Russian Sledges

cauldronandcross:

Courage, Anxiety and Despair Watching the Battle (detail)
James Sant
19th Century

Designed by Italic | Country: United States

“Daytrader is a really funny and educational game created by Samir Lyons. It’s a financial board game that brings you the thrills and chills of investing in the stock market but without real risk. It’s simple, educational and fun.

Italic was enlisted to give Daytrader a unique and playful look & feel.  The design draws inspiration from classic American business signage and simple currency-like illustrations as a tribute to the golden age of finance and Wall Street.  The Americana feel to the game adds a warm, approachable simplicity to the chaotic and complex world of economic affairs. Daytrader is designed so a wide range of people can enjoy the experience of playing, from families around the dinning room table, to finance gurus, students, board game geeks and beyond.”

Cedar Mill, Seattle 1919

Telephone Wires over New York, 1887-1888

The first model of the NES wasn’t all that great; just ask any one of the millions of six-year-olds who independently discovered blowing on a cartridge made it work. The second NES hardware revision, the top loader, was better but only had RF video output. These are the only two pieces of hardware that can play every single NES game, and even with years of hacking NES-on-a-chip devices, there’s still much to be desired.

[low_budget] over on the AtariAge forum decided he’d had enough of these hardware compromises and decided to build the first new NES hardware revision in 20 years. It’s got all the best features from both of its predecessors and a few new features not seen on any existing NES. There’s support for composite and RGB video generators, new and better amplifiers for the audio, no lockout chip, and a top loading cartridge slot to prevent bent pins on the 72 pin connector.

While [low_budget]‘s prototype works, it only does so by salvaging the CPU and PPU from a working NES. There’s still much work to be done on the prototype, but even if we’ll have to destroy our beloved NES, we’d love to get our hands on one of these improved consoles.

Filed under: classic hacks, nintendo hacks

Jenny McCarthy Body Count

Georgia O'Keeffe lemons show up with surprising frequency

In a major grocery store, whether it's Safeway, Ralph's, Tesco, or Albert Heijn, you're apt to find beautiful fruit on offer. Oranges so immaculate and perfectly spherical they could be ornaments. Eureka and Lisbon lemons so hefty, so perfect, that they each could stand as the very definition of "lemon." Down the line: perfect fruits and vegetables. Well, perfect to the eye, anyway. Relatively high prices reflect  culling of the oddballs, the defects, the grotesque, the undersized, and the unevenly ripened. Limes for 69¢ each, individual lemons for 89¢.

In a pinch, sure, I'll buy just enough at those prices to eek through whatever citrus shortage drove me to that particular store. But at the rate we burn through fruit — especially citrus for cocktails — I'd be a damn fool paying retail prices for perfectly formed specimens.

Enter the second-tier grocer. You may not know about them in your community, but even many small towns (and I've lived in a few) have markets that serve immigrant communities. I'm not talking about high-end specialty stores that cater to well-heeled world travelers (though those are nice, too). Rather I mean the small stores with ingredients imported from "back home"or made locally in a familiar style that less affluent shoppers nonetheless crave; curry blends, certain cheeses, particular breads, teas, syrups, sugars, sweets, pickles, etc. In Philadelphia, there's the 9th Street Italian market. In San Diego, my go-to place for such things is North Park Produce. The store clearly buys a lot of seconds — those fruit and vegetables that aren't quite up to snuff for display at the major chains, the ones that were culled. These are the fruits I tend to buy for cocktail and cooking.

Limes with a bit of wind blemish, oranges with a blush of green on one side, and lemons that can be, frankly, bizarre are what I'm after. Most of them are actually fine, just undersized. And the prices? Well, they fluctuate, but a single dollar will typically get me 4-5 pounds of oranges (pounds, mind you, not single oranges), 7-10 lemons, or anywhere from 8 to 20 limes. At those prices, we're almost never without the ingredients to crank out any one of hundreds of cocktails.

Of course, if drinkers or eaters will see the fruit as part of serving or prearing it, more seemly specimens may be in order. A big bowl of defects and seconds on the bar is not going to get you top dollar for your cocktails. But a hybrid approach is fine. Serving fresh lemonade from a huge see-though dispenser? Juice the cheap ones, but buy a bag of big perfect beauties to cut in half, ream, and float in the mix.

Customers, after all, do pay a premium for pretty food.

Goes well with:

• Bitter oranges. The season is drawing to a close, but I scored a bunch at North Park Produce (3551 El Cajon Blvd, San Diego, CA) for $1.39/lb and used most of the batch for making vin d'orange. The rest is going into a cake later today.

On Friday, the city of Boston unveiled a webpage that allowed curious citizens to track the locations of snowplows all over the city. But the site interfered with the city’s public works monitoring system, a spokeswoman for the mayor said today. The site had soft runs during prior snow events this season, but yesterday was the first time the city promoted the site through social media, said Emilee Ellison, spokeswoman for the office of Mayor Thomas M. Menino, in a short interview this morning.

Differences, that is. On “Need to Know” this week, Jay and I talk with Christina Hoff Sommers about her important New York Times piece “The Boys at the Back.” We examine the alarming data about boys lagging behind girls in school at every level, from kindergarten through grad school. The gals are taking the more challenging courses, garnering 60 percent of college degrees, and are about to outstrip men in the number of Ph.D.s earned. 

Sommers offers other alarming statistics as well. We venture into forbidden areas — like innate differences between the sexes (it’s called “essentialism” don’t you know), the benefits of single-sex schooling for some kids, and the feminization of American classrooms over the past several decades. These trends, along with pervasive fatherlessness, have yielded a genuine boy crisis. 

Keep reading this post . . .

After some Reddit/4chan MRA babies tried to make #INeedMasculismBecause happen on Twitter today (co-opting the popular feminist meme, because EYEROLL), it blew up in their faces bigtime. The hashtag was gleefully hijacked by the normal, thinking humans of Twitter, who are currently churning out hundreds of tweets lampooning Men's Rights talking points. I had to scroll down for years to find one sincere #INeedMasculismBecause tweet from an MRA. (And when you do find them, they read like parody anyway.) It's pretty awesome. More »

nevver:

Why bother

On this day in 1895, a new game was first played at the YMCA in Holyoke. Many of the men who came to the Y were excited about another new game, basketball, but the Holyoke sports director was looking for a less strenuous indoor sport. Borrowing from basketball, tennis, and handball, William Morgan came up with "Mintonette," soon re-named volleyball. Over the next half-century, the game spread around the world. At the first Olympic competition in the 1964 games in Tokyo, the Soviet men and Japanese women took the gold medal. However, when the Volleyball Hall of Fame opened in 1987, it was in Holyoke, the Massachusetts mill town where the game was born.

FAIRFIELD, Conn. (AP) — Connecticut's governor ordered all roads closed Saturday until further notice due to a storm that buried much of the state under 2 feet of snow, making travel nearly impossible even for emergency responders who found themselves stuck on highways.

Modern Churches + Chickens via Architizer

WASHINGTON—Following the release of a secret Department of Justice memo this week that outlines the administration’s legal justification for killing U.S.

Diane Meyer distorts sections of personal photos resulting in compositions that comment on memory. In her own words: “This series is based on photographs taken at various points in my life and arranged by location. Sections of the images have been obscured through a layer of embroidered pixels sewn directly into the photograph. The embroidery deteriorates sections of the original photograph forming a new pixelated  layer of the original scene. The project refers to the failures of photography in preserving experience and personal history as well as the means by which photographs become nostalgic objects that obscure objective understandings of the past.” (via)

"It's a go! Our chefs and bartenders have arrived and we have plenty of food and cocktails and we're ready to throw a party!" wrote Sarah Hearn, Lynch's spokeswoman, in an email. "Apparently, Barbara can even predict the weather."

Catalog by Design | The User Experience by Aaron Schmidt appeared in the latest Library Journal. It has created quite a heated exchange on AUTOCAT.

Aside from paying very little attention to visual design and not caring about the impact of horrible typography, the big problem with library catalogs is that they are not designed to help people accomplish library tasks. Instead, they’re designed to expose catalog records. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is totally backward—prioritizing the collection, not people, results in a user-hostile interaction design and a poor user experience. Imagine the reverse: a tool that prioritizes helping people accomplish their tasks, whereby bibliographic data exists quietly in the background and is exposed only when useful.

maraid posted a photo:

By James Muirden, 1964

Etsy recognized that their engineering team was not as gender diverse as they wanted it to be, even after recognizing the issue and attempting to fix it. Here's how they made some real progress.

Kellan Elliott-McCrea (@kellan), a former architect at Flickr and co-author of the OAuth spec, is now the CTO at Etsy, the world's most vibrant handmade marketplace. During his tenure, he's played a critical role in the company's restructuring of its engineering organization; now, Etsy hires for diversity, particularly gender diversity. After witnessing first-hand how challenging it can be to attract women engineers, Kellan shares lessons in building a process and culture to attract female engineers. All the good stuff below belongs to him.

Etsy's decision to pursue women engineers is indicative of a broader change: making diversity a core value. But even after a number of concerted efforts to bring more women talent onboard, the company achieved almost no progress; in fact, one year, they actually saw a thirty-five percent decline in gender diversity even when this was a priority.

Tags: Etsy   Kellan Elliott-McCrea

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — A few dozen Rhode Islanders have braved winter weather to rally at the Statehouse against gun control proposals.

BOSTON (AP) — Mass. governor declares state of emergency for blizzard that could bring near 3 feet of snow.

 

The work of Matthew Picton is something more than a map, even something more than a model city.  He meticulously builds cities from paper.  Each buildings wall is built from a strip of paper leaving its interior empty.  In a way his three dimensional maps get at the personality of a city.  Speaking about cartography Picton says,

“There is some intrinsic quality to cartography that goes beyond the scientific document – a beauty of form and detail, a record of past times and places, something that lives as a world in which imagination can flow; places to re-visit, places to re-imagine, a world to re-make itself in the imagination.”     [via]

Several of his pieces depict cities before and after a natural disaster or war.  The charred strips of paper mark burnt or crumbled buildings.  Pockets of burnt paper seem more like injuries than a cold record of a past fact.

 

via gabe: 'The top story in the Poughkeepsie Journal this morning: "You call this a storm? Why, back in my day..."'

victory-candescence:

David Bowie and Iggy Pop's time in West Berlin in the seventies is immortalized in the hearts of fanboys and rock scholars — now it's time for a movie, Lust for Life, to immortalize it for everyone else. England's Altered Image and Berlin's Egoli Tossell Film will produce, with Gabriel Range, ... More »