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Forest swastikas are no joke in Germany.

Apparently standing for decades, the forest swastikas have presented a Nazis mystery that has stood the test of time, and of chainsaws.

Ökoland Dederow discovered the forest swastikas in 1992 while searching aerial photographs for irrigation lines. What he found astounded him. What he discovered was that a grouping of yellow-colored larches set against the green-colored pines made the distinct pattern of the Nazis symbol, the swastika.

Investigators hired a plane to survey the area once again and, sure enough, the forest swastikas were confirmed to be about 200 by 200 feet, standing out starkly against the landscape. Visiting the site on foot, they measured the trees and concluded the forest swastikas were planted in the 1930′s.

The forest swastikas mystery only has rumors as a lead for why the trees were planted to honor the Nazi regime. One local farmer claims a forester paid him a few cents per seedling to plant the trees. Some believe a nearby village may have created the forest swastikas has a sign of loyalty to the Nazis after one of their own was taken to concentration camps. Another forest swastikas rumor claims a local Nazi leader commemorated Hitler’s birthday with the planting. The most benign rumor says the forest swastikas were simply planted as a sign of thanks to the Reich Labor Service for building a street.

Such forest swastikas commemorating the Nazi regime are apparently not unique in Germany. There was apparently a time when making such symbols was ”a fad among National Socialist foresters.” Besides the swastika, one forest has the year “1933″ built into it.

Whatever its true origins, Neo-Nazis have been flocking to the forest swastikas. Needless to say, Germany’s officials didn’t like this reminder of their history written all over the landscape, so in 2000 they allowed 25 of the 150 trees comprising the forest swastikas to be cut down.

Do you think the forest swastikas should be cut down, or should Germany use them as historical monuments to remind the people of history?

Forest Swastikas Nazi Mystery Survives Even Chainsaws is a post from: The Inquisitr

As Linux is arguably the most customizeable operating system between it, Windows, and Mac OS X; there's plenty of room to change just about whatever you please. Proper customizing can potentially lead to massive performance improvements, giving even the oldest hardware a new leash on life. I previously reviewed Xfce quite a while back as a great choice for resource-conscious users, but apparently there's a new kid on the block that is even more lightweight and great for the crappiest hardware imaginable.

Continue reading the article

Read full article: Using An Old Computer? Give It New Life With LXDE

[Photograph via Imgur]

I woke up this morning to see a video on the top of my Reddit feed shot by a uniform-wearing, whistle-blowing employee at a Florida location of the Golden Corral restaurant. The video shows trays of raw hamburger patties, raw baby back ribs, and pans filled with cooked pot roast, gravy, chicken, bacon, and green bean casserole, all stored outdoors, directly next to the dumpsters. His explanation? That's what the restaurant does "during inspection."

The post was quickly followed up by a different Reddit user who posted a series of photos that depicted what he claimed were "average day" scenes of disarray and uncleanliness at her own Golden Corral location.

Take a quick look at the video below:

Pretty unsavory, and it may leave you asking, "why would a restaurant do this on inspection day?"

I don't know the real answer (nor can I confirm if this video is indeed an accurate or fair portrayal of the Golden Corral location in question), but I can offer some pretty educated guesses.

As we reported a few of weeks ago, there are a few inherent inefficiencies in the relationship between restaurants, customers, and health inspectors that stems largely from the lack of correspondence between specifics of DOH's food safety rules and actual food safety. As Lauren Rothman reported, "there's a fundamental divide between what it takes for a restaurant to follow every DOH rule to the letter", and "what it takes for a restaurant to serve hot, tasty food to a dining room full of hungry customers in a timely manner."

How could this lead to something like what you might see in this video? Imagine this scenario: you're managing the floor at a Golden Corral restaurant on a hot Florida day. You have a few more customers in the restaurant than you were expecting. The walk-in refrigerator is struggling just to keep cool, while all of the extra orders means you've been forced to open and close the door more often than you should. As a result, some of the food you've been storing in there is not quite as cold as a health inspector would require it to be.

Lo and behold, you get a call from the health inspector saying he will be arriving on premises in half an hour. You know that if this warm food is discovered, you will be forced to throw it out, or worse, your restaurant may even be closed down if you have a couple of other minor violations to your name. You now have two options: A) throw out the food so that your restaurant passes the inspection; or B) hide the evidence in a location the health inspector may not check, then bring it back after he leaves and continue serving.

Option A will lead to severe reprimands from the corporate office, who keeps all of their locations on a very strict, bottom line-focussed mission. Eat those food costs, and they may well end up eating out of your own bonus, or might even put you out of the job. It's easy to see how under such pressure, option B might seem like the only choice, despicable as it may appear.

Of course, this is only one of many possible scenarios, but I can tell you from experience that every single restaurant I've ever spent time in had some (much milder) version of this scenario, whether it was "inspector's coming, time to put on hair nets," or "better hide that sous-vide machine in the wine room!" or "make sure all that charcuterie is hidden, stat." You get the idea.

Sometimes, these kinds of things seem almost like a game—it's understood by both the inspectors and chefs that the rules set up for inspection miss many of the subtleties of food preparation—salting, drying, or smoking for instance—that would make even totally safe and edible food fail inspection on technical grounds. On the other hand, sometimes you see egregious safety violations like the ones that occurred in this video.

A Golden Corral rep has since responded to the video with the following statement:

A video was recently posted showing an incident of improper food handling at our Port Orange, Fla., location. None of these items were served to a single customer. All were destroyed within the hour at the direction of management. Brandon Huber, the employee who made the video, participated in the disposal of the food.

The following day, the father of the employee, posted an offer to sell the video for $5,000, which was not accepted.

The manager involved in the improper storage was terminated for failing to follow approved food handling procedures.

We've yet to see anything by way of explanation of how it occurred, or how such incidents will be stemmed in the future.

Restaurant workers of Serious Eats: Do you have any personal stories or insights into the complexities of health code and food safety? Do you see a problem between what health inspectors want, what location managers can provide, and what corporate oversight demands?

Like this story? Follow Serious Eats on Facebook, Twitter and Pintrest!

About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

Remember when rogue archivist Carl Malamud asked the IRS for data on $1.5 trillion worth of data from nonprofit organizations? Well, it turns out that the IRS has totally failed to redact it properly, and left in the Social Security Numbers for thousands of people. So they've asked the IRS to take the database down and get it right. He explains:

Public.Resource.Org has issued a statement explaining why we asked the I.R.S. to temporarily take their political money database off the Internet and why they complied with our request. This database is a vital tool for researchers and we apologize to those of you that use this database on a daily basis.

This is only one of several exempt organization databases that the IRS has totally bungled. They've become addicted to bad Internet hygiene and it is time now for the Service to admit it needs help.

We deserve better for the public filings of exempt organizations, a category that makes up 10% of US wages and over $1.5 trillion in economic activity. Let's hope the administration takes this seriously and sends in the A team.

Why We Asked the I.R.S. to Temporarily Turn the Lights Off on Section 527 Data (Thanks, Carl!)

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Possibilities for 3D printing seem just about endless. They've already printed a cast, an entire room, an impressive (though creepy) Spiderbot and a prosthetic foot that allowed Buttercup the duck to walk again

This stuff is amazing and we can't wait to see where the technology goes.

But incredible technological advances aside, can you imagine the epic office hijinks that would be possible if your boss installed a 3D printer? Talk about endless

This video by Funny or Die looks at the amazing moment when your office installs a 3D printer, and then shoots down all your hopes and dreams by telling you it's for "business use only." Read more...

More about Video, Funny Or Die, 3d Printer, Watercooler, and Videos

Elizabeth Harrington / CNSNews:
101M Americans Get Food Aid from Federal Gov't; More Than the Number of Private Sector Workers  —  (CNSNews.com) - The number of Americans receiving subsidized food assistance from the federal government has risen to 101 million, representing roughly a third of the U.S. population.

When most of us think of heads-up displays, our brains almost immediately wander into science fiction fantasies. And lord knows I've been fantasizing about a relatively inexpensive unit that will put turn-by-turn navigation on my windshield. Goodbye, awkward smartphone mount, hello, Garmin HUD.

The new Garmin HUD sits on your dashboard, projecting navigation information at eye-level onto either a transparent film you stick to your windshield or onto an included reflector lens (so you can use it in rental, for example). The unit pairs wirelessly via Bluetooth with a smartphone running one of Garmin's navigation apps (Street Pilot or NAVIGON) from which it pulls turn-by-turn directions. Besides the obvious information the HUD projects useful details including what lane you should be in for your next move, and a constantly-updated estimated time of arrival.

OK, so this isn't exactly Tony Stark-vision, but for $130, the Garmin HUD does exactly what we need it to at a price most of us can afford. Garmin says the dashboard wart will be available this summer. [Garmin via The Verge]

You'd think the IRS would be the one organization it might be safe to trust with your precious Social Security Number. Think again. Thanks to a cock-up, the agency just put tens of thousands of the numbers out on the Internet for anyone and everyone to see. Fantastic.

It seems that when the IRS went to upload a bunch of records on the non-profit industry, some unfortunate soul simply forgot to redact the thousands of identifying numbers. Fortunately, the error was spotted by Public.Resource.Org, which likes to publish these kind of records, and the offending list of 9-digit numbers has already been removed. Still, it's disquieting to know they were out there at all, and who knows who saw them.

There have been worse breaches, like when the state of South Carolina got hacked out of 3.6 million SSNs. But it hurts to see the IRS—an agency that trades in these things by its very nature—compromise a bunch through sheer digital incompetence; no hackers necessary. [Boing Boing via The Daily Dot]

Image by chuckstock/Shutterstock

It's a warm summer night in the city, but instead of sleeping with the windows open to let a breeze in, you've got them all closed to keep your bedroom quiet. It's a 'lesser of two evils' decision that people living in crowded urban centers might soon not have to make. Researchers in South Korea have developed a remarkable new type of window that dampens sound while still allowing air to pass right on through.

Developed by Seong-Hyun Lee at the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials and Sang-Hoon Kima at the South Korea Mokpo National Maritime University, the nitty-gritty of how the window works is detailed here. But in layman's terms, the windows are made up of two plates of transparent acrylic sitting 40mm apart that work as a resonance chamber, diminishing the energy of sound waves passing through. And to maximize the window's efficiency, it's perforated with 50mm holes that allow more sound to enter and get trapped, without obstructing breezes.

The exact science of how the windows work is of course far more elaborate and worth a read if you've got a few moments, but in testing it's been found to reduce sounds by an impressive 20 to 30 decibels—enough to turn a traffic-filled street into a sleep-friendly murmur—across various frequency ranges depending on the size of the perforations.

So in addition to soundproofing and cooling an office or a home, in theory, the materials could even be used to make ultra-quiet fans or other hardware. [Cornell University via MIT Technology Review]

Image by Stockelements/Shutterstock

Feòrag NicBhrìde provides a handy map on how to say beer in European countries. This is important. [via Boing Boing]

A lot of your more flashy chemistry experiments are explosion-centric, but there are a few quieter ones that are just as mesmerizing. A mixture of copper sulfate and ammonia, for instance, looks like the surface of an alien gas giant. And when it's in slow motion, it's positively hypnotic.

When you pour ammonia into a copper sulfate solution, you actually see two reactions. First the ammonia reacts with the copper sulfate to create a very pale blue kind of salt precipitate, and then more ammonia redissolves the salt to make the liquid a very stark blue. In short, you get fascinating swirls of light and dark blues.

It's all very beautiful and serene. But still, you can't help but wonder what it would look like blowing up.

Redditor AJ192 took this spectacular shot of a lightning during last night’s fireworks in Rio Rancho, New Mexico.

Photographer Silvia Grav (slightly nsfw) lives and works in Madrid, Spain where she creates some beautifully original conceptual photographs. Her work can be dreamy and occasionally terrifying, as translucent layers of stars, clouds, and waves mingle with stark portraits, skeletons and shadowy figures. Several of her pieces are available as prints through various galleries, feel free to get in touch.

I’m crushing your ferris wheel…

kicktv:

Bubble Football is the truth

Marco Arment:

RSS represents the antithesis of this new world: it’s completely open, decentralized, and owned by nobody, just like the web itself. It allows anyone, large or small, to build something new and disrupt anyone else they’d like because nobody has to fly six salespeople out first to work out a partnership with anyone else’s salespeople.

That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them, and they want to shut it down. “Sunset” it. “Clean it up.” “Retire” it. Get it out of the way so they can get even bigger and build even bigger proprietary barriers to anyone trying to claim their territory.

Well, fuck them, and fuck that.

Lockdown [marco.org]

Meet the “real” Peter Griffin. A video that was posted on YouTube on Oct 14, 2012 has recently went viral thanks in no small part to the subjects outfit and accent which very closely mirrors that of Family Guy’s Peter Griffin.

The man showed up at New York’s ComicCon in 2012 wearing Peter Griffin’s trademark white shirt and green pants. Just like the cartoon character the ComiCon fan had absolutely no problem saying the most inappropriate things possible.

The real Peter Griffin gives a shout out to New York and the ComiCon event proclaiming:

“Screw Quahog, screw the Drunken Clam, I’m getting drunk in Manhattan baby.”

While the Family Guy fan definitely sounds like Peter Griffin his jokes aren’t quite on par with Seth MacFarlane’s brand of humor, still we commend the guy for nailing Griffin’s persona.

Since being uploaded by YouTube user Kirkout01 the popular video has received more than 200,000 views.

YouTube viewers have given the real Peter Griffin his props, although one commenter jokes:

“This is good. But what I want to see is the real Brian.”

If you are unfamiliar with the Family Guy cartoon series Brian is the family’s talking dog who acts more like a human than a dog.

Check out the “real” Peter Griffin video and let us know what you think.

‘Real’ Peter Griffin Wows Fans At New York ComiCon is a post from: The Inquisitr