1. Promoting a “Jelly Invasion” this month.

View this image ›

2. Just a perfectly wonderful lamppost installation using a mysterious anglerfish.

View this image ›

3. Ads promoting the “Frogs Forever” exhibit.

View this image ›

4. The aquarium put up these posters and urinal installations in the men’s room of a nearby bar. When gents pissed on the pregnancy test, it registered a positive. In the Syngnathidae family of fish, it’s the males that get pregnant.

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5. This exhibit just ended last month. Very cool design.

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6.

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7. Their ad agency is Taxi, in Vancouver.

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8. LEFT — high tide. RIGHT — low tide. Brilliant.

Original Source

fairy-wren:

Black Naped Monarchs. Photos by alanhuangaste

photo via Arbore Historic Floors

Spanish flooring company Arbore Historic Floors created this fantastic wooden floor inspired by the famous lithograph “Reptiles” by M. C. Escher. The custom floor was created at the request of a client in Madrid back in 2011.

photo via Arbore Historic Floors

image via Official M.C. Escher website

via Technabob, Archie McPhee’s Endless Geyser of Awesome

From Gabe Wyner come photos of a menu in Arcos de la Frontera, whose English version is full of the delightful consequences of someone's earnest reliance on a bilingual dictionary. For example:

In the Spanish version of the menu, that one of course is Calamares en su tinta.

Lexicographical parentheses come up again in the various dishes characterized as Revuelto de X, where revuelto here means "scrambled", and (I think) refers to scrambled eggs with various other ingredients, but has been translated as "In a mess (Untidy)":

Another poetic fragment involves several dishes characterized as "Attacked" of this and that, resulting from the fact that saltear can mean "rob, assault" as well as "sauté":

A more subtle misconnection is the translation of guarnición as "garrison" rather than "garnish":

The full English and Spanish versions of this menu page are here and here.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess what you'd get if you ordered "Iberian Secret" or "Iberian Pen (Feather)" from the "Meets" section:

Seattle

According to a survey commissioned by U.K. communications regulator Ofcom, the classic Pareto principle is in full effect for people who use pirated versions of copyrighted material. The top 20 percent of copyright infringers account for 88 percent of all infringements (with the top 10 percent being responsible for a whopping 79 percent).

What’s surprising, however, is that the top 20 spent £168 (about $253) on content during the six-month monitoring period. That’s not just more than the amount spent by the lower 80 percent (£105, or about $158), it’s significantly more than the £54 ($81) spent by the average person who never pirates anything. In other words, the worst pirates get the vast majority of their stuff for free, but they take in so much media that they end up spending 321 percent more than people who never pirate.

It’s a fascinating study, and not only because it turns expectations about pirate behavior upside down. The goal was to classify and predict pirate behavior, with an eye on figuring out how best to curtail it. What wasn’t a surprise were the top factors that would encourage copyright infringers to stop: better pricing and increased availability.

(via TorrentFreak)

DevoBots is a DEVO-authorized iOS app that is a both a synthesizer and robot design app. The synthesizer function features 1980s-era sound loops taken from DEVO’s archives. The robot maker lets users create their own DEVO-inspired robot avatars. Created by Whitewall Studios, app is now available on iTunes. We previously posted about DevoBots back in 2012.

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

Introduction

Google Reader is essentially dead. Its passed on. This reader is no more. It has ceased to be. Kicked the bucket. Shuffled off its mortal coil.

I'll miss the syncing service, but I was never really thrilled with the interface so it's a minor loss.

Rather than throw out a bunch of alternatives that I've never used more than five minutes, I'll give you my opinions from the ground up. This post begins with the winner, Newsblur.¹ Future posts will discuss alternatives in the context of Google Reader, Fever and Newsblur.

Newsblur

Newsblur has been around for awhile but, like all RSS readers, received a huge influx of new users over the past two months. I tried it awhile ago before going back to Fever. Let's be honest, it wasn't great. There were bugs and it was ugly. But I liked what it had at its core. What it had was an honest and eager developer with some good ideas. So I kept up with the Newsblur blog and I'm glad I did. See this Verge article about the developer and the recent Newsblur redesign.

Before I get into the review and tutorial, let's get this out front. Newsblur offers a free account that will sync 64 feeds. Forget that exists. If you care about your feed reader, go buy the $24 annual subscription to the premium service.²

Getting Started

Newsblur offers direct import from a Google account. The import preserves all of the folders (or tags). After the import, I ended up with all of the subscriptions I had in Google Reader.

Newsblur can also import from an OPML file. I exported my feed data from Fever and imported directly into Newsblur. This worked perfectly. Every feed came over organized just as I had it in Fever.

But here's where Newsblur already starts to impress. Browsing through the feeds, I noticed several with a yellow exclamation mark. Clicking that icon shows that the feed is broken, but Newsblur offers up a couple of solutions. You can choose to either retry or use a new feed. If Newsblur already knows about another feed for the site it will suggest the alternative. This fixed several of the dead Feedburner feeds cluttering up my list as people flee Google.

The Reading Experience

Newsblur presents a similar yet more effective design than Google Reader or Fever. While feeds are grouped by folders, Newsblur also allows nested groups.

The main feed list may be toggled between two different modes, a simple List View and a Split View. The List View is a continuous stream of full articles. Scrolling through articles marks them as read.

I prefer the Split View, which presents an adjustable list of articles on the bottom and a full article view on the top.

I also turned on the option to show unread counts on the feed groups.

Side Note on Performance

Newsblur is fast. I mean **really** fast. All of the content is pre-fetched so that browsing is fluid. Scrolling through the full article list is instant and responsive. The cost of this performance is that there is no option to force all feeds to be refreshed. However, an individual feed is refreshed from a contextual menu. Details for a feed indicate how often it will be refreshed. Most are refreshed every 10 minutes.

Newsblur provides three reading modes:

• Original: The website home page
• Feed: The article feed source. This is the feed as generated by the site
• Text: A readable plain version of the article parsed from the website
• Story: The article as read on the website

Each feed can be configured with its own preference. That way pretty sites like The Mindful Bit can be read as it should be. Ugly and offensive sites can be viewed in a simple readable format.³

Newsblur has a good number of keyboard shortcuts to satisfy the Google Reader user. They are familiar enough to be proficient within a day of switching.

The careful placement of tools is welcome in reader. The Mark All as Read toggle is available right on the reading list bar.

Changing what is displayed in the feed list (unread, newest first, etc.) is easily accessed right on the list bar as well.

There's even an option to fix the marker that is used to set an article as read when scrolling. Slide this little arrow up and down. When the article title passes this marker it is automatically set as read. Basically, it allows me to tailor whether I need to see the entire article or just the title before it is marked as seen.

General Aesthetics

I started this review before the latest update to Newsblur. I'm glad I waited to publish because the new Newsblur is much more pleasing to the eye. Everything is cleaner and easier to use. There are nice animation effects and overall non-news information is less distracting.

The service has a number of general settings to help customize the experience.

Newsblur incorporates font adjustments right into the application. Helvetica or Georgia can be used and the point size is adjustable from 12pt to 17pt.

There is one little bit of visual clutter I actually turned on in Newsblur. I like the way it captures edits to articles over time and show the additions and deletions. This is an option.

The Great Intelligence

Where Newsblur departs from the crowded space of mediocre feed readers is with the customizable Intelligence training feature.

Out-of-the-box, Newsblur is just a typical feed reader. Click on a group and see all of the new unread articles. Click on a large collection and give up. But right click on an article and choose Intelligence Trainer. In the Trainer window, select a tag, author or word from the title and mark as thumbs up (green) or thumbs down (red). It's a simple process of selecting a word or phrase in a title. Topic tags are generally recognized from the source, as well as author tags. As a publisher, there are a couple of ways to make more information available to Newsblur and it's all in the FAQ.

Here's the magic: Articles that contain a thumbs-down term are hidden from the feed list. Switching to the Focus mode shows only articles that contain thumbs-up terms, hiding both the undesireable and unrated. Only articles that contain a positive attribute make it through the Focus mode.

By casually training Newsblur I've given myself a very easy way to get to just the news I want to read. This may seem insular, but in reality it has made high volume sites like TechCrunch and The Verge useful to me. I can now subscribe to them and get just a trickle of articles from writers I like or topics I care about.

About Focus

I'm pretty brutal about applying my negative ratings and pretty spare in positive ratings. I like coffee, but if I only have a few minutes to read, it's probably not going to be about coffee.

If I want to see everything, it's easy enough to switch modes and show every article in a feed or group of feeds. Newsblur provides visual queues throughout the interface to indicate stories I should like. There is a green count indicator in the folder view and items in the article list receive a subtle green dot. Words in titles that match my preferences are highlighted in green, as well as authors in the bylines.

Entire feeds can be marked as Thumbs-up. There are several feed sources that I do this with. This allows me to quickly toggle to the Focus mode and select a feed group. Every article is visible in the list.⁴

You know what is a pleasure? Selecting my All Feeds category and only seeing 20-30 articles that fit exactly what I'm interested in.⁵

The Dashboard

The Newsblur Dashboard is superfluous but has some small value. It's a place to see information about the service, like new features, community feedback and the total feeds and users on the service. The Dashboard also provides some suggestions for feeds to follow but it feels like these suggestions are purely based on popularity because they had no relevance to my taste.

Hooking Up the Pipes

While Newsblur has an option to export feeds as OPML, there are few good ways to get information back out. The web interface has several options to invoke bookmarklets but the experience is tedious and takes the user out of the reading context.

The iOS apps have a slightly better experience for sharing but still not great. There are some aspects I really dislike. See below for further discussion.

The big problem is that none of my favorite feed reading apps support the Newsblur service. I hope that changes. They make a great API. Get to it Mr. Reader.

The Social Hour

Newsblur has a number of social features built in. You can follow users and share stories to your "Blurblog". I do not use these features because I don't like social networking.

I do like the activity monitor. Newsblur keeps track of what I do. If I saved an article it shows up in my activity monitor. Clicking an activity takes me to the article. It's not terribly useful but it's also not intrusive.

The Apps

Here we are, at the real deciding factor for most services. How can someone use Newsblur? Well, I'm happy to say that the iOS apps are really good. They load fast and have almost all of the features as the Web site.⁶

iPhone

The iPhone app is laid out well. The app launches to the list of feeds and folders. Tapping a folder instantly shows the list of articles. Best of all, the Focus mode works perfectly. It's a great way to dive in quickly, read some interesting stuff and get out.

Tapping on a story shows the feed view with a great layout that highlights the tags and authors. Stories can also be viewed in the built-in browser by tapping the compass in the upper right corner.

The Send To functionality is nice but limited. I was disappointed that there was no option for Pinboard or Pinbook sharing on iOS. The Copy function is also a little odd. It doesn't copy just the address of the current article. It copies the title and the URL. This could be great for Drafts actions but stinks for getting articles into Pinbook.

After sharing an article on the iPhone, the screen smoothly scrolls to the bottom of the page to show the sharing summary. The experience is nice and feels like a lot of thought went into how people actually read.

Aside About Sharing

I send a lot of stuff I read out to Twitter. I have IFTTT rules that automatically capture the links and add them to Pinboard. But I also think Twitter is a good way to share stuff that I don't have much to say about.

I really dislike the way Newsblur shares links on Twitter. It does not share the original link. It [shares a Newsblur "blurblog" link](http://macdrifter.newsblur.com/story/save-keyboard-maestr/a96a14). Maybe there is a good reason for this but I can't think of one I care about.

The reading experience is nice. Quickly plowing through stories with the big NEXT button is smooth. This feels like a native app with no delays at any point.

I noticed a couple of bugs in the iPhone app where the next-button overlapped the Training-button. Given that the training function can be accessed by a dropdown menu, this wasn't a deal-breaker.

iPad

The iPad app is also great. It makes appropriate use of the space and isn't just a web view or an upscaled version of the iOS app. As with the iPhone version, the iPad version is responsive. Articles open instantly. The feed list refreshes in just a couple of seconds.⁷

All the functionality is still there on the iPad. Adding feeds is easy. Just fill out the URL and set a folder for the new feed. Move feeds and share articles just like on iPhone or, for the most part, the web.

The Intelligence Trainer works just as well on iPad as on the web. Select title text or tags to filter by tapping and swipping. All of this filtering data is sent back to the Newsblur service to improve the reading experience across your account.

What's Missing

The big gap is search. There isn't any. I can save articles until my heart is content but I have to browse through them to find anything specific.

The second big gap is that lack of integration with IFTTT or Zapier.⁸ In Fever, I used the RSS feed of my favorites to pump articles into Pinboard. There's no such option in Newsblur.

While the Trainer is excellent, I'd like more control over the system. I'd like a way to see everything I've ever given a thumbs up or down to. I'd like a way to manually add terms without needing to see them in an article first.

Conclusion

Newsblur may be the best feed reading service I've used. It certainly feels better than Google Reader ever did. It's faster and the Focus mode is terrific. Newsblur sets a standard that is hard to beat and I'm happy to pay to support something so valuable.

heyoscarwilde:

candid behind the scenes photos from The Muppet Movie circa 1978

via flickr.com

Those who feel that Alice Eve's underwear scene in Star Trek Into Darkness was gratuitous, this might make you feel better — director J.J. Abrams debuted a deleted, but equally gratuitous scene from the film of Benedict Cumberbatch showering on Conan last night.

Read more...

A perfect shoe for Summer, the Leydon Summer Saddle Blucher is one of the new models we will be releasing on Friday at LSBH during Nate Humble’s visit. Alden’s flex construction and oiled single leather sole make this shoe a joy to wear. The combination of snuff suede and brown alpine grain calf works well and is easy to match with a variety of colors.

(Leydon last, $525.00)

artetak:

Still one of my favorite runway shows.
Alexander McQueen Spring/ Summer 2005 

The Bow Tie Crowd Just Hangin’ Out At The Glass House.

Andy Warhol.

IT HAS been almost a month since the collapse of a factory building in Bangladesh killed over 1,100 garment workers. The tragedy led to outrage in Bangladesh over the recklessness of the building's politically connected owner; factory operations were allegedly in the building without permits and workers were ordered to their machines even after inspectors found dangerous cracks in the structure. But the catastrophe has also led to a new round of reflection in advanced economies over the ethics of purchasing consumer products built by poor labourers in countries with lax labour regulations.

Several interesting takes on the question appeared in the wake of the collapse. At the New Yorker, James Surowiecki wrote of the modern garment industry:

Most of us have a sense that low prices in Dubuque have something to do with low wages in Dhaka, but that’s just one aspect of the pressure that we as consumers exert on global supply chains. Our insatiable demand for variety and novelty has led to ever-shorter product life cycles. In consumer electronics, the average product is replaced in just eight months. The rise of fast fashion means that clothing stores get new products almost every week. Richard Locke, a political scientist at M.I.T. who is an expert on global supply chains and the author of the new book “The Promise and Limits of Private Power,” told me, “Instead of buying lots of inventory with long lead times, brands wait as long as possible before ordering.” That way, they can ramp up production if a product takes off or shut it down if the product bombs...

Just as most Western consumers seem reluctant to pay more for T-shirts, most Western companies have been reluctant to take real responsibility for what happens on their suppliers’ factory floors.

Mr Surowiecki notes that for conditions to improve governments must act, in coordination with each other if possible. Coordination is necessary to prevent the garment industry from relocating away from stricter labour rules: a race to the bottom. In a New York Times Magazine piece, Adam Davidson noted that the race to the bottom in the textile industry is among the most venerable of economic trends:

Nearly every rich country has gone through a “T-shirt phase” — an economic period in which there are a significant number of poor farmers who, rather than toil on unproductive land, accept harsh work conditions and low wages in textile and apparel factories. Britain started its T-shirt phase in the late 18th century; the United States had two — New England in the 19th century, then the South in the 20th. During the last 80 or so years, many Asian countries — first Japan, then Korea, Taiwan and China — progressed from the T-shirt phase into broader economic development. Cambodia, Vietnam, parts of India and Sri Lanka are passing through this now. But Bangladesh, where an eight-story apparel factory tragically collapsed last month, killing hundreds of workers and devastating the country, is in the midst of a particularly confusing T-shirt phase. The question is whether it will emerge into a more developed economy, like its many predecessors, or remain stuck, like Haiti.

Neo-liberal defenders of the migrating T-shirt phase make two simple but compelling points in favour of our tolerance of low wages and long hours in industries like these (though no one should tolerate the criminal negligence on display in the Rana Plaza case). First, such factories are willing employers of low-skill workers whose alternatives are often much worse: subsistence agriculture, for instance, or abject urban poverty. And secondly, the first rung of the industrial ladder, while unpleasant, makes it easier to reach the second and third, where conditions and wages are better. As the garment industry matures, firms and workers develop more mechanical expertise, more financial resources, better infrastructure, and deeper ties with global markets. That can help a poor economy kickstart rapid economic development.

But as I read the two pieces above, I began to wonder about the future of this model. The pieces have a shared theme: that bargaining power matters. Mr Surowiecki notes that Western consumers are reluctant to pay higher prices for T-shirts; they are, just as most people in most places are reluctant to pay more for anything. The trick of it is that Western consumers have not had to pay higher prices, because there is always another place willing to squeeze its workers to capture market share. But Western consumers may well pay higher prices if higher prices is what they have to pay. And so coordination by governments around the developing world, or by Western fashion firms or retailers, could help shift the locus of bargaining power away from the consumer. And the consumer might not even mind that much.

But will that shift empower the workers in Bangladesh and elsewhere? One of the remarkable things about the textile industry, I think, is the fact that it remains so labour intensive. It was the arrival of automation to the industry more than 200 years ago that first launched the industrial revolution, after all. And here we are so many years later, with poor men and women still manning the looms. Why is that?

Well the easiest explanation is that it has never made much sense to not use people. Or rather, where it has made financial sense to automate there has been substantial automation. But even robots struggle to compete with Bangladeshi workers at less than $40 a month. Yet robots are getting better and better. And improved manufacturing techniques make it ever cheaper and ever easier to produce limited runs, just in time, of finely specified designs. So a shift in bargaining power away from Western consumers might simply be captured by the owners of capital, who will say that at higher developing-world wages it makes sense to automate the whole process from beginning to end. Then no one can ever picket a store over the use and abuse of cheap foreign labour.

So where does that leave our struggling Bangladeshi workers? It's possible they may find other means through which to use their cost advantage to provide inexpensive, labour-intense products and services to the global market. But maybe not. The textile industry has been relatively unique in industrial history in its ability to productively use unskilled labour at almost any scale. New York City, once upon a time, could employ within its borders the waves of immigrants arriving from overseas thanks to the limitless appetite of the city's garment industry. Other forms of manufacturing create many fewer jobs—and fewer than they used to, as China can attest. India's service and offshoring model might look attractive, but it, too, provides far too little employment relative to the crowds of willing but low-skill workers.

To improve the lot of these workers (or any workers, really) we have to improve their bargaining power. Unionisation might seem like a good option, but that won't help much unless the unionised workforce is already capable of competitively producing in a tradable industry. Education and training are a better bet. But there will be limited payoff to such measures for older workers. And skills don't translate into economic gain without an appropriately supportive economic infrastructure: of talented entrepreneurs, deep pools of capital, reliable utilities and transport, and so on. But there is another way. Mr Davidson notes in passing that:

New England’s textile workers had it relatively good; if conditions didn’t improve, they could threaten to leave for the frontier.

It is the rare economy that enthusiastically welcomes unskilled immigrants from places like Bangladesh. Unsurprisingly; people seem generally happy to exclude outsiders, and the economic gain to the receiving country is too small to mention. But the gain to the migrant himself is enormous; better than any improvement most developing-economy workers can hope to achieve in their home country. If we care about the well-being of the workers in Bangladesh we might support more robust labour rules there, but we should absolutely favour more open immigration.

“I think a lot about what makes a strong female character. You know, movies and TV shows, these things have influence, my own website. So I think the question of “What makes a strong female character?”, often goes misinterpreted. And instead we get these two-dimensional superwomen, who maybe have one quality that’s played up a lot. Like, you know, a Catwoman type, or she plays her sexuality up a lot and it’s seen as power. But they’re not strong characters who happen to be female, they’re completely flat and they’re basically cardboard characters.
The problem with this is that then people expect women to be that easy to understand, and women are mad at themselves for not being that simple. When in actuality, women are complicated. Women are multifaceted. Not because women are crazy, but because people are crazy. And women happen to be people!”

-Tavi Gevinson for TEDTalks [x]

fuckyeah-nerdery:

Oh

My

Zod.

proudlybigotedmisandrist:

defranco:

edwardspoonhands:

tyleroakley:

Oops.

lolololol

hehehe

ignore the part with tyler oakley

porcelain-horse-horselain:

 Not a god damn thing.

“Someone To Cuttle” is, in the author’s words, “Gay Cuttlefish Shapeshifter Erotica.”

Unsurprisingly, customers who purchased it also purchased “The Catgirl And The Orc Woman”, and “There’s an Orc In My Ass!”

With so much other stuff going on with tornados and the FBI shooting in Florida and all the scandal talk that I suspect most of you have still heard about this. But in case not, in England yesterday two men, apparently Britons of African ancestry (they spoke with British accents) attacked an off duty soldier in broad daylight and decapitated him.

They then stayed there shouting political slogans (largely about British soldiers killing Muslims) at passersby until police finally showed up and shot both of them and took them into custody. (Both are in the hospital; one in serious condition.) This report suggests that one woman, Ingrid Loyau-Kennett - who got off a bus and then talked to the men until police showed up - may have prevented the incident from escalating or more being killed. At least a couple people videotaped what was happening. Here's the basic AP rundown with more details.

This new report says that both men had been investigated in previous security service probes for links to terror groups.

Here's some of the video I mentioned above.