"Eagle was fine - she was massive, and used talons to 'punch' the drone out of the sky," writes the drone operator from Australia's Melbourne Aerial Video. (more…)

WingYew takes us time traveling in an unnamed city with a MOC that spans a hundred years, from the arrival of streetcars to the proliferation of megachains. The dueling coffeeshops are replete with excellently detailed interiors and give a striking sense of how little has changed – and exactly how much has changed.

“We just got a lovebird and every time I take selfies she wants to join in and look at herself in the screen.” [imgur - carlinh]

The news of deadly wildfires ravaging California has been as awe-inspiring as it is terrifying. Great swaths of forests, mountains, fields, and entire neighborhoods can be incinerated in moments leaving nothing unscathed. For the last few years, Los Angeles-based photographer Stuart Palley has been shooting these fires as they rage across Southern California as part of a series he calls Terra Flamma.

More than just capturing flames or firefighters, Palley focuses instead on the entire landscape surrounding each event. By utilizing long exposure techniques he incorporates trails of sparks, the lights of firefighting aircraft, and even the stars above to create images that speak more to the strange beauty of wildfires than simple editorial documentation.

Though Palley often jumps at the opportunity to photograph a fire at a moment’s notice, he’s also well prepared. He takes a number of precautions including completion of the US Forestry Service’s “Introduction to Wildland Fire Behavior” to better ensure his safety.

You can follow more of Palley’s work on Instagram. (via PetaPixel)

Among frozen summer desserts, granitas are a hard sell, not matter how you rename them. A coarse, grainy sorbet, they’re the shaved ice of the Italian food world. Sure, they’re insanely refreshing, require no churning and are probably the kind of thing you ought to be cooling off with on a very hot day, but who’d choose them over hot fudge sundae cakes, toasted marshmallow milkshakes, saltine crack ice cream sandwiches or key lime pie popsicles? Nobody we’re going to be friends with, for sure.

... Read the rest of raspberry crushed ice on smittenkitchen.com

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© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. | permalink to raspberry crushed ice | 74 comments to date | see more: Blackberries, Gluten-Free, Ice Cream/Sorbet, Photo, Raspberries, Summer, Vegan

TW: Hate speech (esp. racism and misogyny), death threats, and other violent rhetoric.

It will surprise no one that Rebecca Watson’s “Planned Parenthood is Not Selling Baby Parts, You Fucking Idiots” led to a flood of comments, emails, and tweets of outrage as well as the usual accusations of censorship for moderating comments and muting or blocking tweets.

If you are one of the many victims of our feminazi fascism, take heart! The Uncensorship Project is here to display your delightful comments and questions in all their ridiculous, nonsensical, often ironic glory within a context that highlights their true nature: old-timey photos.

I’ll share a few of my favorites here, but we have plenty more on the tumblr, so if you don’t see your CENSORED comment or tweet here, odds are it’s there now or will be soon.

The comments that first inspired me to get back into this project were those that revealed what an ironic misnomer “prolife” really is. For example:

It’s astonishing how many “prolife” people are actually pro-abortion. Here are a couple examples among many:

Less astonishing, perhaps, was the pervasive confusion about biology and what words mean threading through the bulk of comments and tweets. Rebecca wrote about one angle of this confusion in her post Do Anti-abortion Activists Even Know How Babies Are Made?, but believing that women carry pregnancies in their stomach was only one of several misunderstandings among commenters.

The most common misunderstanding was confusing a fetus with a baby. This confusion is so pervasive, people even tried to ask Biology 101 questions as though they were gotcha questions.

At no point in the pregnancy is it a baby. A baby is by definition born. This is one reason it is ridiculous to say that the Planned Parenthood videos show them selling baby parts. Another, of course, is that they aren’t selling fetal tissue, which they actually say repeatedly in the unedited videos (in comments such as “Nobody should be ‘selling’ tissue. That’s just not the goal here.”). PP donates fetal tissue with the woman’s consent, and donation has costs, including shipping, storage, handling, recordkeeping, and so forth, costs that vary depending on location, amount, special requests, and so on. At no point do the PP representatives in these videos discuss an amount that could come even close to making a profit. (See more information from biorepository experts in the FactCheck.org article on these videos.)

So to recap: A fetus is not a baby. It is also not a woman. Not even a tiny woman.

A fetus is also not a puppy. Never thought that needed clarification, but apparently it does.

A related misunderstanding among comments is of what fetal tissue is. Many, MANY people sought to disprove that PP was donating fetal tissue by sending us lists of body parts shown in the videos. Where do they imagine fetal tissue comes from? Is it like dark matter existing in the interstices of the parts and organs? Researchers who work with fetal tissue need specific tissue cells, such as liver or lung cells for vaccines or neural cells for spinal cord injuries. The more cells that can be extracted from a single source, the more good can be done with those cells, minimizing source variables in the research. So yes, the more they can get, the more intact it is, the better the donation for research purposes.

Even understanding all of this probably would not have made much difference to the anti-abortion crowd, who care more about the imaginary baby they’ve concocted by personifying a fetus with characteristics it does not have than they care about women. This was abundantly obvious on Twitter, especially in response to this tweet:

These tweets and many more like them illustrate the crux of the issue, that those against abortion believe that women are less valuable than an imaginary baby and that we do not deserve the same rights to our bodies that men do. Sex, in their eyes, is giving up the right to our own bodies. Pregnancy apparently always results from consensual sex, except consensual really just means indentured servitude to men and imaginary babies. It’s not surprising that so many people blame women for their own rape or refuse to call rape rape considering the pervasive belief that women deserve only a tenuous hold on human rights.

Some even went so far as to essentially describe women as valuable only for reproduction, the perfect storm of misogyny, transphobia, and heterosexism.

Even those who claim to be pro-choice, to believe it’s wrong to police a woman’s body, have no problem policing how a woman expresses herself. The tone police were out in droves in the tweets, emails, and comments on Rebecca’s post, from the blatantly sexist comments about a woman using profanity to the more subtly but equally sexist insistence that they knew what she was trying to achieve with her post and that they knew better how she should have gone about achieving what they thought she should be achieving.

Some combined tone policing with the inevitable Godwinning:

Antisemitic comparisons were of course accompanied by the racism most of us have witnessed in anti-abortion activists’ coopting of the Black Lives Matter movement, because nothing shows how much you care about life than exploiting and belittling the death, pain, and oppression of actual people to save imaginary babies. If you’re writing in to quote Margaret Sanger or make a eugenics argument, consider how much you are doing to combat racism in this century and how it affects actual living people, such as, say, the women of color you devalue and actively harm when you campaign against one of the only affordable healthcare resources some have available to them.

The racism was particularly stark on Twitter.

So yeah, we moderate our comments and Twitter at our own discretion. This is not a platform for anyone to spout their often racist, always sexist arguments against Planned Parenthood or abortion in general. This includes the bigotry in many comments with pro-choice disclaimers.

No. You’re really not.

You probably don't think about thieves when you unlock your car, but Samy Kamkar certainly does. The security researcher known for his droll (and scary) hacks has created a device called "Rolljam" that cracks the wireless entry systems used by car-...

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "A Grammatical Conundrum" - originally published 8/7/2015 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

podunkmouse:

highlandvalley:

RazerJPさんはTwitterを使っています: “橋を作るという単純ですが、奥が深くユニークなゲームPoly Bridge。 ただ単に橋を造っても上手くいかないらしく、Redditには色んな作品が投稿されてます。(¼) https://t.co/3onxjXL9Rs http://t.co/itCTLtyIKi”

“I tried it society’s way. I really did. And I was denied. Now, we do it my way.”

Hovertext: Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go kill off some weak baby gazelles.

New comic!
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MikMikEternity gives us this wonderful custom Groot minifigure. The detail and sculpting are impressive. He says he sculpted the additional pieces and painted by hand. I love the weathered, wooden look and the subtle greenery all over Groot. There is so much character.

"Pixels" DMCA Takedown Even Worse Than We Thought:

Wow. Holy shit. Wow.

fuckyeahvintage-retro:

Piggly Wiggly, 1950s (via Allen)

The colors are amazing.

One person's dream of becoming the next Snowden or Manning was ruined when nobody believed that the classified documents that they posted to the internet were genuine. Michael Scerba was a 21-year-old graduate at Australia's Department of Defense w...

Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Hovertext: I don't care that we're barely out of a recession, start maxing out your credit cards!

New comic!
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BAHFest East tickets are still available! 

Tens of millions of DMCA-style notices are sent to online services every week complaining about copyright infringement. While most are accurate, some contain errors.

Some take screwing up to a whole new level.

This week anti-piracy group Entura International sent a notice to Vimeo in what first appeared to be an effort to stop piracy of the Columbia movie ‘Pixels’. Not only did it fail to do that in every way possible, it hit a number of indie creators and filmmakers instead.

Founded in November 2004, NeMe describes itself as a non-profit NGO and an ‘Independent Museum of Contemporary Art’.

“Our NGO has just received a DMCA notice for a video we produced in 2006 entitled ‘Pixels’,” the group told Vimeo this week.

“The video was directed by a Cypriot film-maker using his own photos and sounds/music on a shoestring budget and infringes no copyright.”

Sadly for NeMe, however, it has now been resigned to history.

But upsetting the NGO was just the tip of the iceberg. The notice goes on to hit an embarrassing array of entirely non-infringing works.

“Life Buoy is my project for my degree at the National University of Arts from Bucharest,” creator Dragos Bardac explains.

“The film was made in mid 2010 and it is a music video for the song Life buoy by the band The Pixels. I used a mix of stop motion animation techniques in order to tell the story.”

But it doesn’t stop there.

Published on Vimeo in 2011, “Pantone Pixels” is described by creator Rob Penny as a “personal project that took me a very long time”.

Thanks to Entura, however, the image below now greets users of his website.

And it gets worse.

‘Pixels’ is a 2010 award-winning short film created by Patrick Jean. Its tagline “8Bit creatures are invading New York City” only tells half the story of this extremely cool short movie. It’s now wiped out on Vimeo but luckily YouTube still retains copies which together have been viewed millions of times.

Also falling victim is VJLoops.com, a royalty free stock footage & media site. They put up a video on Vimeo titled ‘Love Pixels’ which turned out to be a big mistake. Same goes for a 42 second video concerning this year’s Pixels Festival in Mons, Belgium.

Last, but certainly not least, Entura rounded off this disaster by taking down the official Pixels movie trailer, even though their very own notice lists their errors clearly.

Of course, in addition to the hassle of having had their content wrongfully taken down, each person subjected to a notice from Entura will have a ‘strike’ placed against their Vimeo account.

“The notice we received says that this is strike 1 which we do not accept for the aforementioned reasons. It also says that for Vimeo to accept to return the video online we have to give our name address and an assortment of statements,” the NeMe project told Vimeo in a response.

“I’d suggest filling a counter notice,” Mark from the company responded. “This is in the hands of our trust and safety team and unfortunately our support team cannot help you with this issue.”

Sorry folks, apparently you’re on your own.

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

Jupiter Descending

If you did fall into Jupiter's atmosphere in a submarine, what would it actually look like? What would you see before you melted or burned up?

—Ada Munroe

We don't know! We've only flown spacecraft into a gas planet's atmosphere twice (both Jupiter). One had no cameras, and one went in at night (and was being disposed of, so wasn't taking pictures anyway).

If you took a submarine to Jupiter, it would burn up. Jupiter has a deep gravity well; after falling down toward it from space, you're going very fast. There's no easy way to shed that speed other than slamming into the atmosphere and letting it slow you down, but the entry is about four times faster than the Space Shuttle or Apollo Earth reentries. Only the Galileo probe has survived a Jupiter atmospheric entry.

The Galileo probe survived by being a bullet with a big heat shield, and several inches of the shield were burned away before it finished slowing down and started falling vertically by parachute. The probe only sent back about half a megabyte of data to the Galileo orbiter, and had no camera, so we don't know what it saw.

We could, I guess, try to do the same thing with a submarine—by mounting a giant heat shield on the front—but it would probably qualify as the most Kerbal vehicle ever built.

If our submarine survived, what would we see?[1]I mean, submarines don't usually have a lot of windows, but we at least have a periscope, right?

The best pictures we have of Jupiter's atmosphere are probably these carefully processed mosaics of the Great Red Spot, but they're still taken from very far away. At those resolutions, a huge Earth thunderstorm would appear as roughly one pixel. Trying to figure out what Jupiter's clouds would look like from those pictures is like using this to reconstruct these.

By combining the pictures with other science data, we've been able to put together a pretty good idea of what Jupiter's atmosphere is like, but there are some pretty big questions still unanswered which make it hard to be too confident about what it would actually look like. For example, you know the Great Red Spot? We don't know what all that red stuff is.

Author Michael Carroll has done a lot of thinking about planetary atmospheres, and his book Drifting on Alien Winds vividly describes of what it would be like to descend through Jupiter's clouds. He was also kind enough to answer some of my questions about Jupiter. Here's a rough sketch of what you'd see as you descended through the clouds; for more, definitely check out his book.

Jupiter's upper atmosphere (the part we would see before we died) has three main layers—an upper layer of haze and ammonia clouds, similar to cirrostratus clouds on Earth. Below that is a thick, reddish-brown ammonium hydrosulfide cloud layer. The lowest layer consists of white water clouds, which occasionally rise into towering thunderstorms that occasionally push through the middle layer.

Between these cloud layers, the air is probably pretty clear. At those levels, it would be less dense than the air on Earth, so you could see a long way. Thanks to Rayleigh scattering, the sky would be blue, and objects far off in the distance would fade to blue just like they do on Earth. But since Jupiter is so huge, we might not see the clouds disappear over the horizon; the towers might just fade off into the distance.

We don't really know how accurate these pictures are, though, until we send a camera to fly down into Jupiter's atmosphere and send pictures back.

Juno, scheduled to reach Jupiter next year, carries a pretty nice camera,[2]Thank you to Emily Lakdawalla for her helpful background about various spacecraft cameras, including her many thorough spreadsheets. which should give us slightly better-resolution pictures, but it still won't really give us a sense of what the cloud decks look like from within them. For that, we need to send in a probe with a camera—and there's nothing like that on the horizon. There's certainly more science value in visiting Europa than in satisfying our curiosity about the Jovian sky.

But with interplanetary cubesats soon to make their debut, who knows—maybe someone out there will put together a camera, heat shield, and parachute, and hitch a ride on the next outer planets mission. And then, finally, we'll get to look at Jupiter's clouds from both sides.

Paradox’s internal development studio, responsible for Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Victoria and Hearts of Iron, is deep into development on a space strategy game. We’ve already seen it, and picked the brains of CK II maestro and project lead Henrik Fåhraeus and EU IV designer Tomas Johansson about this giant leap for the studio. The project, which the company announced at their Gamescom fan gathering moments ago, goes by the name Stellaris and it’s shaping up to be one of the most exciting games in recent years.

Below, you’ll find everything we know, including how randomised alien species will ensure that each new galaxy is mysterious, and why the commitment to an intelligent and subversive end-game could make this one of the smartest interpretations of 4X strategy ever made.

… [visit site to read more]

Hovertext: Your move, people who aren't reductionists.

New comic!
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Hovertext: This comic officially not in relation to anything.

New comic!
Today's News:

 Tickets for BAHFest East are now on sale!

These tickets have sold out early every year so far, and the student tickets (available to students from any university) usually sell out very quickly. So, if you want to guarantee a spot, and see people like Rosemary Mosco, Abby Howard, and Max Tegmark, please book soon!

Bravo, Reddit! After so much hogwash about letting it stay on principle, they finally woke up. The problem for Reddit was simple: every ad dollar spent there subsidized a white supremacist community that was getting uncomfortably prominent. It had to go. And it won't be the last.

tj:

Accurate.

Here’s a cool kickstarter: it’s for a real chemistry set, like the ones we had in old days. Go watch the video, and you’ll see that it actually lets you set things on fire!