Sophianotloren

Shared with permission from Siva Vaidhyanathan, this is what I’ve been wanting to write all day, but couldn’t do so quite so eloquently:

Many people are posting versions of “never forget.”

So let’s review, shall we?

1) The 9/11 hijackers were funded by rich people in Saudi Arabia, none of whom have been punished for it.

2) President Bush had ample and direct warnings that Al Queda was a threat yet failed to take them seriously.

3) One security technology could have prevented the hijackings — secure and solid cockpit doors. The airlines fought FAA proposals for them for decades.

4) Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks but more than 10 years later more than half of Republicans still believed it did.

5) For one brief moment almost the whole world was united in horror about the slaughter. Yet our government dissolved that unity within 18 months.

6) The mania that gripped the White House in the wake of 9/11 generated massive violations of US and international law, significant violations of human rights, and a squandering of the moral high ground.

7) If the Supreme Court had allowed the voters to choose the president in the 2000 election we would have had sober, moderate, law-abiding, knowledgeable adults running the country and things would be a lot better now.

8) President Bush not only failed to defend us against Al Queda before 9/11, he let Bin Laden escape from Tora Bora and ceased serious efforts to capture or kill him while he shifted U.S. resources to a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.

Yeah, I am still angry.

You should be, too.

Never forget.

Hovertext: Still, this is the most current reference I've made all week.

New comic!
Today's News:

Only 20 general admission tickets left :) Thanks, geeks! 

Comedy Central’s comedy sketch show, “Key and Peele” wrapped up its fifth and final season a few days ago. A sad? Oh yeah, I haz one. I think it’s signing off too quickly, but maybe that’s the point: it’s better to go out on a high note, no? I’ve often said that the show was hit and miss, but I’ve also often said that that is almost always the nature of sketch shows. “Key and Peele” had some low points (or, rather, mediocre ones) but its high points made the show pretty notably awesome.

Part of the show’s success was due to the fact that Key and Peele aren’t just tremendously funny, they’re amazing actors. And the show’s production values were amazing. It was a quality show.

“Vulture” recently asked many comedians to talk about their favorite “K&P” sketches. I, too, was asked but I declined saying “I am a highly-paid blogger, rich in Bitcoin. I only share my opinions on comedy on LGM. Sometimes twitter. Sometimes with whomever is sitting next to me when I’m watching ‘Brooklyn 99.’ It is often a stuffed animal. What was the question again?”

I’ll remember “Key and Peele” for its high points. For Wendell, the lonely nerd, who made his own vanity music video.

It’s gleefully silly and I love it.

I’ll remember K&P for the sketch where the guys listen to two white women talk about how black men are innately “different” from white men. Alternately aroused and horrified, they eavesdrop as the white women get progressively more racist. It’s hilarious and biting.

I loved the sketch where K&P talk tough about their women in private, gradually moving further away and further away from the women so they can safely whisper-yell “I SAID ‘BIIIIIIIIIIIIITCH.'” K&P sketches often took a turn for the surreal. In this one, the dudes end up in outer space–it’s the only place they can brag about their bravado!

Speaking of surreal, I thought the sketch about Steve Urkel being the evil puppet master behind “Family Matters” was pretty brilliant

And, finally, you know how I feel about the “Gremlins 2/Hollywood Sequel Doctor” sketch. I’m still tittering over it.

I know I’m leaving some of my favorites out; perhaps you’ll correct my oversights and offer up some of your own.

 

Wait for a sunny day, take a pencil and a wooden board and get creative! Refine the result with a lens and in a few minutes you will have a unique drawing made with the sun

In Greek mythology Febo was the god of poetry and science, he was the guardian of the sun. Our aim is to encourage people’s creativity through a process that is constantly inspired by nature.

We believe that everyone can feel like an artist and since every trace is unique, everyone will obtain his or her personal work, crafted with the sun! You have the recipe now, we can give you the tool, just free your imagination and follow the sun!

More info: febo.co

Janken V.3

Project from Ishikawa Lab is a robot that definately WILL beat you at Rock, Paper, Scissors (thanks to high speed cameras and computer vision):

The third version of the Janken (rock-paper-scissors) robot with 100% winning rate has been developed. In this version, we incorporated the high-speed tracking technologies “1ms Auto Pan-Tilt” and “Lumipen 2” in order to extend a field of view of the high speed vision system. The inclusion of these technologies additionally enables the system to dynamically track the human hand and recognize its shape in high speed, regardless of where it moves, as well as improves the synchronization between the motion of the robot hand and that of the human hand. Using high-speed vision together with the high-speed actuation of the robot hand enables the robot to achieve a 100 % winning rate.

More Here

Describing Videos with Neural Networks

On this blog we have seen neural networks interpret art and recognize objects (with interesting but not necessarily accurate results). In this project, samim explores how neural networks try to describe the content in video (and … not quite getting it right …):

Automatically describing the content of an image is a fundamental problem in artificial intelligence that connects computer vision and natural language processing. Recent advances are starting to enable machines to describe image with sentences. This experiment uses neural networks to automatically describe the content of videos.

More Here

For Reasons. 

Related: Both this and this.

Who else does this describe?

“I have always gotten much more publicity than anyone else,” Trump boasts, which, as his exaggerations go, is probably one of the more accurate. This ability seems rooted in a seemingly inexhaustible need for attention. D’Antonio reports that “Trump begins each day with a sheaf of papers detailing where and how often his name has been mentioned in the global press. . . . This need to be noticed, and his drive to satisfy it, has made him a singular figure worthy of close inspection.”

It also makes him pretty much a classic case of narcissism, and D’Antonio cites several textbooks in which Trump serves as an example, including “Abnormal Behavior in the 21st Century” and “Personality Disorder and Older Adults.”

Narcissists typically enjoy conflict and will readily lie or exaggerate to gain the upper hand. Trump’s life can pretty much be summed up as an unending stream of conflicts, some real, many manufactured, all good copy. Trump tells D’Antonio: “I always loved to fight, all types of fights . . .

In the age of social media, where everyone is the star of his own Facebook page, “we no longer agree that intense self-­regard is a sign that something is wrong,” D’Antonio concludes. On the contrary, it’s a virtue.

Right.

Trump is trying to troll his way to the presidency. That this outcome is still considered impossible represents a failure to fully appreciate the spirit of the age.

Originally posted 2015-09-12 09:55:52. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Bobbi Starr Bet Your Ass 6 source: droolingfemme.

If further shots were going to be fired into the corpse of parody, it makes sense that Bobby Jindal’s minions are involved:

The task seems straightforward: Make a list of health care providers that would fill the void if Louisiana succeeded in defunding Planned Parenthood. But the state, which is fighting a court battle to strip the group of hundreds of thousands of dollars in Medicaid funds, is struggling to figure out who would provide poor women with family planning care if not Planned Parenthood.

Nowhere is this struggle more apparent than in a recent declaration by Louisiana’s attorneys that there are 2,000 family planning providers ready to accommodate new patients. A federal judge, reviewing the list in an early September court hearing, found hundreds of entries for specialists such as ophthalmologists; nursing homes caregivers; dentists; ear, nose, and throat doctors; and even cosmetic surgeons.

“It strikes me as extremely odd that you have a dermatologist, an audiologist, a dentist who are billing for family planning services,” said the judge, John deGravelles, who will determine in the next week whether it is legal for the state to end Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid contracts. “But that is what you’re representing to the court? You’re telling me that they can provide family planning and related services?”

QGCon 2015 at UC Berkeley has just put up their list of speakers and sessions. If you'll be around the Bay Area that weekend (in about a month!) then I highly recommend attending, it's a compelling mix of game developers and academic theorists, and there's no other games conference quite like it. Here's some interesting-sounding sessions:

• “Soft-Skinned, Hard-Coded: Straight/White/Washing in Video Games”
• “Witches and Wardrobes: Femme Play in Games and the Development of Be Witching”
• “Games of Death: Playing Bruce Lee”
• “Sex Appeal, Shirtless Men, and Social Justice: Diversity in Desire and Fanservice in Games”
• “Queer Avatar Construction Leads to Homonormative Play”
• “Affection Games in a World That Needs Them”
• “Masculinity in Late Final Fantasy”
• “Infinite Play in Games of Love, Sex and Romance”
• “Degamification”
• “Writing and Selling Queer Bots: Sext Adventure Design Post Mortem”
• (... and so many more!)

Registration is free and open to the public, and they also accept donations in the form of "sponsor tickets" -- please support the communities and institutions you want to see in games!

tastefullyoffensive:

(photos by syndrome)

via http://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/6/55119393327

via http://imnotwordy.tumblr.com/

da-pakistanii:

Pakistan-born, Komal Ahmad, develops phone app to feed almost 600,000 homeless people in San Francisco.

While she was walking near campus one fall day, a homeless man approached her, asking for money to buy food because he was hungry. Instead of giving him cash, Komal invited the man to lunch. As they ate, he told her his story. He was a soldier recently returned from Iraq and had a bad turn of luck. “He’d already gone on two deployments and now he’s come back, he’s 26 and on the side of the road begging for food,” Komal said. “It just blew my mind.”

It bothered her so she decided to do something about it. Within a few months, Komal set up a program at UC Berkeley that allowed the school’s dining halls to donate excess food to local homeless shelters. That program then expanded to 140 college campuses across the US in about three years.

Komal, now 25 years old and CEO of a nonprofit service called Feeding Forward, is looking to expand even more into what she calls on-demand food recovery. Through a website and mobile app, Feeding Forward matches businesses that have surplus food with nearby homeless shelters.

When companies or event planners have surplus food, they tap the Feeding Forward app and provide details of their donation. A driver is dispatched to quickly pick up the leftovers and deliver them to food banks. 

“These are huge cities that have absurd amounts of food thrown away every day,” Komal said. “We are trying to make the Bay Area a case study to say ‘Hey, if it works here, it can work anywhere.’ 

Last week, Ace Hotel’s cozy gallery space opened its latest exhibition, Blastosphere: Digital Art Becomes 3D Fashion. The room was packed with a throng of hotel guests, tech bros, garden-variety art snobs, and Cool Girls. Appropriately situated as a sort of second entryway to the hotel’s Opening Ceremony gift shop, visitors crowded near the tiny self-serve bar stocked with wine. An amalgamation of fashion, technology, and art, the exhibition was a collaboration between three artists, new media site NewHive, online clothier Print All Over Me, and NYC startup Reify.

Blastosphere plays ping-pong with the art, bouncing it back and forth between the virtual world and physical reality. The art objects themselves originated as digital works commissioned by NewHive. Artists Alexandra Gorczynski, Miles Peyton, and Tara Sinn created interactive sites for the multimedia publishing platform that were subsequently translated into the physical world via t-shirts, dresses, and hooded raincoats produced by Print All Over Me.

The cherry on top, and what made this exhibition worth seeing, is the augmented reality technology that Reify embedded into garments. Reify describes itself as a “physical music platform that transforms sound into something we can hear, see and hold.” What exactly that translates to outside of startup language is still a bit dubious, but for the purposes of this project, Reify created an app called Reify Stylus that uses a smartphone’s camera to pick up on patterns printed onto the clothing. Reify founder Allison Wood donned a t-shirt dress with Tara Sinn’s saccharine, Lisa Frank-esque work “Congratulations You’ve Reached the End.” She handed me an iPhone with Reify Stylus installed on it and as I pointed it at the dress, the confetti and 3D spheres printed on the fabric duplicated themselves as moving animations on the screen. In Miles Peyton’s “PartsPartsParts,” fragments of crowdsourced body parts and faces multiplied on a printed sweater, then repopulated on top of each other by moving and twitching on my screen.

Garments were supposedly on hand for guests to try on but it was hard to figure out where to do that in the packed mini-gallery. Unfortunately, the iPhone/iPad app that turned the clothes into augmented reality magic was not ready for download at the time of opening (due to App Store bureaucracy) but was made publicly available a day later. As a result, eager viewers crowded around Wolf and other representatives from the three companies as they pointed iDevices at the artists and others donned in the clothes. Alexandra Gorczynski posed proudly, wearing her creation “UntitledVVV” that manifested itself as a chic raincoat. A spooky technological feedback loop played as guests snapped photos of Wolf’s screen while it made the roses printed on Gorczynski’s poncho come to life.

Gorczynski was refreshingly loquacious in explaining her process and how her contribution to the show came to be. Grinning ear to ear, she described how the classical sculpture references in her work combined with more technological elements, like digital scribbles, creating a dialogue situated on the edge of two worlds. In this way, her work seemed especially fitting for being thrown into this spin cycle of rebirth, where works start off as websites and reproduce and manifest in multiple forms. Like a document in the cloud, the core of the work stays the same but is fungible depending on how you view it. She admitted that not even she had seen the finished product until the opening and was pleased with how the animation and clothing all came together. Clearly a favorite, one of the printed ponchos was hung in a frame near the hotel’s elevators. As I snapped pictures with my phone a cleaning lady making her rounds smiled, “So cool, isn’t it?”

Blastosphere: Digital Art Becomes 3D Fashion continues at the Ace Hotel (20 W 29th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through the end of September. 

Art Movements is a weekly collection of news, developments, and stirrings in the art world.

According to Le Figaro, Anish Kapoor met with French president François Hollande following the second vandalization of “Dirty Corner” (2011–15), the artist’s monumental sculpture currently on display in the gardens of the Versailles Palace. The French culture ministry approved of Kapoor’s request to leave the anti-semitic graffiti in place in order “to bear witness to hatred.” Objecting to Kapoor’s decision, Versailles municipal councillor Fabien Bouglé filed suit against the artist and the president of Versailles palace, Catherine Pégard. “I’ll see him in court,” Kapoor told the Guardian. “It shows how insane the whole thing is.” The work has been defaced a total of three times, the latest tag reading “respect art.”

Seva Novgorodsev, the BBC’s former DJ for the Soviet Union, hosted his last radio show last week. Described as “the man who caused the demise of the Soviet Union,” Novgorodsev played western pop and rock for Russian listeners who tuned in to his broadcasts on frequencies reversed for KGB officials.

The Flight 93 National Memorial visitor center opened in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Reddit user FR_STARMER discovered a logo from 1975 that closely resembles the Airbnb logo. The logo, which was designed for a Japanese drive-in Azuma, was included in a 1988 edition of Yasaburo Kuwayama’s Trademarks & Symbols of the World: The Alphabet in Design.

The Hamabul art collective, a group of Israeli artists and activists, opened an unofficial “Iranian Embassy in Jersusalem” celebrating Iranian culture.

The latest issue of THE THING Quarterly consists of a gingham soccer ball designed by artist Michelle Grabner. The work is described as a “physical rebuttal” to Ken Johnson’s “soccer mom” comment in his review of the artist’s 2014 exhibition at the James Cohan Gallery.

Cantate Domino, the first album to have been recorded inside the Sistine Chapel, is scheduled for release on September 25.

The head from a monumental sculpture of Lenin was unearthed in a woodland outside of Berlin.

The Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, and the Palace of Versailles will be open seven days a week during the Fall.

Steve Martin is co-curating an exhibition of work by Canadian painter Lawren Harris at the Hammer Museum. The exhibition, entitled The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris, opens on October 11.

Sotheby’s and Artsy teamed up to organize an online contemporary art auction next month. The sale will include work by artists who utilize or focus on technology in their work.

Architect Rafael Viñoly unveiled plans to build “the world’s largest green roof” in Cupertino, California.

Artist duo Allora and Calzadilla installed a work by Dan Flavin inside a cave off Puerto Rico’s southwest coast.

Princess, a new project space established by Bodega gallery, can only be accessed “through a window” somewhere in New York City. Although photographs of the courtyard space are available online, the exact location of Princess has yet to be revealed.

Transactions

Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) received a $1 million grant from the Brant Foundation. A portion of the grant will support the college’s appointment of art historian Alex Kitnick.

The German government offered Egypt a grant of €50,000 (~$56,070) towards the restoration of Tutankhamun’s iconic golden mask. The Egyptian Museum’s botched super glue repair of the mask’s beard was widely derided when it was reported last January.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will deaccession 200 works of English furniture and decorative art. A sale of the works will take place at Christie’s on October 27.

The Hyde Collection received its largest gift in 30 years, a donation of 55 works from the collection of Werner Feibes and the late James Schmitt.

Phyllis Kempner and David Stein donated 19 contemporary works to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 10 of which are part of their collection of Japanese ceramics.

Transitions

Charles Desmarais, the current president of the San Francisco Art Institute, will become the art critic for The Chronicle from November 1.

Andrew Bolton will succeed Harold Koda as the curator of Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, Stephen C. Pinson was appointed a curator of photography, and Barbara Drake Boehm was appointed senior curator of the Met Cloisters.

LMAKprojects is relocating to 298 Grand Street, two blocks away from its previous location.

Four DUMBO-based galleries – Klompching Gallery, Masters Projects, Minus Space, and United Photo Industries – will reopen in the newly renovated Stable building on Saturday, September 12.

Christie’s appointed Sonya Roth as managing director, southern California.

Revolution Books will reopen in Harlem on October 3.

The Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD) will open its first permanent location in Williamsburg on October 28.

Accolades

David Adjaye won MIT’s Eugene McDermott Award.

Obituaries

Brad Anderson (1924–2015), cartoonist. Creator of Marmaduke (1954–2015)

Robyn Beeche (1945–2015), photographer.

John Russell Brown (1923–2015), Shakespeare scholar and theatre director.

Irving Harper (1916–2015), furniture designer.

David Michie (1928-2015), artist.

Takuma Nakahira (1938–2015), artist and co-founder of Purovōku (Provoke) magazine.

John Perreault (1937–2015), art critic.

Candida Royalle (1950–2015), pornographic actress, filmmaker, and founder of Feminists for Free Expression.

The Chartres Cathedral in France has long been a crowd favorite, drawing millions of Catholic pilgrims and art lovers every year who come to bask in the famous blue glow of its 13th-century stained glass. But the love may be souring. A new petition against the cathedral’s restoration claims work done over the past six years has irreversibly damaged the 800-year-old building and erased centuries of the history that makes it so special.

According to author Stefan Evans, the restoration has made the cathedral’s interior look like it was built just yesterday. Its walls and vaulted ceilings have been covered with historically inaccurate paint and plaster. And many architectural nuances — for instance, the fact the north tower was constructed in the 16th century in a different style from the rest of the church — have become imperceivable. He writes:

An analogy is a headless statue: a responsible restoration uses filling material and supports when necessary to prevent limbs from breaking. An irresponsible restoration adds a new head and covers the intact limbs with a material that renders the age of the original and newly added parts indiscernible.

Evans and the petition’s co-sponsors — Franco Scardino, Leila Amineddoleh, and Adachiara Zevi — believe the restoration violates the 1964 Venice Charter. Articles 3 and 6 of the charter prohibit conservators from adding new construction, demolishing, or modifying historic buildings in ways that affect their composition and color.

Begun in 2009, the €15 million restoration is being implemented by the Monuments Historiques division of the French Ministry of Culture, with funding from the EU and American Friends of Chartres. The project leaders hoped to transform the cathedral’s interior to look just like it did back when it was consecrated in 1260.

But they were under no illusions that the restoration would be celebrated by all. “There is no doubt that we will lose something, even if we gain a great deal,” Gilles Fresson, the historian overseeing the work for the cathedral’s rectorate, told the Independent at the time. “The sense of mystery, the sense of the passing ages, which you receive when you enter the dark interior of today will be replaced by something fresher and much more dynamic.”

So it’s no surprise that not everyone has liked the look. In 2013, a woman visiting Chartres was horrified by the restorations and petitioned the European Union to stop them. The EU responded to her complaint by claiming to not be responsible for the restoration. Then in November 2013, Adrien Goetz published an article in Le Figaro comparing his recent experience at the much brighter-than-normal cathedral to “watching a film in a movie theater where they haven’t turned off the lights.”

Just a month later, Martin Filler visited the cathedral and was similarly appalled by the restoration work. In a scathing blog post published by The New York Review of Books, he called it “scandalous” and said it was the equivalent of “adding arms to the Venus de Milo.” He went on to complain that the repainting of the cathedral’s Black Madonna had “transformed the Mother of God into a simpering kewpie doll.” The article went viral, prompting many more pieces like it. (Though it contained one inaccuracy: it stated that the piers in the apse had been repainted in yellow faux marble even though it had been there since the 17th century. Some think that may have delegitimized other correct accusations about faux brick joints that had been repainted.) 

Patrice Calvel, then-overseer of the restoration project for the French government, offered a rebuttal in an interview with The Guardian. “It has the full weight of the administration of state, historians and architects who decided over a 20-year period what would be done,” he said. “All I’ve done is a bit of vacuum cleaning.” And many, including Madeline Caviness and Jeffrey Hamburger, agreed, calling it a “careful and historically responsible renovation.”

The authors of the current petition wholeheartedly disagree. They’ve asked the French Ministry of Culture to immediately halt the restoration so that at least the transepts, which have yet to be painted, might be saved. It remains to be seen whether officials will listen to their plea, or whether it comes too late.

the men and women of the NYPD’s elite computer crime task force are back on the job. looks like this guy was planning the world’s biggest orgy

elle-lafille:

micdotcom:

Watch: Serena Williams shuts down a reporter who asked why she wasn’t smiling 

W.A.Y.S.

design-is-fine:

Bookbinding of New Testament, 1740. Black velvet binding over wooden boards with gilded brass bands. Zürich, Switzerland. Via Ketterer Kunst

templeofapelles:

detail
The Suicide of Lucretia, 1525
Meester met de Papegaa

krycha1976:

Helen Mirren by Giuliano Bekor