Sophianotloren

Buzzfeed's Dan Meth has remixed the packaging for iconic American junk-food to make it look like the premium organic/handmade/artisanal products marketed to moneyed, design-forward customers. Read the rest

A new Wikileaks-published leak from the secretive Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty reveals a January 2015 draft "Investment Chapter" of the agreement, where the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms are set out. They allow companies to repeal nations' environmental, health and labor laws. Read the rest

The FBI used to publish excellent advice about encrypting your devices to keep your data secure when your stuff is lost or stolen; this advice has been silently dropped now that FBI Director James Comey is trying to stop manufacturers from using crypto by default. Read the rest

via http://i.imgur.com/miC8i.jpg

via http://kottke.org/12/10/girl-with-a-pearl-earring-and-point-and-shoot-camera

— Julie Andrews discussing Lady Gaga’s Academy Awards tribute to The Sound Of Music, which premiered 50 years ago and will be lavishly re-premiered tonight in Hollywood, in a new interview with Los Angeles Times

“I took a panoramic picture of our living room. But my cat decided to walk through.” -Jannik Görtz

“Immortality” by Lunar Baboon

If I were driving along, and I saw this sign, I would have to turn left. And I would probably be bouncing in my seat with anticipation.

Rahul Khan

I wouldn’t change course even if there were another sign pointing to the right, saying “FREE ICE CREAM.”

Hovertext: I predict that by 2040, sex-dynamos will be cheap, efficient, and carbon-neutral, thanks to Elon Musk.

 Adding hovertext to newer comics. Maybe I'll go back and add more to earlier stuff at some point.

Steve Loves the ’80s: Why It Makes Perfect Sense That Spielberg Is Bringing ‘Ready Player One’ to the Big Screen

As reported by Deadline, semi-well-known movie director Steven Spielberg — auteur of such cult art-house flicks as Jaws, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Saving Private Ryan — has signed on to direct the film version of Ernest Cline’s 2011 video-game dystopia novel Ready Player One. It’s a sublime pairing of director and source material for several reasons, not the least of which is that this marks, as far as I can tell, the first time in history that a book that mentions a particular filmmaker has been adapted for the screen by said filmmaker. And if it’s not the first time, such an event is at least exceedingly rare. I mean, I Googled it and asked two very knowledgeable people, and they couldn’t remember such a thing having happened before.

Ready Player One is set in a near-future, economically destitute, ecologically ruined United States. The only escape from the drab and dire existence of daily life is the OASIS, a fully realistic and massive online realm encompassing platforms for every conceivable human activity, with the exception of eating and excreting...

I know Cleveland fairly well, though I haven’t spent much time there in the last few years. Much of the city is obviously a mess. I love the place more than pretty much any other city east of the Mississippi and there is so much potential for cool things to happen there. One of the highlights of the city is the neighborhood Ohio City, which has a bunch of cool bars and breweries and restaurants and markets. It’s growing and this is positive. The problem is, as these things tend to be, is that the people who are spurring it are enormously egotistical yuppie neoliberals who make me want to puke. I guess this shouldn’t matter. But as this profile of some of the movers and shakers in Ohio City suggests, when they start thinking of themselves as Congressional material, it moves beyond the personally repulsive into the really problematic.

There are signs Veysey is serious about the “doing good” part: After the Obama campaign, Veysey tried his hand at being a candidate. In 2012 he ran for Congress against Rep. Marcy Kaptur and Dennis Kucinich. Veysey’s politics during that campaign were those of a generation growing up in the age of neoliberalism: He was left to the two more established candidates on social issues like gay marriage and abortion, and more to the right on economic ones. Veysey is okay with things like NAFTA, a liberal bogeyman; he thinks America’s debt is one of the country’s biggest issues; he thinks underperforming schools should be starved of money.

Veysey only captured 4 percent of the vote, but the run nonetheless whetted his appetite for more do-goodery.

“I thought that I could have brought value when I ran for office,” Veysey said. “But you don’t have to be in office to bring value to a community.”

Still, there are major differences between being the King of Hingetown and a congressman. Political leaders are, at least in theory, meant to represent everyone, not just the well-off. And Hingetown is definitely not meant for everyone.

This guy is gross enough without running for Congress as a neoliberal who thinks Marcy Kaptur and Dennis Kuchinch are too far to the left on economics. I mean, if there’s one thing that Cleveland needs, it’s a pro-NAFTA congressman who wants to see more Ohio jobs shipped overseas and more poor schools closed and replaced with capitalist schools! And if his goal is to make Ohio City a haven for the rich, which seems likely regardless of the positive things happening there now, that’s also a bad thing.

On the other hand, doing something with the many struggling neighborhoods of Cleveland is really important. So I’m torn.

(via Valspar Paint on YouTube, screenshot by the author for Hyperallergic)

Originally setting out to design safety glasses for use during laser surgeries, materials scientist Don McPherson instead designed a lens that enables color-blind wearers to see the full light spectrum. Rare earth iron embedded in the lenses capture a wider range of light than normal frames, resulting in oversaturated colors for those with normal vision. However, for those with deuteranomaly and protanomaly (commonly known as red-green colorblindness), colors that were previously indistinguishable become visible.

McPherson, who holds a PhD in Glass Science, founded EnChroma Labs, a company dedicated to improving color vision in humans, with two of his colleagues. Last week, EnChroma partnered with paint manufacturer Valspar Paints on viral campaign #ColorForAll. The campaign launched with a video featuring the rainbow-colored string art of Gabriel Dawe’s Plexus series.

Initially employed by surgeons in the operating room to help distinguish between blood and tissue, doctors began to “borrow” pairs for recreational purposes. McPherson himself would often sport the sunglasses while taking daytime strolls, recently telling the Smithsonian Magazine, “Wearing them makes all colors look incredibly saturated. It makes the world look really bright.” McPherson only discovered the glasses’ ability to improve the perception of color-blind people after a color-blind friend asked to borrow his pair. To both their surprise, this friend saw a traffic cone’s vivid orange hue for the first time.

Watching the sunset (.gif via imgur)

The company is attempting to appeal to a broader consumer base, finally introducing a pair that can be used indoors (previous models required sunlight) and for sportswear and child’s frames. These models were made possible by switching from glass lenses to polycarbonite.

(via Valspar Paint on YouTube, screenshot by the author for Hyperallergic)

The colorblind community’s broadly positive response suggests the glasses are bound to become popular. However, the $349 price tag may make the glasses difficult to access without vision insurance. EnChroma has also found that other communities could benefit from the ability to see more color, including those with seasonal affective disorder. These glasses are slowly revealing color’s vital importance in several facets of human perception.

Above: the slaves who catch and process your dinner

One of the issues I talk about in Out of Sight is getting more publicity.

The Burmese slaves sat on the floor and stared through the rusty bars of their locked cage, hidden on a tiny tropical island thousands of miles from home.

Just a few yards away, other workers loaded cargo ships with slave-caught seafood that clouds the supply networks of major supermarkets, restaurants and even pet stores in the United States.

Here, in the Indonesian island village of Benjina and the surrounding waters, hundreds of trapped men represent one of the most desperate links criss-crossing between companies and countries in the seafood industry. This intricate web of connections separates the fish we eat from the men who catch it, and obscures a brutal truth: Your seafood may come from slaves.

The men the Associated Press spoke to on Benjina were mostly from Myanmar, also known as Burma, one of the poorest countries in the world. They were brought to Indonesia through Thailand and forced to fish. Their catch was shipped back to Thailand, and then entered the global commerce stream.

Tainted fish can wind up in the supply chains of some of America’s major grocery stores, such as Kroger, Albertsons and Safeway; the nation’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart; and the biggest food distributor, Sysco. It can find its way into the supply chains of some of the most popular brands of canned pet food, including Fancy Feast, Meow Mix and Iams. It can turn up as calamari at fine dining restaurants, as imitation crab in a California sushi roll or as packages of frozen snapper relabeled with store brands that land on our dinner tables.

Basically, if you are eating commercial seafood, you are probably inadvertently supporting extremely exploitative labor if not outright slavery. Whether it is Walmart contracting with Louisiana fish suppliers who bring guestworkers in from other countries and then lock them into the factory or big American and European companies buying southeast Asian seafood off the open market, horrific labor is what propels cheap seafood.

This is why in order to fight these conditions, we must be able to hold contracting corporations legally responsible for the actions of their suppliers. It is Walmart, Kroger, etc. that are demanding the fish at a very low price. Just like with apparel, this puts downward pressure on wages, to the point of using slave labor wherever possible. Right now, there is no way to hold these corporations accountable. At best, one local operation gets busted but then it just gets replaced by something else almost or just as bad. That’s not acceptable.

No longer stands for “Unlimited Pregnant woman Sacking”

You do this long enough, and you’ll see everything:

Based on this test, the majority rejected the Fourth Circuit’s summary dismissal of Young’s claim. Young was able to present at least some evidence that she was treated differently than other non-pregnant employees with similar limitations related to heavy lifting, and hence her case was dismissed prematurely. Justice Alito — not exactly a bleeding heart on employment discrimination cases — found that it “is not at all clear that respondent had any neutral business ground for treating pregnant drivers less favorably than at least some of its nonpregnant drivers who were reassigned to other jobs that they were physically capable of performing.”

If there isn’t a settlement, it will remain up to the lower courts to determine if she can prove her discrimination claim. But at least she will be allowed to make her case.

So while Young did not get the court to embrace the broadest interpretation of the statute, the decision must be considered a victory. “The court made clear that employers may not refuse to accommodate pregnant workers based on considerations of cost or convenience when they accommodate other workers,” Samuel Bagenstos, the Michigan Law School professor who represented Young before the Supreme Court, told me. “It’s a big step forward towards enforcing the principle that a woman shouldn’t have to choose between her pregnancy and her job.”

We still don’t know if Peggy Young’s strong case will ultimately prevail. But when the Roberts Court issues a ruling that sides with the workers and gives greater protection to women, it’s a reason for both surprise and celebration.

A few additional notes:

• This case was apparently written from an alternate universe in which Stuart Taylor knows what he’s talking about. For the first time in an important case, Roberts and Alito but not Kennedy joined the Democratic nominees.  When I read the Alito concurrence I keep looking for the angle but it’s reasonable enough that I certainly would have signed for it after oral argument. Let’s just say I’m happy that I didn’t have the opportunity to bet on the vote alignment in this case.  I’m not saying that Bagenstos is the greatest Supreme Court advocate since Daniel Webster, but I’m not not saying either.
•  As Irin Carmon observed on Twitter, Kennedy’s dissent is another one of his “I had to rule against your rights, ladies — I’m not prepared to go as far as a Trotskyist like Sam Alito — but I’m a nice guy, honest” specials.
• The Scalia is dissent is pretty much all spittle and no gin, but it must be acknowledged that it almost certainly sets the record for uses of the word “poof” in a Supreme Court opinion.
• More commentary from Lithwick and Leber.

Don’t live on the west coast? None of this until summer for you!

The mockery of Mark Bittman’s “turns out the Bay Area is a nice place to live with many available foodstuffs” column has been swift and inevitable. But there are also some substantive issues at stake here, and Phoebe Maltz Bovy’s response is devastating:

The true villain for the food movement isn’t someone who buys fast food when they should be eating lentils. It’s someone who, despite having the resources to do so, hasn’t researched where his or her food comes from. Grocery shoppers’ desire to purchase fruits and vegetables—a seemingly admirable, or at least innocuous, one—is recast as consumer demand for out-of-season produce—the height of decadence. In 2011, Bittman had some harsh words for these consumers:

[…]

Bittman lamented the fact that “we have ceased to rely upon staples: long-keeping foods like grains, beans, and root vegetables, foods that provide nutrition when summer greens, fruits, and vegetables aren’t readily available.”

Is Bittman relying on root vegetables in Berkeley? When he’s in Rome learning the craft of pasta sauce? Or when he was on a food tour of Spain with Gwyneth Paltrow and Mario Batali? Along similar lines, I became somewhat less impressed with David Tanis’s remarks about how he for one is going to stick with “end-of-winter vegetables” until the “local and seasonal” green ones sprout, when I noticed he’ll be giving a cooking workshop in Sicily this April. I point these things out not (just) out of culinary envy of New York Times food writers, but because it genuinely does mean something different to be a strict locavore if you travel around all the time, or live in grocery-endowed part of California, or both.

In addition to the problem that being a “locavore” isn’t much of sacrifice if you live on the California coast or can afford to travel wherever you want, there are the additional problems that 1)relying solely on local produce requires, you know, plenty of money and 2)in the vast majority of places it would be completely unsustainable if more than a minority did it anyway.

Look, I like farmer’s markets and the local co-op; I try to buy as much localish produce as availability and budget permit. But I also appreciate well-stocked supermarkets with decent produce to go along with other staples. And as to the idea that I shouldn’t have access to most vegetables for 9 or 10 months a year unless I can move to Berkeley, go to hell.

The whiteboard at my gym. -hankhill72

by uaiHebert

bjornenlinda:

Buster Keaton Escapes

With little more than thin wooden dowels and a bit of glue, artist Janusz Grünspek creates scale replicas of everyday objects that from a distance appear like line drawings. Dining room tables, power tools, an Apple laptop, and even a candle chandelier are formed from delicately cut and bent wooden pieces that mimic the form of digitally-rendered wireframes. Grünspek calls the 2011 series Drawings in Space, and you can see a bit more on his website (warning: Flash). (via Junk Culture, Visual News)