Russian Sledges

eush:

I have very conflicted feelings about The Smiths (I hate Morrissey, basically, but like everyfuckingbody else The Smiths were a high school staple) but this Peanuts/Smiths thing is brilliant and I can’t pick a favorite, though this one is definitely up there.

Musk isn’t the first entrepreneur to take on transportation in America. In fact, another wealthy businessman and inventor named Alfred Ely Beach attempted to do the same thing in New York, in 1869. Except instead of Hyperloops, he had pneumatic tubes.

The residents of Borja, Spain, profit from the worst art restoration ever.

The E-Seasoner is an innovative Willy-Wonka-style gadget… only for spices instead of gobstoppers! At the top, various spices are sectioned in separate containers. Simply input your desired combination and the device will do the mixing and dispense a single strip of the combination which can then be thrown in a pan or food mixture to flavor. Great for camping or lunch on the run, the user can take spice combinations for meals without carrying around a bunch of different jars!

Designers: Chikuai, Wudengxin, Huangshu

-
Yanko Design
Timeless Designs - Explore wonderful concepts from around the world!
Shop CKIE - We are more than just concepts. See what's hot at the CKIE store by Yanko Design!
(The E-Seasoner was originally posted on Yanko Design)

No related posts.

hodad

Local drama

Some associates of Tengatenga have said that, in the context of his church, he was a supporter of more moderate policies toward gay people. One Anglican priest told The Boston Globe: “You are asking the impossible of someone coming out of that African situation.... Just rescinding that [appointment] is to show a lamentable lack of understanding of circumstances that are outside the confines of privileged North America.”

But many at Dartmouth said that the key question for the college was whether a position seen as providing moral and ethical leadership at the college should go to someone who had advocated anti-gay policies. A draft letter circulated on campus by the Dartmouth NAACP said: "The LGBTQ community at Dartmouth is a historically subordinated one, and it is disturbing and reprehensible that the leader of Dartmouth's premier spiritual and social justice organization might harbor discriminatory thoughts about those who might look to him and the Tucker Foundation for guidance."

Original Source

You've seen John B. Spark's Histomap of world empires, but he also made versions charting religions, "from primitive cults to modern philosophies," and the evolutionary tree. These are very hard to find, now, but pop up on eBay now and again: the lone current offering there, of the religion map, is already at $155, with thirty bids and more than 5 days left on the clock. A photo of the top half is in the auction gallery.

Embedded below, however, is a great big 5MB JPG of the evolutionary map, spotted by Slate's Rebecca Onion at Samphan Sittiwantana's Pinterest page.

Inmates at Guantanamo Bay are hunger striking in an attempt to make their suffering visible while children at a camp in Florida are using the fantasy of hunger as entertainment.

Well, it's done. [ more › ]

The romances in the game are not for “the straight male gamer”. They’re for everyone. We have a lot of fans, many of whom are neither straight nor male, and they deserve no less attention. We have good numbers, after all, on the number of people who actually used similar sorts of content in DAO and thus don’t need to resort to anecdotal evidence to support our idea that their numbers are not insignificant… and that’s ignoring the idea that they don’t have just as much right to play the kind of game they wish as anyone else. The “rights” of anyone with regards to a game are murky at best, but anyone who takes that stance must apply it equally to both the minority as well as the majority. The majority has no inherent “right” to get more options than anyone else.

MADISON — During recent renovations of the Science Building at Fairleigh Dickinson University's College at Florham, workers found an 81-year-old time capsule; a can with a note inside listing workers involved in a bathroom remodeling project back in 1932. The note was written during Prohibition, when the sale of alcoholic beverages was illegal per the 18th Amendment, and it makes a special appeal to the finder of the note. The following is the text as it was written: These Bathrooms was Remodled in 1932 E.J. Parsons of Morristown N.J. did the Plumbing work and Edw F Daniker of 70 Britten St Madison did the Tile work other men worked on the Job are J. T. Steating Madison Peter Moore " Joe Gero " Tom Skelly Morristown Chas. Clements " It was during Probition and it was a very dry Job. The finder of this note if the 18 Amendment has bin changed have a good Drink on us. E. Daniker

“Without risk, there’s no reward. This applies whether you want to open a restaurant or be a competitive yo-yo-er.” That advice comes from restaurateur Michael Krupp, who opened Somerville’s A4 on Monday with business partner and chef Michael Leviton and chef de cuisine Jeff Pond. A4 is the pizza-focused sister of Kendall Square’s Area Four, the restaurant-cafe that’s become a hive for techies and tourists. Buoyed by an improving economy, several prominent chefs will launch second ventures this season. Jason Bond will open a Concord outpost of Cambridge’s Bondir. Oleana’s Ana Sortun, who also owns Sofra Bakery & Cafe in Cambridge, debuts Sarma, a sit-down meze parlor in a quiet corner of Somerville. Island Creek Oyster Bar’s team is finalizing plans for Row 34 in Fort Point, showcasing oysters and local beers. Meanwhile, Craigie on Main owner Tony Maws is readying Inman Square’s grill-focused The Kirkland Tap & Trotter a few blocks from his Central Square flagship. Tim Maslow of Strip T’s in Watertown welcomed the first guests at Ribelle on Monday. And T.W. Food owners Tim and Bronwyn Wiechmann, who brought French fine dining to Huron Village, recently opened Bronwyn, a Central European restaurant in Union Square.

The private mass transit system has become the most visible symbol of the digital gold rush sweeping this city, and of the sharpening division between those who are riding the high-tech industry's good fortunes and those who are not. "Some days I think of them as the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us," Rebecca Solnit, a longtime San Francisco resident, recently wrote in the London Review of Books. Ground zero for this growing array of grievances is the Mission District, a historically working-class Latino neighborhood where Victorian flats and newer lofts have been overrun by techies. Heated bidding wars — especially in a half-mile radius of shuttle bus stops — have broken out, causing rents to soar, even double in some cases. Along shuttle routes, trendy new restaurants that serve high-end food and spirits have taken the place of corner stores and mom-and-pop businesses.

Survey participants were asked to assign importance to various criteria, including grades, in university admissions. Merit scored well among white participants. But...

When asked about "leadership" as an admissions criterion, white ranking of the measure went up in importance when respondents were informed of the Asian success in University of California admissions. "Sociologists have found that whites refer to 'qualifications' and a meritocratic distribution of opportunities and rewards, and the purported failure of blacks to live up to this meritocratic standard, to bolster the belief that racial inequality in the United States has some legitimacy," Samson writes in the paper. "However, the results here suggest that the importance of meritocratic criteria for whites varies depending upon certain circumstances. To wit, white Californians do not hold a principled commitment to a fixed standard of merit."

Pratt & Whitney laid off 400 salaried employees

On Monday, the League of Conservation Voters launched a $2 million ad campaign aimed at three Republican congressmen and one senator. That one senator, Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), is taking it very personally. Yesterday, before the ad targeting him was even released, Johnson got ahead of the debate by sending out a mass email denouncing the group:

“The League of Conservation voters is not an organization with a balanced approach to a cleaner environment,” states the email from the Johnson campaign. “They are an extreme left group on an environmental jihad.”

The ad, which was posted this morning, points out that Johnson has accepted over $100,000 in political donations from oil and gas companies. In the email, Johnson asked supporters for more donations, saying “I need to be able to respond to their attack ads with the truth."

Continue Reading...

WASHINGTON (RNS) Remember the case of the evangelical home-schooling family who was fighting deportation because they feared prosecution back home in Germany? Some 127,000+ people petitioned the White House to give “full and permanent legal status” to Uwe and Hannelore Romeike and their children.

The White House has now responded (sort of) via its We the People online petition site:

The We the People Terms of Participation explain that “the White House may decline to address certain procurement, law enforcement, adjudicatory, or similar matters properly within the jurisdiction of federal departments or agencies, federal courts, or state and local government.” To the extent that these petitions request a particular law enforcement or adjudicatory action, or address a matter before the courts, we cannot issue a comment.

But while we can’t comment on this particular issue, we know that homeschooling is a popular option for many parents pursuing high academic standards for their children. Homeschooling can provide young people with the resources and attention they need to succeed academically, and we understand why their parents value this freedom.

What’s next? The Romeikes’ attorneys are vowing to take their case to the Supreme Court after a federal appeals court ruled against them.

The post White House to home-schooling family: Sorry, no comment appeared first on Religion News Service.

paxmachina:

Alfred Hitchcock serving tea to Leo the Lion (the mascot
for the Hollywood film studio MGM).

Donotlink.com works like a URL shortener, which many people use for practical reasons anyway in social media posts.  But unlike regular URL shorteners, which generally do not interfere with the ability of Google and others to count links, Do Not Link takes several steps to make sure the link will not be counted. I’ve tested out the service, and it does work as described.

From their home page, you paste in a URL you’d like to mention, and it hands back a short URL. It also returns a piece of BBCode for posting in forums (if that’s your thing), and a piece of HTML markup if you’d like to use this in a web page.

For example, if you want to link to Mike Adam’s horrible Natural News site, paste in the URL and get this result:

To make it even simpler, you don’t even have to visit the website at all! You can simply insert /www.donotlink.com/ in front of the target URL, and use it like you normally do. So instead of linking to:

http://naturalnews.com

Edit the URL so it looks like this:

http://donotlink.com/naturalnews.com

I highly recommend all skeptics adopt this as standard practice.  Further, please point out this article to other skeptics who you observe linking directly to misinformation on social media. We need to make it a best practice to never do this, lest we all become inadvertent shills for the very things we are trying to debunk.

Original Source

Somerville firefighters and the State Fire Marshall’s office are investigating a pattern of “suspicious” early morning fires, including a three-alarm blaze that heavily damaged two homes this morning on Banks Street near Porter Square.

“Whether or not they are connected is part of the investigation. There’s no evident accidental cause and that’s what makes them suspicious,” said Jennifer Mieth of the State’s Department of Fire Services told the Herald.

Selected from the AbeBooks’ Weird Book Room.

 

Nerval's Lobster writes "For most businesses, data analytics presents an opportunity. But for DARPA, the military agency responsible for developing new technology, so-called 'Big Data' could represent a big threat. DARPA is apparently looking to fund researchers who can 'investigate the national security threat posed by public data available either for purchase or through open sources.' That means developing tools that can evaluate whether a particular public dataset will have a significant impact on national security, as well as blunt the force of that impact if necessary. 'The threat of active data spills and breaches of corporate and government information systems are being addressed by many private, commercial, and government organizations,' reads DARPA's posting on the matter. 'The purpose of this research is to investigate data sources that are readily available for any individual to purchase, mine, and exploit.' As Foreign Policy points out, there's a certain amount of irony in the government soliciting ways to reduce its vulnerability to data exploitation. 'At the time government officials are assuring Americans they have nothing to fear from the National Security Agency poring through their personal records,' the publication wrote, 'the military is worried that Russia or al Qaeda is going to wreak nationwide havoc after combing through people's personal records.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Creator’s Note to “Gatekeepers” | Whatever:

John’s been talking sense again. (So what else is new?)

In collaboration with Warren Cathro of Toronto. Belgian dark ale.

Aimee Ault from deviantART discovered that some of their stylesheets would fail to load for some users. Turns out those users were

accessing the site from computers with overly sensitive system-wide profanity filters installed. These users' browsers likely stopped parsing the stylesheet entirely upon reaching the word in the stylesheet, leading to a fairly ugly and/or broken page.

Ideally you have a build system that compresses CSS and removes comments, but if for whatever reason you ship CSS with comments in it, don't swear.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

---

Don’t Swear in Your Stylesheets is a post from CSS-Tricks

popular shared this story from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (updated daily).

---

OLD MAN WEINERSMITH SHAKES HIS FIST AT THE NEWS

Think Progress:

A top American distance runner dedicated the silver medal he won at the track and field World Championships in Moscow to his gay and lesbian friends, becoming the first athlete to openly defy Russia’s new anti-gay law that outlaws “homosexual propaganda.” Nick Symmonds won the silver medal in the 800-meters Tuesday, then broke a previous pledge to not speak out against the law while at the championships by telling a Russian news outlet that he had no choice but to say something.

“As much as I can speak out about it, I believe that all humans deserve equality as however God made them,” Symmonds told Russia’s R-Sport. “Whether you’re gay, straight, black, white, we all deserve the same rights. If there’s anything I can do to champion the cause and further it, I will, shy of getting arrested.”

“I respect Russians’ ability to govern their people,” he added. “I disagree with their laws. I do have respect for this nation. I disagree with their rules.”

Symmonds’ statement is the first major test of the Russian law by an international athlete and could possibly land him in trouble with Russian authorities, who have already deported foreign activists who have protested the law, including four Dutch filmmakers recording a documentary about the activism against it.

Here's hoping the athletes heading to Sochi follow Symmonds' lead. John over at Americablog rounds up all the Russia news in his daily "Russian Gay Olympic Implosion Update" here. I wanted to draw attention to this interview with Alistair Stewart, Assistant Director The Kaleidoscope Trust, "a UK based charity working to uphold the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people internationally." Stewart discusses the legal situation in Russia, what the IOC should do, why there won't be a boycott of the Olympics itself, and the vodka boycott:

What is your view on the vodka boycott?

We are supportive of the vodka boycott. I completely agree that by itself it won’t change the Russian laws and consumer boycotts have a problematic history at best. You also have to be careful when you’re trying to target companies that may ostensibly appear to be Russian but are actually transnational and operate in a number of different territories. Where the boycott has been incredibly successful is in raising the profile of the issue. If it hadn’t been called for it would be unlikely that we would be discussing the problems and unlikely that it would be appearing in national newspapers or that Obama would be talking about it on late night television.

The boycott is working.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

(via Relish Class Unlocks the Secrets of Canning | The Somerville Beat)

Our guide into the world of canning was Sam Musher (pictured above), food preservationist extraordinaire. Musher, a teacher, spends her summers preserving a bounty of fresh food so she can enjoy local produce year-round. She has years of experience canning and preserving food and put everyone at ease that it was highly unlikely we would sicken ourselves or others when canning jams, pickles and other food.

(via Remedy Wine Bar: Doctor’s Orders)

A hundred years ago, the building at the corner of Northwest Everett Street and Park Avenue held a pharmacy, where druggists administered miracle-promising cure-alls, stomach-soothing licorice powder and blood-purifying tonics. Today, that space houses Remedy Wine Bar (733 NW Everett St., 222-1449, remedywinebar.com), where aches receive different—though still somewhat suspect—treatment. Absent are any old-timey trappings, replaced by blocky wood tables, gauzy gold curtains, beer-bottle chandeliers, cushy armchairs and throw pillows. And rather than cocaine tablets and opium tinctures, the dispensers at Remedy—the folks behind CorksCru, KitchenCru and Bowery Bagels—have a well-chosen wine list, heavy on young wines from small vineyards. Unfortunately named “lowtails” might sound like the cocktail equivalent of Coors Light, but they’re actually mixed drinks built from fortified wines and aromatics—nothing over 20 percent ABV. The Little Giuseppe ($9), made with artichoke liqueur, Italian vermouth, orange bitters and finished with sea salt, is like a very earthy, very adult answer to root beer. Remedy might look torn from an issue of Architectural Digest, but this is medicine that goes down easy.