Russian Sledges

GenomeWeb caught what must be an interesting Q&A with George Church in Germany’s Speigel Online (I can’t personally attest to the original story as it is behind a paywall). The Harvard Medical School geneticist is quoted as saying that eventually, an “adventurous female human” will be needed to be the surrogate mother for the first Neandertal baby in some 30,000 years.

From pinball prohibition in 1940s NYC to Dave & Buster’s, the rise and fall of the American arcade.

Laura June | The Verge | Jan 2012 [Full Story]

For nine decades Fulton Market Cold Storage Company operated in Chicago’s meatpacking district with a full ten stories of freezing storage situated close to major railways. Last summer the company decided it was time to start fresh in a state-of-the-art facility outside of Chicago, so the building was sold to SRAM, a bike component manufacturer who will use the space for its global headquarters. Architects Perkins + Will were hired to help convert the ice-encrusted space into a new, modernized office building and were also tasked with the most epic refrigerator defrost in history. Luckily photographer Gary Jensen was asked to snap some incredible photos prior to the thawing which was actually caught on video (sorry no embed). See more photos on his website. (via gapers block)

Update: I’ve been asked to clarify that the building owner is technically Sterling Bay and the architect of the conversion is Hartshorne and Plunkard. SRAM is a potential tenant in the building and Perkins & Will is their architect.

What works, and what doesn't, on the biggest crowdfunding site

LAST year more than 18,000 projects were successfully funded on Kickstarter, the largest crowdfunding website. A total of $320m was pledged by 2.2m people, making possible creative projects including a documentary on fracking, a home aquaponics kit and a community centre for circus arts. Games, a category which includes video, board and card games, received the most support, with $83m pledged to more than 900 projects. Given their high development costs and passionate fans, video games are a good match for crowdfunding, particularly as established publishers churn out ever more sequels, leaving a long tail of unmet demand (see article). In all, 44% of the projects launched last year managed to raise the money they requested, but the success rate ranged from a threadbare 26% in fashion to a sprightly 74% in dance. Seventeen projects raised more than $1m apiece in 2012. Technology projects received the highest average pledge by category, at $107 per backer. The biggest Kickstarter project to date is Pebble, a watch that connects to a smartphone via Bluetooth, which received almost $150 per backer to raise $10.3m in May. (The first finished products are due to be delivered to backers next week.) According to Kickstarter, the total amount raised last year increased by more than 200% compared with 2011. Having opened itself to British-based projects in October, the site expects to see further growth in 2013.

As I walked into Stern Pinball's modest facility in Melrose Park, Illinois shortly before Christmas last year, a loud buzzer went off. Dozens of workers streamed past, heading toward a catering cart stationed nearby. It's break time.

This is all that remains of an amusement empire in Chicago last century, an empire that included brands like Williams, Bally, Gottlieb, and Midway, among others. It's an empire that helped build the arcade era. Apart from Stern, everyone else has long since left the pinball business — or gone out of business altogether.

Stern's director of marketing, Jody Dankberg, takes me on a tour of the building, which is quite literally the only manufacturer of pinball machines left in the world (though New Jersey's...

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The former Democratic presidential candidate in 2004 and 2008 will debut on "The O'Reilly Factor" on Thursday, the network said.

Officials from both companies announced their venture Thursday. They said they envision the two systems will purchase about 60 trains over the next decade.

“Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans…and put them into one vessel.”

3Beans is a beer by Sixpoint Brewery made with cacao beans by chocolatiers Mast Brothers, cold-press coffee by Stumptown Coffee Roasters, and romano beans.

The beans of bygone brewers, united with cacao and coffee, to create a trinity of roasted, rich, and savory flavors.

via The World’s Best Ever

In the wake of its “graph search” announcement, Facebook removed the ability for users to opt out of appearing in search results on the site, as noted by Quartz. Because graph search relies on the content of profiles to fuel its results, the move will allow more comprehensive returns on searches but may violate the privacy of users who previously relied on that feature.

Before Facebook’s changes to its privacy policy and the implementation of graph search, users were able to keep their profiles—even their most basic information—out of the searches of non-friends. This setting made it impossible for non-friends to locate a Facebook profile unless the hidden person reached out first.

Such profiles would hinder the progress of graph search, which relies on profile content to cull information (for instance, “women who like the TV show Homeland” or “Thai restaurants my friends have been to.”) Facebook asserts that a “single-digit percentage” of profiles had previously opted out of being searchable. As Quartz points out, even one percent is now 10 million people, so the change does affect a large swath of users.

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Last year, design firm Stamen got a grant to create an art project based on the bus routes that people in San Francisco take to commute the 30-50 miles south to Silicon Valley. (Click image to enlarge.) Though they take busses, none of these workers take public transit. Their companies, such as Google, Apple, Facebook, and others, run private bus lines through many unmarked stops in the city, before heading straight to the high tech campuses where wealthy San Franciscans work. More »

The contrasting colors orange and blue appear together so often in movie posters and videogame box art as to inspire countless blog posts, tumblrs, and even their own entry on TV Tropes. Intrigued by the entertainment industry's orange/blue affinity, Edmund Helmer — a masters student studying statistics at Stanford — decided to visualize the use of different hues in film trailers. The end result is as telling as it is beautiful. More »

Any fan of the Evil Dead trilogy probably knows the the story of how the franchise began — a young Sam Raimi and his pal Bruce Campbell made a super-cheap horror short called "Within the Woods" in 1978, which they used as a presentation to 1) prove they had the skills to make a real movie and 2) secure funding for said movie. Well, it obviously worked, and now you can see "Within the Woods" in all its $1600, insanely-young Bruce Campbellian glory below. More »

Leon Schelhase and Dylan Sauerwald will play an all-Bach recital. Hungry for some Bach on harpsichord? We've got you. On the Program: C# major and minor Preludes and Fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier book 2 B minor Prelude and Fugue on a theme of Albinoni C minor Toccata C major Concerto for 2 Harpsichords 7:30pm Margaret Jewett Hall, First Congregational Church Freewill donation

January 18th & 19th, 2013 at 7:30pm Somerville Armory 191 Highland Avenue, Somerville Music by Francesco Cavalli Libretto by Niccolo Minato Dylan Sauerwald & Zoe Weiss, Music directors Aria Umezawa, Stage director Cavalli’s 1657 comedy receives its American premiere in an original new staging by Aria Umezawa. Full of mistaken identities and beautiful music, this playful work features a unique instrumental ensemble and truly surprising music.

1 cup whole milk 1 bottle Brooklyn Brewery East India Pale Ale (12 oz.) 4 eggs 1/2 tsp salt 2 cups unbleached flour (sifted) 4 tbs melted butter

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“How long will this Arctic blast last?”

Jimmy Kimmel Live shows how Los Angeles newscasters have been overreacting to the area’s recent cold temperatures.

There is a dish they don’t tell you about in Hansik 101. It is not listed on tourism websites and Korean cookbooks. Whenever an expat stumbles upon it, they are compelled to blog, Instagram and tweet...

Read more at ZenKimchi Korean Food Journal

1967 Soviet made Chaika ll with a Industar 69 lens.

Photo by Daniel Morel, via court document

When Haiti was devastated by an earthquake in early 2010, not many professional-quality photos of the disaster were immediately available. Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world; before the quake, very few journalists were stationed there.

It became one of the seminal events in which Twitter showed that it could fill the void and its value quickly became apparent to media companies. But the use of photos found on Twitter during that disaster by one newswire, Agence France-Presse, turned into a confused morass of erroneous bylines and ultimately, copyright litigation. Daniel Morel, a photojournalist whose photos were placed on the AFP newswire without payment, turned to the courts in March 2010, claiming AFP had violated his copyright. AFP responded with a few different defenses; its boldest, almost shocking defense was that the Twitter terms of service actually granted it a license to use whatever photos it could grab off the micro-blogging service.

The AFP v. Morel lawsuit was widely reported because it was one of the first cases to explore the intersection of copyright law and Twitter's terms of use. Today, nearly three years after the lawsuit began, a key opinion [PDF] has been issued, ruling in favor of Morel and against AFP. The French newswire did manage to win a limitation on damages, but it could still be liable for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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When we launched We the People, none of us knew how popular it would be, but it's exceeded our wildest expectations. Through the past year, interest in We the People exploded and we're closing in on 10 million signatures.

When we first raised the threshold — from 5,000 to 25,000 — we called it "a good problem to have." Turns out that "good problem" is only getting better, so we're making another adjustment to ensure we’re able to continue to give the most popular ideas the time they deserve.

Starting today, as we move into a second term, petitions must receive 100,000 signatures in 30 days in order to receive an official response from the Obama Administration. This new threshold applies only to petitions created from this point forward and is not retroactively applied to ones that already exist.

In the last two months of 2012, use of We the People more than doubled. In just that time roughly 2.4 million new users joined the system, 73,000 petitions were created and 4.9 million signatures were registered.

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(Image source: Wikipedia)

We hope that you all had a great holiday season and entered 2013 as enthusiastic as we are now! As you may guess we are receiving tons of emails with feature requests, and to make those easier to track we have configured a special feedback page. Go ahead and check it out - you can submit new feature requests as well as vote for existing ones. Also this now gives us lots of visibility into what our users really want, so we can spend our time on what’s important first. Keep your voices coming, but please avoid creating duplicate issues (we hate deleting them).

During past months we have mostly been busy refactoring our database backend. This is not something that you can see, but it helped us cut some hardware costs and will ensure that we can scale as fast as our user base grows. We also implemented some minor features you’ve been asking about - reverse post sorting and new passwordless Pocket integration. (You will need to check your Settings menu for that).

You might have also noticed a new image that says Unteleported on our main page. Don’t get scared, as we have not got bought by an evil corporation just yet. We have been discussing various ways to cover our increasing hardware costs, and we liked the idea of being sponsored by cool companies we can relate to. Unteleported is the first of such companies - they are our good old friends, a team of software development professionals (hey, our only real software engineer works there!) who agreed to partially cover our bills. We are extremely grateful for what they do and would like to encourage you to check their new shiny website out. If you have a cool software project to develop, they are the right people!

We were receiving requests and suggestions about translating The Old Reader to various languages. Well, we have a winner! We thank our bright friend and an early Old Reader adopter Daria Nifontova for the Russian translation she made (now available in Settings menu). For anyone else wishing to contribute there is now a separate github repository, and we are happy to accept your pull requests.

And finally, we don’t want to be ahead of ourselves, but our next major update will probably include that B-word we all are waiting for. Cool, no?

Joyland, the once rumoured unlicensed World of Warcraft theme park in Changzhou, China actually exists. Even better, someone went to it and lived to tell the tale.

Reddit user FrancescaO_O took pretty extensive photographs of what must be the world's largest copyright infringement and stuck around to answer user questions about the place.

Evidently it cost ¥300 million (approx $48 million) to build and there are still new areas under construction. Admission cost ¥200 ($32/£20).

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Those are some choice last words, Captain Oates. And a great sweater to boot. 

From submitter laurielover1912

This is Captain Lawrence Oates, a member of Captain Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition of 1910-1912. Oates was a cavalry officer who was in charge of the ponies on the expedition. I’ve had a huge historical crush on him for years and have him to blame for my username. Oates is best remembered for walking out into the blizzard to his death when he couldn’t continue due to the pain he was in, thereby giving his friends more chance of pulling through (sadly they didn’t). Just before leaving the tent, he famously spoke the words: ‘I’m just going outside and may be some time.’ The epitome of the competent but reserved English hero, he was also one very fine looking man.

Originally listed on eBay and now on GameGavel. From the auction:

This is the real deal, the extremely rare and once thought nonexistent prototypeof the Tengen Version of Tetris which states Licensed by Nintendo on the title screen.

If you are a serious collector and capable of winning this auction,you already know why this cartridge is so rare and so valuable.

Why is this cart so important to video game history?

This important piece of history was followed by one of the ugliest lawsuits in early video game history.
One where Tengen was forced to pull their superior version from the shelves just 4 weeks after release.
Only 100,000 units of the production version of Tengen Tetris were sold during that time period.
Less than a handful of these rare pre-lawsuit prototypes ever existed.

THIS IS A ONE OF A KIND ORIGINAL PROTOTYPE
It is possibly the latest build of Tengen Tetris before the legal action commenced.

The label reads "Tetris Property of TENGEN INC. #4 Prototype:"

The game is housed in a modified Duck Hunt Cartridge. The EPROMs are protected with a thick tape and the cartridge is glued together to prevent piracy and or duplication.

I will NOT attempt to open this cart for pictures of the board for fear it will destroy the prototype altogether. Don't even ask.

Auction Here

For coffee and tea lovers torn over what to drink in the morning, you may never have to choose again: scientists have brewed a tea made from the leaves of the coffee plant. They're calling it the coffee tea leaf. Behold the future, friends. More

Did you know that the UN declared 2013 the "International Year of Quinoa"? It seems like the nutty, nutritious grain is everywhere these days, and the United Nations wants to take it even further, expanding knowledge and production of quinoa in countries suffering from food insecurity. More

Former NFL star Jason Taylor was so injured (and yet still playing every week) that for a period of two years, the 6'6" 240-pound linebacker couldn't lift his kids into bed. So how did he play? Shots to kill the pain and then more shots to kill the pain of the first shots. And so on. Until he almost had to have his leg amputated.

The trainer rushed to Taylor's house. Taylor thought he was overreacting. The trainer told him they were immediately going to the hospital. A test kit came out. Taylor's blood pressure was so high that the doctors thought the test kit was faulty. Another test. Same crazy numbers. Doctors demanded immediate surgery. Taylor said absolutely not, that he wanted to call his wife and his agent and the famed Dr. James Andrews for a second opinion. Andrews also recommended surgery, and fast. Taylor said, fine, he'd fly out in owner Daniel Snyder's private jet in the morning. Andrews said that was fine but that he'd have to cut off Taylor's leg upon arrival. Taylor thought he was joking. Andrews wasn't. Compartment syndrome. Muscle bleeds into the cavity, causing nerve damage. Two more hours, and Taylor would have had one fewer leg. Fans later sent him supportive notes about their own compartment syndrome, many of them in wheelchairs.

Taylor's reaction?

"I was mad because I had to sit out three weeks," he says. "I was hot."

He had seven to nine inches of nerve damage.

"The things we do," he explains. "Players play. It is who we are. We always think we can overcome."

At the New Yorker, Reeves Wiedeman reminds us that the NFL is unlikely to change because so much of what happens with injuries is hidden from view.

As we watch a game that we know is dangerous, we soothe ourselves with the idea that these men must be aware of the risks, too; that they are being well compensated to take on those risks; and that, at least when they're on the field, in front of the cameras, they are living the dream that we all craved as kids, and they're having fun.

But what we can take from this story, and from the fact that, on the surface, this weekend's games were filled with such excitement, is the fact that so much of football's barbarism takes place beyond our vision and behind closed doors.

(thx, meg)

Tags: football   Jason Taylor   medicine   NFL   sports