Habanerocouscous

This morning, Russian skip Andrey Drozdov learned a valuable lesson about the momentum of curling stones and the slipperiness of ice. He learned it with his face.

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Comcast plans to acquire Time Warner Cable for about $159 a share in an all-stock deal that will combine America's two largest cable companies, reports CNBC. The newly merged company will be called "why is my internet so slow." And Net Neutrality is about to become all the more important.

Comcast to buy Time Warner Cable in all stock deal worth $159 per $TWC share- sources. Deal set for tomorrow morning. Ratio is 2.875 $CMCSA.

— DAVID FABER (@davidfaber) February 13, 2014

Comcast will indicate willingness to divest 3m subs from combination with $TWC- sources.

— DAVID FABER (@davidfaber) February 13, 2014

Snip from CNBC story, the first to break the news:

The new company, created by the $44 billion purchase, would be by far the largest cable provider in the nation with over 33 million subscribers, and is certain to face a tough review from the Federal Communications Commission.

The agreement comes more than eight months after Charter Communictions and Liberty Media made their first foray to try and negotiate a deal to acquire Time Warner Cable (a story broken by CNBC) and follows months of conversations between Time Warner Cable and Comcast about the prospect of a Comcast acquisition of the company.

Charter's offer of roughly $133 a share in cash and stock has been rejected by Time Warner Cable as it held out for a price of $160, which it has said it reflective of where an asset of its size and scope should trade in a deal.

Brace yourselves, internet.

BREAKING: Comcast and Time Warner merging to create bigger, shittier monopoly.

— Wil Wheaton (@wilw) February 13, 2014

Comcast and TWC aren’t competitors. It’s not good to consolidate ownership, but it doesn’t reduce choice. They were already cartel partners.

— Glenn Fleishman (@GlennF) February 13, 2014

Everyone who is worried about the Comcast Time Warner Cable merger can relax. I'm still getting a solid 28.8K on my modem.

— Dave Pell (@davepell) February 13, 2014

Note that almost uniquely in America, Verizon Fios and Cablevision compete in many markets and, surprise, no caps, better pricing.

— Glenn Fleishman (@GlennF) February 13, 2014

Note that AT&T suddenly, magically revamped its wireless data plans after T-Mobile introduced actually compelling competitive offers.

— Glenn Fleishman (@GlennF) February 13, 2014

Note that AT&T suddenly, magically revamped its wireless data plans after T-Mobile introduced actually compelling competitive offers.

— Glenn Fleishman (@GlennF) February 13, 2014

And yet the telecoms/internet firms persist in this delightful façade that, despite huge profits, we’re as competitive as possible already.

— Glenn Fleishman (@GlennF) February 13, 2014

For Comcast, the crown jewel of @TWC is the New York City market. Soon @Comcast will have its 30 Rock studios AND the cable pipes beneath.

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) February 13, 2014

There will be lots of Q's about government scrutiny of this deal. For what it's worth, Comcast is very well-connected in DC...

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) February 13, 2014

...Timely example: David Cohen, Comcast's head of lobbying, corporate communications, etc was a guest at the WH state dinner last night.

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) February 13, 2014

My initial @CNNMoney story about @Comcast + @TWC: http://t.co/NgPiA9jCci The two companies want to close the deal by the end of this year.

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) February 13, 2014

Here's my cartoon on Comcast and Time Warner and now I'm going to have a drink pic.twitter.com/qnoJKArXpJ

— Panoptisuz (@susie_c) February 13, 2014

WHAT THE FUCK @FCC YOU HAD ONE JOB

— dont kill me obama (@onekade) February 13, 2014

Time Warner and Comcast are merging. Now all we need is for Verizon to join and one of them to bomb Pearl Harbor.

— Josh Gondelman (@joshgondelman) February 13, 2014

The ghosts of 30 Rock are raging tonight.

— NYTFridge (@NYTFridge) February 13, 2014

Interesting that @davidfaber broke the $TWC/Comcast story.

— NYTFridge (@NYTFridge) February 13, 2014

You guys, just think about how much easier everything will be when there is only one company for everything!

— Sean Bonner Ⓥ (@seanbonner) February 13, 2014

Comcast and Time Warner. Two horrible disasters merging. This is like a crappy SyFy channel movie but real.

— Joseph Scrimshaw (@JosephScrimshaw) February 13, 2014

Representatives from Comcast and Time Warner, when reached for comment. pic.twitter.com/uG90ix5IUG

— Wil Wheaton (@wilw) February 13, 2014

It's nice that Comcast and Time Warner are getting together, because people were getting tired of hating Russia and winter and fracking

— John Schwartz -- NYT (@jswatz) February 13, 2014

@xeni You get a data cap! And you get a data cap! EVERYONE gets a data cap! </oprah> @ardalis

— James Hollingshead (@bladesjester) February 13, 2014

TWC goes to Comcast. This chart helps put it in to perspective. pic.twitter.com/XmlAZvOE3Y

— James Gross (@James_Gross) February 13, 2014

During a training run on the Olympic luge course, Indian luger Shiva Keshavan fell off his sled before making an amazing save, somehow flipping over and regaining his position on his sled. The scene made for a pretty mind-bending GIF, which makes it look like Keshavan was aided by CGI or wire effects.

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First time accepted submitter time_lords_almanac writes "A Canadian band has sent an invoice to the U.S. Department of Defense after learning that its music was used without permission in 'interrogations' of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The members of Skinny Puppy, who specialize in electronic music, were originally going to make the invoice the cover of their next album until they discovered they could bring legal action against the department. They were also none to happy to learn the purpose their music was being employed for, let alone illegally. The amount of compensation requested? $666,000, of course."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

XStat's Rapid Hemostasis System is a giant syringe filled with pellet-shaped sterile sponges doped with hemostatic agents for squiring directly into shotgun wounds. Within 15 seconds, the sponges absorb blood and expand, staunching the wound.

The sponges themselves are standard medical sponges that were coated with a hemostatic agent and then compressed. Once they come in contact with liquid, they rapidly expand and fill a substantially larger volume than their compressed state. Besides helping block blood flow, the sponges also provide a surface on which blood can begin clotting. Because the sponges have to be eventually removed, each has a tiny radiopaque marker so that any remaining in the body can be spotted on X-ray

XStat Rapid Hemostasis System for Gunshot Wounds Works in 15 Seconds [Medgadget]

In the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers recount the fascinating case of an electrician who, after sustaining a 14,000-voltshock to his left shoulder, presented with "bilateral stellate anterior subcapsular opacities of the lens." Translation: Starburst-shaped cataracts.

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Natalie is the proprietor of Austin's Side Serf Cakes. When she married Dave, they had a "Til Death Do Us Part"-themed wedding, whose centerpiece was this amazing cake that resembled their severed heads on a platter.

The Most Gruesome Wedding Cake Ever [Dmitry/Design You Trust] (via WTBW)

Okian Warrior writes "In a followup to the earlier story about Princeton researchers predicting the end of Facebook by 2017, Facebook has struck back with a post using similar statistical techniques to predict that Princeton itself may be facing irreversible decline. By using similar methods ('likes', mentions in scholarly papers, Google searches) Facebook has created graphs that indicate Princeton is losing ground compared with its rivals and may have no students at all by 2021."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Noooooooope. [ more › ]

Dominic Wilcox says: "Here’s my second object for my Selfridges window at the Festival of Imagination. I thought to myself ‘what would it sound like if I could hear the things that happened on my left side through my right ear?’ So I decided to make this Reverse Listening Device, and it actually works. It sounds very strange and I now will wear it at all times."

Reverse Listening Device

(Above photo: Dominic Wilcox wearing the Reverse Listening Device. Photograph by Piotr Gaska)

More Dominic Wilcox on Boing Boing

In anticipation for icy (and possibly snowy!) roads tonight, de-icing material has been placed on I-35 and Highway 290 and they apparently make the roads just as slippery as when they have ice on them. [ more › ]

The Buffalo Bills didn't give their fans much to be excited about this year, but that didn't stop this group of rad dudes from having a blast at each home game. That's because they spent their time hanging out in the parking lot, viciously posterizing fans of opposing teams.

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[The Netherlands' Sjinkie Knegt unloads both barrels on Russia's Victor An after losing the men's 5000m relay at ISU European short track speed skating championships this Sunday. Photo by Robert Michael/Getty Images]

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Via StuffJournalistsLike twitter feed. Appears the sign is stolen so often that the Colorado Department of Transit settled on this.

Thanks, Ryan!

Electricity-generating windmills churn out free energy as long as the wind is blowing. So strapping one to the roof of your car where there's always a breeze as long as you're driving just seems obvious. The Transport Turbine—seen here as a 3D printed proof of concept—puts four small wind turbines on the roof of your car that generate electricity as long as you're driving at least 25 mph, with minimal drag so as not to affect your gas mileage.

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What you are about to watch is beer getting weird. Before California-based brewery Sierra Nevada bottles Bigfoot, its classic barleywine-style ale, the wort goes through a six-day fermentation process that sees a whopping 24,000 gallons of liquid appear to bake like bread, roil like a contaminated foam party in Ibiza, and overflow like a sentient creature from a 1950s horror film.

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Best viewed while listening to Kind of Bloop.

Nightpix, by BJ Heinley

Singaporean macrofocus photographer Nicky Bay produces wonderful portraits of insects in their natural setting. Particularly fascinating are the photos of bugs eating each other, particularly the shot above of an assassin bug (Acanthaspis sp.) which "decorate themselves with the corpses of their consumed prey," forming a protective "meat-shield" as well as offering olfactory and visual camouflage to help it infiltrate ant-nests.

Engrossingly Gross Photos of Spiders and Insects Eating Each Other [Wired]

(via WTBW)

In Identifiable Images of Bystanders Extracted from Corneal Reflections, British psychology researchers Rob Jenkins and Christie Kerr show that recognizable images of the faces of unpictured bystanders can be captured from modern, high-resolution photography by zooming in on subjects' eyes to see the reflections in their corneas. The researchers asked experimental subjects to identify faces captured from these zoomed-in images and found that they were able to do so with a high degree of reliability.

The researchers used 39 megapixel cameras, substantially higher-rez than most people's phone-cameras, but low-cost cameras are making enormous leaps in resolution every day. What's more, the researchers suggest that the determining factor for identifying a face isn't resolution; it's having a viewer who is already familiar with the subject. It's an interesting wrinkle on the problem of information-leakage, and implies that future privacy-filters will have to scrub photos of reflective surfaces (especially eyes) of identifying faces before they're posted.

“In the context of criminal investigations, this could be used to piece together networks of associates, or to link individuals to particular locations. This may be especially important when for categories of crime in which perpetrators photograph their victims. Reflections in the victims eyes could reveal the identity of the photographer. “Also, around 40 million photographs per day are uploaded to Instagram alone, he pointed out. “Faces are among the most frequently photographed objects. Our study serves as a reminder to be careful what you upload. Eyes in the photographs could reveal where you were and who you were with.” Although Jenkins did the study with a high-resolution (39 megapixels) Hasselblad camera, face images retrieved from eye reflections need not be of high quality in order to be identifiable, he said. “Obtaining optimal viewers — those who are familiar with the faces concerned — may be more important than obtaining optimal images.” In addition, “in accordance with Hendy’s Law (a derivative of Moore’s Law), pixel count per dollar for digital cameras has been doubling approximately every twelve months. This trajectory implies that mobile phones could soon carry >39 megapixel cameras routinely.”

Reflected hidden faces in photographs revealed in pupil [Kurzweil AI]

What do you get when you mix Shinji Kagawa and Hiroshi Kiyotake, 33 Japanese kids, and a soccer pitch? Well, a pretty easily scored goal. But what about when you up the number to 55? Pure chaos.

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We've often pointed to posts from Liartown, USA, Sean Tejaratchi's funny, profane, NSFW Tumblr. Today, he's really scored with a gratuitously sweary and convulsively funny calendar about lighthouses. If this were an actual article of commerce, it would have topped my Christmas wishlist.

This past Friday, Bloomberg TV anchor Matt Miller took an on-air opportunity to give the gift of Bitcoin to two of his fellow anchors during his "12 Days of Bitcoin" segment. And in a beautiful twist of karmic justice, punishment for running such an absurd segment in the first place, every last digitally invested cent was stolen immediately.

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The updated app's new feature continuously auto tags songs and TV shows even when the user isn't able to whip their phone out of their pocket. [Read more]

A crow uses a jar lid to go snowboarding. (Thanks, Matthew!)

Donning sunglasses, Panthers defensive end Greg Hardy said his name was "Kraken" and that he attended Hogwarts during SNF's player intros. But the nickname wasn't totally random.

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Steelers center Cody Wallace resorted to gross tactics during a scrum for a fumble, shoving his hand into the ambiguous butt/crotch area of Dolphins defensive tackle Randy Starks. (It happens at the 0:16 mark.) As you can see from the video, Starks obviously felt it.

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