Sure female superheroes are usually drawn with idealized female figures, but they are still busy kicking butt. When they go home, that's when supergals really start looking sexy as DeviantArt user TorqueArtStudio shows with this great pin up version of Supergirl. I don't know about you guys, but I'd love to see this turn into a full series with a variety of heroes in a variety of classic pin up poses.
Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory got a neat surprise when they were trying to develop a new method of making graphene. They managed to capture a chemical reaction in the act, atom by atom, bond by bond:
“We weren’t thinking about making beautiful images; the reactions themselves were the goal,” says Fischer, a staff scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division (MSD) and a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. “But to really see what was happening at the single-atom level we had to use a uniquely sensitive atomic force microscope in Michael Crommie’s laboratory.” Crommie is an MSD scientist and a professor of physics at UC Berkeley.
What the microscope showed the researchers, says Fischer, “was amazing.” The specific outcomes of the reaction were themselves unexpected, but the visual evidence was even more so. “Nobody has ever taken direct, single-bond-resolved images of individual molecules, right before and immediately after a complex organic reaction,” Fischer says.
I missed this back in March 2012, but it bears re-visiting. Here's a series of Doonesbury strips that some newspapers refused to run in spring 2012. The strips criticize Republican state legislatures' plans to require transvaginal probes for women contemplating abortion, with special emphasis on Texas governor Rick Perry.
Trudeau wrote: "Ninety-nine percent of American women have or will use contraception during their lifetimes. To see these healthcare rights systematically undermined in state after state by the party of 'limited government' is appalling. "In Texas, the sonograms are the least of it. The legislature has also defunded women's health clinics all over the state, leaving 300,000 women without the contraceptive services that prevent abortions in the first place. Insanity."
Trudeau is dismayed by the newspaper reaction. "I write the strip to be read, not removed. And as a practical matter, many more people will see it in the comics page than on the editorial page," he wrote.
"I don't mean to be disingenuous. Obviously there's some profit to controversy, especially for a satirist. If debate is swirling around a particular strip, and if its absence creates blowback, then I'm contributing to the public conversation in a more powerful way. But I don't get up in the morning and scheme about how to antagonise editors. Some of these folks have supported me for decades."
Oh, Texas... This is why I want to leave you. (via Reddit) 
    
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Let me play you the song of my people.
BinaryjesusHoly shit - "Minority Report"
Norcross Police Chief Warren Summers spoke at this week's PDC meeting in front of local business owners and residents to give an update on what the police department has been up to recently.
While he talked mostly about what the city is doing to decrease the crime reported in the Hispanic community, he also touched on other topics:
Dramatic increase in service calls: Compared to previous years, the city has seen an uptick in the number of calls for services, which include everything from crimes to missing elders to noise complaints. From January to May in 2011, there were more than 81,000 calls were made in Norcross. During those months in 2012 after annexing east Norcross, nearly 11,000 calls were received. So far this year, Norcross Police have had more than 13,300 calls.
Predicting crime: The police department is seeing if it can use drug money to get a contract with Minority Report, a software program that predicts crime. According to Summers, the program is based on three variables: The date and time of a crime, its location and the type of crime. The software then puts everything into an algorithm that predicts when and where criminals may strike next. Summers said the Atlanta Police Department and several departments in California have implemented the program. This report by ABC News details one department's success in the program.
Outside criminals: The police chief said most criminals involved in Norcross incidents are from outside the city.
Street closures: Being summer time, Norcross is no stranger to 5K races and fun runs. With these races, the police are having to block off streets, sometimes the busy Holcomb Bridge Road, for public safety. What the police department, city staff and the Atlanta Track Club have decided to do is design four routes that future race organizations can choose from to decrease the number of streets that are blocked off. And "none of them cross over Holcomb Bridge Road," which can be a first safety issue, according to Summers.
See also:
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In an explosive investigative piece published in the Guardian, Glenn Greenwald details a top-secret US court order that gave the NSA the ability to gather call records for every phone call completed on Verizon's network, even calls that originated and terminated in the USA (the NSA is legally prohibited from spying on Americans). This kind of dragnet surveillance has long been rumored; Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall published an open letter to US Attorney General Holden saying that "most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted...the Patriot Act." Here, at last, are the details:
The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compels Verizon to produce to the NSA electronic copies of "all call detail records or 'telephony metadata' created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls".
The order directs Verizon to "continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order". It specifies that the records to be produced include "session identifying information", such as "originating and terminating number", the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and "comprehensive communication routing information".
The information is classed as "metadata", or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access. The document also specifies that such "metadata" is not limited to the aforementioned items. A 2005 court ruling judged that cell site location data – the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to – was also transactional data, and so could potentially fall under the scope of the order.
Revealed: NSA collecting phone records of millions of Americans daily
As the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Cindy Cohn and Mark Rumold point out, this kind of surveillance is at the heart of several of its ongoing cases, and the Obama administration has done everything in its power to stop the American people from finding out how it interprets the Constitution:
This type of untargeted, wholly domestic surveillance is exactly what EFF, and others have been suing about for years. In 2006, USA Today published a story disclosing that the NSA had compiled a massive database of call records from American telecommunications companies. Our case, Jewel v. NSA, challenging the legality of the NSA’s domestic spying program, has been pending since 2008, but it's predecessor, Hepting v. AT&T filed in 2006, alleged the same surveillance. In 2011, on the 10th Anniversary of the Patriot Act, we filed a FOIA lawsuit against the Department of Justice for records about the government’s use of Section 215 – the legal authority the government was relying on to perform this type of untargeted surveillance.
But at each step of the way, the government has tried to hide the truth from the American public: in Jewel, behind the state secrets privilege; in the FOIA case, by claiming the information is classified top secret.
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For last summer's sock-hop, PJ and her daughter K made a Doctor Who themed poodle skirt, sporting K-9:
Now, K is a fan girl and not a girly girl at all, so though she wanted to wear a poodle skirt, she was not interested in some fluffy pink poodle on a pearl leash. Oh no. It had to be something fan related. Her first thought was a dalek skirt, with big yarn pom poms in lines all round and felt strips for the bars. Fabulous idea, too funny, but she decided that would be too obvious. She wanted it to be subtle.
She just wasn't sure what she wanted, so we picked a burgundy felt for the skirt, a wide black elastic for the waist, some shear black to make a scarf, and she picked out a bunch of felt rectangles, in a variety of colors for the decoration. My job was to make the skirt, which was the easy peasy part. Her job was the decoration.
Fan Girl + Sock Hop = Awesome! (via Neatorama) 
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About this groundbreaking photo from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley:"Almost as clearly as a textbook diagram, this image made by a noncontact atomic force microscope reveals the positions of individual atoms and bonds, in a molecule having 26 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms structured as three connected benzene rings."
"Nobody has ever taken direct, single-bond-resolved images of individual molecules, right before and immediately after a complex organic reaction," says Felix Fischer of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
(via James McInerney) 
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Here's a great Instructables for hiding a stash-box behind a wall of cut-away books. In some ways, it's a lot less fiddly than creating a single hollow book, though it does require you to use a scroll saw.
1. The height and depth of the books are the important dimensions of the book. The size of the cover is what limits storage space. Since you are using multiple books, the thickness of each one doesn't matter.
2. The books do not need to be the same size, but it is convenient if they are. Sets of reference books like encyclopedias work well because they are all the same and it is a reasonable excuse to have a bunch of large books all in one spot on the book shelf.
3. Hardback books hold their shape better than paperbacks do after being cut up.
4. The secret compartment only remains a secret as long as no one tries to read any of the books. So it helps if the book are relatively uninteresting while still looking like something that you would have on your shelf.
Multi-Book Secret Storage Compartment by DIYHacksAndHowTos (via Make) 
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Nicole sez, "Fans of Adventure Time so look forward to seeing the gorgeous and imaginative artwork that appears at the top of each new episode in the title cards. Now, these beautiful designs featuring Finn, Jake, and the many off the wall inhabitants of the Land of Ooo are available as framable art prints from WeLoveFine.com. Eleven are available so far, including fan-favorite episodes 'The Creeps' and 'It Came From the Nightosphere'; all are 18 x 24, printed to order on high-quality ARTA paper and are $25 each. Some of the designs are also available as t-shirt variants, also $25 each."
Adventure Time Episode Title Card Designs! (Thanks, Nicole!) 
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This fee offers a rare chance to fight back against a corporate giant. You can use the administrative fee as a loophole to break your contract, without having to pay any costly early termination fees.
Even if the monthly fee isn't a big deal to you, upgrading your phone early probably is. By canceling your contract, you can get a new Samsung Galaxy S4 or HTC One with AT&T or another wireless carrier at the cheaper subsidized pricing.
Nelson Aguilar at Wonder How To describes how to do it
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26p5 is a post from: The Adventures of Dr. McNinja
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BinaryjesusA new must-see.
I’ve been visiting Kang Nam for so many years that it’s surprising I’ve never written about it. I guess I’ve been keeping it as part of my “secret stash”, hoping it wouldn’t get too crowded. I started going there for the occasional sushi lunch when I kept an office at PDK airport a few miles away. More recently, A & I have been using it as one of our comfort destinations – it’s usually quiet, no wait for a table, the staff is attentive and the fish is fresh.
First things first – this is a sushi restaurant, but understand that it’s a Korean sushi restaurant. So, what does that mean in terms of sushi? Best I can tell, absolutely nothing. And that’s a good thing. You’re not going to find a rarefied sushi selection. If you want that, head about a mile North on Buford Highway and try Sushi House Hayakawa (but be prepared if you don’t have a reservation). You’re not going to find an izakaya menu here either. If you want that, head about a mile West to Sushi Yoko or a mile South-West to Shoya Izakaya.
What you will find is workaday sushi of consistently high quality. But it’s also a Korean restaurant with a nice selection of traditional dishes – which I will admit, I’ve never tried…
Being a Korean restaurant, meals always start with an assortment of banchan. There’s usually some variation, but the selection usually includes kimchi (fermented cabbage), sigeumchi namul (spinach salad), miyeok julgi bokkeum (sauteed seaweed), sukjunamul (marinated bean sprouts) and Korean potato salad (an odd adoption of an American dish).
There’s also the obligatory iceberg salad with ginger dressing (I’m not sure, but I think this is an invention of Benihana) and miso soup.
My fallback dish is always chirashizushi, a bowl of sushi rice topped with sashimi and other ingredients.
Takuan (pickled daikon), sake (salmon), tako (octopus), kanikama (fake crab), saba (mackerel), tamago (egg), maguro (tuna), ebi (shrimp), ika (squid), hokkigai (surf clam), tobiko (flying fish roe), with the occasional variation thrown in by the chef.
I love to sit at sushi bars, but this is one of my favorites. It’s never really crowded (often the entire restaurant seems empty). But the itamae (chefs) seem to be constantly churning out bowls and sushi boats loaded with 50, 60, 70 pieces of sushi and sashimi, which quietly disappear behind the curtains around the edge of the dining room. And if you’re lucky, they’ll experiment on you with off-the-cuff dishes as well.
A little observation – each tatami room, hidden behind a curtain has a sign over it. The names on the signs (Ban Po, Do Gok, etc) are train stations in Seoul. KangNam (Gangnam) itself is both a district and a train station in the city.
Kang Nam
5715 Buford Hwy NE
Atlanta, GA 30340
Here's glassblower Alan Bennett's astounding triple-nested Klein bottle, a beautiful thing:
A single surface model made by Alan Bennett in Bedford, United Kingdom. It consists of three Klein bottles set inside each other to produce, when cut, three pairs of single-twist Mobius strips. A Klein bottle has no edges, no outside or inside and cannot be properly constructed in three dimensions.
Klein bottle, 1995. (via Neatorama)
(Image: Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library) 
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Well, this just shows that cats that sit at the door meowing piteously are just motherfucking LAZY.
