Russian Sledges

The party led by Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, once a political exile, appeared to have enough seats to form a government easily.

Dating Tip #209: Forget his face and put it back together wrong. 

Credit to: Anonymous 

You’re looking a little strange today Jamie. 

WASHINGTON—Sources across the nation confirmed today that the font in this article is too small.

jensensations:

Ryan Gosling won’t eat his cereal (x)

Note to self: never get on Tim Read’s bad side. The author of the fine, fine (did I say fine?) whiskey blog Scotch and Ice Cream, Read has just written an extensive post ripping into the wine critic Robert Parker and his recent foray into bourbon.

If you are ready, please scroll to see Matt Smith with a shaved head. ONLY WHEN YOU ARE READY.

“Four years after the MIT faculty adopted their Open Access Policy, a significant new milestone has been reached: Papers made openly available through the Open Access Articles Collection have been downloaded over 1 million times. Total downloads from the collection of just under 9,000 papers reached 1,045,518 by the end of April.” (via MIT Libraries)

BOSTON — Boston officials have released the death certificate of Tamerlan Tsarnaev (TAM'-ehr-lun tsahr-NEYE'-ehv), after the Boston Marathon bombing suspect who died on April 19 was buried at a small Islamic cemetery in Virginia.

The certificate was filed in Boston because Tsarnaev, a 26-year-old Cambridge resident, was pronounced dead at a city hospital where he was taken after a fierce gun battle with police in Watertown.

Cause of death, as previously disclosed, was listed as gunshot wounds and blunt trauma to head and torso.

Claude Frisse-Greene's color footage of London in the 1920s.

Third Man Records might be making LP covers out of laser-cut wood, but software designer Amanda Ghassael has made an actual LP out of the same material. Ghassael used a 3D printer to cut three songs into wood discs—Radiohead’s “Idioteque” into plywood and The Velvet Underground’s “Femme Fatale” and “Sunday Morning” into a maple. There are limitations to the process—the grooves have to be about 10 times wider than they are on normal vinyl, for instance—but soon, everyone with a 3D printer or laser etching capabilities should be able to ruin their turntable needles with ease.

Ghassael detailed her whole process for Instructables, and it’s pretty nerdy. She found that the tracks that work best (and work is a relative term here, because the songs just sort of sound okay on wood) are “very full in the lower to mid range, but also very ...

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Mysterious aircraft puzzles Quincy residents

QUINCY —
The Federal Aviation Administration knows what’s up there but it’s not telling the public.
A slew of Quincy residents have been complaining and calling police and the city about an aircraft that appeared about two weeks ago and has been taking wide, repeated loops in the air, between about 7 p.m. and 4 a.m.
Residents from Wollaston to West Quincy describe a low-pitch humming sound coming from the aircraft. Some have said it’s reminiscent of a drone, which is an unmanned aircraft operated by remote control.
“It’s not a drone,” FAA spokesman Jim Peters said. “It’s an authorized flight and we are aware of it.”

Original Source

#ohgood

The mayor's office announced today city government will be moving from its current legacy applications - such as Microsoft Exchange and Outlook - to Google Apps.

In addition to making legally required e-mail retention easier, the move will save money and free city MIS from the task of maintaining creaky legacy applications, by handing the thing over to Google:

"By bringing city government into the cloud, Boston continues to modernize our technology while saving taxpayer dollars and freeing up city workers to focus on the vital work of helping people. Our technology experts will now be able to focus on moving the city forward, rather than maintaining servers," Mayor Menino said. "I applaud the vision of our technology leadership and the efforts of all those involved in this process."

In addition to Gmail, the move, expected to happen this summer, will give city workers access to Google Hangout, Google Docs and Google Drive. The city has hired San Francisco-based Appirio to manage the transition and to oversee ongoing support and security for the new system.

The city claims 75,000 e-mail users, although roughly 57,000 of those are Boston public-school students who have addresses on city systems.

Original Source

LAWRENCE — An 18-year-old Methuen High School student charged with making online threats that included outdoing the Boston Marathon bombers has been ordered held without bail for 90 days.

A judge in Lawrence District Court ruled Thursday that Cameron D'Ambrosio posed a threat to the community, not only for the Facebook comments he allegedly made last month, but for a pattern of threatening violence, including a recent threat to stab his sister.

D'Ambrosio has been held in jail since his arrest May 1 on a charge of communicating a terrorist threat.

Acoustic imaging helps trace streets and buildings in port of Dunwich, which vanished underwater centuries ago

The streets, churches, market place and town walls of Dunwich, a major town in Suffolk which vanished into the North Sea centuries ago, have been mapped using acoustic imaging to peer through the murky silt which now buries the remains.

A few houses, a museum, a pub and legends of the sound of drowned church bells still ringing from beneath the waves are all that remain today of a port which once rivalled London. However, over the past five years archaeologists, historians, local divers and scientists have joined forces, funded by English Heritage, combining high-tech equipment, underwater exploration and study of old charts and navigation guides to trace the ruins of what has become the world's largest underwater medieval town site.

In Roman times the shoreline was at least 2,000 metres further out. The town's slow death began in 1286 when a three-day storm which started on New Year's Eve wrecked much of the settlement and blocked the river mouth. Further storms silted up what had been an international port, destroying the town's prosperity, and the erosion of the coastline was remorseless. As recently as 1736 All Saints was a handsome church with a tall tower: by 1912 only the ruined tower remained teetering on the edge of the cliff, and now nothing remains on dry land.

Although the ruins are only between three and 10 metres below the water, visibility is atrocious. Prof David Sear, of the geography and environment department of Southampton University, who led the project, described the Didson acoustic imaging used as "like shining a torch on to the seabed, only using sound instead of light".

The new map locates ruins including major churches and a large house which may have been the town hall, scores of other archaeological sites including several windmills, wooden port structures and a town wall which may have been Saxon in origin.

Updated: 7:41 a.m. ET

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) -- A woman buried in the wreckage of a collapsed garment factory building for 17 days was rescued Friday, a miraculous moment set against a scene of unimaginable horror where the death toll is more than 1,000 and still rising.

The woman survived in a Muslim prayer room in the basement of the eight-story Rana Plaza building, where crews have been focused on recovering bodies, not rescuing survivors, for days. Trapped in wreckage finally exposed by heavy equipment, she waved a pipe to attract attention.

The crews ordered the cranes and bulldozers to immediately stop work and used handsaws and welding and drilling equipment to cut through the iron rod and debris still trapping her. They gave her water, oxygen and saline as they worked to free her.

When the woman, whom soldiers identified as Reshma, was freed after 40 minutes, the crowd erupted in wild cheers. She appeared to be in remarkably good shape despite her ordeal, and was rushed to a military hospital in an ambulance.

Abdur Razzak, a warrant officer with the military's engineering department who first spotted her in the wreckage, said she could even walk.

"She was fine, no injuries. She was just trapped. The space was wide," said Lt. Col. Moyeen, an army official at the scene.

She told her rescuers there were no more survivors in her area. Workers began tearing through the nearby rubble anyway, hoping to find another person alive.

The religious aspects of the rescue -- in a Muslim prayer room, on Islam's day of prayer -- was not lost on the ecstatic crowd. Hundreds of people who had been engaged in the grim job of removing decomposing bodies from the site raised their hands together in prayer for her survival.

"Allah, you are the greatest, you can do anything. Please allow us all to rescue the survivor just found," said a man on a loudspeaker leading the supplicants. "We seek apology for our sins. Please pardon us, pardon the person found alive."

Workers at the site had been clearing the rubble since the collapse April 24. More than 2,500 people were rescued in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. However, no survivors had been found in the wreckage since April 28, when Shahin Akter was found amid the wreckage. As workers tried to free her, a fire broke out and she died of smoke inhalation.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina congratulated the rescuers.

"This is an unbelievable feat," she was quoted as saying by her assistant, Mahbubul Haque Shakil.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.

The 65-year-old man died after his boat was fired on by a Philippine government ship. Manila said his boat had tried to ram the Philippine vessel.

A reader writes:

It would be nice if what your reader said was true: that the nearly 40 percent increase in rape occurred because victims now feel more comfortable reporting it. (I said “victims” and not “women” because more than half of rapes in the military are done to men.) The nearly 40 percent jump was for cases of sexual assault reported in an anonymous survey. The number of reported rapes has stayed about the same. This shows the opposite of what the reader said – that no progress is being made in making victims feel that reporting their rape will lead to anything positive.

Another:

The most surprising thing about the public discussion of military sexual assault is that no one has said “duh.” Think about it – the military:

Is composed largely of men in their sexual prime;
who are in peak physical condition;
who are trained to be aggressive and violent;
who are deprived of the opportunity for normal sexual relationships for months at a time;
who are subjected to enormous stress and fear of death.

Take a lot of guys in their horniest ages, whip their bodies into prime shape, teach them aggression and violence, show them they might not live much longer, and deprive them of most opportunities for sex. What the hell do we think is going to happen?

This is not to excuse sexual assault at all. It is, rather, to indict the military establishment’s unpreparedness or unwillingness to deal with it. They should have seen it coming a mile away.

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I'm curious to hear what you think about the New York City Council proposal to let non-citizens vote in municipal elections. To me, it's definitely a bad idea. That's not, I hope it's clear, because I'm anti-immigrant. I'm very pro-reform and pro-legalization. But citizenship itself is a critical thing to me -- and I suspect that opinion is shared by many residents and currently undocumented immigrants who are clamoring to get a chance to join the club.

I've written about this several times in the past. But I believe in what I think of as 'thick citizenship', a robust bundle of rights and responsibilities. Being a citizen of the United States isn't just a matter of carrying a US passport or being able to vote. It's much more foundational than that. It's a commitment to a political community, albeit a vastly large one. And it's because of that that I don't think there should be such a thing as dual citizenship. In my mind it's almost a contradiction in terms.

To me, thick citizenship is really at the root of our equality as Americans. The mix of rights and responsibilities that come with it are what makes the Salvadoran immigrant every bit as much an American as someone whose ancestors have been here for centuries. We're all equal because we've all made the same commitment as citizens. Being an American citizen also matters for how you're taxed and where you keep your money.

That's what makes the plutocrat who renounces his citizenship for tax purposes really execrable and someone who I don't think should be allowed ever to enter the country again.

Particularly as our society becomes more economically stratified, citizenship is the sheet anchor of what keeps us fundamentally equal, at least in key ways. It's the basis of every citizens claim on the larger national community. If our citizenship isn't common, what really connects the affluent educated New Yorker who can live or work anywhere on the globe to an impoverished young woman in South Texas with none of those freedoms or opportunities?

If Latin American immigrants maintain citizenship in the countries of their birth, doesn't that undermine the claim to full equality here?

I know there are other ways of thinking about it. But in my mind, real citizenship and social solidarity makes the commitment of citizenship really important. I don't want anything that makes citizenship into something more vague and associational like a travel status or one of many transactional commitments you may have here or around the globe. I think everyone who is a US citizen should share that common commitment -- fundamentally, be in the same boat.

Now, as a practical matter I know there are people who carry dual citizenship because of very practical reasons like child custody and basic convenience for bi-national families. My wife is probably arguably a dual citizen simply because there's no obvious way to renounce her original citizenship in the country of her birth. So I don't see people who have dual US-Canadian citizenship as some great threat to the commonwealth or something or something that we actively need to eliminate. It's basically a non-problem. But I think it would be a bad thing if it became more pervasive - which is something that I think is possible as the free flow of peoples becomes easier and more common.

What New York is proposing isn't unprecedented. And to the extent that large numbers of people who've basically become Americans and are making their life here cannot participate in our politics, I understand some of the motivation. Indeed, this is why keeping the doors open to citizenship is so important. But I don't really want anything that blurs the lines of the political community we all (those of us who are American citizens) participate in. And to me, this does that.

Gotta get out of this place.

Blade Runner, Beyond the Black Rainbow

As our sun heads to its 11 year solar maximum, NASA has captured, during a solar flare, this amazing picture of a giant “solar whip” last week.

A burst of solar material leaps off the left side of the sun in what’s known as a prominence eruption. This image combines three images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured on May 3, 2013, at 1:45 pm EDT, just as an M5.7 class solar flare from the same region was subsiding. The images include light from the 131-, 171- and 304-angstrom wavelengths. Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA

[Source: dailymail.co.uk | Picture: NASA]

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Selected images from a massive late 19th century tome entitled simply Magic, subtitled Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, including Trick Photography, compiled and edited by Albert A. Hopkins. The book takes a thorough tour through the popular magic tricks and illusions of the day, including along the way many delightfully surreal diagrams and illustrations, the top pick of which we’ve included here – often especially great when seen out of context. Towards the end are some particularly great “decapitation” trick photographs. See the book, with explanatory text and many more illustrations over in our post in the Texts collection. Housed at: Internet Archive | From: California Digital Library Underlying Work: PD Worldwide | Digital Copy: No Additional Rights Download: Right click on image or see source for higher res versions HELP TO KEEP US AFLOAT The Public Domain Review is a not-for-profit project and we rely on support from our readers to stay afloat. If you like what we do then please do consider making a donation. We welcome all contributions, big or small - everything helps! Become a Patron Small angel : £3.00 GBP - monthly Medium sized hero : £5.00 GBP - monthly Large emperor : £10.00 GBP [...]

Not the same Vanity Fair of current fame, this was a version published by The Commonwealth Publishing Company of New York City, incorporated in February 1902 but which went bankrupt in April 1904. “Vanity Fair” has been the title for at least 5 magazines, and as a phrase became popular through John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress where it was the name for Beelzebub’s dominion, and later also as the title of William Thackeray’s 1848 novel. Dian Hansen in the first volume of her History of Men’s Magazines (Taschen, 2004) discusses the “Bifurcated Girls” special issue and argues that this particular incarnation of Vanity Fair can be seen as the origin of the American girlie magazine: While France had a well-established men’s magazine industry by 1900, America was just showing its ankles in 1903. A magazine called Vanity Fair (unrelated to the current incarnation) was the raciest thing around, and rooming house loozies the hotties of the time. In this New York, tabloid girls who drank like men might strip down to their petticoats and fall into bed together, exposing their corset cover and stockings to peeping male boarders. The famously loose morals of stage actresses made them popular subjects for these [...]

A selection from a collection of early 20th century lantern slides held at the Fylkesarkivet of Sogn og Fjordane, a county in the west of Norway. The slides are produced by at least two British photographers – professional photographer Samuel J. Beckett and amateur photographer P. Heywood Hadfield, who was a ship’s surgeon employed by the Orient Steam Navigation Company. Hadfield produced several illustrated books from his travels, including With an Ocean Liner (Orient Co’s S.S. “Ophir”) through the Fiords of Norway. A Photographic Memento of a Fortnight’s Cruising, published in several editions by the London Stereoscopic & Photographic Co. Ltd in the early 1900s. Beckett also produced a book on Norway The Fjords and Folk of Norway, first published in 1915 by Methuen & Co. Ltd. Learn more about Lantern Slides here. (All images taken from the Flickr Commons collection of the Fylkesarkivet i Sogn og Fjordane. Visit for higher resolution images and for more details on each photograph). HELP TO KEEP US AFLOAT The Public Domain Review is a not-for-profit project and we rely on support from our readers to stay afloat. If you like what we do then please do consider making a donation. We welcome all [...]

My close friend is Armenian, and her father has friends in the Armenian community in Watertown, much of which is located on Franklin. In these last 24 or so hours, one of his friends have received calls, threatening or yelling at him just for being Armenian. Allegedly, these calls have blamed Armenians for helping the Russians, though this man did not help the suspects at all. Like everyone else, he was only trying to lay low and stay safe. He has received at least 5 of such calls.