Fatbob

http://youtu.be/ODOmo0EyLaQ

"How would you like to be remembered?" "Oh I don’t know. Haven’t thought about that. Dead and gone," replied Freddie Mercury.

Whether he intended it or not, iconic Queen frontman Freddie Mercury is impossible to forget. In celebration of LGBT Pride Month, artist Chuck Knigge remembers the rock legend by dressing him as other great queens in history and pop culture — from Queen Elizabeth I to Queen Amidala

Knigge says he has long been influenced by Queen, but recent developments in the LGBT rights movement inspired him to take it a step further. The website explains, "Juxtaposing Freddie Mercury’s many faces with the imagery of famous queens allows Knigge to create a social commentary in a digestible series. He wants you to have fun first, but not without raising questions about sexuality." Read more...

More about Gallery, Art, Artists, Freddie Mercury, and Music

Marissa Mayer has said the first step in her plan to turn around Yahoo is to make the company a more desirable place to work. So how well has that worked out?

The average employee satisfaction rating at Yahoo was 3.7 out of 5 in three of the four quarters that Mayer has been CEO, according to data provided to Mashable by Glassdoor, a job site that features reviews from anonymous employees for thousands of companies. Employee satisfaction at Yahoo under Mayer is at its highest level in the five years Glassdoor has been tracking reviews

Mayer, who took over as Yahoo CEO in mid-July of last year, has also enjoyed a stronger approval rating so far than some of her predecessors in the role, based on Glassdoor's data. Mayer had a 91% rating in her first quarter at the company and an 84% rating in the most recent quarter, for a cumulative rating of 85%. By comparison, Carol Bartz and Scott Thompson each had ratings in the low 30% range in their final quarter at the company Read more...

More about Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, and Business

Being an enlightened individual means understanding basic scientific information about how the world works. Sure, we have teachers and parents there to fill our brains with knowledge, but the sad truth is that there are certain facts that take on a life of their own as they pass from ear to ear, eventually etching themselves into our collective brain-mass in twisted forms that are, well, just plain wrong.

Good thing the saints over at Mental Floss are here to show us the light. Last time it was booze, this time their mission is debunking 50 scientific falsehoods posing as facts. Go forth, and be smart. [Mental Floss via Neatorama]

Raw!

Have a mosquito problem???

At your next outdoor gathering try this SAFE and EFFECTIVE method of keeping mosquitoes at bay! Simply slice a lime in half and press in a good amount of cloves for an ALL NATURAL mosquito repellent.

Thanks Grace H

In an interview with Game Informer, Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto spoke about where the company's priorities lie in terms of creating new intellectual properties. There are a lot of familiar franchises coming up for Wii U and 3DS and although many of them look great -- terrific, in some cases -- is this overwhelming reliance on familiar characters a problem?

"Certainly within Nintendo," begins Miyamoto, "we have people internally who are saying, 'Well, we have our old characters from our old games, and that's old IP, and we should think about creating new IP.' But the question that we always ask is: 'Does a new character really make it a new game?' And to me, the answer to that is, 'No.'

"What makes it a new game is new gameplay and new interactions. So when we're creating a game, we're always looking at it from, 'What is the gameplay, and how are making that gameplay new?' And then, 'Who is the character that is best suited to that gameplay?'"

Miyamoto feels this approach allows Nintendo to create new experiences even if they are associated with fan-favorite characters. Citing Pikmin as an example of Nintendo's philosophy, he explains that "we created this new style of gameplay, and it really needed a new character in order to have that gameplay work, and that was the approach we took. We created the gameplay mechanic first, and then created the characters afterwards."

He continued: "What we always stress, when we're working with our development teams is, 'Focus first on creating fun and new gameplay, and then we'll figure out what the character is or what the IP is that's going to go with it.'" While it's an admirable approach and one that has largely served Nintendo well, I can't help but wonder if we couldn't get just a little bit more on the new-IP front.

Miyamoto Talks Zelda, Pikmin, and Wii U Development [Game Informer]

Sid Meier's Civilization V: Brave New World, all new content for Sid Meier's Civilization V is Now Available on Steam!

Sid Meier's Civilization V: Brave New World is the second expansion pack for Civilization V - the critically acclaimed 2010 PC Game of the Year. This new expansion provides enhanced depth and replayability through the introduction of international trade and a focus on culture and diplomacy. Your influence around the world will be impacted by creating Great Works, choosing an ideology for your people and proposing global resolutions in the World Congress. As you move through the ages of history you will make critical decisions that will impact your relationship with other civilizations.

[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.

(YouTube link)

This incredibly cute duckling loves his man. He also loves to swim, get his feathers blow-dried, and cuddle. Be warned you might melt from the cuteness. Also, in this video, we learn what webbed feet sound like on a wood floor: wappity-wappity-whap! -via Daily of the Day

Now that Dish Network is out of the picture, Clearwire shareholders have officially accepted Sprint's $5 a share offer to buy its remaining shares. [Read more]

The connection between the opening credits of 80s TV classic The Cosby Show and 2013 summer jam "Blurred Lines" might not seem obvious at first. But play a little six-degrees game on IMDb.com, and the link becomes obvious.

Bill Cosby's TV daughter was Keisha Knight Pullium (aka Rudy Huxtable), who starred on Tyler Perry's House of Payne. Tyler Perry just wrapped production on Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas, which features actress Lisa Whelchel. Whelchel was the star of The Facts of Life, the theme song of which was composed by Alan Thicke. Alan Thicke is the father of Robin Thicke, singer of "Blurred Lines." Bam. Read more...

More about Viral Videos, Bill Cosby, Watercooler, Videos, and Robin Thicke

Collect them all! Artist Adrien Noterdaem has done up most of the massive "Game of Thrones" cast as "Simpsons" characters. [Read more]

When it comes down to it, what makes a movie "good" is a matter of taste. Even bad movies have their fans. What makes a movie "influential" is a little easier to try and brute force. Especially when you have Wikipedia on your side.

Massaged into being by the Arg! Team, this massive list ranks the most influential movies of the past 100 years by modeling a theoretical Wikipedia surfer, who meanders through the site, randomly clicking on links. According to the algorithm, the bored little guy clicks a link every second, 85 percent of the time it's a random internal link, the other 15 percent it's the "Random Article" button. The result is a sort of Wikipedia PageRank, and the movies that pop up the most frequently and get the most screentime are the most influential.

Here's the breakdown by year, with the length of the blue bar representing relative influence power:

It looks like Titanic was by far the most influential movie to be released recently, with the original Star Wars film the most noteworthy before that. And, of course, Citizen Kane tops the charts when it comes to weight.

Granted, this is only one way to go about indexing movies, but considering the insane mass of interconnected information that is Wikipedia, it's definitely a valid one. Then again, it's going to have its biases; Wikipedia editors are overwhelmingly male.

Be sure to hop over to the Arg! Team's blog to see the list in it's gloriously convenient hyperlinked form. Any guesses as to what'll top the Wiki charts this year? It's got to be The Internship, right? [The Arg! Team via Hacker News]

Just over a year ago we brought you Anna Farkis' 2500 Watt astronomical lampshade, which projects constellations on the ceiling whenever the light is turned on. At the time, it was just a one-off concept—but as we had hoped, the stars have aligned: Today, the lamps are finally available for sale under the new name Starry Lights.

The lamps are available in four colors with your choice of four different constellation layouts, plus the option to design your own. Unfortunately, they come with an equally out-of-this-world $1,000 price tag. For that much money, you can buy yourself a nice telescope and just drill holes in the lamps shades you already own—but damned if they're not tempting anyways. [Starry Light]

If you want the fastest flash drive around for an affordable price, our friends at the Wirecutter have crowned the SanDisk Extreme USB 3.0 as king of the pack.

Read more...

Half of these aren’t that odd… but then I eat peanut butter and pickle sandwiches, so what do I know.  Here are a couple of weird ones from the list:

Mayonnaise and Banana Sandwich

Cupcake filled sausages

The complete list

 

During her termination meeting with Valve founder Gabe Newell, former hardware head Jeri Ellsworth told Newell to either fund her latest augmented reality gaming project, or let her leave with it. Ellsworth had been with Valve for one year and seven months, and she believed in the potential behind her team's progress - even though Valve was firing many of the people involved.

"Give it to them," Newell said.

Ellsworth and fellow former Valve teammate Rick Johnson took their prototypes and started Technical Illusions, where they've been working on Cast AR, a set of 3D, augmented reality glasses. Four weeks after Ellsworth was fired from Valve, she and Johnson hit a breakthrough in the Cast AR project, and everything came together ahead of schedule, she said on The Grey Area Podcast.

Cast AR is a "projected augmented reality" system that throws graphics into the real world, allowing players - multiple players at one time, even - to interact with an artificial projection as if it were actually right in front of them, using a wand-like controller and special mat. Engadget got their hands on the Cast AR in May.

Early prototypes of the Cast AR are hardly bigger than standard glasses for a 3D movie, with spots on the corners from whence the projections, well, project. A camera on the bridge of the nose tracks the surface of the mat, so the glasses know where the player is looking. This set-up allows the wearer to see objects from different angles, and could apply to board and computer games alike. Technical Illusions intend the glasses, wand and surface to cost less than $200, with a Kickstarter planned for early 2014, Ellsworth said.

Best of all, Cast AR makes Wizard's Chess a reality. "You can imagine Star Wars Chess, as an example," Ellsworth said on the podcast. "There's little chess characters just walking around your table. If I'm sitting in front, facing forward at them, I see their faces. And I can stand up, walk around the table, and I can see the backside of the characters."

Continue reading Hardware hacker spills on Cast AR 'projected reality' glasses, Valve

Hardware hacker spills on Cast AR 'projected reality' glasses, Valve originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 08 Jul 2013 20:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here's a problem about guys: many of us don't wash our hands after using the restroom. It might be general grossness or everyman laziness or being too trusting your own hygiene or being too drunk or taking on a drive through mentality with a urinal but if you monitor a men's restroom, you'll see many folks skip the sink.

But this new urinal design by Kaspars Jursons tries to solve the hand washing problem by combining the sink with the urinal, two birds with one stone kind of thing. The thinking is that putting the sink on top of the urinal and making it sensor-activated, men will wash their hands because it is right in front of their face.

The thinking is wrong. And the thinking is unbelievably gross.

Here's what will likely happen with these Frankenurinals: men, with their terrible aim and never ending urine, will manage to piss inside the sink and stain the tap a disgusting shine of morning yellow. It's going to be foul. In fact, with this new urinal + sink design, I'd bet there would be more piss in the sink, on the handle, around the receptacle and all over the place than there would be inside the urinal. I'd rather deal with non-washed hands than this.

Men are disgusting. Don't encourage us to be more disgusting. [Jursons via DesignTAXI]

So last year the BBC did an awesome documentary following a handful of British trannies, and some kind soul uploaded all 4 parts to JewTube. And here they are, because I said so that's why! Now go to your room!

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