Cary

Cath is a post from meh.ro

Sending his wife into space…

Cool, all my favorite religious characters in one comic! (Yes yes, I know. Some of these are more real than others.)

Last May, we learned that the NSA intercepts equipment being shipped around the world and installs eavesdropping implants. There were photos of NSA employees opening up a Cisco box. Cisco's CEO John Chambers personally complained to President Obama about this practice, which is not exactly a selling point for Cisco equipment abroad. Der Spiegel published the more complete document, along with a broader story, in January of this year:

In one recent case, after several months a beacon implanted through supply-chain interdiction called back to the NSA covert infrastructure. The call back provided us access to further exploit the device and survey the network. Upon initiating the survey, SIGINT analysis from TAO/Requirements & Targeting determined that the implanted device was providing even greater access than we had hoped: We knew the devices were bound for the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment (STE) to be used as part of their internet backbone, but what we did not know was that STE's GSM (cellular) network was also using this backbone. Since the STE GSM network had never before been exploited, this new access represented a real coup.

Now Cisco is taking matters into its own hands, offering to ship equipment to fake addresses in an effort to avoid NSA interception.

I don't think we have even begun to understand the long-term damage the NSA has done to the US tech industry.

Slashdot thread.

Typically when I think about panna cotta, it's topped with some kind of citrus or berry curd. This dessert recipe, however, takes things in a new direction by adding a toasted marshmallow layer to the top of this classic dessert. Impressive, right?

READ MORE »

A religious conservative broadcaster warned Christians to “prepare for martyrdom” if the U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned marriage equality. Sandy Rios, director of governmental affairs for the American Family Association and host of a daily radio program, did not specify what she meant by that – but h...

"Replace me", Digitaldruck, 2009, Rosemarie Trockels eigenwillige Version von Gustave Courbets Skandalbild "Der Ursprung der Welt". Arbeiten der deutschen Künstlerin sind jetzt im Kunsthaus Bregenz zu sehen (Courtesy Sprüth Magers/© VG Bildkunst, Bonn 2015)

buy this comic as a print!
Or share on: facebookreddit
If you enjoy the comic, please consider supporting A Softer World on Patreon

Warning Signs of Satanic Behavior. Training video for police, 1990

By Leo Babauta

Have you ever made a bucket list? For me, they’re incredibly seductive — I love reading other people’s bucket lists, and making my own.

But here’s what happens when you make a bucket list:

1. You put this huge burden on yourself to get the list accomplished. As if we don’t already have enough on our to-do lists already!
2. If you don’t do well at pursuing the things on the list, you feel guilty or underaccomplished.
3. If you do well at pursuing the list, you are probably pursuing less-than-meaningful activities. They’re usually just there because they sounded cool to do.

The truth is, most of the things we put on bucket lists are just ideas that popped into our heads, not anything connected to meaning. We put things like “skydiving” and “learn to surf” and “visit the Amazon rainforest” and “kiss in the rain”— all of which are excellent activities … but we rarely put things like, “change someone’s life” or “find meaningful work that I care about” or “be compassionate toward my family”.

Why put pressure on ourselves to achieve a huge list of things that aren’t that meaningful? Why feel guilty if we’re not pursuing them? Why not let them go?

Life isn’t a big todo list, nor is it about optimizing all the things we do in life.

The most amazing things are right in front of us, right where we are. Right now. We don’t have to go anywhere or see some incredible sights or do daring activities to experience the wonder of life.

And we can do meaningful work, right where we are. What would a shorter list of meaningful activities look like? What would your anti-bucket list contain?

And if you don’t know what’s meaningful to you … isn’t that what you should be pursuing instead of a bucket list?

The longer you live, the more likely you are to get cancer. Therefore, party hard and burn out young. Wait, no, that’s not the lesson: therefore, you should all learn about cancer, and a good starting point is The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. I’ve recommended it before, and I’ve used it as assigned reading in a biology of cancer course, so you know I think highly of it.

But, you say, it’s so long. It is a rather substantial text. But there is going to be an alternative.

The Emperor of All Maladies has been made into a three-part television documentary! You must watch it. This is a required assignment.

Watch for it on 30,31 March and 1 April, on your PBS station.

(BAR-EEST-AH)

The aurora borealis started off early last night as soon as the sun had set. I captured this image just outside of the Duluth city limits. Enjoy!

The post Northern Lights! appeared first on Perfect Duluth Day.

dustrial-inc:

Where’s my Kick Murder Squad at?
Available here [ X ]

msflamingo:

Here is your St Patrick’s Day activity, courtesy of the Catholic Church.

In which Karl Ove Knausgaard’s NYT series about travelling to the United States visits Duluth, Superior and more.

My Saga, Part 2: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Passage Through America

The post Coming to America appeared first on Perfect Duluth Day.

This week, considering why museums publish online, destroying an Islamic museum, a new peacock spider, Mac’s original icons, male shaming, and more.

 How should we assess the success of museums and their online publishing endeavors?

For museums to become significant publishers online, they need to accept that playing the metrics game will mostly only preserve the status of certain institutions: those with name recognition and large encyclopedic collections that can be digitized and utilized in diverse ways, from research to a Tumblr, appealing to an audience that varies from the art historian to the occasional user based thousands of miles away from the museum. This strategy has been incredibly successful for museums that already top the list of visitor counts — the likes of the Met, MoMA, or the Tate and their millions of Twitter followers and Facebook fans. This is not a digital strategy that would work for a contemporary art space in a mid-size city. In the past decade, as institutions internalized the importance of digitizing, a number of attitudes toward online presence emerged. The building of online publishing platforms relates to a traditional role of museums — to support research, then publish and publicize it — and indeed, many museums large and small publish catalogues, books, and sometimes also magazines. But publishing on the internet differs from these initiatives because of the pressure to attract a global audience. If most text online goes unread, how to explain the incentive of these institutions to publish?

 Felice Picano talks to Lambda Literary “On Remembering the Past, the AIDS Crisis, and Gay Activism“:

It is the job of a writer to convey a world that is gone. There are so many different types of people, some well-known and some not known at all. All are good subjects, and all the people who have been around us define who we are. I find them fascinating. I’m the dullest of them.

 The story of a car bomb that detonated outside Cairo’s Museum of Islamic Art last year. It demonstrates how dysfunctional the Egyptian museum system is when confronted with emergency situations:

The problems began immediately after the blast. Amid the chaos, curators were unable to locate the distinctive Allen key required to lever open the intricate locking mechanisms for the few showcases that withstood the explosion. As water from the sprinkler system seeped into the cracks, desperate workers resolved to smash their way in, but succeeded only in chipping other valuables and mixing new glass among the fragments of 1,000-year-old lanterns and urns.

 Museum of Modern Art Curator Paola Antonelli has acquired Macintosh’s original icons, designed by Susan Kare:

 Writing for the Boston Globe, Michael Andor Brodeur sees a rise in male shaming by the media:

Where did this intensified attention toward the male body come from? It’s easy to conjure some likely culprits: The 24/7 validation cycle of social media has stoked hyper-consciousness of appearance among the famous and non (even the most dashed-off selfies are the product of several takes); and the Internet joins the already noisy shame-scape of gossip magazines, fitness advertisements, movies, and TV shows that regularly sport more six-packs than the parking lot at Gillette Stadium.

But according to Dr. Jennifer Greenberg, a research director at Massachusetts General Hospital who works with patients suffering from severe fixations on appearance, while men and women are both subjected to unattainable ideals and altered images, men may put more emphasis on them.

 It was revealed this week that the NYPD has been editing the Wikipedia pages of the people they’ve killed, like Garner and Diallo. According to Capital New York:

Computer users identified by Capital as working on the NYPD headquarters’ network have edited and attempted to delete Wikipedia entries for several well-known victims of police altercations, including entries for Eric Garner, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo. Capital identified 85 NYPD addresses that have edited Wikipedia, although it is unclear how many users were involved, as computers on the NYPD network can operate on the department’s range of IP addresses.

 Xkcd tackles the topic of “art projects“:

 DC’s Holocaust Museum is receiving collection donations at a rate of four a week, something it never predicted when it opened in 1993.

 The Field Museum in Chicago had this response to the destruction of antiquities by members of ISIS (aka Islamic State):

 These are some surprising statistics about the religious affiliation of US prison populations:

 Thanks to @felixsalmon for this laugh:

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

Saint Jude Thaddeus, I thank you for your support. My masochistic partner had a doubt about his desires. We argued heatedly about it, until the day of the breaking up came. However, four months later he couldn’t stand the separation, and thanks to Saint Jude we returned to each other. He realized what he wanted and accepted who he was. So now, before going to sleep, he asks me to spank him really good.

Mariano Larios
Mexico City, 1960

Happy π Day

Sacred Heart, thank you for giving me the opportunity to love and be loved. This love is forbidden, but it made me feel everything I had desired. I know it’s a sin, but nobody’s gonna deprive me of this pleasure. I repent of nothing, and I’m never leave him.

Paloma
Colonia Roma, Mexico City
February, 2006