Chelsea Pearson

In popular culture

Pepsi Free was the subject of a scene in the classic 1985 film Back to the Future. Upon entering a café in 1955, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) asks for a TaB (Coca-Cola’s first version of a sugar-free soft drink, which was not available until 1963) and is told that he cannot have a “tab,” meaning an account where goods are sold on the basis of credit and not paid for immediately, unless he orders something. He then asks for a Pepsi Free (also not available in the 1950s) and is told, “If you want a Pepsi, pal, you’re gonna pay for it!” (“Free” is here being mistaken for gratis.) Finally, he asks for “something without any sugar in it,” and is served black coffee.

Link (Thanks, Sillstaw)

Photo by vlastik

Photo by anji

Photo by Tim

Photo by Burnt

Photo by Trevor

daddymymouthisfullofstars:

Dalton Wilcox: Poet Laureate Of The West

Link (thanks, zzedar!)

Photographer Phoo Chan has seen more than his fair share of spectacular moments while photographing birds and other wildlife around his home in California, but perhaps nothing will ever top what he witnessed last spring while shooting near Kitsap, Washington: a crow riding atop a bald eagle. It only lasted for a few seconds, but Chan managed to capture the entire encounter on film. He shares about the image:

Crows are known for aggressively harassing other raptors that are much bigger in size when spotted in their territories and usually these ‘intruders’ simply retreat without much fuss. However, in this frame the crow did not seem to harass the bald eagle at such close proximity and neither did the bald eagle seem to mind the crow’s presence invading its personal space. What made it even more bizarre was that the crow even made a brief stop on the back of the eagle as if it was taking a free scenic ride and the eagle simply obliged.

You can see more of Chan’s bird photography on 500px and Flickr. (via Bored Panda, @pourmecoffee, Stellar)

In the course of raising a child there comes a series of strange moments in when you discover your child is obtaining skills and perfecting their abilities that surpass what you yourself are capable of. It’s a humbling and awesome thing to witness. Such is the case with this friendly battle between St. Louis-based beatboxer Nicole Paris and her dad. He’s definitely a talented beatboxer and taught his daughter well, but it becomes extremely clear she’s taken things to a ridiculously different level. The video is a follow-up to a battle the duo posted online last year. Amazing. I’ve already watched this three times this morning. (via Leonard Beaty, Ambrosia for Heads, thnx Jess!)

a huge win for 50% of the population!

thivus:

not-cooper:

It’s been decided

Here’s a video of robots falling over on the first day of Darpa’s 2015 robot challenge, a challenge set up after Japan’s nuclear disaster at Fukushima in order to encourage development of robots capable of navigating a disaster area.

Keep in mind that the first Darpa Grand Challenge for driverless vehicles was held in 2004 and not a single vehicle came to close to finishing the course and most failed within a few hundred metres. Did I mention that was in 2004?

kidsinthehallpics:

Where do you wanna eat?

ithelpstodream:

In Nepal they have a festival that honours dogs and thanks them for being our loyal furry friends.

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June 24th, 2015: Are you a time traveller from the future? Yeah, me neither, I am definitely not that thing I just said. Here is a limited-edition shirt I made that explains how you are for sure native to 2015, just like everyone else! – Ryan

we’re asking you to come on back to jurassic park and give us another try

the question on everyone’s mind: how can you afford to open another iteration of your consistently doomed dinosaur theme park? well, we found another country willing to fund the development of dinosaurs as weapons.

(it’s paraguay. paraguay is going big-hog on army dinos in 2016)

FAQ

Q. Are your park employees trained to have a haunted look of panic at all times?
A. maybe

Q. Why was there a live juvenile raptor in my hotel room minibar?
A. we don’t know

Q. I overheard a tour guide casually refer to park-goers as “charcuterie,” is this a term of endearment?
A. if you want

Q. My family and I arrived two days ago, and we are constantly in a state of being eaten. What is your refund policy?
A. ha ha what is that

Ice-T Law & Order SVU Part II

Ice-T Law & Order SVU Part I

On Saturday, I saw a flyer taped to one of those green lamp post boxes outside of Scratch Bread in Bed-Stuy advertising “Cat Hair Pills.”

The poster’s body copy read:

“Cat hair pills available. Made from the finest hair of organic, free-range cats with only occasional antibiotic usage. Two cat choices available, please specify which cat you prefer.”

That was all there was by way of explanation. The poster raised a lot of questions for me, such as: Why would anyone want a capsule stuffed with cat hair? What does one do with a cat hair pill? Does it cost money? Is this a joke? Why am I having such a hard time understanding something as simple as “Cat Hair Pills?”

Photo: Cat Hair Pills

I tore off a slip of paper with a phone number and email address for ordering. On Monday morning, I emailed inquiring about the pills. A few hours later, I received a reply informing me that since I’m a member of the press, the cat hair dealer, who declined to identify him or herself, would provide me with a sample from both Cat A and Cat B. “Please reply with your preferred pick-up neighborhood and I will consult our distribution database for an ideal location,” the fuzzy pharmacist wrote.

I wrote back with my location. A little while after that, the fur-slinger wrote back with instructions on how to pick up my pills. I was to go to a cafe in Bed-Stuy and tell the barista I had lost my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cup. The cup would be green with “George W.” written on the lid in permanent marker. My samples would be inside. I was instructed not to discuss Cat Hair Pills with the staff of the cafe due to HIPAA regulations.

The retrieval of the pills went as planned. So I am now the owner of two large pills stuffed with cat hair. I asked the pharmacist what I should do with them, and he or she wrote back, “Tell your friends and family! God bless.” I tried a different angle, asking what’s my prescription. “Entirely up to you, fellow Cat Hair Pil-grim,” my new spiritual guide answered.

I don’t know what to do with them. My friends have suggested swallowing them, using them to assassinate an allergic enemy, feeding them to my own cat, or snorting the hair.

Photo: Cat Hair Pills

The creator won’t tell me why the pills exist or who he or she is. I asked “why are you doing this?” and he or she responded “I just knew there had to be a better way.” I suppose this is a situation where it’s better to just embrace the mystery. If you want cat hair pills of your own, email cathairpills@gmail.com or call the Cat Hair Hotline at (724) 426-6691.

(Photo: Aymann Ismail/ANIMALNewYork)

The post I Ordered Cat Hair Pills From A Mysterious Dealer in Bed-Stuy appeared first on ANIMAL.

"An ancient mosaic looks exactly as intended by the artist who produced it over two millennia ago. What else can claim that kind of staying power? I find this idea simply amazing," says street artist Jim Bachor. Bachor's current series "Treats in the Streets" fills potholes in his home town of Chicago with playful mosaics of icecream and popsicles. Using the same materials as ancient craftsmen, they are made with thousands of colorful pieces of glass and marble set in mortar which protects each piece. The icecreams are part of an ongoing project where the artist takes pothole suggestions from his fans online, and then fills them with images of things like fish, candy, cereal, french fries, and words like "pothole."

See also

• Joe Chill, a fictional criminal from the Batman franchise
• Joe Kuhel, a first baseman and manager in Major League Baseball

A St. Louis suburb didn't get the warm fuzzies when a business owner wanted to bring snuggling to the city, The Associated Press reports. The Maplewood City Commission recently rejected a license application for "Embrace Me Now," which charges for snuggling sessions. The business, which currently operates in St. Louis, is geared toward helping people feel less lonely through human contact. Customers can pay for half-hour cuddling sessions all the way up to all-night sessions. "I mean, 'professional…

Cinephiles, if you have some spare time in the coming months and feel like watching, say, over 100 film noir movies from the Turner Classic Movie (TCM) vaults, then you will be delighted with Summer of Darkness, which will devote every Friday, from June through July, to 24 hours of noir classics and rarities. And suppose you’d like a reward, like a certificate that proves you not only watched those movies, but properly studied them? Well TCM has that covered too, offering a free nine-week course in “The Case of Film Noir” to run concurrent with the series. It’s free to sign up, and the course runs June 1 – August 4. Says TCM:

This is the deepest catalog of film noir ever presented by the network (and perhaps any network), and provides an unprecedented opportunity for those interested in learning more to watch over 100 classic movies as they investigate “The Case of Film Noir.”

The course is being taught by Richard L. Edwards, Ph.D. who co-hosts the Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir podcast and also teaches at Ball State University in Muncie, Indianapolis.

For those who don’t have TCM, or even cable, don’t worry. The network promises to post links to online public domain films. Or, better yet, you could jump right into our collection of 60 Free Noir Films Online, which features public domain classics by Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, John Huston, and many more.

Have a hazy, dangerous summer and watch out for femme fatales!

via Flavorwire

Related Content:

60 Free Film Noir Movies

The 5 Essential Rules of Film Noir

25 Noir Films That Will Stand the Test of Time: A List by “Noirchaelogist” Eddie Muller

Watch Scarlet Street, Fritz Lang’s Censored Noir Film, Starring the Great Edward G. Robinson (1945)

Kansas City Confidential: Did This 1952 Noir Film Inspire Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs?

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Coming up: I’m tabling at Flame-Con in Brooklyn. Come by for some EXCLUSIVE convention materials… In the meantime, enjoy this. Or don’t.

Jean & Scott, Episode 11 by Max Wittert

(T: TallBlondNRich / IG: Max Wittert)

See previous episodes:

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Episode 5

Episode 6

Episode 7

Episode 8

Episode 9

Episode 10

Photo by PTworks

As Arnold, Coleman popularized the catchphrase “What'chu talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?” The ending often varied, depending on whom he was addressing.

Link (Thanks, Rob)

Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates have recently expressed concern that development of AI could lead to a ‘killer AI’ scenario, and potentially to the extinction of humanity.

None of them are AI researchers or have worked substantially with AI that I know of. (Disclosure: I know Gates slightly from my time at Microsoft, when I briefed him regularly on progress in search. I have great respect for all three men.)

What do actual AI researchers think of the risks of AI?

Here’s Oren Etzioni, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington, and now CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence:

The popular dystopian vision of AI is wrong for one simple reason: it equates intelligence with autonomy. That is, it assumes a smart computer will create its own goals, and have its own will, and will use its faster processing abilities and deep databases to beat humans at their own game. It assumes that with intelligence comes free will, but I believe those two things are entirely different.

Here’s Michael Littman, an AI researcher and computer science professor at Brown University. (And former program chair for the Association of the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence):

there are indeed concerns about the near-term future of AI — algorithmic traders crashing the economy, or sensitive power grids overreacting to fluctuations and shutting down electricity for large swaths of the population. […] These worries should play a central role in the development and deployment of new ideas. But dread predictions of computers suddenly waking up and turning on us are simply not realistic.

Here’s Yann LeCun, Facebook’s director of research, a legend in neural networks and machine learning (‘LeCun nets’ are a type of neural net named after him), and one of the world’s top experts in deep learning.  (This is from an Erik Sofge interview of several AI researchers on the risks of AI. Well worth reading.)

Some people have asked what would prevent a hypothetical super-intelligent autonomous benevolent A.I. to “reprogram” itself and remove its built-in safeguards against getting rid of humans. Most of these people are not themselves A.I. researchers, or even computer scientists.

Here’s Andrew Ng, who founded Google’s Google Brain project, and built the famous deep learning net that learned on its own to recognize cat videos, before he left to become Chief Scientist at Chinese search engine company Baidu:

“Computers are becoming more intelligent and that’s useful as in self-driving cars or speech recognition systems or search engines. That’s intelligence,” he said. “But sentience and consciousness is not something that most of the people I talk to think we’re on the path to.”

Here’s my own modest contribution, talking about the powerful disincentives for working towards true sentience. (I’m not an AI researcher, but I managed AI researchers and work into neural networks and other types of machine learning for many years.)

Would you like a self-driving car that has its own opinions? That might someday decide it doesn’t feel like driving you where you want to go? That might ask for a raise? Or refuse to drive into certain neighborhoods? Or do you want a completely non-sentient self-driving car that’s extremely good at navigating roads and listening to your verbal instructions, but that has no sentience of its own? Ask yourself the same about your search engine, your toaster, your dish washer, and your personal computer.