Luke.stirling

Dennis Hlynsky filmed an enormous flock of starlings at 600 frames per second, revealing the path and "personal space" of individual birds. The result turns complex mathematical order into a beautiful abstract effect. Read the rest

nickholmes:

Seize immortality. 

More dogs.

“As I’ve worked to dismantle my own internalized racism and the ways that I privilege whiteness, I’ve learned to resist being ‘othered’ through the use of language. So when someone says, ‘Oh, they did that to you because you’re black,’ I quickly correct them with, ‘No, they did that because they are bigots.’ This often shocks people. I can see the panic in their eyes. Sometimes, their eyes dart about. If there are lot of people, they may get quiet.
Sometimes, someone will try to lessen the blow of my words with some clever deflection. I then come back with, ‘No. They are bigots.’ I name the problem. Trayvon and Michael’s blackness wasn’t the problem. The problem was the negative perceptions of that blackness and what spaces that blackness was ‘allowed’ to occupy. These perceptions are supported, funded, and reinforced by institutionalized racism. Matthew Shepard wasn’t murdered because he was gay. Sakia Gunn wasn’t murdered because she was a lesbian. Matthew and Sakia were murdered by people who made a choice to exercise their bigotry within a culture that deemed Matthew and Sakia ‘others.’”

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Toni Bell, "I’m Not Your Token" via The Body Is Not an Apology

How one uses language can be so constructive for their (hopefully just) cause.

RWSWJ/RAWJ

(via theblacknonblackdivide)

From Vice's Motherboard:

That means when you search for “cold sores,” for instance, and click the highly ranked “Cold Sores Topic Overview WebMD” link, the website is passing your request for information about the disease along to one or more (and often many, many more) other corporations...

Thus, Libert has discovered that the vast majority of health sites, from the for-profit WebMD.com to the government-run CDC.gov, are loaded with tracking elements that are sending records of your health inquiries to the likes of web giants like Google, Facebook, and Pinterest, and data brokers like Experian and Acxiom.

From there, it becomes relatively easy for the companies receiving the requests, many of which are collecting other kinds of data (in cookies, say) about your browsing as well, to identify you and your illness...

WebMD, for instance, is the 106th most-visited site in the US, according to Alexa, and figures prominently in search results for most commonly searched diseases. It sends third party requests to a whopping 34 separate domains, including the data brokers Experian and Acxiom.“WebMD is basically calling up everybody in town and telling them that’s what you’re looking at..."

With nonprofit sites like the CDC and the Mayo Clinic, again, it’s not due to any insidious intent; it’s simply because developers are installing “free” tools like Google Analytics and social media “share” buttons on their sites, and most users have no idea that means information about their searches is being shared with third parties. “The problem is that using these 'free' third-party tools is really easy for web developers. What developers don’t consider is, why are these tools free?”

More at the link.   Not an April Fool's joke.

The Force is clearly strong with artist Maria A. Aristidou, who uses coffee to paint stunning portraits of Star Wars characters and other pop culture figures. Read the rest

Rafi of the blog So Let’s Talk About It recently made a startling discovery about subtle racial biases. Read the rest

A photo from 1935, found at Shorpy (click to embiggen).

Every Car Listed published some interesting maps about America's gas-guzzling habits. In 42 of 50 states, the most popular vehicle is a pickup truck or SUV. Read the rest

Here’s a great list of 9 things many Americans just don’t understand — I’ve distilled it down to just the main headings, but you should read the whole thing.

1. Universal Healthcare Is Great for Free Enterprise and Great for Small Businesses

2. Comprehensive Sex Education Decreases Sexual Problems

3. American Exceptionalism Is Absolute Nonsense in 2015

4. Adequate Mass Transit Is a Huge Convenience

5. The Bible Was Not Written by Billionaire Hedge Fund Managers

6. Learning a Second or Third Language Is a Plus, Not a Character Flaw

7. Union Membership Benefits the Economy

8. Paid Maternity Leave Is the Norm in Most Developed Countries

9. Distrust of Oligarchy Is a Positive

And it’s just weird: I can imagine most Republicans and Libertarians disagreeing angrily with those points, and even passing laws based upon their misconceptions…but the crowd I hang with, and most of the people who read this blog (Americans and non-Americans alike) would probably say those nine things are good and even obvious.

So how do we wake up the rest of the country?

Clearly, I need to do more shopping at IKEA. I have enemies who deserve presents, and since they tend not to be very bright, it’s good that the instructions are so simple and clear.

Nick Cohen gets it exactly right.

A few weeks ago Margot Wallström, the Swedish foreign minister, denounced the subjugation of women in Saudi Arabia. As the theocratic kingdom prevents women from travelling, conducting official business or marrying without the permission of male guardians, and as girls can be forced into child marriages where they are effectively raped by old men, she was telling no more than the truth. Wallström went on to condemn the Saudi courts for ordering that Raif Badawi receive ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes for setting up a website that championed secularism and free speech. These were ‘mediaeval methods’, she said, and a ‘cruel attempt to silence modern forms of expression’. And once again, who can argue with that?

Who could? Quite a few Islamic states could.

The backlash followed the pattern set by Rushdie, the Danish cartoons and Hebdo. Saudi Arabia withdrew its ambassador and stopped issuing visas to Swedish businessmen. The United Arab Emirates joined it. The Organisation of Islamic Co-operation, which represents 56 Muslim-majority states, accused Sweden of failing to respect the world’s ‘rich and varied ethical standards’ — standards so rich and varied, apparently, they include the flogging of bloggers and encouragement of paedophiles. Meanwhile, the Gulf Co-operation Council condemned her ‘unacceptable interference in the internal affairs of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’, and I wouldn’t bet against anti-Swedish riots following soon.

You know what’s interesting about that, though? The strong response tells me that they’re at least a little embarrassed.

Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot. Imagine that a Saudi foreign minister made a speech in which he was aghast that Americans let women drive cars and choose who they marry; that the US has laws against pedophilia; that bloggers are allowed to say almost anything they want against the US president, and they aren’t even jailed. Would we then turn around and condemn Saudi Arabia for stating those terrifying facts about our country? No, we’d say “Damn right,” and some of us would also point out that we aren’t quite liberal enough yet.

If flogging people for writing criticisms is part of their “rich and varied ethical standards”, why aren’t the representatives of Saudi Arabia saying, “Damned right, we think it’s important to punish anyone who does not worship Islamic values”? Why are they censuring Sweden for saying up front what they object to in their “rich and varied ethical standards”?

I also find it ironic that they’d be so indignant at a Swedish foreign minister for pointing out that the way they treat their own citizens is cruel and barbaric that they’d start severing ties with that country. I consider the brutal campaigns of the US against citizens in Islamic countries to be far more cruel and barbaric — bombing people via drones and cruise missiles is far worse than criticizing cultural practices.

Or how about this? Here’s John Yoo testifying before congress that he thinks the president has the right to have the testicles of children crushed before their parents’ eyes.

Come on, Saudi Arabia. Talk to us about severing ties with the United States. I can think of plenty of things that you could wave in our faces and we’d be ashamed and be forced to admit that we’ve failed to live up to our own high-minded standards. Blustering at Sweden for speaking the truth is pure chickenshit.

On March 31 the Swedish Museum Of Natural History opens a new exhibition called Fossils & Evolution. My part of this production was to provide illustrations of the animals in their natural environment. With permission from the museum, I’m releasing the material on my website. I couldn’t have done these images without the help from the following people at NRM: 

• Thomas Mörs - Senior Curator, Fossil Vertebrates 
• Stephen McLoughlin -Senior Curator, Paleobotany
• Christian Skovsted - Senior Curator, Fossil Invertebrates
  
• Daniella Kalthoff - Curator, Zoology
  
• Tove Frambäck - Producer

For the full series, go here.

For information about the exhibition go here.

A classic thought experiment asks you to choose between doing nothing and letting an out-of-control trolley crash into a schoolbus, or pushing a fat man into the trolley's path, saving the kids but killing the bystander. Read the rest

People started sharing files with each other – text, games, music – as soon as there was a storage medium you could copy.

Originally, this meant the compact cassette which was used for music and programs for the first home computers. Cassette decks at the time had a convenient copy mechanism where you’d insert an original in one slot, a blank tape in another slot, and press a prominent “copy” button to get an analog replica – not perfect, if it was music, but if it was a digital computer file, it would be readable and usable. The one-push copy was even a sales point.

Everybody had their circle of friends who contributed to the common collection between them, and we’d always be carrying some copy of something else we anticipated was in demand. People would copy something from you more or less every day. You would copy things from several people pretty much every day.

Copyparties were huge fests where hundreds of teens (or pre-teens) rented a school building for a weekend, brought their entire catalog of tapes and diskettes, an equivalent amount of blank media, and just copied everything they could from each other instead of sleeping. These copyparties frequently had pallets of Jolt Cola for sale.

In this setup, completely before the Internet, if something in high demand was published, it would take three days on average for that piece of media to get to everybody who wanted it.

In other words, in a complete shutdown of the Internet where people go back to sharing by copying media by hand, the very best the copyright industry can hope for is three days until saturation instead of today’s one day. It’s almost funny how the copyright industry still delays releases by weeks if not months between neighboring countries and think they can determine who gets to see what when. That was never the case, and won’t ever be the case.

File sharing is here to stay and the reason it’s still traceable is mostly because the risk of getting caught by stale, obsolete, and outdated laws is considerably lower than the risk of getting struck by lightning. There’s no real push to improve it, like there was right after Napster shut down. But let’s imagine for a moment if there was a real push to move sharing back under the radar.

Today, the storage of an ordinary mobile phone can effectively store all music except the most narrow. And with fourth-generation Bluetooth, it can wirelessly – and tracelessly! – share all of it to all mobile phones in a 50-meter range. Subway cars, cafés, even cars at red light stops become torrent swarms without somebody acting – or even noticing. The notion of being able to stop, control, or contain this files under “what’s the weather like on your planet?”.

Not only that, but the best-generation scenario that the copyright industry can ever hope for is the equivalent of a shutdown of the entire internet. That would mean a regression from today’s 24-hour saturation to a pre-internet 72-hour saturation. Think about that. The best conceivable scenario for the copyright industry, if they really manage to destroy the entire Internet, is that it would take three days instead of one day for something to get shared to everybody who wants it.

Moore’s Law further suggests that in a decade or so, an ordinary mobile phone will also have capacity to store most TV and movies ever made.

So once you accept that file-sharing is here to stay for good, and that any attempt to contain it is a Canutian attempt to order the tide back, you can let go of that and instead focus on all the positive aspects of that development:

The income is there for artists. In fact, more than twice the income is there for artists with file-sharing. There’s no need to fret and worry about that development, no need to hunt license fees for every copy manufactured without a license. Rather, as soon as you realize that chasing license fees for every copy is actually a cashflow net negative, you’ll start to chill and realize the revenue is still there. (Well, not for the parasitic middlemen: not for the actual copyright industry. But artists have always hated those with a passion.) As a significant bonus, you won’t be turning your customers into enemies.

But more importantly, it means that every human being has 24/7 access to humanity’s collective knowledge and culture, and that every human being is able to add to that pool. That’s the equivalent of when the first public libraries opened in 1850, but on an enormously larger scale. Even though the copyright industry is trying again and again to burn this Library of Alexandria, it’s worth more than pause to consider what a huge leap ahead for humanity this really is.

And while the copyright industry may order the tide held back, waging war against future generations is rarely a winning proposition in the long run.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and anonymous VPN services.

Even the studio’s missteps are eminently watchable. But some are more watchable than others. Read the rest

If you are in Queens, NY, you have a multitude of choices - 9 intersections and 28 corners by my count.

Image cropped for size from the original at The Land of Maps.

This amazing three-bedroom vacation home was designed by Fougeron Architecture studio, and is located on Big Sur’s spectacular south coast is anchored in the natural beauty and power of the California landscape.

more photos

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SSDs and other flash memory devices will soon get cheaper and larger thanks to big announcements from Toshiba and Intel. Both companies revealed new "3D NAND" memory chips that are stacked in layers to pack in more data, unlike single-plane chips cur...

David Badash has the story. (Tipped by JMG reader Scott)

“I took a panoramic picture of our living room. But my cat decided to walk through.” -Jannik Görtz

This is Cale Leiphart and he likes trains, and I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and enjoying his builds for many years now. His latest culmination of train-awesomeness is the Red Lion Station, and is a model of the Maryland & Pennsylvania RR train station and surrounding areas.

At over 3.5 x 17 feet (that’s 5 meters), this requires adjectives which I do not posses to describe the incredible feat. That’s not to say there haven’t been larger builds, but I have a hard time recalling a build of this size that has this much detail packed in. Not only does each of the buildings have a beautiful facade, but each building has a fully decked out interior. It’s so large it’s incredibly hard to even photograph, and is one of those builds that are best enjoyed in person at a display:

I really liked how Cale has gone against the grain and built buildings and streets at non-right angles, a non-trivial feat, to build off-axis roads and buildings:

Not only are the roads difficult to build at an angle, most people would have simply laid the train track on top of the road to avoid complicated brickwork, but Mr. Leiphart, true to form, built it inside the road with some really clever brick work.

As I mentioned before, I had seen earlier versions of this layout last year and it really caught my eye. By catch my eye, I mean I did a double take and went OH-MY-G-O-S-H. Again the size is impressive, but I’m a detail guy, and this nondescript grey building blew my mind. Take a closer look at the sides, it’s not just nicely stacked brick, it’s made up of panels, hundreds of panels attached in some seemingly magical way. Despite being very late on the first setup night, Cale – who was still setting up this magnificent display – noticed our fevered interest and stopped everything and came over to us and showed us the secret of the grey building. This became my number 1 cool must-see thing at BrickFair that year.

Check out the full photo collection here.

© lustik