firehose

The folks behind Sailor Moon Crystal, the rebooted animated series set to premiere this July, have announced their first early premiere event. In partnership with ViVi magazine, the event is timed for June 30th, the birthday of heroine Usagi herself, and will admit no men... unless they are accompanied by a woman.

WASHINGTON—In an effort to expand women’s presence in traditionally male-dominated fields, the STEM Education Coalition launched a new initiative Tuesday dedicated to inspiring young girls to pursue math and science educations so they could ...

It just so happens that if you add up the diameters of every planet in the solar system but earth, the number is less than 238, 555 miles. Which means that if you could fit them together nice and snug, you could line them up between here and the moon…

(via Reddit)

Archer and Bob's Burgers voice actor extraordinaire H. Jon Benjamin dubbing the sentient computer HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick's scifi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey? This is all I've ever wanted out of life and I didn't even know it before today.

Read more...

Propelled by a soaring stock market, the median pay package for a CEO rose above eight figures for the first time last year.

or Why you need to read Le Système international d’unités (8^e édition)

How do you write very large or very small numbers? How, for example, would you write the speed of light out in full?

If you would write c = 299,792,458 m/s then please stop, because you’re doing it wrong. You can argue all you want about tradition, and “the way things have always been done” but you are still totally, absolutely, unequivocally wrong. There is a right way, an official, standardised way, to write very large and very small numbers, and it’s not with commas in them.

“Following the 9th CGPM (1948, Resolution 7) and the 22nd CGPM (2003, Resolution 10), for numbers with many digits the digits may be divided into groups of three by a thin space, in order to facilitate reading. Neither dots nor commas are inserted in the spaces between groups of three.”

The correct way to write the speed of light is c = 299 792 458 m/s. Ideally you’d use a special Unicode character, known as “NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE (U+202F)”, which stops text from wrapping around half-way through a number, but this isn’t very well supported, so the better-supported “THIN SPACE (U+2009)” or even just a normal space will do.

The reason for this is that the decimal point isn’t always a decimal point. Only 60% of countries use a full stop, whereas other countries use other marks. For example, a number that would traditionally be written in the UK as 123,456,789.01 would be written in France, Germany, Spain and many other countries as 123.456.789,01 and in Canada as either, depending on whether you’re working in English or French. This confusion (see this for example) was deemed undesirable and as such the scientific community declared in 2003 that:

The 22nd General Conference [of the BIPM],
considering that a principal purpose of the International System of Units is to enable values of quantities to be expressed in a manner that can be readily understood throughout the world …
reaffirms that “Numbers may be divided in groups of three in order to facilitate reading; neither dots nor commas are ever inserted in the spaces between groups”, as stated in Resolution 7 of the 9th CGPM, 1948.

Remember that thousand separators are also used when dealing with very small numbers. I’ve provided some examples below if you’re struggling to get your head around them.

Incorrect	Correct	Incorrect	Correct
123	123	0.123	0.123
1234	1234	0.1234	0.1234
12,345	12 345	0.12345	0.123 45
123,456	123 456	0.123456	0.123 456
1,234,567	1 234 567	0.1234567	0.123 456 7
12,345,678	12 345 678	0.12345678	0.123 456 78

The estate of Arthur Conan Doyle asked a seemingly unsympathetic Seventh Circuit on Thursday to overturn a lower-court ruling that the elements from the first 50 Sherlock Holmes stories have lapsed into the public domain in the United States. According to Law 360, estate attorney Benjamin Allison insisted that U.S. District Judge Ruben Castillo erred […]

Digital comics distributor turned eBook distributor Graphicly will shut down as its key employees join self-publishing platform Blurb.

New rules "Basic D&D" will be FREE!:

dungeonsdonuts:

In some very surprising and very welcome news, Mike Mearls has announced that when new D&D comes out, the basic rules set, now dubbed “Basic D&D”, will be made available as a FREE PDF!

It comes with all the rules you need to play the game, including info/stats for four classes and four races. The upcoming hardcover books (Player’s Handbook, Monster Manual, Dungeon Master Guide) will be supplements to these new basic rules. 

This is incredible news. Especially from a marketing and word of mouth advertising standpoint. 

• Want to learn to play D&D? Here’s a link to the rules, FREE.
• Dig this awesome fantasy art from D&D? There’s rules to play it here, FREE.
• Tumblr post about roleplaying? Couple of reblogs later and there’s a link to the rules, FREE.
• See hashtag “rollad6” on twitter? Retweeted with a rules link, FREE!
• Online group getting together for the first time, and not everybody has the books? Oh, here’s the rules, FREE. 
• D&D? *click* Downloading *click* You’re now ready to go. For FREE!

The potential for free advertising and viral marketing with this announcement is pretty big. If Wizards of the Coast’s intent is to get new people into playing Dungeons & Dragons, this is a big step in the right direction. 

Let’s hope they keep these steps coming. 

It’s like an SRD, but less portable, functional, or developer-friendly!

It’s like releasing rules under Creative Commons or a Community Use license, except nobody else can use them!

It’s like buying a Starter Set box and inside is just a piece of paper with a URL and the address of your nearest Office Depot!

It’s like not releasing PDFs of any other product and hoping nobody notices!

The D&D Basic PDF: Marketing RPGs like it’s 2007!

(Snark aside, hooray, but I don’t understand how releasing even a substantial set of rules for free is news. Even if it’s WotC.)

(Photo: New York Post/David McGlynn)

If you're a wealthy, professional parent, you may be getting your kids ready to attend an exclusive summer camp in a few weeks. The camp administrators have sent you a packing list. But you don't have time to put all of that stuff inside the luggage! You need a professional organizer, such as Barbara Reich.

Reich is a professional personal organizing consultant. People hire her to get their lives arranged neatly. In the past few years, she and other professional organizers have found that there's a market for getting rich kids' belongings properly packed for summer camp:

Two years ago, she had one trunk request. Last year, she had five trunks, and this year, she has packed 10 trunks — and it’s not even Memorial Day.

Professional organizer Dayna Brandoff of Chaos Theory has at least four camp-packing requests on the books and expects at least 15 more in June.

Some of her clients have requested she recreate their child’s bedroom so they can feel completely at ease in their air-conditioned bunks.

“It’s really about bringing the feel of home to camp,” Brandoff told The Post.

Reich charges $250 per hour. A single packing job can earn her as much as $1,000. To many clients, it's worth the expense:

“I talked three people off the camp ledge,” Reich told The Post. “For a lot of mothers, particularly when their child is going away for the first time, it’s very stressful. Clients will say, ‘I need to touch and feel the sheets for softness.’ ”

I found this article via Marginal Revolution, where many of the comments are negative toward the clients. I don't understand. Why would you get mad at a rich person giving you the opportunity to make money by engaging in a small amount of work?

The Centers for Disease Control released a monster report last week on the state of Americans' health. The 511-page report makes one thing abundantly clear: teens are behaving better right now than pretty much any other time since the federal government began collecting data.

#academy award winning screenwriter jim rash

hey saucieshares

The co-founder of Rap Genius has left the company—presumably forced to resign—after he annotated the 100+-page manifesto written by Santa Barbara murderer Elliot Rodger. In an attempt at cleverness, Mahbod Moghadam added notes to the manifesto, which had been uploaded to Rap Genius. (In case you’re not familiar with the massively popular site, it allows users to explain song lyrics, line by line, in minute detail. YES, WE WILL END UP WITH THE INTERNET WE DESERVE.) Just days—hours, really—after the attack that left seven people dead (including Rodger, the sole perpetrator), Moghadam thought it would be smart—genius-level, even—to add flippant notes to the dark, misogynist ramblings of a person who had just destroyed countless lives. He speculated on the attractiveness of the murderer’s sister, and declared bits of the document “beautifully written.” Such things don’t usually appear on the 126th ...

One reason there's a backlash against Google glasses is that they try to bring the online rules into the offline world. Suddenly, anything can be recorded, and there's the expectation (if the product succeeds) that everything will be recorded. The product is called 'glass' instead of 'glasses' because Google imagines a world where every flat surface behaves by the online rules. [The day after this talk, it was revealed Google is seeking patents on showing ads on your thermostat, refrigerator, etc.] Well, people hate the online rules! Google's answer is, wake up, grandpa, this is the new normal. But all they're doing is trying to port a bug in the Internet over to the real world, and calling it progress. You can dress up a bug and call it a feature. You can also put dog crap in the freezer and call it ice cream. But people can taste the difference.

Apple’s new expensive line of Mac Pro computers seem to be causing a headache for a tiny fraction of the Mac userbase. According to several professional video editors who have contacted us or posted information to various online forums, the recent OS X 10.9.3 update is breaking compatibility between some Mac Pro graphics cards and video editing applications such as Adobe Premiere Pro and Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve. Reported issues range from videos stalling during the export process, pink and green lines appearing in exported video, and overall application crashing and freezing. Obviously the presence of these bugs in large video production environments, especially on expensive machines running expensive software, is a real problem. Most users are reporting these issues on 2013 Mac Pros with the AMD D700 graphics engine, but some users are also reporting similar issues with D500 cards.

sofapizza:

bbeeaarr:

Holy shit

"I love pizza rolls."
"I know."

ijustloveyoutubers:

weholytrinititties:

Hannah Hart

This hit me like a tonne of bricks..

paulsgroovypalace:

when they say simpons did it already

they’re not fucking kidding

firehose shared this story from The Week: Most Recent Business Posts.

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