Andrew

Ebola is a very scary disease with horrifying symptoms, but it poses very little risk to the US.

Despite that, the conversation surrounding the disease has become exceptionally heated in recent days. Republicans have accused the Obama administration of mishandling the outbreak. Democrats have blamed the disease's spread on Republican-backed budget cuts. Politicians from both parties have called for a travel ban for flights in and out of Ebola-stricken countries. Media outlets have run stories that suggest, with little scientific basis, the disease could go airborne. The public is also calling on the government to do more.

On Wednesday, Fox News' Shepard Smith said everyone needs to calm down.

"Unless a medical professional has contacted you personally and told you of some sort of possible exposure, fear not," Smith said. "Do not listen to the hysterical voices on the radio and the television or read the fear-provoking words online. The people who say and write hysterical things are being very irresponsible."

He later added, "We do not have an outbreak of Ebola in the United States. Nowhere. We do have two health-care workers who contracted the disease from a dying man. They are isolated. There is no information to suggest that the virus has spread to anyone in the general population in America — not one person in the general population in the United States."

To learn more about Ebola, read Vox's explainer.

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After weeks of back and forth, will he or won't he, Marvel finally announced Robert Downey Jr.'s next appearance as Tony Stark / Iron Man, playing counterpoint to Chris Evans' Steve Roger in the NSA-fueled Captain America 3.

But the most interesting part of the announcement is this behind-the-scenes blurb from Variety:

Originally, Marvel wanted to hire Downey for a small role, which would have required just three weeks of work. But Downey wanted Stark to have a more substantial role in the film's plot, which would give him more screen time and naturally a bigger payday. This angered Marvel Entertainment chief Ike Perlmutter, who ordered the screenwriters to write Iron Man out of the script entirely, according to sources with...

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Neil Genzingler, reporting for the NYT on Steven Berlin Johnson’s new series for PBS:

The opening episode, for instance, is called “Clean,” and it sets the pattern for the five that follow. We tend not to acknowledge just how recent some of the trends and comforts of modern life are, including the luxury of not walking through horse manure and human waste on the way to the post office.

The episode turns back the clock just a century and a half, to a time before our liquid waste stream was largely contained in underground pipes. Mr. Johnson then traces the emergence of the idea that with a little effort, cities and towns could have a cleaner existence, and the concurrent idea that cleanliness would have public health benefits.

Sounds like a great show. Looking forward to it.

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Fruits and vegetables have changed a lot since the onset of agriculture 10,000 years ago, as generation after generation of farmers artificially bred crops to select for more desirable traits like size and taste.

But that change can be hard to visualize. So James Kennedy, a chemistry teacher in Australia, created some terrific infographics to show just how drastic the evolution has been. This one, for instance, shows how corn has changed in the last 9,000 years — from a wild grass in the early Americas known as teosinte to the plump ears of corn we know today:

The evolution of corn

(James Kennedy)

The evolution of corn (maize) is a fascinating story. For a long time, scientists couldn't figure out where domesticated corn originally came from — it doesn't look like anything that grows in the wild. It took serious sleuthing by geneticists, botanists, and archaeologists to figure out that maize split off from teosinte grass some 9,000 years ago. (The two are surprisingly similar at the DNA level, differing by just a handful of genes.)

As maize became domesticated in Mesoamerica, it was radically altered through selective breeding. Early farmers would examine their plants and save the seeds of those that were larger or tastier, or whose kernels were easier to grind. By 4000 BC, cobs were already an inch long. Within just a few thousand years, cobs had grown to many times that size. Later on, plant hybridization became an important breeding method to further cultivate certain traits.

Nowadays, corn is grown all over the planet, and humans are still making changes using more advanced breeding techniques. In the 1980s, for instance, seed companies turned to genetic engineering — so, for instance, scientists inserted genes from Bt soil bacteria into corn to help the plant ward off pests. And some researchers are hoping to develop corn varieties that can withstand drought.

The evolution of watermelon

(James Kennedy)

Here's another great graphic from Kennedy. Modern-day watermelons don't look anything like their distant ancestors from Southern Africa. That, too, is the result of thousands of years of breeding. Yet a few of the biggest advances also came in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, when crop scientists helped breed varieties that were resistant to disease and had a thicker rind — allowing watermelons to be grown all over the country.

Even to this day, we're still producing new types of watermelon — like the black Densuke watermelon grown on a single island in Japan. And crop scientists have produced seedless watermelons by adding chemicals to double a watermelon's chromosomes and then breeding the result with a normal watermelon.*

The evolution of peaches

(James Kennedy)

And here are peaches, which started out in China and were selected for size and juiciness over thousands of years. Note that the water content of peaches has changed drastically in just 6,000 years.

Mind you, not all attempts at selective breeding turn out so well. As Sarah Yager recently wrote at the Atlantic, apple growers in the United States during the 20th century tried to breed Red Delicious apples to be as bright and shiny as possible and stay on shelves for as long as possible without noticeable bruising. The result? "As genes for beauty were favored over those for taste, the skins grew tough and bitter around mushy, sugar-soaked flesh." Nowadays, as storage and transport have become more advanced, tastier apple varieties like the Honeycrisp or Gala are surpassing the Red Delicious.

(Thanks to Calestous Juma for the pointer to Kennedy's blog.)

Further reading:

• You can see many of Kennedy's other wonderful graphics on his blog. He also, for instance, had a fun series showing the ingredients inside bananas or strawberries.
• A related earlier story: "traditional crop breeding" isn't nearly as traditional as you think
• Another related earlier story: those ubiquitous "all-natural" labels on food are meaningless. Let's get rid of them.
• How GMOs conquered the United States.

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How big government helps big dairy sell milk

jones_supa writes: Two weeks in, and already a million people have tried out Windows 10 Technical Preview, reports Microsoft, along with a nice stack of other stats and feedback. Only 36% of installations are occurring inside a virtual machine. 68% of Windows 10 Technical Preview users are launching more than seven apps per day, with somewhere around 25% of testers using Windows 10 as their daily driver (26 app launches or more per day). With the help of Windows 10's built-in feedback tool, thousands of testers have made it very clear that Microsoft's new OS still has lots of irksome bugs and misses many much-needed features. ExtremeTech has posted an interesting list of the most popular gripes received, them mostly being various GUI endurances. What has your experience been with the Technical Preview?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I've been spending the morning enjoying OK Go's fourth album, Hungry Ghosts, which was released on Tuesday.

OK Go has been making great music since 1998, but the band really came into its own with the advent of YouTube, which allowed it to stage ever-more-elaborate stunts and capture them on video. Here are my favorite OK Go music videos.

1) "Needing/Getting" (2012)

This 2012 video might be OK Go's most ambitious. It was made possible with the help of a corporate sponsor, Chevy.

The gang lined up rows of noise-making objects — pianos, guitars, jars, plastic barrels — in the desert outside of Los Angeles. Then, according to the band, "a Chevy Sonic was outfitted with retractable pneumatic arms designed to play the instruments. The video took 4 months of preparation and 4 days of shooting and recording. There are no ringers or stand-ins; Damian took stunt driving lessons."

2) "Here It Goes Again" (2006)

This was the video that made OK Go famous. In OK Go's early shows, the band members would lip-sync some of their songs while doing silly dances. Here, they combined that basic concept with a set of eight treadmills, producing a charmingly low-tech music video.

It was posted to YouTube in July 2006, a time when YouTube — and the concept of music videos going viral online — was new. It quickly racked up tens of millions of views, earning OK Go a spot at the 2006 MTV Music Video Awards, a Grammy award, and even a parody on the Simpsons.

It also set a tone for later OK Go music videos. One of the group's first music videos was a conventional number featuring scantily clad women and a close-ups of lead singer Damian Kulesh. But after the treadmills went viral, OK Go stopped trying to make conventional videos and doubled down on nerdiness.

3) "The Writing's On the Wall" (2014)

OK Go's newest video was released in June, to help generate buzz for this week's new album.

Like other recent OK Go videos, this one was done in a single take and required an insane amount of preparation. It features a sequence of optical illusions that play with perspective. Many of them require the camera to be in precisely the same spot, so a whole crew of people worked behind the scenes to make sure everything was set up exactly right.

4) "End Love" (2010)

This video was also done in a single take, but instead of taking three or four minutes, it was filmed over 18 hours. It features radical shifts in playback speed: some sequences are shot in slow-motion, while in other cases, hours fly by in seconds.

The hardest part was keeping the band members' lips lined up with the music so that the lip-syncing would look realistic. The guys behind the video describe how they did it:

In the first section we go from real-time into 4x (meaning every 4 seconds recorded becomes 1 second of playback)… at speeds like 4x you can play the music at quarter speed, and have the singing lip synced just by listening to it and singing slowly… this starts to fail around 8x where the audio starts to become unintelligible.

At this and slower speeds we used a variety of techniques – when it’s around 16-32x (where one minute recorded equals ~2 seconds of playback), we could take the rhythms of the singing and notate when each syllable should start – Eric was continually megaphoning out the cues to all the members, eg "five…. six… ok on eight damian begins saying ‘love’… seven… eight" – all this while also yelling out all the choreography cues!

At the slowest speeds even listening to a count becomes almost impossible – the sleeping bag scene is filmed at 512x, meaning every roughly 8 minutes becomes a second. A single line of singing took usually 45 minutes. To do this reasonably well, we filmed each of the band members singing their lines, and then slowed down the recordings to 1/512x. While they sat/slept (yes they really did sleep) in the sleeping bags, we played back the roughly 2 hours of film on a laptop in the park, where they could see where they should be with their mouths.

5) "Last Leaf" (2010)

This video features animation burned onto slices of toast. And no, the animation wasn't inserted into the video digitally — the team really bought thousands of slices of bread, toasted them, and then used a computer-controlled laser to draw a frame of the animation on each one.

The video was also a business-model experiment: Samsung sponsored the video to promote its NX100 iFn camera.

6) "This Too Shall Pass" (2010)

In this video, the band set up an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine that starts with a line of dominoes and ends up smashing a piano, a television, and much more.

Like most of OK Go's recent videos, this one was done as a single uninterrupted take. It took an insane amount of careful planning to get the whole sequence to work.

7) "WTF?" (2010)

This video, which features the first song on OK Go's third album, combines a clever video gimmick with a bunch of junk purchased at the dollar store to fill the screen with pretty colors.

The video was filmed in front of a green screen. But rather than inserting a totally different shot behind the singers, the background for each frame is simply the previous frame of the video. The result: when objects move across the screen, they leave trails behind them. The band wrapped objects in colorful gaffing tape to produce a variety of on-screen patterns.

First time accepted submitter Dadoo writes By now, everyone who reads Slashdot regularly has seen the XKCD comic discussing how to choose a more secure password, but at least one security researcher rejects that theory, asserting that password managers are the most important technology people can use to keep their accounts safe. He says, "In this post, I'm going to make the following arguments: 1) Choosing a password should be something you do very infrequently. 2) Our focus should be on protecting passwords against informed statistical attacks and not brute-force attacks. 3) When you do have to choose a password, one of the most important selection criteria should be how many other people have also chosen that same password. 4) One of the most impactful things that we can do as a security community is to change password strength meters and disallow the use of common passwords."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Are you the sort of person who just loves correcting other people's grammar? Are you sure that you're doing it right? Some things that people have been taught are rules of English grammar are really not rules at all—and some of them are flat-out wrong.

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People who cant use commas correctly, are maddening. They also can be costly. The blog Priceonomics recently told the story of how one misplaced comma cost the government the equivalent of $38.4 million.

The whole story is fascinating and totally worth your time, but here's the quick version: at the time, tariffs brought in a huge share of government revenue. And up through 1872, the US government's tariff act specified that certain things were exempt from import tariffs. Among these were "fruit plants, tropical and semi-tropical for the purpose of propagation or cultivation."

That's plants, mind you, and not fruit itself. Getting fruit was expensive back then — the 1870 tariff act imposed a 20 percent tariff on grapes, pineapples, lemons, and oranges, and 10 percent on a whole mess of other fruits.

Then in 1872, the new tariff act contained an unfortunate comma that changed everything:

Source: Priceonomics

Now, with "fruit, plants" instead of "fruit-plants," all those pineapples and lemons and everything else were exempt from tariffs. And that typo would cost taxpayers $2 million — the equivalent of around $38.4 million today, and around 1.3 percent of all tariff income. Congress debated but ended up resignedly allowing the comma to stay. However, they did restore the tariffs in later acts.

Comedian and HBO talk show host Bill Maher sparked a major debate last week over Islam, arguing that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are actually not extremist outliers but represent the inherent violence and intolerance of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims. This is not actually a new debate (we've been having it on-and-off in America since September 2001), it's not just Maher making it, and, to be really clear about this, the arguments are both factually incorrect and deeply bigoted.

Still, Bill Maher is popular, and his ideas are unfortunately not uncommon, so you may find yourself facing some version of his argument in your daily life. There a number of ways you can respond: by pointing out Maher's factual errors, by noting that ISIS is widely loathed in Muslim-majority societies, and so on.

Or you could show them this one tweet, from Libyan-American Hend al-Amry, which skewers Maher-style Islamophobia concisely and just about perfectly:

5 of the last 12 Nobel Peace Prize winners were Muslim. So according to Bill Maher, we're all Peace Prize winners! pic.twitter.com/SDY3w51A3D

— Hend (@LibyaLiberty) October 10, 2014

Amry's point: if Maher's argument is that the rise of ISIS proves that all of Islam is extremely violent and intolerant, then by the same logic wouldn't the spate of Muslim Nobel Peace Prize-winners prove that all Muslims are also extremely peaceful?

Here are the winners in the photo: Shirin Ebadi (Iranian activist, 2003), Mohamed ElBaradei (former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, 2005), Muhammed Yunus (microfinance pioneer, 2006), Tawakkol Karman (Yemeni activist, 2011), Malala Yousafzai (Pakistani activist, 2014).

This tweet is a very straightforward way of making a point that shouldn't need to be made, but does: generalizing across a vast and diverse demographic group based on the actions of a few of its members isn't just bigoted, it's logically ridiculous. The fact that we are so ready to embrace that reasoning when it lets us promote deeply negative stereotypes about Muslims, including on major news outlets, is just another of many signs that Islamophobia is increasingly rampant in America.

So the next time someone asks you "why are so many Muslims violent," before you launch into a detailed rebuttal debunking the misconceptions and errors behind the question, simply ask in response, "Why are so many Muslims Nobel Peace Prize laureates?"

WheezyJoe (1168567) writes The E-Cat (or "Energy Catalyzer") is an alleged cold fusion device that produces heat from a low-energy nuclear reaction where nickel and hydrogen fuse into copper. Previous reports have tended to suggest the technology is a hoax, and the inventor Andrea Rossi's reluctance to share details of the device haven't helped the situation. ExtremeTech now reports that "six (reputable) researchers from Italy and Sweden" have "observed a small E-Cat over 32 days, where it produced net energy of 1.5 megawatt-hours, "far more than can be obtained from any known chemical sources in the small reactor volume."... "The researchers, analyzing the fuel before and after the 32-day burn, note that there is an isotope shift from a "natural" mix of Nickel-58/Nickel-60 to almost entirely Nickel-62 — a reaction that, the researchers say, cannot occur without nuclear reactions (i.e. fusion)." The paper (PDF) linked in the article concludes that the E-cat is "a device giving heat energy compatible with nuclear transformations, but it operates at low energy and gives neither nuclear radioactive waste nor emits radiation. From basic general knowledge in nuclear physics this should not be possible. Nevertheless we have to relate to the fact that the experimental results from our test show heat production beyond chemical burning, and that the E-Cat fuel undergoes nuclear transformations. It is certainly most unsatisfying that these results so far have no convincing theoretical explanation, but the experimental results cannot be dismissed or ignored just because of lack of theoretical understanding. Moreover, the E-Cat results are too conspicuous not to be followed up in detail. In addition, if proven sustainable in further tests the E-Cat invention has a large potential to become an important energy source." The observers understandably hedge a bit, though: The researchers are very careful about not actually saying that cold fusion/LENR is the source of the E-Cat’s energy, instead merely saying that an “unknown reaction” is at work. In serious scientific circles, LENR is still a bit of a joke/taboo topic. The paper is actually somewhat comical in this regard: The researchers really try to work out how the E-Cat produces so much darn energy — and they conclude that fusion is the only answer — but then they reel it all back in by adding: “The reaction speculation above should only be considered as an example of reasoning and not a serious conjecture.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russian photographer Zhenya Aerohockey has created a photo series titled Catchingcorners. In it, he documents everyday objects in such a way that buildings, pool tables, cords and more form an almost perfect 90º angle every time.

The series started out as a small personal experiment on Instagram wherein Aerohockey captured these angular images as a way to better train his imagination and more carefully see the world around him. Eventually, the experiment turned into a full-fledged series that’s now up to an large number of images.

Below are a some of the photos from the series that Aerohockey shared with us:

If you’d like to keep up with him and see his other work, you can head on over to his website or his Instagram account, which consists entirely of these 90-degree photos.

(via Fubiz)

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Image credits: Photographs by Zhenya Aerohockey and used with permission

Flight attendants aren't happy with the Federal Aviation Administration's new rules that allow phones, tablets, and other small electronics to be used during takeoff and landing. According to the Associated Press, the largest flight attendant's union in the US — the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA — is suing the FAA in hopes of having its new rules overturned. The union argues that use of small electronics is a danger because they can become projectiles during turbulence and because they may cause passengers to pay less attention during safety announcements.

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An anonymous reader writes Chrome OS is based on the Linux kernel and designed by Google to work with web applications and installed applications. Chromebook is one of the best selling laptops on Amazon. However, devs decided to drop support for ext2/3/4 on external drivers and SD card. It seems that ChromiumOS developers can't implement a script or feature to relabel EXT volumes in the left nav that is insertable and has RW privileges using Files.app. Given that this is the main filesystem in Linux, and is thereby automatically well supported by anything that leverages Linux, this choice makes absolutely no sense. Google may want to drop support for external storage and push the cloud storage on everyone. Overall Linux users and community members are not happy at all.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Columbus Day, which falls on the second Monday of every October in the United States, is America's most awkward holiday. It's the day we celebrate America's discovery by Christopher Columbus in 1492. But as many Americans can tell you, Columbus never actually reached North America, and America had been discovered thousands of years earlier by humans who migrated from northeast Asia (and around 1000 AD by Leif Erikson). More to the point, Columbus is increasingly known less as an explorer than as a genocidal maniac who began the centuries-long destruction of the Americas' native populations.

Celebrating genocidal maniacs is never fun, and even less so when it's on the false pretenses of a discovery that they didn't quite make. So here's a better idea: On Monday, celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving instead!

Instead of Columbus Day, our northern neighbors spend the second Monday of every October celebrating Canadian Thanksgiving or, as they call it, Thanksgiving. As I wrote last year (what can I say, it's my holiday tradition), Canadian Thanksgiving is a way better holiday than Columbus Day in every way.

Here's how the two holidays match up.

Food

Delicious turkey. (Slawomir Fajer)

Columbus Day: There is no special food in the mainline American version of Columbus Day, although I guess if you wanted you could recreate the squalid meals on Columbus's ship by eating hardtack bread and brine-preserved sardines.

Canadian Thanksgiving: It's basically the same as American Thanksgiving: a delicious bounty of turkey, stuffing, potatoes, vegetables, pie, and cake.

Winner: Canadian Thanksgiving.

Traditional activities

A Toronto soup kitchen prepares for Thanksgiving. (Tony Bock/Toronto Star via Getty)

Columbus Day: If you're Italian American, celebrating Italian-American heritage (which, to be fair, is an excellent and worthwhile activity), maybe with a street festival or parade. Otherwise, quietly reflecting on or trying to ignore the holiday's dark legacy. Or maybe nothing.

Canadian Thanksgiving: Football, family, parades, and overeating.

Winner: Canadian Thanksgiving.

Degree to which the holiday celebrates genocide

A 19th century painting of Christopher Columbus by artist Peter Johann Nepomuk Geiger. (Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images)

Columbus Day: Very high. Columbus killed large numbers of the people he encountered, enslaved many, and for a time ruled them as a tyrannical dictator. He was a bad person.

Canadian Thanksgiving: Only moderate! The holiday officially commemorates the 1578 voyage of English explorer Martin Frobisher, whose ship barely survived the journey to what is today Canada. The crew gave thanks for surviving the trip, which became Thanksgiving; not in itself too offensive. Still, Frobisher's arrival, like Columbus's, presaged mass-scale theft from and destruction of native communities.

Winner: Canadian Thanksgiving.

Canadianness

Canadian Royal Mounted Police in Ottawa await a visit from members of the British royal family, whose monarchy Canadians still formally recognize for some reason. (Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

Columbus Day: Low. Though Canada shares just as much of Columbus's legacy as does the United State, it is one of the only countries in the Western hemisphere that does not mark the holiday at all.

Canadian Thanksgiving: High. While the two versions of Thanksgiving are so similar that it's virtually impossible to find substantial differences, there is an extremely high number of Canadian-authored articles and videos that patiently and apologetically explain Canadian Thanksgiving to Americans. While you're not require to apologize during Canadian Thanksgiving celebrations, it is considered traditional.

Winner: Columbus Day.

Final score: Canadian Thanksgiving beats Columbus Day on three out of four metrics. So on October 13 this year, roast a turkey in the oven, turn on some football, invite over your closest friends and family, try to ignore the bloody and still largely unaddressed history of North American colonization, and have a very happy Canadian Thanksgiving!

Columbus Day is the most useless holiday on the federal calendar — and it's time to stop using it as an excuse for a day off school.

Set aside, for a moment, the controversy over whether Christopher Columbus's journey to the Americas should be celebrated at all. The holiday is, as it stands, a logistical headache. Fewer than half of states celebrate it, and almost no other offices do. Just 15 percent of private business close, the smallest proportion for any federal holiday. So if you're a parent in a Columbus Day-celebrating state  — the ones in blue below — you're probably scrambling to find something for kids to do on Monday.

This isn't unique to Columbus Day — Veterans Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and Washington's birthday present similar issues for working parents, although it's slightly more likely for work to be canceled on the other holidays. And Martin Luther King Jr. Day, at least, is also celebrated as a national day of community service, a way to honor King's legacy that's also a good reason to cancel school.

Columbus Day has no such redeeming factor. Some states and school districts have managed the Columbus Day controversy by declaring a simultaneous "Native American Day" (as is the case in South Dakota) or "Indigenous Peoples Day" (which started in Berkeley, California, and has spread to Seattle and Minneapolis).

Here's a better way to use Columbus Day: Make kids go to school that day, as they already do in 27 states. Celebrate Columbus Day by encouraging teachers to talk about the complicated legacy of Columbus in American history (including the day's significance for Italian Americans, who still faced discrimination themselves when it was established in 1937). Going to class on Columbus Day and talking about history makes the day a reason to explore America's past, not just an excuse for mattress sales. As it is now, it's not just a logistical headache for parents — it's a missed opportunity for real learning.

While we're at it, let's rethink Veterans Day, which also poses problems for thousands of parents a month later. Like Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Veterans Day could become an opportunity for community service, directed by either schools (if kids are in class) or community groups (if they're not). Up to 200,000 American veterans are homeless, and one in four veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan say they struggle to afford food.

We could make Columbus Day actually about history, and Veterans Day actually about service. In the meantime, if we really want to give everybody a day off in October or November, what about creating a holiday for Election Day?

For those of us who still own dead tree books, storing them properly is more challenging than it sounds. Sure, you could buy cheap bookshelves, but long-term storage and preservation requires the right type of materials

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This weekend you will probably go to a Halloween party and see sexy burgers, sexy grapes, people dressed as Ken Bone, and other kinds of tomfoolery. People will tell you that Halloween is supposed to be about having "fun." But fun can be had on any other holiday — St. Patrick's Day and Thanksgiving come to mind. Seventy years ago, Halloween was very different.

It was completely horrifying.

The costumes back then were nightmare-inducing, even when they when were completely innocent. Even kids dressing up for a "fun" night of trick-or-treating managed to look like soulless, mangled inhabitants of hell. Have a look:

This person is dressed up as a nightmare factory (1935):

(Hutton Archive)

These are allegedly three young girls "amusing" each other in the Cincinnati suburb of College Hill (1929):

(Cincinnati Museum Center via Getty Images)

The boy dressed up as Satan's bunny rabbit is totally bumming out the clown next to him:

(Hutton Archive)

And again, what is this even? (1905):

(Lambert Archive Photos)

This one in the middle eats your dreams (1955):

(Lambert Archive Photos)

There are actually so many old terrifying Halloween costumes that someone literally made a book of them. In 2011, Random House published a coffee table book of Halloweens from 1875 to 1955 called Haunted Air by Ossian Brown. It is known in some circles as the storage unit of nightmares because of images like this:

(Haunted Air)

Everything in this picture is working together to maximize terror:

(Haunted Air)

This photo looks like it inspired Hollywood's rash of serial killer movies, like The Strangers:

(Haunted Air)

Good night:

(Haunted Air)

Feminists in France are demanding that a statue based on Alfred Eisenstaedt‘s iconic ‘VJ-day in Times Square’ photo be taken down. They say that the original image it was based on is one that portrays sexual assault.

The statue, created by J. Seward Johnson Jr., shows a sailor kissing a woman in a white dress to celebrate Victory over Japan Day. It currently sits in front of the Caen Memorial Museum in Normandy.

French feminist group Osez Le Feminisme is currently trying to get ‘The Kiss’ statue removed, complaining that it represents sexual assault. Here’s what Eisenstaedt said about the scene:

In Times Square on V.J. Day I saw a sailor running along the street grabbing any and every girl in sight. Whether she was a grandmother, stout, thin, old, didn’t make a difference. I was running ahead of him with my Leica looking back over my shoulder but none of the pictures that were possible pleased me. Then suddenly, in a flash, I saw something white being grabbed. I turned around and clicked the moment the sailor kissed the nurse.

A spokesperson for Osez Le Feminisme issued a statement saying,

‘We cannot accept that the Caen Memorial erected a sexual assault as a symbol of peace. We therefore request the removal of this sculpture as soon as possible […] The sailor could have laughed with these women, hugged them, asked them if he could kiss them with joy. No, he chose to grab them with a firm hand to kiss them. It was an assault.’

Stephane Grimaldi, the director of the Caen Memorial Museum, countered, saying that Greta Friedman, one of the three women who claimed to be the woman in the photograph, has said before that she never considered the incident to be assault.

Feminist countered, arguing that Friedman has also been quoted as saying that she was unable to escape the moment.

Despite the complaints, the museum is saying it has no plans to remove the statue, which is set to stay on its premises on loan for another 12 months.

(via Daily Mail)

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Image credits: V-J Day in Times Square by Alfred Eisenstaedt, and statue photograph by CucombreLibre

Ubuntu: It's finally easy to watch Netflix on Ubuntu Linux. Before, you had to use an unofficial desktop app or try various other workarounds, but now all it takes is installing the Chrome browser.

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When Jony Ive sees designs from other companies that closely mimic Apple's, he isn't flattered. Apple's head of design told the audience at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit today that copying makes him angry. In response to a question about Xiaomi's highly Apple-like designs, Ive said his feelings were "a bit harsh." "I don't see it as flattery," he says, noting that he was speaking about the issue generally and not about Xiaomi specifically. "I actually see it as theft." Xiaomi, for its part, has denied being an Apple copycat. But the perception has stuck.

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In the finest of democratic traditions, Norway's next series of banknotes will incorporate two designs into one harmonious union. Having earlier this year invited eight design studios to contribute ideas, Norges Bank has selected the blocky and abstract work of Snøhetta for the reverse of its new notes and the more traditionally artful depictions from The Metric System for the front.

The theme that was set for this task was simply "the sea," which has been represented by Snøhetta in the form of highly pixelated coastal landscapes. One of the interesting themes that runs through the design is how the wind of the sea intensifies in sync with the value of the note, resulting in square, static blocks on the 50 kroner note and elongated...

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Last night I speculated that the slow uptake of iOS 8 was about people not trusting Apple with iOS software updates — too many bugs, and too many friends and family members talking about those bugs. I still think there’s something to that angle.

But it’s very clear that I was wrong about what the primary factor is. The simple answer was staring me right in the face. It’s all about the over-the-air update requiring 5 GB of free storage space, and many people not having that much free space, and not knowing how or simply not wanting to deal with it.

I don’t think I have ever received so much reader feedback on a post in the history of Daring Fireball. Hundreds of emails. Dozens and dozens of replies on Twitter. All of them saying the exact same thing: that either they themselves or people they know want to upgrade to iOS 8 but haven’t yet or can’t because the OTA software update won’t fit on their devices.

Jonathan Hoover puts it well:

iOS 8 OTA update requires about 5GB of free space on the device. Most people, especially those who wouldn’t update until they get the badge on the settings app, don’t have 5GB free on their iPhone. They have no idea they can plug their iPhone into their computer and iTunes will update it. They don’t know they can free up space by downloading their pictures and videos to their computer. 

iPhone makes it so easy for casual users to take gigabytes of photos and videos but nearly impossible for those users to know what to do with them.

This is a serious problem for Apple, because all those 16 GB devices (let alone the 8 GB ones) aren’t going to suddenly gain more free storage space on their own. A lot of these devices might never get updated to iOS 8, but would if the OTA software worked. Unless they can rejigger the OTA software update to require less free space, iOS 8’s adoption rate might lag permanently.¹

Which in turn brings to mind one of the closing paragraphs of my review of the new iPhones 6:

But I don’t understand why the entry level storage tier remained at a meager 16 GB. That seems downright punitive given how big panoramic photos and slo-mo HD videos are, and it sticks out like a sore thumb when you look at the three storage tiers together: 32/64/128 looks natural; 16/64/128 looks like a mistake. The original iPhone, seven years and eight product generations ago, had an 8 GB storage tier. The entry-level iPhones 6 are 50 times faster than that original iPhone, but have only twice the storage capacity. That’s just wrong. This is the single-most disappointing aspect of the new phones.

iOS itself takes up about 4 GB, so these 16 GB devices only have about 12 GB free right out of the box. If there is any way that Apple could have brought the base model storage up to 32 GB with the new iPhones, they should have. And it’s inexcusable that they’re still selling new devices with only 8 GB of storage.

If this decision was made simply in the interest of profit margins, and/or to nudge would-be entry-level-model buyers to the more expensive 64 GB mid-range models, whatever money Apple is making from this is not worth it, in the long run, compared to the collective goodwill they’re losing and the frustration they’re creating.

Outstanding piece by Chris Coyne:

Perhaps the reason the WaPo is so confused is that FBI Director James Comey has told the media that Apple’s anti-backdoor stance only protects criminals. Unfortunately he’s not seeing beyond his own job, and WaPo didn’t look much further.

Apple’s anti-backdoor policy aims to protect everyone. The following is a list of real threats their policy would thwart. Not threats to terrorists or kidnappers, but to 300 million Americans and 7 billion humans who are moving their intimate documents into the cloud. Make no mistake, what Apple and Google are proposing protects you.

Whether you’re a regular, honest person, or a US legislator trying to understand this issue, understand this list.

Used as an in-car hands-free system, Siri causes a high level of mental distraction while driving, according to research conducted by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. In a thorough study [PDF] that measured the cognitive workload of 45 drivers completing in-car tasks using various voice-based technologies, Siri's high complexity and low intuitiveness resulted in some of the highest levels of mental distraction.

Using a five-category rating system, researchers measured Siri-based interactions like sending and receiving text messages and emails, updating Facebook or Twitter, and modifying calendar appointments. Various measurements to record distraction were taken during three separate experiments, in-car on residential streets, without driving, and in a driving simulator.


Researchers tested Siri on an iPhone 5 with iOS 7, using a microphone and voice commands to make the setup both hands-free and eyes-free, with drivers unable to look at or make contact with the phone.

Siri was found to produce the highest mental workload on the researchers' scale, and use of Siri in a car even resulted in two crashes during the simulator study. It was also given the lowest rating of intuitiveness along with the highest rating of complexity, due to its lack of consistency and its inflexibility when it came to voice commands.

Common issues involved inconsistencies in which Siri would produce different responses to seemingly identical commands. In other circumstances, Siri required exact phrases to accomplish specific tasks, and subtle deviations from that phrasing would result in a failure.

When there was a failure to properly dictate a message, it required starting over since there was no way to modify/edit a message or command. Siri also made mistakes such as calling someone other than the desired person from the phone contact list. Some participants also reported frustration with Siri's occasional sarcasm and wit.

According to the researchers, interactions with Siri may improve over time as the voice assistant is able to learn accents and other characteristics of a user's voice, but many commands resulted in overly complex interactions that could be fixed via "improvements to the software design."

Though the AAA study looked at the distraction level when using Siri directly on an iPhone, it did not look at CarPlay, Apple's new in-dash system that the company says is a "smarter, safer way to use your iPhone in the car." Other similar in-dash systems did, however, result in high levels of cognitive workload in a companion study, but cognitive demand varied highly based on the number of comprehension errors and the number of steps required to complete an action.

Early CarPlay reviews have suggested that the system's Siri integration is improved compared to Siri on the iPhone, as it was judged to be easy to use with simple menus and navigation.

The study comes ahead of a set of voluntary guidelines the AAA is planning to create, encouraging users to minimize their cognitive distraction by cutting back on the use of voice-based technologies while driving. According to the AAA, voice-based interactions within a vehicle result in "significant impairments" to driving that may "adversely affect traffic safety."

When superheroes are at their best, they have the ability to make us feel empowered while having fun at the same time. That spirit is alive in The CW's The Flash, premiering on Tuesday night at 8 p.m. Eastern.

The Flash is one of the standouts of this television season, and is, arguably, the most purely fun hour on television this side of Shonda Rhimes.  Here's why you should be excited for The Flash:

When did superheroes stop being fun?

The Flash (CW)

Over the past four years, the entertainment landscape has been flooded with superhero stories. You can trace back the superhero resurgence to Fox's X-Men in 2000 and Sony's Spider-Man in 2002. Both films were a result of Marvel's licensing deals to dig itself out of bankruptcy.

Marvel eventually dug itself out of financial turmoil, saw the earning potential with those franchises, and countered with a hero of its own in Iron Man in 2008. That eventually led to The Avengers, which paved the way for the hugely successful Guardians of the Galaxy, and in the near future, a Netflix four-pack of original shows based on Marvel heroes.

On the other side of the field, Marvel Studios' biggest rival, Warner Brothers (which produces films based on heroes from DC Comics), began investing in Christopher Nolan's grittier, more serious Dark Knight franchise. Its massive success is part of the reason why its Superman reboot Man of Steel, Man of Steel's Justice League-heavy 2016 sequel, and DC-backed shows like The CW's Arrow and Fox's Gotham have gone for a darker tone.

But The Flash doesn't.

What makes The Flash special is in the bones of its concept. The hero's bright red suit, lightning bolt ears, yellow boots, and super speed make him a bit different from what DC has been been trotting out for the past few years. There's something lighter about the hero, and his power — zipping around from mystery to mystery — when compared to his peers.

Co-creator Greg Berlanti and his team seem to recognize this. They could have easily plumbed Barry Allen's (played by Grant Gustin) back-story — his father was framed for the murder of his mother — for yet another grim tale of hardened superheroes. Instead, they're choosing to play up elements of Barry's character — he is meticulous (slow even) in his forensic analysis (his job) so that no one is wrongly prosecuted, his selflessness, his shyness — that will bring us a show that isn't afraid to be fun, or even corny. Some of that is a nod to the comics.

Who is The Flash in the comics?

In the DC Universe, there are actually multiple Flashes. Barry Allen and Wally West are the two most iconic ones. And Allen is actually the more "serious" one. West's Flash is more of a wisecracker, bringing levity to the very earnest Justice League. Audiences have responded to that persona. IGN ranked West its #8 hero of all time while Allen placed in the 40s.

The current comics have Allen claiming the title of The Flash, but still have brief glimmers of the lightheartedness and fun that made West so popular:

Justice League #30 (DC)

The team at The CW seems to be combining certain elements of the two in this show. And the earnest light-heartedness and upbeat tone that they've found is working.

Who are the villains?

The Flash (CW)

One of the biggest challenges The Flash will face is figuring out how to keep its super-speed sequences fresh. NBC's Heroes, probably the foremost example of a show going sour amazingly quick, had the bad habit of showing us the same powers in the same way, over and over, or sometimes never showing them at all. The criminally under-loved Alphas on SyFy, didn't have the budget to fully blossom. TV superpower sequences require imagination and budget — something not every show can boast.

There are moments in the premiere where you can already feel the zippy effects — usually they involve close-ups of Gustin making "amazed" faces — starting to gnaw away at the show. This series is never going to command the budget that Game of Thrones has, so it's going to need to think of different ways at presenting Allen's powers.

Or there's another option: the show could build out its villains. In the season premiere, the villain has the power to manipulate weather, allowing the creative team to build around the concept and show the Flash using his power in interesting ways.

In the comics, Flash's biggest foes were Zoom, a character who can manipulate time around himself, Gorilla Grodd (there are rumors Grodd will be making an appearance on the show), a genius gorilla with telepathic and psionic abilities, and  Captain Cold (to be played by Wentworth Miller), a parka-wearing villain who started out with ice guns but eventually gained the ability to slow molecules around himself in the more recent comics. Both of these foes lend themselves to do some fun stuff visually and more ways to break up sequences of Barry using his powers.

Captain Cold fights the Flash (DC)

Those two have yet to make their grand entrances on The Flash. The looming quasi-villain that we have, is scientist Harrison Wells (Tom Cavanagh), a new character created specifically for the show (though Cavanagh has hinted at the possibility that it might be a cover). This puts devout fans and neophytes on the same page.

Cavanagh plays him splendidly, adding intrigue and acrylic humanity into a role that still remains a mystery. He's one of the best things about the pilot, and watching the motives of Wells unspool week after week should be a treat for both comic fans and Flash newbies.

How else does the show maintain a lighthearted tone?

The Flash (CW)

Although the show constantly reassures us that Barry, his pals, and his main love interest Iris West (Candice Patton) are all adults, the show sounds and feels a bit like it's taking place down the street from Gossip Girl's Constance Billard school.

"I'm stress-eating over my dissertation … If I don't graduate soon, I'm going to be more muffin top than woman," Iris tells Barry in one scene.

The show's dialogue is slapdash, slowing down only to spell out the villain of the week or the angst of Barry's unrequited love for Iris, to say nothing of the ill-timed, lightning-induced coma that kept them apart. This may sound like it's a stretch that goes a bit too far. Your concern is understandable.

But the bubble pop writing works well with the whimsy tone of the show. There are a few moments when the show tries for something deeper, and the dialogue labors under that weight ("This is not cool. A man died."). To the show's credit, it knows this, and these moments feel more like something the powers that be think they should do rather than what they want to do.

The Flash doesn't seem interested in building out some high-brow mythology, nor pleasing those interested in seeing that chewy stuff. It's just trying to have fun. And it's at its best when it remembers that.