Russian Sledges

Some of the most interesting butterfly wing pendants I’ve ever found. Most of these were not much on design. It was enough just to put a little slice of iridescent wing under glass.  But some of these are really transcendent. Look at the far left one, how they used a background wing with contrasting white spots to give the effect of clouds. And the one second to right looks like the moth is flying through Aurora Borealis.

From Left to Right:

c1930 Butterfly Wing Clouds Pendant, 14K (sold)
c1930 Butterfly Wing Pendant, 14K, $250
c1930 Butterfly Wing Aurora Borealis Pendant, $265
c1930 Butterfly Wing Pendant, Silver, $165

Listen, as a father of daughters, I'm really against this kind of behavior, this kind of treatment of women. The kind where they get hurt or they can't vote or we don't give any money to them. You know the kind I'm talking about. The kind I don't want my daughters to experience, and then I just sort of extrapolate out from there.

It didn't always used to be this way. I used to only have sons.

Read more As A Father Of Daughters, I Think We Should Treat All Women Like My Daughters at The Toast.

Life-long NFL football fan Steve Almond recently wrote a book called Against Football in which he details why he is no longer watching the game he loves. Ian Crouch talked with Almond for the New Yorker.

Any other year, Steve Almond would have seen the play. But, after forty years of fandom, he's quit the N.F.L. In his new book, "Against Football," Almond is plain about what he considers the various moral hazards of the game: "I happen to believe that our allegiance to football legitimizes and even fosters within us a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, and homophobia."

This part resonated most with me:

Even a casual N.F.L. fan can recognize that this is a particularly opportune time for a Raiders fan to stop watching football. The team is terrible. I asked Almond about that. "If the Raiders were really good, I might not have written the book," he said. "How fucked up is that? It's true, I love them. I see those colors, and it's me." For Almond, his struggle to confront his own hypocrisy is exactly the point: proof of football's insidiousness, of its ominous power.

"Football somehow hits that Doritos bliss point," he told me. "It's got the intellectual allure of all these contingencies and all this strategy, but at the same time it is so powerfully connecting us to the intuitive joys of childhood, that elemental stuff: Can you make a miracle? Can you see the stuff that nobody else sees? And most of us can't, but we love to see it. And I don't blame people for wanting to see it. I love it, and I'm going to miss it."

I've been a steadfast fan of NFL football for the past 15 years. Most weekends I'd catch at least two or three games on TV. Professional football lays bare all of the human achievement + battle with self + physical intelligence + teamwork stuff I love thinking about in a particularly compelling way. But for a few years now, the cons have been piling up in my conscience: the response to head injuries, the league's nonprofit status, the homophobia, and turning a blind eye to the reliance on drugs (PEDs and otherwise). And the final straw: the awful terrible inhuman way the league treats violence against women.

It's overwhelming. Enough is enough. I dropped my cable subscription a few months ago and was considering getting it again to watch the NFL, but I won't be doing that. Pro football, I love you, but we can't see each other anymore. And it's definitely you, not me. Call me when you grow up.

Update: Chuck Klosterman recently tackled (*groan*) this issue in the NY Times Magazine: Is It Wrong to Watch Football?

My (admittedly unoriginal) suspicion is that the reason we keep having this discussion over the ethics of football is almost entirely a product of the sport's sheer popularity. The issue of concussions in football is debated exhaustively, despite the fact that boxing -- where the goal is to hit your opponent in the face as hard as possible -- still exists. But people care less about boxing, so they worry less about the ethics of boxing. Football is the most popular game in the United States and generates the most revenue, so we feel obligated to worry about what it means to love it. Well, here's what it means: We love something that's dangerous. And I can live with that.

Ta-Nehisi Coates quit watching back in 2012 after Junior Seau died.

I'm not here to dictate other people's morality. I'm certainly not here to call for banning of the risky activities of consenting adults. And my moral calculus is my own. Surely it is a man's right to endanger his body, and just as it is my right to decline to watch. The actions of everyone in between are not my consideration.

Same here. I don't feel any sense of judgment or righteousness about this. Just the personal loss of a hobby I *really* enjoyed. (via @campbellmiller & @Godzilla07)

Tags: Chuck Klosterman   football   Ian Crouch   NFL   sports   Steve Almond   Ta-Nehisi Coates

Arvo Pärt showing off his chicken. 

Happy Birthday, Arvo Pärt!

In his ongoing Flux Machine project, artist Kevin Weir turns archival photographs from the Library of Congress into wonderfully bizarre animated GIFs.

GIFs by Kevin Weir

via Colossal

The Satanic Temple, best known for its offer to build a monument to Satan...

Cliff House is a design concept for a five-story home that hangs off the face of a cliff. Entry to the modular structure is through the top floor garage, and the house is anchored to the cliff by steel pins. The Cliff House concept was designed by Modscape, an Australian company that specializes in prefabricated structures.

images via Modscape

via Inhabitat

A Comet Foreshadows Wars, De Naturæ Diuinis Characterismis, 1575

Fantasy Map: Mock-Up Boston MBTA Map Spotted in LA for Filming

Posted by Seiji Tanaka on his Twitter account, here’s a fictional MBTA map at an LA Metro station for film/TV shooting. The map is at the fictional “Rockwater” station on the equally fictional Yellow Line (replacing the real world Orange Line).

We’ve covered fictional transit maps from TV shows and movies before (this weird DC Metro map from the TV show “Leverage” springs to mind), but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one where the prop designers have just downloaded and edited the official map, which is obviously what has happened here. What’s more, it’s been edited really badly.

The blue water and white background of the official map has been removed and the whole map has been placed on a grey/beige background instead… but all the white boxes behind bus route numbers and white keylines around the route lines that were used to separate them from other elements are still in place. Which means there’s a lot of weird, random white elements on the map for no apparent reason. There are also ferry routes, but no water for them to sail across.

Most of the commuter rail routes have been removed, but not all of the stations: Yawkey is just floating in the middle of the map by itself, for example, and interchange stations still retain their extra “blob” for commuter rail platforms.

The real-life Blue line is now Purple, the Green Line is now Blue (with all sorts of branch name errors) and the Orange Line is now Yellow. This line has also had all of its station names changed, mostly to very un-Bostonian names, like “San Jacomo” and “Cabrerra”. Is this the MBTA or Grand Theft Auto? To me, this suggests that this part of the map might feature a little more prominently in whatever scenes it is featured in.

Yes, I know that these maps tend to appear fleetingly in the background of whatever show they’re used in, so it’s a little unfair to subject them to the same scrutiny as a real transit map, but this one struck me as particularly odd, seeing as it’s so directly and obviously based off the official map (it even has the crossed-out station icon for Government Center).

P.S. Anyone know what TV show/movie this prop is from?

Curiosity was piqued across the games and museum communities last May when the Victoria & Albert Museum announced their first games designer in residence. Now games designer Sophia George has unveiled her first project in the residency, which transforms a vivid Victorian textile into an iPad experience.

Called “Strawberry Thief” after the 1883 William Morris work it explores, George unveiled the game last month at the Dare ProtoPlay festival in Dundee, Scotland. George decided, as part of the V&A’s task to reinterpret British art from the 1500-1900 galleries, to concentrate on the Arts and Crafts Movement, specifically Morris. In collaboration with the V&A, V&A Dundee, and Albertay University, her “Strawberry Thief” deconstructs the botanical pattern into a tablet game where you fly as one of the fruit-stealing birds to draw and color the screen with picked up flowers. BBC Scotland’s science correspondent Kenneth Macdonald got a preview of the game, earlier this month, showing the beauty of the Morris art replicated digitally, with gently soaring music against the simple gameplay.

Later this year, it’s planned that the game will be available for free. Meanwhile, you can check out the build progress on George’s website. The density of the details in the textile and wallpaper designs by William Morris can be hard to mentally break down, but the “Strawberry Thief” looks promising as encouraging a real appreciation for how the fantasy in floral unfolds. Perhaps if it’s a success more museums will invite game designers into their collections, as while it can be a novelty to turn art into a game, it’s even more interesting when the game environment is giving a better understanding of the original work.

Read more about “Strawberry Thief” and see the game’s development at Sophia George’s site.

Looking through the TECHknitting list of posts, I've found some which were finished but never posted. Here's one on smocking. Pretty, and useful, too Smocking on knitting is very pretty. It also has the wonderful property of narrowing fabric without having to use decreases or any shaping at all.  So, not only can you make very pretty sweaters with smocking, but you can use smocking to

Binge drinking is typically thought of as a college activity, but in some states, it's popular with older adults as well.

A map created by Ramiro Gomez and posted on Reddit shows the states where binge drinking among people age 26 and above is most common (the data comes from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and Bloomberg):

As the map shows, more than 30% of adults in North Dakota and South Dakota admitted to binge drinking during the previous month. Those in surrounding states had high rates of binge drinking, as well.

Utah — which has a high population of Mormons compared to the rest of the U.S. — ranked low, as did North Caroline and Tennessee.

North Dakota is also one of the biggest consumers of beer in the U.S., and Utah usually ranks low when it comes to alcohol consumption.

Binge drinking is commonly defined as drinking five or more drinks on the same occasion.

SEE ALSO: Here Are The Drunkest Countries In The World [MAP]

Join the conversation about this story »

Several communities in Massachusetts sustained damage Saturday afternoon as a slow-moving series of thunderstorms moved through the commonwealth prompting a tornado warning and a prolonged severe weather watch.

sushiesque posted a photo:

pattern: shop.grainlinestudio.com/collections/bottoms/products/mar...

main fabric: kokka echino solids linen/cotton
pocket fabric: heather ross far far away unicorn

sushiesque posted a photo:

pattern: shop.grainlinestudio.com/products/maritime-shorts

Tinder is a great way to find hookups romance near you, but it still relies on you and your potential partner finding each other mutually attractive. Since you can't always rely on that, why not boost your odds—say, with a robotic finger that can "like" up to 900 Tinderers per hour?

Read more...

From Harvard’s announcement about a September 15th event:

How Boston Magazine apparently interpreted Harvard’s release:

* A conversation with feminist protest art collective Pussy Riot (harvard.edu)
* Pussy Riot will be joined by scholar Woodrow Wilson (bostonmagazine.com)

- h/t Jim McGrath

Expand

So hot right now: white people showing support for white cops who kill unarmed black people. The latest group to hop on this bandwagon is New York City public school teachers who, after expressly being told to refrain from wearing pro-cop shirts to the first days of school, are going to go ahead ahead and keep wearing NYPD shirts, anyway.

The teachers' "protest," according to DNAInfo, comes on the heels of an anti-police brutality rally presided over by Al Sharpton. Sharpton, like most people who agree that death is an inappropriate punishment for suspicion of selling loosie cigarettes, thought that the death of Eric Garner in the hands of New York City police officers was kind of fucking terrible, and that maybe cops should be less murdery toward unarmed black people. Some teachers disagreed with the union's support, swarming to pro-cop Facebook groups like Thank You NYPD.

Eager to #NOTALLCOPS a terrible tragedy, the educators in Staten Island and Queens "showed their support" for the NYPD by wearing NYPD shirts to work this week and posting images of them to the aforementioned Facebook group.

Critics of the teachers' protest pointed out that a teacher wearing a pro-police shirt to a classroom full of public school children might send kids who had been victimized or seen victimization by police the message that what teachers really mean by the shirts is fuck you. And so, on Wednesday night, teachers at schools where the protest had gotten legs were told by a union rep via email that teachers should aim to wear neutral clothing that doesn't support one political side or another, and that continuing to wear the NYPD shirts to work could result in punishment for the teachers.

Whether or not you believe that teachers protesting on behalf of another group of people seems an odd hill to die on for a group of people who have plenty to protest on behalf of themselves, or that this whole protest is in incredibly poor taste, one thing is clear: every teacher who wore those ugly shirts to work is definitely, beyond a shadow of a doubt guilty of a fashion crime. We need Joan Rivers now more than ever.

Overall, 550 shirts reading "New York's Brightest Support New York's Finest" were ordered in the runup to the first week of school, and humanity continues to be puzzling and terrible.

Images via Facebook

Original Source

Feijo estimated that as many as one of ten buyers in Cambridge are parents hunting for condos or townhomes for their children, some of whom aren’t even out of high school yet. He noted running into one eager father, who, having just completed a tour of Harvard with his 14-year-old daughter, proceeded to tour a million-dollar townhouse in anticipation of her eventual admission at the university. Other parents are buying for their kids on a budget, looking for something safe and convenient, rather spectacular. Coldwell Banker’s Rich Hornblower just sold a one-bedroom condo in Brighton to parents from the New York area, who bought the 747-square-foot unit for their daughter attending graduate school.

I've been a fan of Twitter for five years now, and a vocal Twitter advocate. But over the last year, I've become less and less enchanted with Twitter, to the point where I've thought about quitting the service multiple times. My complaint has nothing to do with advertising in the timeline—they've gotta make money somehow—but with the normalization of Twitter discussion. It's become a boring stew of self-promotion, self-righteous finger-wagging over the latest media event, pointless arguments that never change minds, and inane chatter about television shows. I roll my eyes at Twitter a lot these days.

Part of the reason I've not quit Twitter yet is that I still believe in the simplicity of the service: Short bulletins, arranged in strict chronological order, amounting to a real-time view of how thousands of people see and understand the world. I've harbored the suspicion that if I unfollowed a number of people who I now follow—especially the media types, who are the most infuriating—I could remake my timeline into something worth my attention again. There must still be people out there in the world who are intelligently toying with the formal constraints of Twitter, who have something interesting to say, who don't want to bludgeon the world to death with their boring opinions?

Today, though, it occurs to me that maybe it's time to quit Twitter once and for all. Twitter can't stop talking about Twitter—specifically, they're discussing this Wall Street Journal overview of a presentation by Twitter CFO Anthony Noto:

Twitter’s timeline is organized in reverse chronological order, a delivery system that has not changed since the product was created eight years ago and one that some early adopters consider sacred to the core Twitter experience. But this “isn’t the most relevant experience for a user,” Noto said. Timely tweets can get buried at the bottom of the feed if the user doesn’t have the app open, for example. “Putting that content in front of the person at that moment in time is a way to organize that content better.”

Noto does clarify that chronological order isn't going completely away: "Individual users are not going to wake up one day and find their timeline completely ranked by an algorithm.” But that's not enough of a promise for me. If Twitter fucks with the chronological order of the service, I will be done with Twitter. If I couldn't trust Twitter to provide me with real-time updates of protests in Ferguson, or the Occupy protests, or the Boston Marathon bombing, I would have no use for Twitter. I can find some other way to hang out with friends. I already belong to one social network that whitewashes the news and churns out a repetitive slurry of feel-good posts; I don't need another one.

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Welp. Here's another depressing story about a woman who tried to speak up against workplace sexist bullshit.

Read more...

A few days ago, UK industrial designer and jeweler Mat Brown shared with the Reddit community his ingenious idea for a set of resin inlaid chestnut shelves. Starting with a cracked piece of chestnut wood he mixed standard resin with some mysterious glow-in-the-dark powder he bought on Ebay which he used to fill in the gaps. And voilà, instant glowing furniture with unknown side effects. Seriously though, they look amazing, and you can see his fully detailed tutorial over on his blog. Brown also makes lots of funky jewelry which he sells over on Etsy.