…two-thirds of the 109 state prisons lack air conditioning in housing areas…
…corrections officers have complained to Texas prison officials that the heat index inside facilities is often as high as 130 degrees Fahrenheit, but haven’t been able to persuade them to make changes. They said they were driven to speak out after learning that the state spent $750,000 in June to buy six new barns with exhaust fans and misters to cool pigs raised for inmate consumption.
There is more here.
Michael CollinsAn interview with guy that runs my favorite comic shop in SF.
James Sime, owner of Isotope Comics (326 Fell), is that guy.
You know, the one behind the counter with the trademark stand-on-end hair dressed in a stylish suit, who will happily bring you a stack of graphic novels and comic books and talk you through each one.
It’s understandable where this son of a high school chemistry teacher got the shop’s moniker, not to mention the unbridled excitement with which he talks about radon.
Running the comic book lounge with girlfriend Kirsten Baldock, James has created a one-of-a-kind space that’s sought out by international comic buffs and loyal locals alike.
Hayeswire: How did you find this space?
James Sime: I used to drive by this spot on my way to work—I was out in the Avenues—and this place was empty and I thought, “I want to be there.” And it was before the whole Hayes Valley explosion, but you could see it [coming]. Absinthe is, I think, one of the best restaurants in the city, and I love Blue Bottle and I just wanted to be in this neighborhood. This space was empty for a long time. It was a music school and before that, it was a dot.com.
H: We weren’t really sure about the history of the space.
JS: The space has even more history. Probably the most exciting thing is that one of my neighbors told me that this is where Sylvester would throw his [Disco] parties back in the 70s. So cool. And Robyn Hitchcock lived next door.
H: Obviously you’re not just a shop. You use the term “lounge.” There are so many things that happen here. How did that evolve?
JS: What I always envisioned was a place that was really community-based that would have original art in the gallery, would have a place to hang out, and sit and discover and would do lots of things. I always wanted a place where you would walk in the door and you would feel like you were part of a community already, just by coming in.
H: For someone who hasn’t been here, what kind of things can they expect to find?
JS: We have a wide variety of comic books, graphic novels — which is really our focus — and mini-comics, which are handmade, small batch Xerox zines. There’s lots of rare stuff from all over the world. Not older, vintage books. I only deal in new comics. I’ve armed the store—mostly with me—but with people who are really well read, and huge nerds for varieties of different kinds of comics so I have a lot of customers who come in and they are like, “James, what do I read next?” And that’s kind of the environment I’ve always wanted to have for a store. The other thing is that part of the reason that I opened the Isotope is because I wanted to see a comic bookstore for women and I feel like in the comic’s industry they’ve been really ignored for a long time.
H: It is a very open space for everyone.
JS: The design of the store is lots of open space for humans. Instead of filling the store with more stuff to sell, my concept is kind of to waste the retail space and maximize the space for people so that we can do stuff like have an event and you can come in and have Kirsten’s amazing cocktails and hang out and get to meet the artists.
H: How does the gallery work?
JS: The gallery works very different from other galleries in town. Instead of us hanging art and taking 50% or 30% of the money, all we do is feature the people we love and the artists get all the money.
H: Of course we have to ask about the toilet seats.
JS: We do have a really bizarre museum. It’s called The Comic Rock Star’s Toilet Seat Museum. It’s [the work] of writers and artists of comics from all over the world, drawn on toilet seats. It started kind of as a fluke in 2001. I had an artist/writer in by the name of Brian Wood. He’s writing X-Men now and he does DMZ and Northlanders. I had him in for this in-store and we gave Brian just a little bit more beer than we probably should have and Brian vandalized up my bathroom, and the walls, not so great, but the lid was awesome. The next day I hung his lid in the gallery with the rest of my original art and then this other artist came in, Rick Remender, and Rick was like, “Why does Brian Wood get a toilet seat? What do I have to do to get one of those?” That night I went to Home Depot and I bought five.
H: How many are there now?
JS: I have lost count. This is about half of my collection [here in the store]. So it’s probably not 200 but it’s up there, it’s like 100-something. There are two rules. One, they have to come into the shop in order to get the lid and two, we have to love their comics.
H: Is it true there’s a character from Invincible based on you?
JS: It is true. Robert Kirkman, who does the The Walking Dead comic, wrote me in. There’s a scene that I’m in in Walking Dead as well, I’m in a pile of dead bodies. But in Invincible, the character Isotope is a villain, he’s not a very nice guy. He’s a reoccurring character but very minor. But it’s such an honor to be in Robert’s books because his stuff is so good.
H: Are you happy you chose to set up shop in Hayes Valley?
JS: One of the things that made me know I had to move my shop into Hayes Valley [from the Sunset] eight years ago is that you can go into any of the stores, businesses and the owner is right there and I absolutely love that about the neighborhood. I think it’s a really rare and precious thing that we have—to get that raw passion and the fire behind their business, and the love that they’ve poured into it. I think that that’s an awesome thing. Yeah, Hayes Valley.
The brewmasters at Dogfish Head are certainly no strangers to experimental beers, and their latest brew may just be out of this world. They've added a dose of lunar meteorite to the recipe.
    
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Zazzle is selling these amazing prints of the “San Francisco Archipelago” after the sea levels rise by 200′.
We’ll be cozily nested between Haight Inlet and Outside Sands, but it looks like our friends over at Haighteration and Hayeswire are toast. Nice knowing you!
Of course, there are several other tragic losses in this scenario, unless bison are better swimmers than we’ve heard. We hope your apartment’s big enough to house all your friends.
Along these lines, we wanted to alert your attention to Upper Haighters Ryan Kushner and his wife, who’ve got a Kickstarter to crowdfund a fellowship for climate activists, with open-source training with the world’s best. It’s called The Hero Hatchery, and you can read (and watch) all about it here. We’ll have a full story on the project on October 8th, their official launch day.
In the meantime, we’ll be stocking up on canned goods and firearms.
The upcoming Northwestern home game versus Ohio State has now sold out. Danny Ecker at Crain’s Chicago Business has the post-mortem:
Sales so far show the school was effective in its experimental“Purple Pricing” offer for about 5,000 single-game seats for the game.
The modified Dutch auction system, which guarantees that buyers don’t pay any more for tickets than anyone else in their section, ended up selling out at $195, $151 and $126 for seats on the sideline, corner and end zones, respectively.
On the secondary market, sideline seats have sold for an average of $190, corner seats for $135 and end-zone seats for $127. That suggests that fans haven’t been able to flip them for a profit — at least, not yet.
By Sandor Sas, AdSense Software Engineer
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adsbygoogle.js - will put a placeholder the size of your ad slot on the page, while the synchronous ad code - show_ads.js - will not.
I actually mentioned something about this on Twitter last Thursday:
Animal Crossing should allow you to, under the cover of darkness, commit acts of arson against villagers who build their homes in bad spots.
Quite possibly this could be a more significant development — for the United States at least — than on-line education:
Testing firms are offering new ways to measure what students learn in college. Their next generation of assessments is billed as an add-on – rather than a replacement – to the college degree. But the tests also give graduates something besides a transcript to send to a potential employer.
The latest arrival of the bunch will be a revised version of the Collegiate Learning Assessment, dubbed the CLA+, which the Council for Aid to Education is rolling out this fall. The new test, which is the CLA’s first upgrade in a decade, includes a work readiness component and more student-level data.
Earlier this year the Educational Testing Service (ETS) introduced two new electronic certificates for student learning. And ACT Inc. continues to develop its WorkKeys skills assessment system.
During their routine teardown procedure of Google's new Chromecast, iFixit noticed what appears to be a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy easter egg that's hiding in plain sight.
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Climbing the income ladder occurs less often in the Southeast and industrial Midwest, the data shows, with the odds notably low in Atlanta, Charlotte, Memphis, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Columbus. By contrast, some of the highest rates occur in the Northeast, Great Plains and West, including in New York, Boston, Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, Seattle and large swaths of California and Minnesota.
Check out the map at the NYT link. Based on eyeballing, western North Dakota seems to do best and northwestern Mississippi seems to do worst.
This is based on work by Raj Chetty, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez, and the other results are quite interesting:
The researchers concluded that larger tax credits for the poor and higher taxes on the affluent seemed to improve income mobility only slightly. The economists also found only modest or no correlation between mobility and the number of local colleges and their tuition rates or between mobility and the amount of extreme wealth in a region.
But the researchers identified four broad factors that appeared to affect income mobility, including the size and dispersion of the local middle class. All else being equal, upward mobility tended to be higher in metropolitan areas where poor families were more dispersed among mixed-income neighborhoods.
Income mobility was also higher in areas with more two-parent households, better elementary schools and high schools, and more civic engagement, including membership in religious and community groups.
Regions with larger black populations had lower upward-mobility rates. But the researchers’ analysis suggested that this was not primarily because of their race. Both white and black residents of Atlanta have low upward mobility, for instance.
Of course that is all correlation and not causation per se. The Google link to the original research ought to be here, but right now the available links are down, perhaps soon they will come back up again.
What you're about to see has never been done before in the history of aeronautics. A team of engineers from the University of Toronto have claimed a $250,000 prize after building and flying the first-ever human-powered hover bike.
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In a major breakthrough, researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope have seen the true color of a planet outside our solar system. HD 189733b, as the gas giant is called, is blue. A deep, vibrant, cobalt blue. And just wait til you hear why it's that color.
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See more by Awkward Zombie!
Having gotten all my data out of Google Reader, the next step was to do something with it. I wrote a simple tool to dump data given an item ID, which let me do spot checks that the archived data was complete. A more complete browsing UI was needed, but this proved to be slow going. It's not a hard task per se, but the idea of re-implementing something that I worked on for 5 years didn't seem that appealing.
It then occurred to me that Reader is a canonical single page application: once the initial HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc. payload is delivered, all other data is loaded via relatively straightforward HTTP calls that return JSON (this made adding basic offline support relatively easy back in 2007). Therefore if I served the archived data in the same JSON format, then I should be able to browse it using Reader's own JavaScript and CSS. Thankfully this all occurred to me the day before the Reader shutdown, thus I had a chance to save a copy of Reader's JavaScript, CSS, images, and basic HTML scaffolding.
zombie_reader is the implementation of that idea. It's available as another tool in my readerisdead.com collection. Once pointed at a directory with an archive generated by reader_archive, it parses it and starts an HTTP server on port 8074. Beyond serving the static resources that were saved from Reader, the server uses web.py to implement a minimal (read-only) subset of Reader's API.
The tool required no modifications to Reader's JavaScript or CSS beyond fixing a few absolute paths1. Even the alternate header layout (without the Google+ notification bar) is something that was natively supported by Reader (for the cases where the shared notification code couldn't be loaded). It also only uses publicly-served (compressed/obfuscated) resources that had been sent to millions of users for the past 8 years. As the kids say these days, no copyright intended.
A side effect is that I now have a self-contained Reader installation that I'll be able to refer to years from now, when my son asks me how I spent my mid-20s. It also satisfies my own nostalgia kicks, like knowing what my first read item was. In theory I could also use this approach to build a proxy that exposes Reader's API backed by (say) NewsBlur's, and thus keep using the Reader UI to read current feeds. Beyond the technical issues (e.g. impedance mismatches, since NewsBlur doesn't store read or starred state as tags, or has per item tags in general) that seems like an overly backwards-facing option. NewsBlur has its own distinguishing features (e.g. training and "focus" mode)2, and forcing it into a semi-functional Reader UI would result in something that is worse than either product.
Jim reviews the numbers: “The first Ice Age does $175 million domestically, $206 million internationally. The second one does $192 million domestically, $456 internationally. The third one does $200 million domestically and $700 million internationally.”
That is from the new Lynda Obst book, Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales form the NEW ABNORMAL in the Movie Business. The book is poorly written but sometimes of interest for those who follow this topic.
Douglas C. Engelbart with an early prototype of the computer mouse in 1968 (credit: SRI International)
Douglas C. Engelbart, a visionary scientist whose singular epiphany in 1950 about technology’s potential to expand human intelligence led to a host of inventions — among them the computer mouse — that became the basis for both the Internet and the modern personal computer, died on Tuesday at his home in Atherton, Calif., The New York Times reports. He was 88….
In a single stroke he had what might be called a complete vision of the information age. He saw himself sitting in front of a large computer screen full of different symbols… [that ] would serve as a display for a workstation that would organize all the information and communications for a given project. …
In December 1968, … he set the computing world on fire with a remarkable demonstration before more than a thousand of the world’s leading computer scientists at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco….
He showed how a networked, interactive computing system would allow information to be shared rapidly among collaborating scientists. He demonstrated how a mouse, which he had invented just four years earlier, could be used to control a computer. He demonstrated text editing, video conferencing, hypertext and windowing. [...]
A prototype of Douglas Engelbart’s mouse (credit: SRI International)
