Chris.d.woo

sagansense:

Video of the launch of the Shenzhou 10 yesterday (by RussiaToday)

via futurist-foresight

I still think the Long March 2F is a weird looking rocket. I’m not sure why I think this way since I have no problem with the R7 family and the two aren’t terribly different from the outside.

BrickPi: LEGO Bricks with a Raspberry Pi Brain

This looks like a pretty cool idea.  I have no idea what I’d use it for though.

wnycradiolab:

ucresearch:

This photo — taken by Bug Squad’s Kathy Keatley Garvey — captures the moment after a bee sting when the honeybee attempts to fly away (with the barbed stinger still lodged in the victim). See that trail of goo? It’s actually the bee’s abdominal tissue.

WHAT.

That is one sweet photo.

mattfractionblog:

LET’S DO THIS.

I just laughed so hard I think it injured my throat.

You may recall the hilarity of Ken Tanaka’s “What Kind of Asian Are You” in which Stella Choe comes up with a brilliant response to Scott Beehner’s question “Where are you from.”  As you can imagine, the comments for the video are a mixed bag of terribleness and hilarity.  Scott and Stella read some of the best/worst for our entertainment.

I wonder if people read their comments to a friend out loud before they posted them would they still post them.

comfortableandkind:

kickitoldskool:

from the guy who brought you “Actual Cannibal Shia Labeouf,” please enjoy a new song entitled “Christian Bale is at Your Party”

OH MY GOD NO STOP EVERYTHIGN STOP AND LISTEN THIS IS IMPORTANT S T O P THE W O R L D

ALMOST AS GREAT AS THAT GANGNAM/COTTEN-EYE JOE SONG.

amyleona:

ilovebender:

totally-uncalled-for:

nightmareloki:

fishpun:

pocketwatchesandtea:

Guys.
It happened. 

what a time to be alive

oh. my. God.

FUCK

this is kind of magical

i just

The meme that cannot die has been reborn…and is pretty awesome!

thedailywhat:

LEGO Craftsmanship of the Day: Sony & Lego Team Up for Programmable Lego Bricks!

Your kids’ childhoods will never be the same. At the recent 25th anniversary event for Sony’s Computer Science Laboratories in Japan, Sony announced a partnership with Lego and unveiled their first collaborative project titled “Toy Alive.” As shown in the video, the Danish toymakers’ first remote-controlled platform features several Lego characters that can be controlled with Playstation DualShock controllers, red bricks with built-in LEDs that simulate fire and a webcam that can monitor various objects’ movements in its field of view. But the project is still in the prototype phase, so it’ll be a few years until you can build the high-tech LEGO castle of your dreams.

I think the better fit might be the Wii-U, both because of a similar target market but also because the Wii-U controller includes a separate video screen that could be used to display webcam information in real time to separate controllers. It’d be a great way to sell a BattleBots or Robot Wars licensed Lego property.

Despite ongoing attacks from pro-business Republicans, there is data indicating that President Obama has a sterling, possibly incomparable, record regarding economic growth policies.

An interesting article — though I would still argue that the “recovery” as it exists on a national level has unevenly been distributed both geographically and across economic classes. Still some good news for the President:

• Investors have done very well for themselves with 25% average annual returns.
• Unemployment is slowly inching downwards and consumer confidence is increasing.
• The auto rescue was a success.
• The deficit has shrunk dramatically from 10% to 4% of GDP under Obama’s watch.

There’s also some interesting myth busting of the Reagan years, specifically the “Decrease taxes = economic success” and “Government debt is bad” stories (Reagan dumped something like 2.3B in real dollars into the economy in the form of defense and infrastructure spending, tripled the debt).

pxlbyte:

Classic Zelda Cookies

You can click that read more to order your own or get the recipe. 

Read More

Wut?

I pretty much love everything about this.

merryescapism:

HE LOOKS SO FRICKING HAPPY 

Nasdaq’s parent company will pay the largest fine ever levied against an exchange for “poor systems and decision making” both before and after the bungled Facebook initial public offering.

It should be noted that this was about the trading difficulties some investors faced on the day of Facebook’s IPO. The terrible overpriced valuation is completely someone else’s fault. Facebook stock remains a pretty terrible investment, as it has fallen some 20% this month alone from a high of 29 to today’s 23ish (since the IPO just over a year ago FB has declined a total 40% in value. I personally believe it remains massively overrated even in the low-to-mid twenties and should probably be trading in single digits, but a large portion of the market disagrees with me).

A fast food employee is being lauded by police for his fast thinking after foiling a robbery at a Burger King in Stockton, Calif. As two hamburlgars stormed the restaurant brandishing guns and demanding cash, an employee snuck out a back door, according to KOVR-TV in Sacramento. The employee found the thieves’ idling getaway vehicle in the parking lot, hopped in and drove off, stashing the car around the block. “I haven’t heard of any employee actually leaving a business, getting inside the suspect vehicle and trying to hide it,” Stockton officer Joe Silva told reporters. When the thieves realized…

This is awesome.

fakescience:

I haven’t talked about Facebook (FB) stock in a while (basically since the last big follow-up news article on its hilariously bad IPO a year ago) and I just wanted to revisit the stock.

The news is generally not good. Unless you managed to buy FB at its low point in late-summer and early-fall, you’ve basically lost money (if you’ve managed to get in at its low in late August you’re making a tidy 50% profit). While the rest of the broader market has been rallying the last seven months Facebook has remained largely flat.

If you take a look at its fundamentals the news isn’t much better.  Right now the stock’s P/E ratio stands at 2,209 which is hugely overpriced (my rule of thumb is that a P/E in the 15-20 range is “about right;” Microsoft (MSFT) has a P/E of 17.97, Apple (AAPL) has a P/E of 10.34, and Google (GOOG) has a P/E of 27.07.  Facebook’s P/E is more reminiscent of the late 90s tech boom days). Considering that FB barely managed to eke out a profit in 2012 that suggests significant problems with the company’s future health.

This is somewhat mitigated by a 36% increase in year over year revenue in Q1 2013. However, with some news organizations reporting a sharp decline in users and the release of a phone (or perhaps an android home screen?) no one cared about it — and which AT&T may be cutting soon only a month or two after its introduction — I think it would not be a stretch to call Facebook’s future prospects as “troubling.”

divadawg:

chrisdwoo:

I WANT!

*pinches self* am I dreaming?!

This just reminds me of all the great international/regional McDonald’s products that I wish they sold everywhere. Hell, I’d even take the pineapple slice they have in Hawaii.

fuckyeahemmawatson:

Emma Watson for “W Magazine”

I’m hearing some soft jazz, heavy on the sax.

thedailywhat:

Coming Soon of the Day: Neil Degrasse Tyson Will Host the Sequel of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos

Though it’s been quietly in the works since 2011, Fox has officially confirmed that Carl Sagan’s monumental 1970 sci-ed miniseries Cosmos: A Personal Voyage will be getting an updated sequel next year, which will consist of 13 episodes produced by Family Guy’s Seth MacFarlane and hosted by one of the Internet’s most celebrated astrophysicists, Neil Degrasse Tyson. Fox is hoping the show will have as much as of cultural impact as Carl Sagan’s original series, which still remains one of the most watched PBS series in the world to this day.

(Image by Richard Davies)

This part in particular jumped out at me:

Pantoja goes on to specifically cite last week’s revelation — that an author of Heritage’s false report on the cost of the Gang of Eight’s immigration bill wrote a dissertation in which he suggested that Hispanics are at a permanent disadvantage because they have lower IQs — as the final straw in his political evolution.

Welcome to the Democratic Party, my friend.

Toru Hashimoto’€™s view that so-called comfort women provided relief for Japanese soldiers “€œrisking their lives”€ was swiftly condemned by lawmakers and human rights groups.

So this guy is a giant asshole. Worse, he’s not alone; while the article mentions Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s recent historical revisionism on whether Imperial Japan was an aggressor during World War II, it does not mention his government’s attempts to claim that no women were coerced into sexual slavery during that period in the country’s history.  That claim is pretty obviously false and has since been hastily retracted.

cracked:

The Founding Fathers snubbed their noses at the British AND the Grammar Nazis.

33 Shocking Facts That Will Change How You Picture History

Those of us who have watched the West Wing remember that there is a comma problem in that universe (it’s possibly missing in ours too depending on your view of the takings clause but it’s not due to Toby’s smudge). There’s also a view that the Constitution’s construction by committee may have screwed up separation of powers.

Remember this was a document that was so full of errors and inconsistencies it needed twelve amendments in its first 16 years of life and that didn’t even get to the point where it valued humans equally. The government couldn’t raise a Constitutional income tax until the twentieth century. It took two hundred years for the Constitution to sort out Congressional salaries!

Really it’s more of a surprise about how much the constitution got right in its original draft than what it didn’t.

think-progress:

Damn.

dailyanarchist:

Josh gets it.
http://dailyanarchist.tumblr.com/

EXCLUSIVE: Robert Downey Jr is set for another huge payday from a mega-hit Marvel movie, this time Iron Man 3. I’ve learned he’s already made $35 million…

Yeah, this is definitely going to be insane. I wonder if the cast is going to try to negotiate collectively like the Friends cast did (it actually might be the best example of the kind of bargaining that will end up going on).

There was a lot more of this when I started.