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Fans of Randall Munroe's XKCD strip had a bit of a shock this afternoon, when the long-running, auto-updating comic "Time" apparently came to its conclusion.

The comic, which started on March 25, initially showed a girl and a boy (Megan and Cueball) sitting on a beach, with the alt text—that is, the yellow-boxed text that appears when you mouse over the comic—of "Wait for it." Soon it became apparent that the comic was updating automatically—initially every half-hour, then after 120 hours, every hour.

At first, the animation showed the two figures building an elaborate sand castle. Then it turned into much more.

According to the Explain XKCD wiki:

The unfolding story that it tells is set in the far future, at a time when the Straits of Gibraltar have long been blocked, and the Mediterranean has largely dried up, leaving only a much smaller, hypersaline sea behind. Megan and Cueball, living on the shores of this sea, notice one day while building a huge sand castle that its level is starting to rise, and set off on a journey of exploration to try and find out why. Eventually they discover that the Straits of Gibraltar have once again been breached, and the Mediterranean Basin is being flooded. They run back to their home, assemble their village, and board a makeshift raft. Megan has now established that the sea has risen too far, and that they will have to remain on the raft for the duration of the flood.

The tale ramped up in recent days, particularly as Megan and Cueball ran home to warn others about the flood. (The alt text helpfully changed to "RUN.") Once they reached the village and got everyone on the raft, the alt text changed again to "...." That led some on the forum thread, which has grown to over 50,000 posts, to anticipate another change.

That change came today, which also marked the occasion of that 50,000th post. The raft struck shore, and the villagers disembarked and strode off into the woods. Whereupon the words "The End" appeared both in the image and the alt text. The words later disappeared from the image.

Some speculated this was all a case of nerd-sniping. Maybe that's the case. But Munroe clearly paid enormous attention to detail—as did his community, which was able to deduce by the night sky in the comic that the story was taking place in April of the year 13291. So it seems fairer to consider "Time" a story well told, well, in time.

One day, perhaps, the story of Time will be taken up again. In the meantime, see the entire animated story for yourself.

Munroe image courtesy of Wikimedia. Comic images courtesy of XKCD

If you're new to New York City, simply visiting for vacation, or, if you're a born-and-raised New Yorker that still can't point out any other states on a blank map besides Florida and Jersey, then you might also mistakenly believe what the MTA subway map tells you about the city—that it lacks any realistic level of fidelity and Manhattan is the blown-up silhouette of a Motorala RAZR:

Image via

The U.K.'s Max Roberts, a mapmaker and critic, has created a map that sees its simplifying problem and then solves it by taking a similar approach, but to a much greater degree. The map heads in the direction of a diagram and away from a map trying to represent geographic features. It may be the most lucid reinterpretation of the New York City subway map I've seen yet:

Click on the map to enlarge. 

"A map that pretends to be geographical but isn’t quite correct is potentially misleading, implying to people greater distances than exist in reality,” Roberts told FastCoExist.

It could actually be a success if the MTA were ever to a adopt design such as Roberts, but I think it's rather unlikely. The amount of money it takes to print out a map update when it needs to is enough for the authority to avoid risks with such a concept. Remember that $250,000 typo the MTA incurred back in March?

@danstuckey

The head of Twitter’s business in the UK has responded to concerns that the service is not doing enough to help users report abuse, after a UK-based equal rights campaigner received repeated rape threats this week.

Appearing to respond to a petition that says Twitter’s “current reporting system is below required standards,” Twitter UK General Manager Tony Wang said in a series of tweets that the company “take(s) online abuse seriously” and will “suspend accounts that, once reported to us, are found to be in breach of our rules.”

In addition to providing links to Twitter’s webpages that provide help to users who believe they have been abused on the service, Wang revealed that the company is working on new ways to make reporting abuse easier.

Twitter currently includes a “Report Tweet” button on its iOS and Web apps, but users on other versions can only report abuse by visiting the offending user’s profile page. That can be tricky to find for those who are not well versed with the way Twitter works, or are perhaps in a state of panic from receiving abusive messages.

Also, we’re testing ways to simplify reporting, e.g. within a Tweet by using the “Report Tweet” button in our iPhone app and on mobile web.

— Tony Wang (@TonyW) July 27, 2013

Wang’s comments come after more than 11,000 people signed a Change.org petition calling for the ‘report tweet’ button to be made available across the entire Twitter platform after campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez was deluged with rape threats.

“It is time Twitter took a zero tolerance policy on abuse, and learns to tell the difference between abuse and defence. Women standing up to abuse should not fear having their accounts cancelled because Twitter fail to see the issue at hand,” the petition says.

Criado-Perez received the abuse this week after successfully leading a campaign to bring greater female representation on banknotes in the UK, as the BBC reports.

Wednesday’s announcement that author Jane Austen’s image would appear on £10 notes was said to have kicked off the messages. Criado-Perez reported the incidents to the police, revealing that she received ”about 50 abusive tweets an hour for about 12 hours.”

Her local MP Stella Creasy told the BBC she was “furious” that Twitter had not stepped to deal with the issue.

Wang said, via Twitter, that the company was unable to discuss the specifics of the incident because “we don’t comment on individual accounts.” That position was echoed in a statement that Twitter provided to the BBC.

Headline image via Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

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by Alex Balk

“Where I grew up, it’s okay to have extra pounds. It means someone’s lovin’ you, cooking for you at home," says a man who moved to New York and realized that just doesn't cut it here. Manhattan men are now the second skinniest in the nation, for which you probably have to credit Mike Bloomberg and chopped salads.

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The post Manhattan Men Thin Because Nobody Loves Them appeared first on The Awl.

by Choire Sicha

We didn't learn that much from the massive "Economic Impacts of Tax Expenditures" study that gets a big spread in the Times today, except: if you want them to be rich, have your children in Seattle, Salt Lake City or New York City, and don't have them in Atlanta, Miami or Memphis. But we already knew that.

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The post Study: America Immobile appeared first on The Awl.

Silicon Valley has no time for the dictates of supply and demand: if a programmer wants to eat at one of San Francisco's most exclusive restaurants, he's going to get that fucking table by exploiting the place's website, because fuck you, that's why.

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If there's one thing you should know about Google's Director of Open Marriage Engineering, Eric Schmidt, it's that he loves to fuck. He's also following a select, interesting assortment of people on Instagram, and by interesting I mean a lot of models and women in swimwear.

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Amid this hellish, malarial rant about innovation, or something, startup founder Francis Pedraza says one interesting thing: Snapchat is so simple, even the destitute can use it! We all need to think about the way "tech people" view the rest of us.

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Reviews for Blue Jasmine, Woody Allen's latest film, are finally coming in, and the critics can't help but notice Allen's supposed contempt for the city he shot he shot the film in.  Consider The New York Times' review, which outlines San Francisco's place as an humdrum refuge for New York's down-and-out elite:

Jasmine, née Jeanette, having reinvented herself, had risen to become a member of New York’s elite but, with everything gone, has come to San Francisco to move in with her sister, Ginger. For Jasmine this isn’t a comedown, it’s a catastrophe — everything is. When she first walks into Ginger’s apartment, she stops dead, as if paralyzed by its unspeakable ordinariness.

It’s hard to know if Mr. Allen shares Jasmine’s shock at Ginger’s place. (Mere mortals will note the ample square footage, natural light and fireplace.) With a series of sharp contrapuntal flashbacks that move forward in time — Hal and Jasmine in their empty new Park Avenue apartment and then later presiding over a dinner bathed in light so burnished golden calf must have been on the menu — Mr. Allen illustrates just how drastically she’s been humbled.

Gawker takes it a bit further:

Jasmine's presence in Ginger's modest apartment quickly grates, as Jasmine dispenses unwanted advice about Ginger's various working class boyfriends and crummy surroundings. Among other things, Blue Jasmine is a weird, inexplicable portrait of San Francisco. Allen shoots a series of throw-away touristy scenes and then a seedy grocery store, a clinical dentist's office, and nondescript restaurants. His disdain for the West Coast is obvious, but his uninspired indifference to San Francisco in Blue Jasmine is far less amusing than, say, the playful contempt of Los Angeles he put on in Annie Hall. In Blue Jasmine, San Francisco is painted loosely and tritely, and it suffers in comparison to Allen's careful portraits of New York.

Mind you, those crummy surroundings are the Mission District.  The so-called "modest apartment" sits behind the old Force of Habit record shop at 20th and Lexington--and would assuredly fetch three-plus thousand dollars a month if put on the rental market today.  However, it's widely known that Allen chose the significantly shittier corner of 14th and South Van Ness to act as the apartment's exterior location, suggesting he intentionally set to make the neighborhood look grodier than everyone knows it actually is.

It's staged as a clever, if not slightly dishonest way to introduce viewers to the city: dumping the fine-looking Jasmine out of a cab onto a four-lane urban freeway littered with crummy car lots, opposed to tree-shaded, single-lane street the apartment sits on in reality. (As the Times describes the scene, "[As] she stands with her monogrammed luggage on a nondescript San Francisco sidewalk, she looks frightened, alone — like someone who could benefit from some kindness. Instead, she waves off a stranger and, posing a question that’s as existential as it is practical, demands, “Where am I, exactly?”).  Surely this is set to depict Jasmine's unmistakeable fall from grace as definitively as possible, but the reviews suggest the joke is on San Francisco.

Blue Jasmine opens today in New York and Los Angeles.  San Franciscans will have to wait for a limited release at the Clay Theatre on August 2nd.

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Previously on Uptown Almanac

• Trailer For Woody Allen's Upcoming Movie Shot in SF, Blue Jasmine, Released
• Woody Watch: Woody 'Pops-Up' at 14th and South Van Ness
• Woody Allen's Latest Film Starring Louis C.K. and Alec Baldwin to be Set in the Mission

The UC Davis cop who notoriously pepper-sprayed student protestors in 2011 is now seeking worker's compensation for "psychiatric injury," and Occupy protestors are planning to show him their support during these emotionally trying times. [ more › ]

A view of the balloon launch, looking north towards the Metropolitan Life Tower, which can be seen jutting up in the background. The Met Tower was the world's tallest building in 1911.

Philadelphia retailer John Wanamaker turned an abandoned train station in Philadelphia into the lavish department bearing his name in 1876, just in time for America's 100th anniversary.  He would become one of Philadelphia's largest employers, with 5,000 people working in the store, "the most valuable piece of property of its size in the city." [source]

Meanwhile, in New York City, when shoppers weren't flocking to Ladies Mile, they headed to A.T Stewart's equally grand 'Iron Palace' department store in Astor Place, with over thirty departments specializing in every sort of modern necessity, making it one of the largest stores of any kind in America.

Stewart's store was located on Fourth Avenue between 9th and 10th Streets and was called the 'Iron Palace' as it was New York's largest cast-iron building at the time.  (But not the first; that title goes to its neighbor, the American Bible Society building, at 51 Astor Place.)

Below: The original Wanamaker's between 9th and 10th Streets. The building no longer exists.



It would take two decades for Wanamaker to make his way to New York, eventually buying up an old Iron Palace in 1896 and reopening it as New York's first Wanamakers.

But a man who had filled an entire train station in Philadelphia would not simply be content with one lavish store; across the street, between 8th and 9th, he built another in 1902, using one of the world's most revered architects -- Daniel Burnham, who had just completed work on the Flatiron Building.  Customers could go between the buildings using a fanciful 'bridge of progress'.


That is all, of course, to set this scene for the curious publicity stunt which occurred on the rooftop of Wanamaker's on July 8, 1911.  For three days, a large hydrogen balloon (48 feet in diameter) sat tethered upon the rooftop of the new building, filling up with copious amounts of gas for a journey to Philadelphia -- with a planned landing near Wanamaker's other store.

In 1911, that old train-station store would be replaced with a new Wanamaker's in Philadelphia's Center City, also built by Burnham.  No better way to grab headlines for his new store in Philadelphia than to float a gigantic eye-catching object from one store to the other!

The balloon (called the Wanamaker No. 1), imported from Paris, was launched at 6 pm and gracefully floated over the city, across the Hudson, fadeing into the mists of Weehawken.

Unfortunately for the balloon's two pilots, things went immediately awry, the balloon being a tricky one to control.  Instead of floating southwest, it headed due north.  After an hour and a half of wandering blindly through the clouds, the balloon ungraciously came down -- in Nyack, New York.

But it wasn't considered a failure by any means. Wanamaker's wanted a publicity stunt and got one.  The launch made the front page of newspapers.  For a moment, the whole region seemed transfixed.  "Crowds turned out to gaze at the big airship as it passed over the Hudson River villages," crowed the New York Times.

Some even claimed this was the beginning of a new phase in New York travel.  Rooftops could regularly be used to launch airships of all sorts.  "This is the first step towards making the roofs of the Wanamaker buildings in New York and Philadelphia into permanent aerial stations," claimed the Evening World.  "Landing platforms and hangars for balloons and aeroplanes are to be built on the roofs of the department stores in both cities."

Not to be outdone, the following month, Gimbels Department Store would stage a marvelous airplane race over the streets of Manhattan.

By the way, Mr. Wanamaker wasn't even in the country when all this happened.  He rolled into town the following week aboard the White Star liner Oceanic, having celebrated his 73rd birthday in style by traveling to England and meeting King George and Queen Mary.

The original Wanamaker's building is no longer there, but the south building, the one designed by Burnham and the one from which the balloon was launched, still exists today as the home of K-Mart.

Below: That same week, one could run into the store below the balloon and purchase this swell Victrola. This ad is from the July 10, 1911 issue of the Evening World



Pictures courtesy the Library of Congress.

SafeSearch is off, ladies. [ more › ]

On Friday March 28, 1947, at 6:55 a.m., Bronx bus driver William Cimillo got into his bus to start his daily route. But then something happened. The open road called to him. He said later that he was overcome by "that old spring-time urge." He started driving, and he didn't stop until he reached Florida, where he was found four days later at a race track. During the entire trip, no one ever asked him why he was driving an empty New York bus down the highway.

The bus company filed charges of grand larceny against him, but the public rallied in support of him, feeling that Cimillo simply gave in to that "yearning for escape" that everyone feels at one time or another. So eventually the company forgave him and put him back on the job, on the condition that he was on probation for one year.

Read more about Cimillo's adventure here, here, and here.

Detroit, New Orleans, Oakland... some of the safer places in America to live! Sure, big cities might have more murders per capita... but residents in large cities are *MUCH* safer when it comes to injury deaths than those living in more rural parts of America, according to a new study in The Annals of Emergency Medicine.
"Cars, guns and drugs are the unholy trinity causing the majority of injury deaths . . . Although the risk of homicide is higher in big cities, the risk of unintentional injury death is 40 percent higher in the most rural areas than in the most urban. And overall, the rate of unintentional injury dwarfs the risk of homicide, with the rate of unintentional injury more than 15 times that of homicide among the entire population."

Back in June, the Independent broke a huge story about a scandal whereby the UK Serious Organised Crime Agency sat on evidence of widespread use of phone-hacking and other dirty tricks by rich people, top-flight law-firms, telecoms companies and blue-chip firms.

Today, they've published an update: the list of companies that routinely engaged in criminal behavior is longer than earlier thought -- including pharma companies and many others -- and what's more, SOCA hid this information from the Metropolitan Police force, effectively insulating these top firms and toffs from any consequence for their criminality.

Following weeks of damaging revelations in The Independent, Soca finally bowed to political pressure earlier this week and privately released to MPs the historical details which its investigators ignored for years.

However, the agency has classified the material as secret to safeguard individuals’ human rights and protect the “financial viability of major organisations by tainting them with public association with criminality”...

...Illegal practices identified by Soca investigators went well beyond the relatively simple crime of voicemail hacking and also included police corruption, computer hacking and perverting the course of justice.

Meanwhile, in an extraordinary joint admission on the Soca website, Mr Pearce and Commander Neil Basu of the Metropolitan Police admit the agency sat for years on evidence of criminality, until it was finally forced to act in May 2011 by former British Army intelligence officer Ian Hurst whose computer was allegedly hacked by corrupt private investigators.

Exclusive: 'Bigger than phone hacking' - Soca sat on blue-chip dirty tricks evidence for years [Tom Harper/The Independent]

(via Beyond the Beyond)

How DC Contracts Work. Mark Waid, author of Superman: Birthright (drawn on heavily for the recent film Man of Steel), "explains how professionals are generally compensated for working on company-owned characters".

Photo via ArtBrom/Flickr

A federal judge in New York City granted a subpoena last month that effectively allows Chevron access to nine years of email metadata (i.e. names, time stamps, login info, detailed location data but not content) of any and all parties involved in litigation against the oil company, Mother Jones reports. That means activists, lawyers, witnesses and journalists who are even remotely part of the case against the oil giant. Chevron has asked Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (which owns Hotmail) for names tied to accounts and user location every time he/she logged in.

The oil company is being accused of drilling in Ecuador and leaving behind a trail of toxic sludge and leaky pipelines. The lawsuit was filed in 1993 and has been going on since then. Chevron is still crying wolf, saying that this is part of a major conspiracy against the company. Now, what could a massive oil corporation do that would piss someone off? They have lost this trial before and have refused to pay $9 billion in damages to those they owe it to–they are now expected to pay $19 billion.

The fact is however, that this is a corporation that has just gained access to nine years (and that’s a lot of years) of email metadata; that is personal, private email metadata of individuals involved in a lawsuit. Access was granted on the basis that it did not go against the First Amendment–which protects the right to speak anonymously–seeing as Americans were not the people targeted. This American exceptionalism–both in the case of PRISM and in this lawsuit–reveals an uncomfortable truth: the privacy and rights of every other individual on the planet are up for grabs in America’s newest role as the world’s largest Peeping Tom.

In fact, Kaplan was wrong. At least two Americans have already been impacted by this access, in direct violation of the First Amendment. More even, the subpoena in question has up to 101 email addresses with only two accounts of the defendants directly involved in the lawsuit, based on information from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Even if Americans weren't involved, though, the idea of an oil company getting to poke around in the background of people who are suing them doesn't sit well. 

It's the latest stage in on-going saga against both Kaplan--who has already been accused of being "Chevron's lackey"–and against privacy for whistleblowers and  journalists in the face of a big, well-moneyed corporation. There's still hope that the Internet will become the great leveler that it was once promised to be, but legislation–and increasingly it looks like it will have to be international legislation–is going to have to catch up first.

@r_aqrabawi
 

All images from Manoug Manougian's private collection.

I recently spoke to Manoug Manougian, the lead engineer of the first Arab space program and founder of the Lebanese Rocket Society. The organization, which briefly catapulted Lebanon into the global space race, was founded in 1961. It was terminated just six years later, in 1967, due to military pressure and the beginning of the Arab-Israeli war.

Manoug was kind enough to send us these photos and clippings from his personal collection that document this forgotten—and incredible—chapter of Lebanese history. He is one of the few people who has preserved evidence of the Lebanese Rocket Society, as most of it was destroyed when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978. 

The image pictured above is a photo of the 1961 launching of the first of the Lebanese Rocket Society's first Cedar 2 rocket, on a military-sanctioned location overlooking the Mediterranean. It was the Society's first stage-2 rocket. 

One year later, in 1962 at the same location in Dbayeh, Lebanon, the Society launched the second of the Cedar 2 Series. From this point on, most of the launches were supervised by army officials, interested parties, and students from the Haigazian University

The launching of the Cedar 2-C, the last of the Cedar 2 series launches, also in 1962. 

Here's a picture of the Cedar 3, a 3-Stage rocket, one of the Society's most successful launches.

That was followed by their single most successful venture, the Cedar 4, that was later placed on special postage stamps commemorating 21 years of Lebanese independence, in 1964. 

The Daily Star, a Lebanese English-language newspaper that's still running today. Most of the articles on the Lebanese Space Race were removed from their archives and destroyed out of fear of the Israeli invasion of 1967. Dated: Monday, 08/05/1966

l'Orient le Jour, a Lebanese French-language newspaper still running today. The article covers the anticipation of the Cedar 7 launch, one of the final Cedars launched under the leadership of Manoug Manougian. Dated: 04/04/1966

A U.S Information Service publication, coverage of one of the most successful launchings of the Lebanese Rocket Society.

Get the whole story here:

Lebanon's Forgotten Space Race: In 1961, Manoug Manougian Launched the Arab World's First Space Program

@r_aqrabawi

We’ve seen marriage proposals via modified Nintendo games before, but most of these put the proposal just after the first level. It’s one thing to have the old man in Zelda present your SO with a ring, but it’s another thing entirely to beat the game before getting on one knee. That’s what [Quinn] forced [Amy] to do when he proposed by modifying the ROM for Contra to display a proposal right before the end credits.

By tearing open a few cartridges, [Quinn] found himself with a bunch of EPROMs and NES cartridge PCBs. After grabbing the Contra ROM off the Internet, [Quinn] edited the game’s end screen to his proposal. This was then burned onto a 1 Megabit EPROM, soldered onto a cartridge, and put into the NES for his now-fiance to play. Once [Amy] and [Quinn] finished the game (without cheating, by the way), [Amy] saw her proposal and [Quinn] pulled out the ring.

Filed under: nintendo hacks

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An unusually sustained heatwave oppresses the UK, as temperatures have climbed above 82 degrees Fahrenheit for 11 days, the longest hot spell since 2006. Roads melt in England and Wales, rail lines buckle in England and Scotland, hospital admissions spike and wildfires burn. Swimming-related, army training and heat-related, deaths have increased. The Met Office currently hold a Level Three Heat Advisory for several regions (Level Four is "National Emergency"), while tabloids indulge in traditional "England is hotter than {exotic place}" headlines.

Though other countries may find these temperatures normal, and have the infrastructure to cope, a "Mintel report in 2008 found that just 0.5% of houses and flats in the UK had any kind of air con."

While English beaches are often crowded, those at the other end of Britain remain quiet. The British summer tradition of the hosepipe ban has not yet taken effect.

When Yahoo! acquired Tumblr in May, panic and promises ensued. Marissa Mayer promised to "not screw it up" and to "let Tumblr be Tumblr." David Karp promised the site wouldn't "turn purple."

Users weren't so convinced—especially considering Yahoo! had just spent $1.1 billion dollars for a blogging platform that was 10 percent porn. Still, Mayer assured the Tumblr community not to worry.

Lo and behold, Tumblr has started cracking down on its porn blogs. Under the new content rules, any blog tagged "adult" will no longer show up on tags, meaning the blogs are unsearchable on Tumblr (or Google). 

What's more, the guidelines note that X-rated blogs that aren't flagged by users could be automatically flagged. In other words, Tumblr isn't deleting pornographic content, but it's making it really hard to find. 

David Karp on the Colbert Report Tuesday said Tumblr was commited to freedom of expression.

When asked about all the "off brand" content on Tumblr this spring, Mayer suggested that young, edgy users were exactly who Yahoo! needed more of. "I think the richness and breadth of content available on Tumblr, even though it may not be as brand safe as what’s on our site, is what’s really exciting and allows us to reach even more users," she said.

The aging brand admitted it purchased Tumblr to help it seem cool again. But you know what's isn't cool? Censorship.

Squeezing out all the scandalous blogs is bound to alienate a lot of those young users the company was trying to court. So why the crackdown? Most likely, it's to placate advertisers. If Yahoo! wants make Tumblr profitable, it needs ad revenue.

Though David Karp once said the idea of ads made his stomach turn, sure enough, branded content started showing up in the Dashboard a couple months ago.

Last month, while at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in France, Karp was singing quite a different tune. He told advertisers there he was honored to be in their company, that they were more talented than anyone at the Tumblr office, and that ads could actually make Tumblr better. But don't worry, nothing's going to change.

The major check against the unreasonable, horrible practices on the part of the TSA is that people who fly are wealthier, on average than people who don't -- and people who fly a lot are wealthier still. That meant that the worst stuff the TSA did was felt disproportionately by people who had a lot of political juice -- people who get listened to. Increasingly, though, rich people can opt out of the worst of TSA treatment by buying voluntary background checks and bypassing the rigmarole of the plebs. Now, the TSA is expanding its Pre-Check program, ensuring that pretty much everyone with any political clout will be spared the worst of it, letting the TSA's treatment for aviation's 99 percent spiral steadily downward, moving from mere Security Theater to Security Grand Guignol.

On a day that feels like 110 degrees (which is hotter than it feels in Death Valley!), New York City broke its nearly two-year record for electric usage. Con Ed says, "Day six of a scorching heat wave in the New York area has pushed electric usage to a new all-time high in Con Edison’s service area today, reaching a peak of 13,214 megawatts (MW) at 2 p.m. The previous all-time peak record was 13,189 MW set on July 22, 2011." You did it! [ more › ]

A SPOOKTACULAR ADVENTURE - Alex Roberts' charming mostly-ghostly obscenity-laden, Choose Your Own Adventure game is just filled to bursting with spooks, ooks, and skeletons.

Photo: SteFou!/Flickr

You probably know by now that the standard American diet is really pretty awful and that people aren't getting enough exercise. Even then, a new study from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington makes for depressing reading. 

The top line message is that for all the rightful bad rap that tobacco smoking gets, factors associated with poor diet now kill far more people each year than does lighting up. Based on stats from 2010, nearly 680,000 people die from their dietary habits, versus just over 465,000 from smoking. 

Now, these figures don't mean that diet or smoking directly are the leading causes of death in the US—that honor goes to heart disease, lung cancer, and road traffic injuries—but they do help illustrate the power, both positive and negative, of our lifestyle choices have when extrapolated to an entire population. 

But the truly awful part comes when you start tallying up the other factors:

• High blood pressure kills nearly 443,000 people.
• High body mass index kills a hair under 364,000.
• Physical inactivity does in 234,000.
• H igh blood sugar roughly 213,600.
• High cholesterol nearly 158,500. 

By comparison, alcohol and drug use kill about 88,600 and 25,400, respectively. Even air pollution—which kills millions globally each year—less of a factor in the US, killing a bit over 100,000 people. 

From the paper, click to enlarge

Add all those factors together along with physical inactivity, and the total reaches around 2 million deaths a year. Now, there's overlap in some of those—poor diet can lead to obesity, which can lead to physical inactivity, which can lead to high blood pressure, which is compounded by smoking, and so on. And to be fair, there are systemic factors as well as personal ones: We've built a society in which we drive everywhere, and fast food still receives the benefits of subsidies.

Even so, the report is pretty dark. By choice, economics, and social situation, far too many people, to put it bluntly, are eating crap and sitting on their asses. 

Big time Red Hook landlord John Quadrozzi Jr. put together a new lease for future tenants of the Gowanus Bay Terminal and, in addition to the expected clauses, he’s added three new requirements. Crain’s reported that these new requirements include tenants prioritizing local hiring, implementing sustainable practices, and supporting neighborhood and industrial advocacy initiatives. As Quadrozzi told Crain’s, “As I see much of the industrial areas around the city disappear, it’s a lack of connection between the industry and community… We need to operate in a more holistic way and make the community part of our business.” Under this new lease, tenants looking to hire can submit a job request form that will look for qualified candidates in the neighborhood. (Red Hook’s unemployment rate was 23 percent in 2010, according to the census.) Currently Quadrozzi leases to about 30 medium and small tenants at the GBX, many of which are… Read More