A Reddit user says, "My English teacher has this posted outside her office."

Red Dwarf never gets old! Lister, Rimmer, Kryten and the Cat are back!

I just watched season eleven's kick-off episode, Twentica. Reminiscent of Star Trek's famous The City on the Edge of Forever, the crew travels back in time to prohibition America. Oddly, they find the prohibition is on science!

I could not be happier! Red Dwarf is back! Now just give me the Mighty Boosh and Black Books.

Journalist Thomas Fuller returned to the United States after 27 years abroad, mainly in Asia. He moved to San Francisco and wrote about the reverse culture shock he experienced. The thing that struck him the most was the disparity between the wealthy (ganja yoga, organic ice cream sandwiches, vegan shoes, Bluetooth compatible toothbrushes) and the poor (outbursts of the mentally ill on the sidewalks, vaguely human forms inside cardboard boxes).

From NYT:

Greater Bangkok, a sprawling metropolis with more than 10 million people, has 1,300 homeless people, a survey this year found.

San Francisco has less than one-tenth Bangkok’s population but six times as many homeless people. I’m sure you could fill a book with the reasons for this. Ms. Nopphan believes that homelessness is more intractable in rich societies. “In wealthy countries there are systems for everything,” she said. “You’re either in the system or out of the system.” There is no in-between in America. In Bangkok, by contrast, rich and poor coexist. There are vast tracts of cheap, makeshift homes and a countryside where people in the cities can return to if they lose their jobs or hit hard times.

Photojournalist Tim Page in Oregon on one of dad's northwest college speaking tours with his Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry one-man show. Each morning they would begin the day's journey with a 40-ounce coffee laced with good whiskey. 1974.

Malcolm McSporran, who became the editor of the New Zealand edition of Rolling Stone in the '80s, with author Thom Steinbeck the day he purchased a new motorcycle to ride across the country on. At the end of the road trip, he would leave with Malcom to go to Korea for a big underground ginseng smuggle. Chicago, April 1970.

Mom's photo of one of a series of art billboards around L.A. You can see dad taking a photo of the billboard as well, on the far left. February 1977.

The U.K. organization Clinic Compare has created a set of GIFs that replicate the experience of being colorblind. Far from just seeing the world in black and white, it turns out there are a whole bunch of different types of colorblindness. Here’s some of the ways the condition can manifest:

[via Mic]

Hawaiian-based artist Jane Mount makes it possible to wear your favorite pieces of literature on your sleeve—or anywhere else—with these delightful book pins. Mount sells the pins on her Etsy shop. She currently has 22 different designs available, including titles ranging from Pride & Prejudice to Harry Potter. (more…)

Ka-Bar's Tactical Spork is ideal for the most extreme KFC eaters.

The Tactical Spork, which is made from food and water approved Grilamid, is equipped with a fork/spoon combo and has a serrated knife hidden in the handle. The knife is accessed by pulling the spork in opposite directions from each extreme end

Ka-Bar Tactical Spork (Amazon)

British artist Rebecca Moss went aboard the Hanjin Geneva container ship for a "23 Days at Sea Residency." But the company that owns the ship went bankrupt on August 31, and ports all over the world have barred Hanjin's ships because the shipping line is unable to pay the port and service fees. (more…)

Martin Critchley shot this lovely ice cave footage, which proved so popular he released an extended cut. (more…)

Design website Core77 says, "Industrial designers: Do you find it stings when non-designers invent a successful product that you should have thought of?" The product is called the TubShroom, and it's a silicone ribber gadget that fits into drains to trap hair.

What's interesting is that [inventors Serge and Elena Karnegie] sought funding on both Kickstarter and IndieGogo — and smashed it on both. They gathered $59,267 on the former and about $120,000 on the latter.

That was last year. This year they've returned to Kickstarter with a smaller version called, unsurprisingly, the SinkShroom. The $12 device has already been 400% funded, and there's 18 days left to pledge if you want one.

The TubShroom is available on Amazon for $13.

Source: WalletHub

The post Most & Least Federally Dependent States appeared first on The Big Picture.

Flood Death Valley

Since Death Valley is below sea level could we dig a hole to the ocean and fill it up with water?

—Nick Traeden

Yes! We can do anything we want. We shouldn't do this, though, because it would be gross.

Death Valley is an endorheic basin[1]"Big hole" in California. The floor of the valley is about 80 meters below sea level. It contains the lowest point on land in North America[2]Excluding artificial points like mines. and is the hottest place on Earth.[3]If you're about to say "Wait, what about Liby—," then don't worry, I'm with you. Just hang on and read a few more words ahead!

Now, if you're the sort of person who's into world records, you might have heard that the hottest place on Earth was Al Azizia, Libya. Al Azizia recorded a temperature of 58.0°C (136.4°F) in 1922, a mark Death Valley has never come close to. So what gives?

It turns out Al Azizia has recently been stripped of its record. In 2010, an exhaustive—and definitely a little obsessive—investigation led by Christopher C. Burt convinced the World Meteorological Organization that the Libyan measurement was probably a mistake. This left Death Valley with the record of 56.7°C (134°F), set in 1913. Case closed!

Except it's not quite settled. Burt has raised questions about the 1913 record as well, and has gone so far as to catalog a number of historical extremes along with a credibility score for each. The "real" record is probably 53.9°C (129°F). This temperature has been recorded four times, in 1960, 1998, 2005, and 2007—every time in Death Valley.

These records were recorded with modern instruments and are considered reliable. They also make sense from a theoretical point of view. Geographers have calculated[4]This Army Corps of Engineers publication cites a couple of sources for this, including a 1963 paper by G. Hoffman. Unfortunately, that paper is in German, which I can't read, so I've just decided to trust that the Army Corps of Engineers writers Dr. Paul F. Krause and Kathleen L. Flood aren't pulling a fast one on me. that the highest possible temperature in ideal spots (in desert basins like Death Valley) during the 20th century is 55°-56°C, so 54°C sounds like a reasonable world record.

Now, back to Nick's question.[5]This is nowhere NEAR the record for "most boring digression into world record trivia." That record was recently challenged by IBM computer capable of producing millions of boring pieces of trivia per second, but the machine narrowly lost to reigning human champion Ken Jennings.

Since Death Valley is below sea level, we could, as Nick suggests, flood it with seawater. It would take a lot of digging, since there's a lot of Earth in the way. The lowest route to Death Valley is probably by traveling up the Colorado River watershed, along the Arizona border past Quartzsite,[6]Trivia: If you want to reach Quartzsite, Arizona from my school, Christopher Newport University, you just step out onto Warwick Blvd (Rt. 60) and turn left. That's it—Route 60 runs across the country, from the CNU campus in Virginia to I-10 just outside Quartzsite. then northwest[7]Possibly following one of the routes shown on page G34 in this report. past Zzyzx, which is a real place.

If you did all that digging, you could create a channel from the Gulf of California to Death Valley, and water would flow in. We can use this handy stream-flow calculator to figure out how wide we'd need to make the channel. A channel 20 meters deep and 100 meters wide should be able to fill it in a few months. A really wide channel—like the kind carved by glacial floods—could fill it in hours.

We know it's possible to create this kind of inland sea because we've done it before—by accident. In 1905, irrigation engineers working on the Colorado River made some mistakes. During a flood, the entire Colorado river broke through into the Alamo Canal and flowed directly into the Salton basin to the north. By the time they repaired the canal, two years later, the Salton basin had become the Salton Sea—one of the larger human-caused changes to the world map.

The Salton Sea is fed mainly by agricultural runoff, so it's become saline[8]"Salty" and hypereutrophic.[9]"Gross" Large numbers of dead fish, combined with algal decay and unusual chemistry, have created a smell that the US Geological Survey describes as "objectionable," "noxious," "unique," and "pervasive." The sea is a birdwatching hot spot, but also the site of a lot of mass bird die-offs, so kind of a mixed bag if you're into birds. In recent years, the water has been evaporating quickly, leaving behind dried toxic residue which is swept up into dust storms. Work to clean up and rehabilitate the region is ongoing.

All in all, the Salton Sea is a mess—and Nick wants to make another one.

Nick's Death Valley project would start off connected to the ocean, but without a source of flowing water at the Death Valley end,[10](It's a desert.) the channel would gradually silt up. The link to the ocean would eventually be broken, the sea would start to evaporate, the water would become saline, algae would bloom, and eventually the US Geological Survey would start complaining about the smell.

There would be one more consequence to all this. Thanks to the flood of cold ocean water burying the whole region, Death Valley would stop setting temperature records, and someone else would eventually claim to have broken their 129°F record. The Death Valley records would have to be compared to the newer candidates, which would probably use slightly different methods ... and that means one thing:

A World Meteorological Organization expert panel!

vintagegal:

A Vaudeville performance based on the old English ballad “Death and the Lady”. Photographed by Joseph Hall, 1906 (via)

Be Our Guest and come Pun-Der the Sea to read tonight’s comic

haruchonns:

Current fascination: Pieni Merenneito//Finnish National Ballet

Composed by Tuomas Kantelinen, Choreographed by Kenneth Greve

random-nominandum:

Les Diableries
Louis Alfred Habert, Pierre Adolph Hennetier, & Louis Edmond Cougny
Stereoscopic photography
1860s
France

When Hurricane Matthew rolled through and over Jacksonville, Florida, rocker Lane Pittman didn’t evacuate like a lightweight or cower in a boarded-up house. He did the most American rock and roll thing you can do — put on some swim trunks and Slayer, break out Old Glory, headbang defiantly against the wind, and dedicate the whole thing to Emma Watson on Facebook:

For those of you who don’t know the background song, it’s Raining Blood by Slayer:

Pittman made Florida news last summer when he was arrested for shredding the Star-Bangled Banner too well:

Lane Pittman is the embodiment of Florida rock and roll. Sir, I salute you with a gator steak on a flaming sword!

monolime:

The Queen in the North

I can get the best of both worlds with a red velour skull, on sale now at Michaels, which isn’t just for macrame owls anymore.

 

artbutcher:

Hieronymus Bosch (The Garden of Earthly Delights)

It costs less than $60.

For just a few bucks, you can pick up a USB stick that destroys almost anything that it's plugged into. Laptops, PCs, televisions, photo booths -- you name it.

Once a proof-of-concept, the pocket-sized USB stick now fits in any security tester's repertoire of tools and hacks, says the Hong Kong-based company that developed it. It works like this: when the USB Kill stick is plugged in, it rapidly charges its capacitors from the USB power supply, and then discharges -- all in the matter of seconds.

On unprotected equipment, the device's makers say it will "instantly and permanently disable unprotected hardware".

You might be forgiven for thinking, "Well, why exactly?" The lesson here is simple enough. If a device has an exposed USB port -- such as a copy machine or even an airline entertainment system -- it can be used and abused, not just by a hacker or malicious actor, but also electrical attacks.

Slashdot thread.

The EFF has a good analysis of all the ways Windows 10 violates your privacy.

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