Binaryjesus

1962 NASA Rejection Letter To A Woman

Not all princesses are nice. Herr Nilsson, a street artist in Stockholm, painted Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty lying in ambush for unsuspecting pedestrians.

Link -via Hi-Fructose Magazine

What do they mean? The more I study Shwa Keristead's mystics--the more I sink into their penetrating gazes--the less I understand.

Artist's Website and Gallery -via Ian Brooks

Recently, we learned on Neatorama that as spaghetti and meatballs are actually not true Italian food, which got us thinking about what other things we've accepted as truths are actually damned lies. Well, here's what we found out:

1. Baby Carrots Are Actually Made from Grown Up Carrots

In 1986, California farmer Mike Yurosek got tired of having to throw away imperfect carrots at his packing plant. In some loads, as much as 70% of the carrots had to be thrown away because they were twisted, knobby, or otherwise deformed (he couldn't even feed them all to pigs because after a while, "their fat turned orange," he said.)

One day, Yurosek bought an industrial green-bean cutter from a frozen-food company that was going out of business, and cut the carrots into 2-inch pieces. Then he loaded them up into an industrial potato peeler to smooth down their edges. What he got was what we now know and love as baby carrots (technically, "baby-cut" carrots).

Oh, and here's the best part about the whole baby carrot business: they sell for much higher price than regular carrots, despite that they actually started as carrots destined for the trash heap.

2. Portabello Mushroom is Actually Just Mature Brown Crimini Mushroom

Image: BGSmith/Shutterstock

You pay a hefty premium for large portabello mushrooms at the grocyer store, but did you know that you're actually buying mature brown crimini or button mushrooms? Yep, they're the same thing.

3. You Won't Find Fortune Cookies in China

Eat in any Chinese restaurant in America, and you'll be served with a plate of fortune cookies at the end of the meal. Fortune cookies are so quintessentially Chinese ... yet you won't find them in China.

The origin of the fortune cookies is controversial, but food researchers pointed to its origin as distinctly Japanese (the modern version of the fortune cookie was supposedly invented by Japanese bakers who immigrated to the United States).

And here's the kicker: In the early 1990s, Wonton Food, the largest fortune cookie manufacturer in the United States, attempted to introduce fortune cookies to China, but gave up because the cookies were considered "too American" by the Chinese.

4. General Tso Didn't Invent General Tso's Chicken ...

... but he did quell a few rebellions in which millions of people died!

General Tso Tsun-t'ang, the man whom General Tso's chicken was named after, was a real general* in the late Qing Dynasty, China. He didn't invent the chicken dish in question - or any Chinese food at all, for the matter.

*Unlike Colonel Sanders, for example, who wasn't a real colonel in the military. Sanders was a Kentucky Colonel, a title of honor given by the Governor of Kentucky.

5. You Haven't Tasted Real Wasabi

Wasabi root (Image: Chris 73/Wikipedia)

Unless you've eaten sushi in Japan, or at a very expensive sushi restaurant elsewhere, you haven't tasted real wasabi. That pungent glob of green stuff swimming in soy sauce that you think is wasabi is actually a combination of horseradish, mustard and green food dye.

Real wasabi is made from wasabi root. It is traditionally grated with a piece of sharkskin stretched over wooden paddle.

6. Two Words: Meat Glue

If you thought pink slime in your burger was bad, wait till you hear about meat glue in your steak.

Meat glue, or an enzyme called transglutaminase, binds protein together. It is often used in the food industry to stick together scraps of meat into prime cuts of steak. After the meat is cooked, you can't tell the difference.

7. The First Caesar Salad Was Made From Scraps

From its name, you'd think that Caesar salad is a salad fit for Roman emperors, but did you know that the first Caesar salad was made from scraps?

In 1924, chef Caesar Cardini (yes, the salad was named after him), ran out of food in his restaurant's kitchen, so when a customer asked for a salad, he made do. Cardini put together bits of lettuce with olive oil, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, egg, garlic, croutons and Parmesan. He then added the dramatic flair of tossing the salad "by the chef" at the table-side. The crowds loved it, and the Caesar salad was born!

8. Salmon Gets Dyed Pink

Wild salmon got its nice pink color from eating red-hued krill, but farmed salmon don't get a chance to eat that. Instead, they're fed ground up fish meal and oils that turn their flesh a dull gray color. So, to make up for that color deficiency, farmed salmon are fed pink pigments.

SalmoFan (Image: farmedsalmonfree/Flickr)

Salmon farmers can even choose how pink is pink enough with this nifty SalmoFan. It's just like looking at paint swatches at the hardware store!

9. Chilean Sea bass isn't Chilean. It isn't even a Sea bass.

Chilean sea bass sounds quite nice, doesn't it? That's exactly why it's called that instead of the fish's real name: Patagonian toothfish (man, what an ugly fish!)

Patagonian toothfish AKA Chilean sea bass

In 1977, a fish wholesaler named Lee Lantz wanted to sell Patagonian toothfish to the American market, but realized that nobody wanted to eat a fish with such an unappetizing name. So he tried "Pacific sea bass" and "South American sea bass" before settling on "Chilean sea bass."

The clever name isn't the only problem with Chilean sea bass: according a 2011 DNA analysis by Peter Marko of Clemson University, 15% of Chilean sea bass sold with eco-labels weren't actually from approved, sustainable stock. Worse, 8% were actually different species of fish altogether!

10. You Can't Tell the Difference Between Cheap and Expensive Wine

Image: Minerva Studio/Shutterstock

Ah, the sweet nose of lies that is wine tasting. If you ever thought that pretentious wine tasting experts are full of it, you'd be right.

Psychologist Richard Wiseman of the Hertfordshire University conducted a blind test in which he asked 578 regular people to tell the difference between a variety of wine, ranging from cheap £3 wines to expensive £30 bottles:

The study found that people correctly distinguished between cheap and expensive white wines only 53% of the time, and only 47% of the time for red wines. The overall result suggests a 50:50 chance of identifying a wine as expensive or cheap based on taste alone – the same odds as flipping a coin.

So, in other words. They guessed.

Ah, but that's regular people, oenophiles said. What about experts? Well, the results aren't much better: In 2001, Frédéric Brochet at the University of Bordeaux tested 54 wine experts to rate 2 glasses of red and 2 glasses of white wine. The experts couldn't even tell that the red wine was actually the same as the white wine, but colored by red dye.

If that's not bad enough, wait till you hear what Brochet did next. He took a middling bottle of wine and served it in two different bottles. One bottle had a fancy grand cru label and the other one had an ordinary table wine label. The experts gave the same two wines opposite descriptions: they praised the "grand cru" wine and dismissed the ordinary one as less favorable.

Do you know of any more food lies? Tell us in the comments!

Temperatures at the dark craters of the north pole of Mercury can dip to
as low as 370 degrees below zero.
Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab/Carnegie Institution of Washington

There's Ice in Mercury

Of all the planets in the Solar System, Mercury is the closest to the sun. You'd naturally think that it's also the hottest, but it's not (that distinction belongs to Venus). Oh, no doubt Mercury can get quite hot - its surface temperature can reach up to 800 °F, but at the poles, its temperature never gets above freezing. That's where NASA's Messenger Spacecraft found a large volume of water ice - estimated to be 100 billion to 1 trillion tons of ice, actually.

Maat Mons, the highest volcano on Venus. Image: NASA/JPL

It Snows Metal on Venus

Snowcapped mountains on Earth are majestic, but they're by no means unique in our Solar System. Venus has its own snowcapped mountains, but instead of water, the "snow" is made of heavy metals like lead sulfide (galena) and bismuth sulfide (bismuthinite).

Olympus Mons on Mars. Image: NASA/JPL

Mars has the Tallest Mountain in the Entire Solar System

Let's skip Earth for now and head on over to Mars. If you think our Mount Everest is tall, check out the Olympus Mons on the Red Planet. At about 14 miles (22 km) tall, it's three times as tall as Mount Everest's height above sea level. It's pretty big, too. Olympus Mons is approximately the size of Arizona.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot, as "spotted" by Voyager 1 in 1979. Image: NASA/JPL/CalTech

Jupiter's Great Red Spot

The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is a storm that has been raging for at least 400 years. It was large enough to be seen from Earth (it first spotted by Giovanni Cassini in the late 1600s with a primitive telescope). In fact, the Great Red Spot was large enough to engulf three Earths, though its size has decreased over the past hundred years.

If you think that storms on Jupiter are quite violent, you'd be right: winds around the edge of the Great Red Spot peak at over 260 mph, with lightning bolts* 10 times as powerful as anything ever recorded on Earth.

*Unlike on Earth, lightning bolts in the gas giant Jupiter don't strike the ground. They're cloud to cloud.

Simulated image of Saturn's rings, with false colors to represent ring particle sizes in different regions based on radio signals. Image: NASA/JPL

Saturn's Magnificent Rings and Hexagon Cloud

Why does Saturn have a ring? Because Neptune proposed and they're now married, goes the joke. Ask any schoolchildren and they'd tell you that Saturn has magnificent rings. These rings were first observed by Galileo back in 1610 though his telescope wasn't good enough to discern the actual structure (he thought that Saturn had "ears."). Some forty years later, Christiaan Huygens suggested that Saturn was surrounded rings.

The rings of Saturn are made of countless small particles - from dust particles to large rocks, mostly made of water ice with trace silica material - that orbit the planet. The rings aren't solid - there are thousands of gaps, ringlets, and spiral waves in the rings that are caused by their interactions with the moons of Saturn.

Color-composite image of Saturn's northern hexagon, as taken by the Cassini spacecraft.
Image: NASA/JPL/SSI/Jason Major)

If you thought that the rings are awesome, check out Saturn's Hexagon. It's a strange hexagonal cloud pattern in the north pole of the planet. Each side of the hexagon is about 8,600 miles long (which is longer than the Earth's diameter)

Oh, one more neat fact about Saturn: since it's made mostly of hydrogen and some helium, it's the least dense of all the planets. In fact, it's less dense than water so if you have a bathtub big enough to fit Saturn, the whole planet will float.

Uranus orbits on its side, with its rotational axis nearly perpendicular to the Sun.
Image: Lawrence Sromovsky/University of Wisconsin-Madison/Keck Observatory.

Uranus, the Sideway Planet

Uranus is the only planet that has an axis of rotation approximately parallel with the plane of the Solar System - this means that the gas giant rotates on its side. The cause of this unusual tilt is unknown, but scientists think that during the formation of the Solar System, an Earth-sized protoplanet (or a series of protoplanets) smashed into Uranus, pushing the planet over on its side.

The Great Dark Spot of Neptune, as captured by Voyager 2 in 1989.
Image: NASA/Voyager 2 Team

Neptune's Supersonic Great Dark Spot

Like Jupiter's Great Red Spot, there are large storms on Neptune - the largest of which is named the Great Dark Spot. The elliptical spot is largely the same size as Earth, and it has the fastest winds in the Solar System. Neptune's winds have been clocked at over 1,500 mph - that's twice the speed of sound.

Earth, the Goldilocks Planet

So, you've read 7 wonderful things about the planets of our solar system, but what about our own? What's so special about the third rock from the Sun, our home planet Earth?

Well, it's unique because it's the only planet we know of that has life. Doubly unique because it has intelligent life - though that's arguable depending with whom you talk to ;)

Other planets in the Solar System have liquid water, plate tectonics, and atmosphere - but only Earth has them all just right. It's not too hot or too cold, and it's neither too wet nor too dry for life.

That made Earth a unique planet in the Solar System, but what about in the Universe? In 2011, the Kepler Space Observatory Mission team released a list of 1,235 candidate extrasolar planets, with 54 that rotate around "circumstellar habitable zone" - an astronomical comfort zone, if you will, that allow liquid water to exist.

As of 2013, the list has expanded to 3,216 candidate and 132 confirmed exoplanets in 76 stellar systems. In our Milky Way galaxy alone, astronomers estimated that there are at least 17 billion Earth-sized exoplanets (what about other galaxies in the Universe? It's been estimated that there are as many as 500 billion galaxies in the entire Universe, so you do the math).

But is there life on other planets? Let us leave you with this quote from the 1997 movie Contact, where the father of a young Ellie Arroway replied to his daughter's question:

Young Ellie Arroway: Dad, do you think there's people on other planets?

Theodore Arroway: I don't know, Sparks. But I guess I'd say if it is just us ... seems like an awful waste of space.

Sure, Bini can play basketball, but I'd much rather be friends with Alibi, who knows how to relax and take a load off. We could enjoy avocado face masks together while we munch on some popcorn and watch a cheesy rom-com. You can follow Albi on his daily adventures on his website, AlbiRabbit.com.

Link 

MAKE's Michael Colombo says:

In today’s New York Times article by Heather Murphy, a story was related where a group of lawyers were ordered by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to put their cell phones in the refrigerator before sitting down for dinner. The idea was that the metal-clad fridge would act as a Faraday cage, blocking any electromagnetic signals and preventing the group from being surveilled.

This sounded a bit dubious, since a refrigerator is not completely sealed in metal. A counter surveillance designer by the name of Adam Harvey suggested that a cocktail shaker is a much better alternative. Curiosity got the best of me, so I decided to test out both. See the video above for the results.

Edward Snowden: Can a Refrigerator Function as a Faraday Cage?

Ben Lincoln discovered that his Motorola Droid X2 was silently sending an enormous amount of private, sensitive information to Motorola, without permission -- much of it without any encryption. He carefully documented the scope of the leaks, and gave the steps necessary to repeat his work. It's a terrible, and potentially criminal, design decision by Motorola, and demands full disclosure from the company and full investigation by independent researchers. (via /.)

Red Robot has the best cookouts. Remember this one?

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womenfighters:

The lovely Virginia Hankins, modern lady knight who is also a professional stunt woman, actress and archer.

Her website: http://virginiahankins.com/

* Ripped from Gareth Branwyn's Facebook feed.

Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" (the movie) on speed. Er, even more speed. From 1A4 Studio who have done this with a number of movies, including Star Wars, Back to the Future, and The Matrix.

Here's a photo from Jacob Riis's 1890 classic "How the Other Half Lives," "an early publication... documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s." It shows "Bandit’s Roost, at 59½ Mulberry Street (Mulberry Bend), was the most crime-ridden, dangerous part of all New York City."

Those guys are clearly total bad-asses.

How the Other Half Lives is in the public domain; you can download the full book, listen to a free audio edition at Librivox, and choose from among several editions in print.

Bandit’s Roost (1888) (via Kadrey)

If you have lived past your twenties now and have not lived a sheltered life, chances are you’ve already internalized Thought Catalog’s 19 Brutal Truths About Life That No One Will Tell You. Still, just like the mandatory training videos they made me watch at Microsoft that explain that bribing government officials in order to land a sweet bonus-earning deal is wrong, there’s a certain power and usefulness in stating the obvious.

Go and read the full article, but for the benefit of those you aren’t sure, here’s a list of my quick summaries.

1. Getting friendzoned? It’s because they don’t want to see you naked.
2. Sometimes you’ll be the person everyone else trash-talks, because sometimes you’ve earned it.
3. Unflattering photos of you are more accurate representations of what you look like. Suck it up, ugly.
4. People think about their exes in bed sometimes, including with you.
5. You’re going to see a lot of people who peaked in high school, and feel superior to them or pity for them. Enjoy.
6. Some people are going to think that you peaked in high school, and feel superior to you or pity you. Deal.
7. The people who once treated you like dirt but now treat you nicely are doing so not because they’ve evolved but because you’ve gotten better-looking or more financially successful.
8. People judge you on how you dress.
9. It might be that you went into debt to get your degree, only for it to turn out to be a waste of money.
10. But get that degree anyway, because it might affect how people judge you.
11. This one is so true that I’m just going to quote it directly rather than summarize: Having rich, well-connected parents basically cancel out every other qualifier of talent or hard work or potential. They are the trump card of life.
12. Having rich, well-connected parents will make other people secretly resent you. Don’t sweat it; they’ll still have to stay on your good side.
13. Again, a direct quote rather than a summary: Most politicians, even the “progressive” ones, give a shit about literally no one and nothing but themselves and their mistresses.
14. Your ex has trash-talked you to their subsequent significant others. It happens, and you’ve probably done the same.
15. Another direct quote rather than a summary: At least two of your “friends” don’t actually like you.
16. Most of the terrible things people say about each other boil down to jealousy; tearing someone down is the easiest way to feel better about oneself.
17. One more direct quote: You might just not be good enough for that job you are positive that you really deserve.
18. Some of those most cherished memories with people you used to love may be the memories those people are trying to forget.
19. People have created “leagues” in their mind (as in “She’s out of your league”), and some will judge you as below theirs. Give them a wide berth.

Before you decide to shutter yourself away from the sewer that is humanity, remember that:

• A lot of this stuff just comes from the minor insecurities, jealousies and greed that are part and parcel of being human. As bad as these aspects of our nature often are, they’re also necessary: things like ambition and the drive to excel also come from them.
• Most of the people who are close to you will do these things only to a minor degree, and you’ve done the same to them.
• You can’t control who your parents are, but you have some control over how people perceive you.
• There’s always tequila!

That’s right, there’s always tequila. The end of the article is my favourite part: it’s a paid text ad for the Patron Social Club. I like the message it unintentionally sends: “People are terrible; have some tequila!”

Found by Nicole Simone, who is out of my league, and therefore more certainly out of yours.

On lap 5 of 15 Patrick Kujala misjudged his braking/speed and ran his car into the back of David Fumanelli, who was in front of him; the resulting crash sent Patrick airborne and into the tire barriers in a way not dissimilar to Conor Daly at Monaco last year. Both drivers are ok.

Said the young Finn afterwards, "I was given to understand these cars could drive upside down." (not an actual quote).

With so many luxury car brands out there, it's hard to know which one stands for what. Here's a simple breakdown of every brand identity in the luxury car game.

This guide was drawn up by Jalopnik's perennial voice of reason, pauljones. He wrote it in response to Infiniti and Acura's recent announcements that they're trying to find their own brand identities. Well, listen up.

Luxury brand identities, huh? Okay, here we go:

Auburn: You're sex on wheels.

Maybach: You have no identity. You're just mildly confused with all the right ingredients, but the wrong fucking recipe.

Bentley: You're a wealthy as shit A+++++ lister trying to be hip. You still don't have a clue.

Rolls-Royce: You're a wealthy as shit A+++++ lister who gives zero shits about being hip, cool, or even what goddamn list you're on. Why? Because you have a Rolls-Royce. Now shut up and pass the Grey Poupon.

Aston Martin: You're trying to be James Bond, but the harder you try, the cheesier you come off. Kind of like the new Vanquish Volante.

BMW: You're a douche.

Audi: You're a douche that pretends to hate other douches.

Mercedes-Benz: You're a douche, and you're damn proud of it.

Cadillac: You're Bruce Springsteen singing about "Glory Days."

Lincoln: You still exist?

Lexus: You're grandpa.

Jaguar: You're quirk. You're class. You're quietly confident. You're still scared shitless of your electrical system.

Porsche: You are cold, calculating, and silently biding your time in a plot for revenge after your plans to buy out VW backfired in the most spectacular manner possible.

Acura: Hello, Walter Mitty.

Infiniti: Hello, Minardi.

Maserati: You're the Italian Jaguar. A little louder, a little less suave, but every bit as quirky, classy, and probably a little more exciting.

Ferrari: You're the automotive equivalent of the New York Yankees. You're flashy, successful, and everyone hates you because you're an arrogant prick.

Duesenberg: You're Jay Gatsby.

Pierce-Arrow: You are class. Pure, fucking class.

Jensen: Class be damned. You're a four-wheel-drive hatchback rocket ship, and that's all that matters.

Bristol: You don't fix things that aren't broken. You also don't exist anymore.

Lamborghini: You're a spoiled, whiny 8th-grade brat throwing a temper tantrum after losing out on a date to the middle school prom.

Imperial: You're proof that the 80s sucked for everyone, including royalty.

Stutz: You're the automotive equivalent of Lindsay Lohan. Once upon a time, you were cute, sexy, and stylish. Then you coked up and sold yourself out until your career ended.

I hope that clears things up. If there are any luxury brands that pauljones forgot, fill in your own version below. You could probably squeeze Land Rover in there nowadays, and if anyone wants to try and pin down what being a Ruxton owner says to the world, be my guest.

Photo Credit: Raphael Orlove

Defense lawyers for Terrance Brown, a south Florida man facing bank robbery charges, have asked for NSA mobile phone surveillance records to be supplied in order to support his claim that he was not in the vicinity of the bank at the time it was robbed. He's referring to the leaked court order revealing that the NSA requires American phone companies to turn over the complete records of all their calls, including the location data about the callers.

The prosecution had told defense attorneys that they were unable to obtain Brown's cellphone records from the period before September 2010 because his carrier, MetroPCS, had not held on to them.

Not so fast, Brown's attorney Marshall Dore Louis argued in court documents filed in Fort Lauderdale days after the National Security Agency surveillance program was revealed last week...

...Louis argued in court Wednesday that the government should be forced to turn over phone location records for two cellphones Brown may have used because it could prove he was not present for one of the attempted bank robberies, on July 26 on Federal Highway in Lighthouse Point.

"The president of the United States has recognized this program has been ongoing since 2006 … to gather the phone numbers [and related information] of everybody including my client in 2010," Louis said.

Bank robbery suspect wants NSA phone records for his defense [Paula McMahon/Sun Sentinel]

Photo: kitchenoverlord.com

On Chris-Rachael Oseland's kitchenoverlord.com food blog, there are some wonderful geeky recipes. Two of the more recent posts are breads with science fiction themes, and both sound delicious/disgusting: A cinnamon-vanilla Sandworm bread, from a carb-y parallel version of Frank Herbert's Dune universe, and Alien Xenomorph Pretzel Bread Eggs.

It's not just the finished product that's nerdy, but the very recipe steps.

Photo: kitchenoverlord.com

From the Alien Xenomorph Pretzel Bread Eggs recipe:

Warm your milk up in a microwave until it’s the temperature of warm bathwater. Mine took about 20 seconds, but who knows what kind of crap equipment you have on your ship. Just test it with a finger. Not too hot, or else you’ll kill the yeast. You don’t want to do that. Those beasties are your only friends, now.

Dump the yeast and milk into a bowl and halfheartedly mix them up. Go press your ear against the bulkheads or feel the floor for vibrations for the next 10 minutes. When you come back, the yeast will have bloomed into a healthy colony, unlike those poor bastards on LV-426.

And hey, if you can't deal with baked goods, there are low-carb, easy-assembly options: Alien facehugger eggs, below. Cucumbers, eggs, and some herbs and spices. The instructions crack me up:

Now gently slide your egg into the cucumber mount. Arrange these on a dark plate in order to create a diorama of the alien hatchery. Our still images from the Arcadia appeared to include coarse salt and sriratcha hot sauce, though one of our analysts jokingly suggested it looked more like the eggs were dressed in briny tears and fresh blood. There may have been some unexpected trauma when the eggs hatched.

Share these alien eggs with your fellow crew members and the colonists of LV-426, which they have apparently decided to rename Acheron. Remember, if you see anything like this when scouting the best sites for the first colonial drop, do not approach. Summon one of the ship’s androids, as they can neither be infected nor spread disease to the innocent young of a new species.

(via the Boing Boing Facebook page)

Photo: kitchenoverlord.com

godsndmonsters:

a lost forgotten sad spirit

http://godsndmonsters.tumblr.com/

mirrorwave13:

“Dolmen Sunset” by somadjinn. 

Poulnabrone, Ireland. 

Meet more than 30 potential employers at the fourth annual job fair hosted by the Gwinnett Village Community Alliance.

A variety of companies seeking qualified applicants will participate including Pepsi, Waffle House, Gwinnett Medical, AFLAC, BB&am

Are you a vegetarian or vegan who’s looking for recipes that aren’t so hippy flower-child-like? Are you an omnivore who’s into gangsta rap and looking for some tasty side dishes? If you answered “yes” to either, you’ll love Thug Kitchen, the site that cooks like Morrissey, but talks like Fitty!

Check out the graphics for the recipes below; click on them to get the 411. Be warned, the site’s name is Thug Kitchen, so the language gets a little salty…

Oddly enough, Thug Kitchen got the attention of Gwyneth Paltrow, who sang its praises on the Rachael Ray show:

The Star Trek actor George Takei, writes about being interned in California internment camps along with his Japanese-American family during WWII, a particularly important rememberance in the face of the out-of-control US spying revealed in the Edward Snowden leaks:

As I write this, once again the national dialogue turns to defining our enemies, the impulse to smear whole communities or people with the actions of others still too familiar and raw. Places like the museum and Rohwer camp exist to remind us of the dangers and fallibility of our democracy, which is only as strong as the adherence to our constitutional principles renders it. People like myself and those veterans lived through that failure, and we understand how quickly cherished liberties and freedom may slip away or disappear utterly.

Why We Must Remember Rohwer (via Reddit)

At The Price Hike, Bloomberg News food critic Ryan Sutton writes about Sushi Yasuda, a high-end restaurant in New York which recently eliminated tipping. You cannot tip your waiters, but you can eat there (assuming you can afford the bill!) knowing that your wait staff receive a living wage, and benefits including paid sick days and vacation days.