When you stub a toe, miss a train by mere seconds or send an accidental "reply-all," there's a good chance you'll reflexively blurt out an expletive or two — and there's no reason to feel bad about it. While spewing profanities may offend disciples of Emily Post, it turns out that cursing is a pretty healthy habit. Research suggests that using four-letter words to express pain may inadvertently help alleviate it, whether we're reeling from physical anguish or emotional upset. How fucking convenient.
If it hurts, go on and curse. Dropping f-bombs helps us withstand physical pain, according to a 2009 study in which U.K. researchers from Keele University conducted a different kind of ice bucket challenge. Participants had to dunk their hands in ice water until the discomfort grew unbearable. Half of the participants could repeat their obscenity of choice during the experiment, while the other half had to endure the pain without letting curses fly. Read More
If your survival instinct is lacking, Dying Light's zombie mode may be more your speed. The game's lone PvP mode allows one player-controlled zombie to terrorize a group of co-op players with all manner of horrific sounds and grotesque tendrils, as e...
i'd been waiting to see what someone from MAD had to say. I used to have a collection spanning back to the mid 70s and that was, at the time, some of the most subversive satire i'd ever seen.
John Ficarra, the Editor-in-Chief of Mad Magazine talks Freedom of the Press.
New York City police officers didn't face significant punishment for the use of chokeholds banned by New York City Police Department policy, a new report found.
The report, by the NYPD inspector general, looked at 10 cases involving chokeholds between 2009 and 2014. The Civilian Complaint Review Board recommended the most serious penalty in nine of 10 cases, but the NYPD reduced the punishment to lesser penalties — or none at all — in the cases that have been carried out to completion.
The NYPD's guidelines explicitly ban the use of chokeholds no matter the circumstance. But the inspector general found police officers, in a practice called "particularly alarming" by the report, sometimes used chokeholds "as a first act of physical force in response to verbal resistance."
The report asked the NYPD and Civilian Complaint Review Board to apply more consistent standards, increase cooperation, and improve transparency in disciplinary evaluations. One of the recommendations tasked the police commissioner with putting disciplinary decisions in writing, particularly when they differed from the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
"We really don't know why the police commissioner came out with a different result, a lesser result than the CCRB recommended," NYPD Inspector General Philip Eure told radio station WNYC. "That sort of thing undermines confidence."
A previous, more expansive report by the Civilian Complaint Review Board, reported by the New York Times, found the NYPD had eased its interpretation on its blanket ban of chokeholds. A major problem, according to the previous report, is the NYPD has narrowed its definition of a chokehold, allowing officers to more easily deny they're using them.
Following Eric Garner's death, the NYPD's use of chokeholds came under increased scrutiny
The new chokehold report came one month after a grand jury decided not to indict the NYPD officer who killed Eric Garner by putting the unarmed, black 43-year-old in a chokehold.
Garner's death, which was caught on video, drew national media attention and led to protests in New York City and around the country. Critics viewed the chokehold as excessive. Police said the use of force was justified; they said Garner resisted arrest.
Protesters said the chokehold was another example of racial disparities in police use of force and the criminal justice system. Black Americans are disproportionately likely to be stopped, arrested, and killed by police, according to the available, limited FBI data. These racial disparities remain even in situations in which a victim wasn't attacking anyone else. Some of these victims were instead killed while allegedly fleeing, committing a felony, or resisting arrest.
In 2014, there were several high-profile police killings of black men and boys. In Ferguson, Missouri, former police officer Darren Wilson killed unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown in a highly contentious shooting that sparked nationwide protests. In Ohio, police killed 22-year-old John Crawford and 12-year-old Tamir Rice after they mistook toy guns for actual weapons. In Utah, police killed Darrien Hunt as he fled after an encounter in which police said Hunt attacked them with a decorative sword.
The digital camera industry is dominated by eye-level viewfinders, but waist-level finders have their advantages. One main one is that it makes photographing strangers less threatening since the photographer is looking down instead of directly at the subjects.
Photographer Paul Richters wanted to bring the experience of shooting with waist-level finders to the world of digital cameras, so he turned his Canon PowerShot N compact camera into a little Rolleiflex-lookalike.
In case you’ve never seen or used a waist-level finder before, here’s a photo showing what you see when you look down into the finder on top of a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera:
The Canon PowerShot N can easily be used for waist-level photography because it’s tiny and square-shaped with a 2.8-inch LCD screen on the back that flips up at a right angle:
Richters used pieces of wood to fill in the 4 “missing sides” of the camera, giving the PowerShot a cube body that fixes the LCD on top of the camera (here’s a page with a closer look on how the wooden body was built). He also added strap loops to the side and a tripod mount to the bottom.
Here’s what Richters’ PowerShot N looks like with its new body:
Richters also purchased a 3-inch LCD hood that fits the “top” of the “camera” perfectly. It makes viewing the screen easier in bright, sunny conditions:
Here’s what Richters sees now when he looks straight down into the camera:
He reports that this new design improves the handling of the camera “radically.” It also lets him photograph strangers inconspicuously, and composing is easier than the waist-level finders on film cameras since the image isn’t reversed left-to-right.
The PowerShot N only sells for $130 at the moment, making it a cheap option if you’d like a simple camera that you can look down into while using.
Plants and Animals
Photo credit:
Credit: Isa Betancourt/ANSP. This Lexias pardalis butterfly is a beautiful half-male and half-female rarity.
A half-male, half-female butterfly is fluttering in the spotlight now that a museum volunteer at Drexel University has spotted its unique coloration. The Lexias pardalis butterfly recently emerged from its chrysalis when Chris Johnson, a retired chemical engineer who was volunteering at the exhibit Butterflies!, caught a glimpse of its new wings.
"It slowly opened up, and the wings were so dramatically different, it was immediately apparent what it was," said Johnson.
In September, Florida's West Kendall Baptist Hospital got a very cool (and very important) new tool: The very first "superfast" body scanner designed by scientists at GE. The team at West Kendall just wrapped up a study of the machine—and the images and GIFs that resulted are wild.
Even though we've been hearing electronic music for well over 50 years, songs made with machines still fill my mind with visions of a dystopian future where we're slaves to androids. Sometimes I listen to Aphex Twin and imagine
2001: A Space Odyssey's Dave gleefully smashing Hal 3000 with a sledge hammer. "Out of the Silent Planet," by electronic producer Jordan Jolly, elicits similar kinds of fucked-up sci-fi daydreams. The glitchy chillwave track would serve as the perfect score to a human uprising against the technocratic overlords of our post-apocalyptic future.
Health and Medicine
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Body clocks readily reset themselves to natural sleep patterns if given the opportunity, the study found. Lazurite
One week of camping outdoors and eschewing all man-made light is enough to reset a person’s body clock to its natural sleep rhythms, a new study has found.
Our increased use of electrical light, and reduced exposure to natural light, caused modern humans to stray from our natural circadian rhythms or sleep patterns, and may be a contributor to poor quality sleep.
Meet Skellie, just your average girl looking for a boo and a good glass of red wine. She may sound like everyone you know, except for the fact that Skellie is a skeleton!
What started as an inside joke between co-workers has become one of the funniest Instagram accounts around. Social Media Manager Dana Herlihey couldn’t resist creating an Instagram profile for the Halloween skeleton she and her coworkers used to prank each other. Three months after her first post she’s still posing and photographing Skellie and crafting her personality.
Herlihey’s favourite adventure with Skellie has so far been her trip to see Santa. While waiting for an hour in line kids laughed at the skeleton, and played hide and seek.
Joel: I can’t see anything that I don’t like about you. Clementine: But you will! But you will. You know, you will think of things. And I’ll get bored with you and feel trapped because that’s what happens with me.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2004 (dir. Michel Gondry)
A commercial plane flying from New York to London Heathrow reached near-supersonic speeds on Thursday as it flew through a 200-mile-per-hour jet stream surging across the North Atlantic. The Boeing 777-200 jet reached speeds of 745 miles per hour relative to ground speed.
If you find that creating your role-playing character's backstory a little rough (thanks to your sense of imagination being dulled to a smooth sheen), the internet — as always — is here to help.
The fucked up thing is no one will call this cultural appropriation. Fuck this shit. Punk culture is a culture of its own creation created to subvert mainstream society. Seeing this pisses me off to no end. You like 1D? Cool, good for fucking you. But keep your mainstream band off punk band labels.
If taunting spirits in a video game just isn't enough for you, you might be the type of gamer that developer Volition and publisher Deep Silver are targeting with their Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell pre-order promotion. According to a press release, if...
spoilers aside, i love how snarky his editor is getting with him. ""In my mind, Jon's been Commander for over ten years -- because that is how long ago that ASOS came out...""
A popular fan theory on the identity of one of George R.R. Martin's most mysterious A Song of Ice and Fire characters may have just been debunked—and by a simple trip to the library. Spoilers for the series, including possibly for unpublished material here!
It's always exciting to receive a message from a master like Vincent Laforet telling you about his new photos. This time he has outdone himself (once again!) so I had to share it right away. Never in my life I've seen New York from this perspective and with this stunning quality—so perfect it feels unreal.
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If your survival instinct is lacking, Dying Light's zombie mode may be more your speed. The game's lone PvP mode allows one player-controlled zombie to terrorize a group of co-op players with all manner of horrific sounds and grotesque tendrils, as e...
If taunting spirits in a video game just isn't enough for you, you might be the type of gamer that developer Volition and publisher Deep Silver are targeting with their Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell pre-order promotion. According to a press release, if...
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