Zackc43

Star Trek star and noted homosexual George Takei responds to bigots who believe in restricting the right to love to straight people only: an image gallery on Imgur. Oh, snap, oh glorious snap.

Man, sports are just the fucking worst, aren't they?

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There are underground economies and then there are underground KFC chicken smuggling economies.

What happens inside a caterpillar's cocoon? Scientists got to watch the whole process with the help of X-ray 3D scanning technology. In the video above, you can watch a caterpillar turn into a butterfly. Over the course of 16 days its breathing tubes (shown in blue) and its digestive system (shown in red) change shape and position within the body, while other structures grow from scratch.

Ed Yong has a great story to go with this, too. All about why it's important to actually watch the process happening in a single caterpillar, instead of just relying on the data scientists have collected from years of dissecting different caterpillars at different stages in the transformation.

Regular readers already know what I’m going to say, this design made me smile, and I think that it could be popular, but with that mockup instead of a real photo of the t-shirt being worn I am A LOT less likely to want to buy it. Still, it’s a funny enough concept for me to run even though it’s only in mocked up form.

Costiness=£20 Buy it at Ste Machine Designs (check out their Facebook page for free tee prize draws)

Responsible dog takes care of drunk cat friend. 

It’s super-hot,your AC’s not cutting it, and you think to yourself: My pickup’s parked in front of the cellar door, just inside of which is a hose. Also in the cellar is that Slip ’N Slide you bought used for $5.

As we have told you here repeatedly, Wigan is going to be relegated. Today's 4-1 result (and counting) against Arsenal are making sure of that. Their supporters, well, this guy will love it in the nPower Championship.

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As Jamelle points out, conservatives are doing everything in their power to create a climate in which impeachment proceedings seem inevitable. They’re not — nor should they be — but if they can create the appearance of a beleaguered and ultimately ineffectual administration, the case for the Republican candidate in 2016 will seem a stronger by comparison. So conservatives threw a Benghazi Day Party that resembled a poorly managed support group: the people who didn’t leave in tears were confused and nothing was decided, not even who’d bring the coffee next time.

Over the weekend, they decided it was time to throw another TEA Party. If you’ll recall, the “TEA” in TEA PARTY stands for “Taxed Enough Already,” and so it should come as no surprise that when groups whose founding principles involved paying as little as their fair share of the tax burden started applying for 501(c)(4) tax exempt status, some scrutiny might be in order. Were these TEA Party organizations “generally civic” and promoting “social welfare,” and anyway, why did they only apply for tax exempt status after January 21, 2010?

These organizations were only able to claim [a more expansive] tax exempt status after the Supreme Court decided Citizens United, which meant that in the following weeks the small IRS office in Cincinnati — a city but a single state removed Obama’s Illinois — that processed tax exempt status was inundated with thousands of applications from previously unheard of organizations. Because it was 2010 and the conservative grassroots machine was preparing for the 2012 elections, it stands to reason that many of these new organizations would have names that bespoke their constituents’ creativity: The Tea Party, The TEA Party, The T.E.A. Party, The Patriot Party, The American Patriot Party, The American Patriot Party of Arizona, The 912 Project, The 9-12 Project, The 9/12 Project, and my personal favorite, The Central Michigan 912 Patriot Tea Party.

Creating special categories to deal with identically conceived, similarly named applicants strikes me less like “using keywords to go after conservatives” and more like using keywords. Citizens United created a bureaucratic nightmare for the IRS because the majority of the people who sought to take advantage of it were like the kid who’d take cardboard, macaroni and glue during art class and make a box of macaroni out of it. When your creative team consists of people who stand before a great works of art and agree upon their re-sale value and you put them under pressure you shouldn’t be surprised when they all come up with slight variations of the same hackneyed concepts.

In other words: the IRS “singled out for additional reviews” groups with “tea” or “patriot” or “912″  in their corporate documents because you don’t have a damn thought in your head that someone else didn’t put there. Your creative failure isn’t the IRS’s fault.

Detroit's Robocop statue, crowdfunded two years ago, is finally taking shape. And it's pretty damned amazing.

h/t sharkchunks

It appears that you can make delicious (and fantastically high-carb) bread by mixing melted ice-cream with self-rising flour and baking it. I'm willing to believe that this is totally yummy but I'm not going to try it:

1 Preheat oven to 350 F
2 Let ice cream soften at room temperature for 10-15 minutes.
4 Evenly distribute sprinkles in the bottom of a greased Bundt pan and scoop batter evenly on top.
5 Bake for 35 minutes until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.
6 Invert and allow to cool completely.

Cake Batter Ice Cream Bread (via Neatorama)

whitewhine:

Happy Mother’s Day!

From WhiteWhine’s worst children

Sometimes we forget just how good we have it. With our iPhones, perpetual internet connection, comfortable homes, easy access to all food groups and more, it’s easy to take our good fortune for granted. Reflect on your blessings for a minute with the help of this collection of first world problem tweets that have been quite hilariously paired with stock photos of griefstricken individuals. I’m sure at least a few will sound familiar…

More images below.

pic and info: Buzzfeed

Friday is brought to you by Ryan Gosling not eating his cereal. 

via deerhoof:jensensations:

Ryan Gosling won’t eat his cereal (x)

GOD

SEK pulls his dirty, beaten, decade old Ford Taurus into a toll booth behind PORSCHE GUY from the Republic of FL. SEK’s listening, quite loudly, to the Replacements’ Tim, when he notices PORSCHE GUY seems to be having problems paying his $2.50 toll.

PORSCHE GUY: I only have fifty cents.

TOLL BOOTH ATTENDANT: It’s a $57.70 fine.

PORSCHE GUY: I’m not going to pay that.

PORSCHE GUY exits his car and slowly looks around. He turns to SEK, who turns “Bastards of Young” up even louder.

PORSCHE GUY: HEY YOU!

SEK: IT BEATS PICKING COTTON AND WAITING TO BE FORGOTTEN!

PORSCHE GUY: I KNOW YOU CAN HEAR ME!

SEK: (turns down music) What?

PORSCHE GUY: Can I borrow $2?

SEK: (looks at PORSCHE GUY’s Porsche while the fuel injector on his one-eyed Taurus sputters) Sorry. Don’t have it.

PORSCHE GUY: How were you doing the tolls then?

SEK: (realizing PORSCHE GUY knows some logic) I have $5 and change. Just enough to get me to work.

PORSCHE GUY: Can I borrow it?

SEK: I have just enough to get to work.

PORSCHE GUY: Great. You can pay it forward.

SEK: I don’t think that’s how that works.

PORSCHE GUY: Are you a religious man?

SEK: Not remotely.

PORSCHE GUY: Because I am. I believe in Christian charity.

SEK: (looking at PORSCHE GUY’s Porsche) I can tell.

PORSCHE GUY: Great!

PORSCHE GUY gets back in his car and talks to the TOLL BOOTH ATTENDANT. Both point at SEK, who vigorously waves his arms in an improvised semaphore of “NO NO NO.” PORSCHE GUY sticks his head out his window and turns to SEK.

PORSCHE GUY: Jesus pays you forward! God bless!

PORSCHE GUY speeds off. SEK pulls up to the toll booth and is informed by TOLL BOOTH ATTENDANT that he’d agreed to cover PORSCHE GUY’s toll. She also informs him that if he doesn’t pay the PORSCHE GUY forward, she’ll be docked for the difference. SEK hands over $5.00 and heads to class.

Levskaya's Eschersketch is a GitHub-hosted web-toy that produces Escher style tessellated drawings that are very good fun to make and elaborate upon.

Eschersketch (Thanks, Hugh!)

devilduck:

Lay’s Numb and Spicy Hot Pot flavor. 

“Hard to imagine, but these chips emulate numb and spicy hot pot to a T. They scorch you with real dry-chili heat, not just that red powder that feigns spiciness, and capture the piney taste and euphoric numbing effect of Sichuan peppercorns. After you’re done munching, you feel as if you stuck your tongue in an electrical socket and then dipped it in an ice bath.” 

From the Shanghaiiest.

PLEASE SEND TO MY HOUSE BEFORE 10AM EASTERN PLEASE.

(h/t Paul Constant)
.
When they say “The good die young”, they mean that the best people never live long enough. Via LGF, Empire Online:

Ray Harryhausen, a master of stop-motion animation and a true movie great, has died. He was 92.

Born in Los Angeles in June 1920, Harryhausen’s enthusiasm for the burgeoning form of animation was sparked by a viewing of Willis O’Brien’s King Kong as a wide-eyed 13 year-old. Two years later and he could be found crafting his own homemade animations, prototypes of the models he would quickly come to perfect in Mighty Joe Young (1949), It Came From Beneath The Sea (1955), 20 Million Miles To Earth (1957) and The Valley Of Gwangi (1969)…

Harryhausen’s magic captivated young viewers like Peter Jackson, Steven Spielberg and James Cameron, all of whom are quick to recognise their subsequent debt to Harryhausen and pay tribute to his artistry. “The Lord Of The Rings is my ‘Ray Harryhausen movie’,” enthuses Jackson. “Without his wondrous images and storytelling it would never have been made – not by me at least.” Cameron describes him simply as “a giant”.

When Empire spoke to the great man last year, he remembered working on those stop-motion classics with great fondness. Always unwilling to pick a favourite monster creation – it was like trying to pick a favourite child, he reasoned – he did confess to a weakness for his dinosaurs. “We tried real animals in some of the prehistoric pictures”, he remembered, “just to save time and money, but the real animals never look as good as the animated ones”…

Tenzin Gyatso is the 14th Dalai Lama, the latest in a long line of reincarnations of Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva embodiment of compassion. He's also an insufferable homer who loves free hats.

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This guy!

Mother’s Day is THIS Sunday.

As a way to combat the whole prosaic yawn of "any neighborhood padre has the magic healing hands"  in fantasy gaming, I wrote some time ago about the concept of the prophet class. Within any given priesthood only a few individuals are gifted with the vision necessary to perform true miracles. Often, they wash out of the hierarchy because of the uncomfortable truths they speak, and become controversial vagrants. Sometimes, they minister to a band of equally outcast rambling adventurers.

So, as I consider how wizards and the like might fit into my world (we've avoided this so far because there have been no wizard PCs in the main campaign), why not take up a similar idea?

I mean, if there are as many wizards as fighters ... if there are even one tenth or one hundredth as many wizards as fighters ... you are pretty much into the awful awful 2nd edition "let's think this through" world of unseen servant rickshaws with the continual light headlamps and every ship of the line has a Master Magician to cast fireballs and gust of wind.

"This will be on the quiz."

But what would the substrate for the rare and oddball magic-users be; what would they rise out of, in the same way prophets arise from, or sometimes despite, the Church?

Bingo ... academia. Write what you know.

The boundaries of knowledge between magic, craft and science being more fluid in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, it is possible that spellcasting is ...

• an underground intellectual cult based on hidden or forbidden writings
• an intellectual cult of personality, handed down from master to disciple, in the manner of Straussians, Skinnerians or Freudians 
• something that develops from intensive study of a discipline but is hard to actually grasp, so there are periods of history when the intellectual caliber of the academy dips and it starts the self-serving lie that everything about, let's say, anatomy or optics can be got at empirically, and the incantations of necromancy or illusionism are disused or discredited, until someone picks them up again with the right insight
• something the more advanced study of nature and the universe has moved beyond, just as someone doing Mr.Wizard tricks with chemistry would not really be welcome at the conference of the American Chemical Society - your adventuring wizard is more the equivalent of MacGyver or Walter White
• its own discipline, yet dependent on the others in the academy - to really learn how to make spells work you must learn all about the natural and metaphysical world from people specialized in that knowledge - wizards are like medical school students dutifully grinding through organic chemistry so they can go ahead and do surgery or psychiatry

 




 

One of the common reactions to my discussion of the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth was, "Oh come on, that was written so long ago. Why are we talking about it?"

The reason why I discuss it is because if you immerse yourself in D&D material from that time period long enough, you start bringing the points of view into the current project. I already pointed it out a bit with the races, but it's even clearer in the deities section in the classes.

Sedille: "Sedille" © 2012 Jenna Fowler, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Here are the deities: Arcanist, Lifegiver, Lightbringer, Protector, Reaper, Stormcaller, Trickster, and Warbringer.

Now, I happen to like the creation of archetypes instead of specific deities. This is important because D&D Next is meant to unite editions. By using archetypes, they can provide mechanics for the different deities that work in Greyhawk and in Forgotten Realms. It's weighted a bit towards martial, but that makes sense given D&D Next development until this time, it's largely been dungeon crawls.

However, I do have issues with the descriptions of three of them. Lifegiver, Protector, and Stormcaller. Suddenly, out of nowhere, these deities and the concepts and traditions they represent become gendered. The Lifegiver deity, the one involved with growth, healing, and fertility, is "usually female." The Protector, the domain of defensive strength. As a martial deity, it's usually male, but as the community building, caregiving version, it's usually female. Finally, Stormcaller, which represents storms, wars, physical might, and courage is commonly barbaric and male.

At this point, some will argue that this is traditional, we shouldn't get upset at this. Yes, in patriarchal societies, this was typical but far from universal. But, those are patriarchal societies, something that should not be assumed for all games of D&D. What happened to not setting the thermostat?

Additionally, some may point out that well, we're talking about the deities themselves, not the player characters. The problem with this is that it still implies that there are gender-based distinctions within the setting itself. That men are war-like, courageous, and barbaric. Women are the lifegivers, community builders, and caregivers. Add on top of this the sexual dimorphism, and we're right back in the 1970s. Sure, there are strong female characters in the setting but they are rare and exceptional.

My suggestion, leave out the "usually male" and "commonly female." It doesn't add anything while still setting the thermostat as it were. For those of us who don't want that in our games, it's one less thing we have to explicitly fight against. Our players won't be reinforced into believing that genders are a particular way in our game. People who want this gender bias in their games will bring it to the game on their own. They are still fully supported, especially since the settings mentioned have this bias in them.

Please, don't explicitly put gender stereotypes into your setting, Wizards of the Coast.

Denver Broncos outside linebacker Von Miller has been one of the NFL's best pass rushers since John Elway took him with the second overall pick in the 2011 draft. He put up 11.5 sacks in his rookie campaign, and backed that up with 18.5 quarterback takedowns in 2012, good for third in the league behind J.J. Watt and Aldon Smith. Now that bookend Elvis Dumervil is in Baltimore after a fax-based contract fiasco, Miller is expected to be the leader of the Broncos' defensive front. He's ready for that challenge, but Miller is just as excited about another prospect -- his future as a possible chicken magnate. There's a new company called Miller Farms, and Denver's sackmaster is serious about this stuff.

“Got my first chickens—38 chickens," Miller said from the team's facility in Englewood, Colo. on Thursday. "I’m pretty excited about it. You’ve got to start somewhere. As you guys all know, getting into the poultry industry is something that I always wanted to do. I just didn’t want to go out and buy a [chicken] house and do all this stuff and throw money at all that stuff. I really wanted to get to the fundamentals, get back to just raising chicks, and I’m just going to go from there. I raised chicks in college in class and stuff, but now it’s just a project for me to do it on my own and see where I go with it. I’m pretty excited about it. The chickens are not out here in Denver—the weather is fluctuating way too much right now. I’ve got them back in Dallas. I’m pretty excited about it. It’s a start for Miller Farms right now.”

[Photos: Top propects for next year's NFL draft]

Miller actually majored in poultry science at Texas A&M ("I raised chicks in college in class and stuff"), so this isn't a fly-by-night operation. Miller's got eight acres in Dallas, and this is just the beginning.

"We had a chicken coop for about a year-and-a-half now, just no chickens in it," he said. "We finally just made the move to go ahead and get them. So I’m pretty excited about it. I’m looking forward to seeing what it turns out. Miller Farms is where I’m starting out, but it’s all raw right now. Who knows? I’m only in my third year in the league. This is just a small investment where I can see where I go from here. Hopefully it will snowball into something bigger.”

Speaking of something bigger, Miller has great expectations for his third NFL season. The Broncos were bounced in the first round of the playoffs by the eventual Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens despite a 13-3 record and the top seed in the AFC. Even when he was part of a USO tour in Afghanistan, Miller found football inspiration -- in this case, from J.J. Watt, who led the NFL in sacks with 20.5.

"We were good friends before all of that stuff but when you see the way the guy works—it’s a motivator for me. The guy works out every day. I want to take that aspect of what makes him the type of player that he is and add it to my game. We were out in Afghanistan and he woke me up in the morning and he wanted to go work out. He was telling me he was getting ready to go to the Astros [game] to throw the opening pitch. We were working out in Afghanistan and having a good time in Afghanistan and you leave and turn on ESPN and you see J.J. just cracking them out there [in batting practice]. He had been working at it.

"I just want to take that aspect of what makes him the type of person and the type of player he is and just add a little bit to my game and hopefully I can have a little bit better season.”

Miller's an original, and he's proud of that. He's also got 32 different eyeglass frames, many of which were acquired during a recent shopping binge in New York's SoHo neighborhood.

“I’m the only one that wears glasses and raises chickens and plays football the way I do,” he told the New York Times in January.

Well, there's no arguing that. In fact, there's only one hero we could think of who has engaged in such poultry-related acts of athletic derring-do!

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The Golden Ratio — that geometric expression of the Fibonacci sequence of numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, etc.) — has influenced the way master painters created art and can be spotted occurring naturally in the seed arrangement on the face of a sunflower. But its serendipitous appearances aren't nearly as frequent as pop culture would have you believe, writes Samuel Arbesman at The Nautilus. In fact, one of the most common examples of mathematical perfection — the chambered nautilus shell — actually isn't. Even math can become part of the myths we tell ourselves as we try to create meaning in the universe.

Image: Golden Ratio, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from ernestduffoo's photostream