Russian Sledges

Being an owl landlord is easy and exciting. What a great neighbor to have. Encourage one to come to you by placing an Owl Shack owl house in your yard.

Panasonic could be preparing an exit from the plasma TV market. According to Nikkei, the troubled company is mulling plans to greatly reduce its TV production over the next three years, possibly getting out of plasma altogether as early as 2014. Instead, it company reportedly plans to push into more profitable businesses like airplane systems, automotive parts, and enterprise products. Despite its shrinking market share relative to LCD, plasma is frequently championed by home theater enthusiasts for its deep blacks, wide viewing angles, vivid colors, and lack of motion blur.

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I have 4 baby chinchillas! we are selling them for $75 each. They are very friendly, we just don't have enough time for them. Three of them are 2 years old, and one of them is 6 months

Lime Tortilla Chips Recipe : Alton Brown : Recipes : Food Network:

hmmmmm

“

Pla has been playing football since kindergarten, and for the past two years, the 11-year-old has been holding her own on the gridiron.

Her playing time with the Catholic Youth Organization ended after last season when the Archdiocese of Philadelphia enforced its “boys only” policy for football, sidelining the All-Star guard and defensive end.

Members of a panel selected by the archdiocese voted to continue the boys-only policy as written. Despite the panel’s recommendation, on Thursday Archbishop Charles Chaput ordered the archdiocese to allow girls to play CYO football, according to a statement.

“The Archdiocese will allow for co-ed participation in CYO football, effective in the 2013 season,” the statement said, adding that the rule was provisional and will be reviewed in future seasons.

”

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Girl wins fight to play youth football - CNN.com

just so you’re sure this isn’t a pity party and you doubt a youth league’s designation of “All-star Guard and defensive end”, here she is sacking a QB

here she is making a pursuit tackle

here she is running with the ball away from the other team. (Thanks, photographer, for failing to say why. Presumably a fumble recovery.)

and here she is lead-blocking against three defenders. Note that all her teammates are wearing pink socks.

Big soft wings…

chicagopubliclibrary:

Previously-Unseen ‘The Hobbit’ Drawings By J.R.R Tolkien

From DesignTAXI:

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of The Hobbit, publishing house HarperCollins has produced a covetable collection of 110 original illustrations—’The Art of the Hobbit’—by J.R.R. Tolkien, of which two dozens have never been published before. 

These rare drawings—which range from pencil sketches and ink line drawings to watercolors—were uncovered at the writer’s archives at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and only recently digitized. 

While the published version of the children’s classic consisted only of 20 illustrations by its author, Tolkien had actually made more than a hundred pictures to help bring his legendary story to life. 

Click here to see more drawings! 

CNN broke the news on Sunday of a guilty verdict in a rape case in Steubenville, Ohio by lamenting that the “promising” lives of the rapists had been ruined.

High Country News has a remarkable obituary of one Robert Berlo, an army chaplain and map collector whose 13,000 travel maps were recently acquired by Stanford University’s Branner Earth Sciences Library. The collection includes “every official state road map from 1929 to the present, plus U.S. Forest Service, topographic, regional and city maps,” according to the article.

The real treasures of Berlo’s collection, however, were the maps of places he’d invented himself. Berlo used “the real geography of a place as the foundation for an invented city,” and imagined the evolution of the community from its first settlement to its latest metropolitan guise, creating a new map for each decade of its existence. Island Lakes, shown here, occupies a lake valley of Admiralty Island in the Alexander Archipelago of southeastern Alaska, about 50 miles south of Juneau. What I love about Island Lakes is the very lack of whimsicality in Berlo’s fidelity to the everyday grid that characterizes most modern cities. All he’s done is create another place that might have appeared on any of the 13,000 maps he collected in his lifetime. A man loyal to his passion, certainly.

I haven’t been able to find any other examples of Berlo’s imaginary maps, but I’d certainly be interested to hear of them.

Romeo can’t really be blamed for Ophelia’s death.

I created a new mailing list for people who want to talk about the technical side of RSS syncing.

Ideally there would be a single standard for RSS syncing, and clients could choose among systems. But I don’t insist on that — at least not yet. I think it’s ambitious enough just to get some working sync systems up and running.

The Providence Student Union, a high school student advocacy group, persuaded several dozen high-powered adults to take the test as part of their protest against a new state requirement that high school seniors must reach a certain level of proficiency on the exam to graduate — even though the test wasn’t designed for this purpose. It wasn’t even designed for the assessment of individual students. The Providence Journal interviewed many of the adults after they took the test and it reported that most of them thought they flunked. Results will be made available Tuesday. Some said the test included “trick” questions.

poetryofblood:

asgardiancherrypudding:

WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW, GENDER ROLES?

every bathroom everywhere should say this

The impending death of Google Reader has sparked much wailing and gnashing of teeth, petition-signing, alternative-seeking, and rending of garments. But what about the people who made RSS? Dave Winer, one of the fathers of the both RSS and the blog, couldn't give less of a shit. More »

At 76, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio is one of the oldest popes in history at the time of his election. But there are reasons his fellow cardinals may see this as a good thing.

“Carson is a private person. She prefers to be alone. (When her husband is traveling, Carson will call and tell him, “I miss you, but I’m having a great time.”) Her book jackets have no author photo. Her back-flap biography — “Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living” — is so minimalist that it sounds like a parody of a back-flap biography. […]

Carson is usually referred to as a poet, but just about no one finds that label satisfying: her fans (for whom she does something more than poetry), her critics (for whom she does something less than poetry) or herself. She often labels her work in conspicuously nonpoetic terms. Her book “The Beauty of the Husband” is subtitled “A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos.” Her book “Decreation” is subtitled “Poetry, Essays, Opera.” Carson gives the impression — on the page, at readings — of someone from another world, either extraterrestrial or ancient, for whom our modern earthly categories are too artificial and simplistic to contain anything like the real truth she is determined to communicate. For two decades her work has moved — phrase by phrase, line by line, project by improbable project — in directions that a human brain would never naturally move. The approach has won her awards (MacArthur, Guggenheim, Lannan) and accolades and an electric reputation in the literary world.

In her day job, Carson, who is 62, is a professor of erratic subjects (ancient Greek, attention, artistic collaboration) at various universities around North America, where she appears for a semester at a time as — as she often puts it — “a visiting [whatever].” (Even when she says this out loud, she makes the bracket sign with her hands.) This, I think, is the best catchall description of Carson. Wherever she goes, whatever she does, she is always a “visiting [whatever].””

The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson

dude you guys

Francis aiming at more modest Papacy, David Willey finds

For obvious reasons, my inbox is overflowing with folk suggesting alternatives to Google Reader, or asking me to recommend alternatives to Google Reader.

Here’s the thing: there aren’t any real alternatives to Reader available today.

Of course, there are oodles of applications and services that let you read feeds, but, to quote from bonaldi’s excellent explanation of Reader’s true value on MetaFilter:

Google Reader is like an iceberg. What you see as the website is just the tip, and it’s mostly irrelevant.

So, who’s working on the stuff below sea level, so to speak?

NewsBlur is open source, provides a decent-looking API and charges $1 a month for users subscribed to more than 64 feeds. On the downside, none of the popular RSS applications offer NewsBlur synchronisation yet, and it’s struggling to stay online in the wake of Google’s announcement.

Feedly have announced Normandy, an as-yet-unreleased Google Reader API clone which they plan to open up to third-party developers. It’s probably worth pointing out that Feedly don’t charge for their services. And they’re running Normandy on Google App Engine.

The Old Reader crew deserve an honourable mention, I think. They plan to keep calm, and carry on working towards offering paid accounts and an API, but admit that they ‘have not even started coding this yet’.

TinyTinyRSS is an open-source, web-based, self-hosted feed reader with an API, a companion Android app and Liferea integration.

There’s also Fever, a $30 self-hosted solution with a clever approach to foregrounding interesting links and an API in beta. It doesn’t archive feed contents, though, and development has stalled while creator Shaun Inman concentrates on making computer games.

There’s nothing to match Reader’s core functionality available yet, then, but I tend agree with Andre Torrez’ optimistic assessment:

I don’t think this “kills RSS” as some people on Twitter have said, if anything it is good news for people who actually care about RSS and are building a business on it.

Now RSS is going to have someone spending their time delivering the best service they can, rather than spending their time trying to figure out what ads it could inject in between posts.

Providing a reasonably priced, sturdy and scalable service that replaces the stuff we’ll really miss when Google Reader disappears—the centralised aggregation, crawling and long-term storage of feeds, real-time feed updates, search, and synchronisation across apps on all platforms—is, of course, a huge challenge.

But not an insurmountable one. And it seems reasonable to suppose that at least one of the services listed above—or something new—has the potential to become the Pinboard to Reader’s del.icio.us.

Fingers crossed, eh?

TL;DR: The demise of Google Reader is an opportunity, not a disaster.

Further Reading

• Reeder tweeted a vague announcement, promising that their apps ‘won’t die with Google Reader’.
• FeedWrangler is an unknown quantity, but worth keeping an eye on.
• Ditto Multiplexer.
• Feedbin launched two days ago: web-based, $2 a month, has an API, looks pretty.
• The above-mentioned MetaFilter thread is full of good commentary in amongst the wailing and gnashing of teeth, including contributions from original Google Reader developer Chris Weatherall (AKA ‘massless’).
• Weatherall wrote an interesting, prescient 2011 post on the future of Reader
• Brent Simmons (who knows a thing or two about the vagaries of RSS sync services) also saw the writing on the wall in 2011.
• Daniel Jaikut of MarsEdit fame dreams of a ‘NetNewsWire Cloud’. I would love to see NetNewsWire return to former glories, but Black Pixel’s track record with the app doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
• Marco ‘Instapaper’ Arment is sanguine: ‘in the long run, trust me: this is excellent news’.
• Loveable RSS curmudgeon Dave Winer says, ‘Next time, please pay a fair price for the services you depend on’. Indeed.
• The Data Liberation Front has instructions on extracting your data from Reader.
• Pinboard lets you import starred and shared items from Reader.

Experimental Double India Pale AleWhat’s so experimental about a double I.P.A.? Haven’t they been around for some time? Hasn’t CBC already brewed a whole bunch of different DIPA’s? Well, yes. What sets this DIPA apart is the use of Simcoe “hop hash” as the sole hoppy ingredient in this beer. Hop hash is a concentrated resin of the sticky volatile oils of the hop cone. It’s essentially a byproduct in the production of pelletized hops, created when the whole, dried hop cones are sent through a hammer mill. This turns the hops into powder, which is then extruded through a die and into a pelletized form. As the hops move through the hammer mill, some of the hop resin sticks and clumps to the mill. Historically, this “hop hash” had been scraped off and discarded until one day a forward-thinking brewer said “Hey, isn’t that stuff just super-concentrated hop aroma and bittering oil? I could totally use that!” The downside is that hops are subject to oxidation, so when we contacted our friends at HopUnion in Yakima, WA to see if they’d send us some, we were aware that the resin had an extremely short shelf life. HopUnion was nice enough to overnight us some Simcoe resin right off the mill, and we brewed with it the very next day. Success!! Having no idea what this resinous concentrate would contribute to the beer in terms of measurable bitterness and aromatic components, we were forced, in our own CBC way, to pretty much wing it. After formulating our recipe for a D.I.P.A. we cut the entire hop recipe in half, assuming the concentrate effectively doubled the hop input. What we didn’t forsee is that this resin would require hours of shredding by hand with a box grater, to break it down into a usable powder. Had we tossed the chinks into the kettle they would have sunk and burned. Suffice it to say that after a very long day and only a few shredded knuckles we had what we needed. A few days later we shredded even more and added it to the fermenter as a dryhop addition. The results? An amazing hoppy beer which captures the varietal essence and character of Simcoe hops – floral, fruity, and piney – with plenty of malt and a full body to balance. We’re pretty proud of this one, and we’re sure you’ll like it. Cheers! Teardrop $6

You sometimes hear American-developed video games set in real-world geopolitical hotspots—like entries in the Call of Duty, Battlefield and Medal of Honor series—get decried as jingoistic, flag-waving propaganda. And Pakistan has issued a ban on Call of Duty and Medal of Honorfor how it's portrayed in those titles. And, yeah, while the claim can be made that political mindsets and cultural biases seep into those video games, they're not explicitly made to froth up ideological allegiances. (Well, there was the America's Army franchise but those games offered a pretty tepid brand of "eff yeah" messaging.)

Islamic Mali—as reported by Foreign Policy—goes hard in the opposite direction. The new game—playable here—made by Islamic extremists takes players into the skies to engage in aerial dogfights in the name of al-Qaeda. It's a rudimentary HTML5 browser game where you control an al-Qaeda fighter jet shooting down and dodging fire from French fighter planes. Islamic Mali virtualizes the very real conflict in Mali, where local rebel forces have been fighting jihadi soldiers with help from the French military.

And like so many top-down arcade shooters before it, there's a one-shot instant-kill power-up in Islamic Mali, too. Click on the black box of Arabic text—which translates as the first part of the shahada, Islam's core delaration of faith: "There is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God"—and a black laser obliterates all enemies in its path. And when it's game over, pop-up text indicates that you've become a martyr to the jihadi cause.

Islamic Mali joins the ranks of other explicitly political titles from other countries, like Glorious Mission in China or the Flash games hosted on North Korean web portal Uriminzokkiri. These games won't compete with bigger, fancier games from the West when it comes to entertainment value. But the fact that they exist is a testament to how fervently their creators want their particular ideologies to permeate every aspect of people's lives.

Jihadis create retro 2-D shooter video game [Foreign Policy, via Twitter]

The lost final episode of "The Tenth Planet" is being restored in animated form, using the original sound track.

Flight search site Kayak's chief scientist booked multiple one-way tickets on different airlines for years, finding that this option was often cheaper than booking round trips with the same carrier. Because this method became so commonly effective, they decided to make it a feature of the site. More »

We've talked about how mild ambient noise can keep you motivated and productive, but finding the right sounds and the right amount of ambient noise to help you focus can be tricky. Soundrown can help. Instead of locking you into one type of sound, the webapp lets you choose, adjust the volume, and offers clean recordings that fit right into your flow on their own or behind music. More »