratory without generating harmful neutrons (abstract). A team led by Christine Labaune, research director of the CNRS Laboratory for the Use of Intense Lasers at the Ecole Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France, used a two-laser system to fuse protons and boron-11 nuclei. One laser created a short-lived plasma, or highly ionized gas of boron nuclei, by heating boron atoms; the other laser generated a beam of protons that smashed into the boron nuclei, releasing slow-moving helium particles but no neutrons. Previous laser experiments that generated boron fusion aimed the laser at a boron target to initiate the reaction. In the new experiment, the laser-generated proton beam produces a tenfold increase of boron fusion because protons and boron nuclei are instead collided together directly."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WE WANT AN END TO THE DELUSION OF TIME *NOW*

Sorry for the late update! Just arrived in Boston for BAHFest. Wish us luck!

Elizabeth Perez's concept design for an edition of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 features a strike-anywhere match set into the cover and a screen-printed striking surface on the spine, so you can use the book to set fire to itself. This Fahrenheit 451 design would make a great accompaniment to the asbestos-bound first edition.

Fahrenheit 451 is a novel about a dystopian future where books are outlawed and firemen burn any house that contains them. The story is about suppressing ideas, and about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

I wanted to spread the book-burning message to the book itself. The book's spine is screen-printed with a matchbook striking paper surface, so the book itself can be burned.

Fahrenheit 451 (via That Book Smell)

Nate the greatest writes "Guilford County Schools' headline grabbing tablet program is back in the news again. The program came to an abrupt end last Friday when the school district announced that they were recalling all of the Amplify tablets. GCS had leased over 15 thousand of the tablets (at a cost of $200 a year) for its middle school students, but decided to recall the tablets just one month into the school year after some 1500 students reported a broken screen. Around two thousand complained of improperly fitting cases, and there were also 175 reports of malfunctioning power supplies. There's currently no explanation for the cases or power supplies, but GCS has stated that the tablets broke because they lacked a layer of Gorilla Glass. This was listed in the contract, but the school district did not confirm the condition of the tablets before accepting them. This program was the poster child for News Corp.'s entry into the educational market. It was the single largest program to use the Amplify tablet, and its failure represents a serious setback. The Amplify tablet now has a record for poor construction quality and a breakage rate that is 12 times higher than what Squaretrade reported in early 2012 for the iPad 2."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mysqlbytes writes "The BBC is reporting the National Ignition Facility (NIF), based at Livermore in California, has succeeded in breaking even — 'During an experiment in late September, the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel — the first time this had been achieved at any fusion facility in the world.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "vBulletin is a popular proprietary CMS that was recently reported to be vulnerable to an unspecified attack vector. Although vBulletin has not disclosed the root cause of the vulnerability or its impact, we determined the attacker's methods. The identified vulnerability allows an attacker to abuse the vBulletin configuration mechanism in order to create a secondary administrative account. Once the attacker creates the account, they will have full control over the exploited vBulletin application, and subsequently the supported site."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Claudia Assis writes that the US will end 2013 as the world's largest producer of petroleum and natural gas, surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia with the Energy Information Administration estimating that combined US petroleum and gas production this year will hit 50 quadrillion British thermal units, or 25 million barrels of oil equivalent a day, outproducing Russia by 5 quadrillion Btu. Most of the new oil was coming from the western states. Oil production in Texas has more than doubled since 2010. In North Dakota, it has tripled, and Oklahoma, New Mexico, Wyoming, Colorado and Utah have also shown steep rises in oil production over the same three years, according to EIA data. Tapping shale rock for oil and gas has fueled the US boom, while Russia has struggled to keep up its output. 'This is a remarkable turn of events,' says Adam Sieminski, head of the US Energy Information Administration. 'This is a new era of thinking about market conditions, and opportunities created by these conditions, that you wouldn't in a million years have dreamed about.' But even optimists in the US concede that the shale boom's longevity could hinge on commodity prices, government regulations and public support, the last of which could be problematic. A poll last month by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that opposition to increased use of fracking rose to 49% from 38% in the previous six months. 'It is not a supply question anymore,' says Ken Hersh. 'It is about demand and the cost of production. Those are the two drivers."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Romenesko has the stats on that ‘Breaking Bad’ fan group’s Walter White obituary in the Albuquerque Journal. It's the most-read online story since the paper began tracking with Google Analytics in 2006. eBay sellers are making some nice profits with copies of the print edition.

No worries, no spoilers here.

I don’t watch a whole lot of television anymore. So I didn’t expect Breaking Bad to really hook me, and I definitely wasn’t prepared for how much the finale would get to me. I’ve never loved a single TV show so much, and I still can’t articulate what made it so special. There wasn’t s a single bad episode, and that’s a big deal. Any show that’s longer than one season without any stinkers is amazing. But it’s more than that. I love this show the way I love books and a few rare movies.

It’s been 3 days, and I’m still tearing up at screen shots and song clips. It’s stupid and wonderful how much I loved this show.

There are good memories, too.

I’ve been reading almost everything I can about the finale, from reviews to Vince Gilligan sharing alternate endings.

The best thing I’ve found, though, to help me get my fix and get through this terribly trying time of goodbye, is the minisodes. Have you seen them? They’re roughly as safe for work as the show itself is, with F-bombs and adult subject matter. There’s a video of Jesse’s band, “TwaüghtHammër.” There’s all sorts of good stuff in these minisodes, really. Watching helped me remember how hilarious the first episode was. If you’re still jonesing the way I am, it might be just the thing. Here’s the first one, and you can follow the YouTube trail to your heart’s content.

 

Thanks to Vince Gilligan and all the writers, cast, and crew! You gave us an amazing gift, and I am very grateful!

Neil Gaiman's illustrated children's novel Fortunately the Milk is a magnificent tribute to the fatherly art of trolling kids with straightfaced, outlandish tales. It's narrated by a boy whose mother is away on a business trip, and whose father had to go out to the corner store for a pint of milk for the cereal and his tea. Dad takes an unconscionably long time getting the milk, and when he returns, the narrator and his little sister accuse Dad of having stopped to gossip at the store. Not so, insists Dad, who proceeds to explain exactly what happened while he was out getting the milk.

It's an astounding tale, starting with an alien abduction, moving swiftly onto a space-time journey to the ship of a vicious pirate queen and a near-death plank-walking, a daring rescue by a time-travelling dinosaur scientist in a hot-air-balloon time machine, and thence through interference with a pre-Colombian human sacrifice, and many, many other adventures, including several involving temporal paradoxes.

It's an absolute delight to read aloud -- I've read it to my five-year-old daughter twice since the weekend -- and the interludes in which the kids break in to question the dad's story sparked great conversations, especially when it came to the temporal paradoxes. The fact that the kids clearly suspect that Dad is making it all up, but would rather try to disprove it by picking holes in his continuity than by denying it outright perfectly captures the spirit of an excellent round of dad-trolling.

And for all the mad-cappery, there's a fair bit of attention here to an internally consistent time-travel story, with all the fun that implies. By the end, we're in a kid-safe place that's one part Douglas Adams, one part Doctor Who, and one part The Usual Suspects. It's quite a mix!

There are two editions of the book: the UK edition is illustrated with Chris Riddell, whose art is more Al Jaffee, less Ralph Steadman -- madcap rather than grotesque. The US edition is illustrated by Skottie Young, whose work is more grown-up. Both artists complement the text well, but I favor the UK version. You can see some art samples below.

Fortunately the Milk [UK edition, illustrated by Chris Riddell]

Fortunately the Milk [US edition, illustrated by Skottie Young]

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UK edition (Chris Riddell)

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US edition (Skottie Young)

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KentuckyFC writes "Last month, NASA declared that Earth's most distant probe had finally left the Solar System. But the announcement may now turn out to be premature. It was prompted by a dramatic increase in the density of plasma in the region of space the spacecraft is now in. However, there has been no change in the local magnetic field, which is what astrophysicists would expect if Voyager had entered interstellar space. Instead, space scientists think the probe may be caught inside a magnetic portal known as an interstellar flux transfer event. This occurs when the magnetic fields from two different objects briefly become connected through a tube-like magnetic structure. This process happens between the Earth and Sun's magnetic field about every eight minutes, so similar events are expected between the Sun's field and the interstellar field. This magnetic tube would allow particles in from outside the Solar System, increasing the density of plasma, while maintaining the same magnetic field. If so, Voyager 1 hasn't yet left the Solar System after all."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lauren says:

In one chart, "German graphic artist Dirk Loechel has assembled virtually every spaceship known (over 200) including vessels from video games including Halo, TV shows dating back to Galaxy Quest, and CGI animated fare such as Wall-E."

Check out the image at Loechel's Deviant Art page

Constance Cooper sez, "My 8-year-old daughter spotted some incredibly sexist kids' books in a bookstore, and got them removed by the management. Warning: looking at the section headings of the books may raise your blood pressure."

For boys:
Warning!
How to Survive a Shark Attack
How to Survive in a Forest
How to Survive Frostbite
How to Survive a Plane Crash
How to Survive in a Desert
How to Avoid a Polar Bear Attack
How to Survive a Flash Flood
How to Treat a Broken Leg
How to Survive an Earthquake
How to Survive a Forest Fire
How to Survive in a Whiteout
How to Survive a Zombie Invasion
How to Survive a Snake Bite
How to Survive If Your Parachute Fails
How to Survive a Croc Attack
How to Survive a Lightning Strike
How to Survive a T-Rex
How to Survive Whitewater Rapids
How to Survive a Sinking Ship
How to Survive a Vampire Attack
How to Survive an Avalanche
How to Survive a Tornado
How to Survive Quicksand
How to Survive a Fall
How to Survive a Swarm of Bees
How to Survive in Space

For girls:
Warning!
How to Survive a BFF Fight
How to Survive Football Trials
How to Survive a Breakout
How to Show You're Sorry
How to Have the Best Sleepover Ever
How to Look Your Best for a Party
How to Survive Siblings
Scary Survival Dos and Don'ts
How to Handle Becoming Rich
How to Keep Stuff Secret
How to Survive Tests
How to Survive Shyness
How to Handle Sudden Stardom
More Stardom Survival Tips
How to Survive a Camping Trip
How to Survive a Fashion Disaster
How to Teach Your Cat to Sit
How to Turn a No into a Yes
Top Tips for Speech-making
How to Survive Embarrassment
How to Create a Diversion
How to Survive a Crush
Seaside Survival
How to Soothe Sunburn
How to Pick Perfect Sunglasses
Surviving a Zombie Attack
How to Spot a Frenemy
Brilliant Boredom Busters
How to Survive Truth or Dare
How to Beat Bullies
How to Be a Brilliant Baby-Sitter

How my 8-year-old daughter got some sexist kids' books yanked from the bookstore (Thanks, Constance!)

"Wonder Woman," a live action short by Rainfall Films. "It's a scant two and half minutes, but in the end, it's one hundred and fifty seconds of pure fantasy, where I get to consider the two sides of my favorite warrior: a crusader in man's world, and a paragon of virtue told through Greek mythology," says director Sam Balcomb.