Russian Sledges

If you think there is an occasional eye game in class this semester, you are right. You're my student, and I couldn't care less. Sound familiar? Tell me when class meets.

Doctor Who actress Freema Agyeman has confirmed via her official Twitter page that she will not be returning to her role as Martha Jones as part of the show's 50th Anniversary celebrations.
Freema, who starred alongside David Tennant, said that although she's not appearing in the drama she will be contributing to a documentary for BBC America. She also said that she would return to the show "under the right circumstances ie character development and opportunity"
On Friday John Barrowman revealed that he is in talks to reprise his role as Captain Jack, whilst David Tennant recently stated that he is still yet to receive a call about returning to the show...

Follow Freema Agyeman on Twitter here.

1)Involvement in DW 50th anniversary? : I'm contributing 2a programme for BBC AMERICA but not involved in the drama. Excited 2watch tho! X

— Freema Agyeman (@FreemaOfficial) March 3, 2013

2)Am I on Facebook? 'Fraid not m'dears. I might be at some point but its just Twitter 4now. Shud probably get involved wiv Instagram too...X

— Freema Agyeman (@FreemaOfficial) March 3, 2013

3)Would I play Martha Jones again? : Yes - under the right circumstances ie character development opportunity. X

— Freema Agyeman (@FreemaOfficial) March 3, 2013

tonight at the ICA, we were watching a video of a man that was half buried under ground, playing an acoustic guitar, singing about how satan exists. we joked about how it was funny that the guy was singing about satan with his kids running around him [...]

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Widespread loss of water pressure was reported Sunday morning in New Orleans, and the city advised residents in most of the city to boil their water.

I love Seth. His custom notebook system is exactly what I expect from him and it's truly great. He's like a Jedi librarian.

You may have heard that Amazon is selling a "KEEP CALM AND RAPE A LOT" t-shirt. How did such a thing come to pass? Well, as Pete Ashton explains, this is a weird outcome of an automated algorithm that just tries random variations on "KEEP CALM AND," offering them for sale in Amazon's third-party marketplace and printing them on demand if any of them manage to find a buyer.

The t-shirts are created by an algorithm. The word “algorithm” is a little scary to some people because they don’t know what it means. It’s basically a process automated by a computer programme, sometimes simple, sometimes complex as hell. Amazon’s recommendations are powered by an algorithm. They look at what you’ve been browsing and buying, find patterns in that behaviour and show you things the algorithm things you might like to buy. Amazons algorithms are very complex and powerful, which is why they work. The algorithm that creates these t-shirts is not complex or powerful. This is how I expect it works.

1) Start a sentence with the words KEEP CALM AND.

2) Pick a word from this long list of verbs. Any word will do. Don’t worry, I’m sure they’re all fine.

3) Finish the sentence with one of the following: OFF, THEM, IF, THEM or US.

4) Lay these words out in the classic Keep Calm style.

5) Create a mockup jpeg of a t-shirt.

6) Submit the design to Amazon using our boilerplate t-shirt description.

7) Go back to 1 and start again.

There are currently 529,493 Solid Gold Bomb clothing items on Amazon. Assuming they survive this and don’t get shitcanned by Amazon I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they top a million in a few months.

It costs nothing to create the design, nothing to submit it to Amazon and nothing for Amazon to host the product. If no-one buys it then the total cost of the experiment is effectively zero. But if the algorithm stumbles upon something special, something that is both unique and funny and actually sells, then everyone makes money.

Dictionary + algorithm + PoD t-shirt printer + lucrative meme = rape t-shirts on Amazon

These photos containing both the Moon and Venus were captured by Hungarian astrophotographer Iván Éder in 2007 (above) and 2004 (below). There’s much more of Éder’s astrophotography on his site, as well as a gallery of his impressive collection of custom astrographs (astrophotography telescopes).

via PetaPixel

Miyazaki x Street Fighter: Spirit Fighter by Drew Wise

This, along with a Snorlax x Totoro design, is available as a shirt for on The Yeetee today. The tees aren’t actually animated, but they are super cheap at $11 each.

BUY Studio Ghibli films

roxa:

prostheticknowledge:

Bombermine

Massive multiplayer Bomberman clone playable in your browser.

Try it out here

AWESOME

Holy mother of all possible FUCKBALLS.

Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il is an upcoming biography of the late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il by author & professional ghostwriter Michael Malice. To write the book in Kim Jong-il’s own words, Malice is drawing on a collection of English language North Korean propaganda books which he collected during a trip to North Korea. Malice is raising funds for the project on Kickstarter. He expects to complete the book by October 2013.

This will be the best book ever written. Welcome to the bizarre world of the north Korea (since Korea is one nation divided by American Imperialism, we keep the “n” lowercase). It’s a nation where politics is religion, and religion is the worship of an odd little man by the name of Kim Jong Il. It is a notoriously reclusive and closed nation, one whose inner workings can only be guessed at by outsiders—until now.

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

GopherVR was a 3-D environment for Gopherspace, allowing you to “walk around a server” and get a graphic view of its contents using a simple VR-type world.

This version of GopherVR… is still unfinished, but you can play with it. It builds and runs on Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6.

Metal Slime Keyboard!

Today has turned into an unintentional theme day on Tiny Cartridge, with the discovery of Hori’s Metal Slime version of its excellent Slime keyboard, complete with removable Slime figures on the buttons, and even a Liquid Metal Slime on the escape button … naturally.

Ostensibly, it’s for use with Dragon Quest X, and includes some in-game Metal Slime stuff, but who cares. It’s USB, it’ll work with things.

This is going to be released sometime in the spring for ¥4980 ($53), and judging by how quickly the last one sold out, I don’t have much time to think about it if I want to buy one of these. Is a novelty keyboard something I need at this point in my life…

BUY Dragon Quest games, upcoming games

Obama to Create U.S. Department of Cities: President Obama has announced that he plans to create a...

Life during Wartime

http://www.velociraptors.info/

We understand where [John Clarke Mills] is coming from when he says he wants a home theater but not at the expense of dedicating a room to it. His situation is a bit more sticky than most folks in that he has a beautifully kept Victorian era home. Recently he was removing a renovation from ages past that didn’t fit with the style and it gave him the opportunity to build in this hidden projector screen.

Years ago someone walled in this opening and added french doors. After opening up the wall [John] sized up the situation and decided he had just enough room to build a soffit which could hide a rolled up projection surface. He purchased a motorized screen (we’ve seen a few diy projection screens but can’t remember one that rolls up) and built a slot into the design just large enough for the screen to pass through. He’s testing it out in the clip after the break before doing the plaster work.

The columns on either side are his additions as well. The floor of the house is unlevel and one of those columns ended up a full inch longer than the other. We certainly can’t tell.

Filed under: home entertainment hacks

Hamlet is the story of a man named Hamlet.

“We must bring balance to the Force.”

On Twitter, the White House has generated a meme for President Obama’s plan to avert the sequester and reduce the deficit (the “Jedi Mind Meld”). Yes, sci-fi metaphors seem to have been mixed, as Jedi were in Star Wars and ‘mind meld’ refers to Star Trek. Still, this is a cool way for the White House to reach out to the internet savvy.

UPDATE: The Atlantic Wire has the full story on the “Jedi Mind Meld” reference. Thanks David Connell!

We must bring balance to the Force. #Sequester #JediMindMeld twitter.com/whitehouse/sta…

— The White House (@whitehouse) March 1, 2013

via Xeni Jardin

From Boston.com

A massive spill at a Chivas plant has sent the smell of spirits flowing through a Scottish sewer and sorrow coursing through the hearts of Scotch whisky fans.

That is some good news writing. Still, "Less than 18,000 liters" is still a shitload of Whisky down the drain.

“

Every map, no matter how good overall, has weaknesses.

This is not new. Paper maps were never free from errors, after all, and with satnavs, even the best onboard maps would become less reliable if you didn’t purchase the updates.

But online maps are different: we’re using them much more often than we ever did paper maps or even satnavs. We haven’t just delegated our navigation skills to them: we’ve integrated them into our maps and websites, we rely on them for transit schedules and business listings. They give us a false sense of security and a false sense of reality: we forget that the map isn’t the territory.

We used to be more tentative with our paper maps or our friends’ directions. We tended to think about it more, rather than blindly follow.

We’ve decided that knowing where to go is no longer our problem, and getting lost is no longer our fault.

This might be a bit premature.

”

- All Online Maps Suck

I was curious to see the opera in High Definition, the Saturday matinee video broadcast beamed live from the Met to small-town theatres across the country. It seemed like a contradiction in terms: isn’t the opera, by nature, an imperial experience?

The White House brief asserts a bold claim to full equality for gay and lesbian Americans, which is a significant development in the nation’s rapidly moving consideration of the issue.

Die Kriechthiere Deutsche-Ost-Afrikas by BioDivLibrary on Flickr.

Berlin,Geographische Verlagsbuchhandlung Dietrich Reimer,1897..
biodiversitylibrary.org/page/36023878

Ron Rosenbaum reviews Bernard Bailyn The Barbarous Years, which details the “little-remembered” brutality of life in the American colonies during the 17th century:

Bailyn has not painted a pretty picture. Little wonder he calls it The Barbarous Years and spares us no details of the terror, desperation, degradation and widespread torture—do you really know what being “flayed alive” means? (The skin is torn from the face and head and the prisoner is disemboweled while still alive.)

And yet somehow amid the merciless massacres were elements that gave birth to the rudiments of civilization—or in Bailyn’s evocative phrase, the fragile “integument of civility”—that would evolve 100 years later into a virtual Renaissance culture, a bustling string of self-governing, self-sufficient, defiantly expansionist colonies alive with an increasingly sophisticated and literate political and intellectual culture that would coalesce into the rationale for the birth of American independence. All the while shaping, and sometimes misshaping, the American character. It’s a grand drama in which the glimmers of enlightenment barely survive the savagery, what Yeats called “the blood-dimmed tide,” the brutal establishment of slavery, the race wars with the original inhabitants that Bailyn is not afraid to call “genocidal,” the full, horrifying details of which have virtually been erased.

Above image from the Wiki entry for the Indian Massacre of 1622:

Captain John Smith, though he had not been in Virginia since 1609 and was thus not a firsthand eyewitness, related in his History of Virginia that braves of the Powhatan Confederacy ”came unarmed into our houses with deer, turkeys, fish, fruits, and other provisions to sell us”. Suddenly the Powhatan grabbed any tools or weapons available to them and killed any English settlers who were in sight, including men, women and children of all ages. Chief Opechancanough led a coordinated series of surprise attacks of the Powhatan Confederacy that killed 347 people, a quarter of the English population of Jamestown.

Update from a historian in Virginia:

I want to provide a bit more context for your readers about the so-called Indian Massacre of 1622. If, as the reviewer of Bailyn’s book suggests, the details of this period “have virtually been erased,” the image and accompanying Wikipedia information you provide doesn’t much help the effort to un-erase it.

Of course, the 1622 attack was a massacre only from the perspective of the English settlers, who had, in previous years, razed Indian towns, looted religious temples, and stolen or destroyed whole fields of maze. Many of the English military men had fought in Ireland and happily repurposed for Virginia the terror tactics developed in those wars. For instance, according to an account by George Percy, English soldiers captured an Indian chief’s wife and two children and confined them aboard ship. This was in the spring of 1610. Annoyed that their superior, Percy, might show the Indians mercy, the soldiers instead threw the children overboard and shot “owtt their Braynes in the water.” The chief’s wife was later put to the sword.

The “Powhatan Confederacy,” meanwhile, was not a voluntary alliance as the word “confederacy,” used in the Wikipedia entry, suggests. In 1608, for instance, the paramount chief Powhatan surrounded and attacked a member group, the Piankatank Indians. For all intents and purposes, he wiped them out and moved another group of Indians into their newly emptied town. According to William Strachey, Powhatan then collected the dead warriors’ scalps and hung them on a line between two trees – in full view of English visitors, Strachey among them.

The attack of 1622 killed about a quarter of Virginia’s English settlers and a report drawn up for the Virginia Company of London suggested that the “Viperous” and “wicked” Indians, rather than be Christianized and civilized, ought now to be completely destroyed: “by force, by surprize, by famine.” “Conquering them is much more easie then of civilizing them by faire meanes,” the writer concluded, “for they are a rude, barbarous, and naked people.”

And yet what’s interesting is that the deaths caused by Opechancanough‘s attack were a drop in the bucket compared to deaths caused by disease and by what some investors in the Virginia Company described as mismanagement. One such investor was Samuel Wrote. In the wake of the attack he decided to crunch some numbers. He estimated that Virginia’s population in 1619, when the company’s current leadership had taken over, was 700. Another 3,570 men, women, and children had entered Virginia in the subsequent three years, adding up to a population of 4,270. But after Opechancanough’s attacks, and the deaths of 347 colonists, only 1,240 settlers remained. What had happened, Wrote demanded, to the other 2,683?

The barbarous years, in other words, involved much more than war, scalps, and flaying. But so also was it more complicated than a conflict between—as one Virginia history textbook puts it—the “obnoxious” John Smith and Powhatan, “a ruler of great spiritual, mental, and physical strength.”

An anonymous reader writes "While speaking at the TED Conference in California earlier today, Sergey Brin seemingly tried to set the stage for a world where using Google Glass is as normal as using a smartphone. What's more, Brin went so far as to say that using smartphones is 'emasculating.' Brin said that smartphone users often seclude themselves in their own private virtual worlds. 'Is this the way you're meant to interact with other people,' Brin asked. Are people in the future destined to communicate via just walking around, looking down, and 'rubbing a featureless piece of glass,' Brin asked rhetorically. 'It's kind of emasculating. Is this what you're meant to do with your body?' Is wearing futuristic glasses any better?" Another reader sends in an article that also muses on our psychological connection to our devices. Or, as he puts it, the "increasingly weird and perhaps overly intimate relationship we have with our gadgets; the fist we touch when awake, the last at night. Our minds have become bookended by glass."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Detroit takeover planned by Michigan governor GlobalPost The Detroit takeover planned by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder could lead to appointment of emergency manager to manage the city's finances. Detroit emergency 2013 03 01 Enlarge. The General Motors world headquarters as seen Feb. 24, 2013, in ... and more »

Mar 1st 2013 By: Ziah Grace

It's been less than a week since creator Chris Onstad posted short teaser footage of a possible Achewood animated series went up, but YouTube user benhet has apparently already posted five full minutes (with voices included!) of animation that seems to synch up with the initial teaser video. Hit the jump to see (and hear) Ray Smuckles, Roast Beef, and Philippe talk about mood whiskey, where educational board games come from, and why scones are the worst.

Over the course of more than a decade, Achewood has become acclaimed for its mix of wry and earnest dialogue and bizarre (and often dark) plot twists. If this new test footage is any indication, it looks like the show doesn't stray from its comic source material and only increases its accessibility, especially since Onstad will have a starring role voicing Roast Beef. Toby Huss and Abbey DiGregorio round out the cast featured here, as Ray Smuckles and Philippe, respectively.

The transition of comic to animation is never entirely seamless, and it's a fair bet that some die-hard Achewood fans might find that the voices featured here don't match the ones they had in their heads. Regardless, with Onstad taking such an active role in making the animation, this is easily the most faithful adaptation fans are likely to see, and besides, in this writer's opinion, Philippe's voice is perfect.

While fans wait for further updates, you can check out the online archives of the series, or read the collected editions put out by Dark Horse.

[Via Benito Cereno]