Chris.d.woo

winchestersarrow:

kidshade:

drunkle-bunny:

tastefullyoffensive:

Fitness Quotes Over Pictures of People Drinking [thechive]

Previously: Classic Movie Quotes Updated For The Digital Age

Holy shit I need these framed and put up in my room

this is fucking gorgeous 

I think I have a tear in my eye.

archiemcphee:

Obvious Winner recently shared a few tentacular pieces of artwork by Singapore-based artist Keng Lye (previously featured here). You may recall that Keng creates these amazingly lifelike depictions of aquatic animals by gradually layering containers with acrylic paint and resin. The end result is a painting of a creature that looks like it’s about to wriggle out of its container and onto your lap.

Visit Keng Lye’s DeviantART gallery to view more of his awesome artwork.

[via Obvious Winner]

This stuff still boggles my mind.

sex-coffee-and-comicbooks:

Data laying down the sick burns.

Fucking Dr. Polaski. Even after all these years I despise her. I know they were trying to give us another “Bones” character, but the writing definitely failed. The real problem was that she always tried to pick on Data; the writers wanted to have that same Spock-McCoy, logic-vs-emotion dynamic except that (1) Data would largely not know what was going on and (2) despite not having them, Data was all emotion. The writers would have been more successful if they had her have a go at Worf (see Guinan).

We’ll see how poorly I did when I get my score breakdown in the mail, but I somehow doubt I’m in the “re-calculate” numbers.

I have to say this is one fundamentally important toothpaste video.

How could I have been so blind?  I’ve given the public interest loan repayment speech to dozens if not hundreds of law students and graduates.  It’s simple: IBR + PILRAP + 10 year public service loan forgiveness.  Three great programs that work great together. 

It was not until moments ago that I was sending an email to a 1L interested in public interest law, that it hit me: (a) IBR is loan payment based on income (15% of income with a few minor modifiers), (b) I’m married and have joint income so my payments are based on 15% of my JOINT income, (c) so what if I filed my taxes as married filing separately?

Answer:

20 USC § 1098e (d). The IBR repayment rate becomes 15% of my income alone. That means that if we file our 2013 taxes as married filing separately, we can save $500 a month in IBR when it’s next calculated in late 2014. That’s $6000 in savings in 2015.

Does that mean all married coupes where only one spouse has debt on IBR should switch to married filing separately?  There must be some some tax implications I’m not thinking about, right? 

*As always, none of the above should be considered or used as legal advice.

———————

Update:

It seems in addition to the obvious tax bracket and AMT eligibility changes, there are several tax deductions which are unavailable to spouses married filing separately, including the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit.  So to truly see what would be in your economic interests, you have to compare the benefit of the tax credits (and relative bracket & AMT benefits) you’d loose to the IBR benefit you’d gain. For details speak to your accountant and/or tax attorney.

**Seriously, don’t use any of this as legal advice.  Do I sound like an expert to you?

ruckawriter:

brianmichaelbendis:

art of John Berkey

When I was a kid, I would stare at these illustrations, these paintings, for hours. To this day, I cannot imagine how they are created.

Definitely cool.

When I Marty F’n Day’s eyes light up when he took that first bite of food from this hole-in-the-wall Chinese place we found in San Francisco Chinatown, I knew that he suffered a long existance of never tasting authentic Chinese cuisine.  He said it was the best Chinese food he had ever tasted.  I postulate that it’s the ONLY Chinese food he’s ever tasted.  What many of my non-Asian friends consider to be Chinese food is a pale shadow of the real thing.  Indeed, for the longest time Audrey thought she hated Chinese food because what she had been exposed to all her life wasn’t even close to the real thing.

This phenomenon of people being subjected to cuisine that masks itself as Chinese food is perfectly embodied in Patrice Wilson’s latest… um… song I guess, “Chinese Food.”

Now before we get into this mess, I sincerely hope that Alison Gold makes a mint off of this terrible thing.  She didn’t write it.  She didn’t produce it.  She didn’t direct this… music video.  So I don’t think she be blamed for the awful.  That blame lies squarely on the shoulders of Patrice Wilson, the… writer, I guess, of such things as Rebecca Black’s “Friday.”

Back to this… thing.

Whether he meant to or not, Patrice Wilson has created a weird sort of social commentary on the poor state of what I’ll be calling Faux Chinese food from now on.  Some like to call it “Americanized” Chinese, but that implies that Americans don’t like authentic ethnic cuisine and I think that’s bullshit.  I’m American.  I love authentic cuisine.  Everything about this is wrong.  The video starts off in a Mongolian style kitchen.  There are Geisha dancing somewhere in there.  Panda Express is dropped as a Chinese food place.  The lyrics are essentially a list of every Faux Chinese dish you’d find at your local maul (this is how I spell mall. Don’t judge me) food court.  It’s clear that Wilson has no idea what he’s talking about.

Here’s another tell tale sign that there be no Chinese food here.  There are hardly any Asians in the restaurant.  Here’s a quick test to tell if a restaurant is serving ethnic realness.  This works for any ethnic cuisine whether it be Asian, Latin, Mediterranean.  If the majority, I’d say seventy to ninety percent, of the customers are from the culture of the food, chances are you’re gonna be eating the real thing.  If it’s more fifty fifty, you’re gonna be eating some weird Faux version of that cuisine.

“Chinese Food” is a weird sort of celebration of everything that is unauthentic.  There’s no Chinese food.  There’s a weird pedo panda.  Alison is probably too young to be clubbing.  What the fuck are Geisha doing there.  Fortune cookies aren’t Chinese, although even some Chinese people I know don’t even know that so you get a pass on that one.  It’s a big fucking mess are tied up in a viral package.

So if you find yourself ordering the shit listed in the song or eating things that look like what you see in the music video, perhaps take a moment to reflect about your choices.  I think you deserve better.  Although, truth be told, sometimes even I crave the horribleness of Pando Express.

The Redskins have been in the news lately – on the front page of the Times, for example — and not for their prowess on the gridiron. It’s their name. Many native Americans find it offensive, understandably so.  “Redskins” was not a name they chose. It was a label invented by the European-Americans who took their land and slaughtered them in numbers that today would be considered genocide.

President Obama offered the most tepid hint of criticism of the name. He did not say they should change their name. He said that if he owned the team, he would “think about” changing the name. But that was enough for non-Indians to dismiss the idea as yet one more instance of “political correctness.”

Defenders of the name also argue that the name is not intended to be offensive, and besides, a survey shows that most Americans are not bothered by it.  I would guess that most Americans also have no problem with the Cleveland Indians logo, another sports emblem that real Indians find offensive.

In response the National Congress of American Indians offers these possibilities.  The Cleveland cap is the real thing.  The other two are imagined variations on the same theme.

The pro-Redskins arguments could also apply here. The New York Jews and San Francisco Chinamen and their logos are not intended to offend, and a survey would probably find a majority of Americans untroubled by these names and logos.  And those who do object are just victims of “the tyranny of political correctness.”  This last phrase comes from a tweet by Washington quarterback Robert Griffin III, an African American.  His response seems to make all the more relevant the suggestion of years ago by the American Indian Movement’s Russell Means: “Why don’t they call them The Washington Niggers?”

Cross-posted at Montclair Socioblog; HT to Max.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

I have 285 posts (after this post) until I hit 10,000 posts. In 75 days, I will have been alive for exactly 10,000 days (seriously, I used Wolfram-Alpha to find out).

There is a small part of me that wants to stretch out my number of posts so I hit both on the same day, except that’s like just a little under four posts a day and I post a lot more than that a day. It’s a weird confluence of events, so I just thought I might do it. Probably not (I imagine I’ll hit 10,000 posts in the middle of November).

Happy Ada Lovelace Day everybody! If you’re new to this blog, you will probably want to start with Lovelace: The Origin, so you know who everybody is.

The last couple of Ada Lovelace Days I wrote about a few other women around our heroine, but today I want to come back to Lovelace herself. You usually hear about Lovelace the programmer but it’s Lovelace the visionary that’s been on my mind lately.

Slowly taking shape like some monstrous unairworthy Zeppelin behind the scenes here is the Leviathan culmination of this comic, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, The Book and fully-functioning doorstop.  Coming.. a year from now. Yeah sorry.

As part of the book I’ve been undertaking the task of visualising the Analytical Engine. Not the one that lurks ambiguously in the backgrounds of the comics but the real one from Babbage’s plans. Hoo boy let me tell you however complicated you think this thing is, raise that to the power of six right away because oh. my. god. Babbage what kind of brain did you have in there? It’s been very enlightening however and hopefully I can start blogging about it soon!

Here’s some of it:

Trust me it’s waaaaaay bigger than that. Anyhow working on this thing has definitely cemented my awe of both Babbage and Lovelace, Babbage because, well, geez just look at this thing, and Lovelace because a)she could get her head around it without a 3d modelling program, and b) because she realised, which even Babbage didn’t, that this thing was a computer. That is, the equations it could potentially handle were not just numerical ones, but logical equations.

Like Babbage, the deeper I get into Lovelace’s paper the more I am astonished at this insight because it not only not obvious, it’s one of the least obvious things anyone has ever thought of, at least of the category of things that turn out to be right.  It’s even less obvious than you think it is because even the very idea of using mathematics symbolically was new and even controversial even in the 1830s.

Very much not by coincidence two of the biggest names on the pro-symbols and anti-symbols sides were tutors of Ada Lovelace. On the anti side we have William Frend, a mathematician so conservative he was against negative numbers. On the subject of symbolic mathematics (which to be fair had shaky theoretical underpinnings at this point) he wrote “Give me certainty not uncertainty, science not art!” You will be delighted to learn that he’s the guy who told Lady Byron that Ada should be taught mathematics “as it is a subject that could not possibly give rise to any objectionable thoughts”.

On the other side, Lovelace’s later and most important teacher Augustus de Morgan– Frend’s son-in-law! so you can imagine the dinner table arguments, the debt-ceiling would be nothing to them (jk- they got along famously, just not mathematically). De Morgan wrote some of the earliest books in which you see someone reaching towards a mathematical expression of logic:

That’s from First Notions of Logic Prepratory to the Study of Geometry which he published the year Lovelace started working on the Analytical Engine. Lovelace published her paper on the Engine five years before Boole’s Laws of Thought, which was (I think?) the first complete mathematisation of logic.

There’s a nice paper free online if you’re a super-dork about this stuff btw, which contains the following seemingly devastating refutation of the anti-symbolists by Augustus de Morgan:

I’m surprised to see so eminent a logician as de Morgan make such an elementary error, as any child could so easily disprove this with -(pooh)ⁿ  n=infinity+1.  But even geniuses can be human, as lord knows I’ve learned from writing this book.

I think the thing that gave Lovelace this idea that you could do mechanical logic came from this widget, one of the many many manyⁿ widgets on the Engine:

This is one of the barrel controls that does.. something I’m not completely sure on (this is a HIGHLY simplified version by the way, the real version has about 4 times as many bits and has 50 rows of pegs or something). Pay particular attention to the peg on the very top- you see how it only activates is lever if there’s a peg and the other little lever is interposed. If. And. IF. AND. These are logic concepts and this is why Lovelace writes:

Whether the inventor of this engine had any such views in his mind while working out the invention, or whether he may subsequently ever have regarded it under this phase, we do not know; but it is one that forcibly occurred to ourselves on becoming acquainted with the means through which analytical combinations are actually attained by the mechanism. […]It seems to us obvious, however, that where operations are so independent in their mode of acting, it must be easy, by means of a few simple provisions, and additions in arranging the mechanism, to bring out a double set of results, viz.—1st, the numerical magnitudes which are the results of operations performed on numerical data. (These results are the primary object of the engine.) 2ndly, the symbolical results to be attached to those numerical results, which symbolical results are not less the necessary and logical consequences of operations performed upon symbolical data, than are numerical results when the data are numerical.

It was a hundred years before anyone applied logic practically, that was Claude Shannon by the way. (also by the way you should read James Gleick’s The Information)

So Happy Ada Lovelace Day and as you use your computers today in all their myriad forms think of that candlelit room all those years ago when someone thought, “Heeeeeeeey….”

Some housekeeping notes!

I’m speaking at the first ever conference on Ada Lovelace this Friday in at the Stevens Institute, so come along if you happen to live in the environs of New York city!

Also for New Yorkers, I’m speaking (though virtually by Skype) at Thoughtworks NYC at their fab-sounding Ada Lovelace bash!

Everybody else in the world, there are endless great ALD events all over our fine planet! 

I am informed that commenting is broken, I THINK only one the post preceding this one. If there’s no comments on this post either comments are still broken, or you are all preserving a frosty silence at my lack of comics production, and who can say which?

auric-pauper:

Tell me this is not one of the most motivating demotivating posters you’ve ever seen.

Made by Drakevarg

Edit:  Drakevarg’s druid quote, "The only reason Nature hasn’t wiped your wicked civilization off the map is that you simply aren’t worth the effort. I am not so lenient."

I love these.

kelsium:

Did anyone ever, though?

Well my mother would approve of this…

So this is a pretty cool project some high schoolers made for the 2010-11 FTC World Championships. It’s an interesting project (they use electrodynamic suspension to drive the train and permanent magnets for suspension). It’s a really great project made from a couple arduino, legos, a few shields, a bank of electromagnets, and a whole lot of hard work. The only thing I wish is that the track was a little longer. If you want to read more they have this great page about it.

ruckawriter:

Joshua Lyman, ladies and gentlemen.

WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 24: A worker cleans the street in front of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) building on May 24, 2013 in Washington, DC. The IRS is one of at least four federal agencies that is closed today due to the automatic sequestration cuts forced government agencies giving employee's an unpaid furlough. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

It’s official. After Congress failed to reach an agreement, the federal government has shut down.

With any luck, it will be quick and painless. But in the interim, the country is going to be doing a bit of a shuffle, trying to figure out what’s open, what’s closed and what it all means.

There’s good news and bad news for taxpayers.

The good news first: no audits! The Internal Revenue Service is suspending all audit activities while the federal government is shut down.

And that’s pretty much it for good news.

Here’s the bad news: if you’re on extension, your 2012 federal income tax return is still due on October 15, 2013. And yes, the IRS will cash your check on time.

But the door doesn’t swing both ways. If you are due a refund, it will likely be delayed (the extent of the delay is largely dependent on the length of the shutdown).

Walk-in assistance centers for taxpayers will be closed. Similarly, the IRS will not pick up the phones: all telephone hotlines would be closed.

Only 8,752 employees (just under 10% of total IRS employees) will report for work as “excepted employees” during the shutdown. Included in the list (report downloads as a pdf) are the Acting Commissioner; the Deputy Commissioner for Services & Enforcement; the Deputy Commissioner for Operations Support and the Chief of Staff.

Also on the “excepted employees” list are a number of appeals staff and a number of lawyers to ensure that statutory deadlines are met. Missing deadlines affects IRS as much as it does taxpayers and the IRS is assuming (as we all are) that Tax Court and other federal courts will remain open. If courts do close, then those affected attorney would switch over to “non-duty” status.

Seven staff will remain on duty in the Communications and Liaison Office. Those folks will coordinate information regarding the shutdown, furlough status and recall. They will also facilitate information with the taxpaying public and Congress.

Forty-five employees will stay on with the Taxpayer Advocate Service; those are personnel considered necessary for the protection of statute expirations, bankruptcy, liens and seizure cases. Specifically, Nina Olson (the National Taxpayer Advocate) will go to work, as will her executive and staff assistants and her senior advisor. Additional directors and deputies needed to provide oversight will also report during the shutdown. (Oct 5 update: The final version of the IRS shutdown plan furloughed Olson and all Taxpayer Advocate employees. Details are here.)

Of course, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Office will remain open: that office is responsible for coordinating the implementation of ACA. October 1, 2013, is a big ACA day (the exchanges open, among other things) so these offices are bound to be busy. In fact, a number of ACA related positions are “excepted” and those personnel will report to work.

A significant number of Criminal Investigation (CI) employees – more than 3,500 – will also report to work. This makes sense: if the bad guys don’t take a break, neither should those in pursuit of them. Currently, CI is working nearly 4,600 active criminal investigations with even more in the adjudication phase. That means that right now, nearly 9,000 investigations are in process on some level: special agents are actively gathering evidence, conducting critical interviews, testifying in court proceedings, executing search warrants and conducting arrests. CI will basically continue at “normal” levels since federal courts, federal prosecutors and federal law enforcement partners are operating with business as usual.

thedailywhat:

Single Topic Blog of the Day: 300 Sandwiches

The New York Post’s senior reporter Stephanie Smith’s boyfriend Eric has taken "Make Me a Sandwich" to a whole new level. After he jokingly told Smith that she was “300 sandwiches away from an engagement ring” in June 2012, Smith launched the blog 300 Sandwiches to document her journey of learning how to cook while earning wedded bliss. Today, after creating more than 176 sandwiches, Smith revealed her blog project in a column article on the New York Post, in which Eric was quoted as saying “[Men are] not complex. Just do something nice for us. Like make a sandwich.” Hat tip goes to Gawker!

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeh?

space-pics:

Next Soyuz Rolls to Launchpad for Fast-Track Flight to the Space Station

http://space-pics.tumblr.com/

I still love that the Soyuz is rolled out on a train. It combines two things I absolutely love: space travel and trains. If there was like a KSP for trains (as in you physically build the trains, selecting the wheels, boiler size, track gauge, etc.) I would play that almost as much.

space-pics:

Buzz Aldrin takes a “selfie” while performing an EVA during Gemini XII, 1966
http://space-pics.tumblr.com/

To continue my absolute love for pneumatic tubes, some enterprising Dad built a pneumatic tube system to help the tooth fairy collect his kid’s teeth. It’s powered by a Raspberry Pi and two old iPhones through a web interface over the wifi network. It’s a pretty swell, basic system. You can read the article on Make.

We’re celebrating the end of the year with our most popular posts from 2013, plus a few of our favorites tossed in.  Enjoy!

 You know all those badass ladies out there that are inexplicably single? Well, maybe it’s not so inexplicable.

In a study contending for most-depressing-research-of-the-year, psychologists Kate Ratliff and Shigehiro Oishi tested how a romantic partner’s success or failure affects the self-esteem of people in heterosexual relationships.  The short story: men feel bad about themselves when good things happen to their female partners.  Women’s self-esteem is unaffected.  Here’s some of the data.

The vertical axis represents self-esteem. In this experiment, respondents were told that their partner scored high on a test of intelligence (“positive feedback”) or low (“negative feedback”).  The leftmost bars show that men who were told that their partners were smart reported significantly lower self-esteem than those who heard that their partners weren’t so smart.

In the second condition, respondents were asked to imagine a partner’s success or failure.  Doing so had no effect on women’s self-esteem (rightmost bars).  For men, however, imagining their partners’ success made them feel bad about themselves, whereas imagining their failure made them feel good.

The various experiments were conducted with American and Dutch college students as well as a diverse Internet sample.  The findings were consistent across populations and were particularly surprising in the context of the Netherlands, which is generally believed to be more gender egalitarian.

We’ve got a long way to go.

Cross-posted at The Huffington Post and Pacific Standard.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

We’re celebrating the end of the year with our most popular posts from 2013, plus a few of our favorites tossed in.  Enjoy!

Flight attendants are not only friendly with their passengers, they’re also often super friendly with each other.  This may be because especially gregarious people go into the profession, but it’s also an adaptation to a surprising structural feature of their job. It turns out that, on any given flight anywhere in the world, most flight attendants are meeting their co-workers for the very first time.

There are about 100,000 flight attendants in the U.S. alone and they get their flights through a process of bidding, one month at a time, one month ahead.  Most really do “see the world,” as the old glamorized image of the intrepid stewardess suggests, instead of working the same route over and over again.  As a result, explains Drew Whitelegg in Working the Skies, they rarely run into the same flight attendant twice.

This means that flight attendants must get to know one another quickly once they get on board.  They need to do so to make food and beverage service efficient, to coordinate their actions in the tight galleys in which they work and, most importantly, so that they will trust one another if they are called upon to do what they are really there for: acting in an emergency, one that could theoretically happen within seconds of take-off.  There’s no time to lose. “[F]rom the moment they board the plane,” writes Whitelegg, “these workers — even if complete strangers — begin constructing bonds.”

Image credit: National Library of Australia

Their instant bonding is facilitated by their shared experiences and their “peculiar identity,” Whitelegg explains — few people understand their job and the airline industry deliberately misportays it – and also by a culture of confession.  The galley has its own rules to which new flight attendants are socialized.  So, even though the workers are always new, the workplace is predictable.  Whitlegg describes how galley conversations during downtime tend to be extremely, sometimes excruciatingly personal.  ”The things you hear,” laughs Clare, a flight attendant for Continental, “I could write a book. The things you hear at 30,000 feet.”  It’s the odd combination of a habit of bonding and the anonymity of strangers.

So, if you have the pleasure of taking a flight, spend a few minutes watching the surprising coordination of strangers who seem like old friends, and take a moment to appreciate the amazing way these workers have adapted to their very peculiar position.

Cross-posted at The Huffington Post, Pacific Standard, and Work in Progress.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

My friend, Azie, was hired to portray a slave at a popular historic site (you can totally guess which one).  Part of her job was to interact with visitors and answer their questions.  She would come back with all sorts of crazy stories that always left me breathless with laughter.  I couldn’t believe some of the stupid shit people would ask.

When Azie told me she was thinking of turning her experiences into a web series, I knew it was going to be absolutely brilliant.  Ask A Slave is finally ready for the world to see.  If you’re into smart comedy with a helping of social commentary, please give it a watch and share with all of your friends.

And look! Episode 2 is already up!

My day is just really freaking weird now. I apologize for any spelling/grammar/logic problems that were in that little essay cuz I’ve been sick for like a week and who knows where my brain has been.

davidaprice:

I need more doors so I can use these.

seancurry1:

SQUEEEE I WANT TO EAT THEM ALL

via Loldwell