Kingofthesofas

New Comic: Sagacity

LOS GATOS, CA—In a swift and unexpected departure from their present business model, officials from Netflix revealed Wednesday that the company is currently considering adding a good movie to their online streaming service.

We love us some SPARTH.




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If you live in a place that’s not likely to see snow this winter, or you’re bitter that the white Christmas you’ve been dreaming of decided to remain a dream, these stunning photos of the European Alps by Swedish photographer Jacob Sjöman will either ease the pain, or make you incredibly jealous. Either way, they’re worth a look.

The photographs — which were taken in Val D’Isere, Chamonix and Val Thorens in France, and Hopfgarten in Austria — are breathtaking.

Often featuring a lone skier or a single hut surrounded by the grandeur of the European Alps, the photos inspire a sense of solitude and even exploration. Sure, they’re not photos of actual explorers braving freezing wastelands (you can see some of those here), but the lone skier carving his or her path through the pristine snow, or the lone hiker standing at the edge of a cliff, leaves one either awestruck or drowning in wanderlust… perhaps both.

Here is a selection of those photographs:

Of course, you don’t have to take the photos symbolically. The beautiful shots of sky-high peaks and lonely mountain cabins are sufficiently enjoyable without ascribing any further meaning.

To see the rest of the photos or if you’d like to browse through more of Sjöman’s work, head over to his Bēhance profile by clicking here.

(via Exposure Guide)

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Image credits: Photographs by Jacob Sjöman.

There’s no doubt the ubiquity of fake and mis-reported content on the Internet has turned many of us into big-time skeptics. Whenever we see something that seems incredible or outlandish, our knee-jerk reaction is to call it fake and begin searching for evidence of that fact, using our confirmation bias as a guide.

One video that elicited such a response from many of the people that saw it was this recent Sony ad that showed an a7R lens change happening in mid-air during a skydive.

As it turns out, the footage was actually 100% real. Filmed by Simon Hammond and Cutting Edge, the behind the scenes video above gives us a peek at how the mid-air, slow motion, 4K video was captured over the course of nine jumps.

In all, they had two days to perform the nine skydives that would need to contain every single bit of footage required for the aerial shots. That amounts to about 9 total minutes of shooting time.

Of course, even the BTS video won’t turn skeptics off, but as Rob Douthat — one of the Aerial DOPs for the commercial — tells ISO 1200, he’s not worried:

I have been pretty amused at the comments on the A7R skydive commercial. The BTS Vimeo link gives some of it away. I laugh my guts out at the armchair experts who speculate what is “FAKE”. You don’t see every trick of the skydiving cinematographer trade and the multiple times we shot different views so the haters will never be satisfied . And to be truthful I’m not overly worried either… When you use the best people for the job you can do amazing things.

I actually did 3 test jumps the week prior changing a camera lens while in free fall so I can tell you 100% for sure it can be done.

To read more of what he had to say, head over to ISO 1200 by clicking here. Otherwise check out the video at the top and then stop by the Cutting Edge website to see more of their phenomenal work.

Making of the badass changing lens on Sony A7R like you’ve never seen it before [ISO 1200]

It turns out the rich, famous and powerful of today bear a striking resemblance to the rich, famous and powerful of yesteryear — at least if you trust the photo series Iconatomy by George Chamoun and the followup series Then & Now by Marc Ghali.

Chamoun, who is a Swedish jewelry design student at the Konstfack University of the Arts, actually debuted his Iconatomy series a few years back. By masterfully combining old photographs of beautiful people with their equivalent today, he showed the uncanny similarities between stars like George Clooney and Carey Grant, Scarlett Johansson and Marilyn Monroe and more.

“Lots of people think I have just made part of the picture black and white. I did so much more!” explained Chamoun in an interview with SSSQUARE. “Having experimented making the transitions faded I decided to keep the lines sharp. Sometimes, I look at the way they fit together and think ‘How did I do that?!’ The whole process was really fun.”

Here are Mr. Chamoun’s images:

The Iconatomy series, which only consists of the 5 mashups above, became a source of inspiration for photographer Marc Ghali, who created the similar series Then & Now.

Like Chamoun, Ghali combined portraits from past and present. The difference is that he expanded his range from movie stars to include other influential people, such as President Obama (juxtaposed with Malcolm X) and Princess Diana (juxtaposed with Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton).

Take a look:

To see more of Chamoun’s work be sure to head over to his website by clicking here, and if you’re interested in purchasing a print of any of the Iconatomy images you can do so on the SSSQUARE website here. More of Ghali’s work can be found on his Behance profile here.

(via Lost At E Minor)

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Image credits: Images by George Chamoun used with permission. Images by Marc Ghali used in accordance with Creative Commons license.

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Update: After posting these series yesterday, several commenters expressed their anger at the fact that we posed Ghali’s Chamoun-inspired work alongside Chamoun’s originals. For us, it really wasn’t something we did with the intention to stir up controversy or upset people. Ghali’s series isn’t quite on the same level as the original, but it is often (almost always, in fact) shared when Chamoun’s Iconatomy is presented.

Of course, that doesn’t make it the right move (everybody else does it so we did too is hardly good reasoning) and the comments that seemed to indicate Chamoun was probably upset by the ‘Then & Now’ series got us thinking. So we asked Mr. Chamoun what he thought of the followup and the fact that it is so often shared alongside his original series. (We also offered to remove it if he didn’t want the two shown side-by-side).

Here’s what he had to say:

I’m sorry in advance because I won’t be able to elaborate too much on this subject.

I have seen the pictures in question before. I do think they are very similar, especially in the way they are made and the execution. On the other hand, one can’t stop anyone else from being inspired by their work.

The downside is, some people have mistaken his work to be my work. Yesterday I got an angry email from a person who was upset that I had merged Rihanna and Diana Ross and I didn’t understand anything!

So there are both positives and negatives.

Feel free to let us know what you think of Mr. Chamoun’s response in the comments. As always, we appreciate your feedback and in the future will we promise to think more critically before crafting a post like this.

gothamknowledge:

Buttered Toast Cat Wormhole Physics via TrollScience and fromquarkstoquasars

by token

Matthew says: "Here's a YouTube video of three men destroying a rock formation in Goblin Valley, Utah. Geologists estimate the rock formation was approximately 200 million years old, formed during the Triassic Period (Mesozoic Era)."

I wonder if the rock can be replaced? If so, these men should be made to pay for it.

Boy Scout leaders destroy ancient formation in Utah's Goblin Valley

Releasing an overpriced iPhone 5c in China looked like a disaster waiting to happen, and a recent report seems to indicate just how much damage the misstep has caused. Insider C Technology reports that Apple has decreased average daily production of the iPhone 5c from 300,000 to 150,000 units — though those figures seem a bit odd — as sales continue to plummet and gray market prices drop to meet the meager demand. Gray market traders buy iPhones all around the world for subsidized prices and then smuggle them back to China to sell at a slightly lower price than official retailers and wireless carriers. Typically the gray market price for a popular product would only amount to limited savings, but the iPhone 5c is currently available for a 30% discount (or more) through less-than-legal channels. C Technology points out that Apple's price for the iPhone 5c is 4,488 yuan ($727 USD) but on China's popular online marketplace Taobao, prices are as low as 3,000 yuan ($490 USD). iPhone 5s sales have remained consistent, but reports like these are signs that the 5c might have been a failed experiment in China.

But they like it.

From TED Ed: "What do Game of Thrones’ Dothraki, Avatar’s Na’vi, Star Trek’s Klingon and LOTR’s Elvish have in common? They are all fantasy constructed languages, or conlangs. Conlangs have all the delicious complexities of real languages: a high volume of words, grammar rules, and room for messiness and evolution. John McWhorter explains why these invented languages captivate fans long past the rolling credits."

In the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA’s domestic surveillance activities, the NSA has recently announced that they plan to get rid of 90% of their system administrators via software automation in order to “improve security.” So far, I’ve mostly seen this piece of news reported and commented on straightforwardly. But it simply doesn’t add up. Either the NSA has a monumental (yet not necessarily surprising) level of bureaucratic bloat that they could feasibly cut that amount of staff regardless of automation, or they are simply going to be less effective once they’ve reduced their staff. I talked with a few people who are intimately familiar with the kind of software that would typically be used for automation of traditional sysadmin tasks (Puppet and Chef). Typically, their products are used to allow an existing group of operations people to do much more, not attempting to do the same amount of work with significantly fewer people. The magical thinking that the NSA can actually put in automation sufficient to do away with 90% of their system administration staff belies some fundamental misunderstandings about automation. I’ll tackle the two biggest ones here.

1. Automation replaces people. Automation is about gaining leverage–it’s about streamlining human tasks that can be handled by computers in order  to add mental brainpower. As James Turnbull, former VP of Business Development for PuppetLabs, said to me, “You still need smart people to think about and solve hard problems.” (Whether you agree with the types of problems the NSA is trying to solve is a completely different thing, of course.) In reality, the NSA should have been working on automation regardless of the Snowden affair. It has a massive, complex infrastructure. Deploying a new data center, for example, is a huge undertaking; it’s not something you can automate.

Or as Seth Vargo, who works for OpsCode–the creators of configuration management automation software Chef–puts it, “There’s still decisions to be made. And the machines are going to fail.” Sascha Bates (also with OpsCode) chimed in to point out that “This presumes that system administrators only manage servers.” It’s a naive view. Are the DBAs going away, too? Network administrators? As I mentioned earlier, the NSA has a massive, complicated infrastructure that will always require people to manage it. That plus all the stuff that isn’t (theoretically) being automated will now fall on the remaining 10% who don’t get laid off. And that remaining 10% will still have access to the same information.

2. Automation increases security. Automation increases consistency, which can have a relationship with security. Prior to automating something, you might have a wide variety of people doing the same thing in varying ways, hence with varying outcomes. From a security standpoint, automation provides infrastructure security, and makes it auditable. But it doesn’t really increase data/information security (e.g. this file can/cannot live on that server)–those too are human tasks requiring human judgement. And that’s just the kind of information Snowden got his hands on. This is another example of a government agency over-reacting to a low probability event after the fact. Getting rid of 90% of their sysadmins is the IT equivalent of still requiring airline passengers to take off their shoes and cram their tiny shampoo bottles into plastic baggies; it’s security theater.

There are a few upsides, depending on your perspective on this whole situation. First, if your company is in the market for system administrators, you might want to train your recruiters on D.C. in the near future. Additionally, odds are the NSA is going to be less effective than it is right now. Perhaps, like the CIA, they are also courting Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help run their own private cloud, but again, as Sascha said, managing servers is only a small piece of the system administrator picture.

If you care about or are interested in automation, operations, and security, please join us at Velocity New York on October 14-16. Dr. Nancy Leveson will be delivering a fantastic keynote on security and complex systems.

I admit that I am an Instagram Junkie. To paraphrase that classic SNL line: “I got a fever and the only prescription is MORE INSTAGRAM.” It’s not that I really enjoy sharing images of my dog and what I had for dinner, it’s more that I love looking at the uploads of those I follow. Following celebrities is a lot of fun, as you get to see a glimpse inside their world. What are they thinking? Where are they going? What are they doing?

BforBel.com knows this and took it a step further…all the way to Disney.

Yes, if you ever wanted to know what a Disney Princess Instagram account would look like, this is it.

Warning: those afraid of heights might not want to follow Rapunzel.

You can find the original collection over on BforBel.

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Image credits: Parody illustrations based on Disney films created by BforBell and used with permission

Adam Savage is a happy mutant hero, a master maker with ethics, personality, warmth, and wit. We are honored that Adam, co-host of Mythbusters, co-founder of Tested, and BB contributor, will speak at our Boing Boing: Ingenuity theatrical experience on Sunday, August 18, in San Francisco! Won't be there in person? Don't fret! We'll be documenting the whole shebang on video for sharing on the site in the coming weeks! Meanwhile, here's Adam's take on "How Simple Ideas Lead To Scientific Discoveries."

Boing Boing: Ingenuity in partnership with Ford C-Max.

Me: Now type in your password again.

Client: I can’t. I don’t know what it is.

Me: It’s the one you just typed in.

Client: I know, but I already forgot it.

Me: Okay, let’s write it down on a piece of paper.

Client: I already did, it’s right here.

At this point we are quite confident that public The Old Reader will be available in the future, now with a proper team running it.

More details later this week.
Sorry about Monday. Again.

On Saturday (July 20) we moved over a terabyte of data from one storage system to another. We made the move because the amount of data we have to store simply did not fit on our servers, and our preliminary tests showed that the new system will only be using about ⅓ of the disk space.

Migration went through fine, however we started seeing a higher I/O load after we finished, and suddenly one SSD drive in one of our database servers stopped working. Not a big deal, we thought — we obviously store data in mirrored mode on several servers — so we asked our hosting provider to swap the drive. We had to re-sync the data to the new disk, so you might have noticed the site being flacky.

However while data was syncing, another SSD drive went down in a different server. We got it replaced, and started syncing two database shards at the same time. At this point we lost 2 more drives, one of which unfortunately was on the server in one of the shards that were repairing.

While you can fly a plane with an engine off, unfortunately when all your engines stop your flight is over. Right now we have to restore our last pre-migration full database backup, and apply incremental updates to bring database to a fresh and (hopefully) consistent state.

Here comes the worst news - this will probably take a day or two.
Sorry about that.

This is a tough and incredibly stressful situation, but it looks like we have no other choice. We understand your frustration (actually, we are in the same boat: we are RSS junkies and built The Old Reader for ourselves and friends) and we are doing everything to make it as fast and painless as possible and live happily ever after.

After that, we will deploy bug fixes along with new things and improvements we have already developed. During last year we adapted and successfully expanded first from 2000 to 5000 users practically overnight, then from 10 000 to 160 000 in several weeks and from 200 000 to 400 000 in four months, so we are considering this as a new level-up for the project (although bumpy and painful one).

It’s 5 AM right now and backup restoration has already begun. We are monitoring and working on The Old Reader nearly 24 hours a day. We will keep frequent (but not annoying updates) in Twitter and will answer all your questions.

We deeply apologize for what has happened but we intend to come back in a much better way.
Thank you very much for your patience, support and understanding,

The Old Reader team.

UPD:

July 25, 21:07 UTC
Back online! We hope this outage lasting July 25 19:12 UTC
If everything goes as planned, we should be back in 4-5 hours.

July 25 15:50 UTC
Import — check;
Indexes — check;
Balancing data between shards and configuring replicasets — in progress.

July 25 08:45 UTC
It looks like we have managed to upload the data. If indexes get generated correctly, we might be back online later today.

July 25 2:00 UTC
Continuing the upload, hoping it goes as planned, counting hours.

July 24 14:00 UTC
Proceeding with restore. More details hopefully in the evening.

July 23 18:00 UTC
We have managed to create a consistent dump of our database and started uploading it to the database servers.

It's official: composer John Williams will be back for Star Wars: Episode VII. During the Star Wars Celebration Europe event via StarWars.com taking place this week, Kathleen Kennedy announced and confirmed that Williams will be returning for the new movie, still being directed by J.J. Abrams, along with the rest of the trilogy. While some fans were hoping Michael Giacchino would get his Star Wars shot with J.J., rumors hit back in April that Williams would likely be back even though he rarely does scores anymore at age 81. Nonetheless, it's official - he'll be back. See a video with Williams talking about his return below. ›››

Continue reading Composer John Williams Confirmed to Score Next 'Star Wars' Trilogy