bernot

(763): How many Wendy's frosties do you think it would take to fill a bathtub?

soph-okonedo:

Tinashe attends the 2015 CFDA Fashion Awards at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center on June 1, 2015

Chris Gronkowski, one of Rob’s football-playing brothers, went on a Boston radio show with Wes Welker to discuss many things, such as Welker’s health and desire to get on an NFL roster this year. They also talked about how Rob didn’t enjoy going to the Kentucky Derby for the first time because there wasn’t enough loud music and dancing. Seems like an understandable objection for Gronk. There was also a local hair restoration doctor who counts both Welker and Chris Gronkowski as clients because sports radio ain’t give a damn.

They also mentioned the time that the Gronkowski clan got in a bathroom “sword fight” at the 2012 ESPYs, an episode that has been mentioned before, though only through secondhand witness accounts. Chris just dives right in, even though he was being asked about a different Gronkowski bathroom incident. I get the feeling there are more than a few bathroom stories in the Gronkowski family.

“I think we were at the ESPYs, and at the bathroom the line was taking forever, you do what every normal family would do: you go and have a sword fight with all of us. I think there was all five brothers,” Chris said.

“A sword fight? So you guys are just all in there peeing on each other, basically?” Welker asked in astonishment.

“I mean, you don’t pee on each other. But then, what kind of reporter actually comes in there and then writes a story about that? Come on. That was crazy. I couldn’t believe that article. I thought it was fake,” Gronkowski said.

I love how insulted Chris is by Welker’s question. “What’s wrong with you? You and four other dudes never crowded into a single urinal before? You think you’re all high and mighty or something?”

Do you remember your first Facebook experience? Likely, there was some level of excitement in looking up what old classmates, friends, and lovers were up to in the world. Or how about LinkedIn? You probably were amazed that you could find out where buddies were working, and how many connections there were between you and, say, Bill Gates.

But at the same time, there must have been an initial sentiment that you were crossing some privacy line, or doing something “creepy.” Eventually, you got over that worry, as the endorphin rush of lurking far outweighed concerns over who was watching you.

Get ready to have that “creepy” feeling again when you first try a new invite-only email application called Crystal.

It’s aiming to build a viral consumer product that can also convert to quick freemium enterprise revenues– something only a handful of companies have ever done well, among them LinkedIn, Slack, Dropbox, and Evernote. Already the company is “cash flow positive,” and hasn’t done any fundraising as of yet, according to founder Drew D’Agostino. But I’d expect that to change soon. (Maybe even in two weeks when Pando brings a flood of Silicon Valley VCs to Nashville for our annual Pandoland event.)

Here’s what makes Crystal so intriguing and creepy all at once: It scours anything you’ve ever done online to sum up everything about your personality, down to whether you are easily distracted, tend to write one-word replies to messages, or tend to be late to meetings. It primarily uses public content written by you and about you online, and then matches you with one of 64 personality types. It claims 80% accuracy, a figure it bases on users essentially saying, “Yeah, I totally am easily distracted, taciturn, habitually late.”

Here’s what Crystal said about me and some of the other members of the Pando staff:

 

The fact that it couldn’t find a description of Paul Carr shows one flaw with Crystal: If you don’t have much of a social footprint, it doesn’t have much to work with. So the addressable market is only, yunno, a billion-plus people. In the case of the Pando staff, the descriptions are pretty right on, but also vague enough they sound a bit like a horoscope. The descriptions tread carefully, phrasing attributes in the positive. For instance, Dan Raile’s mom might describe his “prioritizing relationships over immediate personal achievement” as him not being ambitious enough. Some may see my “resisting formal structure” as “don’t hire this guy to do a Fortune 500 job.”

At first blush, it’s a fun novelty. You can look up yourself and anyone you know, and Crystal spits out its findings. It’s not quite as creepy as the episode of Black Mirror where a company recreates deceased loved ones in android form by scouring their social media profiles and emails… with typically apocalyptic results. But it’s a hair more scientific than your typical “WHICH CHARACTER FROM GREASE ARE YOU?” quiz on Facebook.

But that’s just the beginning. Crystal then uses that information to essentially become your email coach. A “social spellcheck” if you will, D’Agostino says.

The email tool gives real time guidance on how best to communicate with the person you are messaging. It might tell you whether or not to send a two line email or a long detailed message, based on the recipients personality, and it can also tell you that if you get short response from someone, you shouldn’t be offended, because that’s just the sender’s writing style. “It’s a concept that the best managers and executives will do instinctively,” D’Agostino said. “Crystal automates the process so that you can quickly have an understanding of how to approach someone or operate even if you don’t know them very well.”

Crystal is confident the product works well enough to charge everyone $19 a month for it after an initial free trial, not just those who want more services, like typical Valley-based freemium products. The company also offers a “master account” product that is geared towards executive, hiring managers, and recruiters, that can predict the relationship between an individual and a company, a team, or another individual.

The company, which only launched its website and Gmail plug-in two months ago, already has a massive number of users signing up for its services. D’Agostino said that Crystal is adding between 1,000 and 2,000 new users each day without having done any marketing or promotion. He wouldn’t share how many of those are converting to paying customers.

“I think it seems like we hit a nerve accidentally,” said D’Agostino. “Crystal toes this line between being this kind of creepy thing at first. But when you use it, you realize, this isn’t creepy, it’s actually quite powerful.”

D’Agostino says most people either love Crystal and want to use it all the time, or hate it and don’t want anything to do with it. For the last group, the company has an opt out option that will remove anyone’s profile from the system.

Chipotle Mexican Grill has picked Kansas City as the test market for its newest protein option, The Kansas City Star reports. The Denver-based restaurant chain will begin serving chorizo to Kansas Citians on Tuesday at its 33 metro locations. "Kansas City is probably a really good barometer of how people will respond to the chorizo anywhere," Chris Arnold, Chipotle's communications director, told the Star.

Created by my good and super talented friend Alex Colby, whose photography & other creative work hangs out here. Photo by Annie Liebovitz, of course, and Wheaties box by – well, Wheaties. (Yes, that’s Jenner’s original Wheaties box.)

Behind the Kentucky senator's NSA 'filibuster' lies a desperate quest for cash.

A new report from Big Brother Watch shows how just often police in the United Kingdom request access to the personal metadata of someone in their district. The answer is, a lot.

The report, which is based on responses to several Freedom of Information Act requests, claims that 733,237 requests were made between 2012 and 2014. That means roughly every two minutes, a request was made for data pertaining to “the who, where and when” of a text, email, phone call or web search.” And this is likely an underestimate — one police district didn’t even bother to respond to Big Brother Watch’s inquiry.

Big Brother Watch claims that around 93 percent of the request were approved. And the requests aren’t slowing down in most of the UK: the number of data requests peaked in 2014 with 250,000 requests in total, and most of the police districts requested data more frequently as the years passed.

The Guardian notes that the release of this report comes after the so-called “Snooper’s Charter” was re-introduced during the Queen’s Speech in May. Big Brother Watch is effectively sharing how much data police already gather to illustrate how troublesome it would be if their surveillance powers expanded.

Perhaps the most troubling thing for Americans is  that most of us don’t know how often our police departments collect our data. Most departments can’t tell us how often they gather information even if they want to, thanks to non-disclosure agreements signed in exchange for access to surveillance tools:

A non-disclosure agreement that police departments around the country have been signing for years with the maker of a cell-phone spy tool explicitly prohibits the law enforcement agencies from telling anyone, including other government bodies, about their use of the secretive equipment, according to one of the agreements obtained by an Arizona journalist.

Police in the UK, on the other hand, are gathering information with the knowledge that those figures might (and now have) become public. And considering the frequency of these requests, How often might police officers in the United States have collected similar information when they know they’ll never have to fess up to it?

[illustration by Brad Jonas]

Apollonia Saintclair 579 - 20150531 Le vertige (Gaze into the abyss)

Granaconda

Tonight’s Gender of the Night is: Kraken

AIDS in the TRANSGENDER COMMUNITY…..It’s time to accept and quantify the issue!

Every time I see JoAnne Keatley’s name connected with an issue, I know I am going to be impressed with the commitment and depth of research that is dedicated to the issue.
The first time I became aware of her work was with the World AIDS Conference, held in Melbourne 2014. It was the first time that Transgender people were represented at this conference which is held bi-annually in different global locations. JoAnne headed that push and was the primary speaker on the issue.

In an article by BY JACOB ANDERSON-MINSHALL where he announces that “The Journal of the International AIDS Society” will be running a special issue focused on “HIV Journal Announces Transgender Issue”

In 2012 a systematic and meta-analytic review of transgender women in 15 countries, the data indicated that 19% of this group will likely become HIV positive. In more meaningful terms, this figure is a whopping 49% greater than in the general population. And not to further scare you, but for Female Transgender sex workers they are 9 times more at risk than their CIS gender sisters in the sex industry.

STAGGERING ISNT IT!

Similar data on Transmen is not so readily available. However, indications are that, if not so high as for Transwomen, they are likely to suffer a heightened vulnerability to HIV.

Submissions for this issue have closed on May 29th, but I would still encourage you to submit if you have sufficiently strong issues to present. The suggested topics are (but not limited to):

• HIV clinical and prevention issues for trans people (e.g., HIV drug interactions with gender-affirming medical interventions, integration of gender-affirming medical interventions and HIV care services, mental health care and other service integration needs, substance use)
• Epidemiological and behavioral data addressing HIV risk and prevalence among trans people in countries and regions with little published research (e.g., sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia/Eastern Europe)
• Research and practice addressing HIV-related social and structural issues among trans people, including but not limited to issues such as marginalization and stigmatization, isolation, depression, vulnerability to violence, agency-deprivation, and inadequate standards of care
• Evaluations of service delivery and community-based interventions to improve engagement in the HIV service cascade by trans people
• Field-based policy and programmatic case studies of HIV prevention, care, and treatment efforts for trans people, especially those meaningfully engaging or led by trans people

Joanne Keatley along with Tonia Poteat and Chloe Schwenke will be the guest editors for this special issue.

 

•  

The post Staggering! Study shows trans woman are 49% more likely to be HIV+ appeared first on Planet Transgender.

IBISWorld, a market research firm, has released a report showing that Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) drug sales are booming, and by 2020, will rake in $17.5 billion. It’s not just a loosening of diagnostic criteria that is making it so profitable. Workers can’t survive on the meagre earnings of a single job, and students can’t keep up in schools with failing budgets. We need to be more productive than ever before to stay above water. The answer has always been there, and we’ve been slowly progressing to it, but we’re barred from considering it by moral grounds: the ultimate life-hack, prescription stimulants.

Pediatrician Dr. Michael Anderson, outright admitted to the New York Times that he was not prescribing powerful stimulant drugs to treat ADHD, but to improve the academic performance of children. “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid,” he said.

It’s not just students that need speed. Wages have stagnated since the 1970s; a $50k salary in 1975, would need to be nearly $220k to have the same buying power today. Those who want to work cannot find steady work with their jobs outsourced to China, outmoded by technology, or replaced by an army of temps in the “gig economy.” Millennials are moonlighting in huge numbers trying to scrape together enough to live and working a 16 hour work day is nearly impossible. Even on money soaked Silicon Valley and Wall St, the workers are pounding stimulants and eugeroics just to keep up.

We are unwilling to increase taxes to return a social safety net, or offer support to those struggling. We’re unwilling to put restrictions on our trade with the rest of the world to keep America fully employed. It’s clear to everyone that something needs to be done to address the fact that the majority of Americans, can no longer afford to live and work in America. In this global market, we need to work twice as hard on ever shrinking wages. Getting a full 8 hours of sleep a night, and not eating a sad desk lunch are now luxuries.

If this is where we are as a society, then lets drop the fucking ADHD pretense and just give everyone Adderall.

You ever picked up a classifieds? (Damnit I just revealed how old I might be). How about looked at the jobs section on Craigslist? Every job needs at least $100k worth of degrees or 3-5 years of experience. How are you supposed to get that when there’s no entrance level? An internship that pays nothing? How do you eat?

The free market has determined that we aren’t above chemically drop-kicking children in the head to keep them going in school, so lets expand that to everyone. Hell, let’s make it a right, Medicaid already covers the costs of cheap generic stimulants.

Drug companies are already splashing the airwaves with glitzy ads, recruiting the likes of Adam Levine of Maroon 5 to tell you “own” your adult ADHD. These ads, focused on improving work performance or school performance and deemphasized treating ADHD so much, that the FDA fined the drug companies. Lets make it so that you can, with just your driver’s license, drop into a pharmacy and pick up a pack of 25 stimulants to get through the month.

On stimulants, your need to eat is reduced, most people lose weight. They say Americans are too fat anyway. You also have a reduced need to sleep, so you can stay up all night working your 2nd or 3rd job with competence and full productivity.

The only way to survive in our capitalist dystopia is to pop pills.

How about a bottle of Ritalin (methylphenidate), strong enough to substitute for cocaine, or Concerta, the all-day version? Got a big project due? Grab a pack of Adderall (mixed levoamphetamine and dextroamphetamine) or Dexedrine (dextroamphetamine) if the levoamphetamine makes you feel like your insides are filled with fire ants. Or, if you have private health insurance, you can pick up the new, more expensive, hotness, Provigil (modafinil), or Nuvigil (armodafinil), smart drugs that have less side effects than traditional stimulants.

Sure these powerful drugs can be addicting and have severe side effects, but we’re willing to tolerate a suicide here and there. We’d probably be stuck in bed, sleeplessly checking our smartphones. We’d fret over the smallest thing, convinced that everyone would be out to get us. We’d hoard guns and think of crazy conspiracy theories of martial law or false flag attacks. The news media would descend into a shouting match. The slightest bit of social change or civil disruption would lead to an overwhelming police suppression out of fear. Wars would be started left and right over the smallest chance of danger to ourselves as our minds spin the worst scenario possible.

On the other hand, we’d probably have a manned mission to Mars, highly effective treatments for Cancer, and probably a whole new Green Revolution in biotech to solve world hunger. Bring on our cyberpunk nightmare world where we chemo-hack our brains in order to keep up in ever diminishing jobs for megacorps.

The post The Ultimate Life-Hack: Let’s Just Give Everyone Adderall appeared first on ANIMAL.

You can always rely on California to be ahead of the curve, but the latest health and safety regulations from the Golden State have one of their world-beating industries all hot and bothered. Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing reveals that one of the new porn film regulations would require the actors to wear protective eye goggles: California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health has...

[This is a short summary; please click the story headline to read the full story on our site]

Since Rand Paul launched his bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, he has consistently finished between third- and sixth-place in polls that include as many as 19 GOP contenders.

 

pr1nceshawn:

One time, when I was drunk…

it-was-ironic:

feminismandgenderequality:

loganl517:

I’m liking this

This is what it’s all about!

THIS. THIS. THIS.

mohammed salem


mohammed salem


mohammed salem


klaus thymann


mohammed salem


mohammed salem


klaus thymann


mohammed salem


klaus thymann


mohammed salem

awkwardsituationist:

these photos were taken by mohammed salem and klaus thymann (click pic), showing the rise of parkour in gaza’s shati and khan yunis refugee camps. unemployment in the camps is high, and with little to do and limited resources, some have turned to parkour as a means of escape.

as abdullah enshasy, who cofounded gaza parkour team with mohammed aljkhbeer, explains, “i have witnessed war, invasion and killing. when i was a kid and i saw these things, blood and injuries, i didn’t know what it all meant.”

adds aljkhbeer, “there is a big relationship between parkour and barriers that we’re surrounded by in the gaza strip. there’s the blockade, walls are everywhere. …parkour gives us a sense of freedom and allows us to endure these conditions without getting deeply depressed.” 

for a sport that is literally about overcoming obstacles and living beyond imposed physical restraints, parkour has perhaps even greater resonance in the narrow, politically and militarily confined gaza strip, which is home to a densely boxed in population of 1.7 million palestinians.  

but enshasy notes, “at first people didn’t accept us. they would say, ‘you jump like monkeys and you climb buildings like thieves’.” but as their facebook page explains, parkour is about breaking from conventional paths in life and finding your own.

Today’s Gender of the Day is: An empty blue picture frame promoted by Tumblr

Local creativity or May sweeps letdown . . . Weird rock formations suddenly show up in Kansas City

MOIROLOGIST

[noun]

a hired mourner.

Etymology: from Greek moira, “fate, death” + logos, “word”.

[Stephen Mackey]

sixpenceee:

36-year-old Skeleton of Dead Baby Found Inside Indian Woman

Doctors in India have removed a baby’s skeleton from inside its mother, nearly four decades after the unborn infant died. Kantabai Thakre became pregnant in 1978, aged 24, but doctors warned the ectopic pregnancy had little chance of success.

Terrified of an operation, the young mother fled home and sought treatment for the pain in a small clinic near the village where she lived. After a few months the pain subsided and Mrs Thakre was convinced she had been cured.

However, last week the pains returned and Mrs Thakre, now 60, visited doctors in the central Indian city of Nagpur. Having found a lump on the lower right side of her abdomen, doctors at the NKP Salve Institute of Medical Sciences were concerned about cancer but an MRI scan revealed the hard mass was in fact the skeleton of her unborn child.

Doctors have now removed the skeleton. After searching medical records, the team of doctors believe this may be the longest ectopic pregnancy on record. (Source) 

constitutiveoutsider:

It is a lie that women have been able to vote since 1920. 

White women have been able to vote since 1920. All Native American women couldn’t vote until 1924. All Asian women couldn’t vote until 1952. All Black women couldn’t vote until 1964.  

In five years there is probably going to be some big centennial celebration of women’s suffrage. But that will be a whitewashing of history. It will be an event that erases the struggles of non-white women. It will be an event that will try to hide the fact that white feminists heros like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton actively argued against the rights of people of color in order to advance their own goals. 

Hans Erni, Couple dancing with fruit in hair, 1952. Mixed media.

Depicting the horrors of hell through art is a tradition in Buddhism that goes back at least 1,000 years in Japan. By depicting the suffering in store for sinners, the artworks were supposed to scare people onto the straight and narrow.

But if that’s what this late 19th century scroll was for, it might have had the opposite effect. We’ve never seen such a cute hellscape!

This particular scroll is part of Waseda University’s collection and is a copy by an artist called Kanshou of an unknown earlier hell scroll. His style is simple and kind of spindly, making the humans and devils look cartoonish. The combination that doodling style and the sometimes nonsensical situations makes for a very cute package, in our opinion.

Check out these highlights.

▼The hell where you are only allowed to air swim, like this pug

▼ The hell where you can only communicate through interpretive dance

▼ The hell where you join pretend to be Totoro and join Cirque du Soleil

▼ The hell where you get weighed and a devil tells you you’re fat

▼The hell where a balding stranger invades your personal space and then you get poked with a stick

▼The hell where you have to play horsey with really ugly kids

▼The hell where you have to pretend to be a fan of kamishibai

▼The hell where you stick your head in a giant croissant

▼The hell where you are given unwanted spa treatments

▼The hell where you have to offer room service towels to a very grumpy guest

▼The hell where you get hot tea up your nose

Not exactly wailing and gnashing of teeth, right?

That last one did have an effect on me though. I could really go for a cup of tea now…

H/T Japaaan Magazine
Images: Waseda

Origin: Meiji-era vision of Hell is not at all frightening, actually kind of cute
Copyright© RocketNews24 / SOCIO CORPORATION. All rights reserved.

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Polaroid photography has seen a new wave of interest over the past decade, in large part from young photographers looking to do something different from what they can with the digital technology on which they grew up. The other modern practitioners include no less a creator than Patti Smith, who have personally witnessed the format’s appearance, fade, and return. A few years ago, her Polaroid photography reached the galleries, becoming shows and installations in Connecticut and Paris.

These “black-and-white silver gelatin prints made from Polaroid negatives, small and square and in soft focus,” writes the New York Times’ A.O. Scott, “are culled from a collection that documents hundreds of encounters with worldly effects transformed into sacred relics. A fork and a spoon that belonged to Arthur Rimbaud, the French symbolist poet who has been one of Smith’s touchstones forever. [Robert] Mapplethorpe’s bedroom slippers and the tambourine he made for Smith. A chair that belonged to the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. William S. Burroughs’s bandanna. A replica of a life mask cast from the features of William Blake.”

Smith’s “gorgeous, misty photographs are inspired by artifacts from some of Smith’s favorite artists, from museums she has visited around the world, and many are from her personal life,” writes Flavorwire‘s Emily Temple on “Camera Solo,” the Hartford exhibition which introduced these Polaroids to America in 2011. If you didn’t make it to the Wadsworth Atheneum for that show, you can still experience it through Patti Smith: Camera Solo, its companion book. Or have a look at her work on display at the BBC’s site, the gallery that offers the photos of Virginia Woolf’s bed, writing desk, and gravestone just above.

You can see even more at this post from Lens Culture on “Land 250,” the exhibition of Smith’s Polaroid photography at Paris’ Fondation Cartier.”I first took Polaroids in the early 1970s as components for collages,” it quotes Smith as saying. “In 1995, after the death of my husband, I was unable to center on the complex process of drawing, recording or writing a poem. The need for immediacy drew me again to the Polaroid. I chose a vintage Land 100.” In 2002, she settled on the Land 250, the venerable instant camera that gave the Paris show and its associated monograph their titles. It surely counts as one of the most important artifacts of Smith’s artistic life — and one with which she has captured the artifacts of so many other artistic lives important to her.

Related Content:

Watch Patti Smith Read from Virginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Surviving Recording of Woolf’s Voice

Patti Smith Reads Her Final Words to Robert Mapplethorpe

Patti Smith’s List of Favorite Books: From Rimbaud to Susan Sontag

Andy Warhol’s 85 Polaroid Portraits: Mick Jagger, Yoko Ono, O.J. Simpson & Many Others (1970-1987)

The Masterful Polaroid Pictures Taken by Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky

Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.