Russian Sledges

“Biden says his mother told him that no one is “better” than him. And while Biden should treat everyone with respect, his mother said her son should also “demand respect.’””

- VP Biden: Dignity trumps ring-kissing etiquette - Yahoo! News

On the anniversary of the Iraq War, why don’t we turn for a moment to the wisdom of Thomas Friedman.

      [Update Below] The magical horse dog you can see in the photos above was spotted on the R train today by one tipster: "It was weird as hell," they told us. "She got on at Union Square where I was. I got off at Prince. I took a bunch of pics—have some of her on the platform with that beast too." If you saw a magical creature stumbling around our urban jungle, wouldn't you do anything you could to capture its essence too? [ more › ]

Sarfraz Manzoor goes on the trail of the forgotten men of the West.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will now have one more opportunity to thrill visitors—and "force" them into paying its $20 "suggested" admission fee. The arts institution has announced that it will no longer be closed on Mondays, starting July 1. Museum director Thomas Campbell said, "Art is a 7-day-a-week passion, and we want the Met to be accessible whenever visitors have the urge to experience this great museum." [ more › ]

Given the impending shutdown of Google Reader, the owner of RSS.com has decided that now is a good time to sell.

“This map of Australia (1827), relatively accurate in its coastal profile, is filled with imaginary mountain ranges, rivers and deltas. Its place names, grid and topographical assumptions derive from European cultural conventions unrelated to the landscape depicted, a landscape which the Aborigines had already mapped in minute and reliable detail.”

– from David Turnbull’s Maps Are Territories: Science is an Atlas (some or all of which, I’m not sure, is available online)

SAN BRUNO, CA—The Silicon Valley headquarters of YouTube reportedly erupted in cheers shortly after 10 a.m. local time Thursday as the popular video-sharing service celebrated

Critics are charging PETA — renowned for its aggressive anti-cruelty campaigns — with hypocrisy after the group's euthanasia statistics were posted on the website of the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

"Five years ago, I was wanting to install Google Reader on my desktop with Fluid but noticed I couldn’t find a good icon for it at all. So I made one, and posted it to Flickr."

Peter Jackson isn't too busy filming the rest of the third Hobbit movie to think about his next career move -- and the LOTR mastermind really wants to direct an episode of the time-traveling soap comedy Doctor Who. He doesn't even want any money for it.

Read more...

We have some auction catalogs to give away. They show art from different countries and centuries. They are too beautiful to throw away. Other people have used this kind of catalog for art classes in schools, hospitals and shelters, or for personal [...]

This has been circulating again over the last few days:

As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.”

It’s a year old, but it appears from the outside that it’s still probably accurate.

∞ Permalink

A year-long project has come to fruition. We are happy to announce that TBRC’s place name database of the Tibetan cultural region is now viewable on the Harvard World Map, as  ”Tibet Map.”

Tibetan Cultural Sites on WorldMap

Click here to see the above on WorldMap

Starting with place data produced and contributed by Karl Ryavec from the University of Wisconsin, each place on the Tibet Map was pinpointed by Lex Berman, the project manager of the Center for Geographic Analysis at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University. The original data set corresponds in part to the place dictionary available at the Tibetan and Himalayan Library (THL) at the University of Virginia, as made available by David Germano. Consultation on place names in Amdo was also provided by Gray Tuttle at Columbia University.

With the orignal set of places, the TBRC research team worked for nearly a year to normalize the data so that it corresponds to TBRC standards and conventions. In doing so, we cleaned and curated place names, types, relative and absolute locations, and integrated new place records with works, persons, and associated places in the TBRC Library.

As part of this data integration process, the TBRC Research Team:

• Defined new fields to capture place specific data
• Cleaned-up duplicate place records
• Normalized place names in Tibetan
• Added place name variants in Wylie / Tibetan, Chinese, Romanized Phonetic
• Added location information and GIS RIDs
• Located places within counties or approximate regions
• Added historical events and institutional affiliation by tradition
• Added Associated Persons, including abbatial lines (gdan rabs)
• Annotated places with Tibetan text references
• Devised a taxonomy of place types 
• Marked place records by type
• Created hundreds of new place records

The sum of these efforts is a collaborative project that brings TBRC location information that is specific to places on the Tibetan plateau and surrounding regions to the Harvard World Map. What the import of this data onto the map enables is a dynamic digital tool for visualizing the cultural and geographic places in the Tibetan world.

The place data now resides in TBRC for preservation and access and is connected to texts, persons, and lineage transmissions. In the coming weeks and months, we will be adding layers to the map that reflect the TBRC taxonomy of place types, so that viewers can see places by region and type (monastery, nunnery, printery, etc.).

 

Michael Sheehy & Jeff Wallman

March 21, 2013

Calypso Nash, reports Oxford student paper the Cherwell, was sacked after 30 students made a Harlem Shake video in the college library. They've been fined by the college, but Nash, the librarian present at the time, lost her job.

“

A transgender high school student who applied to prestigious, private, all-female Smith College has been rejected because the school only accepts women.

Smith returned Calliope Wong’s application — and application fee — earlier this month, reports The Advocate.

“As you may remember from our previous correspondence, Smith is a women’s college, which means that undergraduate applicants to Smith must be female at the time of admission,” admissions dean Debra Shaver wrote in a letter to Wong, The Advocate says.

Wong has identified as female for several years, according to the Keystone Student Voice. However, on the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) Wong apparently checked the gender box saying male.

According to The Advocate, Smith’s rejection places reliance on the laws of Connecticut, Wong’s home state. The state categorizes Wong as male and would only recognize Wong as a female after expensive, complex sex reassignment surgery.

On August 15, 2012, Wong identified on a Tumblr blog as “a male-to-female transsexual girl.”

“Yes, I was born into a body with typically male parts,” Wong blogged last fall. “But I identify and am living as female. Prevailing scientific and medical opinions support the fact that who I am identity-wise is different from the gender identity typically associated my physical body.”

“I am not a rapist; I am not a criminal, and it is not fair to assume that I am such a person,” Wong also wrote. “Thing is, I’m a girl who wants to just wants [sic] her fair shot at Smith.”

However, the absence of certain required lady parts looks to be an insurmountable problem for Wong, even under Smith’s decidedly progressive policies concerning transgender students.

“As a women’s college, Smith only considers female applicants for undergraduate admission,” Smith proclaims in a statement called “Gender Identity & Expression” on its website. “And like other women’s colleges, Smith is a place where women are able to explore who they are in an environment that is safe and accepting.”

“Smith does not maintain records related to the gender identity, gender expression or sexual orientation of its students,” the school also says. “Once admitted, any student who completes the college’s graduation requirements will be awarded a degree.”

Smith is a small private liberal arts college in Northampton, Massachusetts — the American city with the highest percentage of lesbian couples in the nation, according to City-Data.com.

Notable Smith alumnae include Nancy Reagan, Julia Child and a host of professional feminists including Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem.

”

- Transgender student denied admission to all-female Smith College - Yahoo! News

Inventing a language is arduous, even preposterous. Yet invented languages are ubiquitous. What’s the motivation? Ego, sure, but mostly dissatisfaction… more»

Dontnod Entertainment's Remember Me - set in Neo-Paris 2084, the game stars Nilin, a memory hunter - got a lot of dismissals from publishers thanks to its female lead. For some publishers, successful games and male leads are synonymous, so when creative director Jean-Max Morris and his crew were shopping for publishers, this spurred the cold shoulder.

"We had some that said, 'Well, we don't want to publish it because that's not going to succeed. You can't have a female character in games. It has to be a male character, simple as that,'" Morris told The Penny Arcade Report. Capcom, of course, didn't seem to mind.

Morris said the decision to have a female lead was "something that just felt right from the beginning" of development. "It's one of those things that we never looked at from a pure, cold marketing perspective because that would have endangered the consistency of the whole game." That's not to say Morris didn't receive the advice to switch Nilin from a girl to a guy, but changing Nilin would've been relatively impossible for the stage Remember Me was at. Still, hypothetically that change would've brought its own set of problems.

One anecdote Morris talked about is a scene where we see Nilin kiss a man and Morris was told that scene wouldn't work if she was switched to a guy, even though technically it would be far from the first depiction of same-sex romance in video games. "We had people tell us, 'You can't make a dude like the player kiss another dude in the game, that's going to feel awkward.'" For Morris, that response is puzzling. "I'm like, 'If you think like that, there's no way the medium's going to mature,'" he said. "There's a level of immersion that you need to be at, but it's not like your sexual orientation is being questioned by playing a game. I don't know, that's extremely weird to me."

Remember Me launches on June 4 for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.

Publishers rejected Remember Me because of female lead originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

“Stephen King and his wife have agreed to pay $3 million to overhaul their century-old hometown library in Maine, as long as $6 million is raised from other sources.”

- Stephen King, wife pledge $3M to Maine library - Yahoo! News

Yet Another Fucking Music Festival takes place during the hottest 3 days this summer at a really inconvenient location. Headliners include That Band All Over The Radio, 2 Dudes & A MacBook, Cute Girl With A Guitar And A Sundress, and The Sellouts. This rather spot-on parody poster is by entertainment, art, and design studio Neat Dude Collective. The poster is available for purchase.

via Laszlo Thoth

tu sais ces photos de l'Asie que j'ai prises à deux cents Asa

Wednesday’s ad is for Schlitz, from 1948. I love the look on her face, like she’s about to play a trick on someone, instead of simply delivering a beer. I know it was 1948, but it’s hard not to notice the servant/slave and husband/master relationship depicted in the ad. At least she looks happy in her subservience. He just looks clueless.

As the property price and rent are so high in Hong Kong, many lower class Hong Kong people are now living in the so-called “coffin Homes”, which means a tiny compartment just big enough to fit in a bed within an apartment. Photography blog Hong Wrong blogs Ko Chung Ming’s aerial shot series featuring “coffin home” families who's monthly income are around HKD8000 (approximately US1100).

Written by Oiwan Lam · comments (0)
Share: Donate · facebook · twitter · reddit · StumbleUpon · delicious · Instapaper

This is an Icelandic waterfall called Litlanesfoss and the naturally occurring rock formation is columnar jointed basalt.

The columns form due to stress as the lava cools. The lava contracts as it cools, forming cracks. Once the crack develops it continues to grow. The growth is perpendicular to the surface of the flow. Entablature is probably the result of cooling caused by fresh lava being covered by water. The flood basalts probably damned rivers. When the rivers returned the water seeped down the cracks in the cooling lava and caused rapid cooling from the surface downward. The division of colonnade and entablature is the result of slow cooling from the base upward and rapid cooling from the top downward.

One of the coolest things I have ever seen. Looks totally fake, like they built it for Fractal Falls in Polygon Gorge at Disneyland or something. Giants Causeway in Northern Ireland looks amazing as well. Check out several similar formations from around the world.

Tags: geology

Urban Explorer Infiltrates an Abandoned Gasometer via Urban Ghosts 

Situated somewhere in Europe, urban explorer Urbex Maestro captured this striking series of photographs featuring a now abandoned gasometer dating to the turn of the 20th century. 

The vast empty structure, built in 1904, was designed to store 50,000 cubic metres of gas. The roof was capable of moving up and down to control the pressure inside the 60-metre diameter tank.

This gasometer is a typical example of the ornate industrial architecture that flourished throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, reflecting the importance of form as well as function.

I have always been a big proponent of following your heart and doing exactly what you want to do. It sounds so simple, right? But there are people who spend years—decades, even—trying to find a true sense of purpose for themselves. My advice? Just find the thing you enjoy doing more than anything else, your one true passion, and do it for the rest of your life on nights and weekends when you’re exhausted and cranky and just want to go to bed.