Andrew

The movie Frozen debuted in November of 2013. But the big, hit earworm it unleashed upon the unsuspecting American populace took over 2014 in a way that has yet to fully dissipate.

We speak, of course, of "Let It Go," and even if there were bigger hit songs in 2014, it's still not hard to think of the year as the year of "Let It Go." (You probably have it stuck in your head right now.)

"I am one with the wind and sky," Idina Menzel sings as Elsa in the song, and that might seem prophetic: for a big part of 2014, this addictive song was pretty much one with the air we breathed.

Here's the original song in case you live under a rock and/or have blocked it from your memory:

"Let it Go" enjoyed absurd popularity. It was a number one single. The Frozen soundtrack sold 2.7 million copies this year, making it second only to Taylor Swift's 1989 for the year, to go along with the $1.27 billion the film made at the worldwide box office. The song even won an Oscar.

But on top of those monumental sales, the cultural omnipresence of the song was better observed elsewhere: on YouTube. "Let it Go" solidly took over as the cover song of choice for the first few months of the year. It may have even been bigger than 2012's "Call Me Maybe" epidemic.

Here are nine versions of "Let it Go" that will remind you why this song got so huge:

1. The best cover:

Alex Boyé's Africanized cover of "Let it Go," featuring the One Voice Children's Choir, was by far one of the most popular versions of the song. The video has an absurd 58 million views on Youtube. But it features singing children and beautiful backing vocals. What's not to love?

2. The toy version:

In one of the host's first Tonight Show episodes, Menzel joined Jimmy Fallon and the Roots to play "Let It Go" on toy instruments. The metal triangles add an extra level of clanging, but the song still shines through, thanks to Menzel's soprano.

3. The children trying to sing version

Four-year-old twins Maddie & Zoe try really, really hard to sing "Let it Go" in this cover. But they're 4, which means the attention tends to wander. One of them actually yawns in the middle of the song, which might be the greatest thing ever.

4. The acoustic version

There were plenty of acoustic versions of "Let It Go," but Cimorelli, a singing group made up of six sisters offered up the best one. In a sea of people uploading themselves singing the song, Cimorelli stays on key and adds its own special flair.

5. The famous musicians parody:

Christina Bianca sings "Let it Go" as several different musicians, starting with Idina Menzel, then working her way through Demi Lovato and Britney Spears and Alanis Morisette. Bianca is a great singer on her own, but her on-point impersonations add so much to this video.

6. The talented teen version:

Connie Talbot, a 13-year-old former competitor on Britain's Got Talent, offered up one of the most beautiful renditions of "Let it Go," sitting at the piano in what appears to be her living room. Her stellar voice is complemented perfectly by her skill on the piano.

7. The med school parody:

Med school students loved this parody version, but it's kind of terrifying for prospective patients. Let's hope these students aren't actually WebMD-ing patient symptoms.

8. The poop parody version:

We wish we were more mature, so we wouldn't laugh so much at this, but, alas, we are not.

9. The Tyra Banks Vine.

Why was the internet created? For this. Six seconds of Tyra Banks singing, then spitting out an ice cube. C'mon. Just let it go, and enjoy!

Come back every day of December for Vox's picks of some of our favorite pop culture of 2014.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

In the wake of Eric Garner's death, the head of the NYC Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, a police interest group, blamed Garner: "You cannot resist arrest, that's a crime." But it's not a crime that most police officers often file reports about.

The New York Police Department is made up of 35,000 officers, and just a minority of them have sent people into court for "resisting arrest."

But the ones who do, according to a new report from WNYC, charge a lot of people — and that can be a "red flag" for other issues.

WNYC looked at over 51,000 cases where someone was charged with "resisting arrest" since 2009. They found that 40 percent of those cases — over 20,000 — were committed by just 5 percent of all the police officers on the force. And 15 percent of officers accounted for a majority of all "resisting arrest" charges.

Why "resisting arrest" cases matter

The upshot of this data is that charging people with "resisting arrest" is something most cops do very rarely, and a few cops do a lot. Here's why that matters: if a cop is routinely hauling people into court for resisting arrest, he might be taking an overly aggressive attitude toward civilians. A police officer might even, as police accountability expert Sam Walker told WNYC, use the criminal charge to cover up his use of excessive force:

"There's a widespread pattern in American policing where resisting arrest charges are used to sort of cover - and that phrase is used - the officer's use of force," said Walker, the accountability expert from the University of Nebraska. "Why did the officer use force? Well, the person was resisting arrest."

That pattern held up in the case of Donald Sadowy, a Brooklyn police officer who's the subject of the WNYC article. Sadowy has more than 20 resisting arrest cases since 2009 — putting him in the 98th percentile, or higher, among all police. Meanwhile, over the last two years, Sadowy's been sued 10 times for excessive force.

New submitter jonhorvath writes: Several of the top contributors to Node.js, a popular open source run-time environment, have decided to fork the project, creating io.js as an alternative. The developers were unhappy with how cloud computing company Joyent was directing work on Node.js. Mikeal Rogers said, "We don't want to have just one person who's appointed by a company making decisions. We want contributors to have more control, to seek consensus." Here's the new repository, and a README file to go with it. A developer at Uber tweeted that they've already migrated to io.js on their production systems. It'll be interesting to see how many other sites follow.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why was there no indictment in the Eric Garner case? Two words: Police credibility. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that we have two different standards for guilt in the American criminal justice system: civilians get "beyond a reasonable doubt." Police get "beyond any possible doubt, no matter how implausible it may seem."

There is video of Garner's death. It shows NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo wrapping his arm around Garner's neck, and then throwing his entire body weight against it until Garner fell to the ground, choking and gasping that he could not breathe. The NYPD placed an absolute ban on the use of chokeholds in 1993, on the grounds that the technique was too dangerous to use in any circumstance. A New York medical examiner ruled the death a homicide. But that wasn't enough for the grand jury, because Pantaleo told a different story.

Pantaleo spoke before the grand jury for nearly two hours — itself a privilege that most defendants are not afforded. According to the New York Times, Pantaleo testified that he didn’t use a chokehold, but a "wrestling move." Pantaleo also testified that he got off of Garner "as quick as he could." (The video shows him and other NYPD officers piled on top of Garner even after he had fallen to the ground. One officer knelt on Garner's head as he gasped for breath.)

But when faced with the question "who are you gonna believe — the cop, or your own eyes?" the grand jury decided that the answer was "the cop." To them, his testimony outweighed the videos, as well as the testimony of 22 civilian witnesses.

That is part of a pattern of juries placing tremendous faith in the credibility of police testimony. But juries are hardly anomalous: as a society, we generally tend to believe cops. A version of that tendency can be seen in the many people who insist that the killing of Eric Garner was very different from the killing of Michael Brown. The Federalist's Sean Davis said that Brown's killing was "murky and muddled at best," but expressed shock at the Staten Island grand jury decision because "Garner’s completely unnecessary death was captured on video." Red State's Leon Wolf urged his readers to "forget Ferguson," with its lack of video evidence, but that Garner "was subjected to clearly excessive force." And Mother Jones's Kevin Drum argued that in Ferguson, the evidence was "just too inconsistent," but that there was "no excuse" for the grand jury's failure to send Pantaleo to trial for killing Garner.

But the killings of Garner and Brown were not wildly different. In both cases, an unarmed black man was killed on a city street by an armed police officer. In both cases, eyewitnesses said that the force seemed unnecessary, while the officer involved claimed he had no choice. A main distinction is that in Garner's case, there was video of what happened, relieving observers of some of the burden of deciding whether to believe the officer's story or bystanders. But that attitude still implies a presumption that police are to be believed. As steps towards fairness go, "vids or it didn't happen" is a very small and grudging one.

And that's a problem, because the widespread presumption of police officers' truthfulness eviscerates the legal standards that are supposed to restrict cops’ use of force. Police officers are only allowed to use deadly force to protect themselves or others, or to prevent a fleeing felon. But that standard turns on whether the officer reasonably believed that the force was necessary, which is at heart a question of the officer's credibility. If juries presume that police officers are always credible, that's effectively blanket permission for police to use force, even deadly force, at any time.

Apple was handed a setback in Australia on Wednesday when a Federal Court judge rejected Apple's appeal as the company tries to trademark the term "app store" in the country. The news of the rejection was first reported by The Sydney Morning Herald. ...

It used to be that having a million YouTube views was cool. It used to be that 800 million views would be enough to make you YouTube's most watched clip, but now not even a figure of 2,147,483,647 views is enough to contain the chronically popular Gangnam Style music video by Psy. YouTube has announced this week that it's upgrading its view counter after the K-Pop video surpassed its old 32-bit limit, which was set on the assumption that nothing would be so pervasive as to be watched more than 2.1 billion times. At the time of writing, Gangnam Style is nearly 5 million views above the earlier limit, so YouTube's promise of "bigger and bigger numbers" is already being put into effect. Going to the video page and hovering over the view...

Continue reading…

Matthew Green, cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins, knows all about iPhone security and apparently so does his 7-year-old son, Harrison. According to CNN Money, the child was able to bypass Apple's Touch ID security measures and access Angry Bird...

Microsoft has a number of Black Friday and Cyber Monday laptop offers this year, but if you’re a PC desktop owner then a deal on a new 4K display might be the most tempting. Microsoft has priced Dell’s 28-inch 4K display at just $299 today, down from $499 — a saving of 40 percent. With a 3840 x 2160 4K resolution, the LED panel also includes four USB 3.0 ports, three DisplayPorts (including a Mini version), and support for HDMI. It’s worth noting this is a 30Hz monitor, so it might not be ideal for video editing, but if you’re looking for an affordable 4K display then it’s available online and at Microsoft Stores today. Other deals include a $49 Windows Phone, up to $150 off a Surface Pro 3, and $329 Xbox One bundles.

Continue reading…

House of Cards, Netflix's first breakout success, is coming back for a third season. Netflix today announced the premiere date: February 27th, 2015.

Continue reading…

In 2011, when the end of NASA’s shuttle program was announced, photographer Dan Winters decided that he would photograph the final three launches and compile those images into a book.

That book, Last Launch, was released in 2012, and is well worth the $33 if would cost you to pick it up for yourself on Amazon. But, of course, sometimes the story behind the images is just as powerful than the images themselves, and Winters recently opened up about the entire experience on stage at WIRED by Design.

The talk is, especially at the beginning, quite emotional. In the first few minutes, Winters captures the spirit of adventure and exploration that defined the more romantic later Apollo missions, and it’s a spirit that brings Winters to tears.

Later he dives into the technical aspects of capturing the last launches, scrolling through beautiful photograph after beautiful photograph while describing the meticulous planning process and the challenges that must be overcome.

The talk, however, ends on the same note as it began, with a poignant Neil Armstrong quote: “Mystery creates wonder, and wonder is man’s desire to understand.”

Check out the full talk in the video above, and then head over to the full WIRED article by following the link below.

The Nerve-Wracking Process of Shooting the Very Last Space Shuttle Launch [WIRED]

Buying Girl Scout cookies is about to become much easier. For the first time ever, the Girl Scouts of the USA will accept online orders of Thin Mints, Tagalongs, Savannah Smiles, and other cookies during the upcoming selling season. After nearly 100 years of requiring purchases to be made in person, the Scouts are now giving girls the option of setting up a website where friends and family can order boxes from anywhere in the US. You'll of course be able to place orders the old-fashioned way, but the Girl Scouts are finally embracing modern times and giving scouts a new way of raising money for good causes.

Since most of the 2 million Girl Scouts are under 18, privacy is a huge focus of the new "Digital Cookies" effort. Parents must...

Continue reading…

jaromil writes: The so called "Veteran Unix Admin" collective has announced that the fork of Debian will proceed as a result of the recent systemd controversy. The reasons put forward are not just technical; included is a letter of endorsement by Debian Developer Roger Leigh mentioning that "people rely on Debian for their jobs and businesses, their research and their hobbies. It's not a playground for such radical experimentation." The fork is called "Devuan," pronounced "DevOne." The official website has more information.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Let’s talk about this new lightsaber. About a minute into the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer, a cloaked figure is tromping through a snowy forest and ignites a weird-looking lightsaber: it’s big, sort of flickery, and it has a crossbar.

Continue reading…

Winter isn't coming.

It's here.

Sunsets in the middle of the afternoon, temperatures dipping into the 40s and below throughout the country, and itchy, irritated skin from heating systems kicking into high gear — all these factors have worked in unison to break our souls and make the past few weeks feel exponentially longer.

Thankfully, we have Thanksgiving on the horizon.

Thanksgiving is magical. It's a warm blanket for your soul — a brief break from the dark, bleak, chilly winter that's threatening to swallow all of us whole. And what makes it so special is, of course, the food.

Our finest family chefs turn into wizards in white aprons, crafting old bread and cured meats into something called stuffing. Or they tap into some ancient alchemy, willing mashed potatoes out of milk and butter. The holiday is so magical that even Brussels sprouts become edible.

Of course, not all food is welcome. Someone will, no doubt, bring a "special" sweet potato casserole topped with a white skin of marshmallows. And no matter how secret the turkey recipe you're using is, it will still not be half as good as you hope it will be.

So let's make it clear: Sides make or break Thanksgiving. And that's the reason we decided to definitively choose the best side — using science and hard data, of course.

Taste versus time

It's easy for nearly anything to taste good on first bite, after we've wasted a large chunk of time waiting for the turkey to be done. The true goal of a great side is that it taste good over the third and fourth bite ... and that it's better than the turkey.

(Tyson Whiting/Vox)

The availability theorem

The best sides are the ones that everyone wants. For instance, there's always an abundance of sweet potato casserole. Why? Put simply, it is not the best Thanksgiving side.

(Tyson Whiting/Vox)

The leftover theorem

The best sides are the ones you never want to send your guests home with, the ones you want to eat over the next few days. Unfortunately, we can't have it all. And by all, we mean a never-ending flow of mashed potatoes.

(Tyson Whiting/Vox)

Ease versus taste

Simply put: A great side shouldn't be that difficult to make.

(Tyson Whiting/Vox)

We've taken all of this data into consideration and arrived at this: the definitive ranking of the best and worst Thanksgiving sides.

1) Mashed potatoes

(Manuel Alarcon via Flickr)

Why: Mashed potatoes taste delicious, are easy to make, and continue to taste good even after the fourth and fifth bite.

2) Stuffing

(Derek Lo via Flickr)

Why: Stuffing is great. Stuffing might even be the greatest side. But, there might just be too much variation, including the aggressively healthy variety (think wild rice and stuff like raisins), and it can be tough to make. All of this keeps it from being the best.

3) Mac and cheese

(Flickr user Christaface)

Why: Some Vox staffers say they do not have mac and cheese on Thanksgiving. You should pity them.

4) Rolls

(Class V via Flickr)

Why: Golden brown on the outside. Light and fluffy on the inside. Think of them as tiny butter canoes.

5) Green beans

(Meal Makeover Moms via Flickr)

Why: Green beans allow you to have a green object on your plate of fat and carbs, making you feel better about yourself. They are a key ingredient in green bean casserole, which, when made properly, is basically as bad for you as a carb or a creamy side like mac and cheese.

6) Brussels sprouts

(Mackenzie Kosut via Flickr)

Why: Brussels sprouts would rank higher if they didn't need to be burned within an inch of their lives and doused in bacon fat to be tasty.

7) Cranberry sauce

(Nomadic Lass via Flickr)

Why: People will tell you that weird stuff in a can is no comparison to "real" cranberry sauce. But whether it's "real" or that weird stuff in a can, it's not that good. If it were, we would serve it at times other than Thanksgiving.

8) Sweet potato casserole

(Kevin Lim via Flickr)

Why: There is no good reason for someone to make this, unless she had a vendetta. A co-worker told me there are less offensive variations available, but they seem like urban legends.

The ideal plate distribution

Now that you have a definitive ranking of sides, it's time to consider ideal plate distribution:

(Tyson Whiting/Vox)

submitted by quailman03 [link] [45 comments]

A grand jury has decided that Ferguson, Missouri, police office Darren Wilson will not face charges for killing Michael Brown.

For many who wanted Wilson to be punished for Brown's death, it's a scandal that Wilson has gotten away with what they see as a crime. But the bigger scandal is that what he did arguably wasn't a crime at all. Our legal standards and legal system make it difficult — if not impossible — to prosecute police violence.

The legal standard for when police can use force

Armed riot police confront protesters in Ferguson, Missouri during the protests that followed the grand jury decision on November 24. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

It was never likely that Wilson would be prosecuted for shooting Brown. The set of situations in which police officers are allowed to use force is narrow in theory but broad in application.

Police officers are not allowed to use deadly force except in a few theoretically narrow circumstances: in defense of themselves or others, or to prevent a suspect from fleeing the scene of a "dangerous felony."

That sounds quite limiting — and it would be if the danger had to actually be real or the dangerous felony had to have actually taken place. But that’s not the law. What matters, legally, is whether the officer reasonably believed that those factors were present — or can convince a jury that he did.

And that's not hard to do, because police officers are given a great deal of deference by the legal system. Juries tend to perceive police officers as credible, and so are likely to credit officers' claims that their fear was reasonable.

And race adds a thumb on the scale: Americans overestimate black people's involvement in crime, which is helpful to an officer trying to claim that he believed a black victim was a threat, as has been the case in so many high-profile police shootings.

That means that to press criminal charges in a police shooting, the prosecutor has a heavy burden to overcome. The officer is likely to claim that he believed the suspect was a threat and made a split-second decision to use force. The jury is likely to believe him, even if his decision was a bad one.

That makes it difficult for the justice system to hold police officers to account when they use force against people who didn't actually pose a threat at all. We don't know exactly how often police officers shoot people who turn out to be unarmed, because there isn't any reliable data on police killings. But every Michael Brown, John Crawford, or Tamir Rice is a reminder that that happens far too often.

What that meant for Darren Wilson and Michael Brown

A makeshift memorial at the site where Brown was shot (Joshua LOTT/AFP/Getty Images)

Wilson claimed that when he requested that Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson use the sidewalk instead of walking in the street, Brown flew into an unprovoked rage and attacked Wilson in his squad car. According to Wilson, Brown leaned into his car and punched him. He said that later in the encounter, Brown charged at him and reached for his waistband. (There was nothing in his waistband — Brown was unarmed.) The officer said he felt like his life was in danger and that he had no option but to shoot Brown several times and kill him.

Some aspects of Wilson's story are supported by physical evidence. Ballistics evidence proves that the first shots were fired from inside the car, and Brown's DNA was found on the vehicle. Brown was facing Wilson when Wilson shot him multiple times, killing him.

Other aspects of the story, though, seem bizarre. Why would Brown suddenly attack an armed police officer sitting inside a police cruiser? Why did Wilson seem to believe that Brown might have a gun — hence the multiple references to Brown reaching into his waistband — even though the men had already struggled, and Brown had not drawn a weapon? Brown was killed more than 150 feet from Wilson's police cruiser, so why did Wilson feel so threatened by Brown running towards him that he had no choice but to shoot him over and over until he was dead?

But the grand jury listened to that testimony, considered the other evidence, and determined that there was no need to have a court hear the case. The jurors found Wilson credible enough and his fear for his life reasonable enough that they concluded there was no probable cause that a crime had been committed.

What that means for the rest of us: the costs of police violence

Armed police confront a lone protester in Ferguson Missouri on August 11. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

It's not just Michael Brown. Coupled with the legal system's deference to police, the legal standard for the use of force causes serious harm.

First, a great deal of regular life looks threatening to an officer who is primed to see danger. For instance, when John Crawford plucked an air rifle off the shelf of an Ohio Walmart on August 5, police perceived him as a threat, and killed him. And when 12-year-old Tamir Rice took a toy gun to a Cleveland playground last weekend, police determined him to be a danger, and shot him. He died the next day.

The second, more insidious problem is that the current system seems to encourage police in some departments to escalate encounters into violence instead of resolving them more peacefully. For instance, in August, a video surfaced of the St. Louis police killing Kajieme Powell, a mentally-ill man who was holding a knife. Powell was not within reach of the officers, and did not try to attack them. The police waited 23 seconds before shooting Powell multiple times.

It's difficult to watch the video and not conclude that the officers could have found a way to de-escalate the situation, and that their failure to do so cost Powell his life. But the law insulates the officers who shot Powell from the consequences of their decision.

That same pattern plays out over and over in police officers' interactions with the citizens they are supposed to protect. Instead of prioritizing de-escalation, police prioritize their own safety, even if that means escalating violence.

That attitude could be seen in the decision to have police officers roll through the streets of Ferguson in armored vehicles, and to use military-grade equipment against protesters. That heavy armor may be intended to keep officers safe, but it can have the effect of escalating or even catalyzing violence.

It's that same attitude that encourages the use of armored SWAT teams for ordinary activities like serving search or arrest warrants. The officers' tactical gear may make them feel protected, but the over-use of heavy weaponry inevitably leads to innocent people getting hurt, including very small children, and even the officers themselves.

And it's that attitude that causes police to shoot dogs during police work that takes them into family homes, leading to the unnecessary deaths of beloved furry companions.

Time for a change

Demonstrators in Los Angeles protest the grand jury decision on November 24. (David McNew/Getty Images)

We can't pretend that changing this system will be be costless. If we put more restrictions on officers' ability to use force, and impose bigger penalties on them for getting it wrong, then in some cases that will probably cause officers to hesitate at the crucial moment, and the consequences of that might be very serious indeed. Current use-of-force statues exist precisely out of concern that police officers who hesitate at the crucial second could be injured or killed.

But the costs of the status quo are too terrible to bear. Innocent Americans are getting killed as they shop, and play, and sleep in their homes. That is unacceptable. It's time for a change.

Me: You can pay here [PayPal link]

Client: Haha, no. You should’ve gotten me to sign a contract!

Me: I did.

Client: Oh well I’m still not paying.

We've finally heard from Officer Darren Wilson.

Wilson had been publicly silent since the events of August 9, when he shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. And, even as the grand jury announced its decision not to indict him, he remained silent. He had his attorneys release a statement on his behalf.

But on Monday night, St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch released the evidence given to the grand jury, including the interview police did with Wilson in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. And so we got to read, for the first time, Wilson's full, immediate account of his altercation with Brown.

And it is unbelievable.

I mean that in the literal sense of the term: "difficult or impossible to believe." But I want to be clear here. I'm not saying Wilson is lying. I'm not saying his testimony is false. I am saying that the events, as he describes them, are simply bizarre. His story is difficult to believe.

The story Wilson tells goes like this:

At about noon on August 9th, Wilson hears on the radio that there's a theft in progress at the Ferguson Market. The suspect is a black male in a black shirt.

Moments later, Wilson sees two young black men walking down the yellow stripe in the center of the street. He pulls over. "Hey guys, why don't you walk on the sidewalk?" They refuse. "We're almost at our destination," one of them replies. Wilson tries again. "But what's wrong with the sidewalk?" he asks.

And then things get weird.

Brown's response to "what's wrong with the sidewalk?", as recorded by Wilson, is "fuck what you have to say." Remember, Wilson is a uniformed police officer, in a police car, and Brown is an 18-year-old kid who just committed a robbery. And when asked to use the sidewalk, Wilson says Brown replied, "Fuck what you have to say."

Wilson says Brown replied, "Fuck what you have to say."

Wilson backs his car up and begins to open the door. "Hey, come here," he said to the kid who just cursed at him. He says Brown replied, "What the fuck you gonna do?" And then Brown, in Wilson's telling, slams the car door closed. Wilson tries to open the door again, tells Brown to get back, and then Brown leans into the vehicle and begins punching him.

Photos surround Michael Brown's casket in Ferguson, MO. (Richard Perry-Pool/Getty Images)

Let's take a breath and recap. Wilson sees two young black men walking in the middle of the street. He pulls over and politely asks them to use the sidewalk. They refuse. He asks again, still polite. Brown tells Wilson — again, a uniformed police officer in a police car — "fuck what you have to say." Wilson stops his car, tries to get out, and Brown slams the car door on him and then begins punching him through the open window.

What happens next is the most unbelievable moment in the narrative. And so it's probably best that I just quote Wilson's account at length on it.

I was doing the, just scrambling, trying to get his arms out of my face and him from grabbing me and everything else. He turned to his...if he's at my vehicle, he turned to his left and handed the first subject. He said, "here, take these." He was holding a pack of — several packs of cigarillos which was just, what was stolen from the Market Store was several packs of cigarillos. He said, "here, hold these" and when he did that I grabbed his right arm trying just to control something at that point. Um, as I was holding it, and he came around, he came around with his arm extended, fist made, and went like that straight at my face with his...a full swing from his left hand.

So Brown is punching inside the car. Wilson is scrambling to deflect the blows, to protect his face, to regain control of the situation. And then Brown stops, turns to his left, says to his friend, "Here, hold these," and hands him the cigarillos stolen from Ferguson Market. Then he turns back to Wilson and, with his left hand now freed from holding the contraband goods, throws a haymaker at Wilson.

Every bullshit detector in me went off when I read that passage. Which doesn't mean that it didn't happen exactly the way Wilson describes. But it is, again, hard to imagine. Brown, an 18-year-old kid holding stolen goods, decides to attack a cop and, while attacking him, stops, hands his stolen goods to his friend, and then returns to the beatdown. It reads less like something a human would do and more like a moment meant to connect Brown to the robbery.

Wilson next recounts his thought process as he reached for a weapon. He considered using his mace, but at such close range, the mace might get in his eyes, too. He doesn't carry a taser with a fireable cartridge, but even if he did, "it probably wouldn't have hit [Brown] anywhere". Wilson couldn't reach his baton or his flashlight. So he went for his gun.

Brown sees him go for the gun. And he replies: "You're too much of a fucking pussy to shoot me."

"You're too much of a fucking pussy to shoot me."

Again, stop for a moment and think about that. Brown is punching Wilson, sees the terrified cop reaching for his gun, and says "You're too much of a fucking pussy to shoot me." He dares him to shoot.

A protestors holds up a sign saying "don't shoot". (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

And then Brown grabs Wilson's gun, twists it, and points it at Wilson's "pelvic area". Wilson regains control of the firearm and gets off a shot, shattering the glass. Brown backs up a half step and, realizing he's unharmed, dives back into the car to attack Wilson. Wilson fires again, and then Brown takes off running. (You can see the injuries Wilson sustained from the fight in these photographs.)

Wilson exits the car to give chase. He yells at Brown to get down on the ground. Here, I'm going to go back to Wilson's words:

When he stopped, he turned, looked at me, made like a grunting noise and had the most intense, aggressive face I've ever seen on a person. When he looked at me, he then did like the hop...you know, like people do to start running. And, he started running at me. During his first stride, he took his right hand put it under his shirt into his waistband. And I ordered him to stop and get on the ground again. He didn't. I fired multiple shots. After I fired the multiple shots, I paused a second, yelled at him to get on the ground again, he was still in the same state. Still charging, hand still in his waistband, hadn't slowed down.

The stuff about Brown putting his hand in his waistband is meant to suggest that Wilson had reason to believe Brown might pull a gun. But it's strange. We know Brown didn't have a gun. And that's an odd fact to obscure while charging a police officer.

Either way, at that point, Wilson shoots again, and kills Brown.

There are inconsistencies in Wilson's story. He estimates that Brown ran 20-30 feet away from the car and then charged another 10 feet back towards Wilson. But we know Brown died 150 feet away from the car.

There are also consistencies. St Louis prosecutor Robert McCulloch said that Brown's DNA was found inside Wilson's car, suggesting there was a physical altercation inside the vehicle.

But the larger question is, in a sense, simpler: Why?

Why did Michael Brown, an 18-year-old kid headed to college, refuse to move from the middle of the street to the sidewalk? Why would he curse out a police officer? Why would he attack a police officer? Why would he dare a police officer to shoot him? Why would he charge a police officer holding a gun? Why would he put his hand in his waistband while charging, even though he was unarmed?

None of this fits with what we know of Michael Brown

None of this fits with what we know of Michael Brown. Brown wasn't a hardened felon. He didn't have a death wish. And while he might have been stoned, this isn't how stoned people act. The toxicology report did not indicate he was on PCP or something that would've led to suicidal aggression.

Which doesn't mean Wilson is a liar. Unbelievable things happen every day. The fact that his story raises more questions than it answers doesn't mean it isn't true.

But the point of a trial would have been to try to answer these questions. We would have either found out if everything we thought we knew about Brown was wrong, or if Wilson's story was flawed in important ways. But now we're not going to get that chance. We're just left with Wilson's unbelievable story.

It’s November and aspiring writers are plugging away at their novels for National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, an annual event that encourages people to churn out a 50,000-word book on deadline. But a hundred or so people are taking a very different approach to the challenge, writing computer programs that will write their texts for them. It’s called NaNoGenMo, for National Novel Generation Month, and the results are a strange, often funny look at what automatic text generation can do.

The developer and artist Darius Kazemi started NaNoGenMo last year, when he tweeted out an off-the-cuff idea.

Hey, who wants to join me in NaNoGenMo: spend the month writing code that generates a 50k word novel, share the novel & the code at the...

Continue reading…

Last Thursday in its annual Investor Meeting Intel revealed the first details of its 3D NAND technology and announced that it will begin the shipments of 3D NAND in the second half of 2015. While Intel's investment in 3D NAND hasn't been a secret, the company has been relatively quiet about any specifics and the vital specs such as the number of layers and die capacity have remained unknown. In Thursday's webcast, Rob Crooke, Senior VP and General Manager of Intel's non-volatile memory group, disclosed that Intel's first generation 3D MLC NAND die will be 256Gbit (32GB) in capacity and will consist of 32 layers. The technology also enables a 384Gbit (48GB) TLC (3-bit-per-cell) die as we have learned over the years.

Intel claims that its 3D NAND is the most cost effective on the market and bases this on the fact that its die is 256Gbit whereas Samsung's is only up to 128Gbit at the moment. I'm not sure if I buy Intel's claim because while it's true that a higher capacity die results in higher array efficiency (i.e. peripheral circuitry takes less area), Samsung consciously went from a 24-layer 128Gbit MLC die to a 32-layer 86Gbit MLC die. In other words, Samsung could have upped the die capacity to ~170Gbit by just adding the extra layers, but the company chose to go with a smaller die instead. Smaller capacity dies have advantages in performance (higher parallelism) and applicability because eMMC/microSD devices have very strict die size constraints, so that might be a part of the reason why Samsung's strategy is so different from Intel's and Micron's. 

As the graph above shows, Intel's/Micron's NAND dies have historically been larger than the competitors', so the die capacity alone isn't enough to dictate whether Intel's 3D NAND is more cost efficient than Samsung, especially because both have 32 layers. Unlike Samsung, Intel didn't reveal the lithography that is used to manufacture the 3D NAND, but I would say it's safe to assume that the lithography is in the order of 30nm or 40nm because the whole idea of 3D NAND is to move away from multi-patterning to cut costs and with today's technology the smallest pitch of single-patterning is somewhere between 30nm and 40nm. Either way, it will be very interesting to see how Intel's 3D NAND stacks up against Samsung's because there are also some structural differences that affect the production cost as well as performance and endurance, but I'll save the structural analysis for a future article.

Intel said that 3D NAND technology will enable +10TB SSDs in the 'next couple of years', but it wasn't clear whether that is with first generation 3D NAND or some later generation with more layers and higher die capacity. Currently Intel's lineup tops out at 2TB (P3700 & P3600) with a 128Gbit die, so the 256Gbit die alone isn't enough to bring the capacities above 10TB. With effective controller development it should certainly be possible to build a 10TB SSD with a 256Gbit die, although I'm still inclined to believe that Mr. Crooke was referring to second or third generation 3D NAND with his statement. 

Similar to Intel's previous NAND efforts, 3D NAND has been jointly developed with Micron and will most likely be manufactured in the co-owned Utah plant as Intel sold its share in other fabs a couple of years ago. Interestingly enough, Mr. Crooke said that they also have the ability to bring 3D NAND production to an Intel fab, although to me that sounded more like a statement of technological possibility rather than a hint of future strategy. I wouldn't rule it out, though, but like Mr. Crooke said in the Q&A, Intel needs to have significant competitive advantage for it to make sense. In the past Intel's NAND technologies have generally been slightly ahead of the rest of the industry, but at least as of now Intel doesn't seem to have any substantial advantage in 3D NAND technology as Samsung is already shipping a 32-layer die and will likely ship a 48-layer die before Intel ships its 32-layer product.

All in all, we'll likely get more crumbs of information as the second half of 2015 gets closer. Given Intel's recent SSD strategy, I expect 3D NAND to first find its way to enterprise-class SSDs, but we'll see soon enough.

There's a reason people basically don't eat turkey save on one day in November (and then a few more as they're desperately trying to rid their refrigerators of the disappointing leftovers).Turkey isn't a very tasty meat to begin with. It's leaner even than chicken — and fat is where most of the flavor resides. But the bigger problem is turkey is a terrible bird to roast whole.

turkey is a terrible bird to roast whole

There's virtually no way to put an entire turkey in an oven and have the the dark meat cook to the point of safety without the white meat cooking beyond the point of edibility. Or, to be more precise, the problem with roasting a whole turkey is that the leg meat needs to get to 165° but the breast dries out over 150° (and note that USDA tells you to cook the breast to 165° which is, as Serious Eats says, "a guarantee you'll have dry, tough meat").

That's why we cover turkey in jellied, sugared cranberries and thick gravy at the same time in order to enjoy it. We're making up for its lack of fat and the fact that it is almost always badly overcooked.

You don't see people doing that with, say, pork shoulder.

I don't want to be too dogmatic on this. There are ways to make turkey delicious. But they tend to mean betraying Thanksgiving tradition and cutting the turkey into parts so that the different pieces can be cooked properly, as with Mark Bittman's braising method, or cutting out the backbone and flattening the turkey so the entire bird cooks at the same rate, as with spatchcocking. Or they take an enormous amount of work (one of my closest friends smokes his turkey and it's amazing — but it's also incredibly labor intensive, and you need a smoker).

the best way to cook a turkey is to cook a Momofuku pork shoulder instead

So if you're an adventurous cook and you want to prove yourself by making something delicious out one of the worst proteins around, then go nuts. But if you're a normal human being who already has too much to do on Thanksgiving, then the best way to cook a turkey is to cook a Momofuku pork shoulder instead.

The benefits of pork shoulder

David Chang, the profane head of the Momofuku empire, talks cooking at Google.

Unlike turkey, pork shoulder is delicious. Unlike turkey, it's easy to make insanely well. Unlike turkey, it's reasonably easy to find in humane, organic forms. And unlike your turkey, your Thanksgiving guests will remember your pork shoulder. It will make your Thanksgiving different, memorable, better. They will fondly think back to how unusually delicious Thanksgiving at your house was, because you served Momofuku pork shoulder and not turkey. You will be a hero. Can't you hear their cheers now?

Tradition isn't everything

The rebuttal here is that turkey is tradition. Turkey is what makes the fourth Thursday of November into Thanksgiving. But the earliest Thanksgivings certainly didn't have turkey. As Robert Krulwich wrote in an A+ headline for NPR: "First Thanksgiving Dinner: No Turkeys. No Ladies. No Pies."

Tradition isn't everything. Thanksgiving is better with ladies. It is better with pies. And it is better with pork shoulder than with turkey.

David Chang's Momofuku cookbook has a particularly good recipe for pork shoulder (it says pork butt, but remember that pork butt, confusingly, is just pork shoulder). And it's dead simple.

You take a bone-in pork shoulder. You coat it with a cup of white sugar and a cup of salt. You cover it in plastic wrap and refrigerate it overnight. The next day, you unwrap it and roast it in the oven for six hours at 300 degrees, basting hourly. (Quick note: some people wash or wipe off the salt/sugar rub before roasting — it just depends on your tolerance for salt.) Then you take out the pork shoulder, coat it in seven tablespoons of brown sugar plus another table spoon of salt, jack the oven up to 500 degrees, and give it another 10-15 minutes to develop a crust.

If you're a visual learner, the Working Class Cooks have a good video outlining the process:

And that's it. Make whatever sauces and sides you want. You can go the full bo ssam route and serve it with lettuce wraps, oysters, kimchi, ssam sauce, and ginger-scallion sauce. Or you can just serve it with cranberry sauce, gravy and mashed potatoes. After all, it's Thanksgiving.

This is the story of a man who had a tapeworm living in his brain for at least four years. You can see the worm moving from one side of his brain to the other in this series of images, taken over that timespan:

(Nagui Antoun)

This 50-year-old man came to the hospital complaining of headaches, weird smells, seizures, and memory problems. Eventually, Tim Chester of Mashable reports, the doctors did brain surgery, found the tapeworm, and removed it.

Now, how did this person get a tapeworm in his brain? It's because it wasn't any ordinary tapeworm. Ordinary tapeworms live in stomachs, and you can find them in dogs and cats in the United States because fleas can carry tapeworm larvae.

This brain tapeworm is a very rare and different species, called Spirometra erinaceieuropaei. It lives in some Asian countries (this patient had recently been to China) and can be acquired through eating undercooked frog meat or drinking contaminated water.

Scientists later sequenced its genome — the first of this species. They hope to find clues in its DNA of what kinds of drugs will best fight it in the future. They published this tale, and its scientific results, in the journal Genome Biology on November 21, 2014.

Here's some more crazy things you can see with MRI:

Paul Ford, writing for The New Yorker:

You might have read that, on October 28th, W3C officially recommended HTML5. And you might know that this has something to do with apps and the Web. The question is: Does this concern you?

The answer, at least for citizens of the Internet, is yes: it is worth understanding both what HTML5 is and who controls the W3C. And it is worth knowing a little bit about the mysterious, conflict-driven cultural process whereby HTML5 became a “recommendation.” Billions of humans will use the Web over the next decade, yet not many of those people are in a position to define what is “the Web” and what isn’t. The W3C is in that position. So who is in this cabal? What is it up to? Who writes the checks?

Ford achieves something extraordinary with this piece — it works well as an introduction to the world of web standards for the uninitiated, but works also as a cogent overview for those of us who are intimately familiar with the W3C (idealistic) / WHATWG (practical) political saga.

Ford is on a roll. It’s amazing how many of my favorite pieces of the last few months have his byline.

Reddit, land of internet treasures like cat GIFs, fitness bros, and people are willing to share entertaining tales of messing up their lives, never ceases to surprise. On Friday, a redditor took to the "Writing Prompts" subreddit (a place, like its name suggests, where people drop in prompts and other people submit their responses), and asked for the most beautiful opening sentences their fellow redditors could create.

The results were magical, primarily because you got to see how different people think of beautiful writing. Like ketonespecies who probably finds Neil DeGrasse Tyson all kinds of wonderful:

(Reddit)

And Redditors weren't afraid to get dark:

(Reddit)

Or a wee bit violent:

(Reddit)

There was also angst-filled romantic language, the kind that would make Twilight author Stephenie Meyer shed a tear of joy:

(Reddit)

And this being Reddit, there were poop jokes:

(Reddit)

For more beautiful sentences, head on over to Reddit.

It's almost that time of the year: snow is about to fall, toys are about to go on sale, and the culture wars about to heat up.

That's right. It's beginning to look a lot like — persecution season.

The Farmer's Almanac is predicting this year's War on Christmas to be one of the nastiest on record, what with Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas scheduled to open in church cafeterias everywhere next week.

If you're not sure what the War on Christmas is, it's very easy to explain it: a certain subset of the Christian population feels threatened whenever they are wished "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas." The generic holiday greeting, they feel, is discriminating precisely because it dethrones Christ from the center of the holiday.

If you feel that you are being unjustly discriminated against this holiday season, here is a simple and handy flowchart to consult. It's from Christian blogger Rachel Held Evans.

Apple's upcoming Watch smartwatch was featured recently by Time magazine as one of the Best Inventions of 2014. The annual round-up of gadgets and technology breakthroughs showcases the innovations that promise to make the "world better, smarter and-...

Lenore Skenazy is a public speaker and founder of the book and blog Free-Range kids. Her show "World's Worst Mom" airs on Discovery/TLC international.

The Richland, WA, school district is phasing out swings on its playgrounds. As the district's spokesman recently told KEPR TV: "It's just really a safety issue. Swings have been determined to be the most unsafe of all the playground equipment on a playground."

Ah yes, those dangling doom machines. All they sow is death and despair.

But while this sounds like yet another example of how liability concerns are killing childhood (seen a see-saw anywhere in the last 20 years? A slide higher than your neck?), it's deeper than that. Insurance underwriters are merely the high priests of what has become our new American religion: the Cult of Kiddie Danger. It is founded on the unshakable belief that our kids are in constant danger from everyone and everything.

The devout pray like this: "Oh Lord, show me the way my child is in deathly danger from __________, that I may cast it out." And then they fill in the blank with anything we might have hitherto considered allowing our children to eat, watch, visit, touch, or do, e.g., "Sleep over at a friend's," "Microwave the macaroni in a plastic dish," or even, "Play outside, unsupervised."

The Cult’s dogma is taught diligently unto our children who are not allowed to use Chapstick unless it is administered by the school nurse, nor sunscreen, lest they quaff it and die of poisoning, nor, for the same reason, soft soap in pre-k. It doesn't matter that these fears are wildly at odds with reality. They are religious beliefs, not rational ones.

What's more, this is a state religion, so the teachings are enforced by the cops and courts. Those who step outside the orthodoxy face punishment swift and merciless.

You can't step outside at all, in fact. Americans are not allowed to believe any public place is safe for their children, ever, without constant supervision. Trust is taboo.

The logical under-current is illogical, as it’s based on a hapless understanding of basic statistics. How many children are kidnapped by strangers in a year? About one in 1.5 million — those are incredibly great odds. But odds don’t matter when we’re evangelizing about a vision of death and destruction.

That's why, last winter, when a New Jersey mom left her sleeping 18-month-old in the car for 5-10 minutes while she ran an errand at an upscale shopping mall, she returned to find herself under arrest. Though the child was completely fine — he seems to have slept through the whole "incident" — the mom was found guilty of abuse or negligence. An appeals court of three judges upheld this conviction with the comment, "We need not describe at any length the parade of horribles that could have attended [the child’s] neglect."

In other words: The judges need not spell out their Boschian fantasies. If an authority can envision something "horrible" happening — and even turn that adjective into a noun — it doesn't matter how farfetched any actual scenario is. (In fact, the danger of dragging your child across the parking lot is larger than letting him wait in the car a few minutes.) Anyone doubting constant danger is a heretic. The mom is now excommunicated — that is, she's on the New Jersey Child Abuse Registry. Good luck to her if she hoped to work with kids, at least while the case makes its way to the New Jersey Supreme Court.

And if you can stand to hear another one of these, a similar case concerns a Chicagoland mom who let her young son wait in the car for less than five minutes this September while she, too, ran an errand. An onlooker alerted the authorities, which brought not only the police but also the paramedics, who proceeded to examine the child as if he had been in grave danger. Sure, it's the same grave danger any of us face when sitting in traffic — four minutes in an unmoving car. But magically, because the mom was not directly supervising the child, it transmogrified into a near-death experience.

Zero Tolerance laws are another code of the Cult, stemming from the same belief that while the danger to a child might seem minimal to the point of non-existent, to true believers it looms large and immediate. And so children have been suspended around the country for a plastic gun the size of a toothpick, a Lego gun the size of a quarter, and the infamous "gun" made out of a Pop Tart. And by "made" I mean "bitten into the shape of, by a 7 year old."

How can we explain any of this hysteria if not by religious fervor? To see danger where there is none is no longer considered crazy, it's a mission. Many authorities seem to believe the more danger they can imagine, the holier they are. In a letter home to parents, the principal at the Pop-Tart school wrote, "While no physical threats were made and no one [was] harmed, the student had to be removed from the classroom."

Had to? Because...he had a Pop Tart? Or because the boy with the pastry pistol was magically dangerous, like a witch with her cat?

In a society that believes children are in constant danger, the Good Samaritans are often terrible people. So, recently, when a woman in Austin noticed a 6-year-old playing outside, she asked him where he lived, walked him home (it was just down the hill), and chastised the mom, Kari Anne Roy, for not being careful enough. Then this Samaritan called the Inquisitors. Er...cops.

An officer showed up at Roy's doorstep and despite the fact that the crime rate today is at a 50-year-low, a CPS investigator was also dispatched to interview all three of Roy's children. She asked Roy's 8-year-old if her parents had ever shown her movies with people's private parts. "So my daughter, who didn't know that things like that exist, does now," says Roy. "Thank you, CPS."

It was almost seven years ago that I let my 9-year-old ride the subway alone and wrote a newspaper column about it. The result? A media firestorm. Back then I thought my crime, in the eyes of the public, was putting my child in danger.

But gradually I've come to realize my real crime was that I publicly disavowed the state religion. Talk show host after talk show host tried to get me to recant, asking: "How would you have felt if he didn't come home?"

I could have sobbed and fainted, claiming it had been only a momentary lapse when I'd trusted my son in the world. Instead I said, "I wasn't thinking that way. If I did, I could never let him do anything."

Today it is a sin — and sometimes a crime — NOT to imagine your children dead the moment we take your eyes off them. The moment they skip to school with a Chapstick, wait in the car a minute, or play at the park.

We think we are enlightened in this quest to keep kids completely safe. Actually, we have entered a new Dark Ages, fearing evil all around us.

If we want the right to raise our kids rationally, even optimistically, it's time to call the Cult of Kiddie Danger what it is: mass hysteria aided and abetted by the authorities. But as earlier holy books so succinctly instructed us, there is a better way to live.

"Fear not."

This piece was originally published in New America’s digital magazine,The Weekly Wonk. Sign up to get it delivered to your inbox each Thursday here, and follow @New America on Twitter.