Maitri

Citizen Brick, the makers of that very-nearly-almost Breaking Bad LEGO set, have just created “The Dragon Sword Fighter Force!” It’s as close to a Game of Thrones series of minifigs as they could get without running afoul of HBO’s legal department. Check out them out right here.

The figs come in four sets of three that each come with custom weapons, body parts, and cloth elements. They’re pricey at $55 for a set of three minifigs, but it’s probably the closest you’ll ever get to an official Game of Thrones LEGO series. Plus, if you buy the full set at once Citizen Brick will even throw in a 13th fig for free. Who gets the honor of being the bonus fig?

As we saw with the Breaking Bad “Superlab Playset” Citizen Brick’s unofficial wares can sell out pretty quickly. So if you’re the kind of person who’s going to plop down $220 for an unofficial George R. R. Martin minifig you’d better act fast.

(via Citizen Brick)

Meanwhile in related links

• Check out the Superlab Playset right here
• House of Thrones has Frank Underwood vying for the Iron Throne
• Sir Typesalot George R. R. Martin released a new/old chapter of his next book

When I heard that my 21-year-old son, a student at Harvard, had been stopped by New York City police on more than one occasion during the brief summer he spent as a Wall Street intern, I was angry. On one occasion, while wearing his best business suit, he was forced to lie face-down on a filthy sidewalk because—well, let’s be honest about it, because of the color of his skin. As an attorney and a college professor who teaches criminal justice classes, I knew that his constitutional rights had been violated. As a parent, I feared for his safety at the hands of the police—a fear that I feel every single day, whether he is in New York or elsewhere.

Moreover, as the white father of an African-American son, I am keenly aware that I never face the suspicion and indignities that my son continuously confronts. In fact, all of the men among my African-American in-laws—and I literally mean every single one of them—can tell multiple stories of unjustified investigatory police stops of the sort that not a single one of my white male relatives has ever experienced.

In The Atlantic’s April feature story “Is Stop-and-Frisk Worth It?” author Daniel Bergner cited Professor Frank Zimring’s notion that stop-and-frisk is “a special tax on minority males.” I cannot endorse the conclusion that this “special tax” actually helps make communities safer. As indicated by the competing perspectives in Atlantic essays by Donald Braman and Paul Larkin, scholars disagree on whether crime rate data actually substantiate the claims of stop-and-frisk advocates. Either way, I do believe that the concept of a “special tax” deserves closer examination.

Proponents of stop-and-frisk often suggest that the hardships suffered by young men of color might be tolerable if officers were trained to be polite rather than aggressive and authoritarian. We need to remember, however, that we are talking about imposing an additional burden on a demographic that already experiences a set of alienating “taxes” not shared by the rest of society.

I can tell myriad stories about the ways my son is treated with suspicion and negative presumptions in nearly every arena of his life. I can describe the terrorized look on his face when, as a 7-year-old trying to learn how to ride a bicycle on the sidewalk in front of our suburban house, he was followed at 2-miles-per-hour from a few feet away by a police patrol car—a car that sped away when I came out of the front door to see what was going on. I can tell stories of teachers, coaches, and employers who have forced my son to overcome a presumption that he will cause behavior problems or that he lacks intellectual capability. I can tell you about U.S. Customs officials inexplicably ordering both of us to exit our vehicle and enter a building at the Canadian border crossing so that a team of officers could search our car without our watching—an event that never occurs when I am driving back from Canada by myself.

If I hadn’t witnessed all this so closely, I never would have fully recognized the extent of the indignities African-American boys and men face. Moreover, as indicated by research recently published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the cumulative physical toll this treatment takes on African-American men can accelerate the aging process and cause early death. Thus, no “special tax” on this population can be understood without recognizing that it does not exist as a small, isolated element in people’s lives.

It’s equally important to recognize the more acute dangers posed by these encounters. When my son was walking home one night during his summer in New York City, two men jumped out of the shadows and grabbed him. Any reasonable person would instantly have been jolted into wondering, “Am I being robbed?” That question demands quick decision-making: “Do I defend myself? Do I break free and try to run away?”

However, because cautious African-American men know that they are frequent targets of sudden and unexplained police stops, they must suppress their rational defensive reactions with self-imposed docility. What if these were plainclothes police officers? Any resistance could have led to my son’s being tasered or even shot. And if the police were to shoot him in this context—all alone in the shadows on an empty street late at night—that act would likely have been judged as a justifiable homicide. In my son’s case, it turned out that they were plainclothes police officers who failed to identify themselves until the encounter was well underway.

This example is by no means unique. My African-American brother-in-law, a white-collar professional, was driving to my house on Thanksgiving Day with his 20-something son when their car was stopped and surrounded by multiple police vehicles. The police officers immediately pointed guns at my relatives’ heads. If my brother-in-law or nephew—or one of the officers—had sneezed, there could have been a terribly tragic police shooting. After the officers looked them over and told them they could go, my relatives asked why they had been stopped. The officers hemmed and hawed for a moment before saying, “You fit the description of some robbery suspects—one was wearing a Houston Astros jersey just like the one your son is wearing.”

In reality, if my in-laws had fit the description of the robbery suspects so well, there is no way the police could have ruled them out as the robbers without searching their car. Sadly, it seems likely that the police were stopping—and presumably pointing guns at—every African-American male driver who happened by. I have heard similar stories from other African-American friends—and never from any white friend or relative.

Many have noted that stop-and-frisk practices hinder important constitutional values: the liberty to walk freely down the street; the reasonable expectation of privacy against unjustified invasion of one’s person by government officials; and the equal protection of the laws. But even the best-intentioned white writers often gloss over the actual human impacts of these encounters. Now and again, an individual white elite will have an experience that personalizes this principle of individualized suspicion.

For example, Linda Greenhouse, the Yale Law School Research Scholar and New York Times columnist, once wrote about the “unnerving” experience of being “unaccountably pulled over by a police officer” in a quiet, residential neighborhood in Washington, D.C. at night. As Greenhouse wrote, “My blood pressure goes up as I recall it years later.” Michael Powell, another New York Times columnist, learned from his two 20-something sons that they had never been stopped by police despite traveling regularly all over New York City, while eight male African-American college students told him they’d cumulatively been stopped a total of 92 times—in encounters that included rough physical treatment. Neither of these writers lacked knowledge about these issues, but their experiences obviously humanized and heightened their awareness.

My son’s experiences aside, I can only call on one personal reference when the issue of stop-and-frisk is raised. As a graduate student in April 1981, I spent a spring break traveling around Europe. When I visited Germany, I decided to spend one afternoon walking around Communist East Berlin. I quickly found myself being stopped at every single street corner by police officers whose suspicions were undoubtedly raised by my American clothing. Because of my limited knowledge of German, every encounter involved emphatic demands and raised voices, accompanied by threatening hand-slapping gestures. While Linda Greenhouse described her one-time experience with a police officer as “unnerving,” my encounter with a Communist police state would be better described as “suffocating.” I had the sense of being helplessly trapped, aware that no matter which direction I chose to walk, I would find more police waiting for me on the next block. I often wonder whether suspicionless stop-and-frisk searches regularly force African-American males into an East Berlin-esque sense of oppression—while the rest of us go our merry ways without noticing.

I understand the necessity and inevitability of police discretion. I also understand the pressures we place on law enforcement agencies to prevent and control crime. However, stop-and-frisk practices frequently disregard the basic requirements laid out in the seminal 1968 Supreme Court case Terry v. Ohio. The Court ruled that an officer performing a stop should note “unusual conduct which leads him reasonably to conclude in light of his experience that criminal activity may be afoot and that the persons with whom he is dealing may be armed and presently dangerous.” By contrast, in their reports on stop-and-frisk encounters, contemporary New York City police officers can merely check a box that says “furtive movements” or one that implausibly just says “other.”

If we truly believe that a tax must be imposed in order to control crime, then we should all share in the burden of that tax. We should not take the easy and unfair route of imposing the tax on someone else—especially when that someone else is already overburdened. As an intellectual exercise, why don’t we envision matching the application of stop-and-frisk to the demographic composition of a city? In New York City, if officers wanted to stop-and-frisk three African-American men on their shift, they’d also have to stop-and-frisk five white women and five white men—and proportionately equivalent numbers of Latinos and Asian-Americans. Some might say, “Wait, it’s a waste of the officers’ time to impose these searches on innocent people instead of searching people who might actually be criminals.” But the evidence shows that New York City police were already imposing stop-and-frisk searches on innocent people nearly 90 percent of the time—it is just that the burden of those stops and searches was endured almost exclusively by young men of color.

Moreover, if police start stopping and frisking hundreds of thousands of white women and men in the manner they’ve been searching young men of color, they will undoubtedly issue some summonses and make some arrests. There are middle-class white people in possession of illegal guns—not to mention heroin, illegal prescription painkillers, and marijuana. The success rates may not be high. But this shouldn’t deter police officials. After all, low success rates haven’t dissuaded them from searching young men of color for contraband and firearms.

This suggestion isn’t entirely tongue-in-cheek. If police were to actually apply it, even for a short while, it would test society’s disregard for individualized suspicion and force us to think more deeply about what it means to impose stop-and-frisk on large numbers of innocent people. It is easy enough to rationalize away a “special tax” when we apply it to “them.” But how will we feel about that burden once it’s shared by all of us?

Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "Finally, you don't have to raise your voice over a group of whisperers in the New York Public Library to get a better view of its map collection. Actually, you don't even need to visit the place at all. Over 20,000 maps and cartographic works from the NYPL's Lionel Pincus & Princess Firyal Map Division have been uploaded and made downloadable for the public. 'We believe these maps have no known U.S. copyright restrictions,' explains a blog post announcing the wholesale release of the library's map collection. 'It means you can have the maps, all of them if you want, for free, in high resolution. We've scanned them to enable their use in the broadest possible ways by the largest number of people.' The NYPL is distributing the maps under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, which means you can do whatever you want with the maps."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Daleks have been the thorn in the side of the Doctor throughout his five decades of adventures through time and space. No […]

Asteroid mining, orbital 3-D printing, and--of course--manned spaceflight are all part of the modern-day space race.

1. SpaceX

For making rockets reusable, and Mars seem possible. Already the world's most high-profile commercial spaceflight company, SpaceX continues to demonstrate its technical bona fides, racking up recent milestones as historic as they are diverse. Along with fielding a more muscular version of the workhorse Falcon 9 rocket (with engines that are 50% more powerful than their predecessors), the company conducted a series of test flights of its Grasshopper rocket, which traveled as high as 1,066 feet in June 2013 before depositing itself back on the launchpad, as opposed to dumping in the ocean. SpaceX flies fast, cheap, and always in control, making founder and CEO Elon Musk's plan to eventually establish a permanent, 80,000-person Martian colony, seem less like a pipe dream, and more like the inevitable.

Read Full Story

Recently I saw a movie on the life and death of Aaron Swartz, who is nowadays often called a martyr for the freedom of the Internet.

People, nations and governments like martyrs. They love them, they need them. Martyrs are part of our bipolar, black and white society constructed from good and bad guys, who always do good and bad deeds. Martyrs are those who have escaped our human condition, of being judged by people as people. Martyrs are beyond judgement, they become the scapegoats for our biggest failures, for the banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt phrased it.

I don't believe Aaron Swartz ever wanted to become a martyr. He just wanted to live within a world that he believed he could fix, a world that was technically malleable and hackable, where he could be active and ingenious, even if that reform effort might involve a few false steps.

I find it unjust, unfair, maybe even outrageous to treat his suicide as a martyrdom. The legal machinery that crushed Aaron Swartz could have crushed any of us, at least if we happened to get apprehended and charged within the USA. We need to pay due heed to the fates of those who get singled out as examples. The system by its nature represses hackers, freelance thinkers or Internet activists. Some will die of that mistreatment, especially if they are neglected, or shunned, or met with public indifference and numb stupidity. The exaggerated honor we pay to "martyrs" is a guilty, posthumous reparation for our failure to keep them alive.

More "Internet martyrs" are clearly on the way for a host of nations. Aaron Swartz was a particularly brilliant MIT "burglar" and was therefore repressed with particular vigor by an ambitious American prosecutor. But America has a huge prison system with millions of people behind bars -- everyone but bankers, basically. If Aaron Swartz was still alive today, having pled guilty and gone to American prison for a felony, how much effort would we spend to get him out of jail, or to help him once he was free?

Prosecutors of all nations will always play fast and loose with computer crime laws, if they think that nobody is watching or cares. Recently, three bloggers in Serbia were condemned to one year of prison with a particular ingenious prosecutorial scheme. These bloggers, who were writing under their online nickname pseudonyms, made some sarcastic wisecracks about a right-wing filmmaker who is a darling of violent right-wing Serbian nationalist goons. They bloggers were promptly charged and convicted with hate crime and death threats of this author.

This is the exact sort of behavior that the EU would most like to see out of Serbia: vigorous defense of an imperiled author. They probably didn't expect to see this kind of hate law applied in a vigorous defense of the government's own apologists and some street-fighting right-wing extremists. However, the current Serbian government demonstrates a true genius for stealing the opposition's clothes. So here is a case of online dissidents and university teachers being promptly condemned and sentenced as hooligans.

Most anything said or written can become a verbal crime, if the rule of law doesn't mean much. Back in the Yugoslavian Communist regime, a poet could go to prison for a single word, if it was the wrong one; singing politically non correct song could land a private in court. No Communist ever wrote laws or doctrine to make that situation entirely clear. Legality would have defeated the entire purpose of a totalitarian atmosphere.

You just had to know what was sayable or unsayable, sense it, feel it. If you did not feel it, then you were either hopelessly stupid, or an enemy of the state. Both the stupid and the enemy were entirely expendable. They provided good practical examples for the others, to learn the everyday behavior for a society devoid of rules.

The modern Internet jungle quite reminds me of those lost days. Much like the victims of the Communist regime, the victims of the modern Internet can be pretty much anybody who somehow demands too much, in some awkward, embarrassing or disruptive way. The modern Internet is overrun with spies, hacker thieves, intrusive databanks, filters and censors. This is no longer a free and pristine electronic wonderland -- any more than late-period Communism was all about being genuinely communal.

Of course Communist societies relentlessly described themselves as liberated and avant-garde, and they even claimed that everything was freely shared even when shops were empty. It took real struggle to realize that this blizzard of official rhetoric just didn't coincide with people's lived reality. Today's Internet users haven't gotten this far as yet; they still talk about their "free services," as if not paying for commercial big-data spyware was somehow utopian.

Computer communication systems were not born free. The original freedom of the Internet came as a second-hand unplanned consequence, as the work of brave activists and hackers, and as a glitch.

It's only when you transgress that you can fully feel and understand the borders, the limits. Aaron Swartz's big mistake was to believe in the limitless possibilities of a media system, just because he was good at coding for it.

Serbian computer users also thought they could permanently outsmart the technically illiterate police and blinkered Communist court system. That worked, too, for about a generation's time. However, the current Serbian government isn't by no means a tottering Communist nomenklatura. Today's Serbian state system and its enthusiastic majority voters do not consider the Internet any obstacle to their nationalist and Orthodox religious ambitions. If anything, the Internet helps to reveal who their enemies are, not that they had many doubts. The new state needs new enemies, and new martyrs, too.

The Internet was once an oasis for those who thought and spoke differently, a global arena of public opinion in which to demonstrate the power of the powerless. That's not how it works in this decade. But maybe that is good news of a kind: as we lose our anonymity, that old Internet in which no one knew you were a dog, the chains of the dog's masters also become more visible to everyone.

Serbia is so small and poor that the NSA could scarcely be bothered to spy on it, the NSA being busy spying on its major NATO allies in the EU. However, living out of the imperial limelight has both upsides and downsides for Serbia. The downside is that the modern Serbian state has all kinds of unaccountable power over virtual Serbian life, but the upshot is that the repressed Serbian bloggers are still alive. Their quarrel was too small to get them liquidated, for there just wasn't all that much at stake.

Serbia lacks the public conscience of a major third-world player like Brazil, which fought for years for its own, national, internet civil rights constitution.

However, Serbia does have one good thing: genuine activism in the streets. Recently, Women in Black from Serbia had a lynch threat on Facebook. The porte parole of the serbian antiterror police on Facebook, addressing his usual audience of right-wing Facebook hooligans, advised them to beat up Women in Black in the streets instead of uselessly brawling with each other. Women in Black have always been the target of hate and violence and foul language, due to their persistent street presence. However, to have this customary behavior blatantly revealed to everyone on Facebook changed the situation, and the Serbian porte parole will be suspended from duty for his indiscretion. He might even be charged and convicted of something or other,since Women in Black are presssing charges.

There must be some difference between the three Serbian bloggers, who were convicted of death threats and hate speech while meaning no real harm other than sarcasm, and this policeman, an agent of the state who would rather like the state's opponents to come to some extralegal harm at the hand of thugs. That difference is called "justice." The more of that you have, the less need you have to loudly exult about all of your martyrs.

Things that are none of your business (a non-exhaustive list):

1. My decision to not change my last name
2. The last time I shaved my legs
3. The conversations I have with my gynecologist
4. If and when I’m going to have kids
5. If I’m on birth control and why

Things that are none of my business (a non-exhaustive list):

1. Your sex life and the consenting adult(s) with whom you conduct it
2. How many kids you decide to have
3. Your weight and how you choose to manage it
4. How you deal with your crippling anxiety disorder
5. The way you want your end of life care handled

Things that “my” money gets spent on that I dislike immensely (a non-exhaustive list):

1. Tax breaks for religious organizations
2. The TSA
3. No Child Left Behind/Race to the Top (not to be confused with education in general)
4. Drone warfare
5. Professional sports venues

I hope you can take a look at the three above lists and catch my drift. But if not, allow me to summarize: My personal life, which includes my medical decisions, is none of your fucking business. Your personal life, which includes your medical decisions, is none of my fucking business. No one gets to pick and choose so that their money only gets spent on things they personally like when they are part of a societal collective, whether we’re talking about a government budget or group health insurance.

You’ll notice the third list is entirely about things the government spends “my” money on that I don’t like, rather than health decisions people make under their insurance that I would decide differently. I tried to make a list like that (for example, if I suffered a traumatic brain injury and thought I even had the right to make those choices, I’d probably cut you off after three kids, max) but I found the entire concept so deeply repugnant I couldn’t do it. Because your medical decisions are none of my fucking business.

As you may have already figured out, this is about the Hobby Lobby case the Supreme Court is hearing right now. That this is even a question disturbs me more than I can really articulate. I was under this strange impression that when a company employed me, it purchased my time, my effort, and my skills–not the manipulative right to weigh in on my life outside of work.

I’ve seen people point out a lot in this argument that you know, there are other reasons people take birth control pills. Not just contraception. Which is true, and does point out a nice hole in the moralistic bullshit. But that argument also bothers me, because it can effectively legitimize the unstated claim that it’s anyone’s business to begin with. It can be heard to imply that well, there are certain uses of the pill that are legit, it’s not just for sluts who want to sleep around. Just like the whole “rape and incest” exception for abortion tacitly supports the idea that some abortions are totally more legitimate than others.

Your abortion is none of my fucking business, by the way. Just like your use or non-use of birth control. Just like your sex life. Just like your type II diabetes or your depression. Your health and the maintenance thereof is not mine to control.

So let me tell you a story that’s none of your fucking business. I was on birth control pills for well over a decade, and it wasn’t because I had crippling cramps or endometriosis. It was because I was an adult human being in her twenties who didn’t want to have kids, and who believed (and still believes) that sex is part of being human and living life, as opposed to a crime punishable by pregnancy.

Don’t like that? Good thing you have your own life to live.

When I was unemployed and paying ridiculous amounts of money for COBRA on my old healthcare insurance, I had to drop off birth control pills because my plan didn’t cover them and I was struggling to make my mortgage payments. I’d just met someone (Mike) with whom I was head over heels in love–but neither of us were in any kind of place where kids were an option, and we still aren’t now. It was pretty scary until I could afford to buy the pill again, which involved Mike helping me out financially. And that’s always fun.

Oddly enough, if I’d been a man who couldn’t get it up, the plan would have still covered my Viagra. Even more hilariously, if I’d become a failure statistic for condoms, the plan would have covered my much more expensive pregnancy. A pregnancy which likely would have made it significantly harder for me to find employment, and probably prevented me from going back to college at that time.

That’s why I was so indescribably happy when the ACA mandated birth control in healthcare plans, because of bullshit like that. These things matter. When you have no money, these things matter a hell of a lot. These things shape the course of a person’s life.

And that should not for Hobby Lobby or anyone else to decide.

A completely unsurprising thing has happened during the first season of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos reboot. Creationists vocally complained that the show does not give their point of view an equal hearing. Tyson responded, saying “you don’t talk about the spherical earth with NASA and then say let’s give equal time to the flat-earthers.” The analogy is more amusing than effective, since roughly fifty percent of Americans are Creationists, while perhaps 49.9 percent fewer believe the earth is flat. But the point stands. If scientific theories were arrived at by popular vote, the “equal time” argument might make some sense. Of course that’s not how science works. Is this bias? As Tyson put it in one of his well-crafted tweets, “you are not biased any time you ever speak the truth.”

“But what is truth?” asks a certain kind of skeptic. That, suggests the late Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman above, depends upon your method. If you’re doing science, you may find answers, but not necessarily the ones you want:

If you expected science to give all the answers to the wonderful questions about what we are, where we’re going, what the meaning of the universe is and so on, then I think you can easily become disillusioned and look for some mystic answer.

Going to the sciences, says Feynman, to “get an answer to some deep philosophical question,” means “you may be wrong. It may be that you can’t get an answer to that question by finding out more about the character of nature.” Science does not begin with answers, but with doubt: “Is science true? No, no we don’t know what’s true, we’re trying to find out.” Feynman’s scientific attitude is profoundly agnostic; he’d rather “live with doubt than have answers that might be wrong.”

Feynman couches his comments in personal terms, admitting there are scientists who have religious faith, or as he puts it “mystic answers,” and that he “doesn’t understand that.” He declines to say anything more. While similarly agnostic, Neil deGrasse Tyson states his opinions a bit more forcefully on scientists who are believers, saying that around one third of “fully-functioning” “Western/American scientists claim that there is a god to whom they pray.” Yet unlike the claims of Answers in Genesis and other Creationist outfits, “There is no example of someone reading their scripture and saying, ‘I have a prediction about the world that no one knows yet, because this gave me insight. Let’s go test that prediction,’ and have the prediction be correct.”

Both Feynman and Tyson seem to agree that the scientific and Creationist methods for discovering “truth,” whatever that may be, are basically incompatible. Says Feynman: “There are very remarkable mysteries… but those are mysteries I want to investigate without knowing the answers to them.” For that reason, says Feynman, he “can’t believe the special stories that have been made up about our relationship to the universe.” His wording recalls the phrase Answers in Genesis uses to characterize human origins: “special creation,” the description of a method that places meaning and value before evidence, and doggedly assumes to know the truth about what it sets out to investigate in ignorance.

Confronted with the Creationists of today, Feynman would likely lump them in with what he called in a 1974 Caltech commencement speech “Cargo Cult Science,” or “science that isn’t science” but that intimidates “ordinary people with commonsense ideas.” That lecture appears in a collection of Feynman’s speeches, lectures, interviews and articles called The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, which also happens to be the title of the program above, from which the clip at the top comes.

Produced by the BBC in 1981, the hour-long interview (found in our Free Documentaries collection) was taped for a show called Horizon which, like Cosmos, showcases scientists sharing the joys of discovery with a lay audience. Like Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Carl Sagan before him, Feynman was a very likable and accomplished science communicator. He had little time for philosophy, but his practice of the scientific method is unimpeachable. Of the Feynman TV special above, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Sir Harry Kroto remarked: “The 1981 Feynman-Horizon is the best science program I have ever seen. This is not just my opinion – it is also the opinion of many of the best scientists that I know who have seen the program… It should be mandatory viewing for all students whether they be science or arts students.”

Related Content:

‘The Character of Physical Law’: Richard Feynman’s Legendary Course Presented at Cornell, 1964

The Richard Feynman Trilogy: The Physicist Captured in Three Films

Richard Feynman Introduces the World to Nanotechnology with Two Seminal Lectures (1959 & 1984)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Richard Feynman on Religion, Science, the Search for Truth & Our Willingness to Live with Doubt is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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The confusion starts with the name, but whether you write SEGY, SEG Y, or SEG-Y, it's probably definitely pronounced 'segg why'. So what is this strange substance?

SEG-Y means seismic data. For many of us, it's the only type of seismic file we have much to do with — we might handle others, but for the most part they are closed, proprietary formats that 'just work' in the application they belong to (Landmark's brick files, say, or OpendTect's CBVS files). Processors care about other kinds of data — the SEG has defined formats for field data (SEG-D) and positional data (SEG-P), for example. But SEG-Y is the seismic file for everyone. Kind of.

The open SEG-Y "standard" (those air quotes are an important feature of the standard) was defined by SEG in 1975. The first revision, Rev 1, was published in 2002. The second revision, Rev 2, was announced by the SEG Technical Standards Committee at the SEG Annual Meeting in 2013 and I imagine we'll start to see people using it in 2014. 

What's in a SEG-Y file?

SEG-Y files have lots of parts:

The important bits are the EBCDIC header (green) and the traces (light and dark blue).

The EBCDIC text header is a rich source of accurate information that provides everything you need to load your data without problems. Yay standards!

Oh, wait. The EBCDIC header doesn't say what the coordinate system is. Oh, and the datum is different from the processing report. And the dates look wrong, and the trace length is definitely wrong, and... aargh, standards!

The other important bit — the point of the whole file really — is the traces themselves. They also have two parts: a header (light blue, above) and the actual data (darker blue). The data are stored on the file in (usually) 4-byte 'words'. Each word has its own address, or 'byte location' (a number), and a meaning. The headers map the meaning to the location, e.g. the crossline number is stored in byte 21. Usually. Well, sometimes. OK, it was one time.

According to the standard, here's where the important stuff is supposed to be:

I won't go into the unpleasantness of poking around in SEG-Y files right now — I'll save that for next time. Suffice to say that it's often messy, and if you have access to a data-loading guru, treat them exceptionally well. When they look sad — and they will look sad — give them hugs and hot tea. 

What's so great about Rev 2?

The big news in the seismic standards world is Revision 2. According to this useful presentation by Jill Lewis (Troika International) at the Standards Leadership Council last month, here are the main features:

• Allow 240 byte trace header extensions.
• Support up to 2³¹ (that's 2.1 billion!) samples per trace and traces per ensemble.
• Permit arbitrarily large and small sample intervals.
• Support 3-byte and 8-byte sample formats.
• Support microsecond date and time stamps.
• Provide for additional precision in coordinates, depths, elevations.
• Synchronize coordinate reference system specification with SEG-D Rev 3.
• Backward compatible with Rev 1, as long as undefined fields were filled with binary zeros.

Two billion samples at µs intervals is over 30 minutes Clearly, the standard is aimed at <ahem> Big Data, and accommodating the massive amounts of data coming from techniques like variable timing acquisition, permanent 4D monitoring arrays, and microseismic. 

Next time, we'll look at loading one of these things. Not for the squeamish.

US NAVY

Debris sightings have drawn attention to a particular region, but choppy seas and rough waters deny a conclusive discovery. The TPL-25 is a military underwater microphone that could improve our chances of finding the flight data recorder, the "black box" that holds Flight 370's secrets. [Wired]

If subtitles don’t play automatically, please click the “CC” button at the bottom of each video.

When Sigmund Freud died in 1939, the year Hitler invaded Poland, W.H. Auden wrote a eulogy in verse and remarked “We are all Freudians now.” One might have said something similar of Michel Foucault after his death in [...]

Michel Foucault and Alain Badiou Discuss “Philosophy and Psychology” on French TV (1965) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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One year ago today
Venn Diagram of Irrational Nonsense: chart of woo: Crispian Jago has compiled a handy Venn Diagram of Irrational Nonsense.

Five years ago today
G20 Welcoming Committee Gets Ready: It's sure gonna be a long, hot FUN summer...

Ten years ago today
Lessig's Free Culture, free online, under a Creative Commons license: Larry Lessig's new book "Free Culture" -- which is about the value of freedom to cultural production -- is out in stores today, and, unlike his previous two books, Larry has foudn the leverage to convince his publisher to let him release the full text of the new book online under a Creative Commons license.

Here is a practice question from a Louisiana standardized test. It sucks.

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Who Killed the Archmage? Was it Tordek in the Dragon's Lair with the Flaming Battle Axe? The Dungeons and Dragons Clue board game is sitting close to its lowest price ever today, an unavoidably good time with the right group of friends that deserves a spot in your board game collection. [Amazon]

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Have you heard the startling news that the Earth's poles might flip? Perhaps in the response to a close pass from the mysterious Planet X? Are you imagining the entire Earth actually flipping over on its side or rotating upside down, possibly while Yakkity Sax plays in the background? When will this happen? Can this happen?

Have you ever had to talk out a decision in a big meeting? Did the meeting take forever and accomplish nothing? Here's why.

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Houston has earned the dubious distinction of being one of the most economically segregated metro areas in the country, according to a study conducted by Richard Florida and covered in The Atlantic Cities. Houston was ranked the No. 4 most income-segregated large metro in the U.S. That means, by Florida's calculations, that Austin has one of the highest shares of upper-income households — or households of $100,000 in annual income or more — living in neighborhoods with a majority of upper-income…

If you bought music on iTunes between 2003 and 2009, there's a good chance these songs are still crippled DRM. Here's how to set them free.

David Sengeh grew up during Sierra Leone's bloody civil war. Today at MIT, he's combining advanced math and 3-D printing to make better artificial limbs for amputees everywhere.

Science fiction fans will always have reasons to dislike the Syfy network, from its insistence on spewing out implausible creature features to avoiding […]

On Tuesday we announced our new web app, modelr.io. Why are we so excited about it? 

• We love the idea that subsurface software can cost dollars, not 1000's of dollars. 
• We love the idea of subsurface software being online, not on the desktop.
• We love the idea that subsurface software can be open source. Here's our code!
• We love the idea of subsurface software that doesn't need a manual to master.
• We love the idea of subsurface software that runs on a tablet or a phone.
• We see software as an important way to share knowledge and connect people.

OK, that's enough reasons. There are more. Those are the main ones.

The point is: we love these ideas. And we hope that you, dear reader, at least like some of them a bit. Because we really want to keep developing modelr. We think it can be awesome. Imagine 3D earth models, imagine full waveform modeling, imagine gravity and magnetic models. We get very excited when we think about all the possiblities. There's no better way to calibrate your seismic intuition than modeling, and modelr is a great place to start modeling. 

Here's a challenge: take 3 minutes and see if you can generate...

A wedge model & tuning curve

An AVA gather for a Class 4 sand

A stochastic AVA crossplot

 

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J. Michael Straczynski has written Thor, World War Z, and Changeling among many other films. He created Babylon 5 and has worked on numerous comic book titles including Superman and The Amazing Spider-Man. Most recently, he has teamed up with the Wachowskis for an original Netflix sci-fi series, Sense8 . He's agreed to take a break from his busy schedule in order to answer any questions you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With the new season of Game of Thrones on its way, we're looking forward to watching a new set of grisly deaths. In the meantime, relive the deaths from the previous seasons with these lovely and mournful posters—one fatal poster for each episode.

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Move over, Rust Cohle. You may be a True Detective, but Batman is The World's Greatest True Detective, and he doesn't have time for any of your beer can men or flat circle nonsense. (On another note: Anyone else wish we were getting this show instead of Gotham?)

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Phil Are Go has done the world the kind service of posting a hi-rez scan of a gorgeous, vintage souvenir of Wisconsin postcard, lavishly and wonderfully illustrated with everything the state has to offer.

Wisconsin, your post card is here.