Russian Sledges

Greenhouse Botanical Garden Grueningen | idA | Markus Bertschi | Via

bigbigtruck:

krudman:

I love this

"you come here often?"
"DWARVEN CRAAAFTS"

KNEEL, FEEBLE SHEEP OF CHRIST. THE BLASPHEMY NOW CONTINUES IN BLOOD-SOAKED, STOMACH-CHURNINGLY HIGH DEFINITION WITH:

THE SCARS - “JUST WHAT I NEEDED……TO FULFILL THE UNHOLY PACT WITH ABEZETHIBOU, LORD OF THE BURNING”

JimsWalks has added a photo to the pool:

A female Powerful Owl feeds its chick tender morsels of Ringtailed Possum.
Ninox strenua, SE Australia.

A major highlight for me seeing these majestic birds. Many thanks to Nick for allowing me the privilege to observe these amazing birds.

As a tech-obsessed child growing up in the nineties, Rob Rhinehart was always puzzled by food. Here he was, eagerly embracing the wonders of the information era, and he had to gnaw on seared chunks of meat and raw vegetables. “I remember when I was very young, eating lettuce and thinking it was very weird to be eating leaves, sitting in this nice house with all of these electronics around us,” he says now.

These days, Rhinehart doesn’t eat much lettuce or anything else recognizable as food. Instead, the 25-year-old gets most of his nutrition from a water bottle filled with a thick, light-brown slurry he invented. A cocktail of highly processed foodstuffs mixed with water—oat flour, tapioca maltodextrin, rice-protein powder, canola oil, and scores of vitamins, minerals, and other nutrient additives—it contains everything the human body needs, or so he claims.

After Rhinehart posted his recipe online in February, Soylent quickly became the first drinkable meme. A crowdsourcing campaign netted over $1 million in preorders, and a community of DIY soylent makers blossomed on the web. Last week, Rosa Labs, the company Rhinehart co-founded to bring Soylent to market, landed $1.5 million in venture-capital funding, putting a considerable dollar value to the geek dream of a post-food future where people spend less time feeding themselves and more time with the advanced electronics and programming languages they love.

Soylent’s enthusiasts see the body as a machine powered by chemicals and talk of transcending the human body’s limits by optimizing it like a supercomputer, a premise that underpins both Tim Ferriss’s popular Four Hour life-hacking books and the self-tracking Quantified Self ­movement. The philosopher Ian Hacking calls this thinking “neo-Cartesian,” after Descartes, who believed minds sat in ­bodies like conductors pulling the tiny levers of our nerves.

If the neo-Cartesians’ future comes to be, it will prove that contemporary foodie culture contains the heirloom seeds of its own destruction. Fresh from Georgia Tech with a degree in computer science, Rhinehart moved to Silicon Valley to work on a wireless-Internet start-up. He was broke and busy, and when it came to meals, he just wanted to eat cheaply. But he found that one does not just eat, and certainly not cheaply, in the birthplace of health-food stores and Chez Panisse. In Silicon Valley, he saw that his childhood paradox had grown into a monster. The most ­technology-forward place on Earth is obsessed with ingesting fancy leaves. “Everyone’s recommendations for healthy food seemed to take a lot of work and produced a lot of waste,” Rhinehart says. “I just thought rather than getting into this back-to-nature, holistic approach to food, I could see it as a form of hardware and standardize it, make it cheap.”

For his first experiment with a standardized diet, Rhinehart analyzed the calories of fast-food menu items, determining that the $5 pepperoni Hot-N-Ready pizza from Little Caesars provided the most energy per dollar. Math proved what countless young bachelors ­instinctively know. “For a week I ate nothing but $5 Hot-N-Ready’s,” Rhinehart says. “I quickly realized that was unsustainable. I just felt awful.” San Franciscans seemed to believe kale was the healthiest of all foods. So next, Rhinehart ate only kale for a week. “That was unbearable.”

A normal person might have considered eating both pizza and kale, and maybe an occasional apple. But this is not the hacker way. Rhinehart decided to create a new, nutritionally complete food from scratch. His roommate, who had a background in biology, provided some basic biochemistry lessons, and he drew further inspiration from local “biohackers,” DIY biotech researchers who approach life’s basic ­functions like programmers to code, ­creating new foods, medicines, and even organisms. He pored over textbooks, open-access scientific journals, and dietary guidelines. “I began to see all the parallels between biochemistry and electronics,” Rhinehart says. “Basically I realized that DNA is information, and proteins and enzymes are gears and transistors.”

After a few months of research, he mixed the first batch of Soylent with ingredients purchased online. He lived on Soylent alone for the next month. “I felt amazing,” Rhinehart says today. “I had more energy; I slept better. I could focus more; I was brighter and more optimistic.”

When his joints began to ache, he added more sulfur to his formula, and the pain went away. In February, Rhinehart revealed his self-experiment in a triumphant post on his personal blog: “I haven’t eaten a bite of food in 30 days and it’s changed my life,” he wrote.

A spectacular claim backed vaguely by science stuff, Rhinehart’s blog post was perfect fodder for geek hive minds like Reddit and Hacker News. Geeks enjoy debunking crazy ideas nearly as much as hyping them, but the negative reaction to Soylent was especially harsh. Some speculated Soylent was such a bad idea it must be a viral-marketing stunt. That Soylent shared its name with the product made of people in the 1973 Charlton Heston sci-fi flick undoubtedly fed the controversy. But Rhinehart says the unappealing name was a preemptive rebuttal to the disdain he knew would inevitably greet Soylent. “The name is a little self-­deprecating,” he says. “I knew there would be all sorts of visceral reactions, and people were going to talk about it on this shallow level. The name feeds into this.”

Luckily for Rhinehart, the Internet is the most efficient system ever devised for converting visceral reaction of any polarity into money. The crowdfunding campaign met its goal of $100,000 in a matter of hours. Business Insider heralded Soylent as “the little invention that might change food forever”; then came the venture money. The first preordered Soylent should ship in December, packaged in pouches that contain three meals’ worth of off-white powder each.

One afternoon in May, I tried a prototype version of Soylent, an experience complicated by the unconscionable amount of lasagna I had just eaten for lunch. Based on Rhinehart’s pitch, I expected drinking Soylent to be effortless and futuristically cool, like licking an iPhone 5. In reality, Soylent resembles watered-down oatmeal. Unflavored, it tastes sour and wheaty, with a wan viscosity that gives off the impression of having already passed through someone else’s body. (Rhinehart says the company is researching a variety of flavors.) Soylent is aggressively nourishing: It coated my tongue, charged down my throat, and engaged in pitched battle with the lasagna already occupying my stomach. Rhinehart’s ideological war on real food raged literally, nauseatingly in my gut, and Soylent lost this particular skirmish. I only managed a few gulps from a pint glass before dumping the rest down the drain.

Soylent, however, is forever open to improvement. In true hacker fashion, Rhinehart has kept his recipe open source, which means impatient geeks like Bill Johnston, a skinny 27-year-old New York City web developer, are already living on the stuff. (The official Soylent is capitalized; homemade soylent is not.) Johnston estimates that more than 70 percent of his food intake for the past four months has been soylent, which he mixes each morning out of eleven powders, pills, and oils. “I feel pretty normal,” Johnston says. “If anything, I noticed that compared to eating a large meal, you feel a lot less groggy.”

On his lunch break in Cooper Square, Johnston removes a neon-green Nalgene from his messenger bag a bit sheepishly. “Honestly, I don’t tell a lot of people about this,” he says. Even his co-workers don’t know, nor have they asked when he finds the time to eat now that he’s going to the gym during his lunch break. Johnston has, however, uploaded his Bill’s Beginner Recipe to Soylent’s active DIY forum, where a user recently offered this tip on calibrating his mixture: “Change your amount of table salt to 1.5g,” wrote qm3ster, “and angels will descend from heaven to sing your glory.”

By promising to “solve” the problem of eating, Soylent takes neo-Cartesianism to its logical conclusion, not just perfecting the machine of the body but eliminating one of its most basic functions. This idea is so strange it has even unsettled Tim Ferriss. “Food isn’t a game,” Ferriss warned ominously in a disparaging blog post after one of his minions tested Soylent for two weeks. (Ferriss’s Four Hour Body has had essentially the same criticisms leveled at it for its endorsement of unproved dietary shortcuts.)

Despite the warning, most Soylenters aren’t looking to quit food entirely. They believe a Soylent-based diet can elevate real food from dreary biological necessity to a purely aesthetic and intellectual enterprise—by making it optional. “For me cooking is like an art form,” says Zach Alexander, a 30-year-old software developer in San Francisco and DIY soylenter. “And it’s really frustrating how biology compels you to eat food three times a day even though you don’t want to.”

Even Rhinehart eats the occasional burrito if he’s out with friends. “I think of it like going out and having a few beers on the weekend,” he says. “It’s not healthy, but I enjoy it.”

*This article originally appeared in the November 4, 2013 issue of New York Magazine.

Related: Juice Heads: How the Newest Liquid-Nutrition Cultists Are Mastering Their Intestines

Read more posts by Adrian Chen

Filed Under: miracle diets, bill johnston, health, rob rhinehart, soylent, soylent green, the no food diet, zach alexander

Emails about how wrong I am in 3... 2... 1...

the-once-and-spooky-ship:

#IT’S NOT A PHASE MOM #IT’S PUNK ROCK AND IT’S MY LIFE #IT’S WHO I AM #IT’S THE BLOOD IN MY VEINS AND THE BEATING OF MY HEART #LEAVE ME ALONE

This is the story of the Monterey Bay Aquarium's 501st attempt to save an orphan otter. From her discovery as a stranded newborn pup crying on the beach through her rehabilitation in secret roof tanks atop the Aquarium, NATURE follows as Otter 501 learns how to dive, hunt, eat, and fend for herself in the wild, where survival is a long shot at best.

Hoo boy, this one's going to be difficult to explain. A new document leaked to Der Spiegel by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden indicates the NSA had taps on German chancellor Angela Merkel's phone for over a decade. 

The German newspaper reports the NSA had Merkel's cell phone number listed on a Special Collection Service (SCS) document since 2002. The number was listed as recently as June 2013 -- the last time President Obama visited the country. The document also alleges the U.S. has a "not legally registered spying branch" in the U.S. Embassy, one that would lead to "grave damage for the relations of theUnited States to another government," if exposed, according to a Reuters translation. U.S. are or were able to wiretap German government communications without letting them know they're being spied on. So how have Merkel and the White House responded to this report so far? 

Both sides refused to comment, according to the Guardian. 

Merkel was already miffed about previous reports indicating the National Security Agency was monitoring her phone. The White House promised, very carefully, that it's not monitoring Merkel's phone right now. White House spokesman Jay Carney dodged accusations the U.S. picked up Merkel's phone number along with 35 other world leaders leader earlier this week, saying the U.S. "is not monitoring and will not monitor" her communications. Given his unsatisfactory response, never denying spying on her phone calls in the past, Merkel arranged a meeting between German and U.S. officials this week to discuss the NSA's alleged surveillance. This latest report won't help warm that already chilly relationship. 

It's unclear how much and what kind of data the NSA collected on Merkel. There's no indication whether the spying agency listened to her phone calls or just logged the call meta data, as is their most common practice. That's Obama's best chance to save face with the German leader. 

greencrook:

greencrook:

My uni students asked me if they had homework for the holidays and I felt so bad for them and their tired, dead eyes that I told them to just mail me pics of their favorite pokemons.  

Three students sent me digimons I can’t fucking trust them with anything I give up

Gulf Coast Slabs | Clay Ketter | Socks Studio

"Some days after hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, I found an image in Time magazine, taken from the air soon after the storm’s passage, of the smouldering remains of some coastal community. This image, like many others taken that day and the days to come, documented the awesome scale of the destruction caused by the hurricane, but in a landscape which differed very much from the worst-flooded wards of New Orleans, so well-covered in the news media. In this picture alone I discovered a wealth of information and understood the need to be there and capture these traces of living which I found hauntingly familiar. My photographer and I went to Gulfport, Mississippi with our cameras, rented a skylift, and shot film. Gulf Coast Slabs is the result of this work." 

- Clay Ketter

Brannon said the group has worked with Christian nonprofits, such as Habitat for Humanity, in the past. "We can all work together to achieve something positive regardless of religion or lack thereof," she said. "We've raised money for March of Dimes, worked with the Generous Garden Project, done community park clean ups, adopted a highway, and sponsored local foster children for Christmas." She said the group is used to its share of animosity within the community, but the exchange with the Soup Kitchen was unlike anything she had experienced. "They are the only group that denied us the opportunity to volunteer," Brannon said. Landrum said she does not have a problem with the group setting up across the street. "They can set up across the street from the Soup Kitchen. They can have the devil there with them, but they better not come across the street," Landrum said. The Upstate Atheists will be handing out care packages between 11 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. or until all of the packages are gone.

Just two guys, casually buying some cheesecakes.

Look, it's obvious why President Obama and Bill de Blasio stopped into Junior's: Good photo op, iconic location, easily identifiable as a spot of-the-people. Plus, you can pick up a couple of cheesecakes for the flight back to D.C. But somebody should tell the president that there really are much more interesting things to eat in Brooklyn these days. [Josh Lederman/Twitter]

Read more posts by Alan Sytsma

Filed Under: cheesecake, barack obama, brooklyn, junior's, photo ops

mymodernmet:

Feather sculptures by Kate MccGwire

Striking organic sculptures made of bird feathers.

Twitter / MargaretAtwood: Behind the scenes: plastic-eating ...:

Behind the scenes: plastic-eating barnacles in the North Pacific Gyre http://deepseanews.com/2013/10/behind-the-scenes-plastic-eating-barnacles-in-the-north-pacific-gyre/ … #DeepSN via @deepseanews @mcleangreaves

FORT WAYNE, IN—Lamenting that there are only so many hours in the day to devote to his various stresses, local Epione Medical Instruments sales manager and father of two Dale Humphrey told reporters Friday that he continues to have difficulty striki...

J. Crew are masters of branding, and they’ve done a superb job rolling out their women’s brand Madewell. In almost all areas. Above: a shirt my friend Nate’s wife ordered from their website. (It has large buttons.)

Original Source

Americans For Tax Reform Tax Policy Director Ryan Ellis said on Wednesday night that he's starting to think tea party activists are "freaking retarded."

@freddoso I've gotta tell you, man, I'm starting to think these tea party activists are freaking retarded

— Ryan Ellis (@RyanLEllis) October 24, 2013

Read More →

Okay so uh Lyle was pretty in his grips the other day, but he had a neat idea that basically I thought could be a money maker around here. The rule of the land is you can't be a booze company unless you jump through just incredible amounts of hoops, and pay taxes out the nose to help cover all the society disasters your product creates, and have sanitation inspections and all of that crud that doesn't matter if your product is basically sanitizer. So to cut to the quick of it, is, I skipped the rules and I am a booze company now. It is weird how that plays out, as I had maybe at best hoped I would be sort of found half dead but not auto-sullied in my britches some day. At best. But here I am, a booze company. Mama come gander at Timmy B. Silktone.

The idea of booze is easy. You put sugar in water. Yeast (a fungus) eats the sugar and sheds off alcohol. When the yeast dies from starvation, you have the most possible alcohol your sugar could make. You boil that water and collect the steam at various temperatures: the steam is your product. Don't collect it 'til you get to 173*F, or it's walleyes and buttersharts for you. Stuff that boils below there is basically like the stuff that they use in dry-erase board cleansing spray, or to help write On The Road. There you go, you have some concentrated, less-deathy booze. It will be harsh, but get this: it will also have boutique cachet. Folks are nuts for somethin' local and fresh-made, so that has got to go for booze as well. I mean hell people buy Monarch gin and that's just nail polish they made clear with gas, expired aspirin, and a canary nobody was attached to.

So I dig this pretty much from the simple science angle, but also I like to finger it up and run this bootleg thing as a kink for the Man. The money won't hurt, even if it's spare, because I don't pay the electric bill around Ray's place, and he ain't the sort to notice a terawatt gone missing.

I was going to name the booze company Hornswoggle, you know, like to "bamboozle," but decided that was just a horrible, horrid type of cleverness that's actually more stupid than smart (also it sounds like what Harry Potter throws up after the Hufflepuff cocktail progressive). So, I got my midnight lumens out and read up on the true recipe of Achewater. Man that took some page-rubbing, but I pieced together a pretty good bunch of the puzzle. Lots of botanical history, regional Southern foodways, ethnic migration patterns, even some phone calls to families nearing defunction. I am making Achewater. Everybody here basically has to buy at least one bottle...but there won't be enough and the X-Y curve will do a little jig in my favor.

http://imgur.com/a/4L1FW

Original Source

St. Albertus

St. Valerius in Weyarn

Hand of St. Valentin

St. Benedictus

Skull of St. Getreu in Ursberg

St. Friedrich at the Benedictine abbey in Melk

St. Valentinus in Waldsassen

Relic of St. Deodatus in Rheinau

In 1578 word spread of the discovery in Rome of a network of underground tombs containing the remains of thousands of early Christian martyrs. Many skeletons of these supposed saints were soon removed from their resting place and sent to Catholic churches in Europe to replace holy relics that were destroyed during the Protestant Reformation. Once in place the skeletons were then carefully reassembled and enshrined in costumes, wigs, jewels, crowns, gold lace, and armor as a physical reminder of the heavenly treasures that awaited in the afterlife.

Over the past few years photographer Paul Koudounaris who specializes in the photography of skeletal reliquaries, mummies and other aspects of death, managed to gain unprecendented access to various religious institutions to photograph many of these beautifully macabre shrines for the first time in history. The photos have been collected into a book titled Heavenly Bodies released by Thames & Hudson early next month. (via Hyperallergic)

carryonmywaywardgabriel:

Martin Freeman is an angry hobbit.

ananyo writes "Allen Nicklasson has had a temporary reprieve. Scheduled to be executed by lethal injection in Missouri on 23 October, the convicted killer was given a stay of execution by the state's governor, Jay Nixon, on 11 October — but not because his guilt was in doubt. Nicklasson will live a while longer because one of the drugs that was supposed to be used in his execution — a widely used anesthetic called propofol — is at the center of an international controversy that threatens millions of U.S. patients, and affects the way that U.S. states execute inmates. Propofol, used up to 50 million times a year in U.S. surgical procedures, has never been used in an execution. If the execution had gone ahead, U.S. hospitals could have lost access to the drug because 90% of the U.S. supply is made and exported by a German company subject to European Union regulations that restrict the export of medicines and devices that could be used for capital punishment or torture. This is not the first time that the E.U.'s anti-death-penalty stance has affected the U.S. supply of anesthetics. Since 2011, a popular sedative called sodium thiopental has been unavailable in the United States. 'The European Union is serious,' says David Lubarsky, head of the anesthesiology department at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine in Florida. 'They've already shown that with thiopental. If we go down this road with propofol, a lot of good people who need anesthesia are going to be harmed.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Elaborate scam rumbled when the couple became suspicious of their own luggage and volunteered themselves to customs

An Australian couple were unwittingly conned into becoming multi-million dollar drug mules after winning a dream trip to Canada with new luggage thrown in.

The elaborate con duped the couple by taking them to Canada as the winners of an all-expenses paid trip, which included accommodation and new suitcases.

But after a dream week in North America, the couple became suspicious about their bags on their return to Western Australia and reported themselves to customs.

Officials discovered 3.5kg of methamphetamine in crystal form in each of their cases, worth a total of £4.1m.

The 64-year-old woman, who wanted to be known only as Sue, said they had been looking for a holiday online and were contacted and after entering an competition.

"Be very careful if you win anything," she said. "I could have ended up in jail for 25 years, and they could have ruined my life. So be very wary, be very careful and check everything out."

Police believe their luggage was swapped while in Canada, with the couple having no clue they were then being duped into carrying the drugs home.

The couple were due to be met on arrival, which set the course of a police investigation that led to a search warrant being issued for a car and a room in Perth, where documents related to the con, more bags similar to the ones seized and nearly £9,000 in cash were found.

A 38-year-old Canadian man was arrested at Perth airport, and has subsequently been charged with drug trafficking offences.

David Bachi, the Perth Airport police commander, said the alleged scam was one of the most elaborate federal officers had come across.

"The organisers of this scam went to great lengths to provide a facade of legitimacy. Thankfully the travellers contacted customs and didn't dismiss their concerns, allowing us to make the arrest," he said.

"We will continue working with local and international law enforcement partners, targeting all elements of this drug syndicate."

Bachi said the scam, operated through a bogus Canadian tour company called AusCan Tours, appeared to be targeting older Australians.

The Canada-based website has now been shut down.

I figured out your sexy halloween costume for you