Patrick KennedyWelcome back, Olympic curling.
Get jazzed: Curling will soon be on TV again in large amounts, the way the snow sports deities intended. For the 2018 Winter Olympics, there’s even more curling—not just because it’s great, but because a new variant has been added to the program, airing before the traditional four-person team curling begins. The first…
Patrick Kennedy#nottheonion
Donald Savastano was a self-employed carpenter eking out a marginal living without retirement savings or health insurance; when he won the $1 million jackpot in New York's "Merry Millionaire" lotto, he could finally afford to see a doctor to check out his long-term sense of unwellness. (more…)
Saudi Arabia is known for its oil and sun-soaked deserts. In a move to secure the kingdom’s financial future, its name could soon become synonymous with renewable energy.
According to the New York Times, Prince Mohammed bin Salman decided that Saudi energy company ACWA Power would spearhead the creation of a $300 million solar farm capable of powering 200,000 homes. And that’s just a drop in the bucket compared to what the Saudi government plans to spend on renewables.
“All the big developers are watching Saudi,” said Jenny Chase, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a market research firm. ... The renewables strategy finally started to take real shape when Khaled al-Falih took over as energy minister in 2016. Mr. Falih made solar and wind a priority for the kingdom, and set up a new unit last year to expedite the work. Much of the staff was drawn from Aramco.
Mr. Shehri, who had worked at Aramco before leading the kingdom’s renewables program, said he faced an “extremely challenging” task. Meeting Saudi Arabia’s targets would require contracts for a series of new facilities to be awarded by the end of 2020. “The only way this was possible,” he said, “was because we have done previous work.”
Saudi Arabia, with its vast oil resources, would seem an unlikely champion for renewables. But the country’s location and climate mean it has plenty of promising sites for solar and wind farms.
By 2019, the Times writes, they’ll have thrown $7 billion at the creation of solar and wind farms. The hope is that this push towards clean energy will be able to provide the kingdom with close to 10% of its internal energy needs, not to mention supplying its citizens with jobs for generations to come.
But there’s a dark side to this story: developing domestic wind and solar power allows Saudi oil companies to export more of their oil.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons
Using LIDAR, a team of researchers in Guatemala has been able to peer underneath the dense jungle to see what the landscape looked like in the time of the Mayans, a civilization which reached its peak between 250-900 A.D. — an x-ray of the forest, if you will. The results are astonishing…they reveal a civilization much larger and more sophisticated than previously thought.
The results suggest that Central America supported an advanced civilization that was, at its peak some 1,200 years ago, more comparable to sophisticated cultures such as ancient Greece or China than to the scattered and sparsely populated city states that ground-based research had long suggested.
In addition to hundreds of previously unknown structures, the LiDAR images show raised highways connecting urban centers and quarries. Complex irrigation and terracing systems supported intensive agriculture capable of feeding masses of workers who dramatically reshaped the landscape.
The potential of LIDAR as a cultural and geological time machine is just starting to be realized. You might remember these LIDAR images of the geology of forested areas in Washington State.
The worst commercial aired during last night’s handegg match was this Dodge Ram ad featuring a snippet of a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. King, of course, was an outspoken critic of capitalism. In fact, later in the very same speech, he railed against this type of advertising. Here’s the audio of that part of his speech overlaid on the Dodge Ram commercial:
Now the presence of this instinct explains why we are so often taken by advertisers. You know, those gentlemen of massive verbal persuasion. And they have a way of saying things to you that kind of gets you into buying. In order to be a man of distinction, you must drink this whiskey. In order to make your neighbors envious, you must drive this type of car. In order to be lovely to love you must wear this kind of lipstick or this kind of perfume. And you know, before you know it, you’re just buying that stuff. That’s the way the advertisers do it…
It often causes us to live above our means. It’s nothing but the drum major instinct. Do you ever see people buy cars that they can’t even begin to buy in terms of their income? You’ve seen people riding around in Cadillacs and Chryslers who don’t earn enough to have a good T-Model Ford. But it feeds a repressed ego.
You can listen to King’s speech in its entirety here:
(thx, hyder)
Tags: advertising audio Martin Luther King TV videoPatrick KennedyI really want to believe this is fake, but deep inside I know it's very real and it all terrifies me so.
Bauer Media's Teen Boss is a new quarterly magazine, launched last summer for "Gen-Z entrepreneurs" aged 8-15 who want to pursue careers as "influencers." (more…)
Patrick KennedyOOF. Haven't played HQ in months honestly, but yeah. Fuck Peter Thiel.
A mere day ago, HQ was the innocuous app that people flocked to twice a day to play trivia for money. Things have changed. Recode reports that HQ, which was founded by Vine alums, is raising a round of capital. The round is led by Founders Fund, the venture fund founded by Peter Thiel. Thiel, of …
Continue reading “People are tweeting #DeleteHQ after Peter Thiel’s fund was named as an investor”
A mere day ago, HQ was the innocuous app that people flocked to twice a day to play trivia for money. Things have changed. Recode reports that HQ, which was founded by Vine alums, is raising a round of capital. The round is led by Founders Fund, the venture fund founded by Peter Thiel.
Patrick KennedyThat double-double will get ya.
Tim Hortons might have over 500 locations in the United States, but I tells ya, it's a Canadian thing.
Patrick Kennedy(A heavily nostalgic-driven) co-sign!
For me, this game is forever tied to getting the SNES for Christmas the year it came out and playing it nonstop over the holiday break.
Data artist Josh Begley edited together a 5m30s video of every concussion suffered in an NFL game this year. I was barely able to get through this…I had to pause a couple of times. From an article about the video at The Intercept:
The NFL has done a masterful job at mainstreaming the violence of the game, so that fans and spectators don’t feel too bad about what’s actually happening out there. No single word has protected the NFL from the true costs of this violence more than “concussion.” That word puts a protective barrier between us and what’s really going on out on the field.
It’s not a headache. It’s not “getting your bell rung.” You don’t have a bell. It’s a traumatic brain injury. Every single concussion is a new traumatic brain injury. In addition to the torn ACLs and MCLs, in addition to all of the horrible broken bones, the NFL diagnosed at least 281 traumatic brain injuries this season. And no document has ever quite displayed the horror of it all like “Concussion Protocol,” a film by Josh Begley and Field of Vision.
The backwards slow-mo technique is a bit off-putting at first, but as Greg Dorsainville noted in the video’s thread:
If it was in forwards it would be like any big hits package you see in an espn highlight show where we celebrate the football and hit and not mourn the result of the moment: a human in pain, disorientation, and slowly killing themselves.
Having big second thoughts on watching the Super Bowl this weekend, karma offsets or no. (via @harmancipants)
Tags: football Greg Dorsainville Josh Begley medicine NFL slow motion video
Fejetlenfej posted a set of maps of european forest cover to imgur, with posters available on Etsy. Though cover is distressingly spase in places such as Denmark and England, check out the places that seem picked clean, as if trees were a menace to be exterminated without remorse. Is there so much as a shrub in Italy's Po Valley?
Data: Global Tree Canopy Cover, 2010, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) High resolution map of all the forests of Europe. Color scheme goes from black as 0% forest to bright green as close to 100%, dense forest. After finally forcing myself to focus more on creating new things, this is my first new design in almost a year. I'm quite excited to show it to you guys, so please, any feedback welcome. Map made mostly with the open-source QGIS software.
Patrick KennedyBetween this and the Warren Miller news, it all really makes me want to get back on a mountain. For the first time in...Jesus, probably a decade?
Glide along with this snowboarder as he surfs his way through a powdery forest to the strains of Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune. I’ve watched this twice now; it’s super relaxing. A fine antidote to the typical extreme sports video. (via the kid should see this)
Tags: music snowboarding video
Not sure what Yankee Stadium food vendors wear now but, apparently, sometime in the late sixties or early seventies they donned this far out, font-heavy number. Baseball photo historian Baseball by Bsmile shared this recently on Twitter and points out that the shirt was designed with ketchup/catsup and mustard colors.
A 2008 Uni-Watch (a site that follows sports teams aesthetics) article shares:
...Reader Paul Wiederecht has provided a wealth of interesting background info...I saw that vendor’s shirt used from 1968-72 at games I attended. Sorry, no pics, but I think I may be able to shed some light on the shirt’s design history.
Much of the Yankees’ look during the team’s CBS ownership era can be attributed to Lou Dorfsman, who was CBS’s creative director for more than 25 years. Except for the eye logo, which was the inspiration of his predecessor, William Golden, Dorfsman was responsible for CBS’s corporate and on-air look. His contribution to graphic/interior and set/broadcast/advertising design is legendary, he set the high standard that artists like me have trying to measure up to our whole careers.
Anyway, back to the shirt: If you look here, you’ll see an example of the three-dimensional wall treatment in the CBS employee cafeteria, which was executed by Herb Lubalin (a typographer of note in his own right). You will see many design similarities [between the wall treatment and the vendor’s uniform], and similar design treatments can been seen in many Yankees publications from that era. I would not be surprised if Dorfsman used Lubalin’s design studio for many Yankees projects, possibly even this shirt.
Dorfsman sas also responsible for the “look” of the stadium — the blue seats, the use of Helvetica for signage around the building, plus he had the walls and facade painted white. My mom, who worked in the club offices from 1953-57, said the previous paint color was “[Dan] Topping money green,” which can be seen in the scenes shot at the stadium in the 1959 film “The FBI Story.”
I know I’ve gone on a bit here, but I don’t think Mr. Dorfsman has gotten his due for his efforts on this subject. If you look at Yankees material since, it dosen’t measure up...
In the cosmology of bureacratic evil, United Airlines is the prince of Hell.
Minutes before departure, already buckled into her seat, she was ordered to leave the plane. The gate agent told her that her reservation had been canceled. Traveler Help Desk, the online agency that sold the ticket, had rescinded it because the landlord made a change directly through United — even though United had assured the landlord that it was not a problem to do so.
Unable to fly, Ms. Amrich drove through the night, not stopping even to use the bathroom. Her sister, in the hospital room, held a phone to their mother’s ear, and Ms. Amrich begged her to hold on.
She was still driving when her cellphone rang again. Her mother was dead.
I can just see the agent's smile when they told her that “nobody flies for free.”
When she complained, United called her landord, to get her address, to send her flowers.
Previously: • Watch bizarre video: United Airlines employee pushes 71-year-old to floor, leaves him motionless • Fecal rampage grounds international United flight • TSA says it doesn't know why United thought comics were banned from checked Comic-Con luggage
Patrick KennedyRIP. I loved his ski videos growing up.
The legend goes that Warren Miller taught himself to ski back in 1937, when he was on a trip to the San Gabriel Mountains with his Boy Scout troop. He spent all of $2 on a pair of beat-up wooden skis and a set of bamboo poles, then looked out on “the most beautiful sight I had ever seen: my first view of an untracked…
What...? Botnik Studios (previously) trained its neural network on thousands of band names to generate a completely fake Coachella 2018 lineup?
Oh, yeah, I totally knew that.
Patrick KennedyLove that he's still out there doing stuff like this. And any dunk from him sends me down memory lane of leaps over very tall Frenchmen (https://youtu.be/XMrPjl-927Q) or *that* dunk contest (https://youtu.be/FeCUMfraHcA?t=4m7s).
Vince Carter turns 41 on Friday, and he’s the oldest dude in the NBA. But that didn’t stop him from showing young Aaron Gordon how to throw it down tonight.
Patrick KennedyDO ITTTTT
Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are returning to TV, as Variety reports that the Cornetto trilogy stars are developing the first series to be produced by their recently founded Stolen Picture company. Pegg and Frost have collaborated since their days on Channel 4's Spaced, where they first hooked up with Edgar Wright, who…
Patrick KennedyUhtceare, what a great and useful word (we no longer, or arguably ever did, use)!
Uht (pronounced oot) is the restless hour before the dawn, when Aurora herself is loitering somewhere below the eastern horizon, rosying up her fingers and getting ready for the day. But for now, it is dark. And in the antelucan hush you should be happily slumbering and dreaming of pretty things. If you are not, if you are lying there with your eyes wide open glaring at the ceiling, you are probably suffering from a severe case of uhtceare. There's an old saying that the darkest hour comes just before the dawn. However, that's utter tosh. If you get out of bed and peek through the window, you will see a pale glow in the east. But don't, whatever you do, actually get out of bed. It's probably chilly and you'll never get your posture in bed (technically called your decubitus) quite right again. You'll just have to lie there and try not think about how horrid it all is. Ceare (pronounced key-are-a) was the Old English word for care and sorrow, emotions that have an annoying habit of striking during the uht. For some reason these early hours are the time when you remember all your sins and unpaid bills and, perhaps, the indelicate thing you did last night, and as each of these creeps into your mind your uhtceare grows more and more severe. For an affliction so common, uhtceare is a very rare word. It is recorded only once, in a poem called The Wife's Lament, which, surprisingly, isn't about how awful and messy her husband is, but about how he has been exiled to a far country and left her here with her uhtceare and her vicious in-laws. Old English poetry is almost universally miserable, and Old English poets should really have bucked up a bit, but they did give us uhtceare and for that we should be grateful.
Do Large (Magnitude ≥8) Global Earthquakes Occur on Preferred Days of the Calender Year of Lunar Cycle?
Patrick KennedyPlus it makes your phone all "old-timey"!
Tristan Harris a former "design ethicist" at Google, says today's candy colored interfaces are addictive. One way to make your phone less appealing, it to make the display grayscale.
Patrick Kennedy"One man trying to fly out of Iceland last week attempted to take a unique approach to solving the issue of excessive baggage fees by throwing on all of the clothes he had packed—some 10 shirts and eight pairs of pants, some of which appeared to be tied around his neck like scarves. [...] But according to Williams, his clothing decision wasn’t some stunt or clever way to simply evade baggage fees. On Twitter, he explained that he couldn’t afford the baggage fee of 90 pounds (about $124) as a result of having been homeless in Iceland for over a week. Nonetheless, police were called to the scene, and Williams says the officers used pepper spray on him before placing him under arrest, the Monitor reported."
Airline baggage fees are too damn high these days ... and depending on what airline you’re flying (and the distance you are going), that feeling of being ripped off can vary. Do you get a first bag free or is the first bag $25? Is it the same price for each bag or do the prices increase in increments as you add on…
Patrick KennedyThis is the work of an insane person.
When the Bank of England misprints banknotes, they shred them into tiny little pieces. In this time lapse video, compressed from an entire work day into 11 minutes, a person with a tweezers attempts to reconstruct a five pound note from those tiny shredded pieces. For reference, here’s what the five pound note actually looks like.
Tags: currency time lapse video
Behold the magic of compaction dynamics. Scientists from Mexico and Spain dumped 25,000 tiny dice (0.2 inches) into a large clear plastic cylinder and rotated the cylinder back and forth once a second. The dice arranged themselves into rows of concentric circles. See the paper and the videos here.
Every Second is a site that keeps track of various things that happen around the world by the second. For instance:
McDonald’s sells ~75 burgers, serves 810 customers, and makes about $800 every second of the day.
On Facebook, each second brings 52,000 new likes, 8500 new comments, and $261 in profit.
Apple sells 6.5 iPhones and handles 460,000 iMessages every second.
In 2016, Taylor Swift earned about $5 every second of the year. (via @daveg)
Tags: Apple Facebook infoviz McDonald’s Taylor Swift timePatrick KennedyFun!
Bed Hog Shop, an Etsy seller from Bethlehem, PA, sells these custom made, $138 Sarlacc Pit baby loungers: " (would also likely be suitable for small pets): "Own your Star Wars fandom and allow the young one to snuggle in awesomeness without the fear of being digested over a thousand years!" (via Geeks Are Sexy) (more…)
An Ohio Republican legislator who campaigned on “family values” and fought against LGBTQ rights has resigned after he was reportedly caught having sex.
Patrick KennedyLOL
Got a relative or friend who doesn't understand the stakes in the net neutrality debate? The FCC Internet Porn Scrambler will help bring the issue into focus: "all of your favorite content will be instantaneously replaced on sites like Pornhub with unwatchable scrambled video." Remember to join today's protests at a local Verizon store!
Patrick KennedyGod, so much bad with this race. Reeeally hoping it doesn't go the way people think it will.
"The first thing Roy Moore wants people to know about Doug Jones is that he “publicly supported NFL players kneeling to protest the National Anthem.” Set aside the complete inaccuracy of that statement for a moment—the goddamn protests were never about the goddamn anthem!—and just consider the circumstances that have obtained to make this half-truth Moore’s first and probably most effective talking point.
Roy Moore’s likely going to win (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/doug-jones-is-just-a-normal-polling-error-away-from-a-win-in-alabama/), because we live in hell."
Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore, who has been multiply and credibly accused of sexually preying on teenage girls, recently sent a mailer to voters in order to convince them that his opponent, Doug Jones, is the wrong man for the job. Please take note of the first bullet point here:
